The War That Came Early: West and East (2 page)

“I know, I know. That’s why I wanted one,” the sergeant said. Along with two machine guns, a Panzer III mounted a 37mm cannon. Unlike the Panzer II’s 20mm gun, which fired only armor-piercing ammo, the bigger weapon had high-explosive shells, too. That made it a lot more useful against infantry out in the open.

A Panzer III also carried thicker armor, and boasted a more powerful engine. A Panzer III was a real panzer. A Panzer II was a training vehicle. Oh, you could fight with it. The
Wehrmacht
had been fighting with it, and with the even smaller, lighter Panzer I, ever since the
Führer
gave the order to march into Czechoslovakia, more than six months ago now. But it would be nice to have a fighting vehicle that matched the ones the enemy used.

Would have been nice. Panzer IIIs were still scarce, while there were lots of IIs and, even these days, quite a few little obsolete Is. (There were also Panzer IVs, which carried a short-barreled 75mm gun and were designed to support infantry, not to attack enemy armor. There were supposed to be Panzer IVs, anyhow. Theo didn’t think he’d ever seen one.)

“I know what I’m doing in a II,” Stoss said. “They never let us drive a III in training. Most of the practice we got was in those turretless Panzer I chassis—you guys know the ones I mean.”

Theo nodded. So did Heinz Naumann. What you used in training was as cheap as the
Wehrmacht
could get away with and still do the job. Theo doubted whether any Panzer IIIs were within a hundred kilometers of a
training base. You didn’t practice with those babies—you got them into the fight.

Eager as a puppy, Adalbert asked, “You know where they’re going to throw us in, Sergeant?”

“Nope,” Naumann answered. “Far as the generals are concerned, we’re just a bullet. Point us at the enemy, and we knock him over.”

Or he knocks us over
. Theo remembered the antitank round slamming into his old Panzer II’s engine compartment. He remembered opening his escape hatch and seeing nothing but flames. He’d followed his panzer commander out the turret hatch instead. Ludwig hadn’t made it much farther. Theo had—which didn’t stop that bullet from finding him a little later on.

The new Panzer II looked like the one that had burned. Theo’s station was behind the turret, just in front of the bulkhead that separated the fighting compartment from the one housing the engine. He couldn’t see out. The smells were familiar: oil, gasoline, cordite, leather, metal, sweat. He didn’t smell much lingering fear, which argued that this panzer hadn’t seen a lot of action.

He started fiddling with the radio. No matter what the manufacturer claimed, every set was different. Heinz Naumann said something. Theo ignored it. Indeed, he hardly heard it: like the radio, he was good at tuning out anything that didn’t directly concern him.

Sometimes, he tuned out things that
did
concern him. Naumann spoke again: “I
said
, is it up to snuff?”

“Uh, it seems to be.” Theo came back to the world.

“Good. Pay some attention next time, all right?”

“Whatever you say, Sergeant,” Theo answered. Ludwig had tried to keep him connected, too. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. When Theo got interested in a radio, or in whatever was going on inside his own head, everything else could go hang.

They motored west, toward the front, the next morning. Naumann rode along standing up with his head and shoulders out of the turret. That was how a panzer commander was supposed to do things when not in combat. A lot of commanders looked out even when their machine was in action. The vision ports in the turret just didn’t let you see enough.
There was talk of building a Panzer II with a proper cupola for the commander. The Panzer III had one. So did a lot of foreign panzers. Not the II, not yet.

Theo had another reason for liking the way Heinz did things. With the hatch open, some of the mild spring air got down to him. Then a bullet cracked past Naumann. The commander dove back inside the turret faster than you could fart. “Panzer halt!” he shouted.

“Halting,” Adalbert Stoss said, and hit the brakes. Instead of using the traversing gear, Heinz manhandled the turret into position with the two handgrips on the inside. The machine gun snarled several short bursts at … something, at … somebody. Theo couldn’t see out, so except for the gunshot he had no idea what was going on. Not counting his earphones, the radioman on a Panzer II was always the last to know.

“Maybe I got him. Maybe not,” Sergeant Naumann muttered. Then he spoke into the tube that carried his voice to Adalbert’s seat: “Forward!”

“Forward,
ja
,” Stoss agreed. As the panzer got moving again, the driver asked, “A soldier behind our lines, or a
franc-tireur?”

