Last Orders: The War That Came Early by Harry Turtledove

before he could do anything about it.
    After the break, they switched ends and went at it again. The Poles scored—that one went right through Theo’s spraddled legs. He was mad, because he thought he should have stopped it. A few minutes later, the Germans leveled. Adi made a sweet pass into the area, and another German headed it home.
    There things stuck. Theo made a good save. So did the Poles’ goalkeeper, who jumped as if on springs to tip a rifle shot of Adi’s just over the crossbar. Adi waved to him, paying his respects. The ’keeper sketched a salute in return. He’d seen what he was up against.
    As they neared the final whistle, Theo grew just about sure the match would end in a draw. He wanted a win, but a draw wasn’t so bad. Nobody’s national pride would be damaged that way. He did wish he hadn’t let in the last goal.
    The Polish ’keeper must also have decided it was safe to relax a little. He took a couple of steps forward, away from the frame of the net. Why not? Safe as houses. The ball was out near the halfway line.
    Theo could have told him nowhere on the pitch was safe when Adi was around. He could have, but he didn’t need to. Adi showed the Pole instead. He launched a howitzer shot with his right foot, high and looping and dropping down straight toward the goal. The ’keeper staggered back, desperately throwing up his arms. He got the fingertips of his right hand on the ball. Theo hadn’t thought he could even do that. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t flip the ball over the bar this time. It went in. Adi’d done it again, all right—in spades.
    When the referee blew the whistle a couple of minutes later, the triumphant Germans carried him off the field on their shoulders. He was grinning like a fool and laughing like a lunatic. Part of that might have been triumph, too.
    Part of it, Theo judged, was something else altogether. Had the
Wehrmacht
men knew more, they likely would have celebrated less.Adi had more in common with some of the soldiers in Polish uniform than he did with them. Most of the Poles wouldn’t have been happy about that, either. Theo cracked a smile. Not only had his side won, he shared a joke with only one other man out of the whole crowd.
    Dr. Alvarez clucked like a laying hen. “You really should not leave hospital so soon,” he insisted.
    He’d been trained in England, all right; any American would have said
leave the hospital
. Chaim Weinberg noticed, but he didn’t care. “Doc, you’ve said you’re not gonna do any more carving on me, right?” he said.
    “Yes,” the hand surgeon answered with a reluctant nod. “But you have not done enough exercises to give you the full strength and dexterity possible in your hand.”
    “So I’ll keep doing ’em once I get to the front,” Chaim answered. “And I’ll do other stuff with it, too. You gotta understand, Doc—I’m just sick to death of laying around here on my butt.”
    “Lying,” Alvarez said.
    “No, honest to God, it’s the truth.” Then Chaim realized what the doctor meant. He started to laugh. Wasn’t it a hell of a note when a foreigner knew more about your language’s grammar than you did? He went on, “I’ll be okay—I really will. You can’t tell me the Republic doesn’t need another soldier who doesn’t halfway know what he’s doing, either.
¡Viva la República!
”
    “¡Viva!”
Dr. Alvarez echoed. He had to do that much. If he didn’t, somebody was liable to report him as a Sanjurjo sympathizer. If his actual politics lay on the Nationalist side, Chaim no more wanted to know about it than Alvarez wanted him to find out.
    One way the surgeon could have kept him in Madrid would have been not to give him any clothes. The filthy, bloody uniform in which he’d come here had long since been thrown away—or, more likely, burned to prevent contagion. But they fitted him with a pair of dungarees and a peasant’s collarless cotton shirt. That would do to get him to the front.