Volk

PROLOGUE

It was a pleasant spring day. The sun shone brightly on village and farms; the sheep grazed contentedly on the outlying slopes. Soon the sheep would be herded to the high summer pastures; already some of them had been dabbed with bright colors on their backs, the dye showing specific ownership. At the moment a number of ewes and lambs stood close to the gray stone walls of the houses, feeling most comfortable there.

The nearby town was swollen with country people, because it was market day, but many others remained at work in their fields and houses. Someone had to watch the animals, regardless of the day.

There was the sound of motors. Men and women paused from their labors, listening nervously. There had been fighting in the region, and it had been coming closer as the Basque line was turned by the better equipped enemy. But defeat was unthinkable. The four insurgent generals—they’d all be hanging, as the song had it.

Soon airplanes loomed on the horizon, as they did more frequently these days. The country was at war; young men from the village had enlisted and disappeared into the labyrinth of training and dispositioning, and every family tried to suppress the hideous fear that not all those young men would survive. Normally the younger sons, unable to inherit, went elsewhere to seek their fortune, but now there might be need of them here. This was really a foreign war, but it was forging nearer to this town, like a poisonous snake that writhed and cast about randomly in search of a target.

A woman looked up from the letter she had been writing. Her house was near the main bridge across the river. Her attention had been attracted more by the cessation of song in the neighborhood than by the distant motors. These people were always singing. Young shepherds would bawl out melodies without words. Children sang together as they walked home. Young men regaled each other in groups, hurling songs back and forth. In bad times older people sang dirges, and the troubadour was highly regarded. But suddenly all song had ended.

She went to the window, looking out at the cluster of houses in the near distance. Some had whitewashed walls, and all had orange tiled roofs. She could just see the spires of the church. Beyond it were the airplanes.

No wonder the singing had stopped. Those machines were coming here! Not passing obliquely, but heading directly for the village. Yet of course that was probably coincidence; they would pass over harmlessly. There was after all nothing to interest a war machine.

She tried to see what kind of airplanes they were. The Russian ones were all right; they certainly wouldn’t stop. But the others—

These were German planes; the Nazi emblems were plain. There were the heavy black and white truncated crosses on the under-surfaces of the wings, and the grim tilted swastika on the tail. They were traveling north toward the industrial region. There had been increasing activity there as the Nationalists closed on that prize.

Apprehension had caused her to look up the aircraft that had passed before, and now she recognized them at sight, as she recognized a particular species of bird she had labored hard to identify. There were three Italian medium bombers, and a greater number of German bombers, JU 52s, considered obsolescent. But these were nevertheless death-dealing machines, the horror of the civilized world. It was incongruous to see them here over the peaceful countryside.

She had thought she had escaped such violence by retreating here to the pastoral hinterlands. She was a pacifist, opposed to any war, but especially to this one that was ravaging her beloved country to no purpose she could approve. When the opportunity came, she had prevailed on her husband to remove his practice from the big city and set up here, albeit it at a financial sacrifice. He had been one of those younger sons who had done considerably better in the outside world than his elder brother who had been in line to inherit this farmstead. But that brother had died relatively young, creating the need for a changed inheritance, and she had begged her husband to accept it.

But the senseless destruction of war seemed to be following them. No region was safe any more.

What was that? There was a plane she didn’t recognize. Smaller than the others, with heavyset, molded wheel casings, making it look almost like a sea-plane. But it wasn’t; it was some sort of bomber, for she could see the bomb-assembly between those wheels. It must be an experimental model. The Germans were dismayingly inventive in such dread matters.

The woman returned to her letter, since she had identified the aircraft as well as she was able, and there was nothing she could do about them anyway. In moments they would pass overhead and continue on to wreak destruction of the factories to the north. She approved of none of this, but was selfishly relieved that the bombs would fall on other heads than hers.

Her missive was addressed to a correspondent in distant America with the unusual name Quality, who was working to master the language she had studied in school by corresponding with a native. Actually, in this region the natives had their own separate language that dated back millennia; most of the villagers spoke it rather than the national tongue. Which was one reason the woman was glad to correspond; it kept refreshing her own language. She liked the isolation, physically, but not intellectually or linguistically, so the letters were valuable.

Quality was another pacifist, and seemed like the sort of person whom it would be worthwhile to meet despite her youth. It was easy to write to her about the futility of revolution and war, the senseless savagery. Yet at this moment the war mocked them both; the devastating machines that were its minions were passing almost overhead. Adolf Hitler, the self-styled Führer, was testing his new toys, in violation of international treaties. Yet the community of the world clucked its tongue and did nothing. Who was most culpable, then: the bully, or those who let the bully have his way? Yet here was a moral trap: how could the bully be stopped, except by more violence? It was a difficult point. Pacifism had no easy answer to the problems of international aggression.

