The Big Switch

Chapter 26

The Ivans were getting frisky. Somewhere a long way ahead lay Smolensk. The orders for Willi Dernen’s regiment said it was one part of a giant pincer that would help encircle the Russian city. But to encircle a place, you first had to nip round behind it. The orders came out of Berlin, and Berlin didn’t get what was going on all these kilometers to the east.

Willi hadn’t shaved since… he couldn’t remember quite when. His face fungus helped a little when it came to keeping his cheeks and chin warm. It would have done more if it weren’t full of rime from his breath. And he was better off than many. He had his greatcoat and the sheepskin vest underneath. And he had a pair of fine felt boots some Russian didn’t need any more. His feet wouldn’t freeze… too soon.

Compared to those of his buddies still stuck with Wehrmacht -issue gear, he was well off. Compared to the French and English, whose cold-weather clothing was nowhere near so good as what the Germans made, he was incredibly lucky.

But the Poles didn’t have to scrounge to get their hands on stuff like this. They knew ahead of time what these winters were like. Seeing German troops collect pitying stares from a bunch of damn Poles was galling, to say the least.

Red Army men had clothes made for this hideous weather, too. They also had gun oil that didn’t freeze up when it got really cold, unlike the fancy shit the Germans used. Willi carried a little tube of that, taken from the dead Russian who’d supplied him with valenki. The action on his Mauser still worked just fine.

He shared the gun oil with his friends. He even shared it with Awful Arno, more from expediency than affection. Baatz might be the world’s biggest pain in the ass, but he was almost as dangerous to the bastards on the other side as he was to his own men.

Fighting went back and forth, back and forth. German panzer lubricants didn’t like the bitter weather any better than German gun oil did. Sometimes you could get panzer support, sometimes not. Russian panzers didn’t seem bothered. They had wider tracks than German machines, too. They could go through or over mud and snowdrifts that made German panzers bog down.

Squatting by a fire in a hut in a wrecked village, Willi said, “If the Ivans even halfway knew what the fuck they were doing, they could run us back into Poland in about a week and a half.”

“Nah.” Adam Pfaff shook his head. He was as grimy and shaggy as Willi. “We’d hang on for two weeks, easy.”

Arno Baatz crouched by that crackling blaze, too. He didn’t growl at Pfaff for defeatism. He just bummed a papiros off of him. There might not be much tobacco in the damn things, but what there was was a lot stronger than German-issue smokes. Willi also had some papirosi in a greatcoat pocket. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of dead Russians to frisk.

“Poor brave stupid shitheads,” he went on. “Their officers tell ’em to do something, they keep on trying to do it, no matter how dumb it is.”

“You mean, like charging off to surround Smolensk?” Adam Pfaff inquired. Awful Arno stirred at that, but for a wonder he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was taking mental notes. If he was-well, fuck him.

And Willi shook his head. “No, not like that. We’re trying all kinds of ways to do it.”

“None of ’em’s come close to working yet,” Pfaff said. Arno Baatz stirred again.

Willi ignored him. “But they’re all different,” he said. “The Russians keep doing the same goddamn thing over and over, no matter how many of ’em get killed. It’s like they don’t care, or they don’t dare get any ideas for themselves.”

“Always more Russians to throw in,” Baatz said. For once in his life, he wasn’t even close to wrong. Soviet generals spent men the way a sailor on leave spent money on girls. More where those came from seemed to be their guiding principle. The Germans always killed more enemies than they lost themselves. But the Ivans kept on coming.

The thought had hardly crossed Willi’s mind before a sentry out at the edge of the village yelled, “Halt! Who goes there?” Only a burst from a Russian submachine gun answered him. The burst must have missed, because the German fired back and an MG-34-not too frozen to operate-chattered to irate life.

“Fuck!” Awful Arno grabbed his rifle. Like Willi, he’d slapped whitewash on the stock and barrel so the piece wouldn’t stand out against the snow. Adam Pfaff’s remained gray-not perfect camouflage, but not bad, either. Since whitewashing his own Mauser, Baatz had quit riding Pfaff about it.

