Two Fronts (55 page)

Even a corporal enjoyed such authority, and Arno enjoyed it as much as any
Unteroffizier
ever minted. He was official and officious. He knew the rules and regulations. He lived by them, and he made the men in his charge live by them as well.

He was a good soldier himself. He wore the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic. He wore his wound badge, too—wore it with pride. He’d been an
Unteroffizier
a devil of a long time. Since before the shooting started, in fact. None of the men set over him had shown the slightest inclination to promote him to sergeant so he could use his talents on a bigger group.

So I can give orders to more people
, he thought. Yes, he knew what he wanted to do, all right.

That he didn’t get the chance he was sure he deserved only left him even more sour than he would have been otherwise. Combine that with the
Wehrmacht
’s failure to knock the Red Army out of the war, and Arno Baatz was a less happy man than he might have been.

These days, the Russians were in the driving seat on the Eastern Front. Germany had to respond to one Soviet thrust after another. Smolensk wouldn’t fall this campaigning season, either. Moscow? Moscow wasn’t even a pipe dream any more. As long as the
Reich
could hold on to Byelorussia and a chunk of the Ukraine, things … weren’t too bad.

He had no idea what the name of the collective farm his section was defending might have been. He didn’t even know whether it had ever enjoyed a name. Maybe the damn Jews who ran the Bolshevik state just tagged it with a number so they could more efficiently keep tabs on it.

He set up the new section MG-34 where it could rake the fields to the east with fire. If the Russians wanted to charge across those fields in the drunken mass attacks they loved so much, they were welcome to try.

“As long as we have enough cartridge belts, we can kill off a couple of divisions’ worth of Ivans,” he declared proudly, once the men had brought the machine-gun position up to his exacting standards.

“If they don’t throw any panzers at us, anyway,” Adam Pfaff put in.

Baatz scowled at the unruly senior private. “When I want to know what you think—”

“You’ll kick it out of me,” Pfaff broke in. “I know.”

“Tend to your business,” Baatz snapped. “Keep the Russians off the gun crew and we’ll do fine.”

“
Zu Befehl
,” Pfaff said, which was a reply not even Baatz could fault. The
Obergefreiter
strolled over to his foxhole, slid in, and pointed his rifle in the direction from which the Russians were most likely to come. Baatz wanted to grind his teeth every time he set eyes on the Mauser’s gray-painted woodwork. You weren’t supposed to do that to a rifle. It was as far outside of regulations as it could get. But Major Schmitz, the battalion CO, let Pfaff get away with it. You couldn’t win.

Pretty soon, Baatz had other things to worry about (though the gray Mauser, like a broken tooth, seldom escaped his mind for long). A volley of Katyusha rockets screamed down on the collective farm. Luckily, the Russians aimed a little long. Most of the horrible things smashed down behind the section’s position. The buildings on the
kolkhoz
had been tumbledown wrecks before the rockets hit. Now they were burning wrecks. The wind blew the smoke away from the
Landsers
. Baatz wished it would have screened them. At least they would be able to see the Ivans from a long way off now.

“Any chance we can get reinforcements, Corporal?” Adam Pfaff asked. “Mighty lonely out here.”

“We are ordered to hold this collective farm.
We
are,” Baatz said importantly. “We’ll do it.”

“Harder if we all get killed,” Pfaff remarked.

“Is that defeatism?” Arno asked. Pfaff didn’t answer. Baatz hadn’t thought he would. Defeatism in the field was a capital crime. A drumhead court martial would pass sentence after a complaint.

Of course, getting overrun by the Russians was also a capital crime, and probably one with a punishment less merciful than a firing squad or an officer with a pistol would show. Stirrings off toward the eastern horizon warned that the Ivans were going to make their push soon.

Flares from little German strongpoints to the north and south said the men holding those stretches of the front were also awake to the building threat. Baatz fired a green flare of his own to show that he was, too. He remembered scaring off some Soviet panzers with red flares. That had been quick thinking from Dernen, no two ways about it, even if he was a troublemaker most of the time. Well, Dernen wouldn’t be doing any quick thinking now, not after he’d stopped one with his noggin.

