Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [119]
Hegel was eighteen, and graveyard thin. His camouflage smock — brown and green and worn over his field uniform — hung on him as from a hanger. His face was long and his mouth was turned down at the corners, and so his friends in his unit thought Hegel carried the world's problems with him, but in truth Hegel was just built with a mournful face. He trotted along, the stock of the Mauser bouncing against his hip. At this stage in the struggle, when Russian guns were in earshot, full kits were worn even during training. Under Hegel's smock were three stick grenades, an entrenching tool, bullet dumps, and a canteen.
Hegel asked, "You think they'll finish with us in time?"
"In time for what?" Corporal Pohl followed in Hegel's footsteps toward the target butts. The path was at the edge of the range, wedged between the trees and the bomb craters.
"In time for the war."
Pohl laughed. "We'll probably finish our sniper training just as the Red Army gets to the camp. That way our unit won't have to be shipped anywhere. We can put our education to use right here."
Roland Pohl wore his field cap back on his head, showing tufts of blond hair. He had tried to join the Wehrmacht two years ago, but was rejected because he was too short. He had showed up at the recruiting office again six months ago, and discovered that, as the Red horde got closer to the Fatherland, he was still growing or the Wehrmacht was lowering its standards, probably the latter. He was little taller than his rifle. His good cheer at being accepted into the army had not quite worn off. He also wore camouflage.
Walking along, the mud sucking at his boots, Pohl said, "We're going to be ordered to do the impossible, you know that, don't you, Ewald?"
"What do you mean?"
"You and me and these rifles are going to be told to stop the entire Russian army. We'll be put out on the line to cover a Wehrmacht retreat, sure as anything."
"Well, if that's our duty then we'll do it." Hegel held his arm out for balance as the path narrowed and he had to negotiate around the crumbling side of a bomb crater.
"We'll be put out there, given a pocketful of cartridges, told to do as much damage as we can and slow the crazed Bolsheviks for as long as we can, and then we'll be forgotten while our army retreats."
The clouds above were broken, revealing patches of white spring sun. A crow wheeled overhead, its shadow climbing Pohl's back then speeding on.
Pohl went on, "We might as well be submanners, for all the chance we have of surviving the war."
"Didn't our Wehrmacht oath contain something about not complaining?" Hegel laughed. "We are going to do what we are told and if that's…"
Ewald Hegel would never be able to recall what happened to him at that instant, would have no memory of it whatsoever. One moment he was chatting with his friend Roland, walking along the path toward the target butts, and the next he was kneeling at the bottom of a bomb crater, gasping for breath, his head feeling as if a grenade had gone off in it, mud dripping off him and splashing into the brown pool of water at the base of the pit. The corporal coughed raggedly, then wiped mud out of his eyes.
Roland Pohl was next to him, on his back, the stock of his Mauser protruding above the surface of the water. Pohl groaned and rolled to his stomach, then brought his legs up to try to stand. He wobbled, then collapsed to the mud, sitting there a moment as if taking in the sun at a beach.
Finally Hegel asked, "What what happened?"
Pohl looked as if he had been rolled in mud. His cap floated nearby. After a moment he could offer an answer. "The edge of the crater must have collapsed."
"Then why does my head hurt so much?" Hegel pressed his temple. "My goddamn head was hit by something."
Corporal Pohl pulled his weapon out of the mud. "The sergeant isn't going to like this, Ewald. Look at my Mauser. He's going to see the water and mud, and court-martial us. I'll