The Winds of War

by Herman Wouk

  “Why must you go?”

  “Well, Amphiteatrov offered. It’ll be informative.”

  “This is the flight to Berlin again.”

  “No. I’ll be on the ground all the way, on friendly territory. Quite a difference.”

  “How long will you be gone from us?”

  “Just a few hours.”

  A green radiance blinded them, a sudden blaze filling the heavens. Pamela uttered a cry. As their pupils adjusted to the shock, they saw four smoky green lights floating very slowly down below the thickening clouds, and heard the thrum of engines. The sentry had darted off the road. The village showed no sign of life: a tiny sleeping Russian hamlet of thatched huts in the woods on a mud road, like a hundred others, with a stage-setting appearance in the artificial glare. All the tanks under repair had been camouflaged.

  “You look ghastly,” Pam said.

  “You should see yourself. They’re searching for this tank battalion.”

  The lights sank earthward. One turned orange and went out. The airplane sounds faded away. Pug glanced at his watch. “I used to think the Russians were nutty on camouflage, but it has its points.” He stiffly rose and opened the cabin door. “We’d better try to sleep.”

  Pamela put a hand out, palm up to the black sky. The clouds were blotting out the moon and stars. “I thought I felt something.” She held her hand toward Pug. In the light of the last falling flare he could see, melting on her palm, a fat snowflake.

  55

  THE car crossed a white bare plain in a steady snowfall in leaden light. Pug could see no road by which the driver guided the jolting, sliding, shaking machine. What about mines? Trusting that Amphiteatrov had no more appetite than he to get blown up, Pug said nothing. In about an hour an onion-top belfry of yellow brick loomed ahead through the veil of snow. They entered a town where soldiers milled and army trucks lurched on mud streets between unpainted wood houses. From some trucks the livid, bloody, bandaged faces of soldiers peered sadly. Villagers, mostly snow-flecked old women and boys, stood in front of the houses, dourly watching the traffic go by.

  At the steps of the yellow brick church, Pug parted company with the others. A political officer in a belted white leather coat, with the slanted eyes of a Tartar and a little beard like Lenin’s, came to take him off in a small British jeep. Talky Tudsbury happily said in Russian, pointing to the trademark, “Ah, so British aid has reached the front at last!” The political officer replied in ragged English that it required men and gunfire, not automobiles, to stop Germans, and that the British vehicles were not strong enough for heavy duty.

  Pamela gave Victor Henry a serious wide-eyed stare. Despite the wear and soil of travel she looked charming, and the lambskin hat was tilted jauntily on her head. “Watch yourself,” was all she said.

  The jeep went west, out of the tumultuous town and into a snow-laden quiet forest. They appeared to be heading straight for the front, yet the only gunfire thumps came from the left, to the south. Pug thought the snow might be muffling the sound up ahead. He saw many newly splintered trees, and bomb craters lined with fresh snow. The Germans had been shelling the day before, the commissar said, trying in vain to draw the fire of Russian batteries hidden in the woods. The jeep bounced past some of these batteries: big horse-drawn howitzers, tended by weary-looking bewhiskered soldiers amid evergreens and piles of shells at the ready.

  They came to a line of crude trenches through the smashed fallen trees, with high earthworks sugared by snow. These were dummy dugouts, the commissar said, deliberately made highly visible. They had taken much of the shellfire yesterday. The real trenches, a couple of hundred yards further on, had escaped. Dug along a riverbank, their log tops level with the ground and snowed over, the actual trenches were totally invisible. The commissar parked the jeep among trees, and he and Victor Henry crawled the rest of the way through the brush. “The less movement the Fritzes can observe, the better,” said the Russian.

  Here, down in a deep muddy hole—a machine gun post manned by three soldiers—Victor Henry peered through a gun slit piled with sandbags and saw Germans. They were working in plain view across the river with earth-moving machines, pontoons, rubber boats, and trucks. Some dug with shovels; some patrolled with light machine guns in hand. Unlike the Russians, concealed like wild creatures in the earth, the Germans were making no effort to hide themselves or what they were doing. Except for the helmets, guns, and long gray coats, they might have been a big crew on a peacetime construction job. Through binoculars handed him by a soldier—German binoculars—Victor Henry could see the eyeglasses and frost-purpled cheeks and noses of Hitler’s chilled men. “You could shoot them like birds,” he said in Russian. It was as close as he could come to the American idiom, “they’re sitting ducks.”

