Then things changed again. Without warning, signs stopped making any sense at all. Luc could no more understand Polish than he could fly, but he could try to sound out the incomprehensible words. Chances were he was botching them worse than Poles botched French, but he could try. When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything…
When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything, they weren’t in Poland any more. They were in the USSR. The Germans had the same problem here. Luc saw quite a few of their signs importantly pointing this way and that, stark black letters on a snowy ground. He didn’t read German, either, though more of the words looked familiar than they did in Polish. But even seeing letters he could understand felt oddly reassuring.
The train stopped. Luc expected silence outside the car now that the noise from the engine and the wheels was gone. Instead, he heard something like far-off thunder. Somebody’s artillery was going to town.
Lieutenant Demange gave him that dreadful grin again. “Well, we won’t have to go real far to find the front, will we?”
“No. What a pity,” Luc said, for all the world as if he meant it. Demange’s sour chuckle said he understood.
A German officer came up to the detraining Frenchmen and immediately started shouting orders-in his own language, of course. None of the soldiers in khaki moved. Luc knew that, even if he did speak German, he would sooner lose a nut than admit it. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one here who felt that way.
His government could make him board a train. It could ship him east. But it couldn’t turn him into a good ally. If the Germans didn’t happen to like that, well… What a pity. For the first time since stepping down onto Soviet soil, he smiled.
A dormouse might find room to sleep inside a Panzer II. An ordinary human being didn’t stand a chance. Theo Hossbach and his crewmates did the next best thing: they dug out a space under the little panzer, using its armored chassis and tracks to protect them from anything the Ivans threw their way.
It was crowded under there, but less crowded than inside the machine. Not so many sharp metal corners to catch you in the knee or the elbow or the side of the head, either. And Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt got along pretty well. They shared cigarettes and food and, whenever they could liberate some, vodka.
“I didn’t like those clouds late this afternoon,” Stoss said as they were settling down. “Looked like rain.”
“Smelled like rain, too. Still does,” Witt put in, wrinkling his nose in the fading, gloomy light. “Wet dust-know what I mean?”
Adi nodded. So did Theo. One of the reasons you dug in under your panzer was to give the beast room to settle. If the ground was soft, it could settle enough to squash you flat unless you were careful. And, of course, it would settle more if rain softened things.
But they’d dug enough of a cave so they wouldn’t have to worry about that. Which didn’t mean Theo didn’t worry. Theo always worried. He had reason to worry here, too. When the fall rains started in this part of the world, they didn’t stop for six weeks or so. All the roads that weren’t paved turned to bottomless lengths of ooze. The next paved road Theo saw more than a couple of kilometers outside a Soviet city would be the first.
That was on the panzer commander’s mind, too. “You know, our maps eat shit,” he remarked, not quite apropos of nothing.
“You bet,” Adi Stoss agreed. “What they call main highways are horrible dirt tracks. And the secondary roads-the ones on the maps, I mean-mostly aren’t there at all for real.”
“The railroads suck, too,” Witt said. Once soldiers started bitching, they commonly had a hard time stopping. “Why did the fucking Ivans pick a wider gauge than everybody else in Europe?”
“So we couldn’t use our rolling stock on their lines when a war started,” Adi answered. “It works, too.”
By the same token, the Russians couldn’t use their cars and engines farther to the west. Their planners must have been afraid they were more likely to retreat than to advance when they banged heads with Germany. On the evidence of two wars, those planners had known what to fear.
Theo pulled his blanket over his head. Adi and Hermann kept talking for a while, but they lowered their voices. Theo fell asleep as if sledgehammered. Anybody who said war wasn’t a wearing business had never been through one.
He woke early the next morning to a soft, insistent drumming on the panzer overhead and on the ground all around. No wonder it had looked like rain the afternoon before. No, no wonder at all. His lips shaped a soundless word: “Scheisse.”
His comrades stirred a few minutes later. They swore, too, not at all silently. “Break out the soup spoons,” Adi said. “The easy advances just quit being easy.”
“Maybe things will pick up again after the hard freeze comes and we aren’t stuck in the mud all the goddamn time.” Witt tried to look on the bright side of things.
“Yeah, maybe.” Adi didn’t sound as if he believed it. Theo didn’t believe it, either. Just then, a tiny rill trickled down the dirt they’d thrown up from under the panzer and into their little cave. Adi sighed theatrically. “Forty days and forty nights-isn’t that right?”
It was right in the Biblical sense. It was also about how long the fall rains in Russia would last. The panzer crewmen glumly emerged into a world that had changed.
