March Vaclav did. He hadn’t done a route march in quite a while. Picking them up and laying them down was no more fun than it had been the last time. If anything, it was worse, because his antitank rifle weighed at least twice as much as an ordinary piece.
He wondered what the Spanish Republicans would make of a sniper with an elephant gun. From what he’d heard, neither side down there had much in the way of armor. Well, there’d be plenty of-what did they call the assholes on the other side? Nationalists, that was it-plenty of Nationalists who needed killing.
There’d probably be plenty of Republicans who needed killing, too. He hoped not too many of them tried giving him orders. The enemy… You could deal with the enemy. You knew what he was, and you knew where he was. But you were stuck with your so-called friends.
Benjamin Halevy fell in beside him. “I wish this turned out better,” the Jew said.
“Fuck it. What can you do?” Vaclav said. “Spain’ll be another balls-up, won’t it?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Halevy answered. “But whenever the brass are willing to send you somewhere, you’ve got to guess they aren’t doing you a favor.”
“If they want to do me a favor, they can all drop dead.”
“There you go.” They marched on, away from one stalemated war that had suddenly flipped upside down and towards another.
As far as Theo Hossbach could see, Byelorussia looked a hell of a lot like Poland. Maybe it was a little shabbier, or maybe that was his imagination. He understood little bits and pieces of Polish, as a lot of Germans from Breslau did. Byelorussian sounded different, but not all that different. And a lot of villages had Jews in them. They could manage with German, and he could do the same with Yiddish.
The biggest change was in the signs. Polish and German used the same alphabet. Sometimes he could guess written words he didn’t know. But the Soviet Union’s Cyrillic script was almost as incomprehensible as Chinese would have been.
Adalbert Stoss said very much the same thing. When he did, Hermann Witt gave him a wry grin and answered, “We didn’t come here to read, Adi.”
“Ah, stuff it,” Adi said. They both laughed.
So did Theo. If Heinz Naumann had said something like that to Stoss, the driver probably would have come back with the same response. But Heinz wouldn’t have been grinning, and Adi would have meant what he said. That the other panzer commander and Stoss hadn’t got along was an understatement. Naumann was dead now, though, and the feud buried with him in a badly marked grave back in Poland.
Witt attacked the engine with screwdriver and wrench. After liberating the carburetor, he held it up in triumph… of sorts. He delivered his verdict like a judge pronouncing sentence: “This thing sucks, you know?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Adi said. “We clean out the valves, it’ll do all right for a while-till it decides not to, anyway.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Witt agreed. “I wonder if the carb on the Panzer III’s any better.”
“I’d sure like to find out,” Stoss said.
Theo nodded. No matter what the carburetor was like, everything that counted was better on a Panzer III. Thicker armor, a cannon that could fire both high-explosive and armor-piercing rounds, a machine gun in the turret and another one in the hull… What was there not to like?
He could think of two things. The turret cannon and machine gun took a loader and gunner, which meant there would be a couple of new people to get used to-never his favorite pastime. And, more to the point, the Reich still didn’t have enough Panzer IIIs to go around, so he was worrying about getting used to a pair of imaginary soldiers.
Back when Naumann commanded the Panzer II, the carb also misbehaved. He and Adi had quarreled about it. Witt didn’t seem to want to quarrel with anybody except the Ivans. Theo approved of that.
The next morning, the promotion fairy sprinkled magic dust on the panzer’s crew. Adi became a Gefreiter, and Theo himself an Obergefreiter. Witt slapped him on the back and said, “They’ll pull you out and turn you into a real noncom pretty soon.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Theo answered. The Wehrmacht had one more grade below Unteroffizier or corporal. After that, you had to go to training classes to get rid of the emblem on your sleeve and acquire an Unteroffizier’s shoulder-strap pip. Theo had had enough of training classes in basic to last him the rest of his life and twenty minutes longer.
Witt laughed. “Might do you good. It’d make you come out of your shell a little bit, maybe.”
“Maybe.” Theo didn’t believe it for a minute. He could no more come out of his shell than a turtle could escape from its. It was part of him. If anything, he wished he came equipped with a Panzer III’s armor, not a Panzer II’s.
Heinz Naumann would have gone on giving him grief about it. Witt didn’t. All he said was “You keep living through fights, they’ll make you an Unteroffizier whether you like it or not.”
“Oh, boy,” Theo said. The panzer commander laughed again. Had Theo been the kind to come out with what he was thinking, he might have added that he’d never run into a better reason to get killed. He hated the idea of giving other people orders. He didn’t like getting told what to do himself, either. He was, perhaps, not ideally suited to the Wehrmacht.
That, of course, bothered the Wehrmacht not a bit. Round peg? Square hole? Drive the damn thing in anyway. Hit it hard enough and it’ll stay in place. Then we can hang some more stuff from it and get on with the war.
Adi Stoss was thinking of other things. “You know what?” he said. “Winter in Russia’s liable to make winter in Poland look like a Riviera holiday.”
“Try not to sound so cheerful about it, all right?” Witt said. “Besides, we’ll have the Poles and the French and the Tommies shivering right beside us. Oh-and the Ivans, too, of course.”
“Aber naturlich,” Adi agreed with more sardonic good cheer. “But the Ivans do this every year. They’re used to it, poor devils. The rest of us aren’t, except maybe the Poles.”
“You’re jam-packed with happy thoughts today, aren’t you?” Witt said. “Why don’t you gather up some firewood?”
“I thought Gefreiters didn’t have to do shit like that,” Stoss said. “Isn’t the whole point of getting promoted not needing to do shit like that any more?”
“Like I told Theo, getting promoted means you didn’t get blown up,” the panzer commander answered. “If you figure out how to pack a servant into the panzer, he can gather firewood for us. Till then, somebody’s got to do it, and right now that’s you.”
“Come the revolution, you won’t be able to abuse the proletariat like this.” Adi went off to collect sticks and boards.
Witt looked after him, shaking his head. “He sails close to the wind, doesn’t he?” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than to Theo. “If somebody who takes the political lectures seriously heard him, he’d go on the rocks faster than a guy with the shits runs for the latrine.”
Theo shrugged to show he’d heard. He did his share of fatigues, even though he was now an exalted Obergefreiter. For that matter, so did the sergeant. Adi knew as much, too; he was just making trouble for the fun of it. A panzer wasn’t like an infantry platoon, with plenty of ordinary privates to do the dirty work for everyone else.
They rolled forward again the next morning-but not very far forward. The Russians had laid an ambush, with panzers hidden in a village and antipanzer cannon hiding among the fruit trees off to one side. The Germans pulled back after a couple of Panzer IIs brewed up and another lost a track.
Maybe the Ivans thought they’d halted their enemies. If they did, they soon learned better. Stukas plastered the orchard with high explosive. One of them, with cannon under the wings in place of bombs, dove on the village again and again. The columns of greasy black smoke rising into the sky spoke of hits.
Adi and Hermann Witt watched him swoop in the distance. They whooped and cheered and carried on. Theo watched the dials on the panzer’s radio set. He could see the machine pistol on its brackets near the set and, if he turned his head, the back of the chair in which the panzer commander sat. Since Witt wasn’t sitting now, Theo could also see his legs. It wasn’t an exciting view. Theo didn’t care. He wanted excitement the way he wanted a second head.