“You know it, I know it, the captain knows it, the colonel knows it, but General Marshall, he don’t know it, and he counts for more’n the rest of us put together,” Daniels answered. “I just wish I was sure he had some kind of notion of what he was up to, that’s all. What’s that they say about ‘Ours is not to wonder why’?”
“The other part of it goes something like, ‘Ours is to let the bastards kill us even when they don’t have a clue,’ ” Herman Muldoon said. He was cynical enough to make a sergeant, all right. And, like any decent sergeant, he knew fighting city hall didn’t pay. “Okay, Lieutenant, how we gonna make this work?”
Mutt let stories from his grandfathers give him the clues he needed to do the job right. He thinned his main line down to what either granddad would have called a line of skirmishers, then to nothing but pickets. To disguise that as best he could, he made sure the pickets had automatic weapons and both the bazooka launchers in the platoon.
To try to hold back Lizard armor, the brass also had a lot of tanks and antitank guns well forward. Mutt didn’t quite follow that: it was as if they wanted the Lizards to go forward, all right, but not too far or too fast. He hoped the big picture made sense, because the little one sure as hell didn’t.
His men had the same feeling. Retreat was hard on an army; you felt as if you were beaten, regardless of whether you really were. The troops didn’t look ready to bug out, but they didn’t act like men with their peckers up, either. If they had to fight and hold ground, he wasn’t sure they could do it.
Not that much of Chicago looked like ground worth holding, anyhow. As far as that went, one stretch of rubble was pretty much like another. Even tanks had a rough time making their way through piles of brick and stone and craters big enough to swallow them whole.
He was taken by surprise when he came upon one stretch of halfway decent road as his unit trudged north. “You can go that way if you want to,” an MP doing traffic control said, “but it makes you easier for the Lizards to spot from the air.”
“Then what the hell did anybody build it for?” Mutt asked. The MP didn’t answer. Odds were, the MP couldn’t answer because he didn’t know. Maybe nobody knew. Maybe the Army had cleared the road just so people walking along it could get killed in carload lots. Mutt was past the stage where anything had to make sense.
Not far from the southern end of the road, he watched a team of soldiers busily repairing a house. They weren’t repairing it to look like new, they were repairing it to look like the wreckage all around it. It looked as if they’d knocked down the whole side nearest the road. Inside was a wooden crate big enough to make a pretty good Hooverville shack. In a little while, though, you wouldn’t be able to see it because the soldiers would have restored the wall they’d knocked down. By the time they were done, the place would look as ugly as it had before they started.
“Ain’t that a hell of a thing?” Muldoon jerked his thumb at the soldiers. “Are we fighting the Lizards or are we building houses for ’em?”
“Don’t ask me,” Daniels answered. “I gave up a long time ago, tryin’ to figure out what’s goin’ on.”
“They ain’t gonna stay there and try and hold on to that box, are they?” Muldoon asked. The question wasn’t aimed particularly at Mutt, who didn’t have any answers, but at whoever in the world might know. Muldoon spat in the mud. “Sometimes I think everybody’s gone crazy but me, you know?” He gave Daniels a sidelong look. “Me and maybe you, too, Lieutenant. It ain’t like it’s your fault.” From Muldoon, that was a compliment, and Mutt knew it.
He thought about what the sergeant had said. He also thought about the way the brass was running the fight here in Chicago. If they’d just kept at what they were doing, they could have pushed the Lizards back to the South Side, maybe even out of Chicago altogether. Oh, yeah, it would have cost, but Mutt had been through the trenches in the First World War. He knew you had to pay the price if you wanted to gain ground.
But instead, they were pulling back Mutt turned to Muldoon. “You’re right. They must be crazy. It’s the only thing that makes any sense a-tall.” Solemnly, Muldoon nodded.
Heinrich Jager slammed his fist down on the cupola as his Panther rumbled out of Oels, heading west toward Breslau. He was wearing gloves. Otherwise his skin would have peeled off when it hit the frozen metal of the panzer. He wasn’t crazy-no, not he. About his superiors, he had considerable doubts.
So did Gunther Grillparzer. The gunner said, “Sir, what the devil’s the point of pulling out of Oels now, after we’ve spent the last three days fighting over it as if it were Breslau itself?”
“If I knew, I would tell you,” Jager answered. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.” Not only had theWehrmacht done a good job of fortifying Oels as part of the outer ring of Breslau’s defensive system, the fourteenth-century castle up on the hill made a first-class artillery observation post. And now they were abandoning the town, the castle (or what was left of it), and the works the engineers had made, just letting the Lizards take them while the panzers pulled back closer to Breslau.
Artillery shells whistled overhead, plowing up the frozen ground between the retreating panzers and Oels, as if to tell the Lizards,thus far and no farther. Jager wondered if the Lizards would listen. They were hitting hard in this latest onslaught, probably fighting better than they had since the days when they first came to Earth and swept everything before them.
His Panther had two narrow rings and one wide one painted on the cannon, just behind the muzzle brake: two armored personnel carriers and one panzer. The Lizards were still tactically sloppy; they didn’t watch their flanks as well as they should, and they walked into ambushes even Russians would have seen. Half the time, though, they fought their way out of the ambushes, too, not because they were great soldiers but because their panzers and rockets broke the trap from the inside out. As always, they’d inflicted far more damage than they suffered.
Even now, Lizard artillery shells fell around the panzers as they withdrew. Jager feared them almost as much as he feared the Lizards’ panzers. They spat little mines all over the bloody place; if your panzer ran over one of those, it would blow a track right off, and maybe send you up in flames. Sure enough, his Panther passed two disabled Panzer IVs, their crews glumly trudging west on foot.
He gnawed on his lower lip. Oels was only about fifteen kilometers east of Breslau. The Lizards were already shelling the city that sprawled across the Oder. If they established artillery in Oels, they could pound Breslau to pieces, scattering about so many of their little mines that no one would dare walk the streets, let alone drive armored vehicles through them.
And yet, he’d been ordered to give up a position he could have held for a long time-ordered in terms so peremptory that he knew protest would have been useless. Stand-fast orders were what he’d come to expect, even when standing fast cost more lives than retreating would have. Now, when standing fast made sense, he had to give ground. If that wasn’t insanity, what was it?
His discontent deepened when his panzer finally reached its new assigned position. The village just outside of Breslau that was the linchpin of the new German line might have held fifty people before the war. It was on flat ground and, as far as he could see, had no special reason for existing. Some rolls of barbed wire strung across the landscape and a few trenches for infantrymen didn’t constitute a line of defense as far as he was concerned, no matter how imposing the wire and trenches might seem on a map in a warm room out of the range of the guns.
His driver thought the same thing. “Sir, they made us pull back tothis?” he said in incredulous dismay.