The rain pattered down out of a sky that reminded Theo of nothing so much as the bellies of a lot of dirty sheep. It cut visibility to a couple of hundred meters at best. Beyond that, everything was lost in a curtain of murk and mist. A hooded crow on the roof of a burnt-out barn sent the Germans a nasty look, as if to say the evil weather was their fault.
Sorry, bird, Theo thought. It’s not us. Our generals will be tearing out their hair-the ones who still have hair, anyhow. The rest will throw down their monocles and cuss. His opinion of the Wehrmacht ’s senior commanders was not high. His opinion of other armies’ leadership was even lower.
Adi stooped and eyed the Panzer II’s tracks. Sure as hell, it was getting muddy. Sure as hell, the panzer was sinking into the mud. The driver mournfully shook his head. “Going anywhere in this crap will be fun, won’t it?” he said.
Witt nodded to Theo. “Get on the horn with the regiment,” he said. “See what we’re supposed to do today. If we’re lucky, they’ll tell us to hold in place.”
“Right,” Theo said. The panzer commander didn’t sound as if he expected them to be lucky. Since Theo didn’t, either, he just climbed into the panzer and warmed up the radio set.
When he asked headquarters what the day’s orders were, the sergeant or lieutenant at the other end of the connection seemed surprised he needed to. “No changes since last night,” the fellow back at HQ replied. “The advance continues. Why?”
“It’s raining,” Theo said. For all he knew, it wasn’t back there. Or, if it was, the deep thinkers at headquarters might not have noticed.
“We go forward,” the man at headquarters said. Theo duly relayed his words of wisdom to Witt and Adi.
“Well, we try,” remarked the panzer commander, who had a firmer grip on reality than anybody back at HQ. He nodded to Adi. “Start her up.”
“Right you are,” Stoss said. The Maybach engine belched itself awake. It should have had more horsepower, but it was reliable enough.
The panzer should have had more armor. It should have had a better gun. It should have been a Panzer III, in other words. But there still weren’t enough IIIs and IVs to go around, so the smaller IIs and even Is soldiered on.
Witt stood head and shoulders out of the cupola. He draped his shelter half so it kept most of the rain off of him and out of the fighting compartment. “We’re kicking up a wake,” he reported, sounding more amused than annoyed.
Theo, as usual, couldn’t see out. He believed Witt, though. The engine labored to push the panzer through the mud. The tracks dug in hard. Even through the panzer’s steel sides, Theo could hear the squelching.
And the going only got worse. Theirs wasn’t the only panzer trying to use the road. The more traffic it took, the more ruts filled with water and turned to soup. “I wonder if we’d do better in the fields,” Adi said.
“Try it if you want to,” Witt told him.
“Damned if I won’t,” the driver said, and he did. The panzer picked up speed-for a little while. Then it came to a stretch that German or Russian artillery had already chewed up. Rainwater had soaked into the shell holes, producing little gluey puddles. Adi carefully picked his way between them. “We’re using more gas than we have been, too,” he grumbled.
Again, Theo believed him. The engine was working much harder than it had when the road was dry. How anyone was supposed to fight in weather like this… He consoled himself by remembering that the Russians would have just as much trouble seeing enemies and moving as his own side did.
That turned out not to be quite true. The Panzer II was fighting to get out of a mudhole when Witt let out a horrified squawk and all but fell back into the turret. He frantically traversed it to the left. “Goddamn Russian panzer!” he explained. “Fucker’s plowing through the mud like it isn’t even there.”
How fast were the Ivans turning their turret this way? Theo’s gut knotted. A 45mm shell slamming through the thin side armor might answer the question any second now. Witt started shooting: one 20mm round after another, as fast as the toy cannon would fire. Then he switched to the coaxial machine gun, and Theo breathed again.
“Bastard’s burning,” the panzer commander said. “I think the machine gun got one of the crew, but the rest are still on the loose.” He laughed shakily. “Never a dull moment, is there?… How are we doing, Adi?”
“We’re fucking stuck, that’s how,” Stoss answered. “We need a tow.”
“Right,” Witt said. “Theo, get on the radio. Let ’em know.”
“I’m doing it,” Theo said. He hoped whatever recovery vehicle the regiment sent out wouldn’t bog down before it got here. And he hoped-he really, really hoped-no more Russian panzers would come along first.
Rasputitsa. Russian had a word for the season of mud that came along every spring and fall. The spring rasputitsa was worse, because it didn’t mark rain alone: the accumulated winter snow melted, making the mud deeper and gooier yet. But the fall mud time was bad enough.
No planes flew. During the winter, fighters and even bombers landed with skis in place of wheels. Even that didn’t work during the rasputitsa. To get airborne and come down again, a plane had to use a paved runway. As far as Sergei Yaroslavsky knew, the Soviet Union didn’t have any.