"We aren't going to do anything like that. They've already been through us once to make sure we don't." Dieselhorst looked around and lowered his voice before going on, "And they didn't need to do that."
"They thought they did. You can see why. If the Fuhrer couldn't trust the generals right under his eye, how can the Reich trust anybody without checking him out real well?" Rudel said.
"Sir…" Dieselhorst hesitated again, much longer this time. He finally shook his head and started to turn away. "Oh, never mind."
"Spit it out," Hans-Ulrich told him.
"You'll spit in my eye if I do."
"By God, I won't." Rudel raised his right hand with index and middle fingers extended and slightly crooked, as if taking an oath in court. "We watch each other's backs. Always."
"Always? Well, I hope so." Sergeant Dieselhorst's jaw worked, as if he were chewing on that. After another hesitation, he picked his words with obvious care: "You know, sir, there's a difference between not fancying the Fuhrer and being a traitor to the Reich."
"No there isn't!" Hans-Ulrich exclaimed.
Dieselhorst's chuckle held no mirth whatever. "I knew you'd say that. But a devil of a lot of people think there is. That's the biggest part of what this ruckus was all about."
"If you try to overthrow the Fuhrer of the German Reich in wartime, what are you but a backstabber?" Rudel demanded, as stern and certain as his father was about the tenets of their faith. If he hadn't promised Dieselhorst… But he had, and his word was good.
"Some people would say, a German patriot," the sergeant replied. "I don't know that that's true. But I don't know that it isn't, either. What I do know is, there's usually more than one way to look at things."
"Not this time," Hans-Ulrich said.
"I knew you'd say that, too." Dieselhorst stepped well away from the Stuka to light a cigarette. "Well, we'll go on and hit the Reds a good lick. If you think I'm going to sing songs about how wonderful Stalin is, you're even crazier than I give you credit for… sir." He blew out a stream of smoke.
They slept in tents guarded by Waffen-SS men. When they got mush and doughy sausages and ersatz coffee the next morning, the fellow who served them wore the SS runes on his fatigue uniform. No one said much at breakfast. Even Hans-Ulrich was sure the mess-hall attendants who carried off the dirty dishes were listening.
Going back to the airplanes was a relief. Flying off toward the front in the east was a bigger one. At the front, things were simple. You knew who was a friend and who was a foe. Politics didn't get in the way-not so much, anyhow.
Before long, the communication from the ground came from men who spoke German with an odd accent, stressing the next-to-last syllable of every word whether they should have or not. "I'd say we're over Poland," Dieselhorst remarked through the speaking tube.
"I'd say you're right," Hans-Ulrich answered. A flight of gull-winged monoplane fighters badged with the Polish red and white four-square checkerboard paced the Stukas, escorting them through an ally's airspace. That Poland was an ally most Germans disliked almost as much as the Soviet enemy didn't matter… for the moment.
Hans-Ulrich eyed the fighters with wary attention. He didn't think they were anywhere near so good as German Bf-109s. Of course, they wouldn't have to be anywhere near that good to make mincemeat of a Stuka squadron. But they just flew along, friendly as could be. One of the Polish pilots caught Rudel's eye and waved. Hans-Ulrich waved back. What else was he going to do?
He also kept a wary eye out for Russian fighters. The Reds had monoplanes and biplanes, both models with noticeably flat noses. German pilots who'd faced them in Spain said they weren't so good as Messerschmitts, either. Again, though, they didn't need to be to shoot him down. How did they stack up against these Polish planes? He didn't know, and hoped he wouldn't have to find out.
A couple of antiaircraft guns fired on the Stukas when they flew over Warsaw. Colonel Steinbrenner screamed at the Poles over the radio. The firing abruptly cut off. It hadn't hit anybody. What that said about Polish air defenses… It sure didn't say anything good.
They landed at an airstrip about forty kilometers east of the capital. When Hans-Ulrich got out of his Ju-87, artillery was grumbling in the middle distance. Well, it wasn't as if he hadn't heard the same thing plenty of times in the Low Countries and France. He wasn't used to hearing it come out of the east, though.
And he wasn't used to the scenery, either. The land looked almost as flat as if it had been ironed. A cold wind that had a long start did its best to blow right through him. He was glad for his fur-and-leather flying suit. Off in the distance, a shabby village looked like something out of the seventeenth century, at least to his jaundiced eye.
To Sergeant Dieselhorst's, too. "Jesus, what a dump!" the noncom said.
"Now that you mention it, yes," Hans-Ulrich said.
"Don't let the Poles hear you talk like that, or they'll smash your face for you," a groundcrew man advised. "They think we're on their side, not the other way around."
That made Hans-Ulrich laugh out loud. "And the flea thinks the dog is his horse, too," he said scornfully. "We've got our soldiers and our planes here, and we aren't going to leave until we're good and ready." If the Poles didn't like that, it was their hard luck. They were only Poles, after all.
Chapter 25
No one had ever claimed Wales was a place where you went to enjoy the weather. There were good and cogent reasons why no one had ever said such a damnfool thing. Alistair Walsh had seen plenty of bad weather there, and even more in his army service. All the same, he'd never imagined anything like winter in central Norway.
The wind howled like a wolf. Snow blew as near horizontal as made no difference. He had a wool balaclava under his tin hat and a sheepskin coat a herder had pressed on him that was far warmer than his British-issue greatcoat. He wore greatcoat and sheepskin one on top of the other, and two pairs of mittens on his hands. He was cold anyway.
A British captain who was stumbling north with him said something. Whatever it was, that vicious wind blew it away. "Sorry, sir?" Walsh shouted back.
"I said"-the captain put his mouth as close to Walsh's ear as a lover might-"I said, without the bloody Gulf Stream, this country wouldn't be habitable at all."
Walsh considered that. "Who says it is, sir?"
"Ha!" The officer nodded. "Makes you understand why the Vikings went pirating so often, what?"
"Damned if it doesn't," Walsh agreed. "Even Scotland looks good next to this, and by God I never thought I'd say that in this life." The country up in the north there was bleak as could be, but this outdid it.
After nodding again, the captain said, "No fucking Germans in Scotland, either."
"Right." Walsh wished there were no Germans in Norway, either. Unfortunately, wishing didn't make them go away. They weren't nearly far enough behind the retreating Allies. German mountain troops had snowshoes and skis, and moved much faster than poor ordinary buggers stumbling up these indifferent roads.
Oh, the Norwegians had ski troops, too, and a few French chasseurs alpins were also equipped for winter warfare. But most of the allied expeditionary force was plain old infantry. And the plain old infantry was in trouble.
"One good thing," the captain bawled into Walsh's none too shell-like ear.
"What's that, sir?" Walsh answered. "It's one more than I've come up with."
"With the weather so beastly, the Luftwaffe can't get off the ground."
"Mm. There is that," Walsh said. "We can get shot and shelled, but the blighters won't bomb us for a while."