He and his men dashed around the wall then, firing as they did. Several Germans were down. Others gaped in horrified amazement. “Hände hoch!” Walsh yelled. The Master Race didn’t always want to fight to the death.
Sure enough, these Fritzes had had enough and then some. They threw away their weapons and raised their hands. Some of them shouted “Kamerad!” And one added “We surrender!” in excellent English.
That made things easier. Walsh’s German was limited to the phrases you needed to tell prisoners what to do, and he rarely understood what the Germans answered. So he was smiling as he said, “Tell ’em we won’t hurt ’em if they do what we tell ’em.”
The German spoke in his own language. Then he asked, “May we tend to our wounded, please?”
“Right. Go ahead. Then we’ll take you back,” Walsh said. The Germans dusted antiseptic powder on wounds and bandaged them. They gave a badly hit man one morphine shot, and then another. Walsh wasn’t sure he’d make it. If they let him die comfortably, it was the last and not the smallest favor they could do for him.
“I am glad to be out of the fighting,” said the man who spoke English. He had a cut on the back of one hand and another on his cheek from grenade fragments. Neither was much worse than a scratch. He’d been lucky.
“Bet you are,” Walsh said with rough sympathy. “Want a fag?” He held out his packet of Navy Cuts.
“Danke schön,” the German said. “I am Eberhard Rothmann. I am a Gefreiter. My pay number is-” He rattled it off. After lighting the cigarette, he went on, “I am very glad to be away from this. Twice now in twenty-five years our leaders have taken us into losing wars.”
“So why did you Germans go, then?” Walsh asked. The lads in Field Intelligence would be happy to get their hands on this bird. He sang like a canary.
“Because they told us what to do, first the Kaiser and then the Führer, and then we did it,” Rothmann said. “And look what we have for doing it.” He gestured at his dead and injured countrymen. “But now, from what I hear, we have had a bellyful of this stupidness.”
One of the other Germans must also have spoken English, or at least understood it. He said something sharp in German. Eberhard Rothmann answered in the same tongue. Then he went back to English.
“What I say is so, even if it likes Klaus not,” he said. “The people, they have had enough of foolishness.”
“He is liar!” Klaus said. His English had a much thicker accent than Rothmann’s.
Walsh cared nothing about that. He told off Jack Scholes and a couple of other men. “Don’t let anything happen to them,” he said. “Don’t shoot them unless they run or they try to jump you. Get their wounded to an aid station. Got all that?”
“Roight, Staff,” Scholes said impatiently. He gestured with his bayoneted Lee-Enfield. “Come on, you filthy buggers. ’Op it, loik.”
Hop it they did. Walsh and the remaining Englishmen warily pushed forward. He peered around the smashed, charred carcass of a German armored car, then hastily jerked his head back. “There’s a Tiger a hundred yards down the path,” he whispered. “Stay low, for Christ’s sake.”
No one had seen him peek out. If the Tiger crew or the other Fritzes who were bound to be close by the monster realized the Tommies were so close, exterminating him and his pals wouldn’t take long.
“Shall we send ’em a flying ’ard-on?” one of the men asked. The bazooka’s phallic rockets hadn’t needed long to get a dirty name pasted to them.
But Walsh shook his head. “He’s front end-on to us,” he said. “It won’t get through his armor.” The bazooka was a better antitank weapon than anything the infantry had had up to now. It beat the stuffing out of the PIAT. It had its limitations, though. A Tiger’s thick frontal armor was more than it could handle.
“What do you want to do, then?” the soldier asked-a reasonable enough question.
“Wait,” Walsh answered. “Let’s see what the Germans have in mind. If they pull out on their own, we don’t have to drive them out.” They wouldn’t kill any enemy soldiers that way. On the other hand, the Germans wouldn’t find the chance to kill any of them, either. Walsh approved of not getting killed. He wasn’t even especially keen on getting wounded. He’d done it before, and found it overrated.
If the Germans decided to come forward again … That might not be very enjoyable. He flattened himself out, wiggled forward, and looked ahead from under the dead armored car. He didn’t see any approaching jackboots. Not seeing them suited him fine.
Dusk began to descend. The Tiger’s engine noise got louder. Walsh’s heart leaped into his mouth. The tank could squash the armored car and him with it and never break a sweat.
But why would it bother? A couple of rounds of HE and a burst or two from the machine guns would finish him with ease, thank you kindly.
He risked another peep around the armored car’s mudguard. The Tiger was backing up-backing away, in other words. The tank commander stood head and shoulders out of the cupola so he could see where he was going. Two or three German foot soldiers standing nearby waved and pointed to steer him away from obstacles. Walsh wondered why they bothered. What was a Tiger made for, if not for grinding obstacles under its tracks?
Sure as hell, its retreating rear end took out the corner of a house. The house fell in on itself. The Tiger, unfazed, backed over and through the wreckage. The infantrymen pulled back with it.
“Bugger me blind,” Walsh said as he pulled his head in once more. “I think it’ll be all right-till tomorrow, anyway.”
He had ration tins in pouches on his belt. The first one he grabbed was steak and kidney pie, without a doubt the best ration the Army made. One of the men carried a cooker that burned methylated spirit with an all but invisible flame. They brewed tea. Life might not be ideal, but it looked a lot better after grub and char.
Snow came later in the Ukraine than it did in Russia proper, but come it did. Ivan Kuchkov and his men put on white snow smocks and whitewashed their helmets. The smocks would get dirty soon enough. Well, so would the snow. They’d stay camouflaged for a while.
Sasha Davidov was putting on a fresh coat of whitewash when Ivan came up to him. The skinny little Jew looked up before Ivan got very close. You couldn’t sneak up on him. Nobody could-certainly not Ivan, and he was pretty good at sneaking. Those hair-trigger nerves made Sasha such a good point man.
“What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” he asked.
“Not a fucking thing, not right now,” Ivan answered. “Tomorrow … Tomorrow I hear we get some tanks.”
Davidov nodded. “Yes, I heard that, too.” With his beaky nose, he looked like a sparrow-a sparrow that badly needed a shave, but even so.
“Did you? I just now found out, so fuck your mother,” Kuchkov said without heat. “Who told you? One of your clipcock buddies?”
“You keep your ears open, you hear things,” Davidov said, a yes that wasn’t a yes.
“You keep your mouth open, somebody’ll stick a dick in it,” Kuchkov said. Then he got back to the business at hand: “So we’ll be going forward again.”
“Seems pretty likely,” Davidov agreed.
“Yeah. It does. So you take your sorry kike ass out before sunup and see what kind of cunts we’ve got in front of us,” Ivan told him. “The more we know, the better the chances we fuck them and they don’t fuck us.”
“I’ll do it, Comrade Sergeant,” the Jew said. “But I’m pretty sure they’ll be Germans.”
Ivan was pretty sure of the same thing. “Goddamn Hitlerite dickheads,” he said in disgust. “Always those Nazi pricks. Never the Hungarians any more. Never the shitass Romanians and their stinking cornmeal mush.” His scowl made him even uglier than he was already. “And I fucking know why, too.”