Two Fronts (44 page)

Theo found out the next day. They went hunting Russians: the Tigers, with a few Panzer IIIs along as guides. Theo’s was one of them. That left him less than thrilled. The Tigers were also splotchily whitewashed, which in spring made sure T-34s would find them.

Finding the Tigers, the Russian panzers roared to the attack. Smoky diesel exhaust spewed from their tailpipes. Maybe they thought the German machines were long-gunned Panzer IVs, against which they still stood an excellent chance. They discovered their mistake in a hurry. The Tigers could hit from as far out as that crewman claimed. And sloped armor didn’t keep out rounds from an 88. One T-34’s turret flew through the air and landed, upside down and blazing, by the chassis.

“The T-34 tips its hat to the Tiger!” someone from another panzer yelled in Theo’s earphones. He would have liked the joke better if he hadn’t heard it before.

Pretty soon, the surviving Russians decided they wanted to go on surviving. They fled. The Tigers raced after them, as well as anything that heavy could race. One of the Panzer III commanders shouted a radio warning to them. Arrogant in their land dreadnoughts, the Tiger crews went right on racing. One of them raced over a mine and threw a track. It slewed sideways and stopped. The others quit charging ahead at top speed, anyhow.

“Fucking told you so, you asslicks,” the Panzer III commander said. There in his small, old-fashioned machine, Theo smiled. He couldn’t have put it better himself.

FRANCE AND ENGLAND
might be back in the war against Hitler, but Alistair Walsh still wasn’t sure how serious about it they were. He hoped it was just the same attitude he’d seen in the trenches the last time around: a sensible reluctance to get shot without the prospect of a decent reward.

Back then, the Germans had shown the same spirit. Not now. Now the Fritzes in Belgium were angry and embittered that they had a war on their hands. A wounded prisoner who spoke some English scowled at Walsh. “Your folk are traitors to Aryanhood. You are traitors to Western civilization.”

“Too bloody bad, mate,” Walsh said cheerily. “Want a fag?” He held out a packet of Navy Cuts.

“
Danke
.” The
Landser
took one. Walsh gave him a light. After a deep drag, he went on, “Wait until you see our
geheime
weapons. Then you sing a not so happy song.”

“What’s
geheime
?” asked Walsh, whose German didn’t run much further than
Hände hoch!

“It is secret,” the German answered after a little thought of his own.

“What d’you mean, it’s secret? You’ll sing like a canary if we want you to,” Walsh growled. Neither of them had enough of the other’s language to clear up the confusion in a hurry. Light did dawn at last. Walsh went on, “Well, what kind of secret weapons have you got?”

“If I knew, they would not secret be,” the Fritz said. “But the
Führer
has them promised, and the
Führer
is always right.”

“My left one,” Walsh jeered. That meant nothing to the German, and the sergeant didn’t bother explaining. He sent the prisoner off to the rear to let someone who could really talk to him ask him questions. He even told the men taking him back not to do for him unless he tried to run for it. With one arm all bandaged up, that didn’t seem likely, but you never could tell.

The Tommies pushed toward Chimay, one more place that had seen a boatload of hard fighting a generation earlier. The Germans pushed back every chance they got. Whenever they had to abandon a farmhouse or a village, they booby-trapped it to a fare-thee-well. One luckless Englishman incautiously lifted a toilet seat and never got the chance to flush.

“Could have buried him in a jam tin, the bloody twit,” a pioneer told Walsh. He chuckled nastily. “He was bloody afterwards—I’ll tell you that.”

“Pity the Belgians didn’t warn him,” Walsh remarked.

“Those buggers?” The military engineer spat. “Likely tell! Odds are better they would’ve warned a German.”

Walsh spat, too. He knew what the other man was talking about. “You ever run up against the Walloon Legion?”

“The Rexists’ collabos?” The pioneer shook his head. “Haven’t had that pleasure yet. Nice to think I’ve missed something, any road.”

“They’re worse than the Germans, to hell with me if they’re not,” Walsh said. “Your Fritz, now, chances are he’s a conscript. He’s a good enough soldier—the Fritzes always seem to be, damn them. But he won’t always have that fire in his belly, if you take my meaning.”

