by John Ringo
Glimpsing her standing nervously at the entrance to the mess, she took his breath away now, too.
The ceremony was conducted in Yiddish. If there was a living rabbi who spoke pure German he must have been far away. Curiously, though he still had to stumble through the ritual, he found he understood the rabbi better than Anna did. It must have been the Russian he had picked up on the eastern front.
Another woman, a widow — Hans desperately didn’t want to enquire as to the mechanism of her widowhood — had donated to the cause a simple gold ring. At the rabbi’s command, he placed the ring on Anna’s finger, then kissed her.
In the ensuing party, deliriously happy, Hans still found time to talk to the rabbi in private.
* * *
Harz was the first of Anna’s crew to regain consciousness. He was pleased to sense that the tank was still upright.
First things first, Harz thought, groggily. On hands and knees he crawled to Schultz, checked him briefly for damage, and confirmed he was alive and, as near as cursory and inexpert examination could determine, unbroken.
A few slaps across the face raised Dieter to a semblance of awareness.
“Back to your station, old son, while I check on the commander.”
With the groggy Schultz climbing back into his gunner’s station, and the main battery about to be, hopefully, functional, Harz went on to the second priority — the commander.
Brasche was already awakening against the bulkhead of the inner fighting compartment when Harz reached him. Harz saw the commander’s arm hanging at an odd angle, red fluid leaking through his uniform, and a red stream pouring from his head to cover his face and trickle onto the deck. “Casualties?” Hans croaked.
“Dunno, sir,” replied Harz. “No report.”
The brigade Ib, or logistics officer, arising from the tank’s deck and climbing back into his secondary gunner’s station under his own power, took one look at his screen and answered, “Heavy, sir. Very heavy, especially among the Tigers. I see five of them flashing black on my screen. Though whether they are dead or dying or what I cannot tell. And I suspect our panzer grenadiers will be in worse shape. The artillery seems to have come through well enough.”
“Damn,” said the stunned Brasche, in a weak voice.
Interlude
“I have had enough!” exclaimed Athenalras. “Call off this multi-damned, demon-spawned attack.”
“My lord, no!” shouted Ro’moloristen, though the carnage along the front sickened him no less than his elder. “We cannot stop now! Think, my lord. The thresh are reeling in the east. And there is barely an obstacle to our brethren’s continued progress into the very heart of this ‘Deutschland.’ ”
Ro’moloristen lowered his head and shook his crest. “The line ‘Siegfried’ is brittle, lord, brittle. Though the People may fall at a rate of twenty to one in chewing through it, fifty to one, one hundred to one — even, as we are in some places, it matters not. For we outnumber the thresh still by a factor of three hundred to one or more on this front.
“And, lord, the bridge the host of Arlingas has captured near the gray thresh town of Mannheim? It is impacting severely on their ability to keep their damnable artillery resupplied. Even in the last few rotations of this planet our losses to this arm along that portion of the front have gone down drastically. Projections are that if we keep up the pressure, the threshkreen must break.”
Sadly, the senior laid one hand upon the very much junior’s shoulder. “Let all this be true, young one. Still, I am sick of the slaughter. And would that it might end.”
“There can be no end, great one. Not until this species is utterly cast down. Come see.”
Gently, the junior led his lord to a data screen. “See the projections, lord.” Quickly the screen jumped through well calculated close estimates of such things as population growth, technological progress, urbanization, advances in the military art, even psychiatric profiles of humans under stress.
“As you can see, lord, our muzzles are plainly hitched to the breeding post.”
Athenalras answered, slowly and deliberately, “We are being well and truly fucked anyway, young one. We have tossed away the flower of the People in futile assaults against this Siegfried line, and have gained nothing by it except to reduce our numbers by one hundred million on this front alone.”
“I know, lord,” said Ro’moloristen. “I know. But I have been thinking…”
“A dangerous pastime.”
“Yes, lord, I know that, too. Nonetheless I have been thinking. We… the People as a whole… make war as we hunt. These threshkreen do not. Or, at least, they do not do so as we do. They have what they call ‘Principles of War.’ The lists of these principles vary among them but I have discovered twelve that seem to cover everything.”
“Twelve?”
“Yes, Lord: they are Mass, Objective, Security, Surprise, Maneuver, Offensive, Unity of Command, Simplicity, Economy of Force, Attrition, Annihilation and Shape. Using these principles I have determined upon a plan that may grant us the victory. Instead of attacking all along the front, we will concentrate our efforts towards the sector nearest to the bridge held by the host of Arlingas. We have no clue how even to use any of the thresh artillery we have captured, let alone build or resupply our own. But we do have ships. From space we will pound — ”
“They will butcher our ships in space!”
Ro’moloristen gave the Posleen equivalent of a sigh. “Yes, lord, surely they will, for a while. But before our ships are destroyed they will, in turn, kill. They will beat for us a flat road through a narrow lane in the Siegfried line.”
“Lord, if we don’t our people are dead!”
Coming to a sudden decision, Athenalras lifted his crest slightly. “Show me the projections of loss,” he demanded.
