The words were clear, though, and the melody compelling. Rinteel heard:
Wiesbaden, Germany, Mühlenkampf’s HQ, 18 June 2008
Below his window, marching by the city’s streetlights, the weary but upright battalion of “Landsers”[45] sang:
Where was this spirit? Mühlenkampf thought bitterly, looking down from his perch. Where was it back when it could have made a difference?
Don’t be an ass, Mühlenkampf, the general reproached himself. The spirit, deep down, was always there. No fault of those boys that their leaders were kept from bringing it out.
The general sighed with regret, contemplated the economic disruption of the Posleen infestations… contemplated, too, the increasing shortage of ammunition, fuel and food. And now, he sighed, spirit is all we have left in abundance.
Mühlenkampf turned away from the window and back to the map projected on the opposite wall. Slowly, all too slowly, he was pulling those units of his which had covered the withdrawal from the Rheinland back to a more central position. Casualties? Who could number them? Divisions that had been thrown into the battle at full strength were, many of them, mere skeletons with but a few scraps of flesh hanging onto their bones. The replacement system, now running full tilt, could add flesh… but it took time, so much time. And there was only so much flesh to be added, so much meat available to put into the sausage grinder.
Some of that sausage-bound flesh, in the form of the infantry division marching to the front to be butchered, sang under Mühlenkampf’s window.
Looking into the marching boys’ weary but determined eyes, the general felt a momentary surge of pride arising above his sadness and despair. Perhaps you are lemmings, as I judged you, my boys. Perhaps you are even wolves when in a pack. But you are wolves with great hearts all the same, and I am proud of every one of you. You may not see another day, and you all know it, yet still you march to the sound of the guns.
While Mühlenkampf watched the procession below, the sun peeked over the horizon to the east, casting a faint light upon the marching boys.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, Germany, 23 January 2008
The rising sun made the fog glow but could not burn it away. In that glow, standing and shivering in the commander’s hatch, Hans glowered with frustration. Something is so wrong over there, and I have not a clue what it is.
Hans had, four nights previously, ordered a renewal of the nightly patrols. This was not, as in days recently past, to help to safety Poles fleeing the aliens’ death machine. Instead, he had put his men’s lives at risk for one of the few things in war more precious than blood, information.
Afoot where the water was shallow enough, by small boats where this was possible or by swimming where it was not, the patrols had gone out, eight of them, of from eight to ten men each. Hans had seen off several of these himself, shaking hands for likely the last time with each man as he plunged into the river or boarded a small rubber boat.
Yet, as one by one the patrols failed to report back within the allotted time, Hans’ fears and frustrations grew stronger.
Other commanders along this front had had much the same idea. Though Hans didn’t know the details, over one hundred of the patrols had gone out. He didn’t know, either, if even one had returned. Only brief flare-ups of fighting, all along the other side of the rivers told of bloody failure.
Success is sweet, thought Borominskar as reports trickled in to him of one slaughtered group of humans after another. What effrontery these creatures have, to challenge my followers on land fairly and justly won by them.
“Fairly” might have been argued. “Justly” no Pole would have agreed with. But that it was “won” seemed incontrovertible. The deaths of one hundred human patrols, nearly a thousand men, admitted as much.
David Benjamin admitted to nothing, especially not to the notion that the war was hopeless or that the patrols were doomed.
An experienced officer of the old and now destroyed Israeli Army, he took the ethos of that army to heart: leaders lead. In a distant way, Benjamin knew that that lesson had not been learned so much from their deliberate and veddy, veddy upper-class British mentors but from the unintentional, middle-class, German ones. Add to this an officer and NCO corps that was more in keeping with Russian practice than Western — many officers, few NCOs of any real authority — and there had really been only one thing for David to do.
The patrol he led had crept in the dense fog to near the banks of the Niesse River. There they had inflated their rubber boat, then carried the boat in strictest silence to the water’s edge. The men, Benjamin in the lead, had hesitated for only a moment before walking into the forbidding, freezing water. The shock of that water, entering boots, leaking through even thick winter uniforms, and washing over skin, had rendered each man speechless. It was as if knives, icy knives, had cut them to the heart.
But there was nothing for it but to go on. As the lead men found their thighs awash they had thrown inboard legs across the rubber tubing at the front of the boat. The rear ranks still propelling the boat forward, the second pair had thus boarded, then the third, then the final. As each pair boarded the men took hold of short, stout paddles previously laid on the inside of the rubber craft.
Finally, the boat drifting forward, Benjamin gave the command in softest spoken Hebrew, “Give way together.” The men dug in gently with the oars, quickly establishing a rhythm that propelled the boats slowly forward.
Up front, David and his assistant patrol leader, a Sergeant Rosenblum, used their paddles also to push away any of the sharp bits of ice that might have damaged the boat. Once, when the horrifying image of a burned and frozen Posleen corpse appeared out of the fog, David used his paddle to ease it over to sink into the murky depths of the stream.
Once gaining the far side, Benjamin leapt out, submachine gun at the ready. Meanwhile Rosenblum pushed a thin, sharpened metal stake into the frozen ground, made the boat’s rope fast, and then helped the others ashore.
The last two men were left behind to guard the boat, the patrol’s sole means of return to friendly lines.
Rosenblum and the other four waited briefly while Benjamin consulted his map and compass — the Global Positioning System was long since defunct — and pointed a direction for Rosenblum, taking the point, to follow.