“Urra! Urra!” The Russian battle shout dinned through the village. The Red Army soldiers were probably liquored up-their daily ration was a hundred grams of vodka, and their officers upped it when they went into action. Booze drove fear into the background.

Willi wished for a hundred grams of potent spirits himself. He burst out of the hut, Pfaff and Baatz at his heels. Bullets cracked past them. They ran toward the heaviest fighting at the eastern edge of the village.

Most of the Ivans wore white snow smocks, on the same principle as the whitewashed Mausers. The Poles had them, too. German quartermasters kept promising to produce some, and kept breaking promises. Some Landsers improvised their own from captured bedsheets, but there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Willi wished he had one. His Feldgrau greatcoat turned him into a big blot against the snowy background.

He flopped down behind the burnt and mashed wreckage of another hut and snapped off a shot at the oncoming Russians. One of the snowsuited figures went down. Was he hit or just taking cover himself? No way to tell, not from where Willi sprawled.

Adam Pfaff lay on his belly ten or fifteen meters away, also firing at the Ivans. “After we capture Smolensk…” he said, slapping a fresh five-round magazine onto his rifle.

“Fuck that shit,” Willi answered. “All I want to do is get out of this lousy place in one piece.”

“That’s on account of you’ve got your head on straight,” Pfaff said. “Now if the clowns in Berlin did, too…”

“Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Willi fired at another Russian.

Enemy fire eased off. None of the Germans in the little village relaxed. The Russians loved to play games like this, to lull their foes into a false sense of security and then jump on them again from a new direction.

Sure as hell, the next attack came in from the south. Mortar bombs burst here and there. Then it was another wave of drunken Ivans bawling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs.

This time, the Russians broke into the village. No matter how frigid the weather was, the work got very warm for a while. The MG-34 worked fearful execution among the Ivans. They couldn’t bring their heavier, clumsier machine guns up for close combat, but raked the village with them at long range.

Willi’s head might have been on a swivel. He tried to look every which way at once. “Adam!” he screamed. “Behind you!”

Pfaff heard. And the gray Mauser knocked over a Russian who would have rammed a bayonet through his kidney in another few seconds. Pfaff shot the Russian again, deliberately this time, to make sure he wasn’t shamming. He wouldn’t pull a Lazarus now, not with the top of his head blown off. His blood steamed in the snow.

“Obliged,” Pfaff said. “This is a whole bunch of fun, isn’t it?”

“If you say so,” Willi answered. The other Gefreiter chuckled.

Sullenly, the Russians pulled back. Bodies littered the ground, some in snow smocks over khaki, others wearing Feldgrau. Wounded men wailed. Injured Russians and Germans sounded pretty much alike. The Landsers kept a few wounded Ivans for questioning and disposed of the rest. It wasn’t as if the Red Army men wouldn’t have done the same to them.

Willi went back to that hut, hoping the fire was still burning. As a matter of fact, the hut was on fire-it had taken a direct hit from a mortar. Anything but fussy, Willi got as close to the flames as he could stand. Warmth meant more than anything else he could think of.

Adam Pfaff came up beside him, also soaking in heat like a lizard in the sun. “Smolensk… Moscow… All easy, right?” Pfaff said.

“Well, sure,” Willi drawled in a way that left no doubt about what he really thought. They both grinned. It wasn’t as if they could do anything about where fate-and the Wehrmacht -had stuck them. A Russian machine gun fired a burst from the woods beyond the fields that surrounded the village. Willi flopped down in the snow again, but no quicker than his friend.

“Reds bomb Scapa Flow! Read all about it!” a newsboy shouted, waving a paper on a London street corner. Alistair Walsh handed him a broad copper penny and got a Times in exchange.

Sure as the devil, the Russians had hit the great British naval base in the Orkneys. Walsh couldn’t imagine how they’d done it. The story told him. They evidently had some huge, lumbering four-engined bombers to which no one in the Royal Navy had given a second thought… till they lumbered southwest from Murmansk, struck the great anchorage, and droned away homeward before the RAF could give chase.

