“Go tell him to come up and check for himself,” Willi said. “If he sends us out anyway …” He shrugged. He would have made the effort, anyhow.
“I’ll do it. Can’t hurt. Maybe he’ll have a rush of brains to the head.” Pfaff’s tone said that was likely to be too much to hope for. Even so, he bobbed his head at Willi and went back to the west.
Willi had time to duck behind a pine and smoke a cigarette before Pfaff came back with Rudi Freigau. The Leutnant was only a couple of years older than the two Obergefreiters. He wore a neat mustache that was blond almost to the point of invisibility. Instead of a rifle, he carried a Schmeisser. He greeted Willi with, “Pfaff says you’re not too happy about moving up from here.”
“See for yourself, sir,” Willi replied. “If they’re waiting for us in that next bunch of trees, we’re sticking our heads in the sausage machine.”
Lieutenant Freigau did look. He was as careful as Willi and Adam Pfaff had been. He’d seen his share of tight spots before; he didn’t want to make things easy for a Russian sharpshooter. After eyeing the bare field and the woods on the far side, he said, “Everything looks quiet.”
“Well, sure, sir. It would if they’re trying to see whether we’re dumb enough to go out there, too.” As soon as he spoke, Willi realized he might have put that more tactfully.
“Or if they aren’t there at all. Which is my judgment of the situation, Dernen.” Freigau sounded irked. Willi supposed he would have, too, if he were an officer who’d just got the glove from somebody hardly even a noncom.
The lieutenant started across the snowy field. Yes, he wore winter white, but that didn’t come close to making him invisible. Willi and Adam Pfaff exchanged stricken looks. “Sir, don’t you want to come back? You’ve made your point,” Willi called after him.
Freigau shook his head. “No need,” he answered. “I’m not going to run away from shadows and ghosts and unicorns and other imaginary things. And every advance we make brings us that much closer to-”
A Russian machine gun barked to life. Willi and Adam Pfaff both flattened out. The gunner might not be aiming at them, but they were still close to his line of fire. Lieutenant Freigau went down, too, but not because he meant to. He writhed feebly and made horrible choking noises. He’d been hit at least twice: once in the belly and once in the neck. Blood darkened his snowsuit and pooled and steamed in the drift where he lay. After a couple of minutes, he quit gurgling and lay still.
“Well, you were right,” Pfaff said to Willi.
“Ja. And a whole fat lot of good that does the lieutenant.” Willi didn’t even point toward Freigau’s body, for fear of drawing the machine gunner’s notice.
“Other thing is,” Pfaff went on, “you’ll be commanding the company pretty soon, the way the people above you keep stopping stuff.”
“If I end up commanding the company, we’re all in deep shit,” Willi said. Adam Pfaff didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. After all, what were friends for?
The Nationalists were spewing out the usual lies through their loudspeakers: “Come across to our lines and we’ll fill you full of mutton stew! Lovely mutton stew! We eat it every day! We’ll fill you so full, you won’t walk any more-you’ll waddle instead! Lovely mutton stew!”
Sometimes it was mutton stew. Sometimes it was chicken stew instead. The Nationalists’ announcer sounded as smooth to Chaim Weinberg as any radio pitchman flogging Lucky Strikes back in the States.
Mike Carroll didn’t take it so kindly. “I’m sick of that lying bullshit,” the other Abe Lincoln growled. “I wish putting a bullet through his loudspeaker would make him shut up.”
“As long as you know it’s bullshit, it doesn’t wear on you so much. And as long as you’ve got enough to eat yourself,” Chaim added. “When times were tough, a big old bowl of stew sounded mighty fine.”
“The Nationalists knew it was bullshit. They’d cross over to our lines, hoping we’d feed them,” Mike said.
“Talk about optimists!” Chaim exclaimed.
“Yeah, well, sometimes they’d be skinnier than we were-and that wasn’t easy.”
“I remember. Those days on the Ebro … Everybody was hungry all the goddamn time. Hell, even I was on the way to being scrawny back then.” Chaim was short and thickset; an unkind man would have called him squat. He looked and talked like the New York Jew he was. In Madrid, he’d got himself a different kind of handle: el narigon loco-the crazy kike. In bar brawls, he’d sail into guys half again his size. He’d flatten them, too, because there were times when he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether he lived or died and because he brought his front-line meanness with him when he went on leave.
Mike Carroll, by contrast, could have come off an SS recruiting poster. You’d lose teeth if you were stupid enough to tell him so, though. He was as good a Communist as Chaim or any other Abe Lincoln. He was probably a better Communist than Chaim, as a matter of fact. Chaim had a habit of asking pointed questions. Mike-Mike believed.
“Delicious mutton stew!” the Fascist announcer called again.
“What did you do to the sheep before you threw it in the pot?” Chaim yelled back. His Spanish was far from smooth, but he could make himself understood.
