Two Fronts (27 page)

“Yes, sir. Afraid so, sir,” Walsh replied. Along with being a Tory MP, Cartland was also a decorated captain. He’d seen France, too: this time around, since he was too young to have served in the last war’s trenches.

“Well, we do muddle along here in spite of everything,” he said.

“A good thing we do,” Walsh said. Cartland and Cranford and some of the other aristos had played a bigger part than Walsh in overthrowing the reactionary government that cozied up to Hitler, but the part Walsh had played left those aristos still interested in him. Speaking carefully, he went on, “How
are
things here in Blighty these days?”

“Interesting times, old man. Definitely, interesting times.” One of Cartland’s elegant eyebrows rose toward his hairline.

They weren’t alone in the sitting room. A glance from Walsh didn’t show anyone else overtly snooping, but he knew perfectly well how to listen in without seeming to do anything of the kind. He had to assume other people could aspire to the same low talent. Since he did, he contented himself with saying, “Like that, is it?”

“Very much like that. Almost too much like that, in fact.” The slight smile on Captain Cartland’s face said he understood perfectly.

Later, Cartland and Cranford filled in more details at a pub where the only customers were likely to be friends. “It’s on tenterhooks, really,” Bobbity Cranford said, slugging back a whiskey with the air of a man who badly needed one. “If we can make a go of knocking Hitler for a loop, I daresay we’ll be forgiven our constitutional trespasses—Lord knows the other side also has a deal that wants forgiving. But if it looks like bogging down into a long, bloody slog like the one you cut your teeth in, Sergeant, we may have ourselves a bit of a problem.”

“Yes, just a bit,” Cartland agreed, deadpan.

Walsh wasn’t used to hearing
bloody
as anything but an obscenity, and needed a moment to realize the MP meant it literally. A bloody slog the Western Front in the last war had indeed been. Walsh knew he’d been lucky to come out of it with only a wound himself. Well, now he had himself a matched set: one from each war. He would gladly have forgone the honor.

“Have we still got … those blokes safe and sound in prison?” he asked. Even in a safe place, he didn’t want to allude too openly to the men who’d taken the country down the path of working with the Nazis.

“Oh, no. That would be illegal and immoral. But we’ve taken a worse vengeance yet,” Ronald Cartland answered, straight-faced. “One of them is his Majesty’s ambassador to Liberia, another to Peru. Yet another heads up the consulate in … where was it, Bobbity?”

“Guatemala City, if I remember rightly,” Cranford said. “Or possibly one of the towns in Cuba. I forget which.”

“You get the idea,” Cartland said to Walsh, who nodded—he did indeed. Cartland continued, “And the former head of Scotland Yard now employs his gift for wiretapping and interrogation as chief of police in Jerusalem. If the Arabs don’t put paid to him, likely the Zionists will. And if by some mischance he survives them both, he may even do the Empire some good.”

“More than he’d ever manage here,” Walsh said savagely.

“Quite.” Cartland nodded. “But that particular lot won’t come back to that particular mischief any time soon. Their letters and cables are quite closely monitored, I assure you.”

“Well, good,” Walsh said. That was hoisting the collaborators with their own petard, all right. Even so, he found another question: “So much for the leaders, then. But what about the spear-carriers, the blokes who went and did what the big men told them to?”

Cartland and Cranford looked at each other. “That’s rather harder to deal with, you know,” Cranford said slowly. “There are a good many more of them, and their guilt is less blatant.”

“But they’re the ones who’ll make you trouble—make us trouble,” Walsh predicted. “Some of them will just have done what their bosses told them to do. That kind’s safe enough. They’ll do whatever anyone tells them to, and not a farthing’s worth more. The others, though, the others will still believe in what they were about. Those are the buggers you’ve got to watch out for.”

The two MPs eyed each other again. Slowly once more, Bobbity Cranford said, “How is it that you’re not a brigadier, Sergeant?”

Walsh snorted laughter. “The likes of me? If I weren’t in the Army, I’d be grubbing coal out of a seam back home in Wales. More likely, I’d be on the dole wishing I were grubbing coal. A brigadier?” He laughed some more.

