Latsis laughed bitterly and lit his own Lucky. “There is no God, or had you forgotten, Sergei Alexievich. Religion is the opiate of the people and we live to serve the state. You think this is horrible, don’t you? Do you want me to tell you again what the Germans did to my family?”
Suslov did not want the story retold. “It doesn’t make this right.”
Latsis sneered. “I can’t wait until the first American women get passed around and used as ornaments like these. The Yanks do have women in their hospitals and with their rear units, don’t they? They’ll squeal as well as the Germans when we get our hands on them.”
“You would do this to Americans?” Martynov was shocked.
“With pleasure,” Latsis answered. “They betrayed their true colors by becoming allies with the Germans. It was one thing for us to fight just them. That could have been an honorable war, if there is such a thing, but by making a treaty with the Nazis, they betrayed their true colors. They are as bad as the German scum.”
They had been joined by the fourth member of their crew, Popov, the part-Asian loader. “We are wanted back at the tank.”
“Why?” asked Suslov.
Popov grimaced slightly. “The political officers want to give us another lecture.” At first Suslov had thought Popov was a spy for the NKVD, but he no longer did. He had proven too reliable.
I can hardly wait, Suslov thought. Perhaps we should tell them to hold it in the shade of these trees. “Yes,” he said instead, “let us go and hear why we must win this war.”
CHAPTER 15
G eneral Marshall accepted the cup of coffee from his subordinate and friend, Dwight Eisenhower. The two men were alone in Ike’s tent near Reims while Burke and a number of aides waited outside, chatting, smoking, and wondering what the great men were talking about.
Marshall sipped his coffee. “I had planned to be here sooner, but it was necessary to travel circumspectly to avoid Red planes.”
Ike smiled slightly. The danger from Russian planes had become a fact of life to those in the European theater, but was something new for someone coming over from the States. Marshall and his staff had also been delayed by the violent peace riots taking place in war-fatigued Britain. They were a clear message that their main ally, Britain, was no longer as reliable as she had been.
Marshall refused an offer of more coffee. “Ike, what’s the latest on the ground war?”
Ike lit another cigarette. “We are fighting them every inch of the way and making them pay. In a couple of days we’ll have to quit Brunswick and be back to the Leine River north of the Harz Mountains. The Reds are beginning to flank Montgomery.”
“Can you hold them at the Leine?”
“No.”
The simple statement silenced both of them. Ike briefly explained that the Leine River was not a major obstacle. Even though there had been time to prepare defenses and fortifications, the river was not particularly wide or deep.
“We can delay them,” said Ike, “but that’s about all.”
Marshall sighed, accepting the fact. “You are still hoping to stop them at the Weser?”
In some places the Weser, a wider and more formidable stretch of water, was only twenty-five or thirty miles west of the Leine. Neither man felt it would be long after the Russians forced the Leine that they would be on the banks of the Weser.
Ike shrugged. “We will make a hell of an effort to stop them there. If that doesn’t work, it’ll be at the Rhine, which is about a hundred and fifty miles away from the Leine. If they cross the Rhine, well, they won’t have much left in the way of natural obstacles to stop them before Antwerp, or much left of Germany for that matter. It’ll have to be flesh and blood that stops them, not rivers.”
Both men paused and pondered the potential cost.
“Get me more troops,” Ike said simply.
“Not likely,” said Marshall. “The only available force is Clark’s Fifth Army in Italy, and it was stripped and nearly cut in half to support the campaign in France. The Fifth is a mere shell of itself and cannot supply the reinforcements you need, especially since the Italian Commies and the Italian government have decided to start killing each other.
“Do you have any good news?”
“A little,” Ike said. “Potsdam is still holding out. They were attacked by a pretty large Russian force, but they managed to defeat it although they took a lot more casualties and the city is pretty well destroyed. There is long-term concern about supplies since we’ve had to stop airdropping, but right now they’re in pretty good shape.”
“Good. Now, what about the Germans?”
Ike paused, then brightened slightly. “Well, with very few exceptions, the German armistice is going well. German units under General Blaskowitz are passing through the British on their way to Holstein and the Kiel Canal defense line without incident, and are joining some other Wehrmacht units under the overall command of Kesselring. Only a couple of fanatics have caused any trouble and just about anyone with an SS background has tried to disappear, probably to South America. Some other German forces are lying low in Austria and likewise behaving themselves.”
Ike leaned forward. Marshall stiffened. He knew what his general was going to say. “General Marshall, what do you think about incorporating German military units into our defenses? We have hundreds of thousands of them as prisoners and a large number of units are still fairly intact. The Germans will fight for their country if we let them and all they need are weapons. It’s repugnant, but necessary if we are to win this war.”
Marshall nodded. He had already come to that unwelcome conclusion. However, there were problems that transcended politics, problems that Eisenhower was overlooking.
“Ike, we can scarcely take care of our own boys. We do not have the resources to organize, equip, and supply any large numbers of Germans, at least not in enough time to influence the fighting now going on.”
“I know. But I would still like to use them where and how I can. We could put existing German units into defensive positions and let them fight for their homes. I think they would fight like bandits to get the Soviets out of Germany after all the atrocities the Reds are committing.”
“I will talk with Truman. His meeting with Speer may have given us the opening we need. And yes, it is repugnant.”
Ike brightened. However small, a weight had been taken off his shoulders. “Did you hear what happened to Goering?” he said, changing the subject with a grin.
Marshall smiled despite his own fatigue. Ike’s grin really was infectious. “No.”
“Well, a couple of our MPs caught him as he neared the Swiss border. The fool was disguised as a woman. A magnificently fat, ugly woman. What a marvelous ending for the Third Reich.”
Marvelous indeed, thought Marshall. Now all he had to do was confront Truman.
Elisabeth smiled tentatively. “Jack, which of us smells worse?”
Jack Logan grinned. They were seated outside her shelter on a low cement wall. She was lightly touching him, and he found the gentle intimacy to be intoxicating. The question, however, was not one he had expected.
“Lis,” he said. He liked using the diminutive he’d heard Pauli call her, spelled with an s and not a z. She had smiled when he first started using it, so he had continued. “I think both of us smell, and rather badly, but where I come from we usually wouldn’t have brought it up. Discussing body odor isn’t some quaint European or Canadian custom, is it?”
She chuckled. “I think you’re right about both of us being offensive, and no, it’s not something I usually talk about with handsome young men, but it is becoming a problem. Now that it’s getting warm, the shelters are almost unbelievably rank.”
Water in the civilian part of the perimeter was either carefully rationed or nonexistent. Despite the nearness of the Havel and a number of ponds, there was a real shortage of water for anything other than drinking and cooking, and then only after boiling. Russian snipers had made life too dangerous for those who would have even dreamed of bathing in the polluted river, and the number of wells dug by engineers and others had not yet met the hygiene needs of the population.