Radio Moscow’s claims as to the damage inflicted on our ships are grossly exaggerated, a Royal Navy spokesman has stated, the Times story said primly. Once upon a time not so long ago-before he resigned from the Army-Walsh would have been sure that was true. Trust the Russians ahead of his own government? Not a chance!

But there was a chance, and maybe a good chance. If a Bentley could run down a prominent critic of the government’s policy, what was safe after that? Not a thing, not so far as Walsh could see.

Not for the first time, he wondered if he was safe himself. He supposed so-he was too small a fish to worry the likes of Sir Horace Wilson. The same didn’t hold, though, for his newfound friends. That he should be friends with MPs still amazed him. If the wind had blown Rudolf Hess’ parachute a few fields over, odds were he’d still be a senior noncom today.

“Odds were I’d be happier, too,” he muttered. That, however, was easier to say than to prove. He might be fighting the Russians right this minute, and wondering how the hell his country came to make the big switch.

As things had worked out, he bloody well knew how. Whether he was better off knowing was a different question. Somebody’d once said you didn’t want to look too closely at what went into making sausages or politics. Walsh was damned if he could remember who the bright bastard was. Any which way, he’d hit it spot on.

Walsh walked down the street, soaking up more war news from the Times. Japanese troops had landed in the Philippines. The Yanks were fighting now, whether they liked it or not. And more Japanese troops had invaded French Indochina. More still were in Malaya, and others in the Dutch East Indies. He scanned the paper for reports that they’d landed in Madagascar, or possibly Peru. He didn’t see any. He supposed that was good news. Other good news about Japan seemed harder to find. None of the stories said anything of Japanese troops retreating. Wherever they’d landed, they were moving forward.

If the same were true of English troops in Russia… Walsh knew he still would have been disgusted at allying with Hitler’s Germany. But it wasn’t true. Winter had frozen the front line solid, except where the Red Army prodded at it. Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, and London denied any serious Soviet penetrations. They might all have been telling the truth. If they were, it would have been a world’s first for Radio Berlin.

With a grimace, Walsh chucked the paper into a rubbish bin. The Nazis had a particularly nasty radio traitor, an Irishman named William Joyce, who was usually called Lord Haw-Haw because of the posh, affected accent he could put on. Lots of people listened to him, though few took him seriously. Ever since the big switch, he’d been broadcasting variations on the theme of I told you so. It made Walsh want to chuck a rock or a pint mug at the wireless set every time the louse’s voice came out of it.

He’d just turned away from the bin when he noticed the skinny fellow with the fawn fedora and the big ears. He’d seen the man a couple of times before as he walked through London. He hadn’t paid much attention to him; London was the biggest city of the world, and full of people. Now he wondered if he was being followed.

Well, he could find out. He walked rapidly down the street and turned a corner. Then he stood in front of a shop window, pretending to admire a display of Wellingtons. Sure as hell, here came the little pitcher with the big ears. He jammed on the brakes when he saw Walsh going nowhere fast.

Walsh turned away from the Wellies and ambled on as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He rounded another corner. This next block had exactly what he was looking for: a deep doorway in which he could stand and wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. The little man walked past him, then stopped in dismay when he realized he no longer had his target in his sights. He turned around-and there stood Walsh, right behind him. “Hello, chum,” Walsh said, almost pleasantly. “Do we know each other?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the little man answered, sounding nearly as affected as Lord Haw-Haw. But his ears betrayed him: they flamed red.

Seeing that told Walsh he wasn’t imagining things. “Then why are you following me?” he demanded.

Even though the stranger’s ears went redder yet, he said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And I’m bloody sure you do.” If Walsh clouted the bugger right here, a bobby would bring him up on charges, and that wouldn’t be so good. He deliberately kept his hands in the pockets of his civilian topcoat. “Go tell whoever’s paying you that I’m wise to him, and he’d damn well better leave me alone from here on out.”

The little man licked his lips. “You don’t know who you’re messing with, mate,” he said, trying for bravado.

