“So,
Colonel
Krigoff, you have come to us from Moscow? In order to ensure that the army functions as effectively, militarily and politically, as possible?”
General-Armii Petrovsky, commander of the Second Guards Tank Army, asked the question with no trace of irony in his voice. But when Alyosha Krigoff considered the words, contemplated the man’s condescending manner, and evaluated the chaotic bustle of the headquarters staff, he felt certain that the army commander was mocking him.
For now, he would take the honorable route, and ignore the taunt. It would not, however, be forgotten.
“Yes, Comrade General! But please consider me a mere assistant, one who will do what he can to aid your commendable efforts to obliterate the foes of World Communism!”
“Ah, yes,” said Petrovksy, with a sigh. He looked tired, Krigoff thought, and his nose was an unnatural, unhealthy red in color. Too much vodka, perhaps? “The foes of World Communism, indeed.”
Now Krigoff was certain that he was being mocked. He was in no mood to accept this kind of treatment, at least not from an army officer, even the general of a mighty army. Krigoff was tired from three sleepless nights on a crowded train, hungry from a lack of any decent food, and sore from the uncomfortable ride on the hard wooden seat. Furthermore, he had been separated from Paulina at Kiev Station—her westward train had departed two hours later than his—and after arriving at the front had been forced to push his way through a chaos of trucks, horses, shouting sergeants, and marching, heavily laden troops, just to reach this building where he had been ordered to report.
Though he was assigned to the staff of the tank army, he had been required to come to the front HQ building first. This was a battered hotel, just east of the Vistula River, and it had been overrun with Soviet officers in the last six months. Such damage as the war had failed to inflict seemed to have been delivered by the hands of the new occupants: walls had been knocked down, heavy communications cables draped through windows and across the floors, and the stink of unwashed bodies seemed to have seeped into the very woodwork. He had masked his distaste, and reported with due respect to his
army commander, who was working at a small desk in a small room on the second floor, but now his temper was reaching its limit.
“I refer, of course, to the Nazis, Comrade General,” he said archly. “I came here with the understanding that you were about to commence an attack against them. Or do you not consider them the foes of World Communism—and Mother Russia—after all?”
Instead of snapping back, as he expected Petrovsky to do, the veteran army commander rubbed his high forehead with a sturdy, short-fingered hand, and sighed heavily.
“Attack the Nazis. Yes, Colonel, we will attack the Nazis here, just as we attacked them at Moscow and Stalingrad, at Kursk and Kiev and all the rest of the places scarred by this war. We will cross the Vistula and trap them in Warsaw or push them out of Poland. Then we will chase them into their own cursed fatherland, and root them out of their holes like the venomous snakes that they are. Now that you are here, of course, this will all be accomplished with ease.”
“I will do my duty to the best of my ability, General,” Krigoff retorted stiffly. “If you will give me my orders, I will be out of your way at once.”
“Orders? Yes, of course. Take your kit and go to my own headquarters—we’re in a manor, ten kilometers down the road from here. Report to General-Leitenant Yeremko, my chief of intelligence, and he will find something for you to do.”
“Yes, Comrade General!” Krigoff honored the army commander with a salute, even as he viewed the old man with contempt. Perhaps Petrovsky had been a fine soldier in his day, but that day had passed like the fading of the summer. At the same time, he was a little surprised, when he thought about it, that the man wouldn’t have made a little more of an effort to be polite to a subordinate just arrived from Moscow. When he pondered the fact the truth seemed to be obvious: Petrovsky just didn’t care anymore.
Now, Krigoff had his own problems. Ten kilometers was not a long distance, but it was farther than he intended to walk. He went down to the hotel lobby, which seemed to be a clearinghouse of frenzied activity. Making his way to the kitchen, he was able to acquire a sandwich—a slab of tough sausage and a thick slice of onion between a couple of pieces of brown bread—and that helped a little. Some further checking revealed a truck loaded with radio equipment, already revving up for the drive to the tank army HQ, and he was able to fling his pack over the tailgate and then climb up in the cab to ride with the driver.
He took a look at the flat and battle-scarred Polish countryside as they lurched along a rutted, frost-hardened road. There were peasants’ cottages scattered about, and each of them was at the very least pocked with bullet holes, if not damaged or destroyed by the impact of high explosives. The few
trees he saw were skeletal and leafless, and though this was the winter norm he could tell by the torn bark and ripped or shattered trunks that many of them had suffered from the campaigns that had swept across this country with such brutality over the last six years.
The manor house of army headquarters proved to be a country home that had once belonged to a wealthy Polish merchant—a Jew, the driver explained to him, spitting. General Yeremko and the intelligence unit occupied a large parlor and a trophy room. Heads of boar and deer, as well as a snarling bear, adorned the walls; now these were draped with the wires connecting to several large radios that had been set up against the walls.
“Krigoff, eh? From Moscow?” Yeremko was a slender man with a pinched face and narrow, penetrating eyes. His age was apparent in his parchment-yellow skin, and the thin wisps of hair that were plastered across his scalp. He eyed the colonel suspiciously, but he, clearly, had the sense not to immediately alienate this new and potentially well-connected officer.
