West and East

Other panzer crews also tinkered with their machines. If you didn't tinker with your panzer whenever you could, it would break down when you needed it most. More often than not, you wouldn't get the chance to tinker with it after that. Somebody would plant you where you'd fallen, with a fence picket to mark the grave. You wouldn't even get a helmet on top of the picket, the way a dead infantryman would.

A hooded crow, black and gray, hopped up to Theo, looking for a handout. The birds were beggars, but they weren't so thieving as their smaller jackdaw cousins. Theo tore off a bit of black bread and tossed it to the crow. The bird seized the prize in its strong bill and flew off toward the closest tree to eat it.

"Now you'll have twenty of them scrounging from you," Heinz said. "Lousy things are as bad as the packs of Jew beggars we get around here. They even dress like 'em." He laughed at his own wit. He wasn't so far wrong, either. The Jews who filled a lot of villages in these parts did mostly wear black, with lighter shirts and blouses for relief. Laughing again, Nauma

Theo also laughed, nervously. The way things were these days, you took a chance if you didn't laugh when somebody made fun of Jews. He got paid to take chances against the Reich's enemies. Nobody gave him a pfe

Adi Stoss chuckled, too. "Where I come from, the crows are black all over," he said. "They don't have the gray hoods they grow here."

"So they're niggers instead of kikes, huh?" Heinz said. "Only matters to the lady crows, I guess."

"One of these days, Sergeant, you'll open your mouth so wide, you'll fall right in," Stoss said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Nauma

That went too far for even Theo to take-the more so since he was sure Adi wouldn't back down. "Enough, both of you," the radioman said. Nauma

Neither crewmate answered that. What could you say? Off in the distance, a Russian machine gun stammered out death. Another gun replied a moment later. Theo cocked his head, listening. That one sounded French, which meant it had to belong to the Poles. They made some of their own stuff, but scrounged the rest from whoever was selling on any given Tuesday.

"Our allies," Heinz said scornfully, so he'd also figured out to whom the second machine gun belonged.

"Would you rather fight them along with the Russians?" Stoss asked.

"What I'd rather, Private, is that you keep your big mouth shut," Nauma

Stoss didn't say another word, but if that wasn't murder in his eyes, Theo had never seen it. A panzer crew was supposed to work together. Theory was wonderful. This particular crew had as many clogs and hitches as the much-maligned carburetor.

The company commander was a bright young first lieutenant named Schmidt. The captain who had been in charge went up in flames with his Panzer II. There wasn't enough of him left to bury, with or without a helmet over his grave. Schmidt was trying his best to do a good job. He came around every evening, as the captain had before him. "Alles gut?" he asked.

"Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant," Heinz answered. "Carb is working the way it's supposed to again." He said nothing about whether the crew was working the way it was supposed to. Maybe he didn't even worry about it. From his perspective, from a commander's perspective, Adi might have been no more than a bit of grit in the works. He might have been, but Theo didn't believe it for a minute.

"Well, all right," Schmidt said. "The push southwest goes on tomorrow. If everything works the way it's supposed to, we'll link up with more Wehrmacht units in the afternoon. They aren't far away."

"That's good, sir," Heinz said. Theo found himself nodding. He saw Adalbert Stoss doing the same thing. They'd wedged their way through the swarming Russians this long. Maybe they wouldn't have to do it any more. Maybe there'd be a real front again soon. The Red Army wasn't as good at blitzkrieg as the Wehrmacht. All the same, being on the wrong end of it wasn't much fun.

"All right," Lieutenant Schmidt repeated. "We move at dawn-the sooner we give the Reds one in the teeth, the better for us." He ambled off to talk to the next panzer's crew.

Dawn came later than it would have a month before. Summer was going, autumn on the way. What would winter be like around here? Worse than the last one in the Low Countries and France-Theo was sure of that.

He ducked down into the back of the panzer with relief. On the move, the crew would talk about business, and that would be that. The radio net was full of traffic. Some of it was in unintelligible Polish and Russian, but most came from the Germans moving south to cut off the Russians who'd moved west to cut off the Germans moving north to cut off the earlier wave of Russians moving west. War could get complicated.

Down in what was now "independent" Slovakia, more German divisions were on the move, these heading north into Poland. Had they been attacking the Poles, the country would have fallen in a couple of weeks. But the Poles were Germany's friends… for the moment.

The first hint Theo had that things weren't going perfectly was the machine-gun bullets slamming into the Panzer II's armored side. "Panzer halt!" Heinz shouted. Adi hit the brakes. Heinz traversed the turret and fired a long burst from the machine gun and several rounds from the 20mm ca

Despite the earphones, Theo heard more gunfire outside. A rifle round smacked the panzer. Theo tensed. Anything bigger than a rifle round would punch right through. He'd bailed out of one burning machine. That was why he had nine and a half fingers now. He didn't want to find out what he'd be missing if he had to do it again.

Nauma

Nauma

He ripped off the earphones and tried to get Nauma

"Scheisse," Adalbert Stoss said. "Bad?"

"Dead," Theo answered succinctly.

"Well, you're it, then," Adi said. "Tell me what to do."

"Just keep going for now," Theo said. Before long, he'd have to stick his head out of the blood-dripping hatch. That was part of what a panzer commander did. Heinz was still bleeding onto the floor of the fighting compartment. That had nothing to do with anything, either.

Absently, he wondered what the new commander would be like. He also wondered whether they'd ever be able to wash out the inside of the Panzer II. Then he wondered if he'd live long enough to find out about either of the other two. Doing his job was the best way to make the answer to that yes. The best way, sure-but no guarantee. HANS-ULRICH RUDEL SOON DISCOVERED wearing the Ritterkreuz at his throat changed his life very little. Oh, some jackass reporters from the Propaganda Ministry talked with him about panzer-busting with a Stuka. A photographer snapped his picture with the Knight's Cross. But that was about it. The reporters and photographer couldn't very well fly with him. And when he was airborne he had only two concerns: finishing the mission and getting home in one piece.