The shelling went on, but none of the other rounds burst close enough to make him pucker. He lit a cigarette. The tobacco was allegedly French. It smelled like horseshit. It tasted the way he imagined smoldering horseshit would taste, too.

“No pasaran,” Mike said, and then, “Gimme one of those.”

“Here.” Chaim handed him the pack.

Mike took a smoke from it. He leaned close to Chaim to get it going. After his first drag, he made a face. “Boy, that’s rotten.”

“Uh-huh.” Chaim held out his hand, palm up. Reluctantly, his buddy returned the cigarettes. Chaim stuck them back in the breast pocket of his ragged khaki tunic. “Only thing worse than rotten tobacco’s no tobacco at all.”

“No kidding,” Mike said.

Chaim took a cautious look out of the trench. Nothing special was going on in the Nationalist lines a few hundred yards away-everybody here talked about meters, but they seemed like play money to him. The shelling was just…shelling. A few people on both sides would get maimed or killed, and it wouldn’t move the war any closer to the end, not even a nickel’s worth.

“No pasaran,” Chaim echoed. “They’d fucking better not pass, not here, or we’re butcher’s meat.” He sucked in more smoke. “Hell, we’re dead meat anyway, sooner or later. I still hope it’s later, though.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Mike Carroll sounded like Boston. Before he came to Spain, he’d worked in a steel mill somewhere in Massachusetts. That was what he said, anyway. A lot of guys had stories that didn’t add up. Chaim didn’t get all hot and bothered about it. He didn’t tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about himself, either. The only thing that really mattered was that you hated Fascism enough to hop on a boat and try to do something about it.