There was a series of explosions. Oh, no! The bombs were falling here!

The woman dashed to the door. Her husband emerged simultaneously from the goat shed, staring at the carnage, his black beret clinging to his head. The Nazis were bombing the town, this town! Debris was flying up, smoke roiling, and fire bursting in the dry bracken that was used for animal bedding. The stone houses were tough, but some direct hits were tumbling the walls, and the slate tiles were flying from the roofs. What hideous devastation even a single bomb could do!

Why are they doing this? she cried. There are no soldiers here!

Her father ran in from the field—technically her father-in-law, but she had adopted the fine old man—clasping his gnarled walking stick. This was still his farm, until he died; every aspect of it was his personal responsibility. He yielded chores only grudgingly, beginning with those his late wife had done. He was not fleeing the bombs, he was coming to protect his house.

A fighter-plane swooped low on a strafing run. The bullets kicked up little gouts of dust. The man cried out and fell, face down, his beret flying from his head. Even from this distance she could see the blood.

Her husband, ordinarily of sedentary bent, caught up a pitchfork and hurled it at the passing plane. The gesture was pathetically futile. The craft took no notice; it was strafing the sheep in the pasture. The animals milled about and fell, bleating in bewilderment.

She screamed, somehow feeling the horror of the pointless slaughter of the sheep more than that of the man. She was numb to her father’s fate; her emotion could not yet compass it; it wasn’t real. But the sheep—their deaths were real, if incomprehensible.

Dully she watched the bombs falling on the town. Every house was being hit, systematically. She heard the screams of the people caught in collapsing homes. Her neighbors, her friends. . .

Yet more terror came plunging out of the sky. It was the strange, small plane, diving down in a collision course with the ground. It must have gone out of control—but it was falling directly toward her own house!

She ran outside. The noise of the descending plane became deafening. A bomb sundered the house, behind her. Stones, plaster, slate and burning wood showered about her. That strike had been intentional! She was a pacifist, yet she felt primitive rage.

The plane’s motor sputtered even as the bomb scored. The machine tilted, dangerously near the ground. The pilot tried to pull it up, to level it, but could not quite succeed. The plane stalled; then with seeming slowness it dropped to the ground beyond the sheep, bounced, plowed a furrow in the turf, and came to rest almost intact.

The woman ran toward it. It would be a miracle if the pilot survived, and a part of her mind marveled that God should allow such miracles to such undeserving people. She knew that airplanes were apt to burst into flames because of surplus fuel. Panting, she caught up to the smoldering craft. The pilot was moving slowly, dazed. She scrambled up on the broken wing and to the open cockpit, amazed that the man hadn’t been cut to pieces when that bubble cracked apart. She caught hold of one of his arms and half-hauled, half-urged him out. Like a child he came, a uniformed German, the swastika on his left arm. No—that was bright red blood; her imagination had transformed it into the dread symbol of Nazism.

Why are you helping me? the pilot asked. He spoke in German, a language she hardly understood, but she grasped his meaning. What else would he be asking? I was aiming for the bridge, but lost control.

And she found herself baffled. This man, this foreign criminal, had bombed her house, destroying it. One of his companions had killed her father and decimated their herd of sheep. She had every reason to hate the Germans! Why did she try to help this monster? It was not that she valued life, even of enemies, though she did; she should have run first to her father-in-law, far more deserving of aid. Why aid the enemy?

Then she realized what it was. She had a correspondence with a foreign person, one she respected. The pilot was a foreign person. There was really no similarity between the two; her correspondent was a pacifist woman while this pilot was a killer in the notorious Kondor Legion. In the stress of horror, her emotion had made a wrong connection, identifying the foreign enemy with the foreign friend.

Now the surviving villagers were charging toward the downed plane, carrying staves, pitchforks and kitchen knives. Innocent victims had been transformed by the brute alchemy of violence into savage remnants; here was the only possible object of their vengeance.

The German pilot, his head evidently clearing, looked at the horde. He glanced down at his arm as if considering whether to run. How fast could he proceed while his strength was being drained by that wound? Where could he go without leaving a telltale red trail? "Donnerwetter!" he muttered.

He brought out his wallet and gave it to the woman; perhaps she could notify his next-of-kin. He thumbed it open and showed her where his name was: Hans Bremen. She nodded to show she understood.

Then Hans Bremen drew his pistol, put it to his head, and fired. His body crumpled silently. Vengeance had been denied the villagers. The woman stood, somehow unsurprised. War was madness; why would she expect otherwise? Sanity had departed when the first bomb fell on this village.

As the villagers arrived, one more airplane came. It dived out of the sky and planted a bomb in their midst. Bodies flew wide, and one of them was that of the woman. The German airman’s wallet tumbled through the smoke and was lost in the debris. There would be no notification of the next-of-kin by this route.

