“As long as we have enough cartridge belts, we can kill off a couple of divisions’ worth of Ivans,” he declared proudly, once the men had brought the machine-gun position up to his exacting standards.
“If they don’t throw any panzers at us, anyway,” Adam Pfaff put in.
Baatz scowled at the unruly senior private. “When I want to know what you think-”
“You’ll kick it out of me,” Pfaff broke in. “I know.”
“Tend to your business,” Baatz snapped. “Keep the Russians off the gun crew and we’ll do fine.”
“Zu Befehl,” Pfaff said, which was a reply not even Baatz could fault. The Obergefreiter strolled over to his foxhole, slid in, and pointed his rifle in the direction from which the Russians were most likely to come. Baatz wanted to grind his teeth every time he set eyes on the Mauser’s gray-painted woodwork. You weren’t supposed to do that to a rifle. It was as far outside of regulations as it could get. But Major Schmitz, the battalion CO, let Pfaff get away with it. You couldn’t win.
Pretty soon, Baatz had other things to worry about (though the gray Mauser, like a broken tooth, seldom escaped his mind for long). A volley of Katyusha rockets screamed down on the collective farm. Luckily, the Russians aimed a little long. Most of the horrible things smashed down behind the section’s position. The buildings on the kolkhoz had been tumbledown wrecks before the rockets hit. Now they were burning wrecks. The wind blew the smoke away from the Landsers. Baatz wished it would have screened them. At least they would be able to see the Ivans from a long way off now.
“Any chance we can get reinforcements, Corporal?” Adam Pfaff asked. “Mighty lonely out here.”
“We are ordered to hold this collective farm. We are,” Baatz said importantly. “We’ll do it.”
“Harder if we all get killed,” Pfaff remarked.
“Is that defeatism?” Arno asked. Pfaff didn’t answer. Baatz hadn’t thought he would. Defeatism in the field was a capital crime. A drumhead court martial would pass sentence after a complaint.
Of course, getting overrun by the Russians was also a capital crime, and probably one with a punishment less merciful than a firing squad or an officer with a pistol would show. Stirrings off toward the eastern horizon warned that the Ivans were going to make their push soon.
Flares from little German strongpoints to the north and south said the men holding those stretches of the front were also awake to the building threat. Baatz fired a green flare of his own to show that he was, too. He remembered scaring off some Soviet panzers with red flares. That had been quick thinking from Dernen, no two ways about it, even if he was a troublemaker most of the time. Well, Dernen wouldn’t be doing any quick thinking now, not after he’d stopped one with his noggin.
“Urra! Urra!” That deep roar, right now just at the edge of hearing, made the short hair at Arno’s nape prickle up. The Russians were nerving themselves for the charge. They were all liquored up when they started yelling like that, sure as hell they were, almost past the point of feeling pain or caring whether they lived or died. And they had no choice but to go forward. NKVD men would shoot them down from behind if they faltered.
“Urra! Urra!” Here they came, still out of range but terrifying all the same. They’d linked arms as they dogtrotted forward in row after row. The skirts of their greatcoats flapped between them. “Urra! Urra!”
Most of them would have machine pistols, not rifles. They’d need to get in close before they could use them. “Urra! Urra!” They were ready to get in close, too. They seemed as determined, as unstoppable, as storm waves rolling up a beach and sweeping aside whatever lay in their path.
Then German mortar bombs started dropping among them. Dirt fountained up at every burst. Men close to the explosions fell or flew through the air. The Ivans who didn’t get hit closed ranks and kept coming.
When the lead wave of men in dun-colored uniforms got within about a thousand meters, Baatz yelled to the men at the MG-34: “Let ’em have it!” The man at the trigger tapped the machine gun’s rear end after every burst, spraying bullets back and forth in short bursts. Other German machine guns, MG-34s and MG-42s, were hammering the enemy along with this one. Russians toppled, one after another. The commissars spent lives the way a drunken sailor spent money on popsies.
Indifferent in the face of destruction, the Russian survivors kept closing up and coming on. “Urra! Urra!” The roar was loud now, and getting louder every second.
Baatz brought his own rifle up to his shoulder and started shooting. He wasn’t sure he hit anyone, not with so many other weapons knocking Ivans down, but hitting had to be easier than missing. He worked the bolt again and again, slapping in clip after clip.
A few bullets came back from the Russians, but only a few. If they didn’t break pretty soon, though, they’d open up with all those goddamn submachine guns, and then there’d be hell to pay. Baatz carried several potato-masher grenades on his belt. He hadn’t actually thrown one in a long time. You were in trouble if you needed them. He shifted in his hole so he could grab them in a hurry. He was liable to be in trouble now.
But then, quite suddenly, the waves of Ivans streamed back, not forward. Flesh and blood, even Russian flesh and blood, could take just so much, and the Germans here had enough firepower to dish it out. Dead and wounded men littered the battlefield. The machine guns went on firing, turning the wounded men into dead ones and making sure the ones who didn’t move wouldn’t. You could bet some of the bastards out there were trying to play possum.
“Fuck me,” Adam Pfaff said, as if from very far away-Baatz’s ears still rang. “We lived through it again, I think.” For once, Arno couldn’t argue with him at all.
The squadron had a new airstrip. They’d flown off runways in front of Smolensk. Then, as the Germans advanced, they’d flown from a base in back of the fortress city. Now they were at another strip in front of Smolensk. It wasn’t the one they’d used before, but Stas Mouradian didn’t think it was far away.
Naturally, he wasn’t the only one who noticed the change and what it meant. “We’re pushing the Hitlerites back,” Isa Mogamedov said as they settled in for their first supper at the new strip.
Stas nodded. He gnawed the meat off a boiled pork rib. Mogamedov was eating ribs, too. He might not drink much, but he didn’t strictly keep the Muslim dietary rules. At a base where the cooks were pork-loving Russians, he might have starved to death if he had.
After Stas swallowed, he said, “They are falling back, the bastards.” He didn’t want merely to be seen agreeing with his copilot and bomb-aimer. He wanted to be heard, too. Mogamedov might well have had similar motives in speaking up to begin with. You couldn’t just be loyal to the Soviet Union. You had to let everybody know how very loyal you were.
You especially had to do that if you weren’t a Russian. If you came from the Caucasus like Mouradian and Mogamedov, or from one of the Central Asian republics, you might be a member of the club by affiliation, but you weren’t-you couldn’t be-a member by birth. And so you had to work all the harder to show you deserved to belong.
One of the other flyers turned on the radio that sat on a crate in a corner of the mess tent. Inside the crate was the truck battery powering the set. When the radio had warmed up, the tail end of something new and martial from Shostakovich came out of it. Mouradian nodded again. That had to be better than the sugary pap they played so often.
The Shostakovich ended with a thunder of kettle drums. Not quite The 1812 Overture with a real cannon, but it did suggest pounding artillery. Then the announcer said, “Moscow speaking.” Everyone leaned toward the radio-it was time for the news.