Two Fronts (14 page)

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
Führer
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 Léon 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
Führer
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
Führer
, 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?”

“Chilly. Hungry. Not starving, but hungry. Pissed off at the froggies for changing sides again. Pretty much what you’d expect, in other words.” Baatz hesitated, maybe wondering if he’d said too much. He made haste to add, “But everybody’s behind the
Führer
one hundred percent, of course.”

“
Aber natürlich
,” Willi agreed. Pfaff nodded. Both men made sure they didn’t sound sarcastic. Baatz was just the kind of pigdog who’d report you to a loyalty officer for defeatism if you opened your mouth too wide and let him see what you were really thinking—what any soldier with a gram of sense had to be thinking.

The really crazy thing was, what a
Frontschwein
thought about Hitler didn’t matter a pfennig. The Ivans would slaughter you whether you thought the
Führer
was off his rocker or you went around shouting “
Sieg heil!
” all the goddamn time. You were up against the Red Army any which way. To the Russians, that was the only thing that counted. Which—
aber natürlich
—made it the only thing that counted to the guys in
Feldgrau
, too.

Cannon rumbled, off in the distance. Like Willi and Adam Pfaff, Awful Arno cocked his head to one side, listening. He delivered the verdict: “Ours.”

“
Ja
.” Willi nodded this time. “You remember that much, anyhow.”

“Like I said before, Dernen, fuck you.” With what he might have meant for an amiable nod, Baatz stumped away, boots squelching in the mud.

Willi sighed. His breath smoked. It wasn’t snowing any more, but it wasn’t what you’d call warm, either. “Why the hell did they have to give him back to us?” he said—quietly, because Awful Arno had ears keen as a wolf’s.

“Most of the time, putting wounded guys back in the slots they held before they got hurt is a good idea. It helps morale, right?” Pfaff said.

“Right.” Willi didn’t sound like someone who believed it—and he wasn’t. “Whoever wrote the rule book never ran into Arno Baatz.”

“I’d like to run into him—driving a
Kübelwagen
,” Pfaff said.

“A truck’d be better,” Willi observed. They went on in that vein for some little while.

Baatz pissed and moaned about the barley-and-meat stew the field kitchen dished out. Nobody else complained. Willi was just glad the stew had meat in it. He didn’t care about what the meat was. He suspected it had neighed while it was alive, but he would have eaten it even if he’d thought it barked. He’d spent too long in the field to be fussy. As long as there was plenty of it, he’d spoon it out of his mess tin. He’d go back for seconds, too. He would, and he did.

Afterwards, he did a good, thorough job of washing the tin and his utensils. No matter what Awful Arno said, he wasn’t slack about anything important. Eat from a dirty mess tin and you were asking for the shits or the heaves. With what you got in Russia, you always took that chance. Making your odds worse was stupid, nothing else but.