“What do you think the odds are?”
“Either she’ll change her mind or she won’t. Right now, you can toss a coin,” the Magyar answered. Grimacing, Vaclav nodded. If you tried to guess when you didn’t know enough, you were bound to end up looking like an idiot. The Magyar declined that dubious honor. Declining made sense. Vaclav still knew what he hoped.
Theo Hossbach didn’t like any SS men, as a general working rule. He disliked the Waffen — SS less than the other branches, though. Men who joined the SS intending to fight foreign foes took more risks than the ones who joined to hit prisoners who couldn’t fight back.
These bastards were still bastards. Unlike their comrades in the Black Corps, they were brave bastards. He’d seen that in France. Waffen- SS units there went straight at obstacles the Wehrmacht would have tried to outflank or would have ignored altogether. Sometimes taking a position was more expensive than it was worth.
So it seemed to the Wehrmacht, anyhow. So it certainly seemed to Theo. The SS men looked at things differently. Sometimes they bulled through where the Wehrmacht would have hesitated, perhaps not least because the enemy often thought they wouldn’t be crazy enough to attack here. Sometimes they got slaughtered for their trouble.
Not that Theo necessarily thought slaughtering SS men a bad idea… He did disapprove of waste, though. Even when the SS broke through, its butcher’s bill was higher than the Wehrmacht ’s would have been.
Right now, Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt were messing with their Panzer III’s transmission, trying to figure out which gear in the train didn’t want to mesh and whether they had or could get their hands on a replacement. “The Ivans don’t worry about shit like this,” Adi said. “Their drivers have a mallet next to their seat. When a gear doesn’t want to engage, they give the stick a good whack. That makes the son of a bitch behave.”
“You’re making that up,” Sergeant Witt said. “I know the Russians can be rude and crude with their equipment, but that’s over the line even for them.”
Lothar Eckhardt, the panzer’s gunner, and Kurt Poske, the loader, watched without saying much. They were both new men, much less experienced than the three veterans. Theo wished it were a new Panzer III, but no. Somebody else got the new machines. This one was a hand-me-down, not so old and beat-up as the Panzer II that was now being cannibalized for spare parts if its carcass had been brought in and quietly rusting if it hadn’t.
Adi raised his right hand with the first two fingers raised and crooked, as if he were swearing an oath in court. “Honest to God, Sergeant. I’ve seen the damn things with my own eyes.”
“Me, too.” Theo rarely contributed to the conversation, but a fact was a fact-and this one cost him only a couple of words.
“Well, fuck me,” Witt said mildly. Heinz Naumann wouldn’t have let his juniors get away with disagreeing with him, even when they were right-maybe especially when they were. Theo missed Naumann not a bit, and suspected Adi missed him even less than that. Seeing that a fact was a fact even when it wasn’t his fact was one of the many things that made Witt a better panzer commander than Naumann had ever dreamt of being.
Adi pounced with a wrench. Three minutes later, he held the culprit in the palm of his hand. “Will you look at that?” he said. “One tooth gone, and another one going. No wonder things were getting sticky.”
“No wonder at all,” Witt agreed. “Have we got a new one we can swap in?”
“I’m pretty sure we don’t,” Adi said.
Witt nodded unhappily. “I’m pretty sure you’re right.” He tossed the toothed steel disk to Eckhardt. “Go on back to the maintenance section and get a replacement. Check it out before you take it, too. Don’t let ’em give you one that’s had new teeth welded on. They’ll tell you it’s just as good, but that’s a bunch of crap.”
The kid looked shocked. He was very fair, and couldn’t have been above nineteen-he hardly needed to shave. “They’d try to dump defective stuff on us?”
“Listen to me.” Witt spoke with great conviction. “You know the Russians are the enemy, right? But your own side will screw you just as hard if you give ’em half a chance. Go on, now. Scoot.”
Theo wondered if Witt would ask Adi or him to go along with Eckhardt. But the sergeant didn’t. The new guys had to learn the ropes. Whenever you had the chance, you broke them in a little at a time. Trouble was, a fast- moving campaign-which this one had become, now that the mud was dry-didn’t always give you chances like that.
