Hitler’s War

Out came her American passport. "Here," she said. "I'm a neutral, as you see."

He scowled at the passport, and at her. "In the struggle against Bolshevism and world Jewry, there can be no neutrals," he declared. Some Germans really did talk that way, the same as some Communists really did parrot the Moscow line. Then he said, "Come to the station with me, so my captain can decide what to do with you."

"To the station?" Peggy yelped. "You've got no right!"

"I am an officer of police," the cop said importantly. "Of course I have the right." In Hitler's Germany, he damn well did, too. He touched the billy club on his belt. "Do you defy my authority?" I'll bust your head open if you do.

"No," she said. "But let me see your papers, please. I will complain to my embassy, and I want to know who you are."

"Ha! Much good it will do you!" He showed her his ID willingly enough. His name was Lorenz Muller. Peggy wrote it down. She didn't think the embassy would be able to do anything, either, but it was the only card she had, so she played it with as much panache as she could.

The station was only a couple of blocks away. Except for his uniform and haircut, the desk sergeant looked like a desk sergeant back in the States: fat and bored but wary, in other words. Muller spewed out a stream of German, too fast for Peggy to follow it. The sergeant listened, then turned to her. "What happened?" he asked.

"I said I was a neutral, and I am-I'm an American. And he got angry at me and brought me here," Peggy answered.

"An American? Let me see your passport, please." When the desk sergeant said please, he sounded as if he meant it. Peggy handed him the passport. After studying it, he gave it back. "Yes, it is in order. Danke schon. You may go."

"What?" Lorenz Muller spluttered furiously-for about a second and a half. Then, without raising his voice, the desk sergeant gave him the most thorough reaming out Peggy had ever heard. She understood maybe one word in three, but that was plenty. Muller would've needed to get plopped into a specimen jar as soon as he was born to be as congenitally idiotic as the sergeant claimed, and he would have had to be 165 years old to have acquired all the vices the sergeant imputed to him. By the time the man got done, nothing was left of Muller but a demoralized puddle of goo on the floor. So it seemed to Peggy, anyhow.

"I am sorry you ran into this…individual," the desk sergeant told her. She'd never dreamt the word could sound so filthy. "By all means visit your embassy. A formal complaint will go into his record, which is good."

By then, she didn't want to. She found herself pitying Muller, which she wouldn't have dreamt possible a few minutes earlier. As she walked out of the station, the sergeant tore into the cop again-something about getting the Reich in bad with an important neutral power. Let's hear it for the Red, White, and Blue, Peggy thought. Yeah! Let's!

In the end, she did go by the embassy. The underlings quickly shunted her up to Constantine Jenkins, whose job probably included dealing with obstreperous tourists. He heard her out and then said, "Sounds like the sergeant did worse to this fellow than we could manage in a month of Sundays."

"Ain't it the truth!" she said. "All the same, I do want you to make a formal complaint."

"Just remember that the official head of the Prussian police is Herma

"I understand all that," Peggy said. "I still want to get it on the record."

"Okay. I'll do it," Jenkins promised. "Maybe it'll keep some other American from getting dragged to a police station because he runs into a cop in a lousy mood."

"That'd be good," Peggy said. "See? I'm a public benefactor." She'd been a lot of things in her time, but that was a new one.

Undersecretary Jenkins gave her a look that would have been fishy if not for the half-hidden amusement she spotted. "What you are is a troublemaker," he said accurately. "And you enjoy making trouble for the Third Reich, too."

"Who, me?" Peggy couldn't possibly have been as i

And any one mission might. He knew that. They were so close, so close. The radio kept going on about the Battle of France, the decisive battle. If they could break through the enemy's lines, he'd never be able to form new ones. Maybe nobody in the whole battle could see that as well as the flyers who went after the French strongpoints.

He wondered whether the Allied fighter pilots had that same sense of seeing the whole chessboard at once when they looked down from five or six thousand meters. Or were they just trying to spot the Stukas before the German dive-bombers roared down and blasted another bridge or train or battery of 75s to hell and gone?

He shrugged. He had more immediate things to worry about. The German attack had accomplished a lot. It had knocked the Low Countries out of the war. It had pushed French and English ground forces back from the middle of Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. The enemy was on the ropes.

But he wasn't out, worse luck. And, while German supply lines had got longer and thi

Which didn't mean the forces in Feldgrau couldn't still win. Hans-Ulrich was flying off an airstrip in northern France. Not long before, it had been a French strip. A couple of smashed French fighters still lay alongside the runway. German technicians had ca

Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Rudel hoped it came from his own side, giving the Allies hell. Otherwise, French and English guns would be pounding the Landsers. He thanked God he was no foot soldier. He slept soft, and in a real bed-a cot, anyway. He ate well. Most of the time, he was in no danger. The enemy could still kill him. That came with any kind of military life. But he wouldn't be hungry and filthy and lousy when it happened, if it happened. He wasn't scared all the time, either.

Of course, when he was, he was about as scared as any human being could be. That also held true for the infantry, though. It was true for the ground pounders a lot more often than it was for him, too.

Sergeant Dieselhorst came by, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He sketched a salute and asked, "Have they told you what we're doing next?"

"Not yet." Hans-Ulrich pointed toward Major Bleyle's tent. "As soon as the boss lets me know, I'll tell you."

"If they haven't hauled him off in the middle of the night," Dieselhorst remarked.

Hans-Ulrich looked around in all directions. Nobody stood close to them, and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to what they were saying. Even so, he wagged a finger at the rear gu

"Yeah, I know." Dieselhorst made a sour face. "That's not what I signed up for, dammit."

"Neither did I," Rudel said. "Who would have dreamt so many traitors to the Vaterland were still ru

"Yeah. Who?" Dieselhorst said tonelessly. The cigarette twitched as he eyed Hans-Ulrich. At last, almost against his better judgment, he went on, "Who knows how many of them really are traitors, too?"