“All you men are to form a detail at once!” Voss shouted roughly. They all turned, faces numbed with fatigue. “Get up! The lot of you! That’s an order.”
They shambled listlessly to their feet like draft animals done in from exhaustion.
“There is a break in the telephone line,” Voss continued. “The colonel is without communication to the forward position. You,” he pointed to two men,” are to find that break and make repairs.” He singled out two more and said, “The two of you will remain here and guard the colonel’s headquarters, and I don’t mean from inside this barn. Stay alert. Now, as for the rest of you, form a patrol. The Russians could be infiltrating throughout the rear. They could be digging in behind your lines, ready to start havoc. Get on with it, all of you.”
The group picked up their weapons and equipment, filed out of the barn, and began their long slog through the mud. They were obviously worn out, apathetic, some ill with fever, but it could not be helped. They can think me a real shit for making them do this, Voss thought, but their survival depends on the actions they now take.
Falkenstein looked down upon the proceedings with Khan at his side. “Noble effort, but I doubt if it will change a thing. When frustrated, our young lieutenant likes to bark out orders. Like all officers, eh, Khan? Let him remain anxious and irate—only make sure, Lieutenant, the orders you snap, the crucial ones, are derived from me.”
It was doubtful how much was understood by the Siberian as the captain spoke in German, but Reinhardt, still at the bow machine gun, overheard. Voss boarded the vehicle, and it wheeled around, pointed in the direction from which it had just come. Falkenstein took a seat. Someone had tidied up. The clumps of mud had been wiped off the seating, and the deck plating was reasonably clean. “Show me that map, Voss.”
Voss sat down beside the captain, removed the creased map from the folder, and opened it. Both officers held on to either end to keep it from fluttering away. “After we rendezvous with the scout car and retrieve the crew, we will strike out for here,” Falkenstein said, pointing to a town on the Zaporozhye-Dnepropetrovsk rail line. “Veranovka. The Reichsbahn had established a repair depot. Not a terribly large operation. I don’t know what condition the place will be in, as it falls on the very border of the sterilization zone, but no matter. It will become our base of operations.”
Voss looked closely at the map. The town lay twelve kilometers northeast of the Zaporozhye salient. The Greyhounds, Voss’s division and the captain’s former one, would have assembled near the reservoir by now. We could radio for assistance, if our situation deteriorates, Voss thought. The reconnaissance battalion will have advance patrols. And the river was twenty kilometers due west of the town. Suddenly there was good reason to have hope. “It’s a sound plan, Captain. Should things get too hot for us, we have the salient as a fallback position,” Voss said.
“You’re not getting cold feet, are you Lieutenant?”
“No, sir, but the safest and most logical course of action would be—”
“Good, because Veranovka is our only fallback position.”
31
Angst and Wilms found refuge inside the truncated fuselage of a downed Junker transport. The tail and flight deck were missing, as was the entire right wing and a small end section on the left. Pieces of the doomed aircraft lay scattered in a wide swath. The midsection was still relatively whole, except for rents and perforations along the port sides and the bulkhead. Wilms removed the radio and set it down on an empty ammunition box, rust showing where the drab brown-green paint had flaked away. A bivouac of sorts had been made here before as either an observation post or as a means of shelter. Empty field ration tins, cigarette stubs, and a pair of muddy socks, the heels and toes completely worn through, lay submerged with more litter in a lagoon of water that had seeped onto the deck.
The rain had stopped some time ago, but the wind became so furious that it was a struggle to walk. They were already done in from traipsing through the mud, and despite shelter halves, their clothing underneath was practically soaked through from sweat. No Russians were found taking cover behind the defile, as Schroeder had suggested there might be. At the last signal contact, the order was to stay put and maintain forward observation until further notice. Angst looked at his watch: sixteen-thirty hours. If Falkenstein did not return soon, he and Wilms and the rest of the crew stood a good chance of spending the night out here. While the signalman fiddled with the radio dial, Angst got comfortable by the port opening that faced east and kept a lookout with binoculars. Visibility extended for no more than a kilometer, where a veil of mist, stirred by the wind, had descended and blanked out the details of the landscape beyond. The thick cloud cover did not improve matters. The wind whistled through cracks and tears in the aluminum skin. After a time, Wilms removed the earphones, careful not to let the trailing wires droop in the puddles of water. “It’s dead out here,” he said, referring to the absence of chatter on the radio. “This whole sector must be clear of Russians.”
Angst hoped that was true. An unusually strong gust whipped through the open ends of the fuselage and caused their shelter halves to flap like sails. “If this wind continues, things should dry up a little,” Angst said, as he struggled to button the ends of his shelter half that had blown open.
“More than likely. We might even see some sunshine by tomorrow,” Wilms replied.
“Good. I was worried my remark was yet another indication of my ignorance of weather conditions around here.” The ugly scene with Detwiler earlier still gnawed at him. Angst had always prided himself on maintaining a certain amount of self-control and decorum, and he was angry for allowing the likes of the machine gunner to get to him. Utter fool that Detwiler was, he should have known to dismiss everything that came out of the man’s mouth.
“How did you come to be here, Angst? Some replacement battalion?” Wilms asked.
“Officially? I volunteered. Unofficially, I was transferred here as a cheap means of revenge to salvage the vanity of a superior officer.”
“A cheap means of revenge,” Wilms repeated, and shrugged. His interest was aroused, and he pressed Angst to tell him more.
Unsure as to why he was indulging the signalman with the details of his farcical military career thus far, Angst said, “I was a lieutenant’s orderly. Lieutenant Nieheus. He was an adjutant for one of the staff officers at division headquarters. I’d been in France ever since the invasion. Then came the occupation. Two years of drill, marches, exercises, and patrolling the beach. We stared at the ocean, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, month after month for an enemy that failed to materialize. The monotony, the boredom was…soul destroying. There were no dividends or amusements. Everyone struggled just to have enough tobacco to help smoke away the terminal hours.”
“Did you visit Paris?” Wilms asked.
“Once. There was an organized cultural excursion for enlisted men. A forty-eight hour pass. We weren’t allowed any time by ourselves, and certainly not to get into any trouble on our own. At least I got to see the main attractions. The Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the tomb of—”
Wilms interrupted. “What about the women?”
Angst smiled bitterly. “For some. The lower ranks had very few dealings with the locals. Where our company was situated, the villages were few and sparsely populated. I and some of the guys in the platoon would barter for eggs and milk, usually with a farmer’s wife who was older than your grandmother.”