These days, Spaniards filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks, and those of the rest of the International Brigades. They understood Chaim fine. Laughing, they started shouting “Sheep-fuckers!” toward the Nationalist trenches.
That pissed off Marshal Sanjurjo’s heroes. It would have pissed Chaim off, too, and he didn’t have the touchy Spanish sense of machismo. The Nationalists’ machine guns started raking the Republican trenches. “Now look what you went and did,” Mike said reproachfully as the Internationals returned fire.
“It’s a war,” Chaim explained. It wasn’t the first firefight jeers at enemy propaganda had touched off, and chances were it wouldn’t be the last.
But he stopped taking it lightly when the Fascists opened up with mortars and artillery. They were more than just pissed off, and they were taking it out on the Republicans. He dove into a bombproof dug into the front wall of the trench, hoping no shell would burst on top of it and bury him alive.
Then somebody banged on a big shell casing with an iron bar. “They’re coming! The bastards are coming!” The shout rang out in English and Spanish.
Chaim scrambled out of the bombproof and took his place on a firing step. Sure as hell, the troops who followed Sanjurjo were rushing across no-man’s-land. It wasn’t like the doomed English plodding forward at the Somme. These fellows knew better. They stayed low. They kept in loose order. Every chance they got, they jumped into shell holes. Some of them fired while others scrambled forward.
That helped, but only so much. Many of them fell scrambling forward. Some lay still once they went down. Others writhed and thrashed and screamed. The noises ripped from the throats of wounded men sounded very much alike regardless of which side they fought on or which country they came from. Suffering was a more universal language than Esperanto ever would be.
One of his own cartridge cases bounced off Chaim’s boot. He loaded and fired and loaded and fired, now and then ducking automatically when an enemy round cracked past his head. Sanjurjo’s men got through the barbed wire with alarming ease. Had they sent out cutting parties the night before? If they had, this attack had been laid on all along; it wasn’t mounted on the spur of the moment.
I can worry about that later-if I’m still around to worry about it, Chaim thought as he slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle. He started to fumble for his bayonet. Unless he was going trench-raiding himself, he used it for a knife and a tin-opener, not a weapon. But this might turn out to be one of the rare times he was glad to have it.
Then a Republican machine gun opened up on the Fascists. A moment later, so did another one. Now despair filled the shrieks from Sanjurjo’s men. They’d braved rifle fire. Nobody, though, could hope to cross open ground in the face of the industrialized murder machine guns personified. Concentrated essence of infantry, someone had called them during the last war. That still seemed a plenty good label.
The Nationalists were recklessly brave (so were the Spaniards who fought on the Republican side). This time, their courage only cost them more casualties. They kept coming for a while after more pragmatic troops would have seen the thing was hopeless.
Some of them got close enough to the Republican trenches to fling grenades into them. A fragment ripped Chaim’s baggy trousers. It didn’t bite his leg, though, for which he thanked the God in Whom good Marxist-Leninists weren’t supposed to believe. He didn’t particularly fear dying in battle. Getting badly hurt … He didn’t know anybody who wasn’t scared of that.
At last, sullenly, the Nationalists pulled back. Some more of them got shot before they could reach the protection of their own trenches. Out in the space between the lines, the wounded groaned.
Some of the Abe Lincolns took pot shots at them, as much to shut them up as for any other reason. Part of Chaim thought that was cruel. Part of him hoped somebody would put him out of his misery if he lay there, helpless and suffering, out in no-man’s-land.
Then one of the Abe Lincolns’ officers said, “Let’s bring in some prisoners and see what we can squeeze out of them. You, you, you, you, and you.” Chaim was the second of those yous, Mike Carroll the third.
“Thanks a bunch,” Chaim said. You could bitch about an order, but you couldn’t disobey one.
Out he went, keeping his belly on the ground like a serpent. Finding Fascists to bring in wasn’t the problem, not this time. Not getting killed bringing them in might be another matter. He’d worry about that when he came to it.
A Nationalist moaned in the next shell hole. Chaim scrambled down into it. “Aw, fuck,” he said softly. His stomach did a slow lurch. The guy’d been blown almost in half. Why wasn’t he dead? Human beings could be uncommonly hard to kill, yeah, but this was-what was the next step past ridiculous?
His eyes found Chaim’s. “Por favor, Senor Internacional,” he said clearly.
Please, Mr. International. He could even be polite about it. Chaim wanted to ask if he was sure, but, given the butchered ruin that he was, there couldn’t be much doubt about that. “Fuck,” Chaim repeated. But he would be doing the guy a favor-there couldn’t be any doubt about that, either.
Chaim pulled out his bayonet and did what needed doing. Then he crawled off to find some other wounded Nationalist to haul back for questioning.