The War That Came Early: West and East (57 page)

A French tank clattered past them. Several soldiers trotted behind it almost in Indian file, using its steel bulk to shield them from the slings and arrows of outrageous MG-34s. As machine gunners often did, the one in front of them concentrated on the tank. Bullets spanged off the armor one after another. They chipped its camouflage paint but did it no other harm.

“That’s a fool,” Halévy said. “There—you see? The Germans can screw up the ordinary stuff, too.”

“I only wish the cocksuckers would do it more often,” Jezek answered.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a 37mm armor-piercing
round from an antitank gun slammed into the French machine. That made the 13mm slugs Vaclav fired seemed door-knockers by comparison. The tank slewed to a stop, smoke and fire spurting from every hatch. Inside the doomed machine, ammunition started cooking off. Nobody got out.

That left the men who’d followed the tank in a horrible spot. If they pushed on, the machine-gun bullets that had hit armor plate would go after their soft flesh instead. If they stayed where they were, they might as well have been out of the fight. They were no more thrilled about taking chances than Vaclav would have been. They started digging foxholes behind the burning tank carcass.

“Some sergeant will come along in a while and make them get moving, poor saps,” Benjamin Halévy said.

“You’re a sergeant. What about you?” Vaclav asked.

“Nah.” Halévy shook his head. “I saw why they’re holing up. And I know that goddamn gun is waiting for them to show themselves. Some other sergeant who comes along in a couple of hours won’t care. And by that time the machine gunners will be thinking about something else, so these guys should be able to go forward again.”

“Huh,” Vaclav said. “You better be careful, or people will start thinking you’re a human being or something.”

“Don’t be dumber than you can help, Jezek. I’m a sergeant, and I’m a Jew. How can I be a human being with all that shit piled on my shoulders?”

“Sergeant’s a problem, yeah. I didn’t say anything about you being a Jew,” Vaclav answered uncomfortably.

“No, but you were thinking it,” Halévy said without rancor, putting a finger on why the Czech felt uncomfortable. “If it weren’t for the fucking Nazis, you wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. You
are
a sergeant,” Vaclav said, which made Benjamin Halévy laugh. But it wasn’t as if the Jew were lying. Back before Vaclav got drafted, he’d had little use for Jews. Czechs didn’t despise them as thoroughly as, say, Poles did, but all the same … Even after he got drafted, he’d preferred Jews to Slovaks or Ruthenians only because they were more likely to stay loyal to Prague and fight the Germans.

“Well, you’re a corporal yourself,” Halévy said.

“A Czech corporal in France! That’s worth a lot,” Jezek returned.

He still couldn’t get a rise out of the Jew. “If Czechoslovakia hadn’t gone to pieces, you’d be a sergeant for sure. They aren’t exactly equipped to promote people here.”

“If I hadn’t got out, I’d be a dead man by now, or else wounded, or sitting in a POW camp somewhere—I was just thinking about that a minute ago,” Vaclav said. “And those all sound better than being a goddamn sergeant. What do you think of that?”

“I felt the same way till they promoted me,” Halévy answered easily. “Now I see that sergeants are the salt of the earth. It’s the officers who’re silly clots.”

“Shows what you know.” Vaclav dug a grubby pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Benjamin Halévy looked hopeful. The Czech gave him one. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t bummed butts from the Jew.

After a while, Vaclav cautiously peered over the lip of the shell hole. There in the distance, between a couple of tree trunks … Was that the painted shield on the Germans’ antitank gun? Something—no, somebody—moved behind it. Yes, the son of a bitch wore
Feldgrau
. Grunting, Vaclav heaved his heavy piece up onto the dirt lip. He flipped off the safety and stared down the sights. The Nazi had crouched down again. Maybe Vaclav could put a round through the shield; it wasn’t made to stop anything more than ordinary ammo. But he might get a better target if he waited.

And he did. The German stood up and looked out through field glasses to try to spot the trouble heading his way. The worst troubles, though, were the ones you didn’t see. Vaclav exhaled slowly to steady himself. He pulled the trigger. The antitank rifle slammed his shoulder. The German threw his hands in the air and fell over.

