The War That Came Early: West and East Read Free Page A

had earned their salary this morning.
    Lieutenant Cavendish went off to inflict his leadership on someone else. Walsh lit a fresh Navy Cut. He climbed out of the hole to see what the shelling had done to the hamlet.
    A skinny little stubble-cheeked French sergeant puffing on a pipe emerged from cover about the same time he did. The Frenchman waved. “
Ça va
, Tommy?” he called.
    “Va bien. Et tu?”
Walsh ran through a good part of his clean French with that. He waved toward the east, then spat.
    The French noncom nodded. “Fucking
Boche,”
he said. His English was probably as filthy as most of Walsh’s
Français
. A couple of his men came out. He started yelling at them. He was a sergeant, all right.
    Walsh checked on the soldiers in his own section. The fellow who’d bought part of a plot came from a different company. That was something, anyhow. After nodding rather smugly, Walsh wondered why itshould be. The British army was no better off because the wounded man wasn’t from his outfit. And that other company was weakened instead of his. In the larger scheme of things, so what?
    But it was a bloke Walsh didn’t know, not one he did. You didn’t want one of
your
mates to stop one. Maybe that was a reminder you were too bloody liable to stop one yourself. Of course, you had to be an idiot not to know as much already. Still, there was a difference—whether there should have been or not—between knowing something and getting your nose rubbed in it.
    “Are we supposed to move up again, Sergeant?” asked a soldier named Nigel. Like Lieutenant Cavendish, he spoke like an educated man. He didn’t sound toffee-nosed doing it, though.
    “Nobody’s told me if we are,” Walsh answered. “You can bet your last quid the lieutenant would have, too.”
    He wasn’t supposed to speak ill of officers. He was supposed to let the men in his charge form their unflattering opinions all by themselves. By the way Nigel and Bill and the others chuckled, they needed no help from him.
    “He’s a bit gormless, ain’t he?” Bill said.
He
came from the Yorkshire dales, and sounded like it. The word wasn’t one Staff Sergeant Walsh would have chosen. It wasn’t one he’d heard before he took the King’s shilling more than half a lifetime ago. Well, he’d heard—and used—a lot of words he’d never imagined back in his civilian days.
Gormless
was one you could actually repeat in polite company.
    “Oh, maybe a bit,” Walsh said, and they chuckled again. He added, “Say what you want about him, though—he is brave.”
    “Well, yes, but so are the Germans,” Nigel said. “Even some of the Frenchmen … I suppose.”
    “They are. We’d be a lot worse off if they weren’t,” Walsh said.
    “Half of them are Bolshies, though. Can you imagine what would happen if the Nazis and Reds were on the same side?” Nigel plainly could. By the way he rolled his eyes, he didn’t fancy the notion. “Some Communist official would say, ‘The Germans are the workers’ friends,’ and all the fellow travelers would decide they didn’t feel like fighting any more.”
    “It’s not going to happen, chum,” Walsh declared, not without relief. “They’re slanging away at each other on the far edge of Poland. You ask me, anyone who wants Poland enough to fight over it has to be daft.”
    “Anyone who’s not a Pole, you mean,” Nigel said.
    “Them, too,” Walsh said with more than a little heat. “Look at that bloody Bosnian maniac Princip in 1914. He got millions and millions killed because he couldn’t stand the damned Austrian Archduke. Suppose that was worth it, do you? Just as bloody fucking stupid to go to war over Poland.”
    “There you go.” Bill grinned at him from under the dented brim of his tin hat. “Now you’ve solved all the world’s problems, you have. Go tell the
Boches
to quit shooting at us—’twas all a misunderstanding, like. Then get on your airplane and fly off to wherever the hell you go