Hitler's war
- Автор: Тертлдав Гарри Норман
- Серия: The War that came early #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Альтернативная история
Электронная книга - «Hitler's war». Краткое содержание книги:
Now, in this thrilling, provocative, and fascinating alternate history by Harry Turtledove, another scenario is played out: What if Chamberlain had not signed the accord? What if Hitler had acted rashly, before his army was ready-would such impatience have helped him or doomed him faster? Here is an action-packed, blow-by-blow chronicle of the war that might have been-and the repercussions that might have echoed through history-had Hitler reached too far, too soon, and too fast.
Turtledove uses dozens of points of view to tell this story: from American marines serving in Japanese-occupied China to members of a Jewish German family with a proud history of war service to their nation, from ragtag volunteers fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain to an American woman desperately trying to escape Nazi-occupied territory-and witnessing the war from within the belly of the beast.
A novel that reveals the human face of war while simultaneously riding the twists and turns that make up the great acts of history, Hitler's War is the beginning of an exciting new alternate history saga. Here is a tale of powerful leaders and ordinary people, of spies, soldiers, and traitors, of the shifting alliances that draw some together while tearing others apart. At once authoritative, brilliantly imaginative, and hugely entertaining, Hitler's War captures the beginning of a very different World War II-with a very different fate for our world today.
Germany and Italy had already pretty much forgotten about Spain. With the French and English navies in the war, the Fascists had a much harder time getting through than they’d had before. And they needed their toys to use against the Western democracies.
So Spain went from being the cockpit of world attention to the war that everybody forgot. Everybody, that is, except the poor, sorry bastards still stuck fighting it.
Lately, Sanjurjo’s men on an outpost a few hundred meters away had found themselves a new weapon: a loudspeaker system. It crackled to life now: “Come over to the winning side!” a Spaniard shouted, and the loudspeaker gave him something close to the voice of God. “Come over to us, and we’ll feed you what we eat ourselves. It’s lovely chicken stew tonight! Don’t miss it!”
“Ha!” Chaim said, and turned to Mike Carroll. “You know how to make Sanjurjo’s chicken stew?”
“First, you steal a chicken,” Carroll answered wearily. “That’s an old one. Got a smoke?”
“Yeah.” Chaim gave him a Gauloise.
“Lovely chicken stew!” the Nationalist boomed again.
“Thanks. Tastes like shit, but thanks.” Carroll puffed happily. Chaim agreed with him-the French tobacco did taste like shit. But Gauloises and Gitanes were better than no cigarettes at all-and better than roll-your-owns made from other people’s (and your own) butts.
“Chicken stew-with dumplings!”
“Lying cocksucker,” Chaim said without much rancor. Every so often, guys from the other side deserted. From what they said, the Nationalists were just as hungry, just as miserable, as the Republicans.
“Maybe their officers have chicken stew,” Carroll said.
“Now you’re talking,” Chaim said. Republican officers ate and lived no better than the men they led. It was an article of faith on this side that the enemy’s officers exploited their soldiers-they were fighting for class distinctions, after all. Some of what the deserters said supported that: some, but not all. The Republicans mostly discounted anything that disagreed with what they’d thought before.
“Wonderful chicken stew! All you can eat!”
Somebody in the Republican lines fired at the loudspeaker. If you were hungry and cold and miserable, talk of food could drive you nuts. And you had to be nuts to shoot like that. At long range, with the crappy rifles and cheap ammo most Republicans carried, how likely were you to hit what you aimed at? Even if you did, what kind of damage could you do? And besides…
Chaim pulled his entrenching tool off his belt. It was very well made; he’d taken it off a dead Italian. He started digging. “That stupid asshole’s gonna bring some hate down on our heads.”
“Tell me about it.” Carroll’s entrenching tool consisted of some scrap iron a smith had beaten flat and then bolted to a stick. But it moved dirt, too. He deepened his foxhole and added dirt to the parapet in front of it and the parados behind.
Sure as hell, the shot woke up the Nationalist artillery. Sanjurjo’s men had more guns and better guns than the Republicans. Hitler and Mussolini had been lavish in supplying their Spanish friends till they got distracted. Nobody on the Republican side had ever been lavish with anything, not till the Czech fight started and not for long enough then.
Fragments wined and snarled overhead. Chaim dug like a mole, trying to make what vets of the last war called a bombproof. He should have done that a long time ago. He knew as much, but nobody liked to dig without need. Now the need was here.
