Two Fronts (20 page)

Could you?

That Walsh had to wonder didn’t speak well for his confidence in his country’s officer corps.
If I were in charge …
he thought, but then,
If I were in charge, what?
The officers weren’t doing any too well, true. But it wasn’t as if he had any better ideas himself.

He didn’t even have the better ’ole Bruce Bairnsfather’s Tommies had sheltered in during the last dust-up. He rode in the back of a lorry whose engine hacked and wheezed with too much inhaled sand. All the lorries were alleged to have desert-strength air filters. So were all the tanks. Lorries and tanks nevertheless went down for the count with depressing regularity.

The soldiers jammed in there with him shared cigarettes and food. One of them squeezed liver paste from a tinfoil tube onto a cracker. As far as Walsh was concerned, that paste was the best ration in anybody’s army. Pointing at the tube, he said, “Took that off a dead Fritz, did you, Algie?”

“No, Sergeant. Off a prisoner,” Algie answered. He was half Walsh’s age, and red and peeling from sunburn. Gingery whiskers sprouted on his cheeks and chin and upper lip. He hadn’t found a chance to shave any time lately, and wouldn’t have cared to any which way: the sun would have left his skin as tender and sensitive as a baby’s. He stuffed the cracker into his mouth. With it still full, he added, “Not half bad.”

“That’s a tasty one, all right,” Walsh agreed.

He didn’t sound wistful or expectant. He made a point of not sounding that way. He was nonetheless a staff sergeant: perhaps not God Incarnate to a private soldier, but certainly no lower than His vicegerent on earth. Algie held out the tube to him. “Want some for yourself?”

“Obliged,” Walsh said, and he meant it. He’d have to find some way to pay back the youngster before too long. In the meantime … In the meantime, he’d eat. You grabbed food and sleep whenever you could. You never could tell how long you’d have to do without them.

As far as Walsh was concerned, the only ration that even came close to the German liver paste was tinned steak-and-kidney pie. It wasn’t
as
good, but it was plenty good enough—and you didn’t have to kill or capture somebody to get your hands on it. As long as he had the real prize, he’d enjoy it. He tried to remember not to make too much of a pig of himself as he squeezed the tube onto a cracker of his own.

His belly growled when food first hit it, then grew quiet and contented. He pulled out a packet of Navy Cuts, lit one, and passed the packet first to Algie. One fag wasn’t enough to give for a squeeze from that tube, but it made a start.

The lorry rumbled along. The road, such as it was, was bad. Along with the wheezy rumble, the lorry gave forth with an irregular series of thuds and bangs. And so Walsh and his comrades didn’t hear the German fighters till the 109s were right on top of their column.

His head had just come up in alarm when machine-gun bullets stitched through the rear compartment of the lorry. Blood splattered. Men tried to topple, wounded or dead. The driver let out a hideous shriek. The machine slewed sideways and went into the sand. The driver’s foot must have come off the pedal, because it quickly slowed to a stop.

“Out!” Walsh yelled. “Out and take cover!”

Some of the men were already moving when he shouted. They got the wounded out of the lorry as gently as they could. One man they left behind: a 7.92mm round had gone in one side of his head and blown off most of the other. No medic would help him—nor would anything else this side of Judgment Day.

Walsh ran around the lorry to get the driver out if he could. “It hurts!” the man moaned. “It hurts!” There was blood all over that compartment, too.

But he was lucky, even if he didn’t think so. He’d got shot through the right nether cheek—no wonder his foot came off the accelerator! “Come on, dammit!” Walsh said, hauling him out from behind the wheel by main force. “That’s a Blighty wound, or it is if you don’t get hit again.”

“Hurts!” was all the driver said.

He was liable to get hit again. Walsh was liable to get hit, too. The Bf-109s still buzzed above the stricken convoy like wasps above a jam jar.

Sure as hell, here came another one, seemingly straight at Walsh. Its machine guns winked malevolently. He fired his Lee-Enfield at it. He had a better chance of knocking it down than he did of flapping his arms and flying to the moon, but not a
much
better chance. He knew as much. He fired anyway. What did he have to lose?

