West and East

Chapter 24

Theo Hossbach hadn't had much to do with Lieutenant Colonel Koch. A radio operator who was happiest by himself didn't hobnob with a regimental commander. Theo wouldn't have hobnobbed with his crewmates if he could have helped it. But he'd never heard anything bad about Koch. The officer was supposed to be brave. He didn't punish his troops because he enjoyed punishing people. Men who knew about such things said he had a good tactical sense. Theo hadn't seen anything to make him disbelieve it.

None of that did Koch any good now. He stood blindfolded, tied to a post in front of a stone wall in a Polish town. Along with quite a few other panzer crews, Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt had been summoned to see what happened to officers who dared go against the German government.

A Waffen-SS captain-they had their own silly name for the rank, but it amounted to captain-spoke in a loud voice: "This man is guilty of treason against the Reich and against our beloved Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. For treason in wartime, there is only one sentence-the supreme penalty."

He turned to his own men: a dozen more asphalt soldiers. They all carried rifles. When he looked at them, they stiffened to attention.

Maybe they didn't realize it, but the watching panzer crewmen packed a lot more close-range firepower than they did. Lugers, Schmeissers… The SS men could wind up dead before they knew it. None of the Wehrmacht troops in black coveralls looked happy at what was going on in front of them. What would it take to turn dismay to mutiny?

Not much, not if Theo was any judge. A word from Koch would have done it. And what would have happened after that? War between the army and the SS? Theo would have been ready, even eager, for it. He knew he wasn't the only one, either-nowhere close. But it might also have been war between rebel and loyalist Wehrmacht units. He couldn't stomach that. And, while the Germans were bashing one another, what would the Red Army do? Stand around watching? Not likely!

"Raise your weapons!" the SS captain ordered. The firing squad obeyed. "Aim your weapons!" he said, and they did.

Lieutenant Colonel Koch did cry out then. Had he yelled Save me! or Down with Hitler!, the mutiny might have started then and there. But all he said, in a loud, clear voice, was, "Long live Germany!"

"Fire!" the SS man shouted. A dozen shots rang out as one. Koch slumped against his bonds. Blood darkened the front of his tunic. The sergeant who headed the riflemen went over to him and felt for a pulse. He must have found one, for he grimaced. "Finish him!" the SS captain snapped. The sergeant drew a pistol and shot Koch in the back of the head. That surely ended that. The SS captain looked out at the panzer troops. "You may bury him," he said, as if he were granting some large concession. By his lights, he probably was.

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."

Fujita smiled before he realized he'd done it. When a smart kid said you'd said something well, of course you were tickled. Yes, he might be flattering you-he knew where his bowl of rice came from, all right. He'd found a good way to go about it, though. Fujita's voice lacked some of the growl he usually put into it speaking to inferiors when he said, "So what did your father tell you about Port Arthur?"

"He never talked about it much, either, not till just before I had to go in for basic training," Hayashi said. "Then he said he hoped I never ended up in a spot like that. He said the Russian artillery was bad-"

"That sure hasn't changed!" somebody else exclaimed. All the soldiers nodded. No matter what other mistakes the Russians made, their artillery was always trouble.

"And he said that our machine guns fired right over the heads of our men when they were attacking the Russian forts," Hayashi went on. "Right over their heads. Sometimes our gunners would shoot our men in the back."

"It happens," Fujita said. "Shigata ga nai." Life was hard to begin with. Soldiering was a hard part of life. If the generals decided killing some of the troops on their own side would help the rest take an objective, they'd do it without thinking twice. It was just part of the cost of doing business. He could understand that. A sergeant sometimes had to make those choices, too, if on a smaller scale.

"Hai. It does happen." Hayashi had seen enough to leave him no doubts on that score. "But, please excuse me, Sergeant-san-I don't want it to happen to me."

"Well, who does?" Fujita said. "Me, I aim to die at the age of a hundred and three, shot by an outraged husband."

The soldiers all laughed. Fujita couldn't remember where he'd heard that line before. Somewhere. It didn't matter. It was funny. When you heard something funny, of course you used it yourself and passed it along.

"Eee, I like that," a private said. "An outraged husband with a pretty young wife, neh?"

