(Thinking of rabbis reminded him of his brief fling with starting a shul. Just as Kossuth had predicted, he hadn't stuck with it. Now he had this new cause instead. Always something, but never the same thing for very long.)
Besides, he was sick of soldiering. He'd seen enough, done enough, lived through enough, to have its measure. If the Internationals needed someone with a rifle to get up on a firing step and shoot at Sanjurjo's men, the Republican equivalent of a fellow like Joaquin Delgadillo would do. Chaim had discovered the joys of… well, of preaching. If it was a smaller moment than the one St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, the difference was of degree, not of kind.
He might have preached better with more fluent Spanish. But he might not have. He had to keep his ideas simple and direct, because he couldn't say anything fancy or highfalutin. Even staying simple, he fumbled for words and verb endings. Joaquin-and, soon, other Nationalist prisoners who'd started listening to him for no better reason than to pass the time of day-threw him a line whenever he needed one. If anything, that made him more effective. His audience was, and felt itself to be, part of the show.
And changing minds-winning converts-turned out not to be that hard, no matter how little H. L. Mencken might have cared for the process. Chaim had a solid grounding in the doctrines of Marx and Lenin. The men to whom he preached seemed to have no ideology at all.
"Well, why did you keep fighting for Sanjurjo, then?" he asked a Spaniard who wore a patch over his right eye socket. He knew the fellow would have fought with desperate courage, too. The Nationalists might serve a vile cause, but they served it bravely.
"Why, Senor?" A Spanish shrug was less comic, more resigned, than its French equivalent. "I was in the army. We had an enemy. What else was there to do but fight?"
"You were oppressed, in other words. That's why you fought," Chaim said. No matter how lousy his Spanish as a whole was, he knew words like oppressed. "How do you get rid of oppression?" He answered his own question: "You have to struggle against it, not for it."
"But how, Senor?" the soldier asked. "If we didn't do what our officers told us, they would have shot us. And if we tried to come across the line, chances are you Republicans would have shot us. It is a bad bargain."
It was a bad bargain. The natives on the two sides hated each other too much for it to be anything else. Their higher-ups did, anyhow. Ordinary soldiers sometimes had a more sympathetic understanding for the poor sorry bastards who filled out the ranks on the other side. Sometimes.
"Officers who oppress can have accidents," Chaim said. "Officers who oppress ought to have accidents. They deserve them."
The Nationalists listened to him without surprise. Things like that had happened in every army since the Egyptians went to war against the Assyrians. Anybody who made his own men despise him needed eyes in the back of his head. Even those weren't always enough to save him.
"Your real problem was, you never wondered if Sanjurjo's officers had the right to give you orders," Chaim said. "Who set them over you? God?" He smiled crookedly. "They want you to think so."
"Who makes officers for the Republicans?" Joaquin asked.
"Mostly, the men choose them. We do in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion," Chaim answered. "Just about all the Spanish Republican units do the same thing." He told the truth-for the most part. Sometimes the Party wanted certain men in certain slots… but the will of the Party was the will of the people. Wasn't it?
The Nationalist prisoners muttered among themselves. Finally, one of them asked, "But what if these men make bad leaders?"
"Then we get new ones," Chaim replied. "What if your officers make bad leaders?" None of the prisoners tried to give him an answer. He and they all knew what the answer was. If a Nationalist officer made a bad leader, his men were stuck with him. Most armies worked that way. Chaim pressed the advantage: "You see how much better the Republican way is?"
They didn't say no. They weren't in an ideal position to say no, but Chaim didn't let that worry him.
Neither did his own superiors. As Mike had prophesied, he got a summons from Brigadier Kossuth. The Magyar eyed him impassively. "So," he said. "Now you are a propagandist instead of a soldier?"
"No. And a soldier," Chaim said, wondering how much trouble he was in.
Kossuth's lizardy tongue flicked in and out. "Soldiers we can always find," he observed. "Propagandists are harder to come by. Do you want to go on reeducating the Nationalist prisoners? That might be useful."
By which he could only mean You'd better want to go on reeducating them. Since Chaim did, he answered, "If that would help the Republic, sure I'll do it."
"Good. We understand each other." Kossuth was dry as usual. Chaim wondered what would have happened to him had he said he'd rather stay at the front. Nothing he would have enjoyed: he was sure of that. The brigadier seemed surprised to find him still standing there. "Dismissed," he said, and Chaim beat it. Moscow or Barcelona might replace Kossuth, but an ordinary lug could only obey him. Maybe Chaim wasn't so different from the Nationalists who needed reeducating after all.
Chapter 17
"Moscow speaking," the radio said importantly.
Sergei Yaroslavsky yawned as he listened. He was drinking a glass of strong, sweet tea and smoking a cigarette, but it was still six in the morning. Had he had any choice, he would have stayed rolled in his blanket.
A thick slab of roast pork, glistening with fat at the edges, sat on the tin plate in front of him. Had he had any choice, he wouldn't have picked something like that for breakfast. It would fill him up better than black bread; he couldn't deny that. But it would also make him want to go back to sleep… wouldn't it?
He sawed away with knife and fork. Methodically, he chewed and swallowed. As soon as he got up in the air, he wouldn't be sleepy any more. He was sure of that. Sleep and terror blended like vodka and castor oil.
Several flyers were fortifying their tea with healthy shots of vodka: the ration was a hundred grams a day. Others were swigging the vodka and ignoring the tea. Sergei preferred not to do that. You might be bolder in the cockpit once you'd got outside with some antifreeze, but you'd surely be slower. Against German fighter planes, against skilled, sober German pilots, slower wasn't a good idea.
"The liberation of Poland from the clutches of the semifascist Smigly-Ridz clique and their Nazi henchmen continues to gather momentum," the newscaster declared. "Advances on a broad front accelerate. Polish soldiers surrender in growing numbers, recognizing the hopelessness of their cause and the justice behind the Red Army's struggle against the lawless hyenas who have led them to destruction."
"He doesn't say anything about the fucking Germans surrendering," remarked a pilot who was knocking back vodka as if afraid it would be outlawed tomorrow-not likely, not in the hard-drinking Soviet Union.
"Hush," three people said at the same time. The only good thing about fighting Germans was that there weren't many of them in Poland. As Sergei had seen in Czechoslovakia, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were dauntingly good at what they did.
The brief byplay made him miss the newsman's latest recital of towns taken and towns bombed from the air. The voice on the radio might have been broadcasting a football match. If he was, he was definitely the home team's announcer. If you listened to him, you had to believe the Red Army and Air Force could do no wrong.