The turret traversed a little. The gun came down to shoot just over the wall. “Fire, Lothar!” Witt yelled. “They know we’re here. The motion must’ve tipped them.”
“On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt said, and the gun boomed. Then the gunner muttered, “Oh, dear Lord!” Saul couldn’t see what the round had done to the pro-Nazi foot soldiers, but that told him everything he needed to know.
Almost everything-a second later, a rifle round rang off the turret. It hadn’t a hope in hell of punching through, but it showed the canister shell hadn’t killed or maimed all the Landsers out there or broken their spirits.
“Another round of the same, Kurt,” Witt said, and then, “Lothar, while he’s loading it hose ’em down with the turret machine gun.”
“Another round of canister,” Poske said at the same time as Eckhardt was replying, “I’m doing it, Sergeant.”
As the MG-34 mounted alongside the panzer’s big gun spat death, Saul wondered how many times they’d chewed up Russians like that. Quite a few, even if he couldn’t put an exact number to it. No matter how often it was, he’d never imagined they would be using the machine gun the same way against rebellious German soldiers.
No, that isn’t right, he thought as the cannon roared again. We’re the rebellious German soldiers. He grinned ferociously, liking the idea.
Then Sergeant Witt spoke to him: “Back us out of here, Adi. I don’t want them coming through the house and jumping us with grenades or Molotov cocktails. Let’s get out into the open, where we can see trouble coming.”
“Backing us out, Sergeant.” Saul put the panzer into reverse. Ivans who drove T-34s often carried a mallet to whack the shift lever and make the transmission do what they told it to. German engineering was of a higher order … even if the USSR kept turning out ungodly swarms of crude but deadly panzers.
After Saul had backed away, Witt sent the panzer out around the end of the wall. That showed Saul what the two rounds of canister had done to his countrymen. Even if they were committed Nazis, the sight made him gulp. The only difference between Russians and Germans after they got blasted to pieces and strings was the color of the bits of unbloodstained cloth covering corpses and bits of corpses.
More bullets rattled off the panzer, these probably from a submachine gun. Theo fired a quick burst from the bow machine gun. He raised the thumb on his left hand, which told Saul they wouldn’t need to worry about that fellow till the Judgment Day.
“Good job,” Witt said. “I don’t think this mob will give us any more trouble, anyhow. Any orders on the radio, Theo?”
“Nope,” Hossbach answered laconically.
“On my own. I wonder if I can stand that much freedom.” The panzer commander paused thoughtfully. “I wonder if Germany can stand that much freedom.” It was one of the better questions Saul Goldman had heard lately. He wished he didn’t have to worry about the answer, too.
. .
Over on the far side of the barbed wire, the Germans were going out of their minds. To Alistair Walsh, that meant they were going further out of their minds than they already were. When soldiers wearing the same uniform but different armbands started shooting at one another, something was rotten in the state of Deutschland.
Only one thing could make all the Fritzes shoot in the same direction these days. When the English or French tried to push a little deeper into Belgium, the Germans turned from distracted lunatics in the middle of a civil war back into, well, Germans.
That was the last thing any of their foes wanted. Distracted lunatics were exciting, even entertaining, to watch. Germans were dangerous. All the Reich’s neighbors had two wars’ worth of experience-France had three-about just how dangerous Germans were.
So Walsh and his men sat tight. They didn’t shoot at the Fritzes. The Fritzes mostly didn’t shoot at them even if they showed themselves, as long as they didn’t look as if they were about to attack. It was a funny kind of war. Any kind of war that turned ordinary soldiers into would-be striped-pants diplomats struck Walsh as pretty funny.
But that was what this war was doing. Jack Scholes came up to Walsh and demanded, “ ’Ere, Staff, wot kind of peace d’you reckon the Germans’ll figure is cricket?”
“Haven’t the foggiest,” Walsh answered; he wasn’t ashamed to admit he had no notion of what would happen next. “Hell’s bells, Jack, we don’t even know whether the generals can beat the Nazis, or whether somebody like Himmler-no, they say Himmler’s dead: somebody like Heydrich, then-turns into the next Führer. If that happens, the fighting’ll be on again for real soon enough.”
“Say the generals win.” Yes, Scholes was like a terrier; he didn’t want to let go of what he grabbed on to.
“It would have to be something close to the status quo ante bellum, I expect,” Walsh said, sucked into the argument in spite of himself.
“To the wot?” Latin was Greek to Scholes. “Blimey, you throw the fancy talk around like a toff, you do.”
“Bugger off! There. Is that plain enough?” Walsh said. The private grinned at him, showing off snaggled yellow teeth. The only reason Walsh knew the sonorous Latin phrase was that he’d heard it a lot the last time around. He explained: “To the way things were before the war.”
“Oh.” Jack Scholes pondered, then nodded. “Makes sense. Can’t let ’em fink they turned a profit on the deal, can we?”
“I hope not,” Walsh said. He lit a Navy Cut, offered one to Scholes, and let out a long, smoke-filled sigh. “Of course, if we don’t flatten them right and proper now, chances are we’ll have another dustup with them fifteen or twenty years down the road.”
Scholes sent him a sly grin. “Chances are, eh? Chances are it won’t be your worry then, too.”
“I hope not. I’ve already got shot in two wars-three would be too bloody many. But you’ll be a staff sergeant yourself by then if you stay in.”
“Roight. And then you wake up.” The kid reacted with automatic mockery. A moment later, though, his gray-blue eyes narrowed. “D’yer really fink Oi could?”
“Why not? The other soldiers respect you, and you’ve picked up a lot since we first bumped into each other,” Walsh said.
“Since you first got stuck wiv me, you mean,” Scholes said, not without pride.
“You said it-I didn’t.”
“A staff sergeant? Me? Cor! Wouldn’t me mum bust ’er buttons?” But Scholes’ eyes narrowed again, this time in a different way. “ ’Course, I’ve got to live through this little go-round first, eh?”
“It would help,” Walsh admitted dryly. The younger man grunted laughter. Walsh went on, “Your chances now are a hell of a lot better than they were a few days ago, at least if the German Salvation Committee wins its scrap with the Nazis.”
“You’ve got that right, I expect,” Scholes said. “But if peace goes an’ breaks out, ’oo says the Army’ll want to keep a scrawny West ’Am supporter loike me?”
He had a point. East End Cockneys weren’t always the first choice of the powers that be for promotion or for anything else that didn’t involve the risk of sudden death. They weren’t calm and reliable and obedient, the way country boys were supposed to be. Like their counterparts from Mancunian and Liverpudlian slums, they had the nasty habit of doing as they pleased, not as they were told.
Still, Walsh said, “I would have gone back to digging coal if they hadn’t decided to keep me in khaki in 1919. There are ways to get them to do what you want-and I’ll be glad to put in a good word for you. We need blokes who can tell privates what to do … and who can look a subaltern in the eye and let him know he’s a goddamn fool.”
Jack Scholes laughed again. “Oi’d ’ate that, Oi would.”
“I daresay.” Walsh chuckled, too. “You can’t let them know you enjoy it, though. You can’t let them know you’re laughing at them. Mm, most of the time you can’t, anyhow. They need that every once in a while.”