"Yeah. How about that?" Joaquin said. "The Caudillo." It wasn't quite so strong a title as Fuhrer or Duce, but it was plenty strong enough.
Carrasquel glanced after Sanjurjo's henchmen. When he decided they'd got out of earshot, he went on, "You know what else you can tell your grandkids?"
"What, Sergeant?" Delgadillo asked, as he was obviously meant to do.
"Tell 'em Sanjurjo's shit stinks just like yours," the older man growled.
Joaquin blinked. He'd expected something different. He looked around, too, to make sure no one could overhear. Satisfied, he spoke in a low voice: "If you feel that way, how come your aren't fighting for the Republic?"
"Chinga the Republic." Carrasquel spat. "Those assholes think workers' shit doesn't stink, just on account of they're workers. Everybody's shit stinks, God damn it to hell. Everybody's. You get down to the bottom of it, it's all shit."
If he'd been on the other side of the line when the fighting started, would he be cussing out the Nationalists now? Delgadillo couldn't ask; he'd said too much already. But he wouldn't have been surprised. Carrasquel needed to fight somebody. Who probably didn't matter much.
And, after some of the things Joaquin had seen, he had a devil of a time thinking the sergeant was wrong. Shit and rotten meat and maggots: things did end up like that, all right. What you did before then mattered, though… didn't it? If it does, what am I doing here?
What was Joaquin doing here? They'd drafted him. They'd made sure he couldn't run away, and they'd beaten the stuffing out of a couple of luckless lugs who tried. They'd shoot him if he deserted at the front, and they wouldn't even waste a cigarette on him before they did. In spite of everything, they'd made a soldier out of him. Turning into a soldier gave him the best chance to live.
A Republic machine gun growled to malign life. One of Marshal Sanjurjo's aides, a tall, gangly man whose head must have stuck up above the rim of the trench, let out a choking moan and crumpled, clutching at himself. Medics rushed over to him. Delgadillo wondered how long he would have had to lie there if he'd got hit. A hell of a lot longer than that, he was sourly sure. The medics carried the groaning officer past him on a stretcher.
"How bad?" Carrasquel asked in tones of professional interest.
"Scalp wound. He's bleeding like a pig, but he ought to make it," a medic answered. "A few centimeters lower, and…" He shook his head.
"Madonna, it hurts!" the officer said.
"I gave you morphine, Senor," the medic told him. "It'll make you easier soon." He and his comrades lugged the man away.
"It could have been the Caudillo," Joaquin said.
"Not unless he really was as big as his pictures make him out to be," Carrasquel said, so Delgadillo wasn't the only one who'd had that thought.
The rest of Sanjurjo's aides plainly thought they'd seen as much of the front as they wanted to, and more besides. Sanjurjo himself took the wounding, and the firing that went on afterwards, in stride. His attitude declared he'd known worse. He had nerve-that much of what they said about him to make him look good was true, anyhow.
Major Uribe's shrill voice rang out: "Come on, my dears! We have to let them know they can't get away with being so rude!"
Joaquin fired a few shots toward the Republican lines. He saw no good targets, but fired anyway. A bullet might do something. The one that creased the aide's head sure had. Beside him, Sergeant Carrasquel was doing the same thing. So were Nationalist soldiers all along the line. One of their machine guns opened up, and then another. Another Republican murder mill responded. It was getting dangerous out, whichever side you were on.
As Joaquin Delgadillo put a fresh clip on his rifle, he glanced toward Sanjurjo. What did the marshal make of his maricon battalion commander? By his smile, he already knew about Bernardo Uribe. If you were a good enough soldier, you could get away with almost anything that didn't hurt the way you fought. Uribe was, and then some.
How many times had Joaquin yelled "?Maricon!" at the Republicans? And now he had a fairy giving him orders! War was a crazy business, all right. He shouldered the reloaded piece and squeezed off another shot at the enemy. "MOSCOW SPEAKING." The newsreader's familiar voice came out of the radio at the Byelorussian airstrip. Sergei Yaroslavsky drank from a glass of strong, sweet tea as he listened to the morning report. Another pilot walked over to the battered samovar bubbling in a corner of the tent and poured a glass for himself. He already had a papiros sticking up at a jaunty angle from the corner of his mouth, as if he were Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tobacco and tea-how could you run a war without them?
On vodka, that's how, Sergei thought. The Russians had run on vodka long before they'd ever heard of tea or cigarettes, and on beer and mead and wine before they knew about vodka. That was all very well for a foot soldier. He thought about flying his SB-2 smashed out of his skull. He grimaced. No, not a pretty picture.
"Comrade Stalin reports heavy fighting on the frontier between the peace-loving Soviet Union and the regime of Hitler's jackal, Marshal Smigly-Ridz," the newsreader said. That was code of sorts, if you knew how to read between the lines. Fierce fighting and stubborn fighting weren't so bad. When they started talking about heavy fighting, the Devil's grandmother had spilled the pisspot into the borscht.
Well, that was nothing he didn't already know. If things were going well, would he have had to get out of Poland while German shells cratered the runway from which he'd been flying?
Across the table from him, Anastas Mouradian raised one dark eyebrow a few millimeters. The Armenian had no trouble understanding news reports, either. Sergei sometimes thought Armenians and Jews and people like that were born reading between the lines. He wondered why Russians weren't. Some Russians didn't even seem to know there were lines to read between.
"Despite the Red Army's displays of heroism, the campaign in the area illegally occupied by the Polish junta has not necessarily gone to the Soviet Union's advantage in all respects, due to the Nazis' treacherous intervention in a fight where they had no true interest." The radio newsreader paused portentously. "Accordingly, Comrade Stalin finds that the situation has changed."
He paused again, making sure he had everyone's attention. He did-all the officers waking up in the tent stared toward the radio. Curls of smoke rose from papirosi being smoked or held between index and middle fingers. Changed. In the middle of a war, there were few more ominous words. Changed how?
The newsreader had the answer, straight from the General Secretary's lips: "Up till this time, our dispute with the vile Polish clique has concerned only the border region they unjustly occupied. But, now that the jackals have invited the deadly German viper into their filthy burrow, they make it only too clear that they are a danger to all lovers of peace. This being so, we are no longer concerned with the border region alone. We shall punish the Smigly-Ridz regime as it deserves. Its very existence is a product of our unfortunate weakness during the civil wars following the glorious Soviet revolution. We shall make Poland-all of Poland-pay for its brazen effrontery."
He went on to talk about the war in the Far East. He also described the fighting there as heavy, which wasn't good news. But Sergei listened with only half an ear. He and Stas Mouradian weren't the only men who exchanged glances of what looked much too much like consternation. No one said anything; people naive or stupid enough to do that had been weeded out by a process of brutal Darwinian selection. Even expressions could endanger, though. Somebody in here was bound to report to the NKVD.
Then again, maybe the local Chekist, whoever he was, also wore a look of consternation. Who wouldn't? If what the newsreader said meant what it sounded like, the USSR intended to attack, or more likely was attacking, Poland up and down their long frontier. The Red Army was much bigger than its Polish opposite number. If it was much better, it hadn't shown it yet.