“Damn right I do.” Arno didn’t bother to hide his irritation. He rarely did. “Go take over for Dirk at the forward sentry station.”
Pfaff gave him a dirty look, which warmed the cockles of his heart. The Obergefreiter was a born barracks lawyer. Baatz waited for him to claim that was one of the duties from which his pipsqueak rank exempted him. If Pfaff tried it, Arno intended to shoot him down in flames. Do it anyhow, ’cause I told you to was always reason enough-if you were giving the orders, anyhow.
But Pfaff just sighed and reassembled his rifle with a few quick, practiced motions. Even Arno Baatz had to admit he made a decent combat soldier when he wasn’t whining. Pfaff lit a cigarette as he got to his feet. “You will remember to send somebody to take over for me?” he said, his tone implying he thought Arno would do no such thing.
“Not me. Far as I’m concerned, you can stay in that hole till 1951.” Baatz laughed to show he was joking. And so he was … up to a point. The laugh sounded nasty even to him.
Well, he wanted to get a rise out of Pfaff. To his annoyance, the Obergefreiter just ambled out of the ruined Russian village without giving any sign that he was irked.
A few minutes later, Dirk came back. “What’s going on up there?” Baatz asked him.
“Not much, Corporal. Ivans seem pretty quiet right now,” the soldier answered. Then he asked a question of his own: “Any of that stew left? My belly’s growling like a mean dog.”
“Might be a little.” Arno made a face. “It’s not what you’d call a treat.” Buckwheat groats and turnips and onions and mystery meat, all of it boiled together till you could hardly tell where one ingredient stopped and the next started … No, it wasn’t what he would have ordered if he were stepping out with a pretty girl back in Breslau.
But Dirk said, “Beats the hell out of empty.” And that was also true. War in Russia had taught Arno more about empty than he’d ever wanted to learn. Dirk headed toward the hut that housed the field kitchen.
Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Baatz gauged the far-off thunder. Well to the south, he judged, German and Russian guns thumping each other. It was something he needed to notice. Unless it picked up, it was nothing he or his superiors needed to worry about.
A babushka scurried to the well, a big saucepan in her hand to carry the water she drew up. She dipped her hand to Baatz and murmured, “Gospodin,” as she slipped past. He ignored her. The way the Russians lived … It was pathetic and disgusting at the same time. No running water or electricity outside the big cities. No paved roads outside the big cities, either, which had come as a nasty surprise to the motorized Wehrmacht.
Arno Baatz curled his lip. We need to clean out this whole country and start over again from scratch, he thought. He imagined a German farming village, full of handsome German farmers and their good-looking German wives and happy children taking the place of this screwed-up dump. In his imagination, even the cows and pigs were plump and contented.
No cows and pigs at all were left here. If the Russians hadn’t slaughtered them, the Germans had. Only a couple of old men and a few more ugly old women still lived in this place. The younger men probably wore Red Army khaki and carried machine pistols. Maybe some of the younger women wound up in German military brothels, servicing a couple of dozen soldiers every shift. Arno hoped so. What else did they deserve?
A Kettenrad chugged into the village. Captain Fellmann, the company’s latest CO, hopped out and waved to Baatz.
The corporal came to attention and saluted. “What’s up, sir?” he asked. He might be hell on wheels to the men below him in rank, but he always showed his superiors perfect military formality.
“We’re pulling back. Gather your men together and head west,” Hans-Joachim Fellmann said. “We’re shortening the line so we don’t need so many troops to hold it.” He made a sour face. Shortening the line was what radio newsreaders said to explain away a retreat. It might be true this time, with the Reich’s manpower stretched so thin. Even if it was, that made it no more palatable.
Baatz saluted again. “Zu Befehl, mein Herr!”
“All right. I’ll see you back at regimental HQ in three or four hours. We’ll all move out then.” Captain Fellmann jumped back into the Kettenrad. The driver gunned the engine. The funny-looking little machine putt-putted off to the next German outpost.
Arno Baatz let out a long, mournful sigh. So much for his vision of replacing this rotten little settlement and the lousy Ivans who infested it with a proper German farm town full of proper Germans. It would stay in its native squalor. The Fuhrer’s much larger and more grandiose vision for shoving the Slavs out of Europe and back past the Urals was also going a-glimmering with the German retreat, but Baatz lacked the imagination to see all that in his mind’s eye.
He chuckled nastily. Tempting to take the rest of the squad out of the line and leave Adam Pfaff in his forward foxhole with an eye peeled for Russians. Would he find them-would they find him-before or after he started wondering why nobody’d come up to relieve him?
However tempting it was, Baatz didn’t do it. No German on the Eastern Front would leave even his worst enemy to the Ivans’ tender mercies. And Adam Pfaff wasn’t Arno’s worst enemy.
Or, now that Dernen had copped one, maybe he was.
Whether he was or not, the corporal sent Dirk back up to retrieve him. No point giving the Landsers anything new to gossip about. They found plenty on their own. The squad trudged away from the village. The Russians could have it. The Russians, as far as Arno Baatz was concerned, were damn well welcome to it.
They said U-boats could roll in a bucket. They said all kinds of stupid things, but they were dead right about that one. And the North Sea was no bucket-not unless you compared it to the North Atlantic, anyhow. Roll the U-30 did. The boat pitched when a wave caught it bow-on, too.
Up on the conning tower, Gerhart Beilharz turned to Julius Lemp and said, “Skipper, you need to get promoted again, is what you need. Another party would be a hell of a lot more fun than this.”
“Work before pleasure,” Lemp answered. “Work after pleasure, too, unfortunately.”
“I know.” The tall engineering officer nodded. “They haven’t figured out how to make you work during pleasure, but I bet some bald old Herr Doktor Professor at the University of Tubingen or somewhere has a research grant to see what he can do about that.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me one goddamn bit,” Lemp agreed. “I’d like another promotion party-but I’m not holding my breath. I didn’t think I’d ever get the last one.”
“You deserved it,” Beilharz said loyally.
“Glad you think so.” Lemp never would have made Beilharz’s acquaintance to begin with if he hadn’t been an officer with a screwed-up career. They’d given his boat a Schnorkel-and the accompanying Schnorkel expert-because they didn’t much care what happened to it (or to him) after he sank an American liner under the mistaken belief it was an English troopship. They didn’t cashier him for the mistake (which German propaganda loudly and stridently denied), but he’d spent a devil of a long time as a lieutenant.
He raised the field glasses to his eyes once more and went back to scanning a quadrant of the sky and the horizon. Ratings in foul-weather gear covered the other three quadrants. You’d never find a target if you didn’t look for it. You’d never spot the plane that was looking for you, either, not till machine-gun bullets slammed into your hull or bombs fell from the belly of the flying beast.