After blowing a smoke ring, Gustav said, “I want to get my hands on one of those Red assault rifles-that’s what I want. You can spray like a machine pistol with ’em, but they’ve got almost as much range as a rifle.” He pointed toward somebody’s Springfield.
Max Bachman paused halfway down a tin of ham and eggs. He liked that one better than Gustav did. “I wouldn’t mind getting one, either, but keeping it in cartridges would be a bitch.” The new Russian weapon fired a round halfway between those for ordinary rifles and submachine guns.
“It’s nothing but a goddamn copy of the Sturmgewehr we rolled out in ’44,” Rolf said. Gustav had fought beside him for weeks, but still didn’t know his last name. He did know Rolf had served in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, one of the crack SS panzer divisions. Rolf still had the headlong bravery-and the taste for blood-that had marked the Waffen-SS.
Gustav remembered the Sturmgewehr, too. He’d craved one, but he hadn’t got one. The Germans never had enough of them. More and more Russians were using their version, though.
“Whatever it is, it uses funny cartridges. That’s the drawback,” Gustav said. He didn’t feel like arguing with Rolf right now. He was too goddamn tired. He hadn’t been pulled out of the line since he started fighting. He’d gone west with it.
Now he was in the town of Wesel, a few kilometers north of Duisburg and only a few kilometers east of the Dutch border. If the Russians forced the Americans, English, and French-and the Germans like him who fought on their side-out of West Germany, they won a big chunk of the war.
Not far enough away, artillery thundered. Gustav cocked his head to one side, gauging the guns. They were Russian, all right: 105s and 155s. Since the shells weren’t screaming in on his buddies and him, he relaxed again. He fished another Lucky out of the five-pack that came with the rations and lit it. Some other sorry bastards would catch hell from those Russian presents, but he wouldn’t.
He wouldn’t this time.
American guns answered the Ivans. As long as the gunners murdered one another, that was fine by Gustav. He only hated them when they came after the guys who couldn’t shoot back at them.
Sometimes, in fast-moving battles, foot soldiers overran the other side’s artillery. Somehow, the assholes who served the guns hardly ever got taken prisoner. They wound up dead instead, stretched out beside the weapons that had dished out so much murder. Artillery was the big killer. Everybody knew it.
The Russians sure did. They used cannons as if they feared somebody would outlaw them tomorrow morning. Man for man, the Germans had always been better than their Red Army foes. But the Russians not only had more men, they had way more guns, sometimes ten or fifteen times as many as the Wehrmacht on the same stretch of front. When that hammer dropped, it dropped hard.
And they were fighting the ground war the same way this time. Their panzers were bigger and nastier than they had been during the last round. More of their guns were self-propelled. That just let them have an easier time putting all their firepower right where they wanted it.
But they didn’t have everything their own way. American jet fighters screamed by, no more than a couple of hundred meters above the ground. They had rockets under their swept-back wings. They looked like Me-262s, but the Amis used far more of them than the Luftwaffe ever had. For that matter, so did the Russians.
Max Bachman dug his right index finger deep into his ear. “Between the guns and the jets, I’ll be deaf as a post by this time next week,” he said.
“What?” Gustav asked, deadpan.
Bachman started to answer him, then stopped and gave him a dirty look instead. “Funny, Gustav. Funny like a truss.”
Gustav blew him a kiss. “I love you, too.”
Then a heavy machine gun coughed into angry life. It was a Russian gun; the rhythm and the reports differed from those of the American equivalent. Almost before he knew how it had got there, Gustav’s PPSh was in his hands, not at his feet. The others had grabbed their weapons just as quickly.
“Back in business at the same old stand!” Rolf sang out. He sounded positively gay about it. Gustav was plenty good at what he did in the field, but he didn’t take that kind of delight in it.
Something went whoosh-crash! That was an American bazooka, not a Russian rocket-propelled grenade. The bazooka had inspired the German Panzerschreck; the German Panzerfaust seemed to be the model for the Red Army’s RPG. Both kinds of weapons could wreck a tank with a square hit. Both were also good for flattening anything else that needed knocking down.
This one knocked down a shop a block from where the Germans had been eating and smoking and were taking cover. Somebody inside the shop started screaming and wouldn’t shut up. Gustav couldn’t tell whether the wounded man was an Ivan or a German civilian who’d been too stupid to refugee out of Wesel before it turned into a battleground. One nationality’s mortal anguish sounded pretty much like another’s.
Ten meters away from Gustav, Max grimaced behind a beat-up stone wall. “I wish he’d be quiet,” Bachman said, and then, after a little while, “I wish somebody’d make him be quiet.”
“Tell me about it,” Gustav said with feeling. “You keep listening to that, you start thinking about making those noises yourself. It’s the goddamn goose walking over your grave-with jackboots on.”
“You got that right,” Max said. “Why don’t the Russians finish him off, the sorry son of a bitch? That kind of horrible racket has to drive them around the bend, same as it does with us.”
Both Germans bitched about the suffering man in the smashed shop. Neither broke cover to go over to finish him off. The Russians wouldn’t be sure that was what they were doing. It would look as if they were trying to advance and take control of the shop’s ruins. The Ivans would shoot them before they got there.
And the Red Army men couldn’t have had a clear path that way, either. They had to figure Germans or Americans would plug them if they put the wounded fellow to sleep. After all, one bazooka round had already hit that building. Another could follow.
So the screaming man in there went right on screaming for the next two hours. As far as Gustav could tell, he fell silent of his own accord, not because anyone killed him. Even after he did, though, the noises he made echoed and reechoed inside the German’s head. That could be me, they said. That could be me.
–
A Red Army man with a sergeant’s shoulder boards said something in Russian to Istvan Szolovits. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, pal,” the Hungarian Jew replied in Magyar.
That was as much gibberish to the Ivan as Russian was to Szolovits. “Yob tvoyu mat’!” the noncom snarled.
Istvan did understand that particular unendearment. Not letting on that he did, though, seemed the better part of valor. The Russian looked very ready to use the PPSh clamped in his hairy paws. Since it had a seventy-one-round snail drum attached, if he started shooting he wouldn’t stop till he’d pureed whatever had pissed him off.
Taking a calculated risk, Istvan asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” If a Hungarian and a Russian had any language in common, German was the top candidate. Of course, if the sergeant did speak German, he was liable to order Istvan to do something that would get him killed. That was where the risk came in.