[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  A man stepped on the field marshal’s handkerchief. “Fire!” Model said.

  A second passed, two. Nothing happened. Model scowled at his men. Gandhi’s deviltry had got into them; sneaky as a Jew, he was turning the appearance of weakness into a strange kind of strength. But then trained discipline paid its dividend. One finger tightened on a Mauser trigger. A single shot rang out. As if it were a signal that recalled the other men to their duty, they too began to fire. From the armored personnel carriers, the machine guns started their deadly chatter. Model heard screams above the gunfire.

  The volley smashed into the front ranks of marchers at close range. Men fell. Others ran, or tried to, only to be held by the power of the stream still advancing behind them. Once begun, the Germans methodically poured fire into the column of Indians. The march dissolved into a panic-stricken mob.

  Gandhi still tried to press forward. A fleeing wounded man smashed into him, splashing him with blood and knocking him to the ground. Nehru and another man immediately lay down on top of him.

  “Let me up! Let me up!” he shouted.

  “No,” Nehru screamed in his ear. “With shooting like this, you are in the safest spot you can be. We need you, and need you alive. Now we have martyrs around whom to rally our cause.”

  “Now we have dead husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Who will tend to their loved ones?”

  Gandhi had no time for more protest. Nehru and the other man hauled him to his feet and dragged him away. Soon they were among their people, all running now from the German guns. A bullet struck the back of the unknown man who was helping Gandhi escape. Gandhi heard the slap of the impact, felt the man jerk. Then the strong grip on him loosened as the man fell.

  He tried to tear free from Nehru. Before he could, another Indian laid hold of him. Even at that horrid moment, he felt the irony of his predicament. All his life he had championed individual liberty, and here his own followers were robbing him of his. In other circumstances, it might have been funny.

  “In here!” Nehru shouted. Several people had already broken down the door to a shop and, Gandhi saw a moment later, the rear exit as well. Then he was hustled into the alley behind the shop, and through a maze of lanes which reminded him that old Delhi, unlike its British-designed sister city, was an Indian town through and through.

  At last the nameless man with Gandhi and Nehru knocked on the back door of a tearoom. The woman who opened it gasped to recognize her unexpected guests, then pressed her hands together in front of her and stepped aside to let them in. “You will be safe here,” the man said, “at least for a while. Now I must see to my own family.”

  “From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you,” Nehru replied as the fellow hurried away. Gandhi said nothing. He was winded, battered, and filled with anguish at the failure of the march and at the suffering it had brought to so many marchers and to their kinsfolk.

  The woman sat the two fugitive leaders at a small table in the kitchen, served them tea and cakes. “I will leave you now, best ones,” she said quietly, “lest those out front wonder why I neglect them for so long.”

  Gandhi left the cake on his plate. He sipped the tea. Its warmth began to restore him physically, but the wound in his spirit would never heal. “The Amritsar massacre pales beside this,” he said, setting down the empty cup. “There the British panicked and opened fire. This had nothing of panic about it. Model told me what he would do, and he did it.” He shook his head, still hardly believing what he had just been through.

  “So he did.” Nehru had gobbled his cake like a starving wolf, and ate his companion’s when he saw Gandhi did not want it. His once-immaculate white jacket and pants were torn, filthy, and blood-spattered; his cap sat awry on his head. But his eyes, usually so somber, were lit with a fierce glow. “And by his brutality, he has delivered himself into our hands. No one now can imagine the Germans have anything but their own interests at heart. We will gain followers all over the country. After this, not a wheel will turn in India.”

  “Yes, I will declare the satyagraha campaign,” Gandhi said. “Non-cooperation will show how we reject foreign rule, and will cost the Germans dear because they will not be able to exploit us. The combination of nonviolence and determined spirit will surely shame them into granting us our liberty.”

  “There—you see.” Encouraged by his mentor’s rally, Nehru rose and came round the table to embrace the older man. “We will triumph yet.”

