“It’s a wonderful gun, though,” another American said, in English. He added “Wunderbar!” in case Gustav hadn’t got it.
But Gustav nodded-he had. “Do you change the barrel often?” he asked the fellow who had a little Deutsch. Because the MG42 put so many rounds through the barrel so fast, it heated up in a hurry. The Wehrmacht had issued an asbestos mitt to handle the hot metal. With it, you could take off the old barrel and swap in a new, cool one in seconds.
The Americans didn’t have an asbestos mitt. Stowing those along with the machine gun would have stretched even German efficiency. But they did have a folded-up wool blanket that now showed scorch marks. The Ami showed it to Gustav to let him know they weren’t burning out the barrels. He nodded again. People said Americans were good at improvising.
Russians, on the other hand…Russians were good at muddling through, at keeping at it when anyone sane would have given up. “Urra! Urra!” the infantrymen shouted, a sound to make the hair of anyone who’d heard it before want to stand on end. They were nerving themselves for a charge.
“Urra! Urra!” Here they came, a great khaki flood of them.
For a bad fraction of a second, Gustav thought he was back in the other war, trying to hold a position in Poland or, later, in eastern Germany. Then the flashback, the nightmare, merged with reality, and reality was just as bad. Armed with the Russian PPSh, he had to sit tight as the Ivans rushed forward. Some of them still wore billowing greatcoats; it might be spring, but it wasn’t warm. His submachine gun was just a peashooter-it couldn’t reach them yet.
Some of them tripped in holes in the ground or over hastily laid barbed wire. A few stepped on land mines. One must have set off a big charge, because he and two of his neighbors vanished into scarlet mist. But the rest of the Red Army men closed ranks, linked arms, and came on. They were as impervious to doubt or damage as they had been on the Ostfront a few years before. Vodka and fear of their own secret police both had to play a part in that.
Rrrriiiippp! Rrrriiiippp! The MG42 cut loose. The Amis fired short bursts to keep from overheating the barrel as best they could. They traversed it so the stream of bullets knocked down Russians across a broad stretch of the line. Riflemen and Yankees with grease guns-which fired heavier cartridges than the PPSh-also took a toll. That khaki wave was liable to roll over these defenses anyhow.
An American took another belt of ammo out of a wooden crate and fed it into the MG42’s insatiable maw. The old crate had an eagle with a swastika in its claws burned onto its side. That emblem was illegal in the new Germany the Allies had made and then broken. It was mighty welcome to Gustav just the same.
Bullets snapped past the machine gunners. Some of the Ivans were shooting as they ran. It wasn’t aimed fire, or anything like it. With enough bullets flying, that didn’t matter. Gustav started shooting back from behind a large chunk of broken brickwork. The Ivans were close enough for him to have a decent chance of hitting them with the PPSh-not a good sign.
Then another machine gun opened up. Its bass stutter put even the MG42’s growl to shame. During the last war, Gustav hadn’t had to face the Americans’.50-caliber machine gun. He counted himself goddamn lucky he wasn’t facing it now. Those big, heavy slugs didn’t just drop the Russians they hit in their tracks. They threw the poor, sorry bastards every which way, like crumpled wastepaper.
Flesh and blood, even vodka-numbed flesh and blood, had their limits. Between them, the MG42 and that heavy monster not only reached but exceeded those limits. Instead of rushing forward, the Russians still on their feet turned and ran away. They wouldn’t break through on this stretch of the line.
One of the Americans on the MG42 tossed Gustav a pack of Camels. “Danke,” Gustav said. His hands trembled when he stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He needed three tries before he could light it. The Amis didn’t laugh at him. They were having the same trouble themselves. They’d lived through a nasty firefight. The shakes came with the territory.
–
Tibor Nagy had a bandage on his right thigh, under his dirty trousers. He had another one on his ribs. Both wounds were just grazes. They’d bled. They’d hurt. They’d left him with horrendous bruises, too. Try as he would, he couldn’t find a comfortable way to sleep.
People kept telling him he was lucky. If they meant he was lucky not to be dead, they were right. As far as he was concerned, though, real luck would have involved not getting hit at all or getting wounded badly enough to have to leave the front without getting crippled.
Instead, he crouched in a muddy hole in the ground. Artillery fire burst not nearly far enough away. Shell fragments screeched and whined by overhead. Pretty soon, the Russians would tell the Hungarian People’s Army to attack the Americans again.
No matter what the Russians told him, Tibor didn’t want to fight Americans. He didn’t want to fight anybody, but he really didn’t want to fight Americans. If you were on a schoolyard playground, did you poke the biggest kid in the eye, especially when he came from the richest family in town? Not unless you were out of your mind, you didn’t.
Or unless the mean kid at school told you he’d wallop the snot out of you unless you took a poke at the big, rich kid. That was what had happened to everybody in the Hungarian People’s Army. No matter what its soldiers thought, Stalin didn’t give them much choice. As a matter of fact, he gave them none.
“Come on, you sorry dingleberries,” Sergeant Gergely called. “Like it or not, we’re going up to the front. Move forward through the communications trenches.”
Reluctantly, Tibor came out of his foxhole. Like any other young Hungarian man, he recognized communications trenches when he saw them. He was too young to have used them during the last war, though Gergely surely would have. But the nomenclature of trench warfare was second nature to him. Everybody in Hungary had a father or grandfather who’d done his time in the trenches when the Kingdom of Hungary (much larger than the current Hungarian People’s Republic) went into World War I along with the rest of the defunct Empire of Austria-Hungary.
Tibor zigzagged along the trench. You didn’t dig them in a straight line; that would have invited one bullet or shell fragment to knock down a whole file of men. Even this trench had fewer kinks than a persnickety military engineer would have liked. It was also punctuated here and there by shell craters. Two burnt-out tank carcasses, one Russian, one American, sat no more than fifty meters apart. Tibor wondered whether they’d fired at each other at the same time.
Whether they had or not didn’t matter. The fighting around here had been rugged any which way. Those steel hulks said as much. So did the shell holes. And so did the faint but unmistakable death stink in the air. Not all the men who’d died in the past few weeks-or all the pieces of them, anyhow-had gone into the ground the way they would have in a well-ordered world.
Isztvan Szolovits trotted along behind Tibor. Both of them hunched forward to make sure they didn’t show themselves above the lip of the trench. “Well, here we go,” the Jew said in a low voice.
“Some fun, huh?” Tibor answered.
“Fun? That’s one word, I guess,” Szolovits said. “We’ve got to be nuts, even trying this.”
Since the same thought had gone through Tibor’s mind not long before, he couldn’t tell Szolovits he was full of crap. He did say, “If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”
“What we ought to do is give up the first chance we get,” Szolovits replied, even more quietly than before-he wanted to make sure no one else heard.