“
Urra! Urra!
” That deep roar, right now just at the edge of hearing, made the short hair at Arno’s nape prickle up. The Russians were nerving themselves for the charge. They were all liquored up when they started yelling like that, sure as hell they were, almost past the point of feeling pain or caring whether they lived or died. And they had no choice but to go forward. NKVD men would shoot them down from behind if they faltered.

“
Urra! Urra!
” Here they came, still out of range but terrifying all the same. They’d linked arms as they dogtrotted forward in row after row. The skirts of their greatcoats flapped between them. “
Urra! Urra!
”

Most of them would have machine pistols, not rifles. They’d need to get in close before they could use them. “
Urra! Urra!
” They were ready to get in close, too. They seemed as determined, as unstoppable, as storm waves rolling up a beach and sweeping aside whatever lay in their path.

Then German mortar bombs started dropping among them. Dirt fountained up at every burst. Men close to the explosions fell or flew through the air. The Ivans who didn’t get hit closed ranks and kept coming.

When the lead wave of men in dun-colored uniforms got within about a thousand meters, Baatz yelled to the men at the MG-34: “Let ’em have it!” The man at the trigger tapped the machine gun’s rear end after every burst, spraying bullets back and forth in short bursts. Other German machine guns, MG-34s and MG-42s, were hammering the enemy along with this one. Russians toppled, one after another. The commissars spent lives the way a drunken sailor spent money on popsies.

Indifferent in the face of destruction, the Russian survivors kept closing up and coming on. “
Urra! Urra!
” The roar was loud now, and getting louder every second.

Baatz brought his own rifle up to his shoulder and started shooting. He wasn’t sure he hit anyone, not with so many other weapons knocking Ivans down, but hitting had to be easier than missing. He worked the bolt again and again, slapping in clip after clip.

A few bullets came back from the Russians, but only a few. If they didn’t break pretty soon, though, they’d open up with all those goddamn submachine guns, and then there’d be hell to pay. Baatz carried several potato-masher grenades on his belt. He hadn’t actually thrown one in a long time. You were in trouble if you needed them. He shifted in his hole so he could grab them in a hurry. He was liable to be in trouble now.

But then, quite suddenly, the waves of Ivans streamed back, not forward. Flesh and blood, even Russian flesh and blood, could take just so much, and the Germans here had enough firepower to dish it out. Dead and wounded men littered the battlefield. The machine guns went on firing, turning the wounded men into dead ones and making sure the ones who didn’t move wouldn’t. You could bet some of the bastards out there were trying to play possum.

“Fuck me,” Adam Pfaff said, as if from very far away—Baatz’s ears still rang. “We lived through it again, I think.” For once, Arno couldn’t argue with him at all.

THE SQUADRON HAD
a new airstrip. They’d flown off runways in front of Smolensk. Then, as the Germans advanced, they’d flown from a base in back of the fortress city. Now they were at another strip in front of Smolensk. It wasn’t the one they’d used before, but Stas Mouradian didn’t think it was far away.

Naturally, he wasn’t the only one who noticed the change and what it meant. “We’re pushing the Hitlerites back,” Isa Mogamedov said as they settled in for their first supper at the new strip.

Stas nodded. He gnawed the meat off a boiled pork rib. Mogamedov was eating ribs, too. He might not drink much, but he didn’t strictly keep the Muslim dietary rules. At a base where the cooks were pork-loving Russians, he might have starved to death if he had.

After Stas swallowed, he said, “They
are
falling back, the bastards.” He didn’t want merely to be seen agreeing with his copilot and bomb-aimer. He wanted to be heard, too. Mogamedov might well have had similar motives in speaking up to begin with. You couldn’t just be loyal to the Soviet Union. You had to let everybody know how very loyal you were.

You especially had to do that if you weren’t a Russian. If you came from the Caucasus like Mouradian and Mogamedov, or from one of the Central Asian republics, you might be a member of the club by affiliation, but you weren’t—you couldn’t be—a member by birth. And so you had to work all the harder to show you deserved to belong.