At last the remaining planes lifted away and departed to the south, leaving the smoldering ruin of the village. This was merely another incident in the year 1937, in the course of the civil war in Spain, in which Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union tested some of their equipment. The headlines of the world never reported this test run against a Basque town, and the dead were lost among the three quarters of a million that were the final toll of this vicious civil war.

But this incident foreshadowed, in significant respects, the greater conflagration soon to come. The hundreds who perished needlessly here would be eclipsed by the millions who would die in World War Two. This was in fact an omen, a warning—that was ignored.

CHAPTER 1

AMERICA

The drive between Boston and New York was never much fun, and this rainy June night it was worse than usual. A disproportionate number of oncoming vehicles maintained their beams adamantly on high, not caring about anyone’s vision but their own. Lane Dowling began to mutter with irritation, then to swear.

Lane... the girl murmured.

He flicked his glance across to her. Even in the gloom of the car, she was comely, her brow and nose and mouth finely chiseled in silhouette. Sorry, Quality, he said. She was a Quaker girl, and she really did object to bad language. That was part of her allure, for him; her informed innocence. Quality Smith was far from ignorant—she was an honors student—but her background was extremely straight-laced. If anyone in this world, he thought, was pure in body and spirit, it was Quality. Therefore she was a treasure, like a hoard of gold: after remaining sequestered for years, the beauty and value were undiminished. She was smart, pretty and chaste.

Another high-beam cowboy loomed. Lane gritted his teeth. It would be so satisfying to let fly one pungent cussword!

Perhaps I should take a turn, his friend said from the back seat. I do have an American driving license, and since you are kind enough to convey me—

Forget it, Ernst, Lane said. You don’t know these roads the way I do.

True, Ernst agreed, chuckling. Neither do I have your experience flying, as shows in the velocity of your machine. Yet I would not have you tire yourself unduly because of me. The German accent was almost imperceptible, but he still tended to speak formally and not too rapidly in English. It is a very great favor that you do for me.

If I were in Germany without a car, Lane said, gratified by his friend’s expressed appreciation, and had to make it in a hurry from Berlin to— He paused, unable to think of a suitable city. The geography of Germany was not as clear to him as that of New York State.

From Berlin to Hamburg, Ernst filled in obligingly. Yes, friend, I would drive you there. He smiled in the dark, highlights from passing headlights reflected in his even teeth. But I do not think you have business in the Fatherland at this time.

Not while the Nazi’s are there, for sure! Lane agreed. How you can go along with the fascists—

Please, Quality said.

Oh, don’t worry, girl. We’re not going to fight. Ernst and I are friends, though I can’t say the same for our countries. He shrugged, then directed a remark at the back seat. What the hell do you see in Hitler?

Please, Ernst said this time. I am prepared to defend the government of my country, but this distresses the lady. Quality made a murmur of agreement.

Look, Quality, Lane said. You always get tight about politics, but they’re part of today’s reality. The thing to do is not to take them seriously. Not between friends. Ernst just happens to be the single solitary Nazi fascist in the world that I can get along with, and we both damn well know—

Lane! she protested, a really sharp note in her voice.

Nazi, yes. Fascist, no, Ernst corrected him. The distinction—

And if war comes we’ll be on opposite sides, Lane continued. We both know that too. It’s like the Civil War, where brother fought against brother—

The Spanish Civil War? Ernst asked. That is not—

The American Civil War, idiot! Or as the text puts it, the War of the Rebellion. But this is peace, and we are friends—and even war isn’t going to change that.

Can’t we drop the subject? Quality pleaded.

No, Lane said, made ornery by the strain of night driving. The drizzly, dirty rain had quickened after a tantalizing intermittence, fouling the windshield and making the road surface treacherous. That was all he needed! We have to have this out sometime.

Friend, it should be let go, Ernst said. I comprehend her feeling.

But now Quality, despite her best intention, was angry. How can a Nazi comprehend the feeling of a pacifist?

Approximately, Ernst said with a half-twisted smile. You abhor me as I would abhor a Jew.

I don’t abhor Jews! she exclaimed indignantly.

Of course not, Ernst agreed, with another unseen smile. You are extremely tolerant of lesser races.

"There are no lesser—"

You do not share our concept of the Master Race.

