On German maps, the roads between Soviet cities had been marked as highways. In any self-respecting country, they would have been highways. In Russia, they were rutted dirt tracks. When the autumn rains fell, and when the drifted snow melted in the spring, they turned to mud. Baatz had never imagined such mud before he got here. It could suck the boots off a Landser’s feet. It could swallow a man up to his waist. It could drown a weary mule who let his head sag down into it. It could bog down a truck.
It could bog down a panzer, too. The sensible German engineers who’d designed the Reich’s panzer forces had no more dreamt of mud like this than Arno Baatz had himself. Russian T-34s plowed through glop that held Panzer IIIs and IVs the way spiderwebs held beetles. It was demoralizing. It could wreck your chances of living to a ripe old age, too.
Right this minute, there were no T-34s in the neighborhood. Baatz didn’t think there were, anyhow. He looked over his shoulder, but he couldn’t see much through the downfalling curtains of water. He couldn’t hear much, either. The rain plashed all around. He wouldn’t know Russian panzers were close by till one squashed him flat. That would be just exactly too late.
Adam Pfaff squelched through the mud a few meters away. Like Baatz, he wore his waterproofed shelter half as a rain poncho. It helped a little, but not nearly enough.
Pfaff managed a crooked grin. “You know what?” he said. “I wish we were Panzergrenadiers.”
“Heh,” Baatz said. “I’ve heard ideas I liked less-I’ll tell you that.” Panzergrenadiers didn’t march into battle-or, as now, away from it. They rode armored halftracks so they could keep up with the panzers instead of wearing out shoe leather tramping along behind them.
Ten minutes later, the Landsers tramped past an SdKfz 251 that was buried in mud past the axle of its front wheels. The armored personnel carrier’s two-man crew and the half-dozen glum Panzergrenadiers it had carried were all clumping around in the oozy muck, trying to excavate it or to get enough wood and brush under its power train to let it move again. Shelter halves or not, they were filthy and soaked.
“I take it back,” Adam Pfaff said. “I don’t want to be a Panzergrenadier after all.”
Baatz eyed the struggling, cursing soldiers and their disabled mount. “Maybe you aren’t as dumb as you look,” he said.
“Hey!” shouted one of the profanely unhappy men wrestling with the SdKfz 251. “How about a hand, you clowns?”
Pfaff clapped and clapped, as if applauding a great save on a football pitch. Arno Baatz guffawed. The Panzergrenadier called them every name in the book, and a few that would have scorched the pages had anyone tried to set them down.
“I don’t think he likes us,” Pfaff said in tones of mild surprise.
“Too bad,” Baatz answered. For once, the Obergefreiter didn’t seem to want to argue with him.
A military policeman with a gorget on a chain around his neck-he wore it outside the shelter half he used for a rain cape-stood at a crossroads directing traffic. “Which regiment?” he demanded whenever another group of soldiers came up from the east.
Baatz told him when he barked the question yet again. “Which way do we go?” the Unteroffizier asked.
“Your lot heads southwest.” The military policeman importantly pointed down the proper muddy track. He must have had the assignments memorized. Any list, except maybe one printed on a tin cup with crayon, would have turned to mush in short order.
“Damn chainhound,” Pfaff said as soon as they got too far from the man to let him hear. The military policemen’s emblem gave them the scornful nickname.
“He’s just doing his job.” Arno Baatz automatically respected authority. That was what authority was there for, wasn’t it? It was to Arno. But, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he saw he’d lost points with Pfaff. Any combat soldier with anything kind to say about the military police turned into a white crow.
Everybody in the squad was grousing by the time they got to a large village an hour and a half later. Another Kettenhund with a gorget stood at the edge of it. “What’s your unit?” he growled. Again, Baatz told him. The military policeman looked disgusted. “Well, you buggered it up good and proper, didn’t you? You clowns were supposed to take the other fork.”
“What kind of Teufelsdreck is that?” Baatz said. He pointed back the way they’d come. “The fool with a gorget at the crossroads sent us down here.”
“I don’t care if the fucking Holy Ghost sent you,” the military policeman said. “You’ve got to go back and do it right.”
Baatz and Pfaff and the rest of the weary soldiers called him so many names, the Panzergrenadiers with the bogged-down halftrack would have listened hard. Back for an hour and a half and then on again for nobody knew how long? No wonder they swore!
For a little while, it rolled off the chainhound the way water rolled off the rubberized fabric of his shelter half. He was more patient than some military policemen Baatz had seen. Before long, though, that patience frayed. “Get moving,” he said, a new sharpness in his voice. “Do you want me to call for an officer? You won’t like it if I do, I promise.”
Miserably, hopelessly, the Landsers turned away and headed back toward the crossroads. “What do you want to bet that other asshole tries to send us this way again?” Baatz said. No longer did he show any sympathy for military policemen.
“I hope the Ivans bomb the crap out of that place,” Adam Pfaff said, jerking a thumb at the village they’d just left. “The chuckleheads there deserve it.” Several of the other soldiers nodded. Even Baatz didn’t reprove the Obergefreiter. Mud kept slopping into his boots.
Getting back to the crossroads took longer than going the other way had. The tired soldiers had to keep stepping off the road while men and vehicles moving the other way went by. Many of the vehicles were horse-drawn, local panje wagons the Germans had impressed into service-that being a fancy turn of phrase for stolen. The wagons had tall wheels and boat-shaped beds. They dealt with mud better than anything from the Vaterland.
A different Kettenhund stood at the crossroads when Baatz and his men returned. He didn’t ask questions. He just waved them onto the other fork of the road. On a day without any large favors, Baatz gladly accepted the small one.
By the time he and his men made it to where they were supposed to go, night was falling. Other German troops filled every hut in the village. The weary Landsers ate their iron rations, fastened shelter halves together to make tents, and rolled themselves in blankets on top of more shelter halves to give themselves a quarter of a chance of staying dry. Baatz slept like a rock even so.
CHAPTER 9
Ivan Kuchkov didn’t mind the rasputitsa, not even a little bit. He was happy to sit on his ass any old time, to roll cigarettes from makhorka and from newspapers he couldn’t read, to eat black bread and sausage, and to drink his daily Red Army vodka ration and as much homebrew as he could get his hands on besides. He was happy to do that any old time, sure. But when the mud time slowed all motion to a crawl, he got the perfect excuse to stay lazy.
Officers got their dicks all excited about patrolling no matter what, about keeping the pressure on the Hitlerite hyenas. Well, they could get their knickers in as big a twist as they wanted. Yes, Red Army men were able to keep moving no matter how muddy it got. Yes, they were better at it than the damned Nazis. Just because you were able to do something, though, didn’t mean you wanted to.