“Yes, just a bit,” Cartland agreed, deadpan.
Walsh wasn’t used to hearing bloody as anything but an obscenity, and needed a moment to realize the MP meant it literally. A bloody slog the Western Front in the last war had indeed been. Walsh knew he’d been lucky to come out of it with only a wound himself. Well, now he had himself a matched set: one from each war. He would gladly have forgone the honor.
“Have we still got … those blokes safe and sound in prison?” he asked. Even in a safe place, he didn’t want to allude too openly to the men who’d taken the country down the path of working with the Nazis.
“Oh, no. That would be illegal and immoral. But we’ve taken a worse vengeance yet,” Ronald Cartland answered, straight-faced. “One of them is his Majesty’s ambassador to Liberia, another to Peru. Yet another heads up the consulate in … where was it, Bobbity?”
“Guatemala City, if I remember rightly,” Cranford said. “Or possibly one of the towns in Cuba. I forget which.”
“You get the idea,” Cartland said to Walsh, who nodded-he did indeed. Cartland continued, “And the former head of Scotland Yard now employs his gift for wiretapping and interrogation as chief of police in Jerusalem. If the Arabs don’t put paid to him, likely the Zionists will. And if by some mischance he survives them both, he may even do the Empire some good.”
“More than he’d ever manage here,” Walsh said savagely.
“Quite.” Cartland nodded. “But that particular lot won’t come back to that particular mischief any time soon. Their letters and cables are quite closely monitored, I assure you.”
“Well, good,” Walsh said. That was hoisting the collaborators with their own petard, all right. Even so, he found another question: “So much for the leaders, then. But what about the spear-carriers, the blokes who went and did what the big men told them to?”
Cartland and Cranford looked at each other. “That’s rather harder to deal with, you know,” Cranford said slowly. “There are a good many more of them, and their guilt is less blatant.”
“But they’re the ones who’ll make you trouble-make us trouble,” Walsh predicted. “Some of them will just have done what their bosses told them to do. That kind’s safe enough. They’ll do whatever anyone tells them to, and not a farthing’s worth more. The others, though, the others will still believe in what they were about. Those are the buggers you’ve got to watch out for.”
The two MPs eyed each other again. Slowly once more, Bobbity Cranford said, “How is it that you’re not a brigadier, Sergeant?”
Walsh snorted laughter. “The likes of me? If I weren’t in the Army, I’d be grubbing coal out of a seam back home in Wales. More likely, I’d be on the dole wishing I were grubbing coal. A brigadier?” He laughed some more.
“You have the mother wit for it. You’ve proved that time and again,” Cranford said. “Should you be denied the right to rise to the extent of your ability because you come from a coal town, and had the misfortune not to be to the manor born?”
Walsh didn’t know how to answer that. He took the class system very much for granted, as a career soldier was bound to do. At last, he managed, “I have more say with a mark on my sleeve than plenty of toffs with shoulders straps do.”
That made Captain Cartland laugh, but he quickly sobered. “You’re right, Sergeant-I’ve seen as much-but you’re also wrong. You have plenty of say about the little things, but none whatever about the big ones. Bobbity’s right, too. It shouldn’t work that way.”
“Are you sure you don’t belong with Labour?” Walsh wanted to make a joke of it. Politics gave him the willies, and all the more so since he’d found himself in them up to his eyebrows.
“Labour knows one thing,” Cartland said. “Labour knows it better than plenty who call themselves Tories, too: Labour understands who our true enemy is.” All three men nodded and solemnly drank together.
Chapter 12
All kinds of interesting things were coming off the Reich’s assembly line. Along with his crewmates, Theo Hossbach gaped at the Panzer IV that chugged past their stopped III. “What the devil?” Hermann Witt said, eyes almost bugging out of his head.
“Damn thing’s got a hard-on-a big one, too,” Adi Stoss opined.
The rest of the panzer crew fell out laughing, Theo among them. Up till now, Panzer IVs had been infantry-support vehicles. They carried a stubby, low-velocity 75mm gun, good for firing HE and scattering enemy foot soldiers, but not worth much against armor.
Not this baby. Theo thought its gun was also a 75mm, but it was a long one with a muzzle brake to lessen the recoil. That beast could fire a big AP round with muzzle velocity to match. Any Soviet panzer-or any French or English one, come to that-in the way would soon be very unhappy.
No sooner had that thought crossed Theo’s mind than Kurt Poske said, “Now we’ve got something that’ll make a T-34 roll over and play dead.”
Everybody nodded. The other men in black coveralls wore fierce grins on their faces. Theo couldn’t see his own, but he would have bet he did, too. An ordinary Panzer III’s 37mm rounds either bounced off a T-34’s glacis plate and turret or stuck in them without penetrating. Even a Panzer III Special with a 50mm main armament failed more often than not. This new Panzer IV sure looked as if it could do the job, though.
Adi said, “You know what we really ought to do?”
“Tell us, Herr Generalfeldmarschall.” Sergeant Witt clicked his heels and saluted the Gefreiter who drove his panzer.
“Ah, stuff it, Sergeant,” Adi said-in the right tone of voice to keep from getting his tits in a wringer for showing disrespect. Then he went ahead and told them: “We ought to stick an 88 in a panzer-that’s what.”
Theo whistled softly. The 88 was designed as a flak gun. But, with Germanic thoroughness, the powers that be manufactured AP ammo for it, too. It was often the only piece in the Wehrmacht’s arsenal that could knock out rampaging T-34s or the even more thickly armored KV-1s. As a towed gun, though, too often it wasn’t where it needed to be. Stuck in a turret, with an engine and tracks, it could make a world-beater.
It could. If …
Hermann Witt came out with the obvious objection: “That thing is fucking enormous. How big a panzer would you need to haul it around?”
“A big one.” Adi admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. “But God knows we need something like that. The only reason the Ivans aren’t kicking our asses around the block is that we’re three times the panzer-men they’ll ever be.”
The crewmen nodded again. It wasn’t as if he were wrong. All the same, Witt said, “Make sure the National Socialist Loyalty Officer doesn’t hear you talking like that. Make good and sure.”
“Zu Befehl!” Adi said. He’d better obey that order if he knew what was good for him. With the fight in the West starting to pick up again, the authorities jumped on anyone they imagined to be disloyal or defeatist with both feet. And they had lively imaginations. Oh, did they ever!
Just then, a Kettenrad-a half-tracked motorcycle-fetched the ammo the panzer crew was waiting for. They didn’t know the driver or the fellow riding shotgun (actually, he carried a captured Russian machine pistol). Since they didn’t, they were immediately on their best behavior. After they bombed up the Panzer III, they fired it up and rattled forward again.
“I want one of those IVs with the big Schwanz,” Adi said to Theo, who sat across the radio set from him. “I mean, I want one bad.” He laughed harshly. “Remember when we felt that way about this critter?”