Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  Another sergeant had an antidote in mind for the dicey water: “We need to drink best bitter all the bloody time. Or Guinness, by God! ‘Guinness is good for you,’ the adverts go.”

  “Got to be better than this fetid cow piss.” Walsh was a great admirer of bitter. Guinness he could take or leave alone.

  Sadly, no beer lorries rumbled west from Alexandria. More tanks did. They were newer models than the English armored fighting vehicles Walsh had seen in France. They seemed as nimble as their German counterparts; the others hadn’t been able to go any faster than an infantryman could trot. And they mounted cannon rather than a machine gun or two.

  Still and all … Walsh studied them with a certain air of discontent. German tanks, like German helmets, looked as if they meant business. He wasn’t so sure about these. They were full of funny angles that might catch shells, and their armor plates were riveted together, not welded. He asked a corporal commanding one of the tanks about that: “What happens if you get hit? Don’t the rivet heads break off and rattle about inside like shrapnel?”

  “Well, myte, Oi ’ope not. ’Ope like ’ell not, in fact.” The corporal was a scrawny Cockney with bad teeth: a nasty little terrier of a man, and one who’d take a deal of killing if Walsh was any judge. He added, “Fritz won’t fancy stoppin’ a two-pounder round, neither, not ’arf ’e won’t.”

  He was bound to be right about that. Walsh did like the idea of fighting with as much armor on his side as the other buggers could throw at him. He hadn’t done much of that, not against the Germans he hadn’t.

  He didn’t need to wait long, either. The bright fellows with the red collar flashes laid on an attack “in the direction of Tobruk.” By the way that read, they didn’t expect to get there, and would be content with pushing the Germans back a bit.

  Tanks and foot soldiers went forward together. Each helped protect the other. The Germans had figured that out straightaway. They’d used combined-arms operations even when they jumped Czechoslovakia. English generals had needed longer to work it out. They might never have got it if they hadn’t watched the Fritzes in action.

  Forward Walsh went. He carried a Sten gun, an English submachine gun. It was much uglier than a Schmeisser, and so cheaply made it was liable to fall to pieces if dropped. But it sprayed a lot of bullets around, and that was what he wanted.

  Incoming German artillery whistled toward Walsh. “Down!” he yelled-he knew the sound of those damned 88s and 105s much better than he’d ever wanted to. The 88 was an antiaircraft gun by trade, and a fine one. But the Fritzes, being thoroughgoing buggers, also made armor-piercing and high-explosive rounds for it, so it could kill you in any of several different ways.

  Fragments whined and snarled through the air. A couple of wounded men wailed. Either they hadn’t started scraping the sand soon enough or their luck was just out. Walsh hoped they’d caught Blighties-wounds that would let them go back to England for a while, or at least to Alexandria, but that wouldn’t kill them or ruin them for life. Stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands lugged the injured soldiers away from the fighting. Whether shell fragments or machine-gun bullets would respect those armbands was no doubt something the bearers tried not to think about.

  Up ahead, the tanks were mixing it up with their German opposite numbers. Officers’ whistles shrilled, ordering the foot soldiers forward to join them. Sods with Sten guns were what kept the Fritzes from chucking Molotov cocktails onto English tanks’ engine compartments, or from lobbing potato-masher grenades through open hatches.

  Walsh captured a German by literally catching him with his pants down. The luckless fellow was squatting behind a spiky thorn bush when Walsh trotted past it. “Hande hoch!” Walsh yelled, aiming the tin Tommy gun at the German’s pale backside.

  With a yip of fright, the German sprang in the air and yanked up his pants before raising his hands. He wore an officer’s peaked cap and a first lieutenant’s pips on his shoulder straps. Walsh relieved him of his pistol and of a map case. The Intelligence wallahs might eventually get some use from that. Then the sergeant gestured to the rear with the barrel of his Sten. Gratefully, the German went on his way, making sure he kept his hands up. So far here in North Africa, both sides seemed to be playing by the rules.

  While Walsh was making his capture, the German tanks in the distance turned tail and rumbled back toward a ridgeline a couple of miles to the west. Like hounds after fleeing foxes, the English tanks raced in pursuit, their tracks kicking up clouds of abrasive dust.

