Last Orders: The War That Came Early (5 page)

But they were stretched too thin these days, when they had to fight the Red Army here in the East and the English and French on the other side of their country. Like a hungry peasant padding out wheat flour with ground peas, the Nazis here in the Ukraine padded their lines with Romanians and Hungarians.

Both sets of Fascist jackals wore khaki darker than the Red Army’s. Figuring out which was which could be confusing. The Hungarians used German-style helmets. The Romanians had a different model, domed on top but long fore and aft.

The other interesting thing was that Hitler’s little chums couldn’t stand each other. The Nazis didn’t dare stick a Romanian unit next to one full of Magyars. They had to keep Germans between their allies. Otherwise, the Hungarians and Romanians would go at each other and forget all about the Russians they were supposed to be fighting.

More and more Red Army soldiers and tanks and planes swarmed into the Ukraine. The Germans kept hitting back as hard as they could.
The Hungarians and especially the Romanians began to realize they weren’t bound for glory. They threw down their rifles and threw up their hands whenever they saw the chance. They figured their odds were better in the gulag than in fighting it out. Ivan thought that showed they were morons, but it wasn’t his worry.

Stavka understood the enemy’s woes. The big pushes went against soldiers in khaki, not against the pricks who wore
Feldgrau
. When the Hungarians and Romanians didn’t give up, they fell back. That meant the Germans on their flanks had to fall back, too, or else risk getting cut off.

Most of the time, that was what it meant, anyhow. Ivan had just finished robbing a Romanian who was sobbingly glad not to get killed out of hand. The swarthy jerk in the brownish uniform had hardly anything worth taking. But he did carry a folding German entrenching tool. Ivan had wanted one for a while. It took up less room than the ordinary Soviet short-handled spade. And you could use it as a pick if you locked the blade at right angles to the handle. It was a nifty piece of work.

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.