Weapons of Choice (The Axis of Time Trilogy, Book 1) by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham
Language: zh
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-20T03:24:19.186563+00:00

21

THE EASTERN FRONT, MAY 1942

Eternity was so cold they had piled up the dead to shield themselves.

The wind cut deeply into Brasch’s bones on the short run from the trench to the forward observation post, until he wondered if he might ever stop shivering; although shiver was too mild a word for the spasms that shook him to his core. He shuddered so violently, and with such little hope the convulsions would ever cease, that he began to wonder if he might die from exhaustion.

There was no source of warmth in the filthy dugout. The three men he found there were wrapped in so many layers of clothing scavenged from fallen comrades and Russian prisoners that they no longer resembled men. They looked like swollen, fuzzy ticks. Brasch tried to speak to them, but his voice stuttered so much he gave up. He had only platitudes to offer anyway. When the next wave came it would sweep them from the face of the earth.

From eternity, as he now thought of it.

Certainly this wretched country stretched out endlessly. Russia was a Hell of frozen, never-ending space and enemies without number. Thousands of them lay in the darkness just beyond this hole.

They had stacked up a dozen or more of the most pliable bodies in the vain hope that they would offer protection against the howling wind that roared across the plain and knifed through every layer of rotting, fetid cloth. One of the Russian corpses with which they had constructed their windbreak had frozen with an arm protruding. Somebody had hacked it off with a spade, and the sharp bone stump dug into Brasch’s neck, forcing him to shift into a more exposed position.

He couldn’t see the faces of the men who huddled there with him and didn’t know their names. This wasn’t his unit. He’d been separated from the engineers for three weeks. They were twelve hundred kilometers away, but it hardly mattered. He now fought with a battalion of Panzergrenadiers and didn’t think he would ever see his comrades again. He had come forward to encourage these men in their vigilance, but was reduced instead to curling in a small ball and trying not to moan.

Brasch knew that far in the rear, across an impenetrable sea of snap-frozen mud, lay mountains of provisions and arctic-weather gear that would never reach them. He knew because he had helped build the great depots himself and seen them fill up with thousands of hooded lamb’s-wool jackets and mountains of thick blankets, with exquisitely warm insulated boots and soft cat-skin gloves. He knew there were half a million sturdy kerosene heaters still packed away in boxes—just one of which might have made habitable this dismal sinkhole in which they suffered.

Instead they were forced to piss on their cracked and blistered hands, the only way they had of even briefly warming and cauterizing fissures and scabs filled with infected, frozen puss. Their wounds made it almost impossible to hold a Mauser, let alone fire one.

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