The War That Came Early: West and East Read Free

rest cure,” Walsh said.
    Maybe Cavendish had been born in 1918, maybe not. If he had, he was still making messes in his nappies. He hadn’t seen—or, for that matter, smelled—the Western Front. He hadn’t got shot there, either. Walsh had done all of those things, however much he wished he hadn’t.
    For a wonder, Cavendish heard the reproach in his voice. The youngster blushed like a schoolgirl. “I know you’ve been through a good deal,Sergeant,” he said stiffly, “but I do believe I am gaining on you when it comes to experience.”
    That he could come out with such claptrap straight-faced only proved how much experience he didn’t have yet. Telling him so would have been pointless precisely because he lacked the experience that would have let him understand what an idiot he was being.
    Walsh didn’t even try. “Whatever you say, sir,” he answered. One of the things staff sergeants did was ride herd on subalterns till their nominal superiors were fit to go around a battlefield by themselves without getting too many of the soldiers under their command killed for no reason.
    Cavendish might have been doing his best to prove he hadn’t reached that point yet. Pointing east, he said, “Well, we’ve given the
Boches
a proper what-for this time, eh?”
    His posh accent only made that sound even stupider than it would have otherwise. Walsh wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible, but Cavendish proved him wrong. “Sir, the Germans came from their own border all the way to Paris. We’ve come from Paris all the way to Messy,” Walsh said. “If you want to call that a proper what-for, well, go ahead.”
    “There are times when I doubt you have the proper attitude, Sergeant,” Cavendish said. “Would you sooner be fighting behind Paris?”
    “No, sir. Not a bit of it.” Walsh’s own accent was buzzing Welsh, and lower-class Welsh at that. What else to expect from a miner’s son? He went on, “I’d sooner be fighting in bloody Germany, is what I’d sooner be doing. But that doesn’t look like it’s in the cards, does it?”
    “In—Germany?” By the way the subaltern said it, the possibility had never crossed his mind. “Don’t you think that’s asking a bit much?”
    “Evidently, sir.” Walsh left it right there. If the French generals—to say nothing of the British generals (which was about what they deserved to have said of them)—were worth the paper they were printed on, the German High Command wouldn’t have been able to impose its will on them with such effortless ease. That had happened the last time around, too. The
Boches
ran out of men and matériel then, while the Yanks gave the Allies all they needed.
    No Yanks in the picture now, worse luck. Just the German generalsagainst their British and French counterparts.
Christ help us
, Walsh thought.
    As if to remind people who’d forgotten (Second Lieutenant Herman Cavendish, for instance) that they hadn’t gone away, German gunners began lobbing shells into Messy. When they started landing too close for comfort, Walsh jumped into the nearest hole in the ground. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of choices.
    He thought Cavendish would stay upright and make a brave little speech about command responsibility—till a flying fragment did something dreadful to him. But no: the subaltern dove for cover, too. He’d learned
something
, anyhow. Walsh wouldn’t have bet more than tuppence ha’penny on it.
    After ten minutes or so, the bombardment eased off. Walsh cradled the Schmeisser he’d taken off a dead
Boche
—for throwing a lot of lead around at close quarters, nothing beat a submachine gun. If the Germans decided they wanted Messy back, he was ready to argue with them.
    But no hunched-over figures wearing field-gray and coal-scuttle helmets loped forward. This was just harassing fire: hate, they would have called it in the last war. Somebody off in the distance was yelling for a medic, so the bastards serving a 105