seemed to have lost its way. It stopped 150 yards from the German foxhole, its 75 mm gun swivelling slowly like the proboscis of some prehistoric animal scenting danger.
The young officer seconded to the 5th SS Panzer, the Viking, raised his head over the lip of the foxhole and cautiously surveyed it.
He turned to the Sergeant crouched beside him. “Do you think they know we’re here?”
“I don’t know, Hauptsturmführer.”
“Then it’s time we let them know.”
“If you say so, Hauptsturmführer.”
The blond Captain with the startling blue eyes looked at the T-34 — perhaps one of the survivors of Kursk, the greatest tank battle in history — through a pair of captured Russian binoculars. No movement except the slowly rotating gun.
“A pity to lose a fine specimen like this, Unterscharführer.”
“You are not suggesting we capture it?” the Sergeant asked. He hadn’t yet made up his mind about this laconic young officer, the embodiment of the Teutonic dream, who had so mysteriously arrived in the midst of the exhausted Viking, now in full retreat towards the Dnieper, the last natural barrier before the Polish border.
Ordinarily he would have assumed that he was a fanatic, dispatched from headquarters to bolster morale. My God it needed bolstering! The Viking had been fighting since the invasion was launched over the River Bug on June 22nd, 1941. More than two years in this bastard wilderness that the Ivans called Mother Russia!
But no, this man was no instrument of discipline, instructed by generals skulking far behind the sound of gunfire. This man was a soldier, albeit a rash one. There was the Knight’s Cross at the throat of his tunic, open at the neck, and a Silver Wound Medal, and a scar on his cheek which the Sergeant recognised as the furrow from a bullet.
Nevertheless he was an enigma. The scar long healed, the tunic miraculously well-preserved, standing out like a spare prick on a honeymoon among the crumpled, lousy, bloodstained clothing of the old soldiers.
The Sergeant glanced curiously at the captain as he surveyed the tank through the field-glasses. He noticed a muscle moving in the Captain’s jaw-bone, the needles of his close-clipped hair, the small cleft in his chin. Not a man to argue with, this one.
But who are you? Where have you come from?
The Captain lowered the field glasses: “You’re right, Sergeant.”
What had he said?
“We can’t capture it. We’ll have to destroy it,” he remarked conversationally, apparently overlooking the fact that all they possessed between them was a Schmeisser machine-pistol and a 9 mm Walther pistol.
The Captain pointed and the Sergeant raised his head to follow the line of his finger.
A Panzerfaust, a grenade launcher, lay on the wheat-coloured grass fifty yards from the foxhole.
He wants me to go and get that? No, my friend, those days are long past. We fight only to survive. Wait till you’ve been two years on the steppe.
“Cover me,” the Captain snapped.
The Sergeant was ashamed of his suspicion. “With a machine pistol, Hauptsturmführer?”
“At least it’s better than the Walther,” the Captain said.
God in heaven, he was making jokes!
“But they’ll spot you. One burst and they’ll have you.”
“There’s some cover over there,” the Captain said. Some scrub on which the first frost of autumn was just beginning to melt.
And then he was up and over the edge of the foxhole, wriggling flat-bellied over the grass.
The turret of the T-34 swung round.
You’ll dirty that precious uniform, the Sergeant thought inconsequentially. But they hadn’t spotted him. Not yet. The Sergeant raised the Schmeisser. Did the idiot want a bullet scar on the other cheek? Or through his chest?
The Captain was ten yards from the grenade-launcher when a machine-gun opened up from a belt of woods to his left. He flung himself to the ground and stayed there until the burst spent itself.
The Captain raised his head — For Christ’s sake keep down! — then his shoulders. As the machine-gun opened up again he scuttled behind a boulder.
Instinctively the Sergeant aimed the machine-pistol in the direction of the machine-gun. But what was the point? They were well out of range. Vaguely the Sergeant wondered what they were doing there. How they had got there. Had the Ivans secretly mounted yet another attack? Had the tank lumbered up merely to give the machine-gunners some target practice? Usually, the Sergeant thought grimly, they preferred prisoners for target practice. But what fighters. Even the Waffen-SS had to admit that.
The barrel of the gun on the tank swung lazily in the direction of the Captain hidden behind the boulder. One shell and both boulder and brave Captain would be no more. But they didn’t fire. Giving the machine-gunners some sport, the Sergeant decided. And after the Captain, me … Why in God’s name had this crazy two-man reconnaissance mission been mounted in the first place?
An aircraft with gull-shaped wings and a silver belly flew overhead. A Stuka. Perhaps one burst from its cannon might change the situation. But the Stuka flew away across the steppe — the infinite steppe — in the direction of the Dnieper.
Their only chance was if the Captain could make it back to the fox-hole. Then, if the machine-gunners are fool enough to move nearer, I’ll have them with the Schmeisser.
If … Peering over the top of the fox-hole the Sergeant realised that the Captain was indeed on the move. In the opposite direction. Towards the grenade-launcher.
And had reached it!
As bullets whipped over his head the Captain rolled into a hollow.
Now the tank must finish him off.
The Sergeant saw the snout of the Panzerfaust protruding from the hollow. Its grenade was said to be capable of punching a hole through eight inches of armour-plate. But the tank was beyond its effective range. Still, it was worth a try.
Machine-gun bullets plucked viciously at the ground around the hollow.
Then the Captain fired the grenade-launcher.
The Sergeant had no doubt of this because he heard the grenade clang against the tank’s armour. The hollowest clang of them all. A dud.
So this is how I am to die, the Sergeant thought. After two years of battle, after glorious victories and a few defeats, I am to die here in a foxhole.
For what? he wondered, failing at first to hear another sound on the crisp autumn air. But when the machine-gun stopped firing he heard it. The Stuka had returned. And was diving as only a Stuka can dive. It opened up with machine-gun and cannon.
The shells and bullets fell short but when
