Down in the trenches Dieter Schultz, age eighteen, shuddered with pain from a tank-fired flechette that had grazed one arm, ripping an inch-long jagged tear across his skin. Blood poured out, staining his kampfanzug, his battledress. The blood showed a dullish red in the tracers’ gleam.
Beside Schultz another of the boys, Harz, looked down in uncomprehending fright. “Dieter, you’re bleeding.”
“Never mind that,” insisted Schultz, clamping a hand to his wound to stop the trickling blood. “Run down the trench to Third Squad. Get them to move to the right and engage… to take some of the fire off of us here.”
“Zu Befehl, Dieter,”[23] answered Harz, half mockingly and yet half serious.
Krueger, meanwhile, crouched silently nearby, watching Schultz’s actions with an eagle eye. He caught a bare glimpse of Brasche, easing himself down the trench, and stood to a head-bent attention.
“Herr Major?” asked Krueger.
“Nothing, Sergeant,” answered Brasche. “Just observing.”
Dieter, obsessed with his wound but more so with his mission, did not notice Brasche standing nearby. Still, Hans noted the quiet boy, growing into his potential, there in the cold and muddy trench.
The boy shouted to the others around him. “Stand by.” Then he spoke a few short words into the radio, “Five rounds, antipersonnel.” Brasche and Krueger ducked low once again. And only just in time, too, as the distant tank began firing rapidly, deluging the surface above with flechettes. All told there were precisely five major blasts and five minor as the flechette rounds burst to spill their deadly cargo.
Without more than half a second’s hesitation after that fifth minor explosion, Schultz shouted another command and the boys, following his example, stuck their heads and their rifles above the trench lip, adding their precision fire to the holograms and ACS remaining.
Very good, thought Brasche.
Paris, France, 17 February 2005
The house was plunged in an early morning sadness. The mother and one little son cried openly. The elder boy, nearing thirteen now, struggled to keep his face clear. Last night his father had made him promise to be the man of the house, a promise asked for solemnly… and as solemnly made.
“I will write every day, ma cherie… ma belle femme,” promised the husband, stroking the sobbing Isabelle’s hair softly. “And I should be able to take leave at sometime.”
Isabelle pressed her wet face into his shoulder. Her encircling arms held him tightly. There were no words she could bring herself to say.
Last night had been bad. They had fought as they rarely fought. She had struggled to get her husband to desert, to flee to some place past the army’s reach. He had steadfastly refused, claiming — truthfully insofar as he knew — that no place on Earth would be safe from the army, not now with the entire planet rearming to the teeth.
In the end, seeing that he would not, it had been she who had relented. In fear for her future and in remembrance of more youthful, happier times, she had dragged her husband to their large wooden bad and made love to him with a dazzling skill and enthusiasm that left him breathless.
“That is to remind you,” Isabelle had said, “to remind you of what you have here and to make you want to come back.”
Still half out of breath, he had answered, “After that awesome performance, my love… and at my age… I should be better to stay away in order to safeguard my life.”
Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, 21 June 2005
Mühlenkampf was… well, there was no other word: he was awed.
Gleaming above him, for the beast had not yet had its coat of paint, stood the Tiger III. Below, at ground level — though the ground was meters-thick concrete — the tracks were caked with the mud, so Mühlenkampf noted with interest.
“She works,” he announced with a quiver in his voice, drawing the correct conclusion from the caked mud.
Proudly, Mueller, Schlüssel, Prael and the others stood a bit taller. “She works, Herr General. This is prototype number one. There are a few bugs yet. But she moves. She shoots. She can take a punch on her great armored nose and punch right back.”
“And,” added Prael who had designed and nearly hand built her electronic suite, “Tiger III is the best human designed and built training vehicle in history, with virtual-reality simulators to allow a full gamut of gunner and driver training without ever leaving the Kaserne.”
“We will have to take her out anyway,” answered the general. “Otherwise you will never know what might still be wrong. When can I have one? Or, better still, many of them?”
“This one is yours now,” answered Mueller. “We are, indeed, hoping your field tests will help work out any remaining problems.”
But Mueller spoke to Mühlenkampf’s back. Already the veteran was fumbling with his new, inconvenient, and sometimes damnable cellular phone.
“Brasche? Get to Munich. Now!”
Sennelager, Germany, 28 June 2005
Basic training was long over now. The thin, emaciated skeleton of a Korps was beginning to grow and fill out here at this training base on the north German plain where the boys had been relocated for unit training.
Though Basic was over, the days were still as long and the nights sometimes longer. And yet the boys reveled in the name “soldier.” On the route marches that took them through the nearby towns the boys marched with pride and a spring in their steps.
That the girls turned out to watch, more often than not, didn’t hurt matters any.
Yet the nights and days remained long. Soldiers were killed in training and their places taken by new faces. The old German army had thought that one percent killed in basic training was not merely an acceptable, but a desirable figure. The new-old German Army did as well, this portion of it, at least.
That rarely happened in the regular Bundeswehr. There, the few Wehrmacht veterans scattered about were impotent to change things from the politically correct, multiculturally sensitive stew the politicians had made of the German army.
Only in the 47th Panzer Korps, called by political friend and foe alike, “the SS Korps,” were there enough men who knew the old ways — knew them, and more importantly, were willing to tell the politicians and social theorists to “go fuck yourselves” over them — to meld their new charges into what Germany, what Europe, what humanity, needed.
And so the boys marched with pride and a spring, knowing that, perhaps alone among their people’s defenders they could and would do the job at hand.
Was it this that the girls of the towns had seen? Was it that they had seen one group of defenders whom they could be sure would never leave them defenseless until death stopped them?
The boys didn’t know.
“I just know I get laid a lot more than I used to,” laughed the irrepressible Harz, just before something attracted his attention.
It began as a low rumble in the air. Soon, the boys were hustling out of their tents in fear of an earthquake.
“What the fuck is it?” asked Harz of Schultz.
Dieter just shook his head, equally uncomprehending.
“Over there!” shouted another of the boys. “It’s a tank. Nothing much.”