  The soldier grunted. “Yes, and give away our position, and start them shelling us! No thanks, Gospodin American.”

  “If they ever get that bridge finished,” said the commissar, “and start coming across, that’ll be time enough to shoot a big dose down their throats.”

  “That’s what we’re waiting for,” said a pipe-smoking soldier with heavy drooping moustaches, who appeared to be in command of this hole in the ground.

  Pug said, “Do you really think you can hold out if they get across?”

  The three soldiers rolled their eyes at each other, weighing this question asked in bad Russian by a foreigner. Their mouths set sourly. Here, for the first time, in sight of the Germans, Victor Henry detected fear on Red Army faces. “Well, if it comes to that,” said the pipe smoker, “every man has his time. A Russian soldier knows how to die.”

  The political officer said briskly, “A soldier’s duty is to live, comrade, not to die—to live and fight. They won’t get across. Our big guns are trained on this crossing, and as soon as they’ve wasted all the time it takes to build a bridge, and they start across, we’ll blast these Hitlerite rats! Eh, Polikov? How about it?”

  “That’s right,” said a bristle-faced soldier with a runny nose, crouched on the earth in a corner blowing on his red hands. “That’s exactly right, Comrade Political Officer.”

  Crawling through bushes or darting from tree to tree, Victor Henry and the commissar made their way along the dugouts, pillboxes, trenches, and one-man posts of the thinly held line. A battalion of nine hundred men was covering five miles of the river here, the commissar said, to deny the Germans access to an important road. “This campaign is simply a race,” he panted, as they crawled between dugouts. “The Germans are trying to beat Father Frost into Moscow. That’s the plain fact of it. They are pouring out their lifeblood to do it. But never fear, Father Frost is an old friend of Russia. He’ll freeze them dead in the ice. You’ll see, they’ll never make it.”

  The commissar was evidently on a morale-stiffening mission. Here and there, where they found a jolly leader in a trench, the men seemed ready for the fight, but elsewhere fatalism darkened their eyes, slumped their shoulders, and showed in dirty weapons, disarrayed uniforms, and garbage-strewn holes. The commissar harangued them, exploiting the strange presence of an American to buck them up, but for the most part the hairy-faced Slavs stared at Henry with sarcastic incredulity as though to say —”If you’re really an American, why are you so stupid as to come here yourself? We have no choice, worse luck.”

  The Germans were in view all along the river, methodically and calmly preparing to cross. Their businesslike air was more intimidating, Pug thought, than volleys of bullets. Their numbers were alarming, too; where did they all come from?

  The commissar and Victor Henry emerged from one of the largest dugouts and lay on their elbows in the snow. “Well, I have finished my tour of this part of the line, Captain. Perhaps you will rejoin your party now.”

  “I’m ready.”

  With a grim little smile, the commissar stumbled to his feet. “Keep in the shadows of the trees.”

  When they got back to the jeep, Pug said, “How far are we from Moscow he
re?”

  “Oh, quite far enough.” The commissar whirred the noisy engine. “I hope you saw what you wanted to see.”

  “I saw a lot,” Victor Henry said.

  The commissar turned his Lenin-like face at the American, appraising him with suspicious eyes. “It is not easy to understand the front just by looking at it.”

  “I understand that you need a second front.”

  The commissar uttered a brutal grunt. “Then you understand the main thing. But even without the second front, if we must, Captain Genry, we ourselves will smash this plague of German cockroaches.”

  By the time they reached the central square of the town, the snowfall had stopped and patches of fast-moving blue showed through the clouds. The wind was bitter cold. The tangle of trucks, wagons, horses, and soldiers was worse than before. Vehement Russian cursing and arguing filled the air. The old women and the wrinkle-faced boys still watched the disorder with round sad eyes. In a big jam of vehicles around two fallen horses and an overturned ammunition wagon, the jeep encountered the black automobile. Talky Tudsbury, in great spirits, stood near forty yelling soldiers and officers, watching the horses kick and struggle in tangled traces, while other soldiers gathered up long coppery shells that had spilled from burst boxes and lay softly gleaming in the snow. “Hello there! Back already? What a mess! It’s a wonder the whole wagon didn’t go up with a bang, what? And leave a hole a hundred feet across.”

