We Install (5 page)

Now the two noncoms exchanged glances. “Should he worry about us being the enemy, or should we worry about him?” Pfeil muttered.

Then sack saw the rampant lion on the fellow's collar patch. “Norway?” he asked, pointing to it.

“Ja!”
the other soldier exclaimed, and then more in his own language. Sack eyed him with increasing respect. Several western European nations had sent contingents to hold back the Red Asiatic flood, and those outfits had solid fighting reputations. Sack just wished their soldiers had picked up more German.

The Norwegian was a big blond fellow who might have posed for a recruiting poster if he'd been cleaner. He and Sack soon discovered they'd both taken English in school. Neither of them was fluent, but they managed to understand each other. The Norwegian said, “There is a—how do you say it?—a canteen? a kitchen?—down the road not far.” He pointed to show the direction.

That cut conversation off at the knees, or rather at the belly. The German supply system had worked well for a while, with everyone having plenty of food and field kitchens keeping pace with the advancing armies. The armies were no longer advancing. Enemy aircraft had taken their toll on truck columns and supply trains. The long and short of it was that Sack hadn't eaten for more than a day.

The big bubbling pot smelled wonderful. Most of the soldiers gathered around it were Scandinavians of one sort or another: Norwegians, Danes who wore a white cross on a red shield, or Swedes with blue and gold emblems that were almost the same shades as those of the Ukraine's national colors. Some spoke German; more knew English. They all had the worn look of men who'd been through a good deal.

But the stew in the pot was thick and rich, full of cabbage, potatoes, and meat. Sack wolfed down a big bowl. “It's horsemeat,” a Dane said apologetically in English. The corporal didn't quite take that in, so someone else translated: “
Pferdfleisch
.” In civilian life, the idea would have revolted him. Now he just held out his bowl for more. The Scandinavians laughed and fed him.

He'd hardly begun his second helping when firing to the east picked up. Gustav Pfeil looked grim. “Eat while you can. I think the Reds are trying to force the river.”

As if on cue, a German artillery battery not far away fired a salvo. Then Sack heard the heavy diesels of the self-propelled guns roar into life to move them into a new position before Red artillery could reply.

The Norwegian who'd led him to the field kitchen handed him a mug full of hot instant coffee. He gratefully held it under his nose. Even the rich aroma was invigorating. And the aroma was all he got, too, for a whistling in the air said the Germans hadn't knocked out all the enemy guns. Soldiers shrieked “Incoming!” in a medley of languages. Some, who'd been around here for a little while, knew where the slit trenches were and dove for them. Sack threw his coffee away and flattened out on the ground. The burst were thunderous, and less than a hundred meters from where he lay. Splinters flew by with deadly hisses; mud splattered down on top of his helmet.

Still on his belly, he pulled out his entrenching tool, unfolded it, and started digging himself in. The Red shells kept falling; it might as well have been a World War I bombardment. If it was going to be like that, Sack wanted himself a nice World War I trench in which to endure it.

Then Gustav Pfeil screamed.

Sack rolled out of his half-dug hole, crawled snakelike over to where the
Wachtmeister
lay writhing on the ground. Pfeil had both hands clenched to his thigh. His trouser leg was already reddish-black, his face gray.

“Medical officer!” Sack shouted. Then, more softly, he said to Pfeil, “Here, let me see it.” His hands shook as he moved the staff sergeant's away from the injury. Pfeil had never been scratched, not in more than two years of hard fighting. How could he be wounded now? And if he was, how could anyone hope to come through this war intact?

The wound sliced cleanly into the meat of the thigh. Pfeil's flesh looked like something that ought to be hanging in a butcher's shop, not like part of a man at all. “I don't think the femoral artery's cut,” Sack said inanely.

“Of course not,” Pfeil replied with the eerie calm of a man in shock. “If it were, I'd already have bled out.”

