The husband quoted from the scrap of paper he had already read fifty times, “In accordance with our time-honored heritage and traditions, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for the defense of the Republic.”
“But you are a doctor, not a killer,” Isabelle objected.
“Killers get hurt,” answered the husband. “Then they need doctors. I report the day after tomorrow.”
She stood there for a long moment, stunned, unable to speak further.
Bad Tolz, Germany, 17 February 2005
Quietly, a long and snaking column of armed men marched up the forest trail in the dead of night. In the darkness, only the eyes gleamed, and occasionally the teeth. The faces were darkened by burnt cork and grease paint… and a fair amount of simple dirt. Frozen dirt and gravel below crunched softly under the soldiers’ boots.
The boys, as Brasche thought of them, had done well so far with their basic training. Marksmanship was of an acceptable order, though Brasche had serious reservations that any amount of normal training would be adequate to teach anyone to shoot well when there was an enemy shooting back. He had served on the Russian Front, after all.
But “well” is a relative term, he thought, too. And we have a few tricks, ourselves, that just may help. Brasche smiled with wicked anticipation at what awaited the boys ahead.
The boys’ ostensible mission was to counterattack to retake a section of field entrenchments lost to a notional Posleen attack. In fact, as Brasche and a few others running the exercise knew, the techniques of the counterattack through the trenches were purely secondary. The objective of the exercise was to frighten the boys half out of their wits so that once they recovered those wits would be harder to frighten.
Brasche heard static breaking over the radio at his side. He answered with his name.
“Oberst Kiel here, Brasche. My men are in position.”
“Excellent, Herr Oberst.” Brasche glanced quickly at the rear entrance to the trench system just as the first of the new troops began his descent into it. “The party should be beginning right about… now.”
As if they were timed to a clock, as indeed they were, the first mortar shells crashed down onto the objective area. Through the actinic glow of the splashing shells Brasche saw, faintly, the outlines of half a dozen or so of Kiel’s men. Themselves immune to any weapon the new boys had to bring to bear — as well as from the mortar shells, the armored mobile infantry were there to add spice, frightfulness really, to the exercise. Their holographic projectors were ideal for portraying a Posleen enemy, even a mass of them. But best of all…
“Liebe Gott im Himmel!” Brasche heard a boy — young Dieter Schultz, so he thought — exclaim over the radio. “They are fucking shooting at us. For real!”
“Indeed they are, Kinder.” Brasche recognized Krueger’s voice in the radio. “With weapons much like the ones the invaders will have. Now what have you been taught about what to do when someone is shooting at you?” asked Krueger, with a tone of scorn.
The radio went silent immediately. Still, so Brasche was pleased to note, rifle fire began to flash out from the trenches, to strike the holographic projections or even, occasionally the armored combat suits. Where a bullet was sensed to have passed or hit, or a shell or grenade to have exploded, an Artificial Intelligence Device — or AID, eliminated one or more of the Posleen targets. Meanwhile, from above the ground and the trenches, the Armored Combat Suits themselves flashed fire generally in the young boys’ direction. The ACS were aiming to frighten, however, rather than to kill or wound, carefully keeping their point of aim away from the boys’ heads and bodies.
Young Schultz’s voice again crackled over the radio to be answered by a regular Bundeswehr tank commander on loan to the training brigade for the exercise.
Over the sound of rifle fire, high explosives, and the sound barrier cracking of the ACS’s grav-guns, Brasche detected the throaty diesel roar of a Leopard II tank in full charge.
Good boy, young Schultz, thought Brasche. Not everyone would have remembered that they were not in the fight alone.
The tank was suddenly lit in Brasche’s view by its own flame as its main gun spewed forth a storm of flechettes onto the objective area…
Brasche and his wingman advanced alone into the storm of steel. Ahead, artillery pounded at such of the Russian positions as could be positively identified or confidently guessed at. There was never enough of it though.
They had been warned that the defenses were incredible. But nothing had prepared Brasche or the men who had begun the battle under his command for the reality of Kursk. Nothing short of a tour through hell could have even approached the reality.
Of the men under his command to begin, a single platoon of Panzer IVs and a platoon of infantry in support, all that remained were a brace of tanks. The infantry was but a memory.
And Ivan’s PAKs, his antitank guns, were everywhere. Brasche shuddered at the memory of a fight between his medium panzers and no less than a dozen Russian guns, dug in, camouflaged and firing under a unified command. That fight alone had cost him two panzers. The screams of one crew, burning alive, still rang in the tank commander’s ears.
In Brasche’s headphones he heard the commander of his wing tank exclaim, “Achtung! Achtung! Panzer Abwehr Kanonen zum—”[22] and the panicky voice cut off.
But the direction was not needed. Standing in the tank commander’s hatch, Brasche himself could see smoke and fire belching from the ground to his right. Eyes straining to make out the precise location of his enemy, he could not see, but he could feel, the half dozen solid shot that tore through the air at himself and his wing man.
Both tanks frantically tried to pivot themselves to place their more strongly armored glacis in the direction of the fire, as their turrets swung round even faster to engage the enemy.
A race against time it seemed. And then Brasche realized there must have been a reason for those guns to have opened fire when they did. He turned around just in time to see more fire coming from behind.
Then the world went black for Hans Brasche, Fifth SS Panzer Division (Wiking).
The Leopard fired again, clearing Hans’ reminiscences from his mind. Never mind, though. Back at Kursk, more than six decades prior, the second battery of guns had opened up, gutting both his tank and his wingman’s. Hans had lost consciousness. He never knew how it had come to pass that he escaped the tank. In his memory he imagined a mindless crawling thing, fleeing the fire like an animal fleeing a combusting forest. Of his trip back to Germany, to his convalescence, his memory had been reduced to a sense of little beyond pain, sometimes dim, sometimes agonizing.
The memory of the pain made him shudder, still.
Brasche pushed the memories aside, finally and completely. The open ramp into the trench system awaited. Hans walked forward and descended.