Mike Carroll made dirt fly, too. They both stopped about the same time. Somebody not far away had been wounded, and was making a godawful racket. “I’d better go get him,” Chaim said, though he could think of few things he wanted to do less. As if to convince himself, he added, “God knows I’d want somebody to pick me up if I got hit.”
“Yeah.” Carroll also scrambled out of his hole, even if he’d just improved it. Not being by himself above ground made Chaim a little less lonely. It also made him wonder if he’d have to try to make pickup for two. Well, if he stopped something himself, somebody was out there to make pickup on him.
He scuttled along like a pair of ragged claws-some damn poem picking the exact wrong moment to bounce around in his head. Like a snake would have been closer, because his belly hugged the ground every second. Off to his left, Mike also looked flattened by a steamroller.
To add to the joy, a couple of Nationalists started shooting at them with rifles. Luckily, none of the rounds came close. Spaniards, whether Nationalists or Republicans, made piss-poor riflemen. Chaim didn’t know why that was true, but it sure seemed to be. The bullets got close enough to scare him cracking past, but no closer than that.
He crawled past some trench a shell hit had caved in and flopped down into the earthwork beyond with a sigh of relief. Mike Carroll made it, too. There lay the wounded guy, trying to clutch his chest and his leg at the same time and howling like a banshee. Two other men from the International Brigades were nothing but raw meat and blood-no blaming them for not helping their buddy, because nobody could ever help them again.
“Fuck,” Carroll said hoarsely. “See who it is?”
Chaim hadn’t noticed-one injured fighter sounded much like another, no matter which language he’d grown up speaking. Now he took a look. “Fuck,” he echoed. “It’s Milt.”
Milton Wolff- El Lobo to the Spaniards on both sides-had led the Abraham Lincoln Battalion since Robert Merriman was lost the spring before. He’d kept them in the line no matter what Sanjurjo’s goons threw at them. He wasn’t just their heart; he was also a big part of their backbone.
And he was badly hurt. Fragments had shredded his left calf and thigh and laid open the left side of his chest. “Jesus,” Chaim muttered. His stomach tried to turn over. He wouldn’t let it.
“What do we do?” Carroll sounded as lost and horrified as Chaim felt. If you saw your father like that…“What can we do?”
“Try and patch him up. Try and get him back to the docs. Maybe they can pour some blood into him,” Chaim answered. Republican doctors could do more with transfusions than just about anybody. That was one of the few places where the Republic worked well-if the crack mobile unit was anywhere within a few kilometers, anyhow.
They used their wound dressings. They used strips of cloth from their uniforms and from those of the dead men, who didn’t care any more. One of the corpses had a miraculously unbroken syringe in a belt pouch. Chaim jabbed Wolff with it-it was the only painkiller he was likely to get.
Wolff was a big man-six-two, easy-which only made things worse. Manhandling him over to a communications trench that went back was no fun for Chaim or Mike Carroll or the wounded Abe Lincoln officer. Hauling him across bare, broken ground and praying the snipers didn’t get lucky would have been even worse…Chaim supposed.
They were heading back instead of sideways when Wolff stopped screaming and asked, “Will I die?” He sounded amazingly calm. The morphine must have hit him all at once.
“I don’t think so, Milt,” Chaim answered, and hoped he wasn’t lying. “We’ll get you patched up.”
“You bet,” Mike agreed.
A Red Cross flag flew over an aid tent. In his bad Spanish, Chaim asked, “Is the blood truck close?”
“?Quien sabe?” a harried-looking male nurse answered. He sounded like a fruit, but that was the least of Chaim’s worries. And he did gasp when he found out who the wounded Abe Lincoln was. “?El Lobo? ?Madre de Dios!” He crossed himself.
By the way people went dashing out of the aid tent, Chaim got the idea they’d track down the blood truck as fast as they could. He wondered whether they would have done the same if he came in wounded. Actually, he didn’t wonder: he knew damn well they wouldn’t.
And he had a hard time getting pissed off about it. He was just a soldado. He had his uses, but their were plenty more like him. Milton Wolff was El Lobo. If he stayed out of action long, the Lincolns wouldn’t be the same. And, while the rest of the world might have forgotten the Spanish Civil War, it remained brutally real to the people who went on fighting it.