Sack dusted the wound with sulfa and antibiotics from his aid kit, wrapped a pressure bandage around it. One of the Danes came up to help a moment later. Along with his white cross on red, he wore a red cross on a white armband. He looked under the pressure bandage to see what Sack had done, nodded, and then rolled up Pfeil's left sleeve. He gave the
Wachtmeister
a painkiller shot, then said in good German, “Make a fist.” When Pfeil obeyed, the Dane stuck the needle from a plasma unit into the bend of his elbow.

The medical officer turned to Sack. “I wish we could airlift him out, but—” A fresh barrage of incoming artillery punctuated the
but.
The Dane stood up anyhow, shouted, “Stretcher party!” first in German, then in English.

“I'm one,” Sack said.

The Norwegian who'd guided the two Germans back to the kitchen came out of his hole. “I'm the other,” he said in English. “I know the way back to the field hospital.”

The medical officer pulled telescoping aluminum stretcher poles from his pack, extended them, and strung them with mesh. He fixed an upright metal arm to one of them to hold the plasma bag. Together, he and Sack got Pfeil onto the stretcher. “He should do well enough,” the medical officer said, “unless, of course, we're all overrun.”

Sack, for one, could have done without the parenthetical comment. He and the Norwegian stooped, lifted the stretcher, and started for the field hospital. Though they headed away from the fighting, no one could question their courage, not with artillery shells still falling all around. They would have been safer staying in their foxholes than walking about in the open.

Wachtmeister
Pfeil was not a big man; he weighed perhaps seventy-five kilos. By the time Sack had hauled him through mud for more than a kilometer, it might as well have been seventy-five tonnes. He marveled that his arms didn't drag the ground like an orangutan's by the time he reached the aid station.

All the tents there were clean and white, with red crosses prominently displayed on the cloth. They wouldn't necessarily keep away artillery fire, but Sack did notice no bigger bombs had hit in the immediate vicinity of the tents. That raised some small measure of relief in him; too often, the godless Reds respected nothing.

An orderly took charge of Pfeil. Sack stood near the hospital tents for a couple of minutes. He windmilled his arms, trying to work the soreness out of them. The Norwegian did the same; they traded weary grins. The lance-corporal wondered what the devil to do next. He supposed he ought to go back to the
panzergrenadiers
; if any officer asked what he was doing there, he could say the military police had sent him.

The Norwegian rolled himself a smoke with old newspaper and coarse Russian
makhorka
. He offered Sack the tobacco pouch. Sack shook his head. “I never got the habit.”

“Better for you,” the Norwegian answered. He lit his own cigarette—no easy feat in the rain—and took a deep drag. “I like it, though.”

“However you wish.” Reluctantly, Sack started back toward the Trubezh River. Still puffing happily, the Norwegian followed. They hit the dirt whenever an incoming round sounded as if it might be close, but otherwise gave the bombardment only small heed.

Then a shell landed almost right on top of them, so suddenly they had no time to duck. The blast left Sack half deafened, and also with the feeling someone about the size of God had tried to pull his lungs out through his nose. Otherwise, though, he wasn't hurt. He looked around to make sure his new friend had also come through all right.

His stomach lurched. Only a burial party needed to worry about the Norwegian now, and they'd have to spoon him into a jar if they intended to sent his remains home. It was worse than butchery; it was annihilation. The only good thing about it was that the Norwegian couldn't have known what hit him.

Dazed and sickened, Sack staggered on. This wasn't how he'd pictured war when he first donned the German uniform. It wasn't so much that he hadn't imagined the death and injury that went with combat. He had, as well as one can without the actual experience. What he hadn't imagined was the horror and terror and dread they left in their wake, nor the filth and exhaustion of long combat, nor, most of all, that Germany, having pushed her frontier east almost two thousand kilometers, would ever see the line begin to shift west once more.

Trucks rumbled past him, heading away from the Trubezh. One of them stopped. Its driver was one of the Scandinavians with whom Sack had eaten. He poked his head out the window and said in English, “How goes your friend? And where is Olaf?”

“My friend will make it, I think,” Sack answered, also in English. “Olaf—” He grimaced, turned. “Back there, a shell—” Speaking of death in a foreign language helped distance him from it, make it feel unreal, as if it could not possibly touch him.