  “They’re on the run!” Lieutenant Preston shouted exultantly. He blew his whistle with might and main, trying to get his men to keep up with the tanks.

  For a few minutes, Walsh thought he was right: not a thought about the young subaltern he was used to having. Then the 88s on the ridgeline opened up on the approaching English tanks. Not even the fearsome Soviet KV-1 owned armor that would keep out an 88mm AP round. These machines didn’t come close. One after another brewed up. Each rising plume of greasy black smoke, each burst of fireworks as ammunition cooked off, meant horrendous deaths for five men.

  The English advance sputtered and stalled like a lorry with no air filter in the desert. Surviving English tanks turned and trundled out of range of the 88s as fast as they could go. The multipurpose guns knocked out several more before they could escape. Then the German armor nosed forward again. Now the Fritzes had the edge in numbers. An English advance turned into an English withdrawal.

  How many times have I seen that before? Walsh wondered. More than he cared to recall: he was sure of that. Gloomily, he trudged back to the east. So did Lieutenant Preston. The enthusiastic youngster wouldn’t meet his eye-and a good thing for him, too.

  As Theo Hossbach had discovered before, the spring mud time in Russia was even worse than the one in autumn. In spring, all the accumulated snow melted, seemingly all at once. Wheeled vehicles bogged to the axles-if they were lucky. Even Panzer IIIs with Ostketten, special wide tracks made for war in the east, had a devil of a time going anywhere when the mud was worst. Hell, even Soviet T-34s had trouble with it. Where a T-34 couldn’t go, nothing could.

  Well, nothing mechanized. Horse-drawn panje wagons brought things to the front for both the Ivans, who’d been building them since time out of mind, and the Germans, who commandeered as many as they could get their hands on. With their big wheels and almost boat-shaped bodies, panje wagons did better in snow and mud than anything with tracks.

  A panje wagon brought a sack of mail to Theo’s panzer company. Theo got a letter from his mother. Hermann Witt got several from relatives and friends. So did Lothar Eckhardt and Kurt Poske. Adi Stoss, as usual, got nothing from anybody.

  None of his crewmates said a word. By now, they were used to his being the man the world had forgotten. When that thought went through Theo’s mind today, he found himself shaking his head. It wasn’t quite right. Chances were some of the world remembered Adi perfectly well. It just didn’t want to get hold of him, for fear of endangering him or itself or both.

  Oddly, that made Theo feel better. Thoroughgoing loner though he was, he’d pitied Adi’s splendid isolation. Realizing a good reason lay behind it made it easier for him, and surely for the panzer driver, to take.

  They were quartered in a Russian village that had gone back and forth several times between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Whatever Russian civilians had lived there in more peaceful times were long gone. Most of the houses had seen better decades, too. The panzer crewmen shifted for themselves as best they could.

  Sleeping in one of the battered, thatch-roofed huts was asking for visits from bedbugs, lice, and fleas. That would have bothered the Germans more if they weren’t already buggy. Sleeping under a roof, or even under the singed remains of one, seemed irresistibly tempting to men who were more used to rolling themselves in blankets and curling up under their panzer.

  Curling up under a panzer wasn’t such a good idea now for all kinds of reasons. The armored beasts settled
even on dry ground. You were smart to do some digging underneath to make sure you didn’t wake up squashed. With everything so squelchy during the rasputitsa-the Germans had borrowed the Russian word-waking up squashed got easier. So did waking up drowned.

  Of course, you could wake up sliced to sausage meat in one of the village huts. Russian artillery, always the most professional part of the Red Army, seemed to know and to visit every place where the Germans were staying. Another crew in the company lost their driver-killed-and commander and loader-badly hurt-when a Soviet 105 blew the house in which they were billeted to smithereens.

  “Could have been us,” Sergeant Witt said unhappily after a panje wagon took the injured men back toward a field hospital. Everybody in the village hoped they would make it there alive. No guarantees, not the way a panje wagon moved; only hope. Witt went on, “Just fool luck.”

