“Our field marshals should come up to the front for a while, too,” Kurt Poske put in. “The orders they give, it’s plain enough they don’t know what the hell it’s like up here.”
Adi favored the loader with a crooked grin. “Look out, world! Another one’s going Bolshevik on us!”
He pitched his voice so no one outside the tight-knit crew could possibly hear him. That word made Theo nervous all the same. Did joking Red Army men call their buddies Nazis and give forth with salutes Hitler would have loved? If they did, they had to be as careful as Adi was. Some ways of tweaking authority could prove more dangerous than they were worth.
Stolidly, Kurt answered, “I’m no fucking Bolshie. I just don’t want some numbnuts with gold braid all over his collar tabs getting my dick blown off on account of he thinks we can work miracles.”
“It’s the season for miracles, all right.” Adi launched into “Silent Night.” His baritone came close to professional quality.
Hermann Witt looked up from the radiator. “Where the devil did you learn that song?” The same question had occurred to Theo, but he wouldn’t have asked it.
But nothing seemed to faze Adi today. “Why, in the convent, Auntie Freeze. The nuns taught me all kinds of fascinating things.” The drama critic in Theo said Adi’s leer was overdone.
Sergeant Witt snorted. “Did they teach you how to bolt the carburetor back on?”
“Aber naturlich,” Adi replied. “Where’d the eight-millimeter wrench go?”
After they slammed down the armored engine cover, Adi climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It fired up right away, which said the new lubricants were indeed better than the old-and also said Russian winter hadn’t yet clamped down with full authority. The rest of the crew came aboard. Before long, the heater made Theo as uncomfortably warm as he had been chilly. The happy medium was as extinct for him as it was in the world generally.
Witt’s panzer and the other two runners from the platoon went out to patrol the German lines. Every white lump left Theo worried. Was that a whitewashed T-34, sitting there in ambush waiting for some unwary German crew-this one, for instance-to trundle by?
Half an hour into the patrol, a signal came in from battalion HQ: “Return to your base at once.”
“Acknowledged,” Theo said; his voice sounded rusty in his own ears. He wanted to ask what was up, but figured the guy back there somewhere safer wouldn’t tell him. Instead, he relayed the order to Sergeant Witt. Doing that wasn’t so bad. He was just a phonograph record, passing on someone else’s words. He wasn’t doing anything dangerous, like initiating speech on his own.
Witt swore. “Why are we supposed to do that? We’ve still got a pretty fair stretch of ground to cover.”
“Don’t know.” When Theo did have to speak for himself, he tried to get the maximum from the minimum.
This time, Sergeant Witt swore some more. “Why didn’t you ask them, for Christ’s sake?” He answered his own question before Theo could: “Because you’re you, that’s why.… The other panzers are heading back. We’d better follow them-sure don’t want to stay out here by my lonesome. Go with ’em, Adi.”
“I’m doing it, Sergeant.” Adi Stoss turned the Panzer III toward the west.
When they got back to the battered village that housed their company, it was boiling like a pot forgotten over a big fire. “What the hell is going on?” Sergeant Witt shouted from the panzer’s cupola: or perhaps something rather more pungent than that.
The engine was still growling. Buttoned up inside the iron shell, with earphones on his head, Theo couldn’t make out whatever answer the sergeant got. He did hear Witt come out with some more fancy profanity. He looked a question across the radio set to Adi. Maybe the driver knew what was going on.
Sure enough, Stoss said, “We’re pulling back to make a shorter defensive line.”
“Oh, yeah?” Amazement jerked the words out of Theo. The Wehrmacht had gone toe-to-toe with the Red Army ever since the Germans came to Poland’s rescue. Landsers never gave back any territory unless the Ivans drove them off it. Retreat without orders was a capital crime. And orders like that didn’t come.
Only now they did. What was different? Theo realized he didn’t have to wear the crimson stripes of a General Staff colonel on his trousers to figure it out. When the Reich started its Russian adventure, Hitler had managed to arrange a cease-fire in the West. For a while, English and French contingents even fought side by side with the Wehrmacht.
Now the West was waking up again. Quite a few German units had already left the Soviet Union to make sure the poilus and Tommies didn’t swarm into the Rhineland and the Ruhr. And the Ivans had turned out to be tougher than the Fuhrer ever dreamt they would be. The Nazis like to say the Fuhrer was always right. Well, so he was … except when he wasn’t.
One thing you had to give him: he didn’t make small mistakes. Nobody could say that about Russia. Other things, yes-plenty of them. But not that. And if the Reich didn’t have enough soldiers and panzers and planes hereabouts to hold the line, pulling back to a shorter one did make a certain amount of sense-provided there were enough to hold that shorter one.
We’ll find out, won’t we? Theo thought. Hitler might have done better to patch up some kind of peace with Stalin till he’d whipped France and England for good. Then he could have turned east without worrying about his other flank. But what were the odds of Nazis and Communists ever making any kind of pact? Theo shook his head. No, that just couldn’t happen. Not a chance.
Julius Lemp always went up before boards of his superiors as if he were going to the dentist. He hoped things wouldn’t hurt too much, and that the senior officers would numb him up a little before starting in on the really painful stuff.
So here he was in Wilhelmshaven. His uniform jacket reeked of mothballs, but he couldn’t do anything about that. He hardly ever wore the goddamn thing. Except for that chemical smell, he was as spruced-up as he could get. Well, almost. Not even for a board of his superiors would he put the stiffening wire back into his white-crowned cap. A floppy hat was part of a U-boat skipper’s idea of himself.
He came to stiff attention before all those gold-ringed sleeves and regulation uniform caps. Saluting, he said, “Reporting as ordered!” His voice might have come from the throat of a machine.
But then the highest-ranking big cheese on the board-a rear admiral, no less-replied, “At ease, Lieutenant Commander Lemp.”
At ease? All the starch oozed out of Lemp’s backbone when he heard and understood that. “Lieutenant … Commander?” he whispered. He hadn’t been promoted since the war started. He’d long since assumed he would never see any rank higher than lieutenant, save perhaps posthumously. Discovering he’d been wrong took the wind from his sails, even in a navy of diesels and batteries and steam.
“Yes, yes,” the rear admiral said with a gruff nod. “You’ve lived down your sordid past, shall we say?” He nodded again, more gruffly yet. “Christ on His cross, Lemp, you’ve lived, and too many others haven’t. Might as well let your experience-and the Ark Royal-count for something, hey?”
Even the aircraft carrier had been no lock to win the next higher grade. “Heil Hitler!” Lemp-Lieutenant Commander Lemp-managed, and shot out his right arm. With politics as touchy as they were, showing your loyalty to the regime could never be wrong.
Unless, of course, it could. The Kriegsmarine had never warmed to the Fuhrer and to the Nazis the way the Army had (to say nothing of the parvenu Luftwaffe, run as it was by one of Hitler’s old henchmen). A couple of the men on the board gave Lemp unblinking stares, as if they were old tortoises watching a fox slink by.