“Don’t know. I never saw enough of him to tell whether he had a uniform,” Heinz said. After a pause for thought, he added, “Sounded like a military rifle, though—not a little varmint gun.”

“Are the Frenchies trying to infiltrate us? That wouldn’t be so good,” Adalbert said.

“No. It wouldn’t.” Heinz thought some more. Then he said, “Hossbach! Report this back to regimental HQ. If it’s not just one guy with a gun, the higher-ups need to know about it. We’re in map square K-4, just west of Avrigny. Got that?”

“K-4. West of Avrigny,” Theo repeated. He sighed as he made the connection and delivered the message. Ludwig had always been on him because he was happier with his own thoughts that with the rest of the world. Now Naumann had figured out the same thing in about a minute and a half.

Theo would have liked to do something about that. But doing something about it would have involved changing, and he didn’t care to change. His panzer commanders would just have to cope with it … and so would he.

*   *   *

FROM GREASY TO MESSY
. Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh nodded in weary approval. The Anglo-French counterattack, pushing east from the outskirts of Paris, was still making progress. Greasy was actually the hamlet of Gressy, a few miles west of where Walsh was now. Where Walsh was now was in Messy, which looked exactly the way its name made you think it would.

Messy had good reason for looking that way. Only a few weeks earlier, the Germans had bombed and shelled the place to chase the Allied defenders back toward Paris. And then, after the German attack ran out of steam both here and up near Beauvais, English and French guns pounded Messy to push back the
Boches
. A few buildings were still standing and didn’t seem too badly damaged, but that wasn’t from lack of effort on either side.

Hardly anyone lived in the ruins. People who could get out had done so before the Germans arrived. They hadn’t come back to reclaim whatever might be left of their homes and property. A lingering sick-sweet stench said not everybody’d got away. Or Walsh might have been getting a whiff of dead Germans. After three days, everybody—and every body—smelled the same.

As much to blunt the reek as for any other reason, Walsh lit a Navy Cut. Beside him, Second Lieutenant Herman Cavendish looked around and said, “So this is victory.”

Walsh hadn’t liked the subaltern ever since Cavendish brought the first order to counterattack. The Anglo-French strike had worked, which didn’t make the veteran noncom like the very young officer any better. “Sir, when you set this against 1918, it looks like a rest cure,” Walsh said.

Maybe Cavendish had been born in 1918, maybe not. If he had, he was still making messes in his nappies. He hadn’t seen—or, for that matter, smelled—the Western Front. He hadn’t got shot there, either. Walsh had done all of those things, however much he wished he hadn’t.

For a wonder, Cavendish heard the reproach in his voice. The youngster blushed like a schoolgirl. “I know you’ve been through a good deal,
Sergeant,” he said stiffly, “but I do believe I am gaining on you when it comes to experience.”

That he could come out with such claptrap straight-faced only proved how much experience he didn’t have yet. Telling him so would have been pointless precisely because he lacked the experience that would have let him understand what an idiot he was being.

Walsh didn’t even try. “Whatever you say, sir,” he answered. One of the things staff sergeants did was ride herd on subalterns till their nominal superiors were fit to go around a battlefield by themselves without getting too many of the soldiers under their command killed for no reason.

Cavendish might have been doing his best to prove he hadn’t reached that point yet. Pointing east, he said, “Well, we’ve given the
Boches
a proper what-for this time, eh?”

His posh accent only made that sound even stupider than it would have otherwise. Walsh wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible, but Cavendish proved him wrong. “Sir, the Germans came from their own border all the way to Paris. We’ve come from Paris all the way to Messy,” Walsh said. “If you want to call that a proper what-for, well, go ahead.”

“There are times when I doubt you have the proper attitude, Sergeant,” Cavendish said. “Would you sooner be fighting behind Paris?”

“No, sir. Not a bit of it.” Walsh’s own accent was buzzing Welsh, and lower-class Welsh at that. What else to expect from a miner’s son? He went on, “I’d sooner be fighting in bloody Germany, is what I’d sooner be doing. But that doesn’t look like it’s in the cards, does it?”

“In—Germany?” By the way the subaltern said it, the possibility had never crossed his mind. “Don’t you think that’s asking a bit much?”

