Sometimes you couldn't ignore the outside world no matter how hard you tried. When hundreds of guns opened up behind you and thousands of shells crashed down in front of you, the world beyond the panzer's armored skin made you notice it. And the company commander bawled "Forward!" into his earphones.
"Forward!" Theo told Naumann.
"Forward!" The panzer commander passed the word to Adalbert Stoss.
"Forward!" The driver put the panzer in gear. The Polish plain could hardly have made better panzer country. The terrain was so smooth, they might almost have been rolling across a manicured practice ground. The only difference was, the Red Army wouldn't have been waiting at the edge of a practice ground.
Theo wondered how big that difference would turn out to be. All winter long, the Red Army had had a devil of a time beating the Poles. The Poles were brave-Theo had seen that in the couple of weeks since the panzer division traveled halfway across Europe. But the gear the Poles had…
He shook his head. Their army might have done all right in the last war. They had rifles and machine guns and field artillery. They also had cavalry regiments that went into battle with lances, as if the twentieth century-to say nothing of the nineteenth-had never happened. Their tanks were rusty French relics, and they didn't own very many. Panzer IIs could have run rings around them and shot them up with ease, and Theo knew the shortcomings of his own mechanical mount all too well.
Bang! Somebody might have smacked the panzer turret with a hammer. Or, much more likely, somebody might have taken a shot at Heinz Naumann, who, like any good panzer commander, rode head and shoulders out of the turret whenever he could. Theo didn't need to see out. Heinz damn well did.
He didn't need to get killed, though. When people started trying to blow your head off, you ducked back inside and used the vision ports. They didn't show much, but they were a hell of a lot better than getting shot. And, no sooner than Naumann had pulled himself inside his case-hardened steel cocoon, several more bullets spanged off the turret and the right side of the panzer.
"Halt!" he ordered, and Adi Stoss did. Heinz traversed the turret to the right. Then he stopped working the traversing gear and said "Forward!" again.
"What's up?" Stoss asked.
"Somebody else took out the foxhole before I could," Naumann answered. "Those Russians won't bother anybody from now on."
"Sounds good." The driver goosed the panzer again. They rattled on. In his mind, Theo pictured a map. Poland had a horn in the far northeast that separated the USSR from Lithuania. It had separated Russia from Lithuania, anyhow; with the Red Army in Wilno, the Soviets were going to border the little Baltic state. The Lithuanians were both furious because they wanted Wilno themselves (they called it Vilnius) and scared shitless because the Soviet Union was a thousand times their size. Now that Germany was jumping in with both feet, Lithuania might join the fight against Stalin. And if she did, Germany and Russia might notice.
Then Heinz said "Halt!" again. A moment later, he added, "Russian panzer!" He slewed the turret to the left for all he was worth.
Not being able to see out didn't usually bother Theo. At times like this, though… How fast was the enemy panzer's turret traversing? The sweat that dripped from his armpits had nothing to do with how hot it was inside the Panzer II. Fear made it foul and rank. Would a red-hot cannon round tear through the flimsy armor around him and set everything in here on fire? Or would it ricochet around inside and tear up the whole crew? All kinds of nice things to think about, and he couldn't do anything about any of them.
For that matter, how well could Heinz shoot? They'd all find out right about… now. The turret stopped traversing. Theo could see Naumann's left hand stab at the trigger on the elevating handwheel. The 20mm cannon barked-once, twice, three times. Heinz waited, then fired once more.
"You got him! He's burning!" Adi said excitedly.
"Ja," Heinz agreed. The coaxial machine gun's trigger was on the traverse handwheel, to his right. He squeezed off a couple of short bursts from the MG34, then grunted in satisfaction. "All right-we don't have to worry about the crew any more. Forward again, Adi."
"Forward," Stoss echoed. "Jawohl!" He hadn't sounded so respectful before Heinz killed his first enemy panzer. Theo could understand that. He was breathing easier, too.
Naumann squeezed off several more bursts from the machine gun. He didn't tell Adi to stop, or even to slow down. "Don't know if I got the damn Russians or not, but I sure as hell did make 'em duck," he said.
And that might be good enough. Foot soldiers who couldn't shoot back might as well not be there. And the German and Polish infantry advancing with and behind the panzers would soon make sure the Ivans weren't there any more. The Red Army might have seized Poland's northeastern horn, but it was about to get taken in the flank and cut off from its homeland. How would the Reds like that?
Not very much, Theo suspected. What could they do about it, though? How good were they, really? Before long, the Wehrmacht would find out.
A machine-gun burst rattled off the panzer's flank. Pebbles on a tin roof, the bullets might have been. They might have, but they weren't.
Huge blasts from somewhere up ahead made all the racket that had gone before them seem small. "Stukas, I hope," Theo said to Heinz.
"You'd better believe it," the panzer commander answered. "A whole bunch of Russians just went up in smoke… Didn't get the panzers, though, dammit."
Theo didn't see how you could expect to wreck a panzer from the air. Only a direct hit would knock one out, and what were the odds of that?
When they stopped for the evening, Heinz said they'd come better than twenty kilometers. Theo believed it, though they might have been going round in circles for all he could prove. One stretch of Polish plain looked like another. That burnt-out Russian panzer hadn't been anywhere close by, though. Theo examined the hulk curiously.
The more he looked, the more formidable it seemed. It was almost the size of a Panzer III, and had a bigger gun than the III's 37mm. Instead of going straight up and down, the armor sloped to help deflect enemy fire. Theo glanced over at Heinz Naumann, who was also eyeing the Russian machine. "Did you kill one of these?"
"Uh-huh." Heinz sounded unwontedly thoughtful. "I wouldn't want to stop a round from that gun. What d'you think? Forty-five millimeters? Fifty?"
"Forty-five, I'd guess," Theo said.
"Smash through our plate like it was tinfoil either way," Heinz said. "Next question is, how many of these fuckers have the Ivans got?"
"Well," Theo answered, "we'll find out."
Chapter 9
Sometimes you got the best view of things from the air. Sergei Yaroslavsky had always thought the Soviet General Staff would have done better to get up in a plane every once in a while to look at the battlefield as if it were a chessboard. Russian chess players amazed the world. So, sometimes, did the Red Army, but not in such a happy way.
Sergei had been pleased with what he saw before. In spite of help from the Luftwaffe, the forces belonging to Marshal Smigly-Ridz's reactionary clique weren't going to be able to hang on to Wilno, or to the terrain that led towards it from the USSR. That would have brought the Soviet border right up to the edge of Lithuanian territory, and would have set another pack of semifascists to quivering in their polished boots.
The mere idea of an independent Lithuania offended Sergei. The locals had taken advantage of the Soviet Union's weakness right after the Revolution to break away. If you thought you could get away with something like that for long, you needed to think again. Or you had needed to think again, till yesterday morning. Now, with the Wehrmacht marching side by side with the damned Poles, everything was as much up in the air as he was himself.