Bullets stitched through the sand all around him, kicking up spurts that got in his eyes and spoiled his aim—if a rifleman on the ground shooting at a fighter going upwards of 300 miles an hour could be said to enjoy anything so refined as aim.

Then the Lee-Enfield fell from Walsh’s hands. All at once, they were both clutching his left calf. He didn’t know how they’d got there, but the damn thing hurt like blazes. Bright red blood seeped out between his fingers. That bubbling, obscenity-filled shriek came from his wide-open mouth.

“Catch one, Sergeant?” a soldier asked.

“Too bloody right I did,” Walsh answered, now through clenched teeth—he’d bitten down hard on that shriek.

He took a hand away from the hole in his leg and fumbled for one of the wound dressings on his belt. He’d got scrapes and cuts and nicks in this go-round, but he hadn’t really got shot since 1918. He’d forgotten how very much fun it wasn’t.

He unsheathed his bayonet and used it to cut away his trouser leg. The wound was through-and-through, but it didn’t look too bad. If it stayed clean, if it didn’t get infected … Like the driver, he’d got himself a Blighty one. It wouldn’t kill him, but he couldn’t possibly fight for some little while.

Now that the first shock had passed, his fingers knew what to do. Gauze pads slowed the bleeding. More gauze and tape held the pads in place. If he had to, he might be able to stump along for a little ways, using his rifle as a stick.

He didn’t have to. Stretcher-bearers lugged him and the driver with the wounded arse to an aid station. A doctor poured alcohol on Walsh’s leg, which almost made him rise off the canvas cot like Lazarus. “Sorry, old man,” the medico said, “but we do need to clean it out, what?”

“Fucking hell … sir,” Walsh wheezed—doctors were officers by courtesy, and had to be treated as such. Tears ran down the veteran’s grimy, unshaven cheeks. “That hurts worse than getting hit to begin with.” The sawbones only shrugged. It wasn’t
his
leg.

Willi Dernen trudged across Russia. He’d worn out a lot of boots here, and that despite the cobblers’ best efforts to make each pair last as long as it could. A German artillery barrage had torn up the ground. A few dead Russians lay in shattered foxholes. There was more military junk: a shattered helmet, a Mosin-Nagant rifle with a long bayonet, a puttee untidily unrolled and spread across the dirt.

He walked past everything. Sometimes military junk came in handy. Sometimes, especially in Russia, it was booby-trapped. It wasn’t as if he’d never taken a chance. This morning, though, he didn’t feel like it.

A hooded crow on the wing came out of the thin mist on his left, flew past him only a few meters away, and vanished into the mist on his right. Its harsh call faded in the distance.

“Damn bird wants to stop for lunch, and we’re interrupting,” Adam Pfaff said.

“Tough,” Willi answered. Except for being gray-and-black instead of solid, glossy black, hooded crows were just like the carrion crows they had farther west. That included their eating habits. Dead dog? Dead cow? Dead horse? Dead Ivan? Dead
Landser?
It was all the same—and all delicious—to them. “Ought to be a bounty on the stinking things.”

His eye fell on Arno Baatz. The corporal was as awful now as he had been before he got wounded. Willi’d hoped a stay in the hospital would mellow him (actually, Willi’d hoped Awful Arno would get inflicted upon some other unit altogether, but no such luck). He wouldn’t be altogether unhappy to watch a hooded crow gorging on Baatz’s mortal remains. But if Baatz caught one, he was much too likely to stop something himself.

Up ahead, a machine gun fired off a long burst. It wasn’t
that
close, but Willi clutched his Mauser more tightly all the same. Unless you were a raw, raw rookie, you needed only a moment to recognize the difference between an MG-34 and an old-fashioned, water-cooled Russian Maxim. The Maxim’s report was duller, and it couldn’t shoot nearly so fast. With its cooling jacket and heavy wheeled mount, it also weighed a tonne.

None of which meant it couldn’t kill you or maim you. Once it got set up, it made a perfectly respectable murder mill. Other German soldiers’ heads also swung toward the gun, gauging distance and likely danger. Like Willi, his buddies decided the Ivans’ gunners weren’t aiming at them right now.