  “Always fool luck,” Adi said. “Nothing but fool luck we haven’t run into a T-34 in a nasty mood.”

  He spoke of the Soviet panzer as if it were a ferocious wild beast, as if gun and chassis and crew were all directed by one fierce will. Theo understood that. Lots of German soldiers thought of the T-34 the same way.

  Hermann Witt nodded, so Adi’s way of talking made sense to him, too. “War just isn’t a healthy business,” he said.

  “Too right it isn’t,” Adi said with some feeling. But then he paused and qualified that: “Most of the time, anyhow.”

  “What do you mean, most of the time?” Lothar Eckhardt demanded.

  Before Adi could say anything, Theo surprised his crewmates by breaking in with, “Sometimes you’re dumb as an ox, Eckhardt, you know that?”

  “Huh?” The gunner gaped, not so much because of Theo’s response as because Theo had responded at all. “What’d I say?”

  Having used up a good part of his daily word ration, Theo just looked at him. That was plenty to reduce Eckhardt to stutters. War was bound to be healthy for Adi Stoss. Driving a Panzer III, you risked your life only every so often: when you did run across a T-34 in a nasty mood, for instance. Absent his black coveralls, he would have been back in the Reich, in danger every minute of every day.

  Lothar knew that, too-maybe not so well as Theo, but he did. But nobody would ever accuse him of being the shiniest bulb in the chandelier, so he didn’t always understand what he knew.

  “Don’t worry about it, Lothar.” Adi spoke in a soothing voice, as he might have to a child. He didn’t want anyone, even the comrades who’d kept him alive again and again, thinking too much about who and what he was.

  The next day, the panje wagon brought the village the regimental National Socialist Loyalty Officer along with a mail sack and two kilos of genuine ersatz coffee. The letters and the coffee were welcome. Theo didn’t know about anyone else, but he could have done without Major Bruckwald. The major wasn’t just in the war, which was a misfortune that could happen to anyone. Bruckwald believed in the war, the way a priest believed in the Holy Spirit. As far as Theo was concerned, that made him a dangerous lunatic.

  Not only did Bruckwald believe in the German struggle, he was full of missionary zeal. His duty, as he saw it, was to make the ordinary soldiers believe in it, too. “This is a sacred crusade against Jewish Bolshevism!” he shouted, smacking one fist into his other palm. “We will drive the subhuman Slavs and their horrible Hebrew masters back beyond the Urals where they belong, and lay hold of the Lebensraum the Reich deserves. Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil Hitler!” the listening panzer crewmen echoed, as they might have during church services. Adi Stoss was not behindhand. Theo would have been astonished if he were.

  Major Bruckwald went right on fulminating. This was his closest approach to the front in some time. By the way he carried on, he was proud of his own bravery for coming so far forward, and expected the men listening to him to be at least as proud. And so they were-or they acted as if they were while he hung around.

  “Remember, the Fuhrer is always right!” he finished. “The Jews and Bolsheviks are trying to stab us in the back again, the way they did in 1918. See how the filthy Jew Leon Blum is back in the French government now that France has betrayed us again. See how the Jew-Bolsheviks here refuse to yield us the lands that are rightfully ours. The Fuhrer smelled out this plot early on. Through his chosen instruments, the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, he will make the enemies of our Volk pay. Sieg heil!”

  “Sieg heil!” the men chorused. Seeming satisfied at last, Major Bruckwald went off to inflict himself on some other outfit.

  “Well, that was fun,” Sergeant Witt said, which was about what Theo was thinking. He added, “It sure is a good thing to know why we’re fighting, isn’t it?”

  “Of course, we had no idea before,” Kurt Poske said.

  Adi made no snide political comments. He never did. Whatever he was thinking along those lines, he kept to himself. So did Theo, though for different reasons. But the panzer commander and the loader figured they could get away with speaking their minds. Theo wasn’t sure they were right, but envied them the sense of freedom they felt.