“Evidently, sir.” Walsh left it right there. If the French generals—to say nothing of the British generals (which was about what they deserved to have said of them)—were worth the paper they were printed on, the German High Command wouldn’t have been able to impose its will on them with such effortless ease. That had happened the last time around, too. The
Boches
ran out of men and matériel then, while the Yanks gave the Allies all they needed.

No Yanks in the picture now, worse luck. Just the German generals
against their British and French counterparts.
Christ help us
, Walsh thought.

As if to remind people who’d forgotten (Second Lieutenant Herman Cavendish, for instance) that they hadn’t gone away, German gunners began lobbing shells into Messy. When they started landing too close for comfort, Walsh jumped into the nearest hole in the ground. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of choices.

He thought Cavendish would stay upright and make a brave little speech about command responsibility—till a flying fragment did something dreadful to him. But no: the subaltern dove for cover, too. He’d learned
something
, anyhow. Walsh wouldn’t have bet more than tuppence ha’penny on it.

After ten minutes or so, the bombardment eased off. Walsh cradled the Schmeisser he’d taken off a dead
Boche
—for throwing a lot of lead around at close quarters, nothing beat a submachine gun. If the Germans decided they wanted Messy back, he was ready to argue with them.

But no hunched-over figures wearing field-gray and coal-scuttle helmets loped forward. This was just harassing fire: hate, they would have called it in the last war. Somebody off in the distance was yelling for a medic, so the bastards serving a 105 had earned their salary this morning.

Lieutenant Cavendish went off to inflict his leadership on someone else. Walsh lit a fresh Navy Cut. He climbed out of the hole to see what the shelling had done to the hamlet.

A skinny little stubble-cheeked French sergeant puffing on a pipe emerged from cover about the same time he did. The Frenchman waved. “
Ça va
, Tommy?” he called.

“Va bien. Et tu?”
Walsh ran through a good part of his clean French with that. He waved toward the east, then spat.

The French noncom nodded. “Fucking
Boche,”
he said. His English was probably as filthy as most of Walsh’s
Français
. A couple of his men came out. He started yelling at them. He was a sergeant, all right.

Walsh checked on the soldiers in his own section. The fellow who’d bought part of a plot came from a different company. That was something, anyhow. After nodding rather smugly, Walsh wondered why it
should be. The British army was no better off because the wounded man wasn’t from his outfit. And that other company was weakened instead of his. In the larger scheme of things, so what?

But it was a bloke Walsh didn’t know, not one he did. You didn’t want one of
your
mates to stop one. Maybe that was a reminder you were too bloody liable to stop one yourself. Of course, you had to be an idiot not to know as much already. Still, there was a difference—whether there should have been or not—between knowing something and getting your nose rubbed in it.

“Are we supposed to move up again, Sergeant?” asked a soldier named Nigel. Like Lieutenant Cavendish, he spoke like an educated man. He didn’t sound toffee-nosed doing it, though.

“Nobody’s told me if we are,” Walsh answered. “You can bet your last quid the lieutenant would have, too.”

He wasn’t supposed to speak ill of officers. He was supposed to let the men in his charge form their unflattering opinions all by themselves. By the way Nigel and Bill and the others chuckled, they needed no help from him.

“He’s a bit gormless, ain’t he?” Bill said.
He
came from the Yorkshire dales, and sounded like it. The word wasn’t one Staff Sergeant Walsh would have chosen. It wasn’t one he’d heard before he took the King’s shilling more than half a lifetime ago. Well, he’d heard—and used—a lot of words he’d never imagined back in his civilian days.
Gormless
was one you could actually repeat in polite company.

“Oh, maybe a bit,” Walsh said, and they chuckled again. He added, “Say what you want about him, though—he is brave.”

“Well, yes, but so are the Germans,” Nigel said. “Even some of the Frenchmen … I suppose.”

“They are. We’d be a lot worse off if they weren’t,” Walsh said.

“Half of them are Bolshies, though. Can you imagine what would happen if the Nazis and Reds were on the same side?” Nigel plainly could. By the way he rolled his eyes, he didn’t fancy the notion. “Some Communist official would say, ‘The Germans are the workers’ friends,’ and all the fellow travelers would decide they didn’t feel like fighting any more.”