"Oh, yes," Fujita said. "What's the point to getting shot for screwing some ugly old woman, eh?"

No one saw any. As soldiers will, the men started talking about young women, pretty women, women they'd known, women they claimed they'd known, women they wished they'd known. Fujita told a little truth and more than a few lies. He figured the other soldiers were doing the same thing. Well, so what? Talk like that made the time go by. In their foxholes and trenches farther north, the Russians were probably telling the same stories.

As if to remind the Japanese that they hadn't gone away, Red Army gunners greeted the next day's dawn with an artillery barrage. Bombers flying above the ugly gray clouds dropped tonnes of explosives through them. They were bombing blind, and none of their presents fell anywhere close to the front. For all kinds of reasons, that didn't break Fujita's heart. He was in no danger himself. And the soft-living men who called themselves soldiers but never saw the trenches-the clerks and the cooks and the staff officers-got a taste of what war was like. He hoped they enjoyed it.

A couple of days after that, the regiment got pulled out of the line. The first place they went was to a delousing station. Like any Japanese, Fujita was glad to soak in almost unbearably hot water. He was even gladder the Russian bombers had missed the bathhouse. If the soap smelled powerfully of medicine, so what? Getting his clothes baked to kill lice and nits was less delightful, but he could put up with it.

Some of the soldiers thought they were going home. Some people could smell pig shit and think of pork cutlets. Fujita was willing-even eager-to be surprised, which didn't mean he expected it.

The men marched off to the west, toward the Ussuri River and the border with Manchukuo. The officers said nothing about where they were headed, or why. Maybe they didn't know, either. More likely, they didn't want the troops to find out till they couldn't do anything about it but complain.

A small flotilla of river steamers waited by the riverbank. They'd all seen better decades. Some of them looked as if they'd seen a better century. Sergeant Fujita's company and another filed aboard one of the river-boats. They filled it to overflowing. It waddled out into the stream and headed south. Fujita feared he knew what that meant… which, in the grand scheme of things, mattered not at all.

Spatters of snow chased the steamers. The clouds overhead remained thick and dark. For that, the sergeant thanked whatever weather kami ruled in these parts. Clear skies would have let Russian airplanes spot the steamers and shoot them up at their leisure. Each boat mounted a machine gun at the bow and another at the stern. From everything Fujita had seen, they wouldn't do a sen's worth of good in case of a real attack.

He said as much to Hayashi. The conscripted student looked back at him. "What difference does it make? If the Russians don't shoot us from the air now, they'll shoot us on the ground pretty soon."

"Maybe they won't," Fujita answered. You had to look on the bright side of things. That was about as far on the bright side as he could make himself look, though.

"Hai. Honto. Maybe they won't. Maybe our own machine gunners will do it for them, the way they did in my father's day." Hayashi had his share of cynicism, or maybe more than his share.

"Your father made it. So did my uncles," Fujita said. Again, just surviving seemed like optimism. The steamers lumbered south through the snow flurries. PERONNE WAS A NORTHERN TOWN that had kept some of its brick-and-stone walls. German bombs and French artillery-or maybe it was the other way around-had done horrible things to them. Big chunks were bitten out of the church of St. Jean. Despite the chill of crisp fall days, the stench of death fouled the air.

In the French drive to the east, Luc Harcourt had seen-and smelled-a lot of towns and villages like this one. He smelled bad himself. He couldn't remember the last time he'd bathed. Joinville and Villehardouin were just as grimy and unshaven and odorous as he was. So were all the other poilus pushing the Fritzes back.

Joinville pointed to a parade of sorts going through the streets of Peronne. "By Jesus, there's something you don't see every day!"

"Too bad," Tiny Villehardouin added in his bad Breton-flavored French.

Luc Harcourt thought it was too bad, too. The locals were forcing a dozen or so young women to march along bare to the waist, their breasts bouncing at every step. Some had had their heads shaved. Others, more humiliatingly still, wore scalps half bare. One was very visibly pregnant.

People yelled at them as they went: "Whores!" "Cunts!" "Scumbags of the Boches!" Rotten vegetables flew through the air. No one seemed ready to cast the first stone, though.

