Now the politruk went on, “Marshal Antonescu shows he always was a Fascist at heart. He thinks the Nazis and their lackeys are a better bet than the USSR. But our heroic soldiers, our brave workers and peasants, will show him what a big mistake he has made. This widens the war. Now it stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Have the Nazis got enough men for such an enormous fight? No! Can Romania hope to fight the Red Army by herself? No again! We will push forward through her and tear into the Hitlerites’ soft underbelly!”
He waited for applause. He got some. The men had learned he shut up sooner if they cheered. “Fuck the Romanians!” Ivan called. “Bugger ’em with a pine cone!” He took the Germans seriously. They were too good at their trade for anything less. But the Romanians? They had to be worse humpties than the Poles. The Poles, at least, were brave. Nobody’d ever said that about the Romanians.
Lieutenant Vasiliev beamed at him. “There’s the Soviet fighting spirit! Are you a Party member, Sergeant?”
“No, Comrade Lieutenant.” Kuchkov wished he’d kept his big mouth shut. You didn’t want to draw their notice. They’d dump garbage on your head if you did.
“Would you like me to begin your paperwork for you? It’s easy enough to arrange.”
“However you please, Comrade Lieutenant.” Ivan wanted to become a Communist almost as much as he wanted to shit through his ears. But you couldn’t just tell the sons of bitches no. Then you’d go on a list. People who landed on those lists had bad things happen to them.
“You’re Kuchkov, right? Yes, of course you are.” Vasiliev had the politician’s knack for matching names and faces. Well, most of the time; with a self-deprecating chuckle, he added, “Please remind me of your name and patronymic.”
“Ivan Ivanovich, sir.”
“Can’t get much plainer than that, can you?” The politruk smiled as he wrote it down. “Me, I’m Arsen Feofanovich, so I’m at the other end of things.” Kuchkov nodded. Both Vasiliev and his father had uncommon first names, all right. But the lieutenant made a mistake if he thought Kuchkov might care.
The Germans started shelling the forest where the company sheltered. Digging proper foxholes in ground frozen stone hard was a bitch. And the Nazis had come up with an evil trick (one the Red Army also used, though Ivan didn’t worry about that): they set their fuses to maximum sensitivity, so most shells went off as soon as they touched branches overhead. Then the bursts sprayed sharp fragments of hot metal down on the men huddled below.
It was Ivan’s first real time under shellfire. He couldn’t shoot back, any more than he could when his bomber drew the unwelcome attention of antiaircraft guns. All he could do was stay low and try to dig himself in, though his entrenching tool took only pathetic little bites of dirt.
Something hissed in the snow a few centimeters from his hand: a shard of brass that could have skewered him as easily as not. “Fuck your mothers!” he yelled, though of course the Nazis serving those distant 105s couldn’t hear him. “I hope your dicks rot off!”
He also hoped one of those nasty fragments would wound Lieutenant Vasiliev. He didn’t want Vasiliev dead, just hurt enough to forget about putting him up for Party membership. If the politruk spent a few weeks in the hospital and then got sent to a different unit, that would do fine.
Other soldiers swore, too, to let out their fear. And wounded men shrieked and wailed. The unhurt soldiers closest to them did what they could to relieve their comrades’ agony. Too often, that wasn’t much. Slapping a wound dressing on a leg ripped from knee to crotch was sending a baby boy to do a man’s job.
Ivan wondered whether the Germans would follow up the shelling with an infantry attack. Russians laughed at Winter Fritz, yeah. Propaganda posters showed scrawny, shivering Nazi soldiers with icicles dangling from the ends of their long, pointed noses. That didn’t match what Kuchkov had seen. Yes, wide-tracked Russian tanks had the edge on German machines in the snow. The German foot soldiers around here seemed to know what they were doing, though. Some of their gear was improvised or stolen from the locals, but it wasn’t bad.
And yes, sentries shouted in alarm. Submachine guns stuttered out death. Far more Red Army soldiers carried them than any other nation’s troops. They didn’t have a rifle’s range, true, or a rifle’s stopping power. But they were cheap and easy to make, and they spat a lot of lead. Inside a couple of hundred meters, a company of men with submachine guns would massacre a company of riflemen.
The Germans, by contrast, made sure almost every squad included a light machine gun. That was another way to get firepower in carload lots. German MG-34s were far more portable than their Soviet equivalents. Ivan hadn’t been a foot soldier long, but he already hated them.
Snatching up his own PPD, he ran for the edge of the woods. Shells kept falling, but you did what you had to do. The artillery might get him. If the Nazis made it in among the trees, he was a dead man for sure.
As soon as he saw figures in whitewashed coal-scuttle helmets running toward him, he threw himself down behind a tree and started shooting. The Nazis were pros. They flattened out. Most of them had snow smocks or bedsheets for camouflage, though a few wore only their field-gray greatcoats and stood out like lumps of coal.
Two Germans served an MG-34. Ivan burned through most of his big drum magazine before he took them out, but he made damn sure he did. Without that monster supporting them, the Fritzes lost enthusiasm for the attack across open ground. Sullenly, in good order, they drew back. Ivan’s sigh of relief filled the air in front of him with fog. His number wasn’t up… this time.
Chapter 5
Benjamin Halevy had all the answers. He was a Frenchman and a Jew, so he sure thought he did, anyhow. “Marshal Sanjurjo inspects the Madrid front every so often,” he said. “The Nationalists still don’t realize everything your elephant gun can do. Put a round through his giblets at a kilometer and a half and watch the assholes on the other side thrash like a chicken after it gets one in the neck from the farmer’s wife.”
“You make it sound so easy.” Vaclav Jezek eyed his cigarette with distaste. Spanish tobacco was even harsher than French. Every drag sandpapered his throat. The only thing worse would be no tobacco at all. This was a misfortune. That would be a catastrophe.
“You’ve done it before,” Halevy said. “You just have to be in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Jezek repeated, even more dryly than before. Like so many things, sniping had to look simple to people who didn’t do it. The positioning, the concealment, the waiting, the shot… Everything had to go perfectly, or you wasted a bullet. More likely, you never got your shot off. Or else some canny bastard on the other side, somebody who was better or luckier than you were at that particular moment, blew out the side of your head.
“Well, think about it,” the Jew told him. “I’m starting to get connections, and sometimes they hear things from the other side. If you punch Sanjurjo’s ticket, the Republic will pin so many medals on you, you’ll look like a Fascist general.”
“I think I’d rather get laid,” Vaclav said. Halevy laughed. Vaclav sent him a sour stare. “And how are you getting connections? You don’t speak Spanish.”
“No, but if people here speak any foreign language, they speak French.” Halevy made it sound natural and easy.
It probably was, for him. Vaclav grunted, pinched out the cigarette’s coal, and stowed the little butt in a tobacco pouch. Waste not, want not. A Jew would land on his feet anywhere-even in Spain, evidently.
Somebody on the other side fired a rifle. The bullet whined high over the Republican line. It would come down somewhere, but long odds it would hurt anybody when it did. A lot of shots fired in war were like that. You wanted to get the other guys, but you didn’t want them to get you. So you fired without sticking your head up to see what you were doing. You made them keep their heads down, anyway.