strafing the feinting column. A few seconds after that, Stukas dove down out of the sky like ugly falcons, their Jericho Trumpets screaming fit to jolt a man’s soul right out of his body. And in case the Jericho Trumpets fell down on the job, 500kg bombs weren’t half bad for spreading terror around, either.
Walsh dove under a lorry-the best cover he could find. He would roll out to fire a shot or two at the planes overhead, then duck back again. Those weren’t Italian pilots flying German planes. Black crosses and swastikas declared who was at the controls. For reasons of his own, Hitler had decided to jump into the war in Africa.
With both feet, too-manmade thunder off to the east said the real striking column was catching hell, too. Tobruk might fall, but it sure as the devil wouldn’t fall day after tomorrow.
Rain in Russia meant panzers went nowhere fast. Theo Hossbach knew that as well as any German soldier in the USSR. With the wider Ostketten, his Panzer III was less likely to bog down, but swift thrusts and dashes were a thing of the past.
The Ivans slowed down in the mud, too. Their ponderous KV-1s had as much trouble with it as any German panzer. T-34s, though, chugged through goop Theo wouldn’t have wanted to try even with Ostketten. Adi was right-the T-34 wasn’t a perfect panzer. But it was kilometers out in front of whichever machine ran second.
And so, for the time being the Wehrmacht would try to hang on to what it had already gained instead of pushing deeper into Russia. Maybe, once a hard freeze came, the Panzertruppen could have another go at Smolensk. In the meantime, units settled down in villages and on collective farms to wait out the mud time.
A couple of platoons from Theo’s company based themselves on a kolkhoz southwest of Smolensk. A few of the buildings remained more or less in one piece. The Ivans who’d fled the farm had slaughtered some of their livestock and driven the rest with them when they headed east. Hitler planned on turning European Russia into Germany’s breadbasket. No one in the Reich had seemed to realize Stalin would have plans of his own. The Germans might gain ground, but they’d draw as little benefit from it as the Russians could manage.
Like any sergeant worth the paper he was printed on, Hermann Witt believed idle hands were the Devil’s playground. “If our panzer isn’t going anywhere for a while, then by God we’ll make sure it goes like anything when we do start moving again,” he declared.
Theo wasn’t the only one who had no trouble containing his enthusiasm. “What? Stand in the rain and sink into the mud while we screw around with the engine?” Adi Stoss said.
“In a word, yes,” Witt answered. “Do you think I won’t be there with you, passing you spanners and pliers and fan belts and whatever else you happen to need? I’ll be messing with the ironmongery, too, you know.”
Adi nodded-reluctantly, but he did. So did Theo. Sergeant Witt was not a man to stay dry where his crew got wet, nor a man to stay clean where they got dirty. He made a good panzer commander, in other words. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be a pain in the fundament.
The new guys were no more enamored of busting their humps in the rain and the ooze than the crew’s old- timers. “If I had a pretty girl there with me, now, not some hairy, smelly old sergeant-” Kurt Poske said.
“You’d come down venereal in about a minute flat,” Witt broke in.
Affronted, Poske shook his head. “I can last a lot longer than that.”
Once they got the bitching out of their systems, they fell to work. They tore down the engine, rain or no rain, mud or no mud. They bore-sighted both machine guns. Lothar Eckhardt calibrated and adjusted the sights for the main armament. They checked every link of their tracks, and got the track tension left and right to just where Sergeant Witt and Adi wanted it.
And Theo serviced his radio set. It still worked all right, but a couple of the tubes plainly wouldn’t last much longer. He swapped in a spare for one, but couldn’t match the second. To his annoyance, none of the other half- dozen radiomen at the kolkhoz had-or would admit to having-that tube, either. He’d gone and talked to all those relative strangers, and they hadn’t been able to help him? It hardly seemed fair.
Unhappily, he reported his difficulty to Sergeant Witt. Witt rubbed his chin, considering. “How long will the old one last?” he asked.
Theo shrugged. “A day? Six months?” He shrugged again. As usual, he talked as if he had to pay for each word expended.
