Harry Turtledove: In the Balance

But before he crossed from Romania into Russia, he’d never imagined how immense the country was; how the plains seemed to stretch on and on forever; how thin a division, a corps, an army, could spread just to hold a front, let alone advance. And from those limitless plains sprang seemingly limitless streams of men and tanks. And they all fought, ferociously if without much skill. Jager knew too well the Wehrmacht was anything but limitless. If every German soldier slew two Red Army men, if every panzer knocked out two T-34s or KVs, the Russians had a net gain.

Riecke lit a cigarette. The flare of the match briefly showed the dirt ground into fatigue lines he’d not had a month before. Yet somehow he still looked boyish. Jager envied him that; at the rate he himself was going gray, he’d look like a grandfather any day now.

The captain passed him the pack. He took a cigarette, leaned closer to light it from Riecke’s. “Thanks,” he said, shielding the glowing coal with one hand: no point giving a sniper a free target. Riecke also hid his smoke.

After they’d crushed out the cigarettes under their bootheels, Riecke said suddenly, “ Are we, going to get new models anytime soon, sir? What does your brother say?”

“Nothing he shouldn’t, which means I don’t know for certain,” Jager answered. His brother Johann worked as an engineer for Henschel. His letters were always censored with special zeal, lest they fall into enemy hands on the long road between Germany and somewhere south of Kharkov. But brothers had ways with words that censors could not follow. After a moment, Jager added, “It might be possible, though I thought size didn’t concern you…?”

“Oh, I’ll carry on with what we have,” the younger man said breezily. Not that there’s any choice in the matter , Jager thought. Riecke’ went on, “Still, as you say, it would be nice to be better and bigger at the same time.”

“So it would.” Jager splashed a little water onto his mess tin from his water bottle, pulled out some fresh spring grass to wipe it more or less clean. Then he yawned. “I’m going to try to sleep till sunup. Don’t be afraid to wake me if there’s any sign of trouble.” He’d given Riecke that order at least a hundred times. As he always did, the captain nodded.

The drone of the four Merlins made every filling in Flight Lieutenant George Bagnall’s head feel as if it were shaking loose from its tooth. The Lancaster jounced in the air as 88mm flak burst all around it, filling the night with puffs of smoke that absurdly reminded the flight engineer of dumplings.

Searchlights stabbed up from the ground, seeking to impale a bomber like a bug on a collector’s pin. The Lancaster’s belly was a flat matte black, but not black enough to make it safe if one of those skewers of light happened to catch it. Fortunately, Bagnall was too busy monitoring engine temperature and revolutions, fuel consumption, oil pressure, hydraulic lines, and all the other complex systems that had to work if the Lancaster was to keep flying, to be as frightened as he would have been as a mere passenger.

But not even the most mechanically attentive man could have stared at his dials and meters to the exclusion of the spectacle outside the thick Perspex window. Even as Bagnall watched, more flames started in Cologne, some the almost blue-white glare of incendiaries, others spreading red blisters of ordinary fire.

Perhaps half a mile away from Bagnall’s plane and a little lower in the sky, a bomber heeled over and plunged ground-ward, one wing a sheet of flame. The flight engineer’s shiver had nothing to do with the frigid air through which his Lanc flew.

Ken Embry grunted beside him. “We may have flown a thousand bloody bombers to Cologne,” the pilot said. “Now we have to see how bloody many fly back from it.” His voice rang metallically in the intercom earphones.

“Jerry doesn’t seem very pleased with us tonight, does he?” Bagnall answered, not about to let his friend outdo him in cynicism and understatement.

Below them in the nose, Douglas Bell let out a whoop like a red Indian. “There’s the train station! Hold her steady, steady-Now!” the bomb-aimer shouted. The Lancaster shuddered again, in a new way this time, as destruction tumbled down on the German city by the Rhine.

“That’s for Coventry,” Embry said quietly. He’d lost a sister in the German raid on the English town a year and a half before.

“Coventry and then some,” Bagnall agreed. “The Germans didn’t throw nearly so many aircraft at us, and they don’t have a bomber that can touch the Lanc.” He set an affectionate gloved hand on the instrument panel in front of him.

The pilot grunted again. “They slaughter our civilians and we slaughter theirs. The same with the soldiers in the desert, the same in Russia. The Japanese are still moving against the Yanks in the Pacific, and Jerry is sinking too many ships in the Atlantic. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were losing the bloody war.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Bagnall said after a few seconds of judicious consideration. “But it does rather seem to hang in the balance, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, one side or the other will do something monumentally stupid, and that will tell the tale.”

“Good Lord, we’re doomed if that’s so,” Embry exclaimed. “Can you imagine anyone more monumentally stupid than an Englishman with his blood up?”

Bagnall scratched at his cheek below the bottom edge of his goggles; those few square inches were the only ones not covered by one or more-usually more-layers of clothing. They were also quite numb. He flogged his brain for some sort of comeback, but nothing occurred to him; this time he’d have to yield the palm of cynicism to the pilot.

He had only a few seconds in which to feel rueful. Then shouts from the rear gunner, and the top turret rang in his ears, almost deafening him: “Enemy fighter to starboard and low! Bandit! Bandit! Bloody fucking bandit!” Machine guns began to hammer, although the.303 rounds were not likely to do much good.

Ken Embry heeled the Lancaster over on its side and dove away from the menace, flying his big, unwieldy aircraft as much like a fighter as he could. The frame groaned in protest. Like any sensible pilot, Embry ignored it. The German up there was more likely to kill him than he was to tear off the Lanc’s wings. He piled power onto the engines of one wing, cut it from those of the other. The Lancaster fell through the air like a stone. Bagnall clapped a hand to his mouth, as if to catch the stomach that was trying to crawl up his throat.

The shouts from the gunners rose to a crescendo. All at once drenched in sweat despite the icy air outside, Bagnall felt shells slam-one, two, three-into the wing and side of the fuselage. A twin-engine plane roared above the windscreen and vanished into the blackness, pursued by tracers from the Lanc’s guns.

“Messerschmitt-110,” Bagnall said shakily.

“Good of you to tell me,” Embry answered. “I was rather too occupied to notice.” He raised his voice. “Everyone present and accounted for?” The seven-man crew’s answers came back high and shrill, but they all came back. Embry turned to Bagnall. “And how did our humble chariot fare?”

Bagnall studied the gauges. “Everything appears-normal,” he said, surprised at how surprised he sounded. He rallied gamely: “We might have been a bit more embarrassed had Jerry chosen to shoot us up before we disposed of our cargo.”

“Indeed,” the pilot said. “Having disposed of it, I see no urgent reason to tarry over the scene any longer. Mr. Whyte, will you give us a course for home?”

“With pleasure, sir,” AIf Whyte answered from behind the black curtain that protected his night vision. “I thought for a moment there you were trying to fling me over the side. Fly course two-eight-three. I say again two-eight-three. That should put us on the ground back at Swinderby in about four and a half hours.”