“Hell I don’t. You can tell that to Sir Horace himself, by Jesus,” Walsh said.

This time, the little man’s ears went white, as if he’d rubbed them with crushed ice. He wasted no more time trading words with Alistair Walsh. Instead, he ran off like a fox pursued by a prime pack of hounds.

“Cor!” a Cockney voice said from in back of Walsh. “Yer didn’t ’arf put the fear o’ God in ’im, did yer?”

“Whatever I gave him, he deserves worse,” Walsh said.

Later that day, he met Ronald Cartland and some of the other insurgent MPs at a pub not far from the Palace of Westminster. When he described his shadow, Cartland whistled thoughtfully. “I do believe I’ve made the acquaintance of that particular gentleman,” he said, knocking back the whiskey in his glass. “He gets his pay from Scotland Yard.”

“Bleeding hell!” Walsh burst out. “They’re making it into the Gestapo, then! He had no warrant from a judge, to give him the right to follow.”

“The government has no warrant for worse things than that,” Cartland said.

“Ah, well. They spy on us, we spy on them. They diddle us, we diddle them. The game’s not all one-sided, not by a long chalk.” One of Cartland’s comrades in insurgency did his best to wax philosophical.

Philosophy didn’t appeal to Alistair Walsh. “They tell people what to do. They tell the blasted country what to do, and the blasted country damned well does it. And we… We sit around in pubs and complain.”

“Oh, we do rather more than that,” Cartland said. “We do a good deal more than that, as a matter of fact. I’d tell you more, but the walls have ears.”

If Scotland Yard tapped telephones, if it used operatives to follow the likes of ex-Sergeant Walsh, no doubt it could and would plant microphones in the public houses the insurgents frequented. “God help the poor blighter who’s got to wade through all the other drivel-” another MP began.

“Before he wades through our drivel.” Cartland’s interruption neatly capped him.

“Talk is cheap,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to take the country back from them, is what we’ve got to do.”

By the way they eyed him, he might have been something escaped from a zoo. Or, then again, he might not. “There’s been no successful coup d’etat here since 1688,” Cartland said in musing tones. “Maybe it’s high time for another one.”

“Maybe it’s past time,” Walsh said, and he might not have been such a strange beast after all.

Even before the Nazis took over, German bureaucracy had been among the most formidable in Europe. German functionaries didn’t invent pseudo-rational reasons for denying requests: that was a French game. They didn’t casually lose or forget about papers, the way their Italian counterparts were known to do. Once a paper landed in a German file, it was there forevermore, and ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice. Efficiency.

Before the Nazis took over, Sarah Goldman’s father had taught her to admire Germanic efficiency. He hadn’t altogether changed his mind even when that efficiency began to be aimed at him.

Sarah, now, Sarah had a different opinion. The downside to German bureaucracy was that everything had to be perfectly aligned before anything moved. If a signature was missing, if a permission was not in place, if a rubber stamp was applied so that a few millimeters of colored ink came down outside the box officially designated for them, whatever you were trying to achieve ground to a halt until the defect could be remedied.

When you were trying to get married, that wore on the nerves even more than it did any other time. Sarah was convinced it did, anyhow.

The real trouble was, the Nazis didn’t want Jews getting married to begin with. They wanted fewer Jews in Germany, not more of them. But, damn them, they weren’t altogether stupid. They recognized that Jews denied the right to marry would cohabit without benefit of ceremony and registration, and would then produce more little Jews in spite of everything. And so they didn’t deny them the right to marry. They just made it as hard as they possibly could.

After yet another infuriating and fruitless afternoon wandering the corridors of Munster’s city hall, Sarah trudged home ready-eager-to bite nails in half. “Those rotten, filthy pigdogs!” she snarled to anyone who would listen: which meant her mother and father.

“That crazy Kafka, in Austria, saw all of this foolishness coming right after the last war,” her father said. “He couldn’t get his stories published. People thought they were impossible nonsense. Everybody laughed at him. But he’d have the last laugh now, if he were still alive.”

