Of course England wanted to mediate. If the Russians weren't fighting Japan, they could throw their full weight against Germany. But London couldn't insist. How long would Hong Kong and Malaya last if Japan went to war against England? People said Singapore was the greatest fortress in the world, but people said all kinds of things that turned out not to be true.
Then there were the Dutch East Indies, which had to be upside down and inside out now that Germany had occupied Holland. And how much attention could France give to Indochina with a war right in her lap? England had excellent reasons for not wanting to antagonize the Japs. The only question was, would Japan head south regardless of what England did?
If Japan chose to jump that way, what would America do? There were the Philippines, way the hell out in the western Pacific. Could U.S. forces there make life difficult for the little yellow men? Peggy thought so. What was the point of holding on to land like that if you weren't going to use it?
"In British news, Prime Minister Chamberlain has named Winston Churchill the new Minister of War," the broadcaster said. "The P.M. praised Churchill's dedication and steadfastness. Churchill himself said, 'Let the Hun do his worst. We shall do our best, and God defend the right.'"
"Wow!" Peggy said. Chamberlain didn't talk like that-he talked like a greengrocer with too much education. If England had had somebody who talked like that from the minute Hitler started getting cute, maybe the war never would have got off the ground. She hoped it would go better now. CABBAGE. Potatoes. Turnips. A little sour cheese. A Jewish supper in Munster: no damn good, and not enough, either. Sarah Goldman was ashamed of the way she gobbled up her portion. She knew how bad it was, but that didn't seem to matter. Her body demanded fuel. If poor fuel was all it could get, she'd make the most of that.
Her father got more than she did. He worked harder than she did, too. There wasn't much between his skin and his bones these days, but what there was was all gristle and tough, stringy muscle. He was somewhere between the best shape of his life and starvation.
He inhaled his supper. Afterwards, he rolled a cigarette from the tobacco in his pouch. It was tobacco scavenged from fag ends picked up on the street. Before the war, only poor people would have scrounged like that. Now the ones who did were mostly Jews, because the Nazis had cut off their tobacco rations.
Samuel Goldman didn't seem to mind. After a couple of puffs, he remarked, "My gang was fixing a bomb crater just fifty meters or so down the street from Wehrkreis headquarters this afternoon."
"And?" Sarah asked. He wouldn't have used a gambit like that for no reason-he had a story to tell.
"And part of me was wishing the bomb would have come down on the headquarters," he said. The recruiters there wouldn't let him and Saul join the Wehrmacht. They'd been embarrassed to refuse, but they'd done it, all right. No wonder he despised the place.
"Only part?" Hanna Goldman said.
Sarah's father nodded to her mother. "Yes, only part. Some of the fellows there, they're not so bad. They have to do what their bosses tell them, or else they get it themselves. The army's not as nasty as the Party-nowhere near."
"Well, all right," Sarah said. "So what happened while you were filling in this crater?" Not long before, she would have been humiliated beyond words at her father's doing such menial work. So would he-he was an academic to the tips of his toes. He took hard labor for granted these days. As with gravedigging in Hamlet, familiarity lent it a quality of easiness.
"We'd just about got things fixed when we heard motors coming up the street towards us-and toward Wehrkreis headquarters," Samuel answered.
That was enough to make Sarah sit up and take notice. Horses and donkeys-and sweating men-hauled goods through Munster's streets these days. Gasoline and motor oil went straight to the front. Except for ambulances, doctors' cars, and fire engines, the city might have fallen back into the nineteenth century. All of Germany might have.
"What were they?" Mother asked, as she was surely meant to do. "Was it connected to… to the trouble on the radio?"
There was a safer way to talk about things than Sarah could have come up with. Any time the announcer told you to follow duly constituted authority, you started wondering what duly constituted authority was and why you should follow it. That was the opposite of what the announcer had in mind-but that was his worry, not yours.
Father nodded impressively. "You'd best believe it was. There were four trucks, and shepherding them along fore and aft were brand new half-tracked armored personnel carriers. Very nasty machines to be on the wrong end of." He spoke with a veteran's trained judgment.
"What did they do?" By the way Mother looked at her, Sarah got the question out first by no more than a split second.
"What did they do? I'll tell you what," Father said. "They stopped right in front of the recruiting headquarters, and SS men started jumping out of them and running inside."
"The Gestapo?" Mother's voice quavered. You didn't have to be a Jew in Germany to quaver at the thought of the secret police-although it sure didn't hurt.
But this time Samuel Goldman shook his head. "No. These fellows belonged to the Waffen-SS-the fighting part. Hitler's personal bodyguards, I guess you could call them. Much as I hate to say it, they were very impressive men." Again, he delivered the verdict with the air of a man who knew what he was talking about.
"There were regular soldiers at the headquarters, right? What did they do? Did they shoot these Waffen-SS men?" Sarah hoped the answer would be yes. She thought shooting was too good for the SS, but it would do in a pinch.
Her father shook his head again, though. "No. The SS took them by surprise. The regular soldiers never had a chance to fight. They don't keep many weapons at the headquarters, anyhow. The SS men stormed in with rifles and machine pistols. They came out again a few minutes later. Colonel Ziegler-the head of the Wehrkreis-came out with them, with his hands high. They seized a couple of his aides, too. They threw all of them into one of the personnel carriers, and then they drove away."
"What will they do with them? To them?" Mother asked.
"Nothing good." Father had smoked the hand-rolled cigarette down to a tiny butt. He stubbed it out and put the little bit of leftover tobacco back into the leather pouch. It wouldn't go to waste. Once he'd finished, he looked up again. "No, nothing good," he repeated. "You don't grab someone that way to pin the Ritterkreuz on him. Ziegler must have been involved in the plot against the Fuhrer-or the SS must have thought he was."
"It doesn't seemed to have worked, does it?" Sarah said. Her father pointed to corners of the room. For a second, that meant nothing to her. Then she remembered the house still might have hidden microphones. If she talked about Hitler's overthrow, she shouldn't sound disappointed because it hadn't happened. She fluttered her fingers to show she got it.
When Samuel Goldman said, "I don't think so. We would have heard by now if it had," he sounded glad the Fuhrer remained in power. Whether he was might be a different story, but he sounded that way.
Mother found a different question-or rather, the same one she'd asked before, but on a larger scale: "What will the Party do to the officers who violated their oath to strike at the Fuhrer?"
"It won't be pretty." Again, Father spoke with what seemed like grim satisfaction. "To do such a thing in wartime…" He shook his head like a judge passing sentence. That really might have affronted him. His desire to be German sometimes showed in peculiar ways.