Gustav skidded down behind a jeep that would never go anywhere again. He rose to one knee and started banging away with the Kalashnikov. He could hit what he aimed at out to three or four hundred meters, twice as far as he would have been able to with the PPSh. The bullets had more stopping power when they hit something-somebody-too.
This Russian steamroller had less steam behind it than attacks Gustav had faced in bygone days. When the Ivans saw they wouldn’t smash the forces in front of them, they didn’t keep trying to break through in spite of casualties. They went to earth and started digging scrapes, the way any sensible soldiers would have.
Back in Marsberg, some potbellied Soviet lieutenant colonel had to be on the brink of apoplexy. How could you fight a proper war if soldiers kept trying to stay alive? Mortar bombs started whistling down on German and Russian positions with little discrimination between the two.
Blasts, screaming fragments…Gustav tried to scramble under the dead jeep. But its tires had burned, and on the iron wheels it sat too low to let him. A clang announced that a fragment had ripped into the back fender. A few centimeters farther to the right and it would have ripped into him instead. You went into a stupid little fight like this, you rolled dice with your life as the stake.
And if you went into enough stupid little fights like this, you would crap out. The odds made it a certainty.
Lieutenant Fiebig got up and dashed toward the Russians, firing his U.S.-issue grease gun from the hip as he ran. “Come on, boys!” the company CO shouted. “Follow me!”
Those had been the magic words in the last war, and they still were. Officers and sergeants who led from the front got better results than the ones who just ordered their men forward while they stayed safe in the rear, the way so many World War I commanders had. Of course, officers and sergeants who led from the front also took more casualties than the other kind. Bravery could be its own punishment.
Gustav got up, too. He slapped a full magazine onto the AK-47 and ran after the lieutenant. Fire and rush, fire and rush…No one needed to tell the Germans how to advance. It wasn’t as if most of them hadn’t learned in a school that buried you if you flunked an exam.
Some of the Russians knew how to fall back the same way. But they had more kids in their ranks than Gustav’s countrymen did. The Germans in this fight were all volunteers. The Ivans put any warm bodies they could find into uniform. Even in the last war, Gustav had been fighting sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Hitler kept screaming how Stalin was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Stalin was, too. But Hitler’s barrel had no bottom left to scrape after a while.
A terrified guy with a broad Slavic face threw down his rifle and threw his hands in the air. “Kamerad!” he bleated. “Freund!”
Gustav pulled the ammo pouches and grenades off the Russian’s belt so he couldn’t change his mind, then gestured with the Soviet assault rifle. “Go on back,” he said. “Somebody’ll take care of you.”
Blubbering palatal gratitude that Gustav couldn’t understand, the Red Army man headed west, hands still high above his head. And maybe some German would get him off to a POW camp, or maybe somebody like Rolf would decide he wasn’t worth wasting time over and plug him. Surrendering could be the riskiest thing you tried on the battlefield.
Marsberg was another town whose church had a tall steeple. The Russians didn’t put an artillery spotter up there-they had a couple of snipers banging away at the advancing German soldiers. But the Red Army wasn’t the only force that issued its men mortars. Bombs began bursting around the church. Then two in a row slammed into the steeple and sent it crashing down.
If the Ivans had tanks in town, taking it wouldn’t be easy and might be impossible. As Gustav knew too well, any tank, no matter how old-fashioned, was death on infantry without armor support. The Germans still relied on the Amis for that. Memories of panzers and blitzkrieg left the USA skittish even yet about a West German army with tanks and planes of its own.
But no tracked behemoths started flinging murder at the advancing foot soldiers. Nor did the Red Army men in Marsberg seem determined to fight to the death to hold every laundry and secondhand bookstore. A couple of machine guns slowed the Germans, but not for long. The Russians pulled back, leaving behind a stench of strong tobacco and sour sweat.
Cautiously, locals started coming out of their cellars and looking around their battered town. A woman burst into tears at seeing the shattered church. “What are you blaming us for, you stupid bitch? It’s Stalin’s fault!” Rolf shouted at her. For some reason, that didn’t make her stop crying.
–
It was over, but then again it wasn’t. In thirteen months, Harry Truman wouldn’t be President of the United States any more. He and Bess would go home to Independence. The reporters would write about him. Then, as soon as he’d settled into the obscurity that was all an ex-President merited, they’d forget about him. After that, the historians would get their licks.
In the meantime, though, he had a war to fight, and with luck to win. He didn’t want to burden his successor, whether Donkey or Elephant, with cleaning up the mess he’d made. He was a proud man, and a tidy one. He wanted to clean up his own messes.
The Oval Office telephone rang. He picked it up. “Truman here. Yes?”
“Mr. Kennan is here to see you, sir,” Rose Conway said.
“Send him in,” Truman answered.
That he was conferring with George Kennan showed how much he wanted to clean up his own messes. Kennan was a Soviet expert. He’d been assistant chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Moscow till after the end of the last war. He’d helped shape the policy of containing the Russians that Truman had carried out. As the Russians blockaded Berlin, set off their own first atom bomb, and let their stooges start the fight in Korea, containing them didn’t seem such a hot idea any more. Pushing them back looked ever more necessary.
Kennan had opposed letting Douglas MacArthur take American troops north of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea. He’d said it was dangerous. No one else had thought so. MacArthur sure hadn’t. Neither had Truman himself. And neither had Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East. And they’d all proved wrong, and George Kennan much too right.
In he came. He was in his late forties, with a patrician bearing, or maybe just one that said he was used to being the smartest man in the room. He was tall and slim and dressed well. His strong-chinned face probably wowed the ladies even if his hairline was in full retreat.
“Mr. President,” he said, and held out his hand. Something in his voice shouted Ivy League.
Truman shook with him. Kennan had a good, firm grip. “Thanks for coming in,” the President said, more conscious than usual of his own Missouri twang. He waved the diplomat to a chair. A colored steward followed Kennan in with coffee.
After the steward disappeared again, Kennan remarked, “I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk to me any more after our earlier…disagreements, sir.”
“I’m not fool enough to think I’m right all the damn time,” Truman said. “That’s for Hitler and Stalin and Mao and people of their stripe. When I sit down on the pot, I know what comes out, and it ain’t angels.”
He got a thin smile from Kennan, who said, “That’s a healthy attitude.”
“Well, I hope so. Healthy or not, it’s my attitude. And you were right, much too right, about what would come of MacArthur’s push north,” Truman said. “So now I want to pick your brain about something else.”
“I’ll do whatever I can for you, Mr. President,” Kennan said, “but I know that, even if I happened to be right the last time, that doesn’t necessarily mean I will be this time.”