“Was he a Jew? Did they kill him for being a Jew?” Sarah asked.

“He was a Jew, all right, but that’s not what killed him,” Father answered. “He had consumption, and he died of it. He died young, poor devil. Or maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to live to see that he knew what he was talking about after all.”

Sarah had no way to guess about that. She said, “For all the trouble they’re putting me through, you’d think I was marrying an Aryan.”

“You wouldn’t have any trouble with them then,” Mother said.

“Huh?” Sarah replied.

“They’d tell you no, and that would be that.”

Father nodded. “New marriages between Jews and Aryans are as verboten as Jews’ serving in the Wehrmacht. We can’t pollute the state with our blood, and we can’t shed our blood for the state, either.” He still sounded bitter about that.

“One of the clerks asked me for a certificate showing my Aryan bloodlines,” Sarah said. “He got mad when I couldn’t give him one, even though I had the Jewish star right where I was supposed to.” She patted the front of her ratty coat. Even brown coal was in short supply for Jews, and the inside of the house got almost as cold as the outside. All the Goldmans wore plenty of clothes all the time.

“Too bad you couldn’t,” Father said. “I’ve heard there are some Jews who’ve bought themselves an Aryan pedigree. I’m only sorry I don’t have the connections to do it myself.”

“Or the money,” Mother put in.

“Or that,” he agreed.

“I don’t want to be an Aryan. I just want to be what I am and not have people hate me on account of it,” Sarah said. “Is that too much to ask for?”

“I didn’t used to think so. I was a grown man before I had to wonder. These days, though, the answer seems to be yes-it is too much to ask for,” Samuel Goldman said.

“They took over not long before my thirteenth birthday,” Sarah said. No need to wonder who they were. “I don’t even know what it’s like, being a grown-up without laws against me.”

“Neither did my great-grandfathers, but the laws against them weren’t as bad as these, and they came off one by one instead of getting piled on again and again.” Father sighed. “I used to believe in progress. I really did. Now? Now I wonder. How can you help wondering?”

“You think it’s progress that a professor of ancient history and classics at the university should become one of Munster’s finest pavement repairers?” Mother said.

Sarah stared at her. Father was usually the one who came out with those sardonic gibes. Mother was sunnier-except, all of a sudden, she wasn’t anymore.

Father chuckled self-consciously. “You give me too much credit, sweetheart. If you don’t believe me, ask my gang boss. If I’m anything more than one of Munster’s slightly below average pavement repairers, I’d be amazed.” He turned back to Sarah. “So what did the clerk say when you couldn’t give him the piece of paper that would have made his heart go pitter-pat?”

“I told him I was a Jew. Like I said, he could already see I was, but I told him anyhow.”

“Good. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. And then?”

“Then he told me he’d have to talk with-to consult with, he said-his superior, so he could get orders about what to do. And he slammed down the brass bars in front of his window thing, and he went away, and he didn’t come back.”

“He’ll be there tomorrow,” Mother said.

“I know.” Sarah was anything but delighted. “That means I have to go back there again, too. Just what I want!”

“Is Isidor having as much trouble getting his permission?” Father asked.

“He was the last time I talked to him, a couple of days ago.” Sarah still wondered whether she’d done the right thing when she said yes. Even though she and Isidor pleased each other in bed or wherever else they could find a little privacy, she couldn’t make herself believe they had a grand passion. And wasn’t that what marriage was supposed to be about? She made herself finish answering: “He makes it sound as though he’s having more tsuris than I am.”

“Well, you’re prettier than he is,” Father said. “If you think that doesn’t make a difference, you’re crazy.”

“It shouldn’t,” Hanna Goldman said.

“Which wasn’t what I said,” her husband replied, and so it wasn’t.

“The Nazis are harder on Jewish men than they are on women,” Sarah said. “They haven’t thrown Mother and me into a labor gang, for instance.”

“They’re soft on women any way you look at it,” Father said. “From bits and pieces I’ve heard, the other countries that are fighting have put a lot more women into war plants than the Reich has.”

