It probably wasn’t anybody’s fault exactly. It-
“Did you say something?” Herb asked, so she must have made a noise after all.
She shook her head. “Not me. Must have been the goldfish.”
“We haven’t got a goldfish,” Herb pointed out. They grinned at each other from a distance of about six inches. How many times had one of them or the other-or, as here, both of them in collusion-made that same silly joke? It was one of the things they shared, one of the things that made them a couple.
Gladys wouldn’t have known how to finish it. Neither would Constantine Jenkins. We’re like an old sock and a shoe, Herb and me, Peggy thought. We fit, and we’re comfortable together. That wasn’t such a bad thing, not when you considered the alternatives.
Chapter 21
If anything was more fun than changing a panzer track in mud and rain, Theo Hossbach had trouble imagining what it might be. The job resembled nothing so much as a bout of all-in wrestling, with the added chance of getting squashed if you were careless.
Having a five-man crew instead of three did help. More hands couldn’t make this work light, but they did make it a little lighter. And the gunner and loader complained just as much as the three men who’d come out of their little Panzer II together.
Which didn’t mean those three didn’t complain. “These fucking things better work, is all I’ve got to say,” Adi Stoss growled, plying spanner with might and main.
“This beast should have come with them,” Lothar Eckhardt said. The gunner wiped a wet sleeve across his equally wet forehead and went on, “I mean, they knew all along what things in Russia would be like, right?”
Adi and Hermann Witt both laughed raucously. Even Theo snorted. Sergeant Witt said, “Lothar, they didn’t know their ass from their elbow. Highways on the maps are horrible dirt tracks on the ground. Secondary roads on the maps aren’t there at all. They didn’t realize we’d need wider tracks on our panzers till we screamed at ’em that the Russians could keep going where we bogged down. And it’s taken a fucking year to get the Ostketten out to us so we could dance like this.”
Ostketten: East tracks. Panzers hadn’t needed wider tracks in Czechoslovakia or the Low Countries or France. They sure did here in Russia. This wasn’t much of a civilized country, or much of a civilized war.
Eckhardt stared at Hermann Witt. “But hasn’t the General Staff come out and looked at this ground?”
“Don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose,” Adi said.
“Son of a bitch!” Eckhardt said with feeling. “If they haven’t, somebody ought to stick ’em in a penal battalion. Maybe they’d learn some sense if they lived through that. And if they didn’t, who’d miss ’em?”
Penal units were a Soviet idea the Wehrmacht had borrowed. Take a bunch of guys who’d disgraced themselves by cowardice or some other mortal sin. Give them a chance at redemption-throw them in where the fighting is hottest. If they try to retreat, shoot them yourself. If they die in action, oh, well. Chances are they’ll shake the enemy doing it. And if they happen to live, you can turn them back into ordinary soldiers again. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can fill up the holes in the penal battalion with new fuckups-there are always new fuckups-and throw it into action somewhere else.
The system had an elegant simplicity. Theo was surprised the Nazis hadn’t thought of it for themselves. But then, they’d never been shy about stealing ideas from other people. Instead of talking about that-which might have made him learn more about penal battalions than he’d ever wanted to know-Theo went on manhandling the Ostketten into place on the road wheels and the idlers and, most important of all, the drive sprocket.
After close to two hours, they finished. A couple of them had vodka in their canteens instead of water. Say what you would about vodka, but it didn’t give you dysentery. The haves shared with the have-nots. Socialism was real at the front. Everywhere else, as far as Theo could tell, it was only a sour joke.
Smacking his lips, Adi said, “No dumb cop’s gonna write me a ticket for drunken driving, not today.”
“If anybody tries, mash him like a potato,” Hermann Witt said. He eyed their backbreaking handiwork. “Let’s see if we can go mash some Ivans now.”
Ostketten wouldn’t keep out shells from a T-34 or a KV-1, of course. But the panzer crew had lashed the old, narrow tracks to the glacis. They might help turn an enemy round there. Or, of course, they might not. But it was worth a try. Theo had seen several other Panzer IIIs similarly decked out. More and more crews would improvise improved armor as more Ostketten arrived.
At least the panzer’s engine started up right away. Hard freezes hadn’t begun yet, let alone the kind of weather that made a mockery of German antifreeze and motor oil. Mechanics swore this year’s antifreeze and lubricants were better than the stuff the Wehrmacht had used the year before. Theo hoped that meant they wouldn’t have to build a fire under the engine compartment to thaw things out enough to start. He hoped… but he didn’t really believe it.
He dripped on his seat when he took his place inside the panzer. The radioman and bow gunner was as far from the engine compartment as he could get. In the Panzer II, Theo’s station had been right on the other side of the fireproof-everyone hoped! — bulkhead. He’d warmed up in a hurry there. No such luck in this machine.
Over on the other side of the centrally positioned radio sat the driver. At Sergeant Witt’s command, Adi put the Panzer III in gear. It rattled and clanked ahead. The engine’s grinding growl seemed a long way off to Theo, who’d been used to listening to it right at his elbow.
Theo glanced over at his comrade, but Adi was paying attention to what he was doing. “How does it seem?” Theo asked. If he wanted to find out, he had to spend some words.
“Feels… a little better, maybe,” Adi answered after a judicious pause. “I don’t want to charge into the thickest slop I can find, you know, just to see if the Ostketten ’ll pull us through it. They’re liable not to, and then you’d have to call a recovery vehicle to fish us out. Everybody’d love me for that.”
If by love he meant scream at, he was right. Otherwise… Otherwise, he was a sarcastic, cynical veteran panzer man, just like thousands of others in the Wehrmacht. Well, almost just like thousands of others. As long as the authorities didn’t notice the difference, everything was fine. It had been fine for quite a while now. Theo hoped it would stay that way.
German authorities weren’t the only ones who could foul things up, of course. The Russians weren’t thrilled about having other people’s tanks gallivanting across their landscape. Theo wondered why. Now that he could see out, he could see what a broad, bleak country this was. It might not have looked so bad when the trees had leaves and the grain was greening toward gold, but the harvest was over and cold and rain had done for the leaves. The word that crossed his mind for the land hereabouts was haunted.
If you were a German panzer man, the landscape damn well was haunted. Russians wore mud-colored uniforms to begin with. And they took camouflage very seriously: more seriously than the Germans did, for sure. They wouldn’t mind rolling in the mud and rubbing it on their faces to make themselves harder to spot. They’d daub mud on their panzers, too, or drape netting over them to disguise their outlines. You might not suspect they were around till a shell slammed into your side armor from a direction you hadn’t worried about.
Adi hit the brakes. Hermann Witt’s voice came through the speaking tube: “Why’d you stop?”
“Ground up ahead doesn’t look quite right,” Stoss answered.
“What’s the matter with it? Just looks like ground to me,” the panzer commander said.
“I’ll go ahead if you want me to, but I’d sooner back up and go around,” Adi told him.