Minor Fictional Characters in The War That Came Early

This article lists the various minor fictional characters who appear in The War That Came Early series. These characters are identified by name, but play at best a peripheral role in the series. Most were simply mentioned once, or had a very brief, unimportant speaking role that did not impact the plot, and never appeared again. As the series is ongoing as of this writing, certain characters may suddenly gain importance.

Dennis Boucher
(West and East)

Denis Boucher was a French soldier during Second European War. After finishing basic training in 1939, he was assigned to Corporal Luc Harcourt's squad. Though he was only one year younger than Harcourt, he was in awe of the NCO, and of NCOs in general. He asked Harcourt for advice on how to deal with his woman, whom he expected of being unfaithful in his absence. Harcourt advised him that, if she was not willing to wait for him to return, she wasn't worth worrying over anyway. Boucher indignantly responded that he loved her.

Several days after this incident, Boucher failed to answer roll call. Harcourt reported him MIA to Sergeant Demange. Both NCOs reflected indifferently that he might have been killed in action or he might have deserted, but either way he was no longer their concern.

Defective Mongolian Officer
(Hitler's War)

In October, 1938, a Mongolian Officer who believed himself to be in danger of being arrested and purged by Khorloogiin Choibalsan fled to Manchukuo to escape the communist dictator's reach. There he surrendered himself to a squad of Japanese soldiers led by Sergeant Hideki Fujita. In a broken Chinese conversation with Shinjiro Hayashi, he promised significant information on the disposition of Russo-Mongolian forces in the disputed border region between the two puppet states. He also provided Fujita and his comrades with the very valuable intelligence that the Soviet authorities in Mongolia were planning to grow far more cautious and conservative in their prosecution of the running war with Japan in the face of developments in Czechoslovakia.

Eddie
(The Big Switch)

Eddie was an usher at a rally for Franklin D Roosevelt in Philadelphia in the fall of 1940.

Herb (JAG)
(W&E)

Herb was a judge advocate officer of the United States Marine Corps stationed in Shanghai. He met daily with Captain Ralph Longstreet, for whose company he was responsible. In 1939, Longstreet promised one of his men, Pete McGill, that he would speak to Herb about McGill's request for permission to marry Vera Kuznetsova.

Luis (The War That Came Early)
(HW)

Luis was one of two aides to General José Sanjurjo while the general was in exile in Portugal. Luis and the other aide, Orlando, initially load Sanjurjo's wardrobe into a small two-seater plane that was destined for Burgos. However, after some careful words from the pilot, Major Juan Antonio Ansaldo, Sanjurjo relented, and had Luis and Orlando remove the general's clothing from the cargo hold.

Marie (The War That Came Early)
(W&G)

Marie was the girlfriend of Denis Boucher. When Boucher was conscripted into the French army during the war, he worried that Marie might cheat on him while he was gone. She was always flirtatious, and had had a fight with Boucher before Boucher reported to Basic Training, a fight which was not resolved when Boucher left. Boucher confided all these things to his corporal, Luc Harcourt. Harcourt told him, not unkindly, that if she proved faithless in his absence, Marie was never worth Boucher's affection anyway, and he'd be better off forgetting her. Boucher took scant comfort in this advice, for he insisted that he really and truly loved her.

Several days after Boucher spoke with Harcourt, he failed to answer roll call. Harcourt was unable to determine whether he'd been killed in action or deserted to return to Marie. Harcourt did not particularly care either way, and neither did his superior, Sergeant Demange, to whom he reported Boucher as MIA. Demange, far less patient with raw recruits' foibles than was Harcourt, hoped that, if Boucher had deserted, he would find that Marie had been unfaithful and that she infected him with a venereal disease. Despite being more compassionate than the senior NCO, Harcourt found he agreed with the sentiment.

Orlando (The War That Came Early)
(HW)

Orlando was one of two aides to General José Sanjurjo while the general was in exile in Portugal. Luis and the other aide, Luis, initially load Sanjurjo's wardrobe into a small two-seater plane that was destined for Burgos. However, after some careful words from the pilot, Major Juan Antonio Ansaldo, Sanjurjo relented, and had Luis and Orlando remove the general's clothing from the cargo hold.

Mr Terwilliger
(TBS)

Mr Terwilliger was a campaign operative for the Franklin Roosevelt campaign in 1940. At a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Mr Terwilliger confirmed that Herb and Peggy Druce were on the list of people authorized to attend the rally and dispatched the usher Eddie to walk them to their seats.

von Rehfeld
(W&E)

Major von Rehfeld was a major in the German army during Second World War. He served as a staff officer to General Leonard Kaupitsch, commander of German forces in Denmark. von Rehfeld helped Peggy Druce obtain a Danish exit visa and passage to Sweden.

Rolf (The War That Came Early)
(The Big Switch)

Rolf was a German casualty of war in World War II. Toward the end of the winter of 1940, he and a number of his comrades were listening to the radio in an abandoned house in an occupied village in northeastern France. Their relaxation had been interrupted by a politically-charged argument among Arno Baatz, Willi Dernen, and Anton. After the argument ended and Baatz and Anton left the house, the soldiers, unsettled by the reminder that they lived under an increasingly totalitarian government, tried to recapture their earlier mood of relaxation by listening to the music of Barnabas von Geczy. Rolf inadvertently defeated these attempts by commenting that, while he enjoyed von Geczy, he would have preferred a jazz piece--jazz being a style of music under Nazi suppression.

After von Geczy's selection, the radio played a piece by Richard Wagner. Rolf left the room rather than listen to the opera composer. He was soon killed by a French sniper while crossing a broad, straight street before Dernen, a former sniper, could warn him to be careful.

Sergei Yaroslavsky's Mother
(W&E)

Sergei Yaroslavsky's Mother had died well before the hostilities that began in 1939 between the Soviet Union and Poland.

At one point during the war, Yaroslavsky took shelter in a trench during a German air raid. Yaroslavsky remembered the smell of damp earth from his mother's burial and associated it with graves. Since he was being attacked with deadly force, the association was one he wished he had not made.