Vaclav worked the bolt as fast as he could, chambering a fresh round. As he’d guessed, another German jumped up to find out what had happened to his buddy. Vaclav fired again. The second Fritz’s head exploded into red mist.

“Two?” Halévy asked.

“Two,” Vaclav agreed. “One dead for sure. The other I don’t know
about.” Any hit from the antitank rifle might kill. Rubbing, he added, “They ought to requisition me a new shoulder, too.”

“Talk to the French quartermasters,” the Jew said.

“Fuck ’em,” Jezek replied with great sincerity. “Maybe the Germans have a supply dump in Laon. If we can chase ’em out of there, I’ll go through it and see.”

“If we can chase them out of Laon, we really are doing something,” Halévy said. “They took it early on. Maybe we can push on up to the coast and cut them off.”

“Maybe we’ll get out of this shell hole in a while,” Vaclav said. “One goddamn thing at a time.” Halévy nodded and scrounged another smoke.

Chapter 24

T
heo Hossbach hadn’t had much to do with Lieutenant Colonel Koch. A radio operator who was happiest by himself didn’t hobnob with a regimental commander. Theo wouldn’t have hobnobbed with his crewmates if he could have helped it. But he’d never heard anything bad about Koch. The officer was supposed to be brave. He didn’t punish his troops because he enjoyed punishing people. Men who knew about such things said he had a good tactical sense. Theo hadn’t seen anything to make him disbelieve it.

None of that did Koch any good now. He stood blindfolded, tied to a post in front of a stone wall in a Polish town. Along with quite a few other panzer crews, Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt had been summoned to see what happened to officers who dared go against the German government.

A
Waffen
-SS captain—they had their own silly name for the rank, but it amounted to captain—spoke in a loud voice: “This man is guilty of treason against the
Reich
and against our beloved
Führer
, Adolf Hitler.
For treason in wartime, there is only one sentence—the supreme penalty.”

He turned to his own men: a dozen more asphalt soldiers. They all carried rifles. When he looked at them, they stiffened to attention.

Maybe they didn’t realize it, but the watching panzer crewmen packed a lot more close-range firepower than they did. Lugers, Schmeissers … The SS men could wind up dead before they knew it. None of the
Wehrmacht
troops in black coveralls looked happy at what was going on in front of them. What would it take to turn dismay to mutiny?

Not much, not if Theo was any judge. A word from Koch would have done it. And what would have happened after that? War between the army and the SS? Theo would have been ready, even eager, for it. He knew he wasn’t the only one, either—nowhere close. But it might also have been war between rebel and loyalist
Wehrmacht
units. He couldn’t stomach that. And, while the Germans were bashing one another, what would the Red Army do? Stand around watching? Not likely!

“Raise your weapons!” the SS captain ordered. The firing squad obeyed. “Aim your weapons!” he said, and they did.

Lieutenant Colonel Koch did cry out then. Had he yelled
Save me!
or
Down with Hitler!
, the mutiny might have started then and there. But all he said, in a loud, clear voice, was, “Long live Germany!”

“Fire!” the SS man shouted. A dozen shots rang out as one. Koch slumped against his bonds. Blood darkened the front of his tunic. The sergeant who headed the riflemen went over to him and felt for a pulse. He must have found one, for he grimaced. “Finish him!” the SS captain snapped. The sergeant drew a pistol and shot Koch in the back of the head. That surely ended that. The SS captain looked out at the panzer troops. “You may bury him,” he said, as if he were granting some large concession. By his lights, he probably was.

He and his men piled into a half-track and a truck and sped away. What other luckless officer was next on their list?

“Fuck,” Adi Stoss said next to Theo. “I hope I never see anything like that again.”

“Amen,” Hermann Witt said. “He was a good soldier.”

The sergeant who commanded another panzer in the platoon said, “You can’t plot against the government, not in the middle of a war you can’t.”

“If he did that,” Adi said, which made that sergeant’s jaw drop. Theo thought it was a reasonable comment. The SS did things and chose victims for its reasons, which often made no sense to ordinary mortals.

