Guidebooks said the town of Wesel was surrounded by pleasant meadows and green forests. The sorry bastards who wrote guidebooks hadn’t looked at the place and its environs since the Amis and Germans did their goddamnedest to hold the Red Army out of it. Gustav did look, out the back of the truck. The town, which had been smashed in the last war and then rebuilt, was leveled again. Wrecked vehicles and shell holes dotted the meadows, like carbuncles and smallpox scars on the face of a man with horrible skin. Shells and bombs and rockets and machine guns had chewed the forests to kindling and toothpicks.
“All we need now is a flight of Shturmoviks to come shoot us up,” Rolf said. “That’s still just as much fun as it was in Hungary back in ’45.”
“Or in Poland,” Gustav said.
“Or in Czechoslovakia,” Max agreed. They all chuckled, on nearly identical sour notes. Among the three of them, they’d done nearly everything German soldiers on the Eastern Front could do.
Nearly. None of them had been at Stalingrad. As far as Gustav knew, none of the Landsers who’d surrendered there had come home even yet. He wondered how many were still alive somewhere in Russia, and whether any still were. He and Max and Rolf hadn’t got stuck in any of the smaller pockets the Ivans had cut off, either. Not many who had came out again.
“How far back are they taking us?” Max muttered discontentedly after the truck, and the others in the convoy, had jounced along for a while-the highway was in no better shape than the meadows and forests.
“A good long ways, looks like,” Gustav said. “Here, have a knock of this.” He drank from a little flask of schnapps he’d extracted from a trouser pocket.
“Don’t mind if I do.” Max also drank. After a moment’s hesitation, he offered Rolf the flask.
“Danke schon.” Rolf tilted his head back. His Adam’s apple worked. He handed the flask back to Gustav. “Afraid I killed it. Pretty good hooch, though. I’m obliged.”
Which meant that, next time he had some, he’d share…if he happened to feel like it. Gustav stowed the flask again. “Wasn’t that much in there to begin with,” he said, to let Rolf know he wasn’t sore it came back empty.
“Fuck me!” Max said a little while later. “We are in Holland.”
“Ja.” Gustav had seen the sign announcing the border, too. He didn’t like it any better than Max did, and not much better than Rolf. If that fat Feldwebel had been in this truck with them, they would have taken turns scorching him up one side and down the other. That wouldn’t have been a Wehrmacht kind of thing to do, but it would have been a human kind of thing.
Rolf scorched him even though he wasn’t here: “That stinking turd probably spent the war on garrison duty in Oslo, screwing the Norwegian girls. Pricks like him always have the luck.”
As soon as the Germans got out of the truck, the Feldwebel and others like him started shouting, “Stay close to your transport! Stay close to your transport! Don’t go wandering off!”
“Well, hell,” Gustav said. “I was going to knock a Dutchman over the head, steal his bicycle, and take off for Amsterdam to see the sights.”
Max wagged a finger at him. “You better watch out, funny boy, or they’ll put you in the movies.”
Rolf wagged a finger at him, too-a different finger. That gesture was American by origin, but there weren’t many Europeans these days who didn’t understand it. Laughing, Gustav gave it back.
A couple of Dutchmen on bicycles did ride up to look the newcomers over. When they realized the soldiers were Germans, not Americans, they spoke to each other in their own language. It was close enough to Gustav’s that he could almost understand them. He thought the gist was something like I hoped we were rid of these shitsacks for good.
Under other circumstances, he might have been tempted to make something of that. As things were, he felt more like a refugee than the invaders the Dutchmen remembered. He smoked appetizing American cigarettes and ate unappetizing American rations and pretended he couldn’t follow a word of Dutch.
Any artillery the Ivans aimed at the troops who’d pulled out of Wesel fell well short-another measure of how far back they’d gone. All the same, Gustav pulled his entrenching tool from his belt and dug himself a scrape to sleep in, piling up the dirt at the east side. The rest of the guys did the same thing. When you’d seen action, you dug in first and thought about it later.
And, in the middle of the night, a new sun woke him by rising, hideously bright, in the east. Then he saw it wasn’t the sun at all, but a mushroom cloud like the ones the newsreels and the papers showed.
Shivering as he watched it tower high into the sky, he suddenly realized why they’d retreated as far as they had. A little closer and…No, he didn’t want to think about that at all.
–
Istvan Szolovits curled up in a hole in the bottom of a battered trench as if he were a cat. Well, pretty much-cats didn’t wrap themselves in blankets before they went to sleep. He was about as happy as a man could be while fighting in a war he wanted nothing to do with.
One of the reasons he was so happy was that the fighting today had been much lighter than usual. Most of the time, the Americans and Germans in front of the forces in the vanguard of revolutionary socialism’s advance (he was steeped in the jargon, no matter how silly most of him thought it was) fought as hard as they could for as long as they could. They might be heading for the ash-heap of history, but they took as many people’s heroes with them as they could.
Today, though, only rear guards had held up the Hungarian People’s Army-and the Red Army, and the Poles. The enemy soldiers still fought ferociously, but fewer of them were doing the fighting.
Sergeant Gergely seemed pleased, or as pleased as the sour sergeant ever let himself seem. “Maybe we’ve got ’em on the run at last,” he said. “Took long enough, but maybe we have.”
Istvan stuck his head out of the hole. “That’d be good,” he said, meaning it in the sense of I’m less likely to get blown to pieces if we do.
Gergely’s sneering grin told him the noncom knew just how he meant it. But Gergely said, “You think I want to slug toe-to-toe all the goddamn time, you’re nuts. Easy’s always better than hard, man. Christ, we must’ve come eight or ten kilometers past that fucking Wesel place that held us up for so long.”
“Sounds about right.” Istvan’s weary legs and sore feet told how much marching he’d done. That was one of the many reasons he was glad to roll back up in that blanket and dive headfirst into sleep.
He dove into it headfirst-and was smashed out of it he never knew how much later. A light brighter than a hundred suns seared his eyes. He feared it seared his face, too. A few seconds later, a blast picked him up and slammed him into the trench wall like an angry child throwing away a rag doll. He tried to breathe. His lungs didn’t want to find air.
For a second or two, he thought somebody’s 155-American or Soviet, he had no idea, and what difference did it make, anyhow?-had gone off right above the trench. But if it had, where was the deadly shower of metal fragments? People were screaming (though he heard them as if from very far away), but it sounded more like terror than mortal anguish.
As a matter of fact, he was screaming himself. When he noticed he was, he stopped. Slowly, slowly, the green and purple glare faded from before his eyes. His face still felt burned. He was bleeding from his nose. His mouth tasted of blood, too. The overpressure from the blast must have come close to killing him from the inside out.