  “So we will,” Gandhi said, and sighed heavily. He had pursued India’s freedom for half his long life, and this change of masters was a setback he had not truly planned for, even after England and Russia fell. The British were finally beginning to listen to him when the Germans swept them aside. Now he had to begin anew. He sighed again. “It will cost our poor people dear, though.”

  “Cease firing,” Model said. Few good targets were left on Qutb Road; almost all the Indians in the procession were down or had run from the guns.

  Even after the bullets stopped, the street was far from silent. Most of the people the German platoon had shot were alive and shrieking. As if he needed more proof—the Russian campaign had taught the field marshal how hard human beings were to kill outright.

  Still, the din distressed him, and evidently Lasch as well. “We ought to put them out of their misery,” the major said.

  “So we should.” Model had a happy inspiration. “And I know just how. Come with me.”

  The two men turned their backs on the carnage and walked around the row of armored personnel carriers. As they passed the lieutenant commanding the platoon, Model nodded to him and said, “Well done.”

  The lieutenant saluted. “Thank you, sir.” The soldiers in earshot nodded at one another. Nothing bucked up the odds of getting promoted like performing under the commander’s eye.

  The Germans behind the armored vehicles were not so proud of themselves. They were the ones who had let the march get this big and come this far in the first place. Model slapped his boot with his field marshal’s baton. “You all deserve courts-martial,” he said coldly, glaring at them. “You know the orders concerning native assemblies, yet there you were tagging along, more like sheepdogs than soldiers.” He spat in disgust.

  “But, sir—” began one of them, a sergeant-major, Model saw. He subsided in a hurry when Model’s gaze swung his way.

  “Speak,” the field marshal urged. “Enlighten me—tell me what possessed you to act in the disgraceful way you did. Was it some evil spirit, perhaps? This country abounds with them, if you listen to the natives—as you all too obviously have been.”

  The sergeant-major flushed under Model’s sarcasm, but finally burst out, “Sir, it didn’t look to me as if they were up to any harm, that’s all. The old man heading them up swore they were peaceful, and he looked too feeble to be anything but, if you take my meaning.”

  Model’s smile had all the warmth of a Moscow December night. “And so in your wisdom you set aside the commands you had received. The results of that wisdom you hear now.” The field marshal briefly let himself listen to the cries of the wounded, a sound the war had taught him to screen out. “Now then, come with me—yes you, Sergeant-major, and the rest of your shirkers too, or those of you who wish to avoid a court.”

  As he had known they would, they all trooped after him. “There is your handiwork,” he said, pointing to the shambles in the street. His voice hardened. “You are responsible for those people lying there—had you acted as you should, you would have broken up that march long before it ever got so far or so large. Now the least you can do is give those people their release.” He set hands on hips, waited.

  No one moved. “Sir?” the sergeant-major said faintly. He seemed to have become the group’s spokesman.

  Model made an impatient gesture. “Go on, finish them. A bullet in the back of the head will quiet them once and for all.”

  “In cold blood, sir?” The sergeant-major had not wanted to understand him before. Now he ha
d no choice.

  The field marshal was inexorable. “They—and you—disobeyed Reich commands. They made themselves liable to capital punishment the moment they gathered. You at least have the chance to atone, by carrying out this just sentence.”

  “I don’t think I can,” the sergeant-major muttered.

  He was probably just talking to himself, but Model gave him no chance to change his mind. He turned to the lieutenant of the platoon that had broken the march. “Place this man under arrest.” After the sergeant-major had been seized, Model turned his chill, monocled stare on the rest of the reluctant soldiers. “Any others?”

  Two more men let themselves be arrested rather than draw their weapons. The field marshal nodded to the others. “Carry out your orders.” He had an afterthought. “If you find Gandhi or Nehru out there, bring them to me alive.”

  The Germans moved out hesitantly. They were no Einsatzkommandos, and not used to this kind of work. Some looked away as they administered the first coup de grace; one missed as a result, and had his bullet ricochet off the pavement and almost hit a comrade. But as the soldiers worked their way up Qutb Road they became quicker, more confident, and more competent. War was like that, Model thought. So soon one became used to what had been unimaginable.

