“I don’t suppose…” Brinkmann began.
“Remaking them to take the box magazine? No, Major; that would be most impractical unless you have a few months to spare.”
“No, no, we don’t.”
“I’d rather thought not.”
“How many magazines can we have?” Brinkmann asked.
“Six or seven per; call it four hundred to six hundred,” Schmeisser answered. “Production isn’t quite what the General Staff anticipated. Loaded, they’re not exactly light, either. And we’ll have a loading tool—Oh, I can’t wait to tell you about loading these things!—per weapon, too. We don’t make the bags to carry the magazines in; there you’re on your own.
“And so, would you care to fire the thing before you take delivery?”
Camp Budapest, Bulgaria
The messenger from the quartermaster’s shop found Kostyshakov in the officers’ shower. “Sir! Sir! The Germans have come through for us! Captain Romeyko says you should come immediately. We have the machine pistols we were promised. Oh, beautiful things they are, too.”
Hiding his own excitement, Daniil said dryly, “Please tell the quartermaster that I will certainly take his request under advisement.”
No sooner was the runner gone than Daniil was furiously working to remove the soap from his body, then dry himself on the thin and miserable ersatz towels that were all Germany could provide at this stage of the war. Still dangerously damp, he wrapped his feet, pulled on his uniform and then his boots, donned his overcoat and began to walk briskly the eighty or so meters to the quartermaster’s shop.
“So show me this marvel of Teutonic weapons design,” Kostyshakov’s voice boomed, as he strode through the cloth-hung door to the shack.
Daniil took one look, then pointed his finger at the same runner who’d come for him. “Get me all the officers in the battalion, plus the sergeant major—both sergeants major—and the first sergeant for the Grenadier Company. Have them meet me in the officers’ mess.”
As the runner scurried off, Daniil looked at Romeyko. “Can you show me how to use this thing?”
“No,” the quartermaster answered, “but Feldwebel Weber has been shown how by Major Brinkmann, and he knows how.”
“Please, then, Feldwebel, show me how this works.”
There’s no delaying it anymore, Daniil thought, as his senior leadership tramped into the officers’ mess, lit by half a dozen flickering oil lamps. Now we’re going to have to do the sorting, and the commanders of First, Second, and Third companies are going to be crying fit to put them on stage as damsels in distress at what they’re going to have to give up.
“Gentlemen,” Daniil began, “let’s talk reorganization and assignments. Cherimisov, you first. What parts of the Grenadier Company are filled?”
“Just half the headquarters, the platoon leaders and platoon sergeants, the snipers, the Lewis gunners, and the flamethrower men from the engineers. Comes to sixteen men in total.”
“Okay. You’re going to be filled up to your full complement before we leave here. First Company; Baluyev?”
“I’m overstrength, sir, as you know.”
“Yes, I know. Everyone is. Now nominate two medics, four pioneers, one of them a corporal or sergeant, and two signalers.”
“‘I expected this, but not so soon,’” Baluyev quoted a graveyard joke. He began listing names but stopped after Cherimisov began violently shaking his head “no.”
“No, Lieutenant,” the Fourth (Grenadier) Company commander said, “two good medics, not two castoffs.”
Oh, well, it was worth a try. With a sigh and a grimace, Baluyev asked, “Corporal Kosyakin and Shulepov good enough for you?”
“They’ll do,” Cherimisov agreed. “Keep going.”
Baluyev began calling off names, about two thirds of which were accepted. Finally, he gave up the last couple.
Cherimisov nodded his acceptance at Kostyshakov, who said, “Number Two Company, your fair share would be twenty-eight riflemen and noncoms, soon to be submachine gunners, for the most part. Give them up.”
Captain Dratvin, commanding Second Company, said, “I asked for volunteers. There were seventy-two out of my current strength of two hundred and thirty. I am not nominating anyone who didn’t volunteer. Seventeen of those I am not going to nominate because—as God is my witness—I don’t think they’re quite good enough.”
“Right,” Kostyshakov agreed.
“Cherimisov, I’ve also scrambled these names. I’ll call a name, and you tell me if you want him. If you don’t want him, he’s out of consideration. If there are less than twenty-eight names you accept, you’ll have to go to the battalion commander to somehow convince him that the men you rejected in the first place were somehow good enough.”
“All right,” agreed Cherimisov, “with reservations.”
“Lebedev.”
“No.”
Dratvin crossed a name off the list with a pencil. “As you prefer. Vasenkov.”
Cherimisov spared a look at his first sergeant, old one-eyed Mayevsky. “Fucker never falls out. He never complains. Sure, he’ll do, sir.”
“All right on Vasenkov.”
“Ilyukhin,” Dratvin said.
Cherimisov spared a glance at Mayevsky, who said, “The boy’s a coal miner’s son. Brave men, they are, those who go down into the mines, never knowing when they might be buried alive. And the fucking acorn never falls far from the oak.”
“Ilyukhin’s fine.”
“He ought to be,” Dratvin said. “Zamyatin.”
Again, Cherimisov spared a glance at Mayevsky, who put out his hand, palm down, and wriggled it.
“No.”
“What?” demanded Dratvin. “There’s nothing wrong with Zamyatin!”
“Nonetheless, I don’t want him.”
It was at about that time that the arguments began.
Kostyshakov stepped out into the sun, exhausted, bleary-eyed, and desperate to never again endure another such meeting.
It was, indeed, morning before Cherimisov had his necessary eighty men, plus five more overstrength in case anyone got hurt or washed out. The officers shuffled back to their own companies to give the necessary orders, while the senior noncoms puzzled over how to move people around with the minimum disruption.
Those selected, when notified, felt a mix of satisfaction and fear. Cherimisov, after all, did have a reputation. And he never really smiled, almost inhuman, that way, he was.
Range Complex, Camp Budapest
Over on Range B, the machine gun range, Feldwebel Weber was putting the Grenadier Company, by platoons, through weapons familiarization on their new machine pistols. It was a waste of range, since the MP18s were close quarters weapons, while Range B was well over two thousand meters deep. On the other hand, they had to shoot the things somewhere; it might as well be some place where the sound of massed automatic weapons fire wouldn’t be thought unusual for anyone listening from afar.
Every man got to load—with much cursing, especially at the loading apparatus—and fire six drum magazines, 192 rounds, before moving on.
Note to self, thought Weber, This is going to take a thousand rounds per man, maybe two thousand, before they get good at it. Will the magazines take that much beating? I’d best ask Major Brinkmann about finding another six hundred or so.
From there, they rotated to the Range V, the grenade range, where each man threw two live grenades at close range and then fired their American-made M1911s. This was done under Lieutenant Federov’s and Sergeant Major Nenonen’s tutelage.