"Jawohl, Herr Oberst," Rudel said. "But it makes an army of a million men march against the Bolsheviks side by side with us. We ought to get the French and the English to do the same thing-a crusade to rid the world of something that never should have been born."
A different kind of silence descended on the farmhouse: one rather like the aftermath of a thousand-kilogram bomb. At last, the fellow next to Hans-Ulrich said, "You've always been an optimist, haven't you?"
"When it comes to Germany, of course I have," he answered proudly.
"We're all optimists about the Vaterland." Colonel Steinbrenner spoke as if challenging anyone there to argue with him. When nobody did, he continued, "But there is also a difference between optimism and blind optimism."
"Are you saying that's what I show, sir?" Rudel asked.
"No, no. You're a good German patriot," Steinbrenner replied. Rudel would have thought hard about reporting him had he said anything else. After all, he'd been brought in here to replace an officer in whom the fires of zeal didn't burn bright enough-or so the Gestapo had concluded, at any rate.
More high-octane liquor made the rounds. Several separate conversations started in place of the general one. That was safer: nobody could hear everything at once. Lickerish laughter said some of the flyers were talking about women-a topic more dangerous than politics, but in different ways. Hans-Ulrich might be a teetotaler, but he didn't stay away from the French girls. His father wouldn't have approved, but he didn't worry about that. When he was with a girl, he didn't worry about anything. More precious than rubies, the Bible said, and, as usual, it knew what it was talking about. The Biblical context might be different from the one Hans-Ulrich had in mind, but he didn't worry about that, either.
"If we didn't fuck up this stupid goddamn war-"
Rudel heard the words through all the other chatter, as one might hear a radio station through waves of static and competing signals. His ears pricked up. Treason would do that. You could say some things in some ways, but there were limits. This shot right past them.
He thought so, anyhow. He wondered how Sergeant Dieselhorst would feel about it. Dieselhorst was an older man and a veteran noncom. Both factors generated a broader view of mankind's foibles than a young officer who was also a minister's son was likely to have. Rudel suspected as much, but only in a vague way. He would not have been himself were he mentally equipped to grasp the full difference between how he thought and how Albert Dieselhorst did.
He didn't enjoy being the only sober man in the middle of a drunken bash. Who in his right mind would? But this was nothing he hadn't been through before. They'd think him a wet blanket if he stayed. They'd think him an even worse wet blanket if he got up and walked out. They'd think he thought he was better than they were. He did, too, but he'd learned that showing it only made things worse.
Somebody not far away was going on about the vastness of Russia, and about how a war against a country like that could have no sure ending. Sober or not, Hans-Ulrich got angry. "Once we smash the Reds, we'll run the country for ourselves," he said. "Russia is our Lebensraum. England and France have colonies all over the world. We'll get ours the way the Americans did, by grabbing the lands right next door."
"Yes, but the Americans only had to worry about Red Indians. We've got Red Ivans, and they're tougher beasts." The other flyer chuckled in not quite sober amusement at his wordplay.
Ignoring it, Hans-Ulrich said, "We can beat them. We will beat them. Or do you think the Fuhrer's wrong?"
The other fellow's mouth twisted. He couldn't say yes to a blunt question like that, and he plainly didn't want to say no. What he did say was, "We all hope the Fuhrer's not wrong."
That was probably safe. Rudel would have had to push to make something out of it. He didn't want to push. He wanted his comrades to like him. The easiest way to do that would have been to act like them. He couldn't bring himself to do it. Showing he was brave and skillful in combat was the next best thing. The others didn't despise him any more, anyhow.
Progress. He could throw it away in a flash if he got too strident about politics or about the way he thought the war ought to be going. He said, "Wherever we run into the enemy, we'll whip him, that's all."
"That's what the Kaiser's General Staff told him, too," the other flyer remarked.
"We beat the enemy," Hans-Ulrich said. "It was the traitors inside Germany who made us lose." He'd been two years old when the last war ended. He was parroting Mein Kampf, not speaking from experience.
The other flyer was probably younger than he was. "That's not what my old man says," he replied. "He was a lieutenant on the Western Front the last year and a half of the war. They had swarms of panzers by the end of 1918, and most of ours were retreads we captured from the Tommies. He says we got whupped."
"What's he doing now?" Rudel asked.
"He's a lieutenant colonel in Poland. Why?"
"Never mind." If the complainer was fighting, Rudel couldn't call him a defeatist. Not out loud, he couldn't. What he thought… he kept to himself. Little by little, he was learning. CHAIM WEINBERG'S SPANISH was still lousy. It would never be great. But it was a hell of a lot better than it had been, especially when he talked about the class struggle or dialectical materialism.
He hadn't liked the political agitators who indoctrinated the Internationals so they would fight more ferociously. If they needed that kind of indoctrination, they wouldn't have come to Spain to begin with. Or it looked that way to him. The leaders of the International Brigades, and the Soviet officers and apparatchiks who stood beside them, held a different opinion. Theirs was the one that counted.
Indoctrinating prisoners with the ideals of the Republic-and of the USSR-was different. Chaim told himself it was, at any rate. The hapless campesinos the Nationalists had dragooned into their army needed to understand that everything they'd believed in before they were taken prisoner was a big, steaming pile of mierda.
"They exploited you," he told the tough, skinny, ragged men who came to the edge of the barbed wire to listen to him. He didn't fool himself into thinking he was all that fascinating. Time hung heavy for the POWs. Anything out of the ordinary seemed uncommonly interesting. "They were shameless, the way they exploited you." Sinverguenza-he loved the Spanish word for shameless.
One of the captured Nationalists raised a hand. Chaim pointed to him. "Excuse me, Senor," the fellow said apologetically, "but what does this word 'exploited' mean?"
Chaim blinked. He'd known these peasants were ignorant, but this took the cake. They literally had to learn a whole new language before they could understand what he was talking about. Before he answered the prisoner, he asked a question of his own: "How many others don't know what 'exploited' means?"
Two or three other grimy hands went up. After some hesitation, a couple of more followed them. How many other Nationalists were holding back? Some, unless he missed his guess.
"Bueno," he said. "If you don't know, ask. How can you understand if you don't ask? When the priests and the landlords exploit you, they take advantage of you. You do the hard work. They have the money and the fancy houses and the fine clothes and the pretty girls who like those things. They take your crops, and they make most of the money from them.?Es verdad, o no?"
The POWs slowly nodded. That was how things worked in Spain-how they had worked before the Republic, and how they still worked where Marshal Sanjurjo and his lackeys governed. Joaquin Delgadillo raised his hand. Chaim nodded to him. He had a proprietary interest in Joaquin.