One of the other flyers turned on the radio that sat on a crate in a corner of the mess tent. Inside the crate was the truck battery powering the set. When the radio had warmed up, the tail end of something new and martial from Shostakovich came out of it. Mouradian nodded again. That had to be better than the sugary pap they played so often.

The Shostakovich ended with a thunder of kettle drums. Not quite
The 1812 Overture
with a real cannon, but it did suggest pounding artillery. Then the announcer said, “Moscow speaking.” Everyone leaned toward the radio—it was time for the news.

“More of the Ukraine has been liberated by the ever-glorious Red Army of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union,” the announcer declared in proud tones. “The Fascist sharks and the Romanian sucker fish that cling to them continue to retreat.”

“Sucker fish!” Stas exclaimed in genuine admiration. Some Party writer had probably won himself a bonus for that. The Romanians and Hungarians were usually jackals in Soviet news broadcasts, sometimes vultures, sometimes Hitler’s lackeys. But that was a new one. Stas wondered if it would stick or be forgotten tomorrow. He hoped it would last. He liked it.

Then he laughed out loud, because Isa Mogamedov bugged out his eyes and opened and closed his mouth several times. Stas hadn’t dreamt the Azeri could turn into such a convincing fish.

He’d missed a little of what the newsreader was saying. Well, no great loss. He knew things were going well here in Russia. That he was eating supper at this new air base and not at the old one told that story far better than the announcer could.

“In Egypt,” the man said, “the English government has confirmed that the transport carrying the theater commander, General Montgomery, was shot down by a Nazi fighter. General Auchinleck has been named to replace Montgomery.”

That the Germans could shoot down an English theater commander was not good news. The generals involved were no more than foreign names to Stas.

“On the Continent, English and French troops have made only the most minimal gains against the Hitlerites in Belgium,” the newsreader continued scornfully. “Fighting of a scale and seriousness to match that which the
Rodina
has suffered since the German invasion has yet to be seen there.”

“Right!” a flyer near Stas said. “Just right!” He pounded the table with his fist to show how right it was. Several other pilots and bomb-aimers nodded.

Stas wondered whether he was the only fellow in the whole squadron who’d been issued a working memory. Germany and the USSR didn’t border each other. Hitler never would have had the chance to invade the Soviet Union if Stalin hadn’t got greedy. Stalin had assumed that, with the Nazis bogged down in the West, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if he helped himself to a chunk of northeastern Poland.

Which only went to show that, unless you were doing geometry, you shouldn’t run around assuming things. Marshal Smigly-Ridz yelled for help from the
Führer
, and he got it. And the Western democracies hadn’t minded a bit when the Nazis took on the Soviet Union. In fact, they’d even pitched in themselves for a while.

But saying something like that on Radio Moscow would be the same as saying that General Secretary Stalin, the wisest and most beloved of all men, the great leader of the people’s revolutionary vanguard, had screwed the pooch when he tried to steal Vilno or Wilno or Vilnius or however you wanted to spell the worthless place. Since General Secretary Stalin obviously hadn’t, obviously couldn’t have, screwed the pooch, the newsreader came out with this bilge instead.

And he expected his audience to believe him. Stas paused thoughtfully. No, that might not be quite true. The newsreader expected his audience to behave as if it believed him.

He would get what he expected, too. Stas imagined himself standing up here and announcing to his comrades what had really led up to the German invasion of the USSR. He also imagined what would happen right after that. If someone had a pistol handy, he might not even live long enough to get arrested. Whoever plugged him would win a commendation, and probably a promotion to go with it.

If nobody here happened to be armed, his comrades would grab him, wrestle him to the ground, and hold him till the NKVD could take charge of him. His troubles would be just starting then, not ending. All things considered, getting shot would be better. At least then everything would be over with at once.

People from Leningrad and from the Ukraine to Siberia (but not to Vladivostok, lost to Japan thanks to some more of the great General Secretary’s brilliance) would be listening to Radio Moscow right now. The ones who did still remember the way things had actually worked would be making the same automatic calculation Stas had just made.

They would come to the same answer he had. How could anyone who didn’t aspire to martyrdom possibly come to any other answer? You had to live, as much as the war and the Chekists would let you.