Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read online

  He’d just stuck it on his own belt when German 105s to the south opened up on the fields through which the Red Army was advancing. A moment later, German shells started screaming down from the north, too. If that didn’t mean a counterattack to slice off the head of the oncoming Russian column, Ivan was even dumber than he gave himself credit for.

  He forgot about the Romanians. The enemy’s good players were coming. “Hit the dirt, fuckers!” he yelled to his own men.

  The Red Army men did, all except for a couple of raw replacements who stood around twiddling their foreskins because they’d never been shelled before. The Romanian who’d been about to shuffle back into captivity flattened out among the growing stalks of wheat, too. Marshal Antonescu’s boys might not be the fiercest soldiers ever hatched, but they weren’t virgins at this business, either.

  Ivan used his new toy to dig himself a little scrape in the rich, bread-smelling black earth. Even a shallow hole with the dirt thrown up to either side might keep you from getting gutted like a barnyard goose at a wedding feast. You could also fight with an entrenching tool if you had to.

  When Ivan heard a Soviet tank’s cannon fire, he knew for sure the Germans were coming. When he heard the tank’s machine guns go off, he knew they were just about here. He carried a PPD submachine gun: an ugly little piece of stamped steel that could slaughter anything out to a couple of hundred meters.

  A Russian T-34 blew up. The Red Army had more tanks, many more, but the Germans had just about caught up in quality. When there were Tigers in the neighborhood, they’d gone ahead. Ivan didn’t see any of the slab-sided monsters, which made him feel a little better, anyhow.

  He did see the wheat stalks rippling as Fritzes crawled through them. He hosed down the area in front of him with the machine pistol. Shrieks and thrashing among the battered crops said he’d done somebody a bad turn.

  But the Germans didn’t want to be driven away here. When mortar bombs started whispering down, Ivan decided he’d had enough. “Back!” he shouted. “Come on, you bitches! Back! We’ll get the cocksuckers the next time.”

  He wanted to make sure there’d be a next time. If they hung around here much longer, there was liable not to be. And so he retreated. If his superiors didn’t like it … they’d stick around and get killed.

  A new Panzer IV. Theo Hossbach almost smiled as he eyed the factory-fresh machine. Inside the fighting compartment, it smelled of leather and paint. They hadn’t swabbed it down with gasoline. That was what they used to mask the odor of rotting flesh, the stench that said the last crew hadn’t made it even if they’d salvaged the panzer.

  With Theo’s crew, it was just the opposite. They’d bailed out after a hit from a T-34 knocked a track off their last Panzer IV. As far as the radioman and bow gunner knew, that panzer was a write-off. But none of the five men in black coveralls got so much as a scratch. For a crew that had to abandon ship, so to speak, that was amazing luck.

  Theo opened and closed his left hand. One finger there was only a stub: a souvenir of the last time he’d fled a crippled panzer, back in France. He’d got out of the Panzer II all right. Trouble was, they didn’t stop shooting at you after you made your escape. He’d been hit running for cover. It hardly seemed fair.

  Adalbert Stoss, the driver, smacked his new mount’s armored flank with rough affection. “Another horse to put through the paces,” he said.

  “I thought you’d talk about scoring goals in it,” Sergeant Hermann Witt said. The panzer commander grinned. Theo found himself nodding. Adi Stoss was the best footballer he’d ever seen.

  But Adi didn’t rise to the gibe. All he said was, “My main goal is coming out of this mess in one piece.” He ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair. “What else can we hope for?”

  A National Socialist Loyalty Officer would have thundered forth bromides about victory and conquest and smashing the Jews in the Kremlin and the hordes of Slavic Untermenschen those Jews led. Nobody in the panzer crew thought that way, though. They’d all seen and been through a lot. Theo knew too well that they weren’t going to be part of a triumphal parade through Red Square. Hell, they’d never made it into Smolensk, much less Moscow. Once you came to grips with that, what could possibly matter more than getting home with two arms and two legs and two eyes and two balls?

