The burning tank set the bushes by it on fire, too. The blaze flushed a few more Fritzes out of their holes. Walsh cheerfully banged away at them with his Sten gun. It was long range for a machine pistol, but he didn’t care. Hitler’s lads had something brand new to give them nightmares when they curled up under their blankets. And wasn’t that nice?
Arno Baatz paused at the western edge of a field of growing grain. He thought the grain was barley, not wheat, but he wasn’t sure-he was a city man. He was sure it was a damn sorry field of whatever the hell it was. It had been badly tended ever since it was planted, and not long before this panzers and halftracks had run through it and knocked half of it flat. Crows pecked at the unripe heads of grain the armored fighting vehicles had threshed.
He cared about that no more than he cared about whether it was wheat or barley. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and thrust it up over his head to gauge the wind. Adam Pfaff laughed at him. “Since when did you turn Red Indian?” Pfaff asked.
“Oh, shut up,” Baatz said. “Shut up unless you know a better way to tell which direction it’s from, I mean.” He waited. Pfaff kept quiet, so Arno assumed he didn’t know any better way. As a matter of fact, he’d already assumed that. He nodded importantly. “It’s coming out of the west. That’s what we need.”
“Jawohl,” Pfaff muttered, perhaps sarcastically, perhaps not.
Baatz didn’t gig him the way he would have most of the time; the Unteroffizier had other things on his mind. Puffing out his chest, he called to the troops of his squad, who stood with him, lined up along the edge of the grainfield: “Get your torches ready, men!”
“It’s not motherfucking close-order drill,” Pfaff said. Baatz ignored him again; he was treating it as if it were. And the Obergefreiter had his torch-a stick with a lump of tallow and straw at one end-ready along with everybody else.
“Light your torches!” Arno Baatz commanded. He loved giving orders. He started his torch with a flint-and-steel lighter. Some of the Landsers had ones like it. Others used matches to get theirs burning. Baatz bellowed again: “Swing your torches over your heads!”
They did, all of them counterclockwise. The flames in the tallow swelled; black smoke trailed the circling torches. It would have been pretty on a practice field. But this wasn’t practice. This was war.
“Throw your torches!” Baatz yelled. The soldiers obeyed, as if they were flinging potato-masher grenades. They didn’t get that kind of distance with the torches, but they didn’t need to.
Down fell the flaming lumps of tallow and straw, in amongst the growing grain-and, better yet, in amongst the dying, yellowing strips of grain the armored vehicles’ tracks had crushed. Each torch started a little fire. The fires grew and spread through the field, pushed on by the wind Baatz had successfully identified. Smoke climbed into the sky. The crows flew away, screeching with fear.
“Well, all right! The Reds won’t march through that any time soon,” Baatz said, inflating his chest again. “And when they do try it, we can put a machine gun in those woods over there and shoot them down like the mad hounds they are.” He pointed to the trees that overlooked the burning field.
Then he scowled at Obergefreiter Pfaff, waiting for him to come out with some crack along the lines of When are you getting your field marshal’s baton? He would have jumped all over Pfaff for that. Talk of a field marshal’s baton was all the more galling to a man who couldn’t even get promoted to Feldwebel. But the senior private just said, “The Ivans won’t be able to eat that grain, either.”
The grain wasn’t that close to ripeness. Baatz grunted and nodded even so. The Russians would eat it anyway if they happened to be hungry. They ate bugs and slugs and newts and mushrooms and ferns and anything else they could get their hands on. The Red Army didn’t give its men any more in the way of rations than it could help. Munitions, yes. Food? The Ivans were on their own for that. They foraged like wild animals. The resemblance didn’t always end there, either.
So, scorched earth. If the Wehrmacht had to fall back, the Russians wouldn’t be able to do much with the land they advanced through. It made perfect military sense to Baatz. It might not have if the Red Army were retreating through Germany and burning and wrecking as it did, but that never once crossed his mind. The Red Army in the Vaterland? Unimaginable!
“Come on, boys,” he said, his sense of self-importance restored. “We’ve got another ten kilometers to go before we make it to our rest line.”
Predictably, the men groaned. They didn’t like wearing out their boots marching. Baatz didn’t like it himself; he was a heavyset fellow. But he had his orders. Give him orders and he’d carry them out. He’d make sure everybody to whom he gave orders carried them out, too.
Slyly, Adam Pfaff said, “If we fall back ten kilometers every day, how many days till we’re retreating through Berlin? It’s like a problem in a math book, isn’t it?”
“It’s no such thing!” Baatz sounded furious, and he was. “We’re just shortening our front and getting into more defensible positions. That’s the only thing we’re doing-the only thing, you hear me?”
He hoped Pfaff would argue with him. Miserable barracks lawyer, Baatz thought. But arguing here would come within millimeters of defeatism, and defeatism was a capital crime.
Instead of arguing, Pfaff just kept marching along. He left Baatz’s words hanging in the air, all by themselves. Somehow, that worked better than any fancy hairsplitting might have.
When they got back to the rest line, they found themselves only a couple of hundred meters from a field kitchen. “Goulash cannon!” Pfaff said happily. There, Baatz wasn’t inclined to quarrel. Seeing the pipe sticking up from the wheeled cart with the stove and boiler made him happy, too. He wouldn’t have to fill his belly with hard crackers smeared with butter from a tinfoil tube or dried fruit or any of the other delicacies he carried on his person.
He brought his mess tin over to the field kitchen. The boiler was full of stew, with turnips and carrots and onions and chicken and duck and whatever else the cooks could scrounge, all done together … done and done and done, till the chicken tasted like onions and the carrots tasted like duck and everything tasted like everything else. It wasn’t anything he would have made for himself or ordered in an eatery. It was wonderful all the same. When you’d been marching all day, anything that plugged up the hole in your belly was wonderful.
Adam Pfaff cleaned out his mess kit after making what was in it disappear. When he came back from the nearby creek, he stretched out on the ground at full length and lit a cigarette. Blowing a long stream of smoke up into the sky, he said, “I got a pretty decent supper in me. Nobody’s trying to kill me right this minute. Life’s not so bad, you know?”
“No, not so bad,” Baatz said. “Now if they’d set up a brothel anywhere around here …”
“That’d be nice,” Pfaff agreed. “But I’ll tell you-if they let me sleep till noon tomorrow, I’d like that just about as much. I’ve got to be a year and a half behind on shuteye since they conscripted me.” He yawned till something in his jaw cracked like a knuckle.
When you watched someone else yawn, you wanted to yawn yourself. Baatz yielded to temptation before he even thought he might fight it. Then he wagged a finger at Pfaff. “You rotten pigdog, you! Now you’ve gone and reminded me how tired I am, too. Noon? I could curl up in a cave somewhere and sleep till spring like a bear.”