Herb took a last drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out in a brass ashtray on the end table by his chair, and lit another one. A thin, straight whisper of smoke rose from the ashtray till he noticed and did a proper job of killing the butt. In a low, troubled voice, he said, “You see stories buried at the bottom of page nine in the paper: pieces where the Russians claim the Germans are massacring Jews.”
“Uh-huh. You do. You don’t see a heck of a lot of stories where the Germans deny it, either,” Peggy said.
“I know.” Herb smoked the new cigarette in quick, fierce puffs. “I’d always thought it was because claims like that weren’t even worth denying, know what I mean? Now I wonder.”
“I’ve wondered all along,” said Peggy, who’d seen the fun the Nazis had with Jews ever since the day they invaded Czechoslovakia. She’d done more than wonder, in fact. She’d believed every word.
“We should do something about that,” Herb said.
“Toss me your cigarettes, will you?” Peggy said, liking him very much. He was the best kind of American. Show him something wrong and he wanted to set it right. The only trouble was, Europe didn’t work that way. So much history piled up on the hatreds there that sometimes pinning the blame was impossible after all this time. Which didn’t stop people from slaughtering one another in carload lots to try to drown an ancient slight in blood.
Good American tobacco helped her not think about any of that for a little while. Maybe, if all the Europeans and the Japs were this prosperous, they wouldn’t want to smash in their neighbors’ skulls with pickaxes any more.
Or maybe they would, but they’d choose a fancier grade of pickaxe to do their dirty work. That struck Peggy as much too likely. She shook her head. The more you looked at this old world, the more fouled up it seemed to be. And she hadn’t even started drinking yet.
Chapter 14
Theo Hossbach knew the way to Smolensk. Whenever his Panzer III and the other machines in the regiment turned toward the Soviet stronghold, the Ivans fought twice as hard as they did the rest of the time. And, considering how much trouble they made any time at all…
He didn’t think the old Panzer II in which he’d gone through so much with Hermann Witt and Adi Stoss would have survived this campaign. No sooner had that gone through his head than he laughed at himself. Of course the old panzer wouldn’t have survived the campaign. It damn well hadn’t.
So now he’d had to get used to two new crewmen. All things considered, he would have been happier charging a Red Army machine gun with a Luger. The Russians could only kill him. They wouldn’t want to try to get to know him.
He had new duties, too, but that wasn’t so bad. Now he sat up front in the panzer, next to Adi, with the radio set between them. He could see out. He needed to see out, because he was in charge of the bow machine gun as well as the radio. He could use them both at once if he had to, controlling the gun with a padded mount that accommodated his forehead.
Getting used to two new people’s habits seemed much harder. Kurt Poske liked to sing and whistle to himself. Sometimes the loader didn’t even realize he was doing it. Theo wanted to reach back and smash his kneecap with a wrench. It might have been better had Poske managed to stay on key. On the other hand, it might not. He still would have been there.
Lothar Eckhardt, by contrast, cracked his knuckles. Everybody probably did that once in a while, but the gunner did it all the time. It sounded like gunfire coming from behind Theo. He could have come up with a million noises he would rather have heard.
A Panzer II’s turret had room for only one man. Sergeant Witt had had to command the panzer and load and fire the cannon and the coaxial machine gun. That left him as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with the hives, but he did it for a long time. He didn’t need to any more, not with this bigger, more modern machine. But everything seemed to come with a price.
Driver and bow gunner/radioman could talk to each other without their crewmates’ hearing. They could, but mostly they didn’t. Theo didn’t talk much no matter what. Adi made more noise, but he respected his comrade’s peculiarities. That was one of the things that made soldiering beside him a pleasure.
As they rattled along one morning, Theo found a question escaping him: “You all right with the new guys?”
Adi glanced over in surprise. A sentence from Theo was like a couple of chapters from anybody else. “Ja,” he answered, pitching his voice so it wouldn’t carry back to the turret. “Pretty much. We’d all be dead by now if they didn’t shoot straight.”
He had that right, no two ways about it. Eckhardt had been a pretty good gunner before he got this slot. The Reich ’s training centers took care of that. And Sergeant Witt, with his own wealth of experience, made the kid better than he had been. Except for singing and whistling, Poske did all right in action, too. Loader was the most junior position in the five-man crew.
None of that had much to do with what Theo meant, though. He tried again: “They give you a hard time?”
“Nah.” Stoss shook his head. “No worse than usual. Nothing a guy can’t handle, know what I mean?”
Theo nodded. Even the usual kind of ragging could rub a man raw. If Heinz Naumann, the guy who commanded the old Panzer II before Sergeant Witt, hadn’t got killed, he and Adi would have fought it out. Theo was sure of that. He was also pretty sure Adi would have done for the late sergeant. Lucky it didn’t happen-lucky for everybody but Naumann.
One more question formed in Theo’s head. He didn’t ask it. Like a cat, he had a very clear sense of limits.
An authoritative voice spoke into his earphones: “Look for Ivans ahead, map square Red-6.”
“Red-6. I hear you,” Theo responded, and relayed the news to Witt.
A brief pause followed. No doubt the panzer commander was checking his maps. German maps of Russia weren’t nearly so good as the people who printed them thought, but you did the best you could with what you had. Profanity followed the pause. “Now they tell us,” Witt said. “We’re already in square Red-fucking-6.”
As if on cue, machine-gun bullets clattered off the right side of the Panzer III’s hull. If not for the hardened steel, some of them would have punctured Theo. They sounded like pebbles tossed onto a corrugated-iron roof-but not enough like that. Pebbles on an iron roof might startle, but they wouldn’t scare the piss out of you.
Though he had a vision port over there, he didn’t want to open it. That might have let in a bullet or two, and he would rather have dealt with angry wasps. Wasps only made you wish you were dead. The Russians used old- fashioned, heavy, water-cooled machine guns, like the German Maxim from the last war. They weren’t very portable, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t chew holes in you once they did get set up.
“Panzer halt!” Sergeant Witt ordered, and Adi Stoss hit the brakes. The turret slewed sideways. Witt gave crisp commands. Eckhardt fired-once, twice. Shell casings clattered at the bottom of the fighting compartment. The stink of cordite filled the panzer. Witt grunted in satisfaction. “Forward again, Adi,” he said, and traversed the turret so it faced the front once more.
That machine gun wouldn’t bother anyone else. Theo still wondered how many other Ivans lurked over to the right. German foot soldiers would find out-probably the hard way. No trees off in that direction, so there probably weren’t any Red Army panzers lurking there. He could hope not, anyhow. He could-and he did.
He peered out through his forward vision port. That one boasted thick armor glass, like the stuff in a Stuka’s windshield. It also had a steel shutter to keep the glass from getting nicked when bullets started flying. Scars and divots on the armor glass said the shutter didn’t always get used. You needed to know what was going on… didn’t you?
Back in the Panzer II, Theo had never known what was going on, or no more than the radio and his crewmates told him. Now he could see out. Monkey curiosity made him keep doing it, too, though as often as not he couldn’t change anything. He could, and did, tell himself it was line of duty. He had the machine gun, after all. But a lot of the time he was just nosy.