  Adi, if course, had more things to worry about even than the rest of the panzer men. He had to worry about Soviet panzer cannon the same way they did. But the country whose uniform he wore—and wore well—could be more dangerous to him than the Ivans were.

  Theo said nothing about that. His crewmates would have been surprised if he had. He surprised them every time he opened his mouth, because he did it as little as he possibly could. He lived almost all his life inside the bony box bounded by his eyes, his ears, and the back of his head.

  He would have said even less than he actually did if the Wehrmacht, in its infinite wisdom, hadn’t made him a radioman. He couldn’t believe that the aptitude tests he took when he got conscripted said he was ideal for the slot. Maybe they’d been short of men for the school and just grabbed the first five file folders that happened to be lying on the table. Or maybe some personnel sergeant back in Breslau owned a truly evil sense of humor.

  Years too late to wonder about that now. When the Wehrmacht told you to do this, this was what you did. Oh, you could tell them no. But that was how you found out about what places like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen were like on the inside. Sensible Germans knew such bits of knowledge came at too high a cost.

  Sergeant Witt clambered up onto the new panzer’s turret. The panzer commander opened a hatch and slid inside. His voice came from the bowels of the machine: “All the comforts of home!”

  “Oh, yeah?” That was Lothar Eckhardt, the gunner. “Where’s the bed? Where’s the broad with the big tits in the bed?”

  Witt’s head popped out of the hatch. “Don’t worry about that, Lothar. You’ve got a bigger gun here than you do in the bedroom.” All the panzer crewmen laughed, some more goatishly than others. Theo didn’t count laughter against his starvation ration of speech.

  “Right, Sergeant,” Eckhardt said with exaggerated patience. “But I have more fun with the one I’ve got on me. And I don’t need Poske here to help me shoot it off, either.” He nudged the loader, who was standing next to him.

  Kurt Poske pushed back. “You’d better not. You’d be some kind of fairy if you did.”

  Witt flipped a limp wrist. “Come on, girls,” he said in a lisping falsetto that would have won him a pink triangle in a camp. “Why don’t you see how you like it in here?”

  Theo found his spot in the right front of the panzer hull only a little different from the same seat in the last Panzer IV. But no rungs were welded to the inside of the machine to hold his Schmeisser. He stowed the personal-defense weapon between his feet. Sooner or later, somebody in the company repair crew could take care of it for him.

  Adi didn’t have a place to hang his machine pistol, either. He couldn’t stash it the way Theo had, not when his feet needed to work the brake and clutch and accelerator. He set it behind Theo’s radio set. “Just for the time being,” he said apologetically. Theo nodded. That didn’t count against his speech ration, either.

  “Fire it up, Adi,” Hermann Witt said, and Stoss’ finger stabbed the starter button on the instrument panel in front of him. The motor roared to life at once. That was what a fresh battery would do for you. The engine noise was higher and smoother than it had been in the old machine. This power plant hadn’t been worked to death shoving twenty tonnes of panzer across the rutted, unforgiving Russian landscape.

  Yet.

  As the panzer rumbled and rattled up toward the platoon’s assembly area, Theo hooked himself back into the regimental radio network. Shifting frequencies, he heard different voices in his earphones. He had to do some talking of his own, to let the owners of those voices know this panzer and its crew were attached to them. Since those words were strictly line-of
-duty, he didn’t feel obliged to count them.

  They didn’t stay assembled in the area for very long. Half an hour after the Panzer IV joined its mates, they moved out to try to blunt a Russian westward thrust. The Reich didn’t have the bit between its teeth in Russia any more. Now hanging on to some of what it had gained in happier times was as much as it could hope for.

  The new panzer clanked past the burnt-out hulk of a German armored car. Fifty meters farther on sat the chassis of a Russian T-34, with the turret blown off and upside-down beside it. Theo did use a word: “Tiger.”

  “You bet it was,” Adi agreed. The German heavy tank’s fearsome 88 could devastate a T-34 like that. A Panzer IV’s long-barreled 75 could kill one, but couldn’t smash it that way. And a T-34 could kill a Panzer IV just as readily, while a Tiger’s thick frontal armor laughed at anything the Russian machine threw at it.