  After a while the flat cracks died away, but from lack of targets rather than reluctance. A few at a time, the soldiers returned to Model. “No sign of the two leaders?” he asked. They all shook their heads.

  “Very well—dismissed. And obey your orders like good Germans henceforward.”

  “No further reprisals?” Lasch asked as the relieved troopers hurried away.

  “No, let them go. They carried out their part of the bargain, and I will meet mine. I am a fair man, after all, Dieter.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  Gandhi listened with undisguised dismay as the shopkeeper babbled out his tale of horror. “This is madness!” he cried.

  “I doubt Field Marshal Model, for his part, understands the principle of ahimsa,” Nehru put in. Neither Gandhi nor he knew exactly where they were: a safe house somewhere not far from the center of Delhi was the best guess he could make. The men who brought the shopkeeper were masked. What one did not know, one could not tell the Germans if captured.

  “Neither do you,” the older man replied, which was true; Nehru had a more pragmatic nature than Gandhi. Gandhi went on, “Rather more to the point, neither do the British. And Model, to speak to, seemed no different from any high-ranking British military man. His specialty has made him harsh and rigid, but he is not stupid and does not appear unusually cruel.”

  “Just a simple soldier, doing his job.” Nehru’s irony was palpable.

  “He must have gone insane,” Gandhi said; it was the only explanation that made even the slightest sense of the massacre of the wounded. “Undoubtedly he will be censured when news of this atrocity reaches Berlin, as General Dyer was by the British after Amritsar.”

  “Such is to be hoped.” But again Nehru did not sound hopeful.

  “How could it be otherwise, after such an appalling action? What government, what leaders could fail to be filled with humiliation and remorse at it?”

  Model strode into the mess. The officers stood and raised their glasses in salute. “Sit, sit,” the field marshal growled, using gruffness to hide his pleasure.

  An Indian servant brought him a fair imitation of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding: better than they were eating in London these days, he thought. The servant was silent and unsmiling, but Model would only have noticed more about him had he been otherwise. Servants were supposed to assume a cloak of invisibility.

  When the meal was done, Model took out his cigar case. The Waffen-SS officer on his left produced a lighter. Model leaned forward, puffed a cigar into life. “My thanks, Brigadeführer,” the field marshal said. He had little use for SS titles of rank, but brigade commander was at least recognizably close to brigadier.

  “Sir, it is my great pleasure,” Jürgen Stroop declared. “You could not have handled things better. A lesson for the Indians—less than they deserve, too” (he also took no notice of the servant) “and a good one for your men as well. We train ours harshly too.”

  Model nodded. He knew about SS training methods. No one denied the daring of the Waffen-SS divisions. No one (except the SS) denied that the Wehrmacht had better officers.

  Stroop drank. “A lesson,” he repeated in a pedantic tone that went oddly with the SS’s reputation for aggressiveness. “Force is the only thing the racially inferior can understand. Why, when I was in Warsaw—”

  That had been four or five years ago, Model suddenly recalled. Stroop had been a Brigadeführer then too, if memory served; no wonder he was still one now, even after all the hard fighting since. He was lucky not to be a buck private. Imagine letting a pack of desperate, starving Jews chew up the finest troops in the world.

  And imagine, afterwards, submitting a seventy-five-page operations report bound in leather and grandiosely called The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More. And imagine, with all that, having the crust to boast about it afterwards. No wonder the man sounded like a pompous ass. He was a pompous ass, and an inept butcher to boot. Model had done enough butchery before today’s work—anyone who fought in Russia learned all about butchery—but he had never botched it.

  He did not revel in it, either. He wished Stroop would shut up. He thought about telling the Brigadeführer he would sooner have been listening to Gandhi. The look on the fellow’s face, he thought, would be worth it. But no. One could never be sure who was listening. Better safe.

