The Man with the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

jerky. “Twenty-three dead, they’re saying now. And almost twice that many wounded bad enough to need treatment.”
    “Shit.” Benton’s drawl almost turned it into a two-syllable word. “Good thing the Jerries didn’t get so many of our guys for every one of theirs while the fighting was still going on. We had more people than they did—more stuff too—but not that much more.”
    “Mm.” Lou hadn’t thought of it in those terms, which didn’t mean the ordnance sergeant was wrong. “If you were out to turn somebody into a walking bomb, how would you go about it?”
    “Same way these fuckers did, I reckon,” Benton replied. “The Nazis bite the big one, but nobody ever said they couldn’t handle shit like this. Explosives—around the guy’s middle, I guess, so they wouldn’t show so much. Scrap metal, nails, whatever the hell for shrapnel. A battery. A button to push. And
kapow!
”
    “Yeah.
Kapow!
” Lou’s echo sounded hollow, even to himself.
    “What do we do about shit like this, Lieutenant?” Benton asked. “If this asshole wasn’t just your garden-variety nut, seems to me like we got ourselves some trouble. The way we fight is, we want to live, and we want to make sure the other sons of bitches don’t. Always figured the krauts played by the same rules. But if all of a sudden-like they don’t give a shit no more, sure as hell makes ’em harder to defend against.”
    “I know.” Lou clenched his fist and pounded it against the side of his thigh. He didn’t notice he was doing it till it started to hurt. Then he quit. “God damn it to hell, Toby, the war in Europe is over. They surrendered. We can do whatever we want to their people, and they’ve got to know it.”
    “Yes, sir,” Sergeant Benton agreed. “That’s how come I hope he was a nut. If they’ve got waddayacallems—partisans…Russians and Yugoslavs gave old Adolf a fuck of a lot of grief with guys like that. I guess even the froggies caused him some trouble.” After hitting the beach on D-Day, his opinion of France and things French could have been higher.
    “Well, it’s not my call, thank God,” Lou said. “I haven’t got the stomach for lining rows of people up against a wall and shooting ’em. Even Germans—except camp guards and mothers like that.” His voice went ferocious. He’d done Latin in college before the war, and remembered coming across the Roman Emperor who wished all mankind had one neck, so he could get rid of it at a single stroke. Back then, he’d thought that was one of the most savage things he’d ever heard. He felt the same way about SS men himself these days.
    “Shit, sir, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was only them. But all these chickenshit civilians and
Wehrmacht
guys who swear on a stack of Bibles they didn’t know squat about any concentration camps…No, sirree, not them. My ass!” Benton made as if to retch, and for once the death reek had nothing to do with it.
    “Uh-huh.” Lou nodded. “And the real pisser is, they expect us to
believe
that crap. How dumb do they think we are?” He knew the answer to that: your average German—your average German with a guilty conscience—thought your average American was pretty goddamn dumb. By the way some U.S. officers were willing to use Nazis to help get the towns they were in charge of back on their feet, maybe your average German hit the nail right on the head, too.
    “You gonna talk with the town councillor who was here?” Benton asked. “What the hell’s his handle, anyway?”
    “Herpolsheimer,” Lou said with a certain gloomy relish. “Anton Herpolsheimer. Jeez, what a monicker. Yeah, I’ll talk to him. Don’t know what he would’ve seen that our GIs didn’t, but maybe something.”
    Herr
Herpolsheimer’s house stood next to the post office on the Hugenottenplatz. Once upon a time, the Germans had taken in persecuted French Protestants instead of clobbering them. Worth remembering they could do such things…Lou