Other panzers-more IIs and the smaller Panzer Is-were dim shapes in the night. Ludwig affectionately patted his machine. The Panzer II was a great improvement over the I.
The driver's voice floated out through the speaking tube: "Kinda hate to leave Katscher. Found this little waitress there-she doesn't know how to say no."
"Jesus, Fritz!" Rothe said. "D'you pass shortarm inspection?"
Fritz Bittenfeld chuckled. "Doesn't hurt when I piss, so I guess everything's all right."
"Wonderful," the panzer commander muttered. Fritz only laughed. The third member of the crew-the radio operator, Theo Kessler-sat in the back of the fighting compartment. The only way he could see out was through peepholes. Ludwig wasn't sure whether he couldn't hear the conversation or just ignored it. But then, he wasn't sure about Theo a lot of the time.
"Halt!" The command floated out of the night. Rothe relayed it to Bittenfeld, who was driving buttoned up. The panzer stopped. They were where they were supposed to be…unless some Czech infiltrator was screwing them over. Rothe shook his head. Natural to be nervous before the balloon went up, but that was pushing things.
Nothing left to do but wait. Ludwig pushed back the sleeve of his black panzer coveralls to get a look at the radium-glowing hands on his watch. A quarter to four. Right on time. Everything was supposed to start at 0600. That gave him something else to worry about. It would still be almost dark. If the clouds overhead lingered, it might really be dark.
And if the clouds lingered, the Luftwaffe wouldn't be able to do as much as it was supposed to. How could you see what to bomb and shoot up if low clouds and fog blotted out the landscape?
This kind of weather was normal for this time of year. Ludwig hoped the fellows with the General Staff's red stripes on their trousers knew what the hell they were up to. If they didn't, a lot of good Landers would get buried in makeshift graves with only a rifle and a helmet for a headstone.
As if picking that thought out of his head, Fritz said, "The Fuhrer knows what he's doing. Those dirty Czechs, they deserve everything we'll give 'em. They can't go murdering people inside Germany."
"Sure," Ludwig said. He thought the Czechs had a lot of nerve bumping off Konrad Henlein, too. But he was fretting about how much the Wehrmacht would take, not what it would dish out.
Again, Theo didn't say a thing. Well, he didn't have a speaking tube to Fritz. And he'd been wearing his earphones. Rothe wondered why. Radio silence was bound to be tighter than Fritz's waitress' works. The only signal that might come was one calling everything off because peace had broken out. The panzer commander didn't expect that. Nobody else did, either.
Ludwig looked at his watch again. 0400. At this rate, he'd feel as if he'd aged a year before things started happening. He couldn't even smoke. Somebody out there would skin him alive if he showed a match. And you had to be even more desperate for a butt than he was to light up inside the turret, what with all the ammo in there. Nothing to do but wait and fidget.
As 0600 neared, the sky slowly began to get light. A few minutes before the hour, he thought he heard thunder in the air. Then he realized it was nothing of the sort: it was untold hundreds or thousands of airplane engines, all of them roaring toward Czechoslovakia.
Fritz heard them, too. You'd have to be deaf not to. "Boy, those Czech assholes are really gonna catch it," he said happily.
"Ja," Ludwig said, and let it go at that.
Behind them, artillery started bellowing. Red flares leaped into the sky-the go signal! Without waiting for an order, Fritz put the Panzer II in gear and started forward. Other panzers were heading for the border-heading over the border-too. Half-seen German soldiers trotted along with them, clutching Mausers and hunching low to make themselves smaller targets.
A shell burst a couple of hundred meters away. Maybe it was a short round. More likely, it was the goddamn Czechs shooting back. Dirt and a couple of men flew up into the air. Poor bastards, Ludwig thought. He wondered what would happen if a 75 or a 105 hit his panzer. Then he wished he hadn't.
More shells fell on the Germans. He'd thought the opening bombardment would silence the enemy guns. Evidently not. One shell did hit a little Panzer I. It slewed sideways and started to burn. Machine-gun ammunition inside started cooking off-pop-pop-pop! It sounded absurdly cheerful.
Somebody in a khaki uniform-almost brown, really-popped up from a hole in the ground and fired at the Germans. They were over the border, then. Ludwig traversed the turret and squeezed off a burst of machine-gun fire at the Czech soldier. He didn't know whether he hit the man. If he made him duck and stop shooting, that would do.
Things inside Czechoslovakia didn't look much different from the way they did on the German side of the line. The terrain was rugged. One reason the Czechs didn't want to give back the Sudetenland was that the rough ground and the forts they'd built in it gave them their best shield against attack. Best or not, it wouldn't be good enough…Ludwig hoped.
The panzer clanked past a house. It looked like the ones inside the Reich, too. Well, why not? Germans were Germans, on that side of the frontier or on this one. Past the house was a forest. Ludwig thought it seemed wilder than woods in Germany would have. The Czechs probably didn't care for it the way they should.
Or maybe they wanted it all jungly and overgrown. A machine gun in there started spraying death at the German infantry. When a bullet cracked past Ludwig's ear, he realized that machine gun could kill him, too. He ducked reflexively. He almost pissed himself. The Czechs were playing for keeps, all right.
They had more than machine guns in the woods, too. An antitank gun spat a long tongue of flame. A Panzer II just like Ludwig's caught fire. A perfect smoke ring came out through the commander's hatch. Ludwig didn't see any of the crew get away.
"Do we go into that, Sergeant?" Fritz asked.
Ludwig understood why he hesitated. Open country was best for panzers. Out on the plains and meadows, you could see trouble coming. But somebody'd forgotten to issue a whole lot of plains and meadows to this part of Czechoslovakia. "Yes, we do," Rothe answered. "Our job is to smash through their defensive lines. Once we do that, the rest of the country falls into our lap."
"If they don't blow our balls off first." That wasn't Fritz; it was Theo. So the radioman was listening after all. Ludwig would have come down on him for sounding defeatist if he weren't so likely to be right.
Into the woods. Other panzers were pushing forward, too. Things were better-or seemed better, anyhow-when you had company. There was, of course, the saying about misery.
A bullet struck sparks as it spanged off the panzer's hull. That left Ludwig with a couple of really unpleasant choices. If he stayed where he was, he was much too likely to get shot. But if he ducked down inside the turret and shut the hatch, he would have the devil's own time seeing where he was going. All kinds of bad things were liable to happen to the panzer then.
He stayed where he was. Every so often, he fired a short burst from his machine gun. The other panzer commanders were doing the same thing. Foot soldiers banged away, too. With enough lead in the air, the Czechs would be too busy taking cover and dying to shoot back much.
He hoped. Boy, did he!
The Panzer II emerged from the woods onto open ground that had taken a beating from bombs and artillery. As soon as it did, Ludwig wished it hadn't, because there sat a Panzer I, burning like nobody's business. The commander had tried to get out of the turret, but he hadn't made it. Something nasty lurked in the next stretch of trees.