“Shit,” the driver said, and then, as if English did not satisfy him, he spoke several sharp sentences in Swedish or whatever his native tongue was. After he spat into the mud, he said, “You'd better climb inside. We're pulling back toward the Dnieper.”

“Already?” Sack said, dismayed.

The driver only answered, “
Ja
. That is how my orders are.”

The men in the back of the truck helped pull the lance-corporal aboard. He sat on somebody's lap the whole way. He was not the only one packed in like that, either, and the truck grew more crowded the further west it went. The compartment stank of unwashed men, mud, and damp.

The Scandinavians told different stories. Some thought the Reds had forced the line of the Trubezh in large numbers, while others claimed the enemy was sweeping down from the north and threatening to cut off all the German forces still on this side of the Dnieper. Whichever was true—if either was—it meant another retreat.

“When will it end?” asked the medical officer who had worked on Gustav Pfeil. No one answered him. The silence was in itself an answer of sorts, but not one to ease Sack's foreboding.

It was indeed another retreat. Over the rear gate of the truck, Sack saw panzers, mechanized infantry fighting vehicles, and self-propelled guns rumbling westward crosscountry, heading no doubt for the still intact bridges (he hoped they were still intact, at any rate) and the ferry links between the eastern bank of the Dnieper and Kiev on the far shore.

He'd passed through Kiev in the summer of '42, on his way to the front. German arms had still been winning victories then. He remembered the blue-and-gold Ukrainian flags everywhere in the city. He remembered the smiling girls who'd greeted and fed him at the soldiers' canteen across from the old Intourist Hotel on Vladimirskaya Street, some of them in the elaborately embroidered blouses, skirts, and headdresses of native Ukrainian fashion, others wearing dresses that had been the very latest styles in Berlin in the early thirties.

He wondered how many flags would be flying now, how many girls would want to have anything to do with soldiers who might have to pull out of their city at any minute. Not many, he suspected. Victory had a thousand fathers; defeat was always an orphan.

Just getting to Kiev looked like more of an adventure than he'd ever wanted. A shell hit the truck right behind his in the convoy, turned it into a fireball in an instant. He looked down at the tattered knees of his trousers, not wanting to watch his comrades burn. It could have been he as easily as they, and he knew it. Had the trucks not kept the ordained fifty meters' separation even in adversity and retreat, it could easily have been he
and
they.

One of the Scandinavians, a big burly Dane, pulled out a mouth organ and started playing American country songs. Sack was not the only one to smile when he heard them. Their incongruity here on a plain vaster than any in the United States somehow brought home the absurdity of war.

After jounces and jolts and halts where everyone scrambled out to put a shoulder to a wheel to get the truck out of the mud, it pulled to a stop not far from the Dnieper. “All out,” the driver called over the intercom. “I'm going back for another load.”

“Good luck to you,” Sack called as the driver put the truck back into gear. The Scandinavian waved to him and drove off. He never saw the fellow again.

If the bank of the Trubezh had been crowded, that of the Dnieper fairly swarmed with men. Panzers and other fighting vehicles still crossed over into Kiev by way of the motor bridges still standing, but that way was closed to mere infantry, who might clog traffic and impede the flow of the precious armor. Military police directed footsoldiers toward the boats boarding by the river.

The two biggest, the
Yevgeny Vuchetich
and the
Sovietskaya Rossiya
, were four-deck Dnieper excursion boats, seized when the Germans first took Kiev more than two years before. Along with a host of smaller craft, now they ferried German soldiers back to guard the city against recapture by the Reds.

The big boats each took aboard hundreds, maybe a thousand or more at a time. The smaller vessels added dozens, more likely hundreds, to that total. But the riverbank remained packed as men from the crumbling German positions east of the Dnieper streamed back to try to hold the line west of the river.

Such a concentration of men, unfortunately, also offered a delicious target for planes painted with the red star. Antiaircraft batteries fired furiously at the raiders, but bold pilots bored through to strike even so. The casualties were horrendous, but Germans still kept pressing down toward the bank. As at the Trubezh, the only alternative was to stand and fight, and that seemed a worse bet than trying to escape.