"I bet this happened after we chased the Germans out the last time, too," Joinville said. The Gascon had his eye on one of the girls in particular. His chances were probably pretty good, too. If she'd sleep with a German, or a bunch of Germans, why wouldn't she sleep with a Frenchman?

"Not with the same broads, I bet," Luc said. Joinville laughed so hard, the Hotchkiss gun on his back almost fell off. Villehardouin, who was burdened with the tripod, fixed his crewmate's straps.

The rumble of aircraft engines swelling out of the east made Luc's head rise like that of a dog scenting danger. If those were Stukas, he wanted to find somewhere else to be, and in a hurry. Another country, by choice.

But this flight wasn't full of vulture-winged dive bombers. In fact, the flying machines looked like something left over from his father's war. They were biplanes with open cockpits. Antiaircraft guns opened up on them. Black puffs of smoke marked shell bursts. Some came quite close to the planes, but the old-fashioned, ungainly machines buzzed on.

Luc had trouble taking them seriously even when they swooped down on Peronne. But then, all of a sudden, it sounded as if God were firing giant machine guns up in the sky. The townsfolk suddenly lost interest in tormenting their wayward women. They ran, screaming. Luc wanted to do the same thing. Only the fear of losing his men's respect forever held him in place. "Hit the dirt!" he yelled, and suited action to word.

Both machine gun and tripod clanked as Joinville and Villehardouin followed suit. That fearsome ratatat-tat grew louder yet as the German biplanes neared. They're doing it with their engines, Luc realized. It was the same kind of trick as the sirens in a Stuka's landing gear. It was designed to make people afraid. And, as with most things German, it did what it was designed for. Did it ever!

The biplanes carried real machine guns: Luc saw them spitting fire. And bombs fell from under their wings: not the monsters Stukas could haul, the ones that pierced reinforced concrete and wrecked fortresses, but even so… Luc rolled himself into a ball like a hedgehog. He only wished he had real spines.

Bullets sparked off brickwork and cobblestones. Bombs bounced him as if he were a basketball. A round clanged off metal somewhere much too close. And then the biplanes were gone-he hoped.

He needed a moment to take stock of himself. Both arms work? Check. Both legs? Check again. No holes? No blood? No pain? No and no and no. "Fuck me," he said. "I'm all right."

Then he looked around to see how his buddies were doing. Villehardouin seemed to be going through a checklist like the one he'd just used himself. The big Breton nodded and gave a thumbs-up. Joinville had taken off the Hotchkiss gun and was looking it over. "Look!" he said, pointing to a dent and a lead splash on one of the iron cooling fins at the base of the barrel. "It hit here and ricocheted. If it hadn't ricocheted, it would have gone into my back."

"Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good." Luc took his water bottle off his belt. "Here. Have some of this."

"Pinard?" Joinville asked, taking the flask.

"Better-applejack," Luc said.

"Ah. Merci, mon ami." The Gascon's throat worked. After a couple of swallows, he handed Villehardouin the bottle. The big man also took a knock. Then he gave the water bottle back to Luc. Luc drank, too, before he stowed it on his belt. He needed a little distilled courage, or at least an anesthetic.

Luc looked around again, this time for the soldiers who'd been hauling the Hotchkiss gun's ammunition. None of the bullets from the biplanes had hit the aluminum strips of cartridges, which was also lucky. They might have started going off like ammo inside a burning tank, which wouldn't have been healthy for anyone within a few hundred meters.

But one of the troopers was methodically bandaging his calf. Red soaked through the white cotton gauze. "How bad is it, Emile?" Luc asked.

"Hurts like a motherfucker, but I don't think it'll kill me," Emile answered. "Hell, if you get me a stick I bet I can walk on it."

"Chances are they'll send you home, then," Luc said.

"Not fucking likely-I grew up in Verdun," Emile said. The eastern town had held in the last war, but fallen in this one.

"Oh." Luc had forgotten that, if he ever knew it. "Well, they'll take you out of the line for a while, anyway."

"It'll do," Emile said. "I only wish to Christ they'd done it sooner."

Loud shouts came from around the corner. That was Sergeant Demange's voice. Of course he'd live through a strafing and a dive bombing. Luc didn't think anything could kill him. He'd probably never been born, but manufactured in some armaments plant during the last war. Maybe he had a serial number tattooed on his ass-or stamped into it.