  As far as he was concerned, he was fighting for one thing: to stay alive and eventually to go home to Breslau. He’d do anything he could to bring that off. If it happened to help the Reich and the Fuhrer, it did. If it didn’t, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

  You lost enough sleep in wartime because of things you couldn’t help. Theo didn’t want to lose any over stupid stuff like politics. But the morning might turn out to be a net gain. If playing Major Bruckfeld’s inspiring words over and over on the phonograph of his mind didn’t help him sleep better than chloroform would have, he couldn’t imagine what would.

  “Hey, the Corporal’s back!” The cry that rose in Willi Dernen’s platoon was not one of unalloyed joy. He looked up from stripping his rifle, hoping against hope people were talking about some other Unteroffizier. But when hope and reality banged heads, hope lost, as it so often did. Sure as hell, there stood Arno Baatz, big as life and twice as ugly.

  Awful Arno had a new wound badge on the front of his tunic and the same old gleam in his narrow, piggy eyes. Willi greeted him with, “Hey, hey, look at the hairball the cat yorked up.”

  “Fuck you, Dernen,” Baatz replied, wasting no time in proving that a wound hadn’t changed him. “I was wondering if they’d finally managed to kill you off.”

  By wondering if, he plainly meant wishing. No, he hadn’t changed a bit. “Not me,” Willi said. “And to tell you the truth, things around here have run a lot smoother since you stopped one.” If he suggested that Awful Arno go stop another one, preferably with his face this time, he’d be insubordinate. If he let Baatz color in the picture for himself, on the other hand …

  Awful Arno was plenty capable of doing that. “Smoother, huh?” he grunted, scowling. “You mean you’ve been screwing off more, is what you mean.”

  “We’re farther forward than we were when you got hit,” Willi said.

  “And I’m sure it’s all thanks to you and your asshole buddy, Pfaff.” Awful Arno was full of snappy comebacks. Maybe they’d issued him some new ones at the hospital. He looked around the wrecked Russian village. “Where is Pfaff, anyway?”

  “He’s around somewhere,” Willi said. “I think he went off to use the latrine trenches. He must have known you were coming.”

  “Nah, he’s always been full of shit, just like you,” Baatz retorted. He looked around again. “God, these Ivans live like swine.”

  The village no doubt hadn’t been this bad before it got overrun a few times. Even so, Willi didn’t think it was ever a place where he would have wanted to live. Finding he agreed with Awful Arno about anything annoyed him. Here came Adam Pfaff from the direction of the latrines. He carried his gray-painted Mauser. That was sensible. The Russians had the nasty habit of bushwhacking Germans they caught easing themselves-and of doing nasty things to their bodies, with luck after they were dead.

  Willi waved to him. “Look at this!”
he called. “Your old friend was just asking about you.”

  Pfaff controlled his enthusiasm at seeing Corporal Baatz. “Old friend?” he said, deadpan. “Where?”

  “Ahh, your mother,” Baatz said.

  “Well, the voice is familiar,” Pfaff allowed. “So is the charm.”

  Awful Arno told him where he could stick his charm. Then he noticed that Willi’s rifle had a telescopic sight and the downturned bolt that went with it. “Still got that worthless sniping piece, do you?”

  “It’s not worthless,” Willi said indignantly.

  “In your hands, it is,” Baatz said. “You can’t aim well enough not to piss on your own boots.”

  “Bullshit.” Willi pointed to the marksman’s badge on his left tunic pocket.

  “So you got lucky one day. Big deal,” Baatz jeered.

  That’s what they said to your old man, too. Regretfully, Willi swallowed the crack instead of coming out with it. It might make Baatz swing at him, and then he’d have to try to knock Awful Arno’s block off. He was pretty sure he could do it, but so what? If you brawled with a superior, you were the one who caught it every single time. It wasn’t fair. Again, though, so what? Willi’d spent enough time in the service to know how little fair mattered.

  Rather than making things worse, Adam Pfaff tried to defuse them: “What’s the Vaterland like these days?” he asked Baatz. “None of us Frontschweine’ve seen it for a long time.”

  Some days, you just couldn’t win. Awful Arno was as touchy as ever. “What? You telling me I’m no Frontschwein? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, Corporal. I’m not saying that. God forbid I should say that.” Pfaff spread his hands in exaggerated patience. “What is the Vaterland like?”