He and his men piled into a half-track and a truck and sped away. What other luckless officer was next on their list?
"Fuck," Adi Stoss said next to Theo. "I hope I never see anything like that again."
"Amen," Hermann Witt said. "He was a good soldier."
The sergeant who commanded another panzer in the platoon said, "You can't plot against the government, not in the middle of a war you can't."
"If he did that," Adi said, which made that sergeant's jaw drop. Theo thought it was a reasonable comment. The SS did things and chose victims for its reasons, which often made no sense to ordinary mortals.
"And even if he was a lousy politician, he was still a good officer," Witt added. "As far as I'm concerned, that counts for more, 'cause chances are it saved my ass-and yours-a few times."
"Huh," the other sergeant said, and walked away.
"Well, that's that. We just went on his list." Adi sounded cheerful about it.
"As long as we're fighting the Ivans, it doesn't matter." By contrast, Witt sounded like a man trying to convince himself.
"Here's hoping," Theo said. His crewmates eyed him in mild surprise, the way they did whenever he opened his mouth.
He never found out how the panzer men decided who would bury the regimental commander. But Koch got a much fancier grave than most German soldiers who met death at the front. And the large cross had Fallen for the Vaterland written on the horizontal bar in big black letters.
"If the SS goons see that, they'll pitch another shitfit," Adi predicted.
"Good," Theo said. They exchanged conspiratorial grins. Again, they could ruin each other with a few words whispered in the wrong ears. It wasn't the first time. It wouldn't be the last. They wouldn't have said such things if each didn't already have good reason to trust the other with his life.
Hermann Witt came up and looked at the grave, and at the inscription on the cross. "I got a letter from my father a few days ago," he said, after looking around to make sure no one but his crewmates could hear him. "He says some of the death notices in the paper go 'Fallen for Fuhrer and Vaterland' and others just say 'Fallen for the Vaterland.' It's a way of letting people see how you feel about things, you know?"
"I'm surprised he talked death notices with you," Stoss remarked. "Doesn't he think it's bad luck or something?"
"Nah. He's a freethinker, my old man," the panzer commander said, not without pride. "The way things are these days, he has to keep his mouth shut more than he used to. I'm the one he can let loose with."
"As long as the army censors don't come down on him," Theo said. He liked Witt much better than Heinz Naumann. He didn't want anything bad to happen to him, or to his family.
"He's careful, the way he puts things. I know him, so I can read between the lines," Witt said. "The blockheads the army has reading mail, they don't know crap from cabbage."
"They may seem dumb a lot of the time, but they're smarter than you make them out to be," Stoss said.
"How do you know?" Witt retorted. "Next letter you get will be the first."
Adi shrugged. "My folks died in a train crash when I was little. My grandfather raised me, but he died a few years ago, too. The Stosses never were a big family. Now there's me."
"No girlfriend?" Witt asked slyly.
Another shrug. "I had one. She didn't feel like giving me what I wanted before I headed off to training, and I told her what I thought about that. Haven't heard from her since, the lousy bitch."
The panzer commander set a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. "Some of 'em are like that, and damn all you can do about it. If they didn't have pussies, there'd be a bounty on 'em. Ought to be a bounty on some of 'em any which way."
"Well, you can sing that in church," Adi said. Witt asked no more questions. He just looked at Lieutenant Colonel Koch's grave one more time, shook his head, and walked off.
Theo asked no questions, either. Questions of that kind weren't his style. He'd served with Adi a lot longer than the new commander had, and had also noticed that the driver never got any mail. Stoss didn't seem to miss it; it was as if he knew he wouldn't.
If he had no family, if he'd told his girlfriend to piss up a rope… Well, hell, didn't he have any friends? He was a good guy. Theo thought so, anyway. Didn't anyone else in the whole wide world? Didn't anyone else like him well enough to send him a note saying I hope you're still in one piece?
Evidently not.
But why not?
Several possibilities had occurred to Theo. He'd long since decided which one he thought most likely, and it had nothing to do with singing in church. If the blackshirts ever came to ask him about it, he'd also decided he would deny everything as hard and as long as he could. Of course he would. You didn't tell the blackshirts anything about your buddies, not if you could help it. But Theo would have kept his mouth shut absent that ironclad injunction. He had a keen sense of the absurd, even if he didn't let other people see it very often. A working sense of the absurd often came in handy in the Third Reich. And if his conclusion didn't fit in well with the general preposterousness of life, he was damned if he could imagine one that would! SOMETIMES THE WORST THING you could do was imagine something. Sergeant Hideki Fujita discovered that painful truth for himself, as so many had before him. The idea of getting transferred to attack Vladivostok hadn't so much as crossed his mind till he and that other sergeant sat around chewing the fat and wasting time.
Once it got into his head, though, it wouldn't go away. It stayed there and stayed there, like an eyelash you couldn't rub out of your eye. Other units had been called away from the blocking position. It could happen to his regiment, too. When you were a soldier, anything that could happen could happen to you. It could, and sooner or later it probably would.
You didn't want to have thoughts like that. They meant that, if you kept at this trade long enough, you would stop a bullet, you would get ripped up by a shell fragment, you would get blasted into chunks of raw meat. How could you keep on soldiering if you kept worrying about such things?
How? Your own side would deal with you if you tried not to soldier, that was how. And if you found yourself in the middle of the trackless Siberian woods (well, not quite trackless-there was the railroad line that had sent the Japanese army blundering among the firs and spruces to begin with), your best chance-maybe your only chance-was to do your job like everybody else.
This was bad. Nobody in his right mind would have called it anything else. But soldiering had taught Fujita one thing, anyway: the difference between bad and worse was much bigger than the difference between good and better.
"My father fought at Port Arthur," Superior Private Hayashi said one afternoon. The squad huddled around a small, almost smokeless fire in the bottom of their trench. It wasn't snowing now, but it had been, and it looked as if it would start up again pretty soon, too. They had thick greatcoats and fur-lined gloves and Russian-style felt boots (although the ones they took from dead Red Army men were even better), but that didn't mean the cold didn't seep into a man's bones. Fire and hot tea or soup were the best weapons against it.
Yet even fire and tea were powerless against the chill that seeped into a man's head. "Two of my uncles did," Fujita said. "They never liked to talk about it afterwards. I didn't understand that till I went into the army myself. You can't tell somebody what combat's like till he's done it himself-and after that he doesn't need to hear it from you."
"Hai, Sergeant-san." Shinjiro Hayashi nodded. Well, of course a superior private would agree with his sergeant. A sergeant would knock your block off if you were crazy enough to do anything else. But then Hayashi added, "That's very well put."