Tinned bully beef wouldn’t have been inspiring in Norway in the middle of a snowstorm. Having choked it down in just those circumstances, Walsh could take oath on that. But it was worse when you always had to be shooing flies away from it, and when you couldn’t shoo off all of them.
Like all his comrades in khaki, he ate some bugs along with his beef. They didn’t improve the flavor. Anything that could make bully beef taste worse than it did to begin with went straight into Walsh’s black book.
He blamed a case of the galloping shits on swallowed flies. A lot of the men in his company had the same complaint. About half of them blamed the flies for it, too. The rest pointed an accusing finger at the water. It was brackish and stagnant and sulfurous to begin with. Heroic doses of lime chloride only made it taste worse. They were supposed to kill the germs lurking in it, but Walsh wouldn’t have bet on that. Some of those germs, land mines wouldn’t have killed.
Another sergeant had an antidote in mind for the dicey water: “We need to drink best bitter all the bloody time. Or Guinness, by God! ‘Guinness is good for you,’ the adverts go.”
“Got to be better than this fetid cow piss.” Walsh was a great admirer of bitter. Guinness he could take or leave alone.
Sadly, no beer lorries rumbled west from Alexandria. More tanks did. They were newer models than the English armored fighting vehicles Walsh had seen in France. They seemed as nimble as their German counterparts; the others hadn’t been able to go any faster than an infantryman could trot. And they mounted cannon rather than a machine gun or two.
Still and all … Walsh studied them with a certain air of discontent. German tanks, like German helmets, looked as if they meant business. He wasn’t so sure about these. They were full of funny angles that might catch shells, and their armor plates were riveted together, not welded. He asked a corporal commanding one of the tanks about that: “What happens if you get hit? Don’t the rivet heads break off and rattle about inside like shrapnel?”
“Well, myte, Oi ’ope not. ’Ope like ’ell not, in fact.” The corporal was a scrawny Cockney with bad teeth: a nasty little terrier of a man, and one who’d take a deal of killing if Walsh was any judge. He added, “Fritz won’t fancy stoppin’ a two-pounder round, neither, not ’arf ’e won’t.”
He was bound to be right about that. Walsh did like the idea of fighting with as much armor on his side as the other buggers could throw at him. He hadn’t done much of that, not against the Germans he hadn’t.
He didn’t need to wait long, either. The bright fellows with the red collar flashes laid on an attack “in the direction of Tobruk.” By the way that read, they didn’t expect to get there, and would be content with pushing the Germans back a bit.
Tanks and foot soldiers went forward together. Each helped protect the other. The Germans had figured that out straightaway. They’d used combined-arms operations even when they jumped Czechoslovakia. English generals had needed longer to work it out. They might never have got it if they hadn’t watched the Fritzes in action.
Forward Walsh went. He carried a Sten gun, an English submachine gun. It was much uglier than a Schmeisser, and so cheaply made it was liable to fall to pieces if dropped. But it sprayed a lot of bullets around, and that was what he wanted.
Incoming German artillery whistled toward Walsh. “Down!” he yelled-he knew the sound of those damned 88s and 105s much better than he’d ever wanted to. The 88 was an antiaircraft gun by trade, and a fine one. But the Fritzes, being thoroughgoing buggers, also made armor-piercing and high-explosive rounds for it, so it could kill you in any of several different ways.
Fragments whined and snarled through the air. A couple of wounded men wailed. Either they hadn’t started scraping the sand soon enough or their luck was just out. Walsh hoped they’d caught Blighties-wounds that would let them go back to England for a while, or at least to Alexandria, but that wouldn’t kill them or ruin them for life. Stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands lugged the injured soldiers away from the fighting. Whether shell fragments or machine-gun bullets would respect those armbands was no doubt something the bearers tried not to think about.
Up ahead, the tanks were mixing it up with their German opposite numbers. Officers’ whistles shrilled, ordering the foot soldiers forward to join them. Sods with Sten guns were what kept the Fritzes from chucking Molotov cocktails onto English tanks’ engine compartments, or from lobbing potato-masher grenades through open hatches.
Walsh captured a German by literally catching him with his pants down. The luckless fellow was squatting behind a spiky thorn bush when Walsh trotted past it. “Hande hoch!” Walsh yelled, aiming the tin Tommy gun at the German’s pale backside.
With a yip of fright, the German sprang in the air and yanked up his pants before raising his hands. He wore an officer’s peaked cap and a first lieutenant’s pips on his shoulder straps. Walsh relieved him of his pistol and of a map case. The Intelligence wallahs might eventually get some use from that. Then the sergeant gestured to the rear with the barrel of his Sten. Gratefully, the German went on his way, making sure he kept his hands up. So far here in North Africa, both sides seemed to be playing by the rules.
While Walsh was making his capture, the German tanks in the distance turned tail and rumbled back toward a ridgeline a couple of miles to the west. Like hounds after fleeing foxes, the English tanks raced in pursuit, their tracks kicking up clouds of abrasive dust.
“They’re on the run!” Lieutenant Preston shouted exultantly. He blew his whistle with might and main, trying to get his men to keep up with the tanks.
For a few minutes, Walsh thought he was right: not a thought about the young subaltern he was used to having. Then the 88s on the ridgeline opened up on the approaching English tanks. Not even the fearsome Soviet KV-1 owned armor that would keep out an 88mm AP round. These machines didn’t come close. One after another brewed up. Each rising plume of greasy black smoke, each burst of fireworks as ammunition cooked off, meant horrendous deaths for five men.
The English advance sputtered and stalled like a lorry with no air filter in the desert. Surviving English tanks turned and trundled out of range of the 88s as fast as they could go. The multipurpose guns knocked out several more before they could escape. Then the German armor nosed forward again. Now the Fritzes had the edge in numbers. An English advance turned into an English withdrawal.
How many times have I seen that before? Walsh wondered. More than he cared to recalclass="underline" he was sure of that. Gloomily, he trudged back to the east. So did Lieutenant Preston. The enthusiastic youngster wouldn’t meet his eye-and a good thing for him, too.
As Theo Hossbach had discovered before, the spring mud time in Russia was even worse than the one in autumn. In spring, all the accumulated snow melted, seemingly all at once. Wheeled vehicles bogged to the axles-if they were lucky. Even Panzer IIIs with Ostketten, special wide tracks made for war in the east, had a devil of a time going anywhere when the mud was worst. Hell, even Soviet T-34s had trouble with it. Where a T-34 couldn’t go, nothing could.
Well, nothing mechanized. Horse-drawn panje wagons brought things to the front for both the Ivans, who’d been building them since time out of mind, and the Germans, who commandeered as many as they could get their hands on. With their big wheels and almost boat-shaped bodies, panje wagons did better in snow and mud than anything with tracks.
A panje wagon brought a sack of mail to Theo’s panzer company. Theo got a letter from his mother. Hermann Witt got several from relatives and friends. So did Lothar Eckhardt and Kurt Poske. Adi Stoss, as usual, got nothing from anybody.