Two Fronts (4 page)

The bus wheezed to a stop several kilometers short of the front. The driver said something in lisping Spanish. Since most of his passengers were Czechs or men from the International Brigades, his own language did him less good than it might have. Seeing as much, he solved the problem another way. He yanked the door open—whatever hydraulics it might have had once upon a time were long gone—and yelled, “
Raus!
”

Chances were it was the only word of German he knew. But it did the job here. Grumbling, the soldiers hopped out one by one. A hulking blond International said something in Polish. Jezek
almost
understood it. He cupped a hand behind one ear and said, “Try that again?” in Czech.

His words would have had the same annoying near-familiarity to the Pole as the other guy’s did for him. The big, fair man repeated himself. Vaclav shrugged. He still didn’t get it. “Gawno,” the Pole muttered. Vaclav followed that fine. Shit was shit in any Slavic tongue. Then the big guy did what a Pole and a Czech would often do instead of staying frustrated by each other’s languages: he asked, “
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
”

“
Ja
,” Vaclav answered resignedly. He’d gone through this before. He’d hoped to skip it this time, but no such luck.

“
Gut
,” the Pole said. “What I said was, we have had our holiday, and now we are going back to the factory.” Like Vaclav, he spoke German slowly, hunting for words. As Poles would, he put the accent in every polysyllabic word on the next to last, whether it belonged there or not.

“To the factory, is it?” Jezek responded. “Well, here’s hoping we stay away from industrial accidents.”

“Here’s hoping.
Ja
-fucking-
wohl
.” That wasn’t exactly proper German, but Vaclav followed some improper German, too.

He and the Pole tramped along together for a while. They told each other the usual lies about the drinking and screwing they’d done in Madrid. A jackhammer couldn’t have done all the pounding the Pole claimed. Vaclav pretended to believe him. Life was too short for some arguments.

They waved when they separated, and wished each other luck. The Internationals’ trenches were north and east of the stretch the Czechs held. “Hey, look who’s back!” Vaclav’s countrymen shouted. One of them added, “You don’t look as rumpled as you ought to, dammit!”

“Rumpled? I’ll tell you about rumpled, by Jesus!” Vaclav retold some of the stories he’d fed the Pole. His buddies ate them up. He’d already thought them through once, and they sounded a hell of a lot better in Czech than they had in German. He hoped he gave good value.

Through all the stories, Lieutenant Benjamin Halévy listened with an ironically raised eyebrow. Everybody got promoted a grade on coming to Spain; that was why Vaclav was a sergeant now. Halévy had been a sergeant—a sergeant in the French Army. His parents were from Prague; he’d been born in Paris. Fluent in French and Czech (and several other languages), he’d served as liaison between French troops and the men who served the government-in-exile.

And he’d accompanied the Czechs to Spain. Like any other Jew, he couldn’t stomach France’s alliance with the Third
Reich
. French authorities hadn’t much wanted him around, either. He could have gone back to civilian life with an honorable discharge. Instead, he’d kept on fighting Fascism.

He was a good soldier, clever and brave. Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews till the war started. When it came to fighting the Nazis, though, they were in it to the end. A couple of Slovaks in Vaclav’s squad at the beginning of things ran out the first chance they got. They were probably in Father Tiso’s “independent” Slovakian army right now, fighting the Russians. Vaclav chuckled nastily. That’d serve the stupid shitheels right!

“Where’s my toy?” he asked Halévy. He didn’t bother with a sir; neither of them took the promotions they’d got from the Spaniards too seriously. The extra pay, in cash and in promises, did come in handy, though.

“Well, somebody saw an elephant out behind the Fascists’ lines. He went hunting with your piece, and we haven’t seen it or him since,” Halévy answered blandly.

Vaclav snorted. “My ass! Is the beast still where I stashed it?”

“You bet it is,” the Jew replied. “C’mon, man—get real. Who in his right mind would want the goddamn thing?”

“Well, I do,” Vaclav said with such dignity as he could muster.

“I said, ‘Who in his right mind?’ ” Halévy repeated patiently. Vaclav snorted again. Halévy led him to the bombproof where he’d left the antitank rifle before he went down to paint the town red (or, given its politics, redder). He’d taken it from a French soldier who was too dead to need it any more. It was a beast and a half: almost as long as a man was tall, and more than twice as heavy as an ordinary rifle. It fired rounds as thick as a thumb, and not much shorter.

Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it almost broke your shoulder every time you pulled the trigger. But those fat bullets would pierce at least twenty-five millimeters of hardened steel, which made it death on armored cars and powerful enough to trouble any tank they’d had in 1938 (more modern marks shrugged off any rifle bullets).

It might not wreck a new tank. To the logical French, that made it obsolete and therefore useless. To Vaclav, it only meant he needed to use the monster for something else. The antitank rifle fired heavy rounds on a flat trajectory with a ridiculously high muzzle velocity. That made it a wonderful sniper’s rifle, especially after he fitted it with a telescopic sight. He could kill a man two kilometers away.

He could, and he damn well had. General Franco hadn’t been so far off—he’d been out around 1,500 meters. Franco, by all accounts, had been a careful and logical man, more methodical than brilliant. No doubt he would have agreed with the French about the obvious uselessness of an outdated weapon. He would have, yes, till Vaclav plugged him. At the moment, he had no opinions about anything. And Vaclav planned on doing some more sniping tomorrow.

THE WINTER BEFORE
, the
Wehrmacht
hadn’t had proper clothes for fighting in Russia. The German greatcoat served tolerably well in Western Europe. Russian winds bit right through it. Willi Dernen had acquired—a polite way to say
had stolen
—a sheepskin jacket in a peasant village. German boots also sucked. The hobnails in their soles took cold right up to your feet, and they also fit too closely to be padded. Willi’d taken a pair of
valenki
—oversized felt boots—off a Russian corpse. He’d done much better after that.

Things were different this time around. German soldiers got cold-weather gear as good as anyone else’s. Even the Ivans stole
Wehrmacht-
issue felt-and-leather boots when they could get them. Willi was relieved. Shivering and risking frostbite were bad enough. Having even your Polish allies laugh at you—or, sadder yet, pity you—because you were shivering and frostbitten was worse.

Willi came from Breslau. Just about everybody in the division was drawn from the
Wehrkreis
—the recruiting district—centered on that town. Poland bordered it on the east. Plenty of Poles lived in the district, and in Breslau. Like most Germans, Willi looked down his nose at them. Watching them look down their noses at him and his countrymen here was flat-out embarrassing.

The
Wehrmacht
first came east to help the Poles drive Stalin’s hordes out of their country. The Germans had done that. Now they were in Russia up to their armpits, the boundary between Poland and the USSR hundreds of kilometers behind them, Moscow still hundreds of kilometers ahead.

Where, in all this Russian immensity, did victory lie? Anywhere? If it lay anywhere close by, Willi couldn’t see it. He didn’t think any of the other
Landsers
in his outfit could, either. He’d quit worrying about it. All he cared about were staying alive and coming home in one piece.

He peered out from the edge of some woods across the snow-covered fields to the east. His new winter coat was white on one side,
Feldgrau
on the other. He’d slapped whitewash on his
Stahlhelm
. With snow dappling the pines and birches that sheltered his section, any watching Red Army man wouldn’t be able to see him from very far away.

Which proved less than he wished it would have. For all he knew, a Russian in a snowsuit was lying in that field not fifty meters away. The Germans didn’t call their enemies Indians by accident. For one thing, Indians were red men. For another, Indians were supposed to be masters of concealment. They were supposed to be, and the Ivans damn well were.

If a Russian
was
lying in the field, he wouldn’t give himself away by moving. He could lie there all day without doing that. He could lie there all day without freezing to death, too. German troops often wondered whether Russians were half animal. If they were, it was the wrong half, as far as Willi was concerned.

Boots crunched in the snow behind him. He turned his head. Nothing to get excited about: just one of his buddies. “Anything going on?” Adam Pfaff asked.

“Well, I don’t
see
anything,” Willi answered.

“Mpf,” the other
Obergefreiter
said. Willi couldn’t have put it better himself. Pfaff went on, “Maybe that means something, and maybe it doesn’t.”

“I was just thinking the same thing before you came up,” Willi said. “If you want to look around for yourself, be my guest. I won’t get pissed off if you spot Ivans I missed. I’ll thank you kindly, on account of you’ll be saving my ass, too.”