  And then Witt shouted, “Panzer halt!”

  “Halting.” As Adi spoke, he trod hard on the brake.

  At Witt’s orders, the turret traversed to somewhere between two and three o’clock. The gun rose slightly. Theo could just see it move. A shell clanged into the breech. “Fire!” Witt yelled.

  “On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt answered. As he spoke, the big gun roared. Flame leaped from the end of the muzzle, and out to either side of the recoil-reducing muzzle brake.

  Then Theo used another word: “Hit!”

  Flame and smoke burst from a Russian panzer he hadn’t even seen till the big gun spoke. It was more than a kilometer away. When he peered out through the armor glass in his narrow vision slit, he couldn’t tell whether the crew escaped. Part of him hoped so—they were members of his guild, in a manner of speaking. But they’d try again to kill him if they did. Maybe hoping they died fast and without much pain was better.

  Summer days over Germany were long, summer nights short. In winter, when things reversed, the RAF and French bombers struck deep inside the country. At this time of year, they couldn’t hope to do that and fly back out of danger before the new dawn showed them to the Luftwaffe.

  In summer, then, the raiders concentrated on the western part of the Reich. They could drop their bombs on towns like Münster and be landing at their distant bases before the sun came up again.

  As it sank in the northwestern sky this evening, Sarah Bruck apprehensively eyed the stretching shadows and the red-gold lights streaming in through the dining-room window. “Do you think they’ll come tonight?” she asked.

  Her father paused with a forkful of boiled potatoes and turnip greens halfway to his mouth. Samuel Goldman considered the question as gravely as if it touched on the death of Socrates or the assassination of Julius Caesar. He had been a professor of ancient history and classics at the university. Since he was a Jew, that didn’t matter once the Nazis took over. Because he was also a wounded veteran from the last war, he still found employment: he was a laborer in a work gang that cleared streets of rubble and tore down shattered houses and made repairs after the enemy struck.

  Having considered, he nodded. “Ja, I think so. There will be plenty of moonlight to help show them the way.”

  “Samuel!” Hanna Goldman said, as if he’d come out with something filthy. Well, in a way he had.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he told his wife. “She asked me what I thought. Should I have lied to her? Then, when the air-raid sirens start screaming, she’ll think My father is a stupid old fool!, and she’ll hate me.”

  “What happens if the raiders don’t come tonight, though, and everything stays quiet?” Sarah’s mother sounded sure she’d won that one.

  But she hadn’t. Father answered, “She’ll think My father is a stupid old fool!—and she’ll love me.”

  They all laughed. The Nazis did everything they could to make life in the Reich as miserable for Jews as possible. They might have done a better job of it than any other gang of persecutors in the history of the world. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t wipe out every single happy moment. Some sneaked past in spite of them.

  “If they come,” Sarah said, “maybe they’ll drop some on the Rathaus and on the square in front of the cathedral. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

  “Dreadful. Frightful,” Samuel Goldman agreed, his voice full of plummy, pious hypocrisy. When you couldn’t be sure the house wasn’t bugged, you didn’t want to give the authorities any excuse to cause you trouble. They could do it without an excuse, of course, but why make things easy for them?

  A bomb hit on the Rathaus in daylight would blow the Burgomeister and the Nazi functionaries who ran Münster straight to heaven—or, more likely, to some warmer clime instead. A bomb hit on the Rathaus at any old time might destroy all the city records, including the ones of who was and wasn’t a Jew. Plenty of people in town knew, of course, but Sarah suspected few would squeal on her parents and her if they somehow found an excuse to take the yellow Stars of David off their clothes. The National Socialist regime was less popular than it had been before it led the Reich into an endless, unvictorious war.

  Which was why a bomb hit on the square in front of the cathedral would bring few tears to anyone in town. Bishop von Galen had dared to protest against the Nazis’ policy of euthanizing mental defectives (though he’d said not a word about how they treated the Jews). The Gestapo had seized him, and the Catholics in town, backed by some Protestants, rioted to try to gain his release. They rose not once but twice. Sarah had almost got shot from accidentally being on the fringes of their second eruption.

