That’s what they thought, anyhow. They were only Romanians. Germans knew better, and often saved a last bullet for themselves so they wouldn’t have to give up to Red Army men.
Yeah, the prisoners would end up in camps. Maybe they’d even be called POWs. But maybe, having got their hands on the enemy soldiers, Soviet authorities wouldn’t bother with games any more. That was how Ivan would have bet. The poor damned Romanians would probably go straight into the gulags, and odds were they’d never come out again.
Chopping down trees in Siberia’s endless forests? Building roads? Digging canals? Mining gold, up north of the Arctic Circle? The possibilities were endless. All of them used up men at hideous rates. You might die a few centimeters at a time, but you’d die, all right. At least the last bullet finished things in a hurry, and you didn’t hurt any more after that.
None of the Russians said a word about such things to the Romanians. It wasn’t that the prisoners wouldn’t have followed, though most of them wouldn’t have. It was more the front-line soldiers’ impulse to cause themselves as little trouble as they possibly could. Pretty soon, the Romanians would realize they might have been smarter to fight it out. Some of them would have had a chance to get away. By the time they did figure that out, though, the NKVD would have taken charge of them. And that would be too late.
Kuchkov watched them trudge off into captivity. They were laughing and singing and cracking jokes in their incomprehensible language. That wouldn’t last long.
“Pretty soon, the poor, sorry shitheads’ll see the fucking joke’s on them,” Kuchkov said. He wasn’t used to feeling sorry for an enemy. Neither the Germans nor the Ukrainian nationalists invited sympathy. But the Romanians were pathetic beyond belief. The big bosses in their country had grabbed them, poured them into uniforms, handed them rifles, and sent them off to war with a pat on the back and a good, loud Lots of luck, suckers!
They might as well have been Russians, in other words.
That, Ivan Kuchkov kept to himself. No one would ever have accused him of being bright. He knew too well that he wasn’t, and that he never would be. But he was not without his own measure of animal cunning. And anyone who’d lived through the Great Terror of the 1930s knew what you could say and what you had to swallow. Anyone who’d lived through the Great Terror knew you’d goddamn well better not mumble in your sleep, either.
The Romanians hadn’t been gone for long when artillery-German artillery-started pounding the Soviet positions. The Nazis were cocksuckers, but they weren’t dumbshit cocksuckers. They understood that they had to give their allies some spine, because the Romanians sure didn’t come equipped with any on their own. And the Nazis understood that the dark-skinned men in the tobacco-brown uniforms with the funny helmets were liable to try to bail out on them any which way. If the Romanians tried it, the Germans who gave them spine would also do their best to give them grief.
Sitting where the Nazis sat, Communist Party bosses would have done exactly the same thing. They might wear different uniforms and spout different slogans, but they thought the same way.
No matter how clearly Ivan Kuchkov saw that, he saw even more clearly that it was one more thing to shut up about. His own country’s rulers would ruin him if they knew they reminded him of the Nazis. And the Nazis would kill him on general principles, sure, but they’d make a special point of killing him if they somehow learned they reminded him of Communist apparatchiks.
Which said … what? Probably that you couldn’t win any which way. Ivan had learned that lesson when he was very small. You couldn’t get out of the game, either. Grabbing a barmaid and jumping on a freighter to somewhere like Peru or Mozambique wasn’t just physically impossible. It lay far, far beyond his mental horizon.
Staying in the game as long as he could didn’t. The first German 105 was still a rising shriek in the air when he jumped into a foxhole he’d dug. Fragments whined over the hole, but none bit him. Dirt rained down on him. A clod thumped off his helmet. It scared him for a moment, till he realized it was only a clod. Smaller bits fell into the narrow space between the back of his neck and his tunic’s collar band. It made his back itch. He hated that. He wiggled in the foxhole, trying to make the dirt go down. Considering what the bombardment could have done to him, the annoyance was tiny, but it was real.
More shells came down. In between the thunderous bursts, Kuchkov heard somebody shrieking. “Poor prick,” he muttered, and pulled himself deeper into his foxhole. He understood noises like that. Anybody who’d been at the front for even a little while did. One of the soldiers had a bad one.
If the man was lucky, they’d drag him back to a sawbones who’d stick an ether-soaked rag under his nose and then patch him up as best he could. Lucky? Very lucky. More likely, he’d keep screaming till he passed out or till he died.
Another shell came down. Something wet splashed the back of Ivan’s hand. It wasn’t just wet-it was hot and red. “Fuck!” he said, and rubbed off the blood against the hole’s dirt wall. Absently, he noticed that the wounded man’s screams had stopped. That burst had probably finished his story once and for all. After a hit like that, there wouldn’t be enough left of him to bury.
Could’ve been me, Ivan thought. It could have been, but it hadn’t. Not yet. Not this time. All the same, he found himself envying those Romanians shuffling back to the prison camps, and who would have imagined that?
Corporal Arno Baatz worried about his own men almost as much as he worried about the Russians. The way he looked at things, that was what a good underofficer was supposed to do. How could the Reich hope to win a war with the undisciplined louts who filled the Wehrmacht’s ranks unless somebody rode herd on them and kept them in line? It couldn’t be done, or so things seemed to him.
The men didn’t appreciate his efforts. They thought that, just because they were up at the front, they could get away with anything. Maybe some corporals would have let them do it. But Unteroffizier Arno Baatz wasn’t one of those soft, yielding souls.
Did they thank him for his care about regulations? It was to laugh. They were as insubordinate as they could get away with, and a little more besides. They swore at him when his back was turned, or sometimes to his face. When they thought he couldn’t hear them, they called him Awful Arno.
He knew he’d worn the nickname for a long time. That just meant he’d hated it for a long time. There were plenty of times when he preferred fighting the Ivans to keeping track of the ruffians in his squad. The Russians were honest. He knew they wanted to kill him. His own men …
“Pfaff!” Arno snapped.
Adam Pfaff was cleaning his Mauser. He’d painted the piece a non-regulation gray. The company CO didn’t want to make a fuss about it, but it distressed Baatz’s orderly, order-craving soul. Pfaff was an Obergefreiter, a senior private, so Arno couldn’t even stick him with the fatigue duties that would have brought him back to the straight and narrow. Pfaff thought the lousy chevron on his sleeve meant his shit didn’t stink.
He was also selectively deaf. Right this minute, he pretended to be altogether focused on getting some oiled rag down the rifle’s barrel with the pull-through of his cleaning kit. Well, Arno wasn’t about to let him get away with that nonsense. “Pfaff!” He shouted it this time.
“Oh, hullo, Corporal.” Adam Pfaff looked up from what he was doing, his face the very image of stubbly innocence. “Did you want something?”