Dark Full of Enemies(49)
He had still had Sergeant B?uml with him, thank God. The man kept the company in line. They had packed their Panzergrenadiers, many fresh from home, still wide-eyed at the endless golden plain, aboard their trucks and rolled to their places, and waited.
Their part in the race never came. They faced the inside of the pocket, fought off anemic probes, and waited. They heard the great tank battle clearly though it took place fifty miles away, a constant rumble dappled with cracks and bangs. And they saw the offensive stall, the armored columns feeding into the salient slow, halt, and begin to pull back. The Russians came down upon them a few days later.
They had held—thanks to training, firepower, and discipline—for three days under attack. B?uml fell in the first assault, shot twice but alive. Two privates had to drag him to the rear and out of the fight. Only one returned. The other, the survivor said, had been annihilated by Russian mortar fire. When the next assault came in the pitch dark that night, the survivor died, too. The next day the morning concert, the dawn bombardment, killed Hansi, the whistler of Wagner.
The attacks worsened. Fass lost men and his company weakened, and the Ivans drove more and more out of their way and brought more strength to bear on them. Fass, even without the fearsome company sergeant, held on. He did not expect relief. He knew better. He held until a wave of six T-34/85s crossed the horizon, pivoted on their earth-tearing treads, unburdened themselves of their brown and khaki soldiers, and jerked into gear toward them. Until the last moments before the shooting started, he could see only the blocky turrets above the blackened and bullet-scythed patches of summer wheat. Then the Russian infantry opened fire.
A submachine gun round found him as he raised a hand to his mouth to shout to his men. The bullet crossed his back shoulderblade to shoulderblade, and before he fell a salvo of tank fire blew shrapnel into his legs and side.
Five months, and his body still had not unstiffened. He gauged his leg’s strength as he walked across the dam, back past the guards, and felt for weakness, pain, soreness, stiffness. Almost none at all, now. After release from hospital, without even taking leave, he had tried to bluff his way back to his unit. Impossible, they said. He did not yet have full motion in his arms and back, and it was obvious. And despite his best efforts—a true thespian, they had said, and he could not tell if it was sarcasm or good-natured commiseration—he could not fully hide his limp. Light duty.
He should have expected as much. He had honed his pessimism to something almost like cynicism. He was an experienced officer and an army that was pouring tanks and men into the Bolshevik maw needed experienced officers—probably needed them most at the top. And so he resigned himself to indefinite months in the rear, a Panzergrenadier guarding railcars or road junctions.
His only encouragements were B?uml and Wagner. The first chance he got, he ordered a complete set of Wagner’s operas and played them during all his waking hours in hospital. And after a few months, he had run into the sergeant while exercising his wounded legs in the hospital yard. They both recovered more slowly than they liked. When Fass got his orders for Norway—a dam that needed guarding most urgently, else it might desert, he told B?uml—he brought the sergeant along, as well as a dozen other Panzergrenadiers he talked into joining them. B?uml, cunning man, handled the bureaucrats.
They traveled the length of Norway by train and when they arrived at the dam’s little station, squatting in the snow and arctic dark, two men in civilian clothes awaited him.
The men sent B?uml and the others to the barracks and stepped into the headquarters with Fass. They did not introduce themselves, but Fass did not need his pessimism to guess that they were Gestapo. They had the look.
“Do you know why you’re here?” one of the men said. Fass was no aristocrat, but a country upbringing and love of army protocol led him to expect some kind of preamble. He disliked them instantly.
“Light duty,” Fass said, “until I and these men recuperate.”
“Yes,” the other man said, “a Panzergrenadier captain, here. Of the Gro?deutschland, no less. That strikes you as odd, no?”
“An officer does what he is told,” Fass said. Discipline.
The men lit cigarettes and did not offer one to Fass. The second man spoke again. He told Fass about the American bandits—gangsters—and their attack a week before. He told him about the lax security at the dam and hinted at the fate of the previous garrison commander. He made the fates of the gangsters and their nearby allies explicit. Fass stiffened. It had never occurred to him to squelch banditry the same way in the west as they had in the east, with its mix of Asiatic barbarity and Jewish Bolshevism. But the men left him to the task at hand, and sent fifteen more frontline veterans a week later.
Fass and B?uml whipped the indiscipline out of the garrison immediately. No more staring out across the frozen lake, no more wandering from one’s post. He made surprise inspections, mixed his veterans with the reservists, and held all of them to a high standard. He did not believe they would attack the dam again—the Americans may be gangsters, or so the Führer said, but gangsters are not fools—but he would leave the garrison better than he had found it. And he would make that his own discipline.
It was then that he noticed the morale problem. Discipline tightened, and the garrison’s already low morale plummeted. Even his veterans began to sag in their uniforms. The men completed their duties, then lay catatonic in their bunks. They had not even the energy to read, write letters, or sneak a filthy magazine into the latrine. He had read in a novel, long since banned as subversive, about prisoners of war too demoralized even to masturbate, and had not believed it. Now he saw.