“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” Mother said, with no irony a microphone was likely to pick up. That was what the Nazis wanted out of women, all right: children, cooking, and going to church. Anything else, anything more, was modern and degenerate-two words that often marched side by side in National Socialist propaganda.

“It will be interesting to see how long they can keep that up if the war against the Russians drags on and on.” Father might have been talking about a bacteriologist’s experiment, with cultures of germs growing on agar-agar in Petri dishes. But he wasn’t. The Nazis experimented with human beings, with whole countries, with whole continents.

So did the Communists. Maybe the war would show that one bunch of those gangsters or the other was wrong. Maybe it would end up showing that both bunches of gangsters were wrong. It looked that way to Sarah.

Which proved… what, exactly? She could almost hear her father’s dry voice asking the question. They might be wrong, but they were running things. And the past eight years she’d seen, without any room for doubt, that who had the whip hand carried more weight than who happened to be right.

Nobody’d come looking for Adalbert Stoss. Nobody’d come looking for anyone using another name, either. As far as Theo Hossbach was concerned, sometimes-hell, often-the very best thing that could happen was nothing at all.

He’d considered telling Adi it would be smart not to play football any more, for fear of giving himself away. But Adi had thought of that for himself. Besides, telling him not to play didn’t have a prayer of working. Whenever a match was on, the panzer men clamored for him because he played so well. How was he supposed to say no to them when they did?

So Theo did what Theo did best: he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t see the Munich man who’d recognized Adi from a Munster football pitch again. Maybe the fellow’d stopped a mortar bomb with his face. Maybe his unit had got shipped hundreds of kilometers away, to shore up the line against Russian counterattacks from the south. Maybe… Maybe a million things.

But that Landser wouldn’t be the only one. Sooner or later, somebody else would work out who-and, more to the point, what-Adi was. It might not matter. Despite the Nazis’ best efforts, not everybody cared. Theo certainly didn’t. Too many people did, though.

It also might not matter another way. Adi might end up slightly dead, or more than slightly, before any snoopy Germans cared about who he was. If he did, Theo had much too good a chance of ending up dead with him. The Russians didn’t really know how to fight with panzers. All the same, they had a lot of them, and they kept on trying. Not only that, but almost all of their machines mounted better guns and armor than a Panzer II.

And if the Ivans didn’t do for the aging machine’s crew, the Russian winter was liable to take care of it. Theo had never dreamt he would have to build a fire under the engine compartment to thaw out the lubricants before the panzer’s engine would turn over. You risked setting the panzer on fire and wrecking it. You also risked drawing Ivans with the flames. But if you didn’t build that fire, there you were, stuck in the snow without a prayer of starting. And so, morning after freezing morning, Theo helped get the beast going any way he could.

So did Adi. Like any soldier worth his boots, he pissed and moaned about it, too. “I bet the Russians don’t have to put up with this shit,” he grumbled, chopping wood almost as fine as kindling. The less gasoline they had to pour over the fuel to get it burning, the better.

Sergeant Witt threw a match on the fire. Such were the privileges of a panzer commander-not that there weren’t plenty of days when he’d done his own share of chopping wood and then some. Flames leaped up: fortunately, not too high. All three panzer men huddled close to the fire, soaking up as much warmth as they could. After a bit, the gasoline heated the wood so it dried out and caught, too.

“Now if we had some sausages to roast for breakfast…” Witt said.

“Then we’d be going from bed to wurst,” Adi put in.

Witt groaned. Theo winced. He’d loathe himself forever if he turned in a man for being a Jew. For a pun like that, though… Who could blame him? The panzer commander said, “Don’t be more ridiculous than you can help. When’s the last time you slept in a bed?”

“That brothel they set up for us… Only I wasn’t sleeping,” Adi said.

“I should hope not!” Witt studied the fire. “Why don’t you climb in and see if you can get her running?”