Now he was trying to pull order out of chaos. He bawled for medics, for stretcher-bearers, for Peronne's firemen, for water, for anything else blasted houses and wounded people were likely to need. He might have restored something resembling calm, too, if the church of St. Jean hadn't chosen that moment to fall in on itself with a crash.

Shrieks from inside announced that people had sheltered there against the German biplanes. Sergeant Demange effortlessly shifted gears. "Come on!" he yelled to whoever might be listening. "Let get the sorry sons of bitches out!"

"Let's go," Luc told his men-or all of them except Joinville, who'd somehow disappeared after his slug of apple brandy. "We'll do what we can."

They followed him. He was proud of that. Till he'd got a corporal's stripes, no one had ever wanted to follow him. Maybe the rank helped make the man. He didn't feel like complaining any which way.

The church wasn't burning: a small thing on the scale of miracles, but Luc would take it. He flung aside stones and chunks of brickwork and tugged at beams. His hands were hard, but he tore them up anyhow. And the first woman he uncovered didn't need help: falling masonry had made sure she never would. He turned her over so he wouldn't have to look at what was left of her face.

He and the other soldiers-and some townsfolk-did pull several people out alive. That made him feel a little better. Joinville showed up about twenty minutes after he started heaving wreckage. "Where the hell were you?" Luc growled.

"I found that broad," the Gascon said with a lazy smile. "Never did it with nobody with no hair up top before. Didn't matter-she had plenty down below." He set to work as if he'd been there all along.

"Merde! I ought to kick your sorry ass!" Luc didn't know whether to laugh or to pound the soldiers's thick head with a brick.

He ended up laughing. Life is too short for anything else. Joinville's presence probably wouldn't have meant life for anyone who'd died. That being so, why resent him for tearing off a piece when he saw the chance? Because I didn't get to, goddammit. Yes, that one answered itself, didn't it? Luc bent to the task once more.

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WATCHED the Hs-123s land one after another. The biplanes were as near obsolete as made no difference. But they could still carry the fight to the enemy, even if Stukas could do more and do it better.

Those Henschels could take it, too. One of them had a hole in the aluminum skin of the fuselage big enough to throw a cat through. It flew, and landed, as if it had just come off the assembly line. Rudel didn't like to think what that kind of hit would have done to his Ju-87. Nothing good-he was sure of that.

Groundcrew men pushed the biplanes toward revetments after they shut down their engines. Before long, the Henschels would fill all of them. Hans-Ulrich's squadron, and the Stukas the pilots flew, were heading east to teach the Red Russians a thing or two.

Sergeant Dieselhorst ambled up. "I was talking to one of the guys in the radio shack," he said. "Sounds like they gave that Peronne place a good pounding."

"All right by me," Rudel said. "But they can't carry cannon under their wings, you know-not a chance in the world."

"Ja, ja." Dieselhorst nodded. "But the scuttlebutt is, the Ivans have more panzers than England and France put together."

"Well, if they do, we'll just have to make sure it doesn't last." Hans-Ulrich spoke with the confidence-with the arrogance-of youth. Dieselhorst, an older man, smiled and nodded and said not another word.

The Stukas flew off to the east two days later. The sun was rising in Hans-Ulrich's face when he rose from the airstrip in France and setting behind him when he put down on the smooth, grassy runway at Tempel-hof, just outside of Berlin. He and Dieselhorst both eagerly hopped out of their Stuka; long flights were tough on the bladder.

Rudel was happier once he'd eased himself, but only for a little while. Then he noticed the armored cars crewed by Waffen-SS men near the edge of the airport. Their turrets were aimed at the just-arrived bombers. "What's that all about?" he asked.

"What do you think?" Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. "They don't want us to bomb up and go after the Chancellery."

"That's crazy!" Hans-Ulrich exclaimed. "We wouldn't do anything like that."

"They're kind of jumpy right now," Dieselhorst said dryly.

"You can't blame them, after… whatever happened here," Hans-Ulrich said. He didn't know the details of the plot against Hitler: only that it had failed. He was glad it had. Treason had brought down the Reich at the end of the last war, and now it was raising its ugly head again? If it was, it needed to be slapped down, and slapped down hard.

"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.