None of his crewmates said a word. By now, they were used to his being the man the world had forgotten. When that thought went through Theo’s mind today, he found himself shaking his head. It wasn’t quite right. Chances were some of the world remembered Adi perfectly well. It just didn’t want to get hold of him, for fear of endangering him or itself or both.
Oddly, that made Theo feel better. Thoroughgoing loner though he was, he’d pitied Adi’s splendid isolation. Realizing a good reason lay behind it made it easier for him, and surely for the panzer driver, to take.
They were quartered in a Russian village that had gone back and forth several times between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Whatever Russian civilians had lived there in more peaceful times were long gone. Most of the houses had seen better decades, too. The panzer crewmen shifted for themselves as best they could.
Sleeping in one of the battered, thatch-roofed huts was asking for visits from bedbugs, lice, and fleas. That would have bothered the Germans more if they weren’t already buggy. Sleeping under a roof, or even under the singed remains of one, seemed irresistibly tempting to men who were more used to rolling themselves in blankets and curling up under their panzer.
Curling up under a panzer wasn’t such a good idea now for all kinds of reasons. The armored beasts settled even on dry ground. You were smart to do some digging underneath to make sure you didn’t wake up squashed. With everything so squelchy during the rasputitsa-the Germans had borrowed the Russian word-waking up squashed got easier. So did waking up drowned.
Of course, you could wake up sliced to sausage meat in one of the village huts. Russian artillery, always the most professional part of the Red Army, seemed to know and to visit every place where the Germans were staying. Another crew in the company lost their driver-killed-and commander and loader-badly hurt-when a Soviet 105 blew the house in which they were billeted to smithereens.
“Could have been us,” Sergeant Witt said unhappily after a panje wagon took the injured men back toward a field hospital. Everybody in the village hoped they would make it there alive. No guarantees, not the way a panje wagon moved; only hope. Witt went on, “Just fool luck.”
“Always fool luck,” Adi said. “Nothing but fool luck we haven’t run into a T-34 in a nasty mood.”
He spoke of the Soviet panzer as if it were a ferocious wild beast, as if gun and chassis and crew were all directed by one fierce will. Theo understood that. Lots of German soldiers thought of the T-34 the same way.
Hermann Witt nodded, so Adi’s way of talking made sense to him, too. “War just isn’t a healthy business,” he said.
“Too right it isn’t,” Adi said with some feeling. But then he paused and qualified that: “Most of the time, anyhow.”
“What do you mean, most of the time?” Lothar Eckhardt demanded.
Before Adi could say anything, Theo surprised his crewmates by breaking in with, “Sometimes you’re dumb as an ox, Eckhardt, you know that?”
“Huh?” The gunner gaped, not so much because of Theo’s response as because Theo had responded at all. “What’d I say?”
Having used up a good part of his daily word ration, Theo just looked at him. That was plenty to reduce Eckhardt to stutters. War was bound to be healthy for Adi Stoss. Driving a Panzer III, you risked your life only every so often: when you did run across a T-34 in a nasty mood, for instance. Absent his black coveralls, he would have been back in the Reich, in danger every minute of every day.
Lothar knew that, too-maybe not so well as Theo, but he did. But nobody would ever accuse him of being the shiniest bulb in the chandelier, so he didn’t always understand what he knew.
“Don’t worry about it, Lothar.” Adi spoke in a soothing voice, as he might have to a child. He didn’t want anyone, even the comrades who’d kept him alive again and again, thinking too much about who and what he was.
The next day, the panje wagon brought the village the regimental National Socialist Loyalty Officer along with a mail sack and two kilos of genuine ersatz coffee. The letters and the coffee were welcome. Theo didn’t know about anyone else, but he could have done without Major Bruckwald. The major wasn’t just in the war, which was a misfortune that could happen to anyone. Bruckwald believed in the war, the way a priest believed in the Holy Spirit. As far as Theo was concerned, that made him a dangerous lunatic.
Not only did Bruckwald believe in the German struggle, he was full of missionary zeal. His duty, as he saw it, was to make the ordinary soldiers believe in it, too. “This is a sacred crusade against Jewish Bolshevism!” he shouted, smacking one fist into his other palm. “We will drive the subhuman Slavs and their horrible Hebrew masters back beyond the Urals where they belong, and lay hold of the Lebensraum the Reich deserves. Heil Hitler!”
“Heil Hitler!” the listening panzer crewmen echoed, as they might have during church services. Adi Stoss was not behindhand. Theo would have been astonished if he were.
Major Bruckwald went right on fulminating. This was his closest approach to the front in some time. By the way he carried on, he was proud of his own bravery for coming so far forward, and expected the men listening to him to be at least as proud. And so they were-or they acted as if they were while he hung around.
“Remember, the Fuhrer is always right!” he finished. “The Jews and Bolsheviks are trying to stab us in the back again, the way they did in 1918. See how the filthy Jew Leon Blum is back in the French government now that France has betrayed us again. See how the Jew-Bolsheviks here refuse to yield us the lands that are rightfully ours. The Fuhrer smelled out this plot early on. Through his chosen instruments, the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, he will make the enemies of our Volk pay. Sieg heil!”
“Sieg heil!” the men chorused. Seeming satisfied at last, Major Bruckwald went off to inflict himself on some other outfit.
“Well, that was fun,” Sergeant Witt said, which was about what Theo was thinking. He added, “It sure is a good thing to know why we’re fighting, isn’t it?”
“Of course, we had no idea before,” Kurt Poske said.
Adi made no snide political comments. He never did. Whatever he was thinking along those lines, he kept to himself. So did Theo, though for different reasons. But the panzer commander and the loader figured they could get away with speaking their minds. Theo wasn’t sure they were right, but envied them the sense of freedom they felt.
As far as he was concerned, he was fighting for one thing: to stay alive and eventually to go home to Breslau. He’d do anything he could to bring that off. If it happened to help the Reich and the Fuhrer, it did. If it didn’t, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
You lost enough sleep in wartime because of things you couldn’t help. Theo didn’t want to lose any over stupid stuff like politics. But the morning might turn out to be a net gain. If playing Major Bruckfeld’s inspiring words over and over on the phonograph of his mind didn’t help him sleep better than chloroform would have, he couldn’t imagine what would.
“Hey, the Corporal’s back!” The cry that rose in Willi Dernen’s platoon was not one of unalloyed joy. He looked up from stripping his rifle, hoping against hope people were talking about some other Unteroffizier. But when hope and reality banged heads, hope lost, as it so often did. Sure as hell, there stood Arno Baatz, big as life and twice as ugly.
Awful Arno had a new wound badge on the front of his tunic and the same old gleam in his narrow, piggy eyes. Willi greeted him with, “Hey, hey, look at the hairball the cat yorked up.”