“Sure, I’ll look. I don’t think I’m likely to spot anything you didn’t, but even when it comes to cabbage two heads are better than one.” Cradling his Mauser, Pfaff moved up alongside Willi. The woodwork on the rifle was painted a gray not far from
Feldgrau
. He’d carried that Mauser since he joined the regiment as a replacement. Arno Baatz, the
Unteroffizier
who’d led this squad, tried to tell him to make the piece ordinary again. The company commander had said it was all right, though. That didn’t make Pfaff and Baatz get along any better.

Then again, Awful Arno didn’t get along with anybody. He and Willi had had run-ins aplenty. Right this minute, Baatz was recovering from an arm wound, and the squad belonged to Willi. He didn’t care what Pfaff did with his rifle, as long as it fired when he pulled the trigger.

Willi’s own weapon was a sniper’s Mauser, with a telescopic sight and a special downturned bolt rather like an English Lee-Enfield’s because the scope got in the way of an ordinary one. Awful Arno also hadn’t liked him to carry that piece.

After scanning the landscape to the east, Pfaff said, “Looks a hell of a lot like Russia, y’know?”

“
Wunderbar
. And here I was expecting Hawaii,” Willi said sourly. “Russia? I could do that well myself. Hell, I
did
do that well myself.”

“Always glad to be of service.” His buddy sketched a salute.

“You think we can advance across those fields?” Willi asked.

“Sure—as long as there aren’t any Russians in the woods on the far side,” Pfaff said. “But if they’ve got a couple of machine guns set up amongst the trees there, they’ll screw us to the wall if we try it.”

“Yeah, that’s about how it looks to me, too. Not a pfennig’s worth of cover along the way.” Willi sighed out a young fogbank. “
Leutnant
Freigau, he kinda wants us to go forward, though.”

The junior lieutenant commanded the company now for the same reason a senior private led the squad: the guy who should have had the slot was getting over a wound. Adam Pfaff sighed, too. “If he’s so hot to go charging ahead like that, let him come here and scout it out. Christ, even ordinary riflemen’d give us a hard time. Like you said, they’d be shooting from cover, and we don’t have any.”

“Go tell him to come up and check for himself,” Willi said. “If he sends us out anyway …” He shrugged. He would have made the effort, anyhow.

“I’ll do it. Can’t hurt. Maybe he’ll have a rush of brains to the head.” Pfaff’s tone said that was likely to be too much to hope for. Even so, he bobbed his head at Willi and went back to the west.

Willi had time to duck behind a pine and smoke a cigarette before Pfaff came back with Rudi Freigau. The
Leutnant
was only a couple of years older than the two
Obergefreiters
. He wore a neat mustache that was blond almost to the point of invisibility. Instead of a rifle, he carried a Schmeisser. He greeted Willi with, “Pfaff says you’re not too happy about moving up from here.”

“See for yourself, sir,” Willi replied. “If they’re waiting for us in that next bunch of trees, we’re sticking our heads in the sausage machine.”

Lieutenant Freigau did look. He was as careful as Willi and Adam Pfaff had been. He’d seen his share of tight spots before; he didn’t want to make things easy for a Russian sharpshooter. After eyeing the bare field and the woods on the far side, he said, “Everything looks quiet.”

“Well, sure, sir. It would if they’re trying to see whether we’re dumb enough to go out there, too.” As soon as he spoke, Willi realized he might have put that more tactfully.

“Or if they aren’t there at all. Which is my judgment of the situation, Dernen.” Freigau sounded irked. Willi supposed he would have, too, if he were an officer who’d just got the glove from somebody hardly even a noncom.

The lieutenant started across the snowy field. Yes, he wore winter white, but that didn’t come close to making him invisible. Willi and Adam Pfaff exchanged stricken looks. “Sir, don’t you want to come back? You’ve made your point,” Willi called after him.

Freigau shook his head. “No need,” he answered. “I’m not going to run away from shadows and ghosts and unicorns and other imaginary things. And every advance we make brings us that much closer to—”

A Russian machine gun barked to life. Willi and Adam Pfaff both flattened out. The gunner might not be aiming at them, but they were still close to his line of fire. Lieutenant Freigau went down, too, but not because he meant to. He writhed feebly and made horrible choking noises. He’d been hit at least twice: once in the belly and once in the neck. Blood darkened his snowsuit and pooled and steamed in the drift where he lay. After a couple of minutes, he quit gurgling and lay still.