Witt pulled out a pack of Junos and offered everybody else a smoke. “We may as well take ten,” he said. “We sure aren’t going anywhere till he comes back with that gear.”
New green grass was pushing up through the dirt and through the gray-yellow dead growth from the year before. Theo sat down and sucked in smoke. Not far away, a skylark sang sweetly. The clear trilled notes couldn’t drown out the distant rumble of artillery, though. Theo cocked his head to one side, listening to the guns. Ours, he decided, and relaxed fractionally.
Another panzer crew was working on their machine at the far edge of the field. Resting infantrymen sprawled in clumps between the two panzers. They all wore SS runes on helmets and collar patches. They were eating or smoking or passing around water bottles that probably didn’t hold water. Some of them lay with their eyes closed, grabbing a little sleep while they could.
They were doing all the things Wehrmacht foot soldiers would have done, in other words. Theo still looked at them differently. Anybody could end up in the Army. He had, for instance. So had Adi Stoss. You had to volunteer for the Waffen — SS, and you wouldn’t do that unless you were a convinced Nazi. They wouldn’t take you unless they were sure you were a convinced Nazi, either, so that worked both ways.
One of the guys propped up on an elbow maybe ten meters away bummed a chunk of black bread from his buddy and squeezed butter onto it from a tinfoil tube. Theo’s stomach rumbled. He told it to shut up. It didn’t want to listen.
“Can you believe those stupid goddamn Frenchmen?” the trooper asked after he swallowed a heroic bite of bread.
“Jesus Christ, but that was chickenshit! For twenty pfennigs, I would’ve blown the fuckin’ froggies a new asshole with my Schmeisser,” answered the other man from the Waffen — SS. Theo’s stomach rumbled again. Once more, he told it to keep quiet. It might not want to listen, but all of a sudden he did.
The first fellow who wore the runes couldn’t have looked more disgusted had he tried for a week. “Once we finish with the Ivans, we’re gonna have to do for the froggies, all right,” he said. “It’s a hell of a note when we can’t give the Hebes what they deserve on account of our so-called friends don’t like it.” He spat in the dirt.
“Damn straight,” his friend agreed. “ Damn straight. This whole stupid, stinking war, it’s about Reds and kikes. If the Frenchmen can’t see that, tough shit for them, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
“Amen!” the first trooper said, as if in church. “The Fuhrer ’s gonna bring things around to the way they’re supposed to be, even if he’s got to wipe out all the goddamn Jews to do it.” The other fellow with the SS collar tab nodded, then started cleaning his submachine gun.
Ever so casually, Theo’s gaze swung toward Adi Stoss. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find Adi hopping mad, or else sizzling inside and trying to pretend he wasn’t. But the panzer driver lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the clouds drifting across the watery blue sky. If he’d paid any attention to what the infantrymen were saying, he gave no sign.
Lothar Eckhardt came back with the gear. He anxiously showed it to Sergeant Witt. “Is it all right?” he quavered. No doubt he was imagining bread and water, if not a blindfold and a last cigarette at dawn, if the answer was no.
The panzer commander carefully inspected the part. If it wasn’t all right, he would go back to the maintenance section and give those clowns a piece of his mind. But he nodded. “Looks good. They knew they couldn’t pull a fast one on you, so they didn’t even try.”
“Wow!” Eckhardt breathed.
“Now you and Kurt are going to install the son of a bitch,” Witt said. “The more you know about keeping your panzer running on your own, the better off you’ll be. One of these days, you’ll run into trouble where you can’t go off to the mechanics.”
Eckhardt and Poske both gulped. “I’m not sure we know how to do that, Sergeant,” the loader said, which could only mean We have no idea how to do that.
Witt chuckled; he understood at least as well as Theo. “Adi and I will coach you,” he said. “It isn’t black magic. It isn’t even real hard, as long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty. And you’d damn well better not.