  These days, armed SS men held the cathedral and the square. If the RAF sent them some presents, wouldn’t that be a shame? Sarah was sure lots of Münsterites were just as worried about it as she was.

  She really did worry about bombs coming down close to the house here. In their infinite generosity, the Nazis had decreed that Jews weren’t allowed in public air-raid shelters. They had to take their chances wherever they happened to be.

  Her mouth tightened. She’d been married to Isidor Bruck for only a few months when he and his mother and father had to take their chances in the family bakery and the flat above it. She would have taken her chances with them if she hadn’t been out. A direct hit leveled the building and killed them all. Now she was a widow, living with her parents again.

  This house had been lucky. Most of the windows still boasted glass panes, not cardboard taped up in their place. But the Brucks had thought the bakery was lucky, too. And so it was … till it wasn’t any more.

  The radio blared out saccharine music and Dr. Goebbels’ latest lies about how wonderfully things were going and how happy the German people were under the Führer’s divinely inspired leadership. Neither Sarah nor her mother and father felt like staying up late to listen to more of that. They slept as much as they possibly could, Samuel Goldman because he worked so hard in the labor gang and all of them because they didn’t get enough to eat to have much energy.

  Sarah didn’t think she’d been in bed more than a few minutes before the warning sirens began to howl. All the dogs began to howl with them. The sirens scared the dogs, and the animals had learned what happened after those sirens shrieked. They had plenty of reason to be scared.

  So did Sarah. Along with her parents, she stumbled down the stairs in the inky darkness and huddled under the sturdy dining-room table: the best protection they could get. Just because it was best didn’t mean it was good.

  “Heil Hitler!” Samuel Goldman said dryly. That was the punch line to a bitter joke the Germans made about air raids. If you’d grabbed some sleep in spite of the bombers, the next day you greeted people with Good morning! If the raid had kept you from getting any sleep and you desperately needed some, you said Good night! And if you’d always been asleep, you said Heil Hitler!

  How many thousand meters up there did the bombers fly? Not far enough to keep the drone of their engines from reaching the ground. Searchlights would be probing for them, trying to spear them and pin them down in the sky so the fla
k guns could get at them. The cannons’ quick-firing snarls punctuated that steady industrial drone.

  Here came the bombs, whistling down. The first bursts were a long way off, but they kept getting closer and closer and.… Make them stop! Please, God, make them stop! Sarah wanted to scream it. She swallowed it instead, all but a tiny whimper. God would hear anyway. Or, by all the signs she’d been able to glean, more likely He wouldn’t.

  Boom! Boom! Boomety-boom! The ground shook. The windows rattled. But the house didn’t fall down on top of them. The windows didn’t blow in and slash them. Their neighborhood had missed the worst of it again.

  After twenty minutes or half an hour (or a year or two, depending on how you looked at things), the droning faded off into the west. The flak guns kept banging away, probably at nothing. Every so often, a falling fragment from their shells would smash a roof and start a fire or land on some luckless man’s head. A couple of guns went on even after the warbling all-clear sounded.

  By then, Sarah was already back in bed. So were her folks. As soon as they decided nothing was coming down on their heads, they slowly and carefully climbed the stairs again. If you were tired enough, you could sleep after almost anything. They were. They could. They did.

  Next morning, Father rolled a cigarette of tobacco scavenged from other people’s discarded dog-ends. A certain predatory gleam lit his eyes as he walked out the front door. “I wonder what we’ll be cleaning up today,” he said.

  In smashed houses, the laborers stole whatever they could: real cigarettes, food, clothes. Once, Herr Doktor Professor Samuel Goldman would have been ashamed to do such a thing. Not Samuel Goldman the work-gang man. Sarah understood the change only too well. What Jew in Nazi Germany had any room left for shame?

  Anastas Mouradian went through the preflight checklist in the cockpit of his Pe-2 with meticulous care. His copilot and bomb-aimer, Isa Mogamedov, sat in the other chair there. He helped Mouradian run down the list.