“Oh, yes.” The pioneer nodded.

Thus encouraged, Walsh warmed to his theme: “The Walloon Legion, though, they’re all volunteers. They have to convince the Nazis they’re mean enough to deserve to carry a Mauser. And once they get to, they don’t dare let the side down. The next Rexist bastard who surrenders will be the first. They were Nazis before the shooting even started, and they likely expect we’ll shoot them out of hand.”

“And do we?” the other man asked in interested tones.

“I never have.” Walsh left it there. Quite a few English soldiers reckoned the Walloon Legion traitors and did give them short shrift. War was a nasty business any way you looked at it. He wondered whether it really had been glorious back before machine guns and poison gas. Maybe … as long as a poet was writing from a safe distance.

More English tanks accompanied the infantry than had been true the last time Walsh was on the Continent during the Germans’ winter rush toward Paris. These machines were faster and better armed than the early models, too. All the same, the high command didn’t have the panache with them that the chaps on the other team did. But Walsh was glad to have them around even so. They made him feel safer, whether he truly was or not.

For a little while, he hoped the Allies could do unto Germany as Hitler’s minions had done unto them a few years earlier. The English and French were pushing forward, after all. A reversed blitzkrieg would be sweet. His side had finally learned not to spread their armor all along the line in penny packets, but to mass it so it might actually accomplish something. The Fritzes were hard schoolmasters, but their lessons stuck.

He soon discovered they had more of those lessons than they’d taught in 1938 and 1939. That wounded POW who bragged of secret weapons might have known what he was talking about after all. British tanks rattled across the field between Chimay and another small town called Marienbourg. Walsh and his men loped along between them to discourage
Landsers
from sneaking up and chucking grenades through the tanks’ hatches.

Something
moved in amongst the bare-branched trees of an orchard ahead. “That’s a tank,” a Tommy called.

“Well, what if it is?” one of his buddies replied. “We’ve got a few o’ them buggers our own selves.”

Walsh felt very much the same way. He wasn’t scared to death of Panzer IIIs or IVs any more, not when he had armor of his own at hand. Odds were his side would have more machines than the Nazis did, so sooner or later Fritz would have to pull back.

This tank came out of the orchard into the open when the Tommies were still more than a mile away. At first, Walsh thought it was a Panzer IV with a long gun: a formidable opponent, but one who had to be suicidal to show himself like that. It did seem large for a Panzer IV. Even so …

As soon as it opened fire, he realized it was no Panzer IV. Two shots smashed two English Valentines. The other English tanks started shooting back. Their AP rounds bounced off the German monster’s armor. Almost contemptuously, it knocked out another Valentine, and then a Matilda II.

The English crews were brave. They tried to get closer, to give their plainly outclassed guns some kind of chance against this … whatever it was. That only made them easier targets. Methodically, as if it had all day, the German tank murdered them. One pillar of greasy black smoke after another marked their pyres.

“They put an 88 in the dirty bastard!” Alistair Walsh heard the horror in his own voice. With an 88 and the thick armor they obviously also had, that German crew could kill every single tank bearing down on them. If they got enough ammo, chances were they could kill every tank England had on the Continent.

His countrymen inside the Matildas and Valentines needed only a couple of minutes more to come to the same conclusion. They broke off their attack and scurried back toward Chimay as fast as they could go. That wasn’t fast enough for two of them. The German behemoth didn’t disdain knocking them out as they retreated.

Then its coaxial machine gun also started chattering, as if to warn the English foot soldiers:
All right, I know you’re there, and that’s close enough
. By then, Walsh required no more convincing. He wouldn’t find out this afternoon what Marienbourg looked like. If he was very lucky, he’d get another glimpse of the ruins of Chimay.

THE VERY IDEA
of flying against enemy panzers inside Belgium affronted Hans-Ulrich Rudel. “They’ve got no business messing about here!” he fumed to his radioman and rear gunner. “They agreed this was part of the
Reich
’s sphere of influence when they made peace with us.”

Sergeant Dieselhorst was considerate enough to blow his stream of cigarette smoke away from Hans-Ulrich. “And then they unagreed when they broke the truce … sir,” he said, plainly giving his pilot the benefit of the doubt by using the honorific.