“I am at your service, Comrade General!” Krigoff declared in response.
“Well, you’ll be sleeping in a tent like most of the rest of us. But we’ll have you working so hard that you won’t have to worry about that very much. There are four weeks of work left to do, and—who knows?—perhaps four or five days before this show gets started.”
Krigoff noted the harried look of the intelligence general, the sallow complexion and the way his eyes darted nervously this way and that. Clearly the man was unstable, perhaps dangerously so.
“Have you ever been in a plane?” asked Yeremko abruptly.
“Yes, Comrade General,” Krigoff lied. “I am fond of flying.” The latter part was vaguely true, insofar as he had always hoped for a chance to get up in an airplane.
“Good. For now, I want you to study reconnaissance photos; we’re trying to pick out the Nazi strong points before we attack. With luck, our artillery will knock out one in ten of them, before the infantry has to take out the rest. So every one you find means a few Russian lives saved, when the attack gets under way.”
“I understand,” Krigoff replied.
“Of course, all of these photos have been looked over by a hundred good men already. But every new set of eyes is useful. I need you to compare the shots from last week to those taken yesterday—we’re looking for changes, anything different. That will be a sign that the Nazis have been at work, and we’ll have the specialists take a look, try to decide what sort of work that might have been.”
“Indeed, General. If necessary, I will take to the air myself, of course,” he added.
Yeremko nodded. “That time will come—when the attack gets under way, I’ll have you and a few other officers flying over the battlefield. That’s the way
of war, today—get us the reports at once, and we can keep our men alive for a few days longer.”
Krigoff nodded, his face impassive though he was troubled by these words. Like Petrovsky, General Yeremko seemed to be placing an undue emphasis on coddling his men, keeping them alive even at the cost of delaying the progress of the offensive. It was a distressing sign of the war-weariness that might prove to be endemic among these veteran officers.
He was still thinking about this as he made his way to the tent that an aide showed him, a shelter he would share with four other colonels. He was relieved to find a cot there, for he had not looked forward to the thought of sleeping on the ground.
Before he entered, he took another look around, at the chaos of men and machines that would, in a few days, be unleashed against the Nazi devils. How would these men function? Would they be as aggressive as necessary?
Yes, thought Krigoff, eventually they would. But it was a good thing that he was here.
“Pull over here,” General Patton said, and Sergeant Mims turned the jeep into the stone-paved courtyard of a small inn. The standard of the Twelfth Infantry Division, one of Third Army’s veteran formations, was draped from the upper window, marking the building as the headquarters of the fast-moving unit—for today, at least.
“Ten-hut!” shouted a sergeant on the headquarters staff as Patton stalked through the door. The general was pleased but unsurprised to see men hard at work throughout the great room of the inn. Maps were spread upon tables, and kerosene lanterns suspended from the rafters gave the place an uncanny brightness.
“As you were,” Patton said, and the men quickly resumed their duties. He approached the table with the largest map, as two captains stood aside to give him room.
“Welcome to the Twelfth, sir,” declared one. “General Hooper will be sorry he missed you—he’s up with the recon unit, checking out the road down into Dasburg.”
“Good for him,” Patton said. That was the kind of thing he liked to hear. He fixed an eye upon the captain. “Tell me, what’s your situation?”
“We’ve got a perimeter set up around Clervaux, General, and we have detachments moving off the road in both directions, getting set up on every piece of high ground between here and the German border. It’s going well—that is, we haven’t had any Krauts shooting at us for the last day, though there are plenty that seem willing to surrender.”
“Good. Most of them know their war is over—at least, when it comes to fighting Uncle Sam. It’s the cocksucking SS bastards that are going to give us trouble, but I think they’re bugging out for the Westwall now. What do you hear from Fourth Armored?”
That tank-heavy division had been ordered to secure the breach in the fortified border that was represented by the small city of Dasburg. Patton’s last report had indicated that CCB of the Fourth was moving into the burg, but he was anxious for further details.
“It sounds good, General,” said the other captain. “They’ve pushed all the way through the town and across the river. They have the high ground on the far bank, and are ready to let the rest of us through.”
“Excellent! If I remember right, Nineteenth Armored should be coming along in a day or so. I want the road held open—they have top transportation priority. As soon as they get into Germany, the rest of you wonderful boys are going to be right on their heels. We’ll spread out through the Rhineland, and make a run for the river with ten divisions. Those Nazi sons of bitches won’t know whether we’re going to punch them in the teeth or kick them in the ass!”
He noted that the rest of the staff had stopped their work to listen, and this pleased him. He knew it was good for the morale of his army to see its general. More important, he tried very hard to make sure that these men understood the fighting mentality that lay at the heart of Third Army, and the need for speed that would see them succeed where no other force in the history of warfare would even dare to try.
“We’re ready to move out, General!” said the first captain enthusiastically. “As soon as the Nineteenth Armored goes through, we’ll be right on their heels!”
“Good, good,” said Patton, turning to leave. At the door he stopped, and favored the staff with a grin. “We’ll take a few bottles of Belgian beer with us—and by the time we’ve finished them, we’ll all be pissing into the Rhine!”