  The shortwave set crackled to life. It was in a secret cellar, a tiny dark hot room lit only by the glow of its dial and by the red end of the cigarette in its owner’s mouth. The Germans had made not turning in a radio a capital crime. Of course, Gandhi thought, harboring him was also a capital crime. That weighed on his conscience. But the man knew the risk he was taking.

  The fellow (Gandhi knew him only as Lal) fiddled with the controls. “Usually we listen to the Americans,” he said. “There is some hope of truth from them. But tonight you want to hear Berlin.”

  “Yes,” Gandhi said. “I must learn what action is to be taken against Model.”

  “If any,” Nehru added. He was once again impeccably attired in white, which made him the most easily visible object in the cellar.

  “We have argued this before,” Gandhi said tiredly. “No government can uphold the author of a cold-blooded slaughter of wounded men and women. The world would cry out in abhorrence.”

  Lal said, “That government controls too much of the world already.” He adjusted the tuning knob again. After a burst of static, the strains of a Strauss waltz filled the little room. Lal grunted in satisfaction. “We are a little early yet.”

  After a few minutes, the incongruously sweet music died away. “This is Radio Berlin’s English-language channel,” an announcer declared. “In a moment, the news programme.” Another German tune rang out: the Horst Wessel Song. Gandhi’s nostrils flared with distaste.

  A new voice came over the air. “Good day. This is William Joyce.” The nasal Oxonian accent was that of the archetypical British aristocrat, now vanished from India as well as England. It was the accent that flavored Gandhi’s own English, and Nehru’s as well. In fact, Gandhi had heard, Joyce was a New York-born rabble-rouser of Irish blood who also happened to be a passionately sincere Nazi. The combination struck the Indian as distressing.

  “What did the English used to call him?” Nehru murmured. “Lord Haw-Haw?”

  Gandhi waved his friend to silence. Joyce was reading the news, or what the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin wanted to present to English-speakers as the news.

  Most of it was on the dull side: a trade agreement between Manchukuo, Japanese-dominated China, and Japanese-dominated Siberia; advances by German-supported French troops against American-supported French troops in a war by proxy in the African jungles.

  Slightly more interest
ing was the German warning about American interference in the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  One day soon, Gandhi thought sadly, the two mighty powers of the Old World would turn on the one great nation that stood between them. He feared the outcome. Thinking herself secure behind ocean barriers, the United States had stayed out of the European war. Now the war was bigger than Europe, and the oceans barriers no longer, but highways for her foes.

  Lord Haw-Haw droned on and on. He gloated over the fate of rebels hunted down in Scotland: they were publicly hanged. Nehru leaned forward. “Now,” he guessed. Gandhi nodded.

  But the commentator passed on to unlikely-sounding boasts about the prosperity of Europe under the New Order. Against his will, Gandhi felt anger rise in him. Were Indians too insignificant to the Reich even to be mentioned?

  More music came from the radio: the first bars of the other German anthem, Deutschland über alles. William Joyce said solemnly, “And now, a special announcement from the Ministry for Administration of Acquired Territories. Reichsminister Reinhard Heydrich commends Field Marshal Walther Model’s heroic suppression of insurrection in India, and warns that his leniency will not be repeated.”

  “Leniency!” Nehru and Gandhi burst out together, the latter making it into as much of a curse as he allowed himself.

  As if explaining to them, the voice on the radio went on, “Henceforward, hostages will be taken at the slightest sound of disorder, and will be executed forthwith if it continues. Field Marshal Model has also placed a reward of fifty thousand rupees on the capture of the criminal revolutionary Gandhi, and twenty-five thousand on the capture of his henchman Nehru.”

  Deutschland über alles rang out again, to signal the end of the announcement. Joyce went on to the next piece of news. “Turn that off,” Nehru said after a moment. Lal obeyed, plunging the cellar into complete darkness. Nehru surprised Gandhi by laughing. “I have never before been the henchman of a criminal revolutionary.”