The War That Came Early: The Big Switch by Harry Turtledove

this assignment. He talked about the need to beat the Russians so Central Asia didn’t grab a foothold in Central Europe.
    Everything he said seemed harmless enough. All the same, Theo wished he
were
back at that desk in Dresden, or whatever his previous assignment had been. Again, the radioman didn’t think he was anywhere close to the only guy with the same wish.
    BACK IN THE TRENCHES in front of Madrid, Chaim Weinberg didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He did know he ought to be pissed off, and he was. He had a good notion of who’d screwed him, and he hadn’t even got kissed. That pissed him off, too. La Martellita had a blowjob mouth if ever there was one—to look at, anyway. He’d never got to feel it on John Henry. Not against his lips, either, for that matter. She couldn’t stand him, so she’d put him back where he started.
    Only a handful of old sweats from the States were left in the Abe Lincolns. Spaniards filled out the ranks, as they did in all the International Brigades these days. The surviving Americans thought his return was the funniest thing that had happened lately.
    “Watsamatter wit’ you, boychik?” said another New Yorker, a Jew who went by the name of Izzy. “You had it soft in Madrid. How’d you manage to screw it up this time?”
    Chaim didn’t like that
this time
, not even slightly. “Talent,” he said, and tried to let it go at that.
    No such luck. Izzy was a born agitator. He was a New York Jew in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—of course he was a born agitator. “What did you go and do?” he asked, eyeing Chaim shrewdly. “Get somebody important mad at you? Can’t get away with that, boychik, not even in the classless society you can’t.”
    “Oh, fuck off,” Chaim answered. Izzy laughed like a loon. Chaim almost hauled off and belted him. He would have, if that hadn’t been the same as admitting the other guy was right.
    Izzy wasn’t the only veteran who thought he was the most comical—and the dumbest—thing on two legs. He couldn’t fight all of them, not if he wanted to live to do anything else. He didn’t know what all he wanted to do later on, but one thing seemed glaringly obvious. He wanted to get an apology from La Martellita. If he couldn’t get an apology, a blowjob would do just as well. Maybe better.
    First he had to live long enough to collect one or the other (even both, if he got really lucky). He hadn’t got sent to the trenches just because La Martellita put in a bad word somewhere. He hoped like hell he hadn’t, anyhow. The Republic was trying to push the Nationalists away from the capital. Whenever the Republic tried something that took hard fighting, in went the International Brigades. That had been true ever since the Internationals got to Spain.
    And, though Spaniards filled out the Brigades’ ranks these days, it remained true even now. The Americans and Englishmen and Poles and Germans and Italians and Hungarians and God knew what all else who remained gave the International Brigades experience and
esprit de corps
no purely Spanish outfit could match. The foreign volunteers had and passed on experience the Spaniards couldn’t match, too. Germans who hated Adolf Hitler’s guts owned just as much professional expertise as the ones who fought in the
Legion Kondor
.
    Naturally, Marshal Sanjurjo’s men understood all that as well as the Republicans. Naturally, the Nationalists kept their own élite troops opposite the Internationals’ positions. Naturally, any advance against those Fascist soldiers was a lot tougher than it would have been against the usual odds and sods who filled out the ranks on both sides.
    You outflanked a bunch of odds and sods, they either ran away or surrendered. Raw troops were as sensitive about their flanks as so many ticklish virgins. You outflanked a bunch of men who knew what they were doing and really meant it, and they hunkered down, dug their foxholes deeper, turned their machine gun your way if they