Athenalras looked over Ro’moloristen’s figures. Frightful, frightful. And yet the puppy is right. What else can we do, if the People are not to perish? “It will take several revolutions of this planet about its axis for us to prepare. See to it. And prepare a special hunting group of ships to see to this reported super-tenaral. And reduce the level of the current offensive to no more than is needed to keep the thresh’s attention.”
Part IV
Chapter 14
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 1 January 2008
“Oh, God, I’ll never drink schnapps again,” moaned Mueller from underneath bloodshot eyes.
“Stop making so much damned noise, Johann,” insisted Prael. “We’re all as hung over as you.”
“Franz and I are not,” insisted Schlüssel. “Neither is Herr Henschel. With age comes a certain wisdom and restraint, after all.”
“My little round ass,” answered Breitenbach, blearily. “You three packed it away as well as any of us. You have just had more years to get in training.”
The combat compartment of the tank grew silent with that, largely out of deference to the “dying.”
For ten days Prael had run the crew through drill after drill, simulated engagement after simulated engagement. Occasionally, when circumstances seemed right, they had taken a potshot at an unwary Posleen vessel passing overhead. Already Schlüssel had painted six kill markers around the lower part of the railguns rail, mute but eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the railgun, even against Posleen ships in orbit.
Ten days and six kills. It would have been an utterly and futilely short period of training but for two factors. The first of these was the tank’s AI; which had both reduced the need for training and made whatever training was given precisely appropriate need.
But the second factor was within the purview of the more subtle part of training: building comradeship. And years of working together, designing and building the two versions of Tiger, had long since welded the men, and one woman, who crewed Brünnhilde into a team. They knew each other, had eaten and drank together. They knew each other’s families, and hopes and dreams. They cared.
Though they didn’t ta
lk much about dreams.
* * *
Though he liked these humans, especially the one with the funny bumps, so reminiscent of Brünnhilde’s armored front, who usually made them their food, Rinteel did not feel a part of the team, not even as the token Nibelung, whatever a Nibelung was.
Not that he was useless, far from it. Unlike Indowy machines this one had awesome defects to it; awesome at least for one born into a civilization where perfection was the minimum standard for tools and machines. The little bat-faced sentient spent full and busy days helping to fix one crisis fault after another. He had a genuine knack for it, even with, to him, alien machinery.
But, useful or not, well treated and respected or not, he simply lacked the sense of ‘Kameradshaft’[41] these humans felt for each other. Perhaps it was that he could not imbibe these things the Germans called “Schnapps” or “Bier.” Kameradeschaft certainly seemed to grow by bounds when the humans had a few each of those.
Though singing seemed a big part of it too.
Rinteel had a hopeless singing voice, where human song was concerned. He started contemplating where aboard Brünnhilde he might build a synthesizer to create the sole Indowy intoxicant, med.
47th Field Hospital, Potsdam, Germany, 2 January 2008
Drugged unconscious, in the Korps field hospital, a dark place and soundless except for the plaintive, unconscious cry of some lonely, wounded soldier, Hans dreamt.
* * *
Though she had never turned to fat, Anna’s hair had grayed, her skin had browned and wrinkled under the harsh sun of Israel.
Still, after more than forty years, Hans found her lovely beyond measure. Only the obscenity growing in her body, wracking her with agony the drugs could never quite overcome, detracted from the beauty of her body, mind and soul; that obscene cancer, and the horrid mechanical sounds of the machines keeping her alive.
By her bedside Hans sat, as he sat every moment he was allowed. Often enough, tears poured from his face. At those moments, Anna often turned her face away. That was not how she wished to remember him, in the hereafter.
It was near the end; they both knew it. She was calm and content. He was desolated. Hans had only the thought, It won’t be so long that I will have to be apart from her, to console himself.
“We have had a good life, Hansi, isn’t that so?” Anna asked.
Wiping his eyes, he answered, “Where you were was paradise for me, Anna. Where you were not was hell… even before we met.”
She gave him a soft smile, and answered, as softly, “It was the same for me, Hansi. But Hansi, what will you do?” she fretted.
“I do not know, Anna. There will be nothing left here for me, once…” And he fell into a fresh wave of tears.
“Hush, hush,” she said, reaching out a weak, skeletal hand to pat his arm. “It will only be for a while… only for a while.”
She pressed, “What will you do?”
Hans forced the tears away, forced calm to his voice. “Perhaps I will return to Berlin. I have no more friends here, since Sol passed away, no relatives either. I still have some there, though I do not know them.”
She digested that thought for a while, came upon another. “Hansi, I never asked. Neither of us wanted to talk about it. But, talked about or not, I always knew. Why did you never forgive yourself? I forgave you long ago, that first night in your hut. But you never did. Why?”
This was not something Hans really wanted to talk about… and yet… and yet it was time. Slowly, deliberately, he answered, “There were three kinds of Germans, Anna, in those days. There were those who didn’t know… about what was done to the Jews and the others in the camps, I mean. A majority, that was, I think, though many more might have suspected. They have no sin, except perhaps one of omission.
