Ivan didn’t need to order his men to start digging foxholes and camouflaging them. The soldiers automatically did that when they saw they wouldn’t be moving up for a while. The foxholes here would be nasty places, and would start filling up with water soon. The men dug anyhow. If German machine guns or artillery were going to probe for them, they wanted somewhere to hide.
Yuri probably wouldn’t make it back for a couple of hours. It might be dark by the time he did, which would put things off till tomorrow. Ivan didn’t mind; he was in no hurry to get shot at. He just hoped the Nazis weren’t readying their own onslaught. They might not need to wait hours to set up something good-sized. The bastards had radio sets falling out of their assholes.
Night came before either Yuri or a German attack. Yuri did manage to find his way back in the dark, and the jumpy sentries managed not to shoot him when he did. “Reinforcements will come up in the morning,” he reported. “The captain wants us to sit tight till then.”
“Khorosho,” Ivan said. The order let him to what he already wanted to, which suited him fine.
But, as Avram discovered, the Germans reinforced under cover of darkness. The Soviet attack never went in. Instead, the Red Army pulled back another kilometer or two and tried to draw a firm line in the mud.
Chapter 23
Hans-Ulrich Rudel shivered. Snowflakes swirled through the air. His breath smoked. The ordinary Luftwaffe greatcoat wasn’t defense enough against the Russian winter. He’d have to go back to wearing his flying togs all the time, the way he had the year before.
The Wehrmacht had been caught short last winter. Even the Germans’ Polish allies laughed at them or, worse, pitied them because of their inadequate cold-weather gear. Nothing could embarrass German national pride worse than pity from a pack of slovenly, hard-drinking, wife-beating Poles.
Things were better this year. Proper winter clothing was reaching the Landsers who needed it most in something like adequate quantities. They wouldn’t have to steal lousy, flea-infested sheepskin jackets from Russian peasants, the way they had before. They wouldn’t have to tailor bedsheets into camouflage smocks for the snow, either. There were proper snowsuits, reversible between white and Feldgrau. Progress, of a sort.
But only of a sort. As a lot of invaders had discovered before Germany tried it, Russia was easy to get into. Getting out was a lot harder. You could win victory after victory… and then what? The Red Army kept throwing in fresh divisions as if it manufactured them in Magnitogorsk. And there were always more kilometers of broad, flat Russian terrain ahead of the men from the Reich.
Nobody talked much about having a bear by the ears. Get labeled a defeatist and you’d soon envy men who’d only been captured by the Ivans. Hans-Ulrich was sure, though, that if he’d started having doubts about what Germany could hope to accomplish here, other people had worse ones and had had them longer. He was automatically loyal to the Reich, to the Party, and to the Fuhrer. Others tried to separate the idea of Germany from the people actually running the country.
And there were other worries. Not long after the ground got hard enough to let them start flying again, Albert Dieselhorst sidled up to Rudel on the airstrip and spoke in a low voice: “What have you heard about the French?”
“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich blinked. “What do you mean, what have I heard about them? They eat frogs’ legs and snails. They make good wine, too, though you’d care more about that than I do. What else am I supposed to know?”
His radioman and rear gunner breathed out twin gusts of exasperation through his nostrils. “In a military sense… sir.” The military honorific plainly took the place of something more like you donkey.
“Well…” Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care, even with Dieselhorst. If he talked about the way the French had held the Reich out of Paris two wars in a row, he could still end up in trouble. So he stuck with the obvious: “They’re holding a stretch of the line not too far south of here.”
“Yes. They are.” The sergeant exhaled again, not quite so extravagantly this time. “How hard are they holding it?”
“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich repeated. This time, though, he didn’t stay a blockhead long. Even an innocent like him began looking for plots when the war wasn’t going so well. “What? Do you think they’re going to try and pull an England on us?”
“It’s… possible.” Dieselhorst seemed happier that his superior did have some kind of clue after all. “Are you ready to fly against them if we have to?”
“I’m always ready to fly against the enemies of the Reich,” Rudel answered, now without the least hesitation.
Sergeant Dieselhorst grinned crookedly. He reached out and set a hand on Hans-Ulrich’s arm. It wasn’t the kind of thing a noncom was supposed to do with an officer. It was, though, the kind of thing an older man might naturally do with a younger one he liked. “There you go, sir. I should’ve known you’d come out with something like that.”
“Well, what else do you expect me to say?” If Hans-Ulrich sounded irritable, it was only because he was. He was a falcon. Fly him at something, and he’d kill it for you. What it was didn’t matter, as long as you wanted it dead. He didn’t think of himself in those terms, of course. But then, chances were a true winged, taloned falcon didn’t think of itself in those terms, either.
“Not a thing, sir. Not a goddamn thing.” Dieselhorst paused, perhaps wondering whether to go on. After a few seconds, he did: “If the froggies screw us over, we’ve got a two-front war for real.”
“God forbid!” Rudel burst out. That had been the nightmare in the last fight, one that Germany hadn’t had to face this time around. If she did… Well, the war got harder.
“God won’t forbid it. God doesn’t work that way.” Dieselhorst spoke about God with as much assurance and conviction as Hans-Ulrich’s father ever had. He went on, “People are going to have to take care of it. One way or another, it’ll be people. It always is.”
He sketched a salute and ambled off. No one, not even a National Socialist Loyalty Officer, could have made anything of the conversation if he didn’t overhear it. They’d been flying together since the start of the war: more than three years now. Of course they’d have things to talk about.
If France went bad, the Luftwaffe would have to fight back out of Germany itself. Well, out of the Low Countries, too. But all that seemed small consolation for so much fighting, so much treasure, so much blood. And if France let England back onto the Continent while the war against the Russians ground on… That could be very bad. Hans-Ulrich didn’t need to be a General Staff officer to see as much.
Two days later, he got up the nerve to ask Colonel Steinbrenner, “Sir, just how loyal are the French?”
The squadron commander blinked. “Et tu, Brute?” he said.
“Sir?” He might as well have been speaking Latin. After a moment, Hans-Ulrich realized he was.
Sighing, Steinbrenner dropped back into plain old Deutsch: “So you’ve heard the rumors, too, have you?”
Rudel also realized that, if he had, odds were everybody else in the squadron had been buzzing about them this past fortnight, or maybe longer. There was an encouraging thought. Not even winning the Knight’s Cross had made him less of a white crow. “Yes, sir. I’ve heard them,” he mumbled.
“Well, now that you have, you know as much as I do,” Steinbrenner said. “If they turn out to be true, we’ve got some new troubles. If they don’t, we’ve got our old lot. Any other questions?”
What came out of Hans-Ulrich’s mouth then surprised him: “Can I get a little bit of leave, sir? Long enough to go back to Bialystok? If things turn bad, I’d like to have the chance to say good-bye to Sofia.”
“You know, you ask so few favors, it makes me nervous sometimes,” Steinbrenner said. “Yes, I’ll give you leave. What you do with it is your business, not mine. Enjoy yourself, though.”