“Himmeldonnerwetter!” he fumed. “A seeing-eye dog right out of driving school could have done that better than I did! I mean, a fucking blind seeing-eye dog could have.”
“Take it easy, Adi,” Hermann Witt said. “I told you to turn left, and you turned left.”
“And this piece of shit went and came off,” Adi snarled. “If I’d been a little smoother, it wouldn’t have.”
He gave a savage tug on the rope attached to one end of the thrown track. Little by little, the crew were wrestling the links over the return rollers and back toward the drive sprocket. Once they got the track onto the sprocket-if they ever did-they could reattach it to the other end, adjust the tension, and ride off into the sunset like cowboys in an American Western.
Sergeant Witt, perhaps incautiously, said as much. Adi clapped a muddy hand to his muddy forehead-he’d already used the gesture before, more than once. “Sure we can,” he said. “If we don’t bog down completely in the meantime. If the Ivans don’t jump us. If-”
“If you don’t quit pissing and moaning,” Witt broke in. Just like the track, the panzer commander’s patience had come apart.
Adi Stoss stared at him. Witt hardly ever barked like that. When he did, he had good reason to. Adi, luckily for him, owned enough mother wit to see as much. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said, his voice sheepish.
One of the things that made Witt a good panzer commander was not staying mad at the other guys in the crew. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to work, then.” Another thing that made him a good commander was working hard and getting filthy like everybody else.
As they yanked and strained and swore, they all kept their Schmeissers where they could grab them in a hurry. Theo didn’t think any Red Army men were in the neighborhood, but he wouldn’t have sworn an oath in court. The Germans called their Russian foes Indians not least because of how they popped up where you least expected them. And thinking about riding off like cowboys naturally called Indians to mind.
In the distance, artillery grumbled and machine guns chattered. When you were cooped up inside your steel box, you never heard things like that. All you heard was the engine’s growl and the rattle and clank of the suspension. Enemy bullets hitting the panzer sounded like gravel on a tin roof. Odds were you wouldn’t hear the round that got through your armor. You’d just hear yourself scream-but not for long.
After a couple of hours of scraped knuckles and broken fingernails and a cut or two, they had the track back in place. Kurt Poske surveyed their handiwork and delivered the verdict: “Boy, that was fun.”
“My ass!” Adi said.
The loader eyed him, then shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he lisped in falsetto, “but it’s not your ass I crave.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Adi told him. “If you talk that way, though, you’re probably after Theo’s instead.”
Theo jumped. He hadn’t expected to get dragged into the raillery. To make sure Kurt had no doubt where he stood on such things, he clapped a battered, protective hand to the seat of his grimy black coveralls. Everybody laughed.
“Come on, girls.” Sergeant Witt lisped and shrilled, too. “Let’s get back to business, shall we?” His voiced dropped into its normal register. “No chocolate-stabbers in this crew. That’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, anyway.”
As Theo clambered into the panzer again, he was chewing on Witt’s comment. By Adi’s expression, so was he. Also by his expression, he wasn’t so sure he fancied the flavor.
But Witt was all business after Adi fired up the Maybach engine and the panzer got moving again. At the sergeant’s order, Theo radioed the company commander and regimental headquarters to let them know the crew had got the track back on. They both acknowledged the report. If they were delighted at the news, they hid it very well.
As the panzer chugged along, Adi glanced toward Theo and said, “I’m trying to drive like I’m on eggs. I don’t want to have to do that again any time soon.”
“I believe you,” Theo said.
Adi smiled, as people often did when they got Theo to talk. Then he said, “I hope we stop in one of those Russian villages with the bathhouse where you throw the water onto hot rocks and you steam till you can’t stand it any more-then you get a bucket of cold water in the kisser or jump in the snow if it’s wintertime and whack each other with the birch-twig bundles. I’ve got all the dirt in the world on me right now.”
“Not all of it.” Theo spoke again. He held up his hands so Adi could see he was wearing a good bit of the world himself.
“Well, maybe you’re carrying some, too.” Adi dropped his voice so Theo could still hear but the three crewmates back in the turret wouldn’t be able to: “You haven’t been carrying yours for the past two thousand years, though.”
Theo wondered what he was supposed to say to that. He said what he usually said: nothing.
“You know what the real bastard is?” Adi hadn’t expected anything different, and went on without waiting for any kind of reply: “The real bastard is, if they come for me, it won’t matter that I’ve spent a couple of years blowing up Ivans with you clowns. They won’t care. And all of you are liable to wind up in deep shit if they decide you knew about me but didn’t say anything.”
“Knew what?” Theo asked, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what the driver might be talking about.
“Ach, so. Funny, Theo. I’m laughing, see?” The noises that came out of Adi’s mouth might have sounded like laughter to him, but they wouldn’t have to any normal human being. After those noises, he said, “Knew why-or one of the reasons why-I don’t go to soldiers’ brothels. The girls’d be too likely to remember me afterwards.”
All this was as close as he ever came to naming his real-and serious-problem. Theo didn’t think it was that big a worry. The girls German authorities dragged into soldiers’ whorehouses in these parts rarely had a long afterwards in which to remember anybody, or any body part. Of course, that in itself was another reason both Theo and Adi stayed away from such establishments.
When they bivouacked, it wasn’t in a village with a bathhouse. It was in the middle of a muddy field with the grass and weeds all torn up by panzer tracks and starting to yellow. There was a field kitchen in amongst the other panzers. Because their Panzer IV got there late, the stewed grain and turnips and sausage in the boiler were getting cold. Theo and his crewmates filled their mess tins anyhow. The stew spackled over the empty places between their ribs.
You hated to get under your panzer in weather like this. It was liable to sink down into the mud and squash you. If you used shelter halves to make a tent, you’d put your blanket on the mud. If you used the shelter halves for ground sheets, you’d get rained on. Theo slept sitting up inside the panzer. He was so tired, he didn’t care about being uncomfortable. The other guys fought the rain. To him, that was their problem.
CHAPTER 10
During the summer, Spain got hotter than Czechoslovakia ever did. Vaclav Jezek bitched about that. During the winter, the cold of the central Spanish plateau pierced him to the root. He bitched about that, too.
During the fall, it rained. He really bitched about that. Any soldier hated being in the field while God pissed on him. A sniper, who had to stay in one place for hours at a stretch, hated it even more.
Benjamin Halévy was as sympathetic as usuaclass="underline" “You can always throw away your elephant gun and go back to being an ordinary soldier, you know.”
Vaclav hated the antitank rifle’s weight and clumsy length. He clutched the monster as if it were his beloved just the same. “I’ve lugged this fucker all over Western Europe,” he said, exaggerating a little but not all that much. “I’ll be damned if I get rid of it now. It’s part of me.”