Compared to those of his buddies still stuck with Wehrmacht -issue gear, he was well off. Compared to the French and English, whose cold-weather clothing was nowhere near so good as what the Germans made, he was incredibly lucky.
But the Poles didn’t have to scrounge to get their hands on stuff like this. They knew ahead of time what these winters were like. Seeing German troops collect pitying stares from a bunch of damn Poles was galling, to say the least.
Red Army men had clothes made for this hideous weather, too. They also had gun oil that didn’t freeze up when it got really cold, unlike the fancy shit the Germans used. Willi carried a little tube of that, taken from the dead Russian who’d supplied him with valenki. The action on his Mauser still worked just fine.
He shared the gun oil with his friends. He even shared it with Awful Arno, more from expediency than affection. Baatz might be the world’s biggest pain in the ass, but he was almost as dangerous to the bastards on the other side as he was to his own men.
Fighting went back and forth, back and forth. German panzer lubricants didn’t like the bitter weather any better than German gun oil did. Sometimes you could get panzer support, sometimes not. Russian panzers didn’t seem bothered. They had wider tracks than German machines, too. They could go through or over mud and snowdrifts that made German panzers bog down.
Squatting by a fire in a hut in a wrecked village, Willi said, “If the Ivans even halfway knew what the fuck they were doing, they could run us back into Poland in about a week and a half.”
“Nah.” Adam Pfaff shook his head. He was as grimy and shaggy as Willi. “We’d hang on for two weeks, easy.”
Arno Baatz crouched by that crackling blaze, too. He didn’t growl at Pfaff for defeatism. He just bummed a papiros off of him. There might not be much tobacco in the damn things, but what there was was a lot stronger than German-issue smokes. Willi also had some papirosi in a greatcoat pocket. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of dead Russians to frisk.
“Poor brave stupid shitheads,” he went on. “Their officers tell ’em to do something, they keep on trying to do it, no matter how dumb it is.”
“You mean, like charging off to surround Smolensk?” Adam Pfaff inquired. Awful Arno stirred at that, but for a wonder he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was taking mental notes. If he was-well, fuck him.
And Willi shook his head. “No, not like that. We’re trying all kinds of ways to do it.”
“None of ’em’s come close to working yet,” Pfaff said. Arno Baatz stirred again.
Willi ignored him. “But they’re all different,” he said. “The Russians keep doing the same goddamn thing over and over, no matter how many of ’em get killed. It’s like they don’t care, or they don’t dare get any ideas for themselves.”
“Always more Russians to throw in,” Baatz said. For once in his life, he wasn’t even close to wrong. Soviet generals spent men the way a sailor on leave spent money on girls. More where those came from seemed to be their guiding principle. The Germans always killed more enemies than they lost themselves. But the Ivans kept on coming.
The thought had hardly crossed Willi’s mind before a sentry out at the edge of the village yelled, “Halt! Who goes there?” Only a burst from a Russian submachine gun answered him. The burst must have missed, because the German fired back and an MG-34-not too frozen to operate-chattered to irate life.
“Fuck!” Awful Arno grabbed his rifle. Like Willi, he’d slapped whitewash on the stock and barrel so the piece wouldn’t stand out against the snow. Adam Pfaff’s remained gray-not perfect camouflage, but not bad, either. Since whitewashing his own Mauser, Baatz had quit riding Pfaff about it.
“Urra! Urra!” The Russian battle shout dinned through the village. The Red Army soldiers were probably liquored up-their daily ration was a hundred grams of vodka, and their officers upped it when they went into action. Booze drove fear into the background.
Willi wished for a hundred grams of potent spirits himself. He burst out of the hut, Pfaff and Baatz at his heels. Bullets cracked past them. They ran toward the heaviest fighting at the eastern edge of the village.
Most of the Ivans wore white snow smocks, on the same principle as the whitewashed Mausers. The Poles had them, too. German quartermasters kept promising to produce some, and kept breaking promises. Some Landsers improvised their own from captured bedsheets, but there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Willi wished he had one. His Feldgrau greatcoat turned him into a big blot against the snowy background.
He flopped down behind the burnt and mashed wreckage of another hut and snapped off a shot at the oncoming Russians. One of the snowsuited figures went down. Was he hit or just taking cover himself? No way to tell, not from where Willi sprawled.
Adam Pfaff lay on his belly ten or fifteen meters away, also firing at the Ivans. “After we capture Smolensk…” he said, slapping a fresh five-round magazine onto his rifle.
“Fuck that shit,” Willi answered. “All I want to do is get out of this lousy place in one piece.”
“That’s on account of you’ve got your head on straight,” Pfaff said. “Now if the clowns in Berlin did, too…”
“Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Willi fired at another Russian.
Enemy fire eased off. None of the Germans in the little village relaxed. The Russians loved to play games like this, to lull their foes into a false sense of security and then jump on them again from a new direction.
Sure as hell, the next attack came in from the south. Mortar bombs burst here and there. Then it was another wave of drunken Ivans bawling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs.
This time, the Russians broke into the village. No matter how frigid the weather was, the work got very warm for a while. The MG-34 worked fearful execution among the Ivans. They couldn’t bring their heavier, clumsier machine guns up for close combat, but raked the village with them at long range.
Willi’s head might have been on a swivel. He tried to look every which way at once. “Adam!” he screamed. “Behind you!”
Pfaff heard. And the gray Mauser knocked over a Russian who would have rammed a bayonet through his kidney in another few seconds. Pfaff shot the Russian again, deliberately this time, to make sure he wasn’t shamming. He wouldn’t pull a Lazarus now, not with the top of his head blown off. His blood steamed in the snow.
“Obliged,” Pfaff said. “This is a whole bunch of fun, isn’t it?”
“If you say so,” Willi answered. The other Gefreiter chuckled.
Sullenly, the Russians pulled back. Bodies littered the ground, some in snow smocks over khaki, others wearing Feldgrau. Wounded men wailed. Injured Russians and Germans sounded pretty much alike. The Landsers kept a few wounded Ivans for questioning and disposed of the rest. It wasn’t as if the Red Army men wouldn’t have done the same to them.
Willi went back to that hut, hoping the fire was still burning. As a matter of fact, the hut was on fire-it had taken a direct hit from a mortar. Anything but fussy, Willi got as close to the flames as he could stand. Warmth meant more than anything else he could think of.
Adam Pfaff came up beside him, also soaking in heat like a lizard in the sun. “Smolensk… Moscow… All easy, right?” Pfaff said.
“Well, sure,” Willi drawled in a way that left no doubt about what he really thought. They both grinned. It wasn’t as if they could do anything about where fate-and the Wehrmacht -had stuck them. A Russian machine gun fired a burst from the woods beyond the fields that surrounded the village. Willi flopped down in the snow again, but no quicker than his friend.
“Reds bomb Scapa Flow! Read all about it!” a newsboy shouted, waving a paper on a London street corner. Alistair Walsh handed him a broad copper penny and got a Times in exchange.
Sure as the devil, the Russians had hit the great British naval base in the Orkneys. Walsh couldn’t imagine how they’d done it. The story told him. They evidently had some huge, lumbering four-engined bombers to which no one in the Royal Navy had given a second thought… till they lumbered southwest from Murmansk, struck the great anchorage, and droned away homeward before the RAF could give chase.