“All right. Next time a Kettenrad comes along, hop a ride back to regimental HQ and snag a new one,” Witt said. “Snag more than one, if you can. Maybe we can swap some of the spares for other stuff we need.”
Muttering didn’t count as words. Neither did Theo’s resigned sigh. Most of the men at regimental headquarters were real strangers, not the relative kind. He would rather have tackled a T-34 with a Panzer II than have anything to do with them, no matter how much sense Witt’s order made.
Two days later, a Kettenrad — a motorcycle with a track instead of a rear wheel-brought mail up to the kolkhoz. When it started back, Theo sat in the sidecar. He carried his Schmeisser. You never could be sure the Wehrmacht had cleared out all the Indians (the common German name for enemy soldiers).
He didn’t have to use the machine pistol on the way to the village the regimental bigwigs had taken as their own. Babushkas cooked for the headquarters staff. Old men with Tolstoyan beards cut their firewood. Younger women probably served them other ways.
Theo didn’t have to ask questions to find the machine shop. Following his ears toward a smithy’s clangor got him there. He stood and waited to be noticed. Eventually, one of the mechanics asked, “Well, what do you need?” He held out the failing tube. The mechanic turned and yelled, “Hey, Helmut! Here’s a guy for you!”
The bespectacled Helmut plainly cared more about radio sets and their parts than about his fellow human beings. Theo got on fine with him, in other words. And he had and could spare four tubes of the model Theo needed. Theo stowed them in his greatcoat pockets.
He wondered how he’d get back to the kolkhoz. Witt hadn’t said anything about that. He was walking up the village’s muddy main street (all the other streets were muddy, too) when someone called, “Hey! Yeah, you-the goalkeeper!”
That made Theo stop. He turned. At first, he didn’t recognize the Landser coming toward him. Then, to his dismay, he did. It was the fellow who claimed he’d seen Adi play football before the war. Theo would rather have met up with a Russian ambush.
“How are you doing?” the guy asked, as if they were old friends. Theo doled out a shrug. He didn’t want to talk to this fellow, who was nothing but trouble-and worse trouble because he had no idea how much trouble he was. Sure as hell, he went on, “And how’s your buddy, the footballer?”
Several possibilities ran through Theo’s mind. The truth was among them, but he didn’t let it bother him for long. Saying Adi’d been killed seemed better, but Mr. Snoopy here might suspect that and try to check it out. How about some play-acting instead?
With a guttural growl, Theo raised the Schmeisser and pointed it at the Landser ’s belly button. The safety was still on, but he didn’t figure the other guy would notice fine details. “You fucking son of a bitch!” he ground out. “So you’re the asshole who tipped him to the blackshirts, and now you’re here to gloat? I ought to blow your balls off-if you’ve got any.”
The guy in Feldgrau went whiter than skim milk. “N-N-N-” He couldn’t manage a “Nein!” till the fourth try. Desperately, he went on, “I didn’t do that! I wouldn’t do that! I’m no rat! On my mother’s name, I swear it.”
What Theo said about his mother would have got him murdered if he weren’t the one holding the machine pistol. “And that’s bullshit, too,” he added.
“It isn’t! Honest to God, will you listen to me?” the Landser said. “That time after the game, I just wanted to say how good he was. How was I supposed to know he’d get his long johns in a twist?” That was what Theo thought he said, anyhow. To a man from Breslau, the other guy’s broad Bavarian dialect came within shouting distance of being a foreign language.
“ Somebody reported him. You sure looked like a good bet.” Theo let his synthetic anger cool. He lowered the Schmeisser-a little. “Why don’t you just fuck off? I still don’t trust you. And if I ever see you again, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
Gabbling thanks and apologies and who knows what, the other fellow beat it. Theo spotted another Kettenrad. He’d been talking. A little more wouldn’t hurt… much. Damned if he didn’t get himself a lift back to the kolkhoz. Every once in a while, words had their uses.
And Sergeant Witt beamed when he displayed the four tubes. “There you go!” He clapped Theo on the back. “And you’ll save the one that’s going bad, too, right? If it isn’t all the way dead, you can get a little more out of it.” Theo nodded; he’d already thought of that. Witt went on, “Anything else going on at HQ?”
