Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

He was a good soldier, clever and brave. Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews till the war started. When it came to fighting the Nazis, though, they were in it to the end. A couple of Slovaks in Vaclav’s squad at the beginning of things ran out the first chance they got. They were probably in Father Tiso’s “independent” Slovakian army right now, fighting the Russians. Vaclav chuckled nastily. That’d serve the stupid shitheels right!

“Where’s my toy?” he asked Halevy. He didn’t bother with a sir; neither of them took the promotions they’d got from the Spaniards too seriously. The extra pay, in cash and in promises, did come in handy, though.

“Well, somebody saw an elephant out behind the Fascists’ lines. He went hunting with your piece, and we haven’t seen it or him since,” Halevy answered blandly.

Vaclav snorted. “My ass! Is the beast still where I stashed it?”

“You bet it is,” the Jew replied. “C’mon, man-get real. Who in his right mind would want the goddamn thing?”

“Well, I do,” Vaclav said with such dignity as he could muster.

“I said, ‘Who in his right mind?’ ” Halevy repeated patiently. Vaclav snorted again. Halevy led him to the bombproof where he’d left the antitank rifle before he went down to paint the town red (or, given its politics, redder). He’d taken it from a French soldier who was too dead to need it any more. It was a beast and a half: almost as long as a man was tall, and more than twice as heavy as an ordinary rifle. It fired rounds as thick as a thumb, and not much shorter.

Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it almost broke your shoulder every time you pulled the trigger. But those fat bullets would pierce at least twenty-five millimeters of hardened steel, which made it death on armored cars and powerful enough to trouble any tank they’d had in 1938 (more modern marks shrugged off any rifle bullets).

It might not wreck a new tank. To the logical French, that made it obsolete and therefore useless. To Vaclav, it only meant he needed to use the monster for something else. The antitank rifle fired heavy rounds on a flat trajectory with a ridiculously high muzzle velocity. That made it a wonderful sniper’s rifle, especially after he fitted it with a telescopic sight. He could kill a man two kilometers away.

He could, and he damn well had. General Franco hadn’t been so far off-he’d been out around 1,500 meters. Franco, by all accounts, had been a careful and logical man, more methodical than brilliant. No doubt he would have agreed with the French about the obvious uselessness of an outdated weapon. He would have, yes, till Vaclav plugged him. At the moment, he had no opinions about anything. And Vaclav planned on doing some more sniping tomorrow.

The winter before, the Wehrmacht hadn’t had proper clothes for fighting in Russia. The German greatcoat served tolerably well in Western Europe. Russian winds bit right through it. Willi Dernen had acquired-a polite way to say had stolen -a sheepskin jacket in a peasant village. German boots also sucked. The hobnails in their soles took cold right up to your feet, and they also fit too closely to be padded. Willi’d taken a pair of valenki -oversized felt boots-off a Russian corpse. He’d done much better after that.

Things were different this time around. German soldiers got cold-weather gear as good as anyone else’s. Even the Ivans stole Wehrmacht- issue felt-and-leather boots when they could get them. Willi was relieved. Shivering and risking frostbite were bad enough. Having even your Polish allies laugh at you-or, sadder yet, pity you-because you were shivering and frostbitten was worse.

Willi came from Breslau. Just about everybody in the division was drawn from the Wehrkreis -the recruiting district-centered on that town. Poland bordered it on the east. Plenty of Poles lived in the district, and in Breslau. Like most Germans, Willi looked down his nose at them. Watching them look down their noses at him and his countrymen here was flat-out embarrassing.

The Wehrmacht first came east to help the Poles drive Stalin’s hordes out of their country. The Germans had done that. Now they were in Russia up to their armpits, the boundary between Poland and the USSR hundreds of kilometers behind them, Moscow still hundreds of kilometers ahead.

Where, in all this Russian immensity, did victory lie? Anywhere? If it lay anywhere close by, Willi couldn’t see it. He didn’t think any of the other Landsers in his outfit could, either. He’d quit worrying about it. All he cared about were staying alive and coming home in one piece.

He peered out from the edge of some woods across the snow-covered fields to the east. His new winter coat was white on one side, Feldgrau on the other. He’d slapped whitewash on his Stahlhelm . With snow dappling the pines and birches that sheltered his section, any watching Red Army man wouldn’t be able to see him from very far away.

Which proved less than he wished it would have. For all he knew, a Russian in a snowsuit was lying in that field not fifty meters away. The Germans didn’t call their enemies Indians by accident. For one thing, Indians were red men. For another, Indians were supposed to be masters of concealment. They were supposed to be, and the Ivans damn well were.

If a Russian was lying in the field, he wouldn’t give himself away by moving. He could lie there all day without doing that. He could lie there all day without freezing to death, too. German troops often wondered whether Russians were half animal. If they were, it was the wrong half, as far as Willi was concerned.

Boots crunched in the snow behind him. He turned his head. Nothing to get excited about: just one of his buddies. “Anything going on?” Adam Pfaff asked.

“Well, I don’t see anything,” Willi answered.

“Mpf,” the other Obergefreiter said. Willi couldn’t have put it better himself. Pfaff went on, “Maybe that means something, and maybe it doesn’t.”

“I was just thinking the same thing before you came up,” Willi said. “If you want to look around for yourself, be my guest. I won’t get pissed off if you spot Ivans I missed. I’ll thank you kindly, on account of you’ll be saving my ass, too.”

“Sure, I’ll look. I don’t think I’m likely to spot anything you didn’t, but even when it comes to cabbage two heads are better than one.” Cradling his Mauser, Pfaff moved up alongside Willi. The woodwork on the rifle was painted a gray not far from Feldgrau . He’d carried that Mauser since he joined the regiment as a replacement. Arno Baatz, the Unteroffizier who’d led this squad, tried to tell him to make the piece ordinary again. The company commander had said it was all right, though. That didn’t make Pfaff and Baatz get along any better.

Then again, Awful Arno didn’t get along with anybody. He and Willi had had run-ins aplenty. Right this minute, Baatz was recovering from an arm wound, and the squad belonged to Willi. He didn’t care what Pfaff did with his rifle, as long as it fired when he pulled the trigger.

Willi’s own weapon was a sniper’s Mauser, with a telescopic sight and a special downturned bolt rather like an English Lee-Enfield’s because the scope got in the way of an ordinary one. Awful Arno also hadn’t liked him to carry that piece.

After scanning the landscape to the east, Pfaff said, “Looks a hell of a lot like Russia, y’know?”

“ Wunderbar . And here I was expecting Hawaii,” Willi said sourly. “Russia? I could do that well myself. Hell, I did do that well myself.”

“Always glad to be of service.” His buddy sketched a salute.