“Pity he can’t be his own fool instead of Hitler’s,” Walsh said.
Up at the front, a mile or two from where they talked, gunfire started up. Walsh began to unsling his Lee-Enfield, but noticed Preston wasn’t getting excited. “They always open fire around this time of day,” the subaltern said. “We think they have orders to shoot off so many rounds every morning, and this is how they make their quota.”
“War shouldn’t be about work rates,” Walsh said. “If it were, all the soldiers would unionize-and likely go out on strike. Then you’d need to hire blacklegs if you wanted any killing done.”
Preston looked at him in yet another new way. “You’re quite daft, aren’t you?” he said.
“Who, me?” Walsh shrugged. “I do my best.”
Hans-ulrich Rudel woke to a soft drumming against the canvas of his tent. He was afraid he knew what that was, but he might have been wrong. He stuck his nose outside to see. Said nose, and the rest of his face, met raindrops. He didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Even now, he remembered he was a minister’s son. But he did say something that never would have come out of his mouth before he joined the Luftwaffe.
The rain poured down from a pewter sky. Hans-Ulrich squelched over to the mess tent. Some of the flyers in there had already started drinking. One of them raised a flask in salute to him. “Have a snort, Rudel!”
“You know I don’t do that,” Rudel answered.
“You may as well. We sure as hell aren’t going up for a while.” Peter took a long pull at the flask. Did his cheeks and nose turn redder, or was that only Hans-Ulrich’s sanctimonious imagination?
Preferring not to dwell on it, Rudel said, “It may stop. The ground may dry up again.” He didn’t believe himself, either. He’d been in Russia the autumn before. He knew what these rains were like.
So did Peter, who laughed raucously. “Go talk to a virgin, pal! This weather’s fucked us before, and it’s fucking us again.”
Since Hans-Ulrich feared he was right, he walked over to see what the field kitchen had turned out. It was a thick stew of boiled buckwheat groats-kasha, the Ivans called the stuff-and onions and carrots and bits of flesh. Pointing to one of those bits in his mess tin, Hans-Ulrich asked, “What is it?”
“Meat.” The fellow who’d ladled out the stew gave back a laconic answer.
“I figured that,” Rudel said with exaggerated patience. “But will it neigh when I bite down? Or bark? Or meow?”
“As long as it doesn’t ask you for a loan, Herr Oberleutnant, odds are you’re better off not knowing,” the cook replied.
Sighing, Rudel decided he was likely to be right. He sat down on a bench and spooned up the stew. They’d never serve it at the Adlon-although food inside the Reich was nasty these days, too. The meat had been boiled so long, he couldn’t tell what it had started out as. It tasted… meaty. He emptied the tin tray faster than he’d expected. He would have gone back for seconds if he hadn’t worried that the cook would laugh at him.
There was a strange thing. Around his neck hung the Knight’s Cross, proof that he didn’t fear anything enemy flak might do to his Stuka-or to him. Yet the thought that an enlisted man who needed a shave might mock him kept his behind glued to the planking.
Courage, and then again courage. Before the war started, he hadn’t understood that it came in different flavors. And what kind of courage was required for an Aryan holder of the Ritterkreuz to sleep with a half-Jewish barmaid? To love her? Hans-Ulrich shook his head. It wasn’t like that-quite. Even having anything to do with her, though, took bravery unlike either bearding a cook or diving on an enemy panzer. It took a certain amount of moral courage, though Rudel himself was unlikely ever to see it in that light.
Colonel Steinbrenner ducked into the mess tent. At a training base in Germany, no doubt, the flyers would have stopped shoveling in kasha and mystery meat. They would have put down the vodka jugs (no, they wouldn’t have had any vodka jugs to begin with). And they would have leaped to their feet, stiffened into attention, and saluted the squadron commander.
A couple of them nodded. One man paused in lighting a cigarette long enough to wave. The rest went on with what they were doing. Steinbrenner took that for granted. He shed his officer’s cap and scowled at the drops of water on the patent-leather brim. “Fucking wet out there,” he remarked.
“Too right it is,” said the pilot with the cigarette.
One of the men passing around the jug held it out to the colonel. He laughed, shook his head, and went over to the pot full of stew. The cook filled his mess kit. Then Steinbrenner caught Hans-Ulrich’s eye, wordlessly asking, May I sit next to you?
Hans-Ulrich nodded and did his best to look eager and inviting. Discipline at the front didn’t work the way it did in the Reich during peacetime, but you needed some mighty good reason to tell your squadron commander to get lost, and he had none.
“How’s it going?” Steinbrenner asked as he parked himself.
“In this weather, sir? It’s not going anywhere,” Rudel said.
“You’ve got that right, anyway. The Landsers’ll just have to live without air support for a while. Well, so will the Russians.” Steinbrenner dug into breakfast. He chewed thoughtfully before delivering his verdict: “I’ve had worse, but I’ve sure had better. What’s the meat?”
“Don’t know,” Hans-Ulrich admitted.
“Didn’t you ask?” Steinbrenner said.
“Yeah, but the cook said I’d be better off not finding out,” Rudel answered.
The squadron commander turned and shouted at the guy behind the cauldron: “Hey, Klaus, what did you kill before you dumped it into this slop?” He didn’t worry about the enlisted man’s precious sensibilities.
And Klaus didn’t worry about his, either. “Sir, I believe that’s your granny,” he replied. The mess tent erupted with laughter.
Colonel Steinbrenner spooned up some more meat. His jaws worked again. He shook his head. “Nah. Granny’d be tougher than this no matter how long you stewed her.” More laughter. The cook held up the ladle in salute, acknowledging the hit.
Hans-Ulrich knew he couldn’t have done anything like that. He could sass Sergeant Dieselhorst that way, and maybe a couple of the other flyers he felt comfortable with, but not a cook he didn’t care a pfennig for one way or the other. Yes, Colonel Steinbrenner was older than he was, but Rudel suddenly realized more than age and rank went into running a squadron.
He didn’t go on from there to realize Steinbrenner had asked to sit next to him for a reason. He was a gear with a worn-down tooth or two, and didn’t fit smoothly into the squadron’s mechanism. Had he realized something like that, he would have taken another step toward being ready to lead such an outfit.
“So what are you going to do now that flying gets tricky?” Steinbrenner asked him. Then the colonel shook his head once more. “Now that flying gets stuck in the mud, I should say.”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir. Maybe I’ll see if I can con a furlough out of my squadron commander,” Rudel said blandly. “Some people can drink so that weeks seem to go by in days. If you don’t drink, though, weeks stuck in the mud seem more like years.”
“Best argument for drinking I’ve heard lately,” Colonel Steinbrenner remarked. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t intended it as anything of the kind, but he could see how the older man might hear it that way-and jab him with it. Steinbrenner went on, “If you did get a furlough-by some miracle, you understand-where would you go? What would you do? And ‘Anywhere away from here’ isn’t a good enough answer.”
Now Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care: “Well, I might take a train back to Poland to get away from the war for a bit. To, ah, Bialystok.” Why deny it? Steinbrenner knew about Sofia.