“You have the mother wit for it. You’ve proved that time and again,” Cranford said. “Should you be denied the right to rise to the extent of your ability because you come from a coal town, and had the misfortune not to be to the manor born?”

Walsh didn’t know how to answer that. He took the class system very much for granted, as a career soldier was bound to do. At last, he managed, “I have more say with a mark on my sleeve than plenty of toffs with shoulders straps do.”

That made Captain Cartland laugh, but he quickly sobered. “You’re right, Sergeant—I’ve seen as much—but you’re also wrong. You have plenty of say about the little things, but none whatever about the big ones. Bobbity’s right, too. It shouldn’t work that way.”

“Are you sure you don’t belong with Labour?” Walsh wanted to make a joke of it. Politics gave him the willies, and all the more so since he’d found himself in them up to his eyebrows.

“Labour knows one thing,” Cartland said. “Labour knows it better than plenty who call themselves Tories, too: Labour understands who our true enemy is.” All three men nodded and solemnly drank together.

All kinds of interesting things were coming off the
Reich
’s assembly line. Along with his crewmates, Theo Hossbach gaped at the Panzer IV that chugged past their stopped III. “What the devil?” Hermann Witt said, eyes almost bugging out of his head.

“Damn thing’s got a hard-on—a big one, too,” Adi Stoss opined.

The rest of the panzer crew fell out laughing, Theo among them. Up till now, Panzer IVs had been infantry-support vehicles. They carried a stubby, low-velocity 75mm gun, good for firing HE and scattering enemy foot soldiers, but not worth much against armor.

Not this baby. Theo thought its gun was also a 75mm, but it was a long one with a muzzle brake to lessen the recoil. That beast could fire a big AP round with muzzle velocity to match. Any Soviet panzer—or any French or English one, come to that—in the way would soon be very unhappy.

No sooner had that thought crossed Theo’s mind than Kurt Poske said, “Now we’ve got something that’ll make a T-34 roll over and play dead.”

Everybody nodded. The other men in black coveralls wore fierce grins on their faces. Theo couldn’t see his own, but he would have bet he did, too. An ordinary Panzer III’s 37mm rounds either bounced off a T-34’s glacis plate and turret or stuck in them without penetrating. Even a Panzer III Special with a 50mm main armament failed more often than not. This new Panzer IV sure looked as if it could do the job, though.

Adi said, “You know what we really ought to do?”

“Tell us,
Herr Generalfeldmarschall
.” Sergeant Witt clicked his heels and saluted the
Gefreiter
who drove his panzer.

“Ah, stuff it, Sergeant,” Adi said—in the right tone of voice to keep from getting his tits in a wringer for showing disrespect. Then he went ahead and told them: “We ought to stick an 88 in a panzer—that’s what.”

Theo whistled softly. The 88 was designed as a flak gun. But, with Germanic thoroughness, the powers that be manufactured AP ammo for it, too. It was often the only piece in the
Wehrmacht
’s arsenal that could knock out rampaging T-34s or the even more thickly armored KV-1s. As a towed gun, though, too often it wasn’t where it needed to be. Stuck in a turret, with an engine and tracks, it could make a world-beater.

It could. If …

Hermann Witt came out with the obvious objection: “That thing is fucking enormous. How big a panzer would you need to haul it around?”

“A big one.” Adi admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. “But God knows we need something like that. The only reason the Ivans aren’t kicking our asses around the block is that we’re three times the panzer-men they’ll ever be.”

The crewmen nodded again. It wasn’t as if he were wrong. All the same, Witt said, “Make sure the National Socialist Loyalty Officer doesn’t hear you talking like that. Make good and sure.”

“
Zu Befehl!
” Adi said. He’d better obey that order if he knew what was good for him. With the fight in the West starting to pick up again, the authorities jumped on anyone they imagined to be disloyal or defeatist with both feet. And they had lively imaginations. Oh, did they ever!

