Ivan Kuchkov wasn’t in a penal battalion. The Russian sergeant didn’t care about anything else. The Germans could still kill him, of course. They’d come too close too many times. The Ukrainian bandits who called themselves nationalists could still do him in, too. Those were the chances you took when you served the Soviet Union.
But his own side wouldn’t just throw him away like a shitty asswipe. Penal battalions got officers and men who’d screwed up badly enough to piss off the guys set over them in a big way. Stavka shuffled them around the long front and threw them in where things were hottest. Clearing a path for the troops behind them was what they were for.
Minefield in front of an entrenched Nazi position? No problem, Comrade Colonel! The boys in the penal battalion will find those mines! They’ll find them with their feet while the German machine gunners shoot down the ones who don’t blow up. Then you won’t waste so many soldiers who might actually be good for something.
German tanks in the neighborhood? No Red Army tanks to drive them off? Don’t worry, Comrade Major General! We’ll hand the lads in the penal battalion magnetic limpet mines. They can run forward and stick them on the Fascists’ side armor! The tanks will be firing at them while they run? So will German foot soldiers? That’s hard luck, all right. But the dumb cunts should have known better than to wind up in a penal battalion to begin with.
If you lived through whatever suicidal mission they sent you on, they gave you back your old rank and put you in an ordinary unit again. You’d wiped away your sin, the way you could in an Orthodox monastery by penance. They did if they felt like it, anyhow. Otherwise, they stuck you in another penal battalion and gave you a new chance to expend yourself. That was how they talked, as if you were a shell casing or a worn-out boot.
One of the sentries in Ivan’s section had shot-had not just shot but killed-the regimental political officer when the stupid politruk wouldn’t give him the password. The company CO didn’t dare cover it up, any more than Ivan had when he found out about it. Somebody would blab, and then all their dicks would go on the chopping block.
So the NKVD came down on poor Vitya Ryakhovsky, and on Ivan, and on Lieutenant Obolensky, too. And in the end, the Chekists decided sending them to a battalion like that would be more trouble than it was worth-too fucking many forms to fill out if they did.
Ivan neither read nor wrote. If scribbling stuff on a bunch of papers was that big a pain in the ass, he was goddamn glad to be illiterate. (He’d also heard that the Nazis shot Russians they captured who could read and write. He didn’t know for sure that that was true, but it sounded like something the Hitlerites would do. It was one of the few things having to do with Germans that he didn’t need to worry about.)
So here he was, still down in the Ukraine with his old unit. So was Lieutenant Obolensky. So was poor Vitya. Ivan didn’t make the mistake of thinking all was forgiven or forgotten. He knew better. They were watching. They were waiting. As soon as they saw the chance, they’d give him one in the nuts if the Germans hadn’t taken care of the job for them by then.
Maybe, just maybe, the Germans wouldn’t be able to do it. He’d developed a healthy respect for Hitler’s pricks. He’d been fighting them since the war broke out. He’d been a Red Air Force bombardier then. After he bailed out of his burning SB-2, he’d kept fighting on the ground. Nobody could ever say that the Fritzes didn’t know what they were doing. Nobody could ever say the bastards weren’t brave, either. They wouldn’t have been anywhere near so much trouble if they weren’t brave.
But they were stretched too thin these days, when they had to fight the Red Army here in the East and the English and French on the other side of their country. Like a hungry peasant padding out wheat flour with ground peas, the Nazis here in the Ukraine padded their lines with Romanians and Hungarians.
Both sets of Fascist jackals wore khaki darker than the Red Army’s. Figuring out which was which could be confusing. The Hungarians used German-style helmets. The Romanians had a different model, domed on top but long fore and aft.
The other interesting thing was that Hitler’s little chums couldn’t stand each other. The Nazis didn’t dare stick a Romanian unit next to one full of Magyars. They had to keep Germans between their allies. Otherwise, the Hungarians and Romanians would go at each other and forget all about the Russians they were supposed to be fighting.
More and more Red Army soldiers and tanks and planes swarmed into the Ukraine. The Germans kept hitting back as hard as they could. The Hungarians and especially the Romanians began to realize they weren’t bound for glory. They threw down their rifles and threw up their hands whenever they saw the chance. They figured their odds were better in the gulag than in fighting it out. Ivan thought that showed they were morons, but it wasn’t his worry.
Stavka understood the enemy’s woes. The big pushes went against soldiers in khaki, not against the pricks who wore Feldgrau. When the Hungarians and Romanians didn’t give up, they fell back. That meant the Germans on their flanks had to fall back, too, or else risk getting cut off.
Most of the time, that was what it meant, anyhow. Ivan had just finished robbing a Romanian who was sobbingly glad not to get killed out of hand. The swarthy jerk in the brownish uniform had hardly anything worth taking. But he did carry a folding German entrenching tool. Ivan had wanted one for a while. It took up less room than the ordinary Soviet short-handled spade. And you could use it as a pick if you locked the blade at right angles to the handle. It was a nifty piece of work.
He’d just stuck it on his own belt when German 105s to the south opened up on the fields through which the Red Army was advancing. A moment later, German shells started screaming down from the north, too. If that didn’t mean a counterattack to slice off the head of the oncoming Russian column, Ivan was even dumber than he gave himself credit for.
He forgot about the Romanians. The enemy’s good players were coming. “Hit the dirt, fuckers!” he yelled to his own men.
The Red Army men did, all except for a couple of raw replacements who stood around twiddling their foreskins because they’d never been shelled before. The Romanian who’d been about to shuffle back into captivity flattened out among the growing stalks of wheat, too. Marshal Antonescu’s boys might not be the fiercest soldiers ever hatched, but they weren’t virgins at this business, either.
Ivan used his new toy to dig himself a little scrape in the rich, bread-smelling black earth. Even a shallow hole with the dirt thrown up to either side might keep you from getting gutted like a barnyard goose at a wedding feast. You could also fight with an entrenching tool if you had to.
When Ivan heard a Soviet tank’s cannon fire, he knew for sure the Germans were coming. When he heard the tank’s machine guns go off, he knew they were just about here. He carried a PPD submachine gun: an ugly little piece of stamped steel that could slaughter anything out to a couple of hundred meters.
A Russian T-34 blew up. The Red Army had more tanks, many more, but the Germans had just about caught up in quality. When there were Tigers in the neighborhood, they’d gone ahead. Ivan didn’t see any of the slab-sided monsters, which made him feel a little better, anyhow.
He did see the wheat stalks rippling as Fritzes crawled through them. He hosed down the area in front of him with the machine pistol. Shrieks and thrashing among the battered crops said he’d done somebody a bad turn.
But the Germans didn’t want to be driven away here. When mortar bombs started whispering down, Ivan decided he’d had enough. “Back!” he shouted. “Come on, you bitches! Back! We’ll get the cocksuckers the next time.”