New World a-Coming, Ch. 28
1939: The Ballyizget underground
By the summer of ‘39, Ballyizget was full of shady characters.
The war years were hard. Of course, it wasn’t like Warsaw, or elsewhere in Poland, or Ukraine—lacking much in the way of strategic resources, Bassanda wasn’t thought to merit or require much of an occupying force, even after September ‘39. It was a little bit of a backwater, and because any ambitious Nazi wanted to be posted someplace more active, the ones who wound up in Ballyizget tended to be overage, under-disciplined, and the general dregs and sweepings. There was an uneasy tension between the Germans and the Bassandans: you’d have thought the Nazis, who had the weapons, the infrastructure, and the Kremlin itself, could have controlled the population. But in practice, most of those half-arsed gauleiters and provincial privates knew that they were outnumbered, and that any one of them could get snatched off the street and disappeared on any moonless night. So they tended to keep to the barracks, and to the taverns near the Kremlin, and they were surprisingly hands-off with the civilian population.
And I think at some level the Germans knew that if they showed much activity, or if Bassanda suddenly became strategically important, things could heat up. And the last thing these sorts wanted was to find themselves on the front lines of a confrontation between Berlin and Moscow; by the spring of ‘40, even though information was at a premium, they’d heard some of what happened to the Ruskis in Finland, and they didn’t want any part of that kind of counter-insurgency meat grinder. Even so, every so often, a train would derail, or a warehouse of munitions would burn, or somebody’d pour gasoline into a diesel truck’s tank and burn out its engine. But the fat and slovenly Germans who manned the barracks in Ballyizget would just pretend not to see, and report the truck as “missing” or the fire as “accidental”—the last thing they wanted from Berlin was orders to take counter-insurrection steps.
What they also didn’t know, because Berlin never did its homework, was that resistance traditions had been going on in Ballyizget for half a millennium at least. I suppose Moscow could have told them—particularly after the Mutual Non-Aggression Pact—but the Ruskis were actually fine with Hitler and Himmler crashing and burning in the satellites: because Bassanda didn’t directly border on the Soviet Union, the way that Poland or Finland did, Stalin was fine with the Germans just burning up resources on what he saw as a third-priority theater.
Things heated up by November, though: when the Russians went into Poland and Finland, everyone else in the border states took notice, and the Bassandans, who’d endured imperial interventions for centuries, knew what was coming, more than most. And you could tell it more indirectly, too, even in the absence of noticeable resistance: the Germans in the Ballyizget garrison got more snappish and more tentative at the same time: they withdrew even more closely to the barracks and the castle, and you barely even saw soldiers on the streets… with good reason: they were being hunted.