Just then, a
Kettenrad
—a half-tracked motorcycle—fetched the ammo the panzer crew was waiting for. They didn’t know the driver or the fellow riding shotgun (actually, he carried a captured Russian machine pistol). Since they didn’t, they were immediately on their best behavior. After they bombed up the Panzer III, they fired it up and rattled forward again.

“I want one of those IVs with the big
Schwanz
,” Adi said to Theo, who sat across the radio set from him. “I mean, I want one bad.” He laughed harshly. “Remember when we felt that way about this critter?”

“
Ja
.” Theo expended a word.

He needed only one; Adi was in a talkative mood: “Some poor, sorry bastards are
still
in Panzer IIs, for crying out loud! Lord, some poor bastards are still in Panzer Is. How’d you like to take on a T-34 in one of those?”

“No, thanks,” Theo said. A Panzer I mounted a pair of machine guns. Anything heavier than machine-gun bullets would hole its thin armor. But they and the slightly tougher IIs soldiered on because they were better than nothing. The only thing either could do against a T-34 was run like hell.

When the company bivouacked, they were only a few hundred meters from a platoon of the long-snouted Panzer IVs. Naturally, they ambled over to get a closer look at the machines they’d just glimpsed before. As naturally, they carried Schmeissers when they crossed the Russian steppe. Never could tell if a few Ivans hadn’t got cleared out the way they should have.

No trouble like that this time. Ravens and hooded crows rose skrawking from a corpse in khaki, but he
was
a corpse, not a live Russian with a PPD shamming. The panzer men from the IVs seemed glad enough to talk about their fancy new toys.

“I’d say we’re pretty close to even with the T-34 now,” said a sergeant commanding one of them. “We’re uparmored, too, even if theirs is still thicker. But this is a better gun—higher velocity, way better fire control. You’ll know about
that
, anyhow.” Damn him, he sounded sorry for them.

“Oh, yes,” Witt said. German sights beat the snot out of what the Ivans used. And a German panzer commander didn’t have to be his own gunner, which made shooting much more efficient. But when all you had was a Panzer III’s popgun, you were too likely to end up efficiently killed.

“Performance is decent, too,” the other sergeant went on. He wore an Iron Cross First Class, the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class, and a wound badge, so he’d had enough fun to know what he was talking about. “With the wide
Ostketten
they’ll issue when the rain starts, we should take mud, mm, almost as well as the Russians do.”

That struck Theo as reasonable. The Red Army designed machinery with these conditions in mind. The
Wehrmacht
was learning on the fly. It was doing a pretty good job—which was why the Germans were holding on and even still advancing in places even though the war was on two fronts again. Would pretty good prove good enough? Only one way to find out. Theo hoped it wouldn’t be the hard way.

Along those lines, Adi said, “We shouldn’t just be as good as the Reds. We need to be better, ’cause they’ll always have more of whatever they make.”

The Panzer IV commander rubbed his chin. He needed a shave; whiskers rasped under his fingers. “I hear that’s coming. It isn’t here yet, but it’s on the way.” He rubbed his chin again. “You’re Stoss, you said?”

“That’s right,” Adi answered. Theo wondered if he should have. He’d just disapproved of something the
Reich
did. If this guy wanted to get pissy about it, he could.

But all the sergeant said was, “I’ve heard of you. You’re the footballer, right? I’d like to see you on the pitch.”

“I’m the footballer,” Adi said tightly. He was too good a footballer. People remembered him and noticed him and talked about him, which was the last thing he wanted or needed. He went on, “Haven’t had much chance to play lately, though. Who knows when I’ll get out there again?”

“If you’re as good as people say you are, you could probably get on one of those teams that go around putting on exhibitions.” The Panzer IV commander sounded plenty shrewd. “You’d sure have a better chance of coming out of this in one piece if you did.”

“Fuck it. I signed up to be a soldier, not to run around in short pants,” Adi said.

“All right. All right. Take an even strain, pal. I wasn’t out to piss you off,” the sergeant said. “I mean, I’m halfway decent playing football, but I’m only halfway decent, y’know? I’ve paid my dues up here and then some. If they let me put on shows for the troops instead of getting smashed to blood sausage, I’d do it in a red-hot minute.”