“But they aren’t supposed to do that,” Rudel complained.

“Well, the only way to stop them is to blow them up,” Dieselhorst answered. “If we don’t do that in Belgium, chances are we’ll have to do it inside of Germany. Then we’d be blowing up our own people, too.”

“Mm. You’ve got something there, I suppose.” Rudel’s nod was reluctant, but a nod nonetheless. “Much better that we should blow up Belgians. Especially these miserable Walloons. They’re nothing but a bunch of Frenchmen flying the wrong flag.”

This time, Albert Dieselhorst pointed to the medal Hans-Ulrich wore around his neck every waking moment when he wasn’t bathing or entertaining someone of the female persuasion. “I saw in one of the service papers that they gave a
Ritterkreuz
to a Walloon.”

“You’re joking!” Hans-Ulrich said.

“So help me.” Dieselhorst raised his right hand, first and second fingers slightly crooked above it, as if he were swearing an oath. “For conspicuous bravery against the Ivans. The
Führer
presented it to him personally.”

All that detail convinced Hans-Ulrich the noncom wasn’t making up the story to annoy him. He smelled politics just the same. “Must be to keep the Rexists happy—and to keep them in line.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Sergeant Dieselhorst chuckled raspily. “Even if that sounds more like something I’d come out with than what I’d expect from you. I’m surprised you didn’t notice the piece, though. From what it said, Hitler really liked that guy.”

“He’s lucky, whoever he is,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“I guess so,” Sergeant Dieselhorst replied, in tones ambiguous enough that Rudel had trouble telling whether he was agreeing or showing doubt. The sergeant went on, “Any which way, if we find Tommies or real French fries in amongst the Walloons, we’ve got to do for them.”

“
Ja
,” Hans-Ulrich said, still with no marked enthusiasm. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to kill Englishmen and Frenchmen. He did, with all his heart. He hated them far more fiercely than he had when the war was new. If only they’d stayed on the
Reich
’s side against the godless Reds, the filthy doctrine of Communism might have been wiped off the face of the earth by now.

As things were, Russia not only remained in the fight, the Ivans were gaining ground in the East. And, like so many rooks and carrion crows, England and France were doing their best to peck bits off Germany even before she was dead.

That she might die was what infuriated and depressed Hans-Ulrich at the same time. He could see that the
Führer
’s foreign policy had failed, and might have failed disastrously. He could see it, yes, but he had no idea what to do about it or even what to think. It was an eventuality for which nothing in his life or training prepared him.

Right now, the only thing he saw worth doing—and the only thing that would keep him out of the stockade—was to fly against the foe whenever he got the chance … and whenever the
Luftwaffe
decided he could do it. With two fronts to cover, German fighters were spread thin. With none of them in the neighborhood, anything the RAF and the
Armée de l’Air
flew shot Stukas down without breaking a sweat.

These days, he couldn’t do as he’d done against the Russians: smash a panzer, rise into the sky to dive again, smash another, and then repeat several more times. Unlike the Reds, the Western Allies had almost as many radio sets as the Germans. Their planes would be on you by the time you were swooping down on your second panzer. So you blasted one, got out of there as fast as you could, and then tried to find another one to kill somewhere else.

It was inefficient. When Hans-Ulrich complained about it, Sergeant Dieselhorst returned him to reality with a single pungent line: “Getting a shell through the motor and going down in flames is pretty fucking inefficient, too … sir.” After that, Hans-Ulrich found other things to complain about.

An order from the
Führer
came to all men fighting on the ground and in the air. No one was to retreat any more, Hitler declared. German forces were to die where they stood if they couldn’t advance.
Thus we best protect the sacred soil of the
Reich
against enemy desecration
, the directive thundered.

No one in the squadron said anything after Colonel Steinbrenner read the order aloud. The CO’s voice showed nothing of what he thought about the typewritten words on the sheet of paper he held. He might have been reading out the
Führer
’s laundry list.

He might have been, but he wasn’t. Nobody said anything while the squadron was assembled in a mass, no. But after Colonel Steinbrenner turned away, small knots of friends formed and started hashing it out. They were knots whose members trusted one another not to betray them to the
Gestapo
.