Harry Turtledove - Last Orders

Now the junior officer’s stare was of unabashed horror. Demange laughed and lit a fresh Gitane. He’d just made another friend.

Russian winter was colder than anything Arno Baatz had ever dreamt of when he was back in Germany. Russian summer didn’t last as long, but it got hotter than the Reich ever did. It got muggier, too; like the men in his squad, the Unteroffizier always had sweat stains under the arms of his wool Feldgrau tunic. Being sweaty all the time made him itch.

All kinds of things in Russia could make you itch. Corporal Baatz had fleas. He had lice. Whenever his outfit got pulled out of the line, the first thing they did was go to a delousing station. That helped till their uniforms cooled off from being baked, and till the men dried off after bathing in hot, medicated water.

The Wehrmacht issued powders and pump sprays that were supposed to kill off pests while you were in the field. Arno Baatz was as patriotic as the next guy. Most of the time, he made a point of being more patriotic than the next guy. But even he had to admit that all the promises on the labels to the powders and sprays were a crock of Quatsch .

And, of course, along with the fleas and the lice came swarms of mosquitoes, plus flies ranging in size from next to invisible to just smaller than a Bf-109. When they bit you-and they would, and they did-all you could do was smear grease on it if you had any grease and try not to scratch. And pretty soon your face and your neck and your hands turned into sausage meat.

One of the senior privates in Baatz’s squad dolefully surveyed himself in a polished steel shaving mirror. “Don’t see much point to getting out a razor,” Adam Pfaff said. “I’d cut me more than I’d cut my whiskers, all bitten up the way I am.”

“You’ll shave like everybody else,” Baatz growled. “It’s in the regulations.”

“A lot of things that are in the regulations sound great in Germany, but they turn out to be really stupid here in Russia.” Insubordination was Pfaff’s middle name.

Baatz glared at him and ran a hand over his own bitten-up but reasonably well-shaven face. “If I can do it, you can do it. And if I’ve got to do it, you’ve fucking well got to do it, too.”

He never could gauge ahead of time what would work on the Obergefreiter . “All right, Corporal. I guess that’s fair,” Pfaff said now, and started scraping away.

No sooner had he rinsed off his razor and stuck it back in his kit than the Ivans started shelling the German positions in the area. All the Landsers jumped for the closest foxhole, and most of them got into cover while the Russian shells were still screaming down. The ground shook from one burst after another. The Russians weren’t the most efficient soldiers God ever made, but they always seemed to have artillery falling out of their assholes.

If a 105 came down right on top of you, cowering in a foxhole wouldn’t do you a pfennig’s worth of good. Baatz knew that all too well. If a shell came down on top of you, they’d bury you in a jam tin … if they could scrape enough of you from the mud to bother with a burial at all. He knew one fellow who’d taken a direct hit and vanished from the face of the earth, teeth, belt buckle, boot-sole hobnails and all. Gone. Off the map.

You tried not to think about things like that. Sometimes, though, your mind kept coming back to them, the way your tongue kept coming back to a bit of gristle stuck between two teeth. Because there were plenty of worse things than dying from a direct hit. Then, at least, you never knew what happened. Baatz had listened to men shriek for hours, sometimes for more than a day, begging their friends and even their enemies to kill them and end their agony. He’d never had to do that himself, but he knew men who had.

Anything that can happen can happen to you . One more truth that wartime brought out, and one more Baatz did his best not to remember. He already had one wound badge, and an amazing scar on his arm. He wasn’t anxious for fate to do any more carving on him.

His anxiety or lack of same, of course, might have nothing to do with anything. “They’re coming!” someone bawled through the roar of bursting shells.

The Ivans had come up with a hideously sneaky trick. They would stop shelling a narrow corridor-sometimes only fifty meters across-and send in their infantry there while they kept plastering the rest of the front. Any defender who wasn’t in the corridor and stuck up his head to shoot at the advancing Reds was asking for a fragment to blow it off.

If you didn’t stick up your head and shoot, the Russians would get in behind you. They were like rats-they squeezed through any little hole. Then you could kiss your sorry ass good-bye. They’d shoot you or bayonet you or smash in your skull with an entrenching tool. Or they’d take you alive and see what kind of fun they could have with you. The USSR never signed the Geneva Convention. Neither side in the East played by any rules this side of the jungle’s.

Swearing and praying at the same time, Baatz popped halfway out of his hole and started shooting. The Mauser slammed against his shoulder again and again: a good, familiar ache. An Ivan in a dun-colored uniform tumbled and fell. Baatz wasn’t sure his bullet got the bastard, but he’d been firing in that direction. He’d take credit for the kill in his own mind.

A couple of foxholes farther south, Adam Pfaff was also banging away at the Russians. He’d painted his rifle’s woodwork a gray not far from Feldgrau . He claimed it improved the camouflage. Baatz thought that was a bunch of crap, but the company CO let Pfaff get by with it. What could you do?

Right this minute, trying to stay alive mattered more than the weird paint job on an Obergefreiter ’s rifle. Baatz slapped a fresh five-round clip into the magazine of his own Mauser and went on firing. A tiny, half-spent shell fragment clanged off his helmet. It didn’t get through. When the last war started, they’d gone into battle with headgear made of felt or leather. Baatz remembered his old man talking about it, and about how in the days before the Stahlhelm any little head wound was likely to kill you. You couldn’t make a helmet strong enough to keep out a rifle bullet but light enough to wear. Just blocking fragments, though, saved a hell of a lot of casualties. Baatz knew that, without his helmet, he’d be lying dead now, with no more than a trickle of blood in his hair-maybe not even that.

No matter how sneaky the Russians were, they weren’t going to ram through the German lines this time. Along with the stubborn riflemen, an MG-34 and one of the new, quick-firing MG-42s hosed the Ivans’ corridor down with bullets. Russians could be recklessly, even maniacally, bold. Or they could skedaddle like so many savages. This time, they skedaddled, dragging their wounded behind them as they pulled back.

Some of their wounded: a soldier in a khaki greatcoat thrashed and screamed just a couple of hundred meters in front of Baatz’s foxhole. He took aim to finish off the sorry son of a bitch-and to shut him up. But then another Russian ran back, waving his arms to show he wasn’t carrying any weapons.

Baatz was about to pot him anyhow. Yes, he was a brave man. To Baatz, that meant he needed killing all the more. One of these days, he’d show up again, this time toting a machine pistol. But a couple of Germans yelled, “Let him live!” Reluctantly, Baatz didn’t pull the trigger.

The Russian waved toward the German foxholes-he knew he could have got his ticket punched right there. He hauled his countryman onto his back and, bent almost double, lumbered away toward the east.

Squeezing liver paste from a tinfoil tube onto a zwieback cracker later that day, Baatz was still discontented. “I should have nailed that turd,” he grumbled, and stuffed the food into his face.