A colored porter wheeled up a baggage cart. He tipped his cap, grinned to show off a mouthful of gold teeth. “Heah you go, gentlemen,” he said, his accent even richer than the manager’s. Yeager let the fellow heave his bags onto the cart, tipped him a nickel. The gleaming grin got wider.
Sitting beside Yeager in the passenger car, Fiore said, “When my dad first got to New York from the old country, he took the train from there to Pittsburgh, where my uncle Joe already was. First smoke he’s ever seen in his life is the steward, and he’s got gold teeth just like the porter here. For months, my, dad thought all colored folks came that way.”
Yeager laughed, then said, “Hell, I grew up between Lincoln and Omaha, and I never saw anybody who wasn’t white till I went off — to play ball. I’ve barnstormed against colored teams a couple of times, make some extra money during the winter. Some of those boys, if they were white, they could play anywhere.”
“That’s probably true,” Fiore said. “But they ain’t white.” The train started to roll. Fiore twisted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. “I’m gonna sleep for a while, then head back to the dining car after the crowd thins out”
“If you aren’t awake by eight, I’ll give you a shot in the ribs,” Yeager said. Fiore nodded with his eyes closed. He was good at sleeping on trains, better than Yeager, who got out his Astounding and started to read. The newest Heinlein serial had ended the month before, but stories by Asimov, Robert Moore Williams, del Rey, Hubbard, and Clement were plenty to keep him entertained. In minutes, he was millions of miles and thousands of years from the mundane reality of an Illinois Central train rolling south over flat prairie fields between one Midwestern town and another.
A field kitchen rolled up to the tank company somewhere south of Kharkov. After a couple of weeks of motoring this way and that, first to halt a Russian attack and then to trap the attackers, Major Heinrich Jager couldn’t have said where he was more precisely than that without a call to Sixteenth Panzer’s signal detachment.
The field kitchen didn’t properly belong to the company. Like the other two units that made up the Second Panzer Regiment, it had a motorized kitchen that was supposed to stay with it, while this one was horse-drawn. Jager didn’t care. He waved the driver to a halt, shouted to rout out his tank crews.
Some of the men kept on sleeping, in their Panzer IIIs or under them. But the magic word “food” and the savory smell that wafted from the stew kettle got a good many up and moving. “What have you got for us?” Jager asked the driver and the cook.
“Boiled kasha, sir, with onions and meat,” the cook answered.
Jager had never tasted buckwheat groats till the. panzer division smashed its way into southern Russia the July before. They still weren’t his top choice, or anywhere close to it, but they filled the belly nicely. He knew better than to ask about the meat-horse, donkey, maybe dog? He didn’t want to know. Had it been beef or mutton, the cook would have bragged about it.
He dug out his mess tin, got in line. The cook ladled out a big dollop of steaming stew. He attacked it with gusto. His stomach complained for a moment; it wasn’t used to taking on a heavy load in the wee small hours. Then it decided it liked being full, and shut up.
Somewhere off in the distance, a machine gun started chattering, and a few seconds later another one. A frown twisted Jager’s stubbly face as he ate. The Russians were supposed to have been kaput around these parts for most of a week. But then, nobody lived to grow old by counting Russians out too soon. The previous winter had proved that.
As if drawn by a magnet, Jager peered through the darkness toward the hulk of a T-34 that sat, turret all askew, perhaps fifty meters away. The killed tank was only a vague shape in the darkness, but even a glimpse could make fearful sweat start under his arms.
“If only we had panzers like that,” he murmured. He stuck his spoon into the stew still on his tin plate, stroked the black ribbon of his wound badge. Thanks to a T-34, he would have a furrow in his calf till the day he died. The rest of the crew of the Panzer III he’d been in at the time hadn’t been so lucky; only one other man had bailed out, and he was back in Germany getting pieced together one operation at a time.
Simply measured tank against tank, a Panzer III, even, one with the new, long 50mm gun, had no business taking on a T-34. The Russian tank boasted a cannon half again as big, thicker armor cleverly sloped to deflect shells, and an engine that was not only more powerful than a Panzer IIIs but a diesel to boot, so it wouldn’t go up in flames the way the. German machine’s petrol-powered Maybach so often did.
“It’s not so bad as all that, sir.” The cheerful voice at his shoulder belonged to Captain Ernst Riecke, his second-in-command.
“Ha. You heard me muttering to myself, did you?” Jager said.
“Yes, sir. You ask me, it’s the same in tanks as it is in screwing, sir.”
Jager raised an eyebrow. “This I have to hear.”
“Well, in both cases knowing what to do with what you’ve got counts for more than how big it is.”
The company commander snorted. Still, no doubt Riecke had a point. Even after almost a year of painful instruction at the hands of the Germans, the Bolsheviks were still in. the habit of committing their armor by dribs and drabs instead of massing it for maximum effect. That was how the dead T-34 had come to grief: rumbling along without support, it had been set upon and destroyed by three Panzer IIIs.
Still… “Think how fine it would be to have a big one and know what to do with it.”
“It is enjoyable, sir,” Riecke said complacently. “Or were you talking about panzers again?”
“You’re incorrigible,” Jager said, and then wondered if it was just that the captain was still on the sunny side of thirty. Promotion came quickly on the Russian front. Good officers led their troops forward rather than sending up orders from the rear. That meant good officers died in larger numbers, a twisted sort of natural selection that worried Jager.
He felt every one of his own forty-three years. He’d fought in the trenches in France in 1918, in the last push toward Paris and then in the grinding retreat to the Rhine. He’d first seen tanks then, the clumsy monsters the British used, and knew at once that if he ever went to war again, he wanted them on his Side for a change. But they were forbidden to the postwar Reichswehr. As soon as Hitler took the gloves off and started rearming Germany, Jager went straight into armor.
He took another couple of mouthfuls of stew, then asked, “How many panzers do we have up and running?”
“Eleven,” Riecke answered. “Maybe we’ll be able to get another one going in the morning, if we scrounge around for some fuel line.”
“Not bad,” Jager said, as much to console himself as to reassure Riecke. On paper, his company should have had twenty-two Panzer IIIs. In fact, it had had nineteen when the Russians launched their attack. On the eastern front, getting that close to paper strength was no small accomplishment.
“The Reds can’t be in good shape, either,” Riecke said. His voice turned worried, just for a moment: “Can they?”
“We’ve bagged enough of them, the last three weeks,” Jager said. That was true enough; a couple of hundred thousand Russians had trudged off into captivity when the Germans pinched off the opening through which they’d poured. The enemy threw away more than a thousand tanks and two thousand artillery pieces. Bolshevik losses the summer before had been on an even more colossal scale.
But before he crossed from Romania into Russia, he’d never imagined how immense the country was; how the plains seemed to stretch on and on forever; how thin a division, a corps, an army, could spread just to hold a front, let alone advance. And from those limitless plains sprang seemingly limitless streams of men and tanks. And they all fought, ferociously if without much skill. Jager knew too well the Wehrmacht was anything but limitless. If every German soldier slew two Red Army men, if every panzer knocked out two T-34s or KVs, the Russians had a net gain.