“And then there were the other Germans, the ones who did know, reveled in the knowing, and thought it all to be proper and right. They can answer to God or the Devil — and I have strong suspicions who it will be that they finally talk to, with a straight face and a clear eye… at least until the fire reaches them.” Hans sniffed with disdain.
The last part came harder; a mirror is often the most difficult kind of glass to look into.
Yet Hans was a brave man, had faced fire bravely in more places than he cared to think about. He could be brave this once more, for his wife. “The last group were the worst and I was in that group. We were the ones who knew, knew that it was wrong, evil, and even knowing this, turned our faces from it, instead of fighting it; turned our faces and ran.
“This kind of German, my kind of German, will face God or the Devil, too. What we will be able to say in our defense before the fire reaches us?”
Anna nodded, understanding, though even that little effort was a strain. She was growing weaker by the minute. In a breathless voice she said, “I understand, my Hansi. You are afraid, perhaps, that we will not be together in the future. Well, let me tell you, speaking as a Jew to a German… you are a good man, Hansi. You have done no wrong… and you always did your best.” She reached up to stroke his cheek, as old as hers and even more weathered, and finished, the sound fading even as she spoke, “God does not expect perfection in his creations, and we will be together again, I promise you…”
* * *
Alone in his bed, a sleeping old man in a twenty-year-old body wept for an old woman remembered as a young woman. In his heart and his mind she was remembered as fresh… and as freshly remembered as the last spring. Though his hospital robe had no breast pocket still, unconsciously, his hand stroked for a little packet usually found there.
47th Field Hospital, Potsdam, Germany, 2 January 2008
On the street outside the hospital a column of gray-clad, determined-looking Schwabian infantry marched past on their way to the front, their boots ringing on the cobblestones below. The Schwabians sang as they marched:
Mein eigen soll sie sein,
Kein’m andern mehr als mein.
So leben wir in Freud und Leid,
Bis der Gott in Zeit uns ausandernscheid’.
leb’ wohl, leb’wohl, leb wohl mein Schatz, leb’ wohl.[42]
Ignoring the music, Mühlenkampf reached out an arm to shake awake Hans Brasche, ignoring the latter’s splinted arm and well-wrapped head. “Get up, Hansi, I need you.”
Slowly and groggily, Hans did awaken. And immediately reached for the bucket near his bed.
Mühlenkampf turned his head away. “Never mind that,” he insisted. “We’ve both been concussed before. Puking afterwards is just another part of it.”
Hans ignored his commander, finishing his business with the bucket before looking upwards. “And how may I assist you, Herr General?” he asked, with polite disinterest, after emptying his stomach.
“You can get back on your feet! You can take over command again of that fucking, falling-apart rabble we call the 501st Schwere Panzer. You can get back to the fucking war.”
Mühlenkampf relented. “I am sorry, Hansi, I truly am. The eastern front has collapsed. Oh, many of the troops will get away but they are a mess. I am throwing the 47th Korps, including the 501st, and two infantry Korps to try to hold it while we reorganize the survivors.
“And, Hansi, I can’t even put you in ‘the tank’ for a Galactic tech repair. The only one near here was taken out by an alien kinetic energy strike from space.”
“Where is the rest of Army Group Reserve going?” Brasche asked.
“There is a spot of trouble in the west. The defenses are still holding but the enemy is acting… funny. Almost clever. Clever aliens worry me, Hans.”
Hans nodded solemnly, then immediately had to reach for his bucket again. Even such a little movement was… difficult.
“Hans, I would not ask if I didn’t need you.”
“I understand,” Brasche said. Rising, unsteadily, he continued, “I will leave tonight.”
“That’s my Hansi,” said Mühlenkampf. “After the east is stabilized, and a certain bridge in the west r
etaken, we will assemble, likely around Hanau. In the interim, I am heading west.”
Mainz, Germany, 4 January 2008
In this ancient city just west of the Rhein, Isabelle and her two children had finally settled into something resembling normalcy.
There was a tremendous housing shortage of course, so much so that the French civilians who had escaped to Germany were forced to live in, in Isabelle’s case, a large indoor gymnasium. But blankets had been hung near the walls, separate living spaces arranged, a modicum of privacy granted.
Isabelle had never been fond of German food. Now, though, she wished she could have twice as much of it, more especially for her boys than for herself. But food, like living space, was in short supply.
There was a bustle of murmuring coming from the mess, the central common area of the gymnasium. This low bee-like hum grew until it was loud enough to attract Isabelle’s interest. Leaving the boys behind, she twisted her way through other cloth cubicles and the long benches at which many of the French refugees sat, dawdling over the meager and bland lunch repast.
A man, in gray uniform, was addressing the people while standing a top one of the benches. Isabelle took a second look to confirm that it was the same Captain Hennessey who had earlier led her and the boys to safety. It took two looks because the captain had turned from tall and robust to the very essence of exhaustion, with deep, dust-filled lines engraved on his face, sunken eyes and the slouch of bone-weariness.
She could not hear what Hennessey was saying from this distance. She approached closer, using her imposing height and personal vigor to force her way through the throng.
