The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Read Free

bullet. Theo didn’t like trouble, which meant he could have picked a better time to be born.
    An infantryman came up to him. “You’re in the same crew as that maniac?” the fellow asked.
    “That’s right,” Theo said. “What about it?”
    “If he drives like he plays, you’re screwed,” the foot soldier said. He swiped his sleeve across his forehead. Despite the cold, sweat stained his tunic under the arms. “He’ll send you right into the Russian panzers, and they’ll blow you to hell and gone. He doesn’t know how to go backwards.”
    “We’re still here so far.” Theo looked to the touchline. His greatcoat lay over there. As soon as this mouthy guy—Theo saw anyone whotalked to him as a mouthy guy—went away, he could find it and put it on.
    “Don’t get me wrong. He plays good,” the infantryman went on. After a moment, he added, “You weren’t bad yourself, dammit. I thought a couple of the shots you stopped’d go in for sure.”
    “Thanks,” Theo said in surprise. He didn’t think he was anything out of the ordinary. You did your best to keep the ball from getting past you. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you couldn’t. Even if you couldn’t always, you tried not to look like too much of a buffoon out there.
    “Well …” More slowly than he might have, the man in field-gray figured out Theo wasn’t the world’s hottest conversationalist. “See you. Try and stay in one piece,” he said, and walked off.
    It was good advice. Theo hoped he could follow it. He was relieved when he found his greatcoat. Nobody who’d lost his own had walked off with it. If he found himself missing his, he might have done that. You didn’t screw your buddies when you were in the field. People you didn’t know could damn well look out for themselves.
    There it was: the essence of war. You stuck with your friends and gave it to the swine on the other side as hard as you could. Theo knew who his friends were—the guys who helped him stay alive. He had nothing in particular against Russians, any more than he’d had before against Frenchmen or Englishmen or Czechs. But if they were trying to kill his pals and him, he’d do his best to do them in first.
    The greatcoat fought winter not quite to a draw. The
Wehrmacht
needed better cold-weather gear. Boots, for instance: the Russians’ felt ones far outclassed anything Germany made. Well, there was more a ground pounder’s worry than a panzer man’s. Theo snorted. It wasn’t as if he had no worries of his own.
    OUT IN THE North Sea again. Lieutenant Julius Lemp felt the change in the U-30’s motion right away. The Baltic was pretty calm. As soon as you passed out of the Kiel Canal, you got reminded what real seas were like. And a U-boat would roll in a bathtub.
    A rating up on the conning tower with the skipper said, “Somebody down below’s going to give it back—you wait and see.”
    “Not like it’s never happened before,” Lemp answered resignedly. Once something got into the bilge water, it was part of a U-boat’s atmosphere for good. All the cleaning in the world couldn’t get rid of a stink. Overflowing heads, spilled honey buckets, puke, stale food, the fug of men who didn’t wash often enough, diesel fumes … Going below after the freshest of fresh air was always like a slap in the face from a filthy towel.
    He went back to scanning horizon and sky with his Zeiss binoculars. Looking overhead was purely force of habit. Clouds scudded by not far above the gray-green sea. The RAF wasn’t likely to put in an appearance. But nobody who wanted to live through the war believed in taking dumb chances.
    “Skipper …?” The rating let it hang there.
    Lemp’s antennae that warned of danger were at least as sensitive as the metal ones on the boat that caught radio waves. Something was on the sailor’s mind, something he wasn’t easy talking about. The way things were these days, Lemp could make a good guess about what it was, too. All the