“And even if he was a lousy politician, he was still a good officer,” Witt added. “As far as I’m concerned, that counts for more, ’cause chances are it saved my ass—and yours—a few times.”

“Huh,” the other sergeant said, and walked away.

“Well, that’s that. We just went on his list.” Adi sounded cheerful about it.

“As long as we’re fighting the Ivans, it doesn’t matter.” By contrast, Witt sounded like a man trying to convince himself.

“Here’s hoping,” Theo said. His crewmates eyed him in mild surprise, the way they did whenever he opened his mouth.

He never found out how the panzer men decided who would bury the regimental commander. But Koch got a much fancier grave than most German soldiers who met death at the front. And the large cross had
Fallen for the
Vaterland written on the horizontal bar in big black letters.

“If the SS goons see that, they’ll pitch another shitfit,” Adi predicted.

“Good,” Theo said. They exchanged conspiratorial grins. Again, they could ruin each other with a few words whispered in the wrong ears. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. They wouldn’t have said such things if each didn’t already have good reason to trust the other with his life.

Hermann Witt came up and looked at the grave, and at the inscription on the cross. “I got a letter from my father a few days ago,” he said, after looking around to make sure no one but his crewmates could hear him. “He says some of the death notices in the paper go ‘Fallen for
Führer
and
Vaterland
’ and others just say ‘Fallen for the
Vaterland.’
It’s a way of letting people see how you feel about things, you know?”

“I’m surprised he talked death notices with you,” Stoss remarked. “Doesn’t he think it’s bad luck or something?”

“Nah. He’s a freethinker, my old man,” the panzer commander said, not without pride. “The way things are these days, he has to keep his mouth shut more than he used to. I’m the one he can let loose with.”

“As long as the army censors don’t come down on him,” Theo said. He liked Witt much better than Heinz Naumann. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, or to his family.

“He’s careful, the way he puts things. I know him, so I can read between the lines,” Witt said. “The blockheads the army has reading mail, they don’t know crap from cabbage.”

“They may seem dumb a lot of the time, but they’re smarter than you make them out to be,” Stoss said.

“How do you know?” Witt retorted. “Next letter you get will be the first.”

Adi shrugged. “My folks died in a train crash when I was little. My grandfather raised me, but he died a few years ago, too. The Stosses never were a big family. Now there’s me.”

“No girlfriend?” Witt asked slyly.

Another shrug. “I
had
one. She didn’t feel like giving me what I wanted before I headed off to training, and I told her what I thought about that. Haven’t heard from her since, the lousy bitch.”

The panzer commander set a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Some of ’em are like that, and damn all you can do about it. If they didn’t have pussies, there’d be a bounty on ’em. Ought to be a bounty on some of ’em any which way.”

“Well, you can sing that in church,” Adi said. Witt asked no more questions. He just looked at Lieutenant Colonel Koch’s grave one more time, shook his head, and walked off.

Theo asked no questions, either. Questions of that kind weren’t his style. He’d served with Adi a lot longer than the new commander had, and had also noticed that the driver never got any mail. Stoss didn’t seem to miss it; it was as if he knew he wouldn’t.

If he had no family, if he’d told his girlfriend to piss up a rope … Well, hell, didn’t he have any friends? He was a good guy. Theo thought so, anyway. Didn’t anyone else in the whole wide world? Didn’t anyone else like him well enough to send him a note saying
I hope you’re still in one piece
?

Evidently not.

But why not?

Several possibilities had occurred to Theo. He’d long since decided which one he thought most likely, and it had nothing to do with singing in church. If the blackshirts ever came to ask him about it, he’d also decided he would deny everything as hard and as long as he could. Of course he would. You didn’t tell the blackshirts anything about your buddies, not if you could help it. But Theo would have kept his mouth shut absent that ironclad injunction. He had a keen sense of the absurd, even if he didn’t let other people see it very often. A working sense of the absurd often came in handy in the Third
Reich
. And if his conclusion didn’t fit in well with the general preposterousness of life, he was damned if he could imagine one that would!