“Maybe we can push them out of Mulhouse again,” he said hopefully.
“That’s what they said we’d do back in Colmar, anyhow,” Meinecke answered. He was a veteran, all right; he understood that what they said and what actually happened could be two very different animals. He pursed his lips, then added quietly, as if afraid of being overheard by malignant fate, “Engine’s been behaving pretty well, knock wood.” He made a fist and tapped it against the side of his own head.
“Let’s hope it keeps up,” Jager agreed. Rushed into production, the Panther could be balky; among other things, fuel pump problems plagued it. But it was a great step forward from earlier German panzers, boasting a high-velocity 75mm gun and thick, well-sloped armor borrowed in concept from that of the Soviet T-34.
All of which meant you only had to be foolhardy to go up against the Lizards in a Panther, as opposed to clinically insane, which was about what opposing them in a Panzer III had required.
“Wish we had one of those bombs the Russians used to blow the Lizards to hell and gone,” Meinecke said. “When do you suppose we’ll get one of our own?”
“Damned if I know,” Jager said. “I wish to God I did.”
“If you don’t, who does?” the gunner asked.
Now Jager just grunted by way of reply. He wasn’t supposed to say anything about that to anybody. He’d been part of the band of raiders that had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in Russia-like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods,said the part of him that, back before World War I, had planned on becoming a classical archaeologist. He’d taken Germany’s share of the material across Poland on horseback, only to have half of it hijacked by Jewish fighters there.
Only luck they didn’t kill me and take it all,he thought. In Russia and then in Poland, he’d learned what theReich had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands; it made him sick, so he understood why the Polish Jews had risen in favor of the Lizards and against their German overlords.
He’d also been involved in the German physicists’ efforts to build an atomic pile at Hechingen, although, again luckily, he’d been in combat in eastern France when the pile went out of control somehow and killed off a good many physicists, including Werner Heisenberg. How long the program would take to recover was anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, the unglamorous infantry and panzer troops would have to keep the Lizards from overrunning theVaterland. If they didn’t, the high foreheads would never get the chance to finish their research and make something that would goboom! In Hechingen, Jager had felt useless; he’d been too ignorant to contribute properly. Now he was back to doing what he did best.
Off to one side of the road, an artillery piece barked, then another and another. “Eighty-eights,” Jager said, identifying them by the report. “That’s good.”
Meinecke understood him without any more discussion than that: “So they can fire their salvo and then get the hell out of there, you mean?”
“Right the first time, Sergeant. They’re easy to shift to a new firing position-a lot easier than the bigger guns.” Jager paused meditatively. “And Lizard counterbattery fire is better than anything we ever dreamt of.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir?” Meinecke agreed with a mournful sigh. “They can drive nails into your coffin from halfway round the world, seems like sometimes. If there were more of them, and if they had the doctrine to go with all their fancy equipment-”
“-The likes of us would have been dead for quite a while now,” Jager finished for him. Meinecke laughed, though again the colonel had spoken nothing but the truth. Down lower in the turret, Wolfgang Eschenbach, the loader, laughed, too. He was a big blond farm boy; getting more than half a dozen words out of him in the course of a day was just this side of miraculous.
For all their good points, 88s had drawbacks, too. They couldn’t fire shells as heavy as the larger guns, and they couldn’t throw the shells they did fire as far. That meant-
“We’ll probably see action in the next few kilometers,” Jager said.
“Bumping up against whatever the artillery boys are shooting at, you mean, sir?” Meinecke said. At Jager’s nod, he went on, “Makes sense to me. Besides, south of Rouffach is where they told us we’d start running into the enemy, isn’t it? They have to be right once in a while.”
“Your confidence in the High Command does you credit, Sergeant,” Jager said dryly, which set the gunner and the loader to laughing again. “I just hope the Lizards use the same kind of flank guards we did when we got stretched thin fighting the Russians.”
“How’s that,Herr Oberst?” Meinecke asked. “Me, I was playing games with the Tommies in the desert before they stuck me in the Flying Circus here.” When Panther and Tiger panzers started rolling off the assembly lines, theWehrmacht put only the best crewmen into them.
“You, you didn’t miss a thing,” Jager said, mimicking his gunner’s diction. “But sometimes we’d have to concentrate our German troops at theSchwerpunkt, the decisive place, and cover our flanks with Romanians or Hungarians or Italians.”
“God save us.” Wolfgang Eschenbach used up half his daily quota of speech.
“They weren’t the worst soldiers I’ve ever seen,” Jager said. “They might not have been bad at all if they were decently equipped. But sometimes the Russians managed to hit them instead of us, and it got pretty ugly. I’m hoping the Lizards are concentrating all their best troops up where they’re trying to advance. I’d just as soon not have to fight the first team all the time.”
“Amen to that,” Eschenbach said; Jager confidently expected him to fall silent till the morning.
The colonel stood up in the cupola again. That was a good way to get shot, but it was also far and away the best way to see what was going on, and if you didn’t know what was going on, you had no business commanding a panzer, let alone a (rather battered) regiment of them. Slamming the lid down and peering through the periscopes made you feel safer, but it also made you miss things that were liable to get you killed.
Northbound shells whistled overhead, undoubtedly the Lizards’ response to the Germans’ 88s. Jager hoped the artillerymen had moved their pieces elsewhere before the shells came down on them.
The countryside began to have the look of a land at war: wrecked and burned farm buildings, smashed trees, bloated dead animals, shell craters pocking fields. Jager clucked sadly at the charred wreck of a German half-track. The Panther rolled past trenches and foxholes that showed the earlier limits of the German push to the south.
Stooping to get down into the turret for a moment, Jager said, “We’re moving forward, anyhow.” Against the Lizards, that was no small novelty, and boosted his hopes that they had only second-line troops on their flanks. Like a jack-in-the-box, he popped up out of the cupola again.
Through the rasping roar of the Panther’s big Maybach engine came the rattle of small-arms fire ahead. A couple of German MG42s were in action, their rapid rate of fire unmistakable-they sounded as if a giant were ripping enormous bolts of thick, tough cloth between his hands. Jager was glad the German infantry had the machine guns; since all Lizard foot soldiers carried automatic weapons, the poorLandsers needed all the help they could get.