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.
Luc had a squad himself. A private first class wasn’t much of a non-com, but he’d gone this far without getting hit. That put him several long steps ahead of the scared conscripts he led.
The sergeant came by, his red-tracked eyes missing nothing. The Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched as he snapped, “Don’t let ‘em lay there with their thumbs up their asses, Harcourt. Set the sorry sods to digging. They’ll hate you now, but they’ll thank you as soon as the Germans start shelling us again.”
“Right, Sergeant,” Luc said wearily. He knew Demange was right, too, but he wanted nothing more than to lie there himself, and who cared where his thumb went? With a sigh, he hauled himself to his feet. “Come on, you miserable lugs. You can rest once you’ve got foxholes to rest in.”
They groaned. Some of them didn’t even have hard hands yet; their palms blistered and bled when they used shovels or entrenching tools. But they’d seen dead men-both bloodied and astonished after meeting death unexpectedly and bloated and stinking from lying in the fields four or five days unburied. They didn’t want anyone else seeing them like that: worse than getting caught naked. They weren’t eager, but they dug.
So did Luc. He already had a scrape of sorts. He improved it as fast as he could. There seemed to be a lull now, but how long would it last? Another twenty minutes? Another twenty seconds? No time at all?
“Don’t throw the dirt every which way!” he said in something not far from horror. “Sweet suffering Jesus, pile it in front of you! Don’t they teach you anything in basic these days?”
“They teach us how to march and how to shoot,” one of the new fish said. He had bloody hands and a pale, unweathered face. “From what they tell us, there isn’t anything else-or if there is, we can pick it up at the front.”
“They’re sending you out to get slaughtered. They ought to see the Boches face-to-face themselves. That’d teach them something-the ones who come back from it,” Luc said savagely.
Sure as hell, the shooting picked up before the soldiers finished their foxholes. They might be raw, but they weren’t complete idiots. They knew enough to jump into the holes and keep on digging while inside them. Luc didn’t think anybody got hit. He thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing.
He also thanked that God Who might or might not be there for sending nothing worse than small-arms fire his way. German machine guns fired faster than their French counterparts. Sergeant Demange said the same thing had been true the last time around, though both sides used different models now. Why couldn’t the French have caught up with their longtime foes, especially since the Germans hadn’t been allowed to mess with machine guns till they started laughing at the Treaty of Versailles?
Luc knew the answer to that. France hadn’t wanted to believe another war would come. The Germans, by contrast, embraced battle the way a man embraced his girl…although fire from the flank could send them running, too. But they had the better tools with which to do their job.
“Is that a tank?” one of the rookies asked fearfully.
“No, my dear,” Luc said after listening for a moment. “That’s a truck-one of our trucks, by God. Maybe we’ve got reinforcements moving in. We could sure use some-I’ll tell you that.
He almost shot one of the newcomers before he recognized the khaki greatcoat and the crested Adrian helmet. The French uniform had been modernized after 1918. It still looked old-fashioned next to what the Germans wore. The Boches seemed…streamlined, almost like oncoming diesel locomotives.
“Where are they?” shouted a corporal who sounded a hell of a lot like Sergeant Demange.
Demange himself gave an answer that was almost usefuclass="underline" “Look in the direction the bullets are coming from, mon vieux. You’ll find the Germans, I promise.”
“Funny,” the corporal said. “You see? I laugh.” And, having laughed a laugh that could have come straight off the cow on the label of a popular brand of cheese, he sent several shots toward the Boches .
A loop of the Marne-whose course was complicated in these parts-curled up toward the French position from the south. The enemy would have to cross the river twice to get in behind Luc and his comrades. As he’d seen to his sorrow, they were good at such things, but he could hope they would think two crossings were too much trouble here.
He popped up out of his hole to fire at an oncoming gray shape in a coal-scuttle helmet. The shape went down. Luc ducked before he could decide whether he’d hit it or not. Thinking of it as a shape, a target, meant not thinking of it as a human being he might just have killed. If he didn’t think of it as a human being, he didn’t have to think so much about what he was doing in this damned foxhole.
And ducking in a hurry meant that none of the other shapes in field-gray had the chance to draw a bead on a khaki shape and wonder whether he’d hit it. Luc didn’t want some nice German young man to have him on his conscience.
The Nazis must also have decided that fording the Marne twice was more trouble than it was worth. But that didn’t mean they stopped coming. If they couldn’t go around the French here, they seemed determined to plow through them.
Sergeant Demange screamed for his men to hold fast till he realized they would all get killed or captured if they tried. One reason he made a good company commander was his aversion to dying. Luc shared the feeling. He wondered whether that would do him any good.
After fighting for a while in some woods, the French fell back into one of the riverside villages. Luc didn’t know which one it was. There were lots of them, each Something-sur-Marne. The soldiers had fun with that, calling them things like Ammo-Dump-sur-Marne and Blowjob-sur-Marne. A blowjob on the Marne would have been a hell of a lot more fun than what Luc was going through.
Most of the locals had long since bugged out. Luc would have, were he still a civilian. Nobody was paying those poor slobs to get shot at, and they didn’t have the weapons to shoot back.
But a few stubborn souls always stuck around. He wished one of them would have been a teenage girl with legs up to there, but no such luck. Most were grizzled men who’d done their bit the last time around and weren’t about to let a little gunfire drive them away from their stone houses and shops and farms. They were plenty tough. Their wives were even scarier, at least to Luc.
Several locals had varmint guns. They were ready to turn them against the Boches. “Big rats, but still gray,” one of them said with a raspy chuckle.
Sergeant Demange didn’t want them. “Dumb assholes won’t take orders,” he muttered to Luc. He was a little more polite to the embattled villagers and peasants, but only a little: “Let us do the job. You know what happens if the Germans catch a franc-tireur? The guy gets it, and then they shoot a bunch of hostages to remind everybody else to play by the rules.”
“They shot my cousin like that in 1914,” said another rifle-toting villager.
“Don’t you think you paid ‘em back after that?” Demange asked with surprising gentleness. The local had two fingers missing from his left hand and walked with a limp.
“Not enough,” he said. “Never enough.”
Demange could have argued with him. Instead, at his unobtrusive gesture, three soldiers sidled up to the man and forcibly disarmed him. The other locals muttered, which bothered the sergeant not a bit. “I told you-let us do the job,” Demange said.
They might have squawked some more, but incoming artillery made everybody scramble for cover. A house that took a direct hit fell in on itself. A woman swore horribly. As soon as Luc saw that the house wouldn’t catch fire, he ran for the ruins. You couldn’t ask for better cover-and maybe, like lightning, 105s wouldn’t strike the same place twice.
Here came the Germans. They must have had some new guys among them. Seeing a village that had just got shelled, they figured nobody would be waiting for them in there. One of them got close enough for Luc to see how surprised-and offended-he looked when he got shot. It was almost funny, although no doubt not to the poor Boche. Well, too bad for him.