Even Awful Arno didn’t need to read the tea leaves to figure that out. “Come on! Keep moving!” he bawled, his voice as nasty and raspy as a buzz saw biting into a nail.

“Who appointed him
Generalfeldmarschall
?” Pfaff wondered out loud. “I don’t see the red collar tabs with the oak leaves or the baton.”

Willi offered an opinion about where Baatz could stow his baton. Marching would have been uncomfortable had he put it there, but Willi wasn’t inclined to quibble about such details. By Adam Pfaff’s giggles, neither was he.

“What’s so funny, you clowns?” Baatz growled. He couldn’t have heard what they were talking about, but he hated jokes on general principles—and because he suspected they were commonly aimed at him. He was commonly right, too.

“A field marshal’s baton,
Herr Unteroffizier
.” Willi gave back the exact and literal truth.

“A baton? Be a cold day in hell before you ever get your filthy mitts on one,” Awful Arno said, which was also true. To show what he thought of things, he added, “If you make field marshal—Christ on a crutch, if you make sergeant—the
Reich
is really and truly fucked.” He turned his glower on Pfaff. “And what the devil makes a baton worth laughing at, anyway?”

By the look on Pfaff’s face, he was thinking about telling the corporal precisely what made it worth laughing at. That wouldn’t have done him any good, even if he might have enjoyed it for a little while. You had to understand when giving in to your impulses wasn’t such a good plan.

Or sometimes you got saved by the bell. Willi’s head swung to the left, toward the north. If the noise had come from the other side, he might not have heard it. He’d squeezed off a lot of Mauser rounds by his right ear. It wasn’t much for catching small noises any more. It wasn’t so very much for catching large noises any more.

These small noises got bigger too damn fast: the clanking rattle of panzer tracks and the belching rumble of diesel engines. Since they were diesels, those tracks had to be attached to Russian panzers—German machines all used gasoline motors. And those dinosaur shapes looming through the mist had sloping sides and turrets; they weren’t all straight slabs and right angles like German panzers.

“They’re T-34s!” Willi shouted: the worst thing he could think of, basically.

Awful Arno whirled away from Adam Pfaff. His Mauser leaped to his shoulder with commendable haste. He fired at one of the enormous Russian panzers. Nothing wrong with Baatz’s balls. His common sense left a bit to be desired, though—not that Willi had already seen as much time and again.

Willi’s own balls wanted to crawl up into his belly. He feared even that wouldn’t save them. No German panzers were within kilometers, not so far as he knew. Panzer IIIs and IVs didn’t stand a great chance against T-34s themselves. Infantry, now … Awful Arno’s shot might make the Ivans notice him. It couldn’t possibly hurt the steel monsters.

They said necessity was the mother of invention. As usual, what they said was a crock. Pure, raw panic sparked Willi’s invention. Fumbling at his belt, he shouted, “Shoot your flare pistols at them! Maybe in the fog they’ll think they’re seeing antipanzer-gun tracers!”

He suited action to word. A red flare hissed toward the nearest T-34. And damned if the glowing flare
didn’t
look something like a tracer from an antipanzer cannon. The mist helped, too. It concealed Willi, and it extended the glowing trail the flare left behind in the air.

Seeing how well the first one worked, Willi frantically fired off another flare. Pfaff sent his own red ball of fire at the oncoming enemy panzers, and then one more after it. Even Awful Arno got the idea. So did several other
Landsers
. If all those red fireballs really were antipanzer tracers, the T-34s were rushing headlong into deadly danger.

You never could tell with Russians. Sometimes they would stolidly take poundings that would make Germans fly for their lives, and would ambush you after you thought they had to be knocked to pieces. But sometimes, if you took them by surprise, they’d run from their own shadows. Not always—not even close. But sometimes.

This time. The Ivans didn’t expect foot soldiers to try to scare them off with flares. If they saw red fireballs flying their way, they expected guns that could smash even a T-34’s formidable armor. And, believing that what they saw was what they expected to see, they turned as fast as they could and roared away toward what they hoped was safety.