  “Where’s Pamela?”

  Tudsbury flipped a thumb over his shoulder. “Back at the church. An artillery spotter is stationed in the belfry. There’s supposed to be a great view, but I couldn’t climb the damned tower. She’s up there making some notes. How are things at the front? You’ve got to give me the whole picture. Brrr! What frost, eh? Do you suppose Jerry is starting to feel it in his balls a bit? Hullo, they’ve got the horses up.”

  Amphiteatrov said he was taking Tudsbury to see a downed Junker 88 in the nearby field. Pug told him that he had seen plenty of Junker 88’s; he would join Pam in the church and wait for them. Amphiteatrov made an annoyed face. “All right, but please remain there, Captain. We’ll come back in twenty minutes or less.”

  Pug said good-bye to the bearded commissar, who was sitting at the wheel of the jeep, bellowing at a scrawny soldier who clutched a live white goose. The soldier was coarsely shouting back, and the goose turned its orange beak and little eyes from one to the other as though trying to learn its fate. Making his way around the traffic tangle, Pug walked to the church on crunching squeaking dry snow. Freedom from the escort—even for a few minutes—felt strange and good. Inside the church, a strong unchurchlike miasma of medicine and disinfectant filled the air; peeling frescoes of blue big-eyed saints looked down from grimy walls, at bandaged soldiers who lay on straw mats smoking, talking to each other, or sadly staring. The narrow stone staircase spiralling up the inside of the belfry with no handholds made Pug queazy, but up he went, edging along the rough wall, to a wooden platform level with big rusty bells, where wind gusted through four open brick arches. Here he caught his breath, and mounted a shaky wooden ladder.

  “Victor!” As he emerged on the topmost brick walk, Pam waved and called to him.

  Seen this close, the bulging onion dome was a crude job of tin sheets nailed rustily on a curving frame. Squared around it was a yellow brick walk and parapet, where Pamela crouched in a corner, out of the whistling wind. The artillery spotter, shapeless and faceless in an ankle-length brown coat, mittens, goggles, and fastened-down thick earflaps, manned giant binoculars on a tripod, pointed west. A fat black tomcat beside Pamela crouched over a bowl of soup, lapping, shaking its big head in distaste, and lapping again. Pamela and the spotter were laughing at the cat. “Too much pepper, kitty?” Pamela’s gay flirtatious look showed she clearly was enjoying herself. Below, the bare plain stretched far east and south to distant forests, and west and north to the black wriggling river and sparse woods. Straight downward the town, a clot of life, made thin noise in an empty white flat world.

  “Vy Amerikanski offitzer?” The spotter showed fine teeth in the hairy uncovered patch of his face.

  “Da.”

  “Posmotritye?” The mittened hand tapped the binoculars.

  “Videte nemtzi?” Pug said. (“Can you see Germans?”)

  “Slishkom m’nogo.” (“Too many.”)

  “Odin slishkom m’nogo,” Pug said. (“One is too many!”)

  With a grim nod and chuckle the spotter stepped away from the binoculars. Pug’s eyes were watering from the wind; he put them to the eyepieces and the Germans on the riverbank leaped into sight, blurry and small, still at the same work.

  “Doesn’t it give you an eerie feeling?” Pam said, stroking the cat. “They’re so calm about it.”

  Victor Henry went to a corner of the brick parapet and surveyed the snowy vista through all points of the compass, hands jammed in his blue coat. The spotter, turning the binoculars from south to north, made a slow sweep along the river, talking into a battered telephone on a long black wire that dangled over the parapet.

  “Kitty, don’t forget behind the ears.” The cat was washing itself, and Pamela scratched its head.

  Pug told her about his trip, meanwhile scanning the horizon round and round as though he were on a flying bridge. An odd movement in the distant snowy forest caught his notice. With his back to the spotter, he peered intently eastward, shielding his eyes with one chapped red hand. “Pass me those.” She handed him small field glasses, in an open case beside the binocular stand. One quick look, and Pug tapped the spotter’s shoulder and pointed. Swinging the large binoculars halfway round on the tripod, the spotter started with surprise, pulled off goggles and cap, and looked again. He had a lot of curly blond hair and freckles, and he was only eighteen or twenty. Snatching up the telephone, he jiggled the hook, talked, jiggled some more, and gestured anger at no answer. Pulling on his cap, he went trampling down the ladder.