That sounded like a polite request, which was the way a good panzer crew worked together. It was in fact an order. Adi took it as such. That he said “Right, Sergeant!” instead of “Zu befehl!” changed things not a bit. He scrambled up and into the driver’s position. Theo hoped the self-starter would fire up the engine. If not, they’d have to crank it-hard labor even in frigid weather, and labor that could break your arm if you weren’t careful when the engine did catch.

Grinding noises came from the starter, as they would have from a car with a low battery. Witt rolled his eyes. Theo swallowed a sigh. Holding a charge when your battery cells froze up was no fun, either.

Adi tried again. The grinding noise was louder this time, and went on longer. A cough, a bang, and the Maybach engine burst into full-throated life. The exhaust blatting out of the tailpipes was the sweetest thing Theo’d smelled this morning-though he did still yearn for sausages.

He paused for a moment atop the Panzer II before sliding down into the radioman’s seat. The morning might be cold, but it was clear. Sunrise would come soon. The eastern sky near the horizon held no color at all-not gray, not white, not blue. It was as if God had left the window-shade up a little bit and let a mere man get a glimpse of the Nothing that lay beyond the edge of the universe. Given Russian vastness, that didn’t seem so absurd as it would have back in Germany. Theo took his place and closed the hatch behind him with more relief than usual.

With the engine growling right behind him, Theo soon stopped freezing. Before long, he started sweating instead. A panzer man had only two temperatures: too cold and too hot. So it often seemed, anyhow.

The panzer company picked up a battalion of infantry half a kilometer to the north and advanced on a large village or small town that was supposed to hold a Red Army garrison. The place did, too. Mortar bombs started falling near the panzers as they approached. Fragments of red-hot metal clattered off the Panzer II’s sides. Witt hastily ducked down into the turret and slammed the hatch shut.

What were those bombs doing to the Landsers who loped between the panzers? The poor bastards had no armored shelters into which they could retreat. Then again, they also didn’t have to worry about antipanzer guns. Theo supposed it evened out. If you were at the front, you got the shitty end of the stick no matter how you fought.

As usual, once the Ivans dug in somewhere, they didn’t feel like leaving. Sergeant Witt fired the Panzer II’s main armament several times, and squeezed off burst after burst from the coaxial machine gun. That, and the panzer commander’s occasional obscenities, were as much as Theo knew about the details of the fighting.

Enemy bullets and more fragments rang from the panzer’s armored hide. Nothing big enough to get through hit the machine. Theo’s missing finger twinged even though it wasn’t there. Phantom pain, the docs called it. He knew what happened when a panzer brewed up. If you were lucky-and he had been-you bailed out. Then the enemy shot at you as if you were a Landser. That was how Theo had got hurt. He hadn’t had anything with which to shoot back. A submachine gun hung on brackets near the radio set now, yes. If he was bailing out again with the panzer on fire, though, he doubted he’d worry about taking the Schmeisser along.

Regiment kept relaying orders to the panzer company. Theo dutifully passed them on to Hermann Witt. The panzer commander laughed at some, swore at others, and ignored almost all of them. “If those shitheads were up here with us, they’d know better than to sound like a bunch of jackasses,” he said.

“You hope,” Theo answered.

Adi let out a sudden warning shout: “Left! Fast! Bastard with a Molotov cocktail!”

Witt had no time to traverse the turret. He popped up through the top hatch like a jack-in-the-box. He didn’t forget his Schmeisser. A long burst from it sent cartridge cases of yet another caliber clanking down onto the fighting compartment’s floor. “Got the mother,” he said as he ducked down again. Theo’s heart descended from his throat. Burning gasoline dripping in through vision ports and under hatches? No, that wasn’t his idea of a good time.

Firing eased off. Theo knew what the quiet meant: no live Ivans left to fight. One more village taken. A few more hectares now belonged to the Reich… except for the Red Army soldiers still wandering across those snowy hectares with rifles in their hands and anger in their hearts.

Russia went on and on and on. Could you ever come to the end of it? Germany and her allies seemed determined to try. Theo didn’t know whether they could or not. He didn’t much care, either. He was alive. He’d probably stay that way a while longer. He wouldn’t get any more maimed than he was already. For now, that would do just fine.