“What did they do to get it like this?” he asked Demange. If the veteran didn’t know everything, he sure didn’t admit it. “It looks like somebody ironed the whole place.”
“We spent billions of francs building the Maginot Line, like I was talking about a few days ago,” Demange answered. “How much do you suppose the Poles would have to lay out to make themselves some mountain ranges?”
Luc hadn’t looked at it like that. After a moment’s thought, he nodded. “Yeah, that’s about what it would take, isn’t it?” He clicked his tongue between his teeth as another kilometer of plain rolled by. “But what happens because they can’t make mountains?”
Lieutenant Demange’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a horrible grin. “What happens? I’ll tell you what happens, my little cabbage.” He made as if to pat Luc on the cheek. Luc knocked his hand away. Unfazed, Demange finished, “Germans and Russians happen, that’s what.”
“Mm.” Luc nodded again. “Must be fun being a Pole, huh?”
“Well, some of the broads aren’t half bad,” Demange said, and Luc nodded one more time. Some of the women he’d seen were spectacular beauties, with more stuff to hold on to than you could shake a stick at. But, again, Demange wasn’t done. He gave his verdict with the air of a judge passing sentence: “Except for that, you couldn’t pay me enough to be a Pole.”
Once more, Luc didn’t care to try to tell him he was wrong. When the people running your country saw the Nazis as the lesser of two evils-and when they might well prove right-you were, not to put too fine a point on it, in deep shit.
Once they got east of Warsaw, they started passing through country that had been fought over. It all looked much too familiar to Luc: the wrecked farmhouses, the untended fields, the rusting hulks of tanks and trucks, the cratered ground, the occasional crashed airplane, the hasty graves marked by homemade wooden crosses or just by rifles topped with helmets. The farther east they went, the worse the fighting looked to have been.
Then things changed again. Without warning, signs stopped making any sense at all. Luc could no more understand Polish than he could fly, but he could try to sound out the incomprehensible words. Chances were he was botching them worse than Poles botched French, but he could try. When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything…
When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything, they weren’t in Poland any more. They were in the USSR. The Germans had the same problem here. Luc saw quite a few of their signs importantly pointing this way and that, stark black letters on a snowy ground. He didn’t read German, either, though more of the words looked familiar than they did in Polish. But even seeing letters he could understand felt oddly reassuring.
The train stopped. Luc expected silence outside the car now that the noise from the engine and the wheels was gone. Instead, he heard something like far-off thunder. Somebody’s artillery was going to town.
Lieutenant Demange gave him that dreadful grin again. “Well, we won’t have to go real far to find the front, will we?”
“No. What a pity,” Luc said, for all the world as if he meant it. Demange’s sour chuckle said he understood.
A German officer came up to the detraining Frenchmen and immediately started shouting orders-in his own language, of course. None of the soldiers in khaki moved. Luc knew that, even if he did speak German, he would sooner lose a nut than admit it. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one here who felt that way.
His government could make him board a train. It could ship him east. But it couldn’t turn him into a good ally. If the Germans didn’t happen to like that, well… What a pity. For the first time since stepping down onto Soviet soil, he smiled.
A dormouse might find room to sleep inside a Panzer II. An ordinary human being didn’t stand a chance. Theo Hossbach and his crewmates did the next best thing: they dug out a space under the little panzer, using its armored chassis and tracks to protect them from anything the Ivans threw their way.
It was crowded under there, but less crowded than inside the machine. Not so many sharp metal corners to catch you in the knee or the elbow or the side of the head, either. And Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt got along pretty well. They shared cigarettes and food and, whenever they could liberate some, vodka.
“I didn’t like those clouds late this afternoon,” Stoss said as they were settling down. “Looked like rain.”
“Smelled like rain, too. Still does,” Witt put in, wrinkling his nose in the fading, gloomy light. “Wet dust-know what I mean?”
Adi nodded. So did Theo. One of the reasons you dug in under your panzer was to give the beast room to settle. If the ground was soft, it could settle enough to squash you flat unless you were careful. And, of course, it would settle more if rain softened things.
But they’d dug enough of a cave so they wouldn’t have to worry about that. Which didn’t mean Theo didn’t worry. Theo always worried. He had reason to worry here, too. When the fall rains started in this part of the world, they didn’t stop for six weeks or so. All the roads that weren’t paved turned to bottomless lengths of ooze. The next paved road Theo saw more than a couple of kilometers outside a Soviet city would be the first.
That was on the panzer commander’s mind, too. “You know, our maps eat shit,” he remarked, not quite apropos of nothing.
“You bet,” Adi Stoss agreed. “What they call main highways are horrible dirt tracks. And the secondary roads-the ones on the maps, I mean-mostly aren’t there at all for real.”
“The railroads suck, too,” Witt said. Once soldiers started bitching, they commonly had a hard time stopping. “Why did the fucking Ivans pick a wider gauge than everybody else in Europe?”
“So we couldn’t use our rolling stock on their lines when a war started,” Adi answered. “It works, too.”
By the same token, the Russians couldn’t use their cars and engines farther to the west. Their planners must have been afraid they were more likely to retreat than to advance when they banged heads with Germany. On the evidence of two wars, those planners had known what to fear.
Theo pulled his blanket over his head. Adi and Hermann kept talking for a while, but they lowered their voices. Theo fell asleep as if sledgehammered. Anybody who said war wasn’t a wearing business had never been through one.
He woke early the next morning to a soft, insistent drumming on the panzer overhead and on the ground all around. No wonder it had looked like rain the afternoon before. No, no wonder at all. His lips shaped a soundless word: “Scheisse.”
His comrades stirred a few minutes later. They swore, too, not at all silently. “Break out the soup spoons,” Adi said. “The easy advances just quit being easy.”
“Maybe things will pick up again after the hard freeze comes and we aren’t stuck in the mud all the goddamn time.” Witt tried to look on the bright side of things.
“Yeah, maybe.” Adi didn’t sound as if he believed it. Theo didn’t believe it, either. Just then, a tiny rill trickled down the dirt they’d thrown up from under the panzer and into their little cave. Adi sighed theatrically. “Forty days and forty nights-isn’t that right?”
It was right in the Biblical sense. It was also about how long the fall rains in Russia would last. The panzer crewmen glumly emerged into a world that had changed.
The rain pattered down out of a sky that reminded Theo of nothing so much as the bellies of a lot of dirty sheep. It cut visibility to a couple of hundred meters at best. Beyond that, everything was lost in a curtain of murk and mist. A hooded crow on the roof of a burnt-out barn sent the Germans a nasty look, as if to say the evil weather was their fault.
Sorry, bird, Theo thought. It’s not us. Our generals will be tearing out their hair-the ones who still have hair, anyhow. The rest will throw down their monocles and cuss. His opinion of the Wehrmacht ’s senior commanders was not high. His opinion of other armies’ leadership was even lower.
Adi stooped and eyed the Panzer II’s tracks. Sure as hell, it was getting muddy. Sure as hell, the panzer was sinking into the mud. The driver mournfully shook his head. “Going anywhere in this crap will be fun, won’t it?” he said.
Witt nodded to Theo. “Get on the horn with the regiment,” he said. “See what we’re supposed to do today. If we’re lucky, they’ll tell us to hold in place.”
“Right,” Theo said. The panzer commander didn’t sound as if he expected them to be lucky. Since Theo didn’t, either, he just climbed into the panzer and warmed up the radio set.