  “What is it?” Pamela said.

  “Take a look.”

  Pamela saw through the big eyepieces of the spotter’s instrument a column of machines coming out of the woods.

  “Tanks?”

  “Some are trucks and armored personnel cars. But yes, it’s a tank unit.” Victor Henry, glasses to his eyes, talked as though he were watching a parade.

  “Aren’t they Russians?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s the direction we came from.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked each other in the eyes. Her red-cheeked face showed fear, but also a trace of nervous gaiety. “Then aren’t we in a pickle? Shouldn’t we get down out of here and find Amphiteatrov?”

  To the naked eye the armored column was like a tiny black worm on the broad white earth, five or six miles away. Pug stared eastward, thinking. The possibilities of this sudden turn were too disagreeable to be put into words. He felt a flash of anger at Tudsbury’s selfish dragging of his daughter into hazard. Of course, nobody had planned on being surprised in the rear by Germans; but there they were! If the worst came to the worst, he felt he could handle himself with German captors, though there might be ugly moments with soldiers before he could talk to an officer. But the Tudsburys were enemies.

  “I’ll tell you, Pam,” he said, watching the worm pull clear of the forest and move sluggishly toward the town, leaving a black trail behind, “the colonel knows where we are now. Let’s stick here for a while.”

  “All right. How in God’s name did the Germans get around back there?”

  “Amphiteatrov said there was trouble to the south. They must have broken across the river and hooked through the woods. It’s not a large unit, it’s a probe.”

  The top of the ladder danced and banged under a heavy tread. The blond youngster came up, seized a stadimeter, pointed it at the Germans, and slid a vernier back and forth. Hastily flattening out a small black and white grid map on one knee, he barked numbers into the telephone: “Five point six! One two four!
R seven M twelve! That’s right! That’s right!” Animated and cheery now, he grinned at the visitors. “Our batteries are training on them. When they’re good and close, we’ll blow them to bits. So maybe you’ll see something yet.” He put on his goggles, changing back from a bright-eyed boy into a faceless grim spotter.

  Victor Henry said, “They’re watching across the river for your batteries to fire.”

  The spotter clumsily waved both heavy-clad arms. “Good, but we can’t let those bastards take the town from the rear, can we?”

  “I hear airplanes.” Pug turned his glasses westward to the sky. “Samalyutti!”

  “Da!” Swivelling and tilting the binoculars upward, the spotter began to shout into the phone.

  “Airplanes too?” Pamela’s voice trembled. “Well, I’m more used to them.”

  “That’s the German drill,” said Victor Henry. “Tanks and planes together.”

  The oncoming planes, three Stukas, were growing bigger in Pug’s glasses. The spotter switched his binoculars to the tanks again, and began cheering. Pug looked in that direction. “Holy cow! Now I call this military observing, Pam.” Tanks in another column were coming out of the woods about halfway between the Germans and the town, moving on a course almost at right angles to the panzer track. He handed her the glasses and squinted toward the airplanes.

  “Oh! Oh!” Pamela exclaimed. “Ours?”

  “Da!” cried the spotter, grinning at her. “Nashi! Nashi!”

  A hand struck her shoulder and knocked her to her hands and knees. “They’re starting their dive,” Victor Henry said. “Crawl up close to the dome and lie still.” He was on his knees beside her. His cap had fallen off and rolled away, and he brushed black hair from his eyes to watch the planes. They tilted over and dove. When they were not much higher than the belfry, bombs fell out of them. With a mingled engine roar and wind screech, they zoomed by. Pug could see the black crosses, the swastikas, the yellowish plexiglass cockpits. All around the church the bombs began exploding. The belfry shook. Flame, dirt, and smoke roared up beyond the parapet, but Pug remained clearheaded enough to note that the flying was ragged. The three ungainly black machines almost collided as they climbed and turned to dive again in a reckless tangle. The Luftwaffe had either lost most of its veteran pilots by now, he thought, or they were not flying on this sector of the front. Anti-aircraft guns were starting to pop and rattle in the town.