I certainly don’t! How anyone can believe that trash—

Quality, Lane murmured with a smile of his own, in the same tone she had used on him. He’s teasing you. Ernst doesn’t hate Jews. That’s just part of what he has to say to keep out of trouble with his government. There’s a Jew on our team, and Ernst was assigned to work with him, and taught him how to—

Ach, swine, you betray me! Ernst muttered, chuckling. This time he pronounced the W with the sound of a V, in the German manner. Lane had picked up a number of interesting sidelights in the course of his association with Ernst, and remained intrigued by them. Most fun was the fact that the word folk, to which the Germans attached a special meaning, was spelled with a V and capitalized: Volk. So the German W was pronounced V, and the V was pronounced

F. Lane hadn’t figured out how the F was pronounced. Quality was stricken. Oh, I’m doing it! I’m making foolish assumptions, letting my temper run away with me, and using pejorative language. She inhaled deeply, exhaled, then turned to face the German. Ernst, I apologize—

Accepted, Ernst said immediately. We have mutually exclusive views, but there need be no rancor.

Yes, she agreed faintly.

But I believe I do understand. The mention of the war in Spain reminded me. One of my companions in the Hitler Youth, which is an organization that parallels your Boy Scouts but is more thorough, was older than I and went on to become a flyer like Lane. He was not listed as such, for political reasons, but he served in the Kondor Legion—you might spell it with a C—in Spain last year. He flew an experimental aircraft called a dive-bomber, and it crashed. When I learned of his death, I cursed the futility of war.

Spain... she echoed.

I lived in Spain, in my youth; my father was stationed there for a time. I learned to speak the language there. It is a nice country, almost as pretty as Germany. Now that memory of Iberia is spoiled, for the blood of my friend seeped into that soil. Yet all would have been well, but for the idiocy of war.

Another pacifist! Lane said in mock wonder. But he found himself touched. He had not known about Ernst’s loss of a flying friend. Ernst had always refused to be taken for a ride in a small plane, and now the reason was coming clear.

I, too, lost a friend in Spain, Quality whispered. I never met her, but I knew her well. A woman who lived in a Basque village.

Ah, the territory of the Basques! Ernst said. That was the Republican stronghold where—

I know that was where! she cried, her voice shrill again. That awful Condor Legion bombed her town!

Ah, no! You do not suppose—?

They could have met? she said acidly. "You think he said ‘Here, my dear Spanish lady, is ein gift from der Führer,’ as he dropped his bomb on her head?"

Gift in German means poison, Ernst said. But I take your meaning. Yet if he crashed, he might not have bombed anyone. He had no animosity to others; he did not mean to hurt. He merely liked to fly, and the experience of diving out of the sky in seeming suicide, to pull out only a few feet from the ground—

That I can understand, Lane murmured. The exhilaration of falling through space, like parachuting—

It is not for me, Ernst said somewhat abruptly. His name was—

No! No names! Quality cried. How terrible, if—

Yes, it is terrible, Ernst agreed soberly. If I could wave a magic wand and abolish the Spanish war, then and now—for the slaughter continues there to this day—and save the lives of your friend and mine, I would certainly do so.

The war continues. Now Quality faced straight forward, her face set. No wish of yours or mine can change it. But I confess you have some basis to understand my feeling.

I’m glad that’s settled, Lane said. He was driving more slowly now, for the rain had continued to intensify, and the edge of the road was getting flooded. I thought for a moment we were going to re-enact the war here in this car. Let’s let the sword be a plowshare, and a gift not be poison. I want you two to get along.

Why? Ernst inquired after a pause. The lady has reason to avoid me, and this I understand. Had her friend been a pilot bombing my friend’s town, I would feel the same.

No, it’s not that, Quality said. We are not our brothers’ keepers in quite that sense. But as long as you support the brutal Nazi regime—

The American regime is far from gentle, Ernst said. One has but to look at history, at the way your country caused Panama to revolt from Colombia, and sent her gunship to balk the Colombian troops, so that a separate deal could be made on the Canal Zone America wanted—

Touché! Lane exclaimed.

And my country’s dealings with Mexico, no more savory, Quality said. I support none of this. Yet—

There is evil enough to go around, Lane cut in, surprised at both Ernst’s and Quality’s conversance with the skeletons in America’s closet. No gunship had appeared in his own history text. We know that. And each person must support his country, his system, even if it isn’t perfect. No one respects a traitor. You two should be able to tolerate each other’s governments for a day.

Now it was Quality who asked Why?

Because I want Ernst to be the Best Man when you and I get married.

Quality gasped. Ernst made a guttural snort of derision.

No, I’m serious, Lane insisted. You’re the best man I know, Ernst.

After a moment the German recovered enough to protest. Nevertheless, in the circumstances—

The car jerked and slowed. The left front wheel had hit a pothole concealed by filling water. For a moment the vehicle veered toward the opposing traffic.

Quality made a little shriek. Ernst grunted and jumped forward. Then Lane wrestled the wheels back to the right. The scare was over.

What? Quality asked, startled. For Ernst’s muscular left forearm was across her front, pressing her back into the seat.

Apology, the German muttered, drawing quickly away.