Watch on the Rhine lota-7

by John Ringo

  Hans did so, taking Sol’s rickety chair from next to his bunk and placing himself on it, facing the girl.

  “I am from Berlin, a Berliner Jewess,” she began. “My father was a professor, my mother a housewife. My father had once been a promising violinist, but he was also a reserve lieutenant and when the Great War began he joined his regiment and went off to serve. He fought for almost four years, before losing an arm and winning a second Iron Cross, an Iron Cross First Class, for bravery. Of course, he could not play violin anymore but the talent was still there. He could teach and he did. And I remember he was very proud of those medals.”

  Anna’s voice was surreally calm. “To look at me is to see a version of him. He looked about as Jewish as I, which is to say not very. Even when the Nazis came to power, he and we suffered less harassment than most Jews did. And he was protected by that Iron Cross, for Hitler himself had decreed that the laws against the Jews were not to apply to decorated veterans.

  “My mother and I had no such protection. Or if we did, the lesser Nazis chose to ignore it. We were picked up, and he, a man who had shed his blood, had himself been maimed and lost his life’s dream for Germany, followed us voluntarily to the camp, the one at Ravensbrück. Though this was normally a woman’s camp a special exception was made for my father, for some reason.

  “I was thirteen years old.”

  Anna shuddered then, apparently at the memory of what she was about to say.

  “Under the overcrowding, the lack of food and medicine, and the cold, my mother soon sickened and died. With the loss of her, my father lost his will to live as well. He followed her into the grave within two months.”

  “I was alone in the world; all alone, Hans. Can you imagine? I suppose I would have died too, without an adult to protect and maybe steal a little food for me. But then, as happens, I changed, began changing anyway, from a girl to a woman. And the guards began to notice.”

  Now it was Hans’ turn to shudder; he knew what was coming next. “Anna you don’t have to — ”

  “Yes I do!” she screamed, eyes wild in her face. Then, after some internal struggle, she said, a little more calmly, “I do. You have to know; you have a right to know.

  “The first one was not the worst. He beat me, of course, never even tried to simply tell me what to do. He beat me then tore my clothes off and bent me over one of the hard wooden beds we had.”

  Hans could not remember ever hearing a voice more hate-filled. “Oh, how I screamed and cried and begged and pleaded. That only made him hit me more. The beating lasted a lot longer than the fucking did, too. Maybe that was why he did it, because the filthy swine couldn’t last more than thirty seconds.

  “When he was finished he turned me around and slapped my face three or four more times. As he turned to leave he tossed half a moldy sausage onto the floor. He said, ‘Eat that, Jew bitch. When I come back I’ll have a different kind of sausage for you to eat.’”

  “And I suppose he did, too,” Hans said, bitterly.

  Anna began to rock, gently, back and forth. “Oh, yes,” she answered, distantly, as if from a far away place. “He, and the other guards. Sometimes ten or twelve of them a night. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes they would make a ‘party’ of me.” The rocking grew more intense.

  With a voice struggling not to break, she continued, “Hans, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can imagine that they did not make me do. They would even take me out of the camp sometimes and sell me to passing soldiers. For my troubles, they would feed me a bit, maybe give me a toothbrush and some tooth powder, used clothing once in a while, even some cheap makeup for ‘special’ occasions.” She shuddered yet again. “That’s why I so despise makeup, you know? They would make me put it on like a Reeperbahn[40] prostitute and then taunt me that I was just another Jewish whore.

  “The worst part though was that not one of them, even once, not in all those years, ever called me by my name. You remember I got angry with you when you called me ‘girl’? The kinder ones would sometimes say, ‘Bend over, girl,’ or ‘Get on your knees, girl.’ But usually it was ‘Jew-bitch, Jew-whore, Jew-slut.’ That sort of thing. I wasn’t even a human being, just a fuck and suck machine.”

  At the memory of that last, that ultimate humiliation of being stripped of even a semblance of humanity, Anna lost control completely, breaking down into great, wracking sobs and a flood of long-suppressed tears. Hans, teary-eyed himself, was out of his chair in an instant, holding her, cradling her, stroking her hair and whispering how sorry he was, how much he loved her.

  Finally, regaining a measure of control, she wrapped her arms around Hans, squeezed tight, and whispered, “Don’t be sorry. It is over. And you didn’t do any of it. But can you care for me now, now that you know?”

  His own nose running slightly, Hans muffled back, “Now that I know what? That you were raped? That you survived? Thank God you survived, my love. You did nothing wrong and I could not love you more if you were as much a physical virgin as I hold you to be a spiritual one.”

  Relieved beyond measure, Anna melted into him then. But almost immediately stiffened again. “There is another thing. Something else you must know. I got pregnant, more than once. The first time I was not quite fifteen. The last time I was a bit over seventeen. It was an inconvenience to them, having to take me to the doctor and bribe him to abort me and keep quiet about it. So the bribed the doctor to… ‘fix’… me. I say ‘fix.’ They said, ‘spay.’ Hans, I can never have children.”

  Beyond guilt and even beyond pity, Hans felt an indescribable sense of personal desolation. Nonetheless, he answered, “No matter, Anna. Please… believe, that doesn’t matter to me.”

  With a last sniffle and a long, quiet pause, Anna came to a sudden, but long contemplated, decision. She stood up, drawing Hans upward with her. She forced a smile and looked deeply into his eyes and said, “I asked Sol to make sure we would not be disturbed; not for all night. I am twenty-three years old.” She began to lead him to his bed, a smile appearing on her face for the first time that night. “That is too old to be any kind of a virgin, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  Though the night sky was illuminated by the battle raging ahead, Hans Brasche ignored it, preferring instead to stroke the pocket containing all that was physical that remained of his love, and submerging in the memory of a first, blessed, night among thousands that were to follow.

  * * *

  The first of the three Posleen landing areas was cleansed before midday on the twenty-second. The second, having more warning, took longer. Not only did it take longer, but this time the Posleen did manage to loft a number of their ships. Hans’ brigade went into action then, his forty Tigers ripping into the newly arrived Posleen. These died, but they died hard, taking seven of Hans’ precious tanks to hell with them. Losses among the rest of the Korps were likewise not trivial.

  The third landing south of Berlin was ready when the 47th Panzer Korps met them on Christmas Day.

  Interlude

  “The thresh of this world have something they call ‘religion,’ my lord,” commented Ro’moloristen.

  “Religion? What is this ‘religion’?”

  “It is something like the way our normals feel about us, something like the way we once felt towards the Aldenata, and something like the Way of the Rememberers,” answered the underling. “It is, admittedly, a very confused and confusing concept.

  “I mention this, lord, because tomorrow is the supreme holy day of the dominant cluster of religious groups on the planet. ‘Christmas,’ they call it. I believe that translates as ‘Solemn celebration of the birth of the anointed one.’ They give gifts to each other, sing songs of praise and thanksgiving to their god, gather to worship, and decorate their dwellings and places of labor with special care.”

  Athenalras shrugged. “What does this mean to us?”

  “Oh, perhaps nothing, lord. I simply found it interesting.”

  “Maybe so,”
said Athenalras, indifferently. “What news of the front?”

  “Not good, my lord,” admitted Ro’moloristen. “In the north and south there is no progress. The People have run into the great ditch the thresh call the ‘Rhein’ and found no crossings. They shudder under the lash of the thresh’s artillery on the near bank. In the center, news is somewhat better. Only a few of the forts of the string of defenses they call ‘Maginot’ still hold out. In some places, those where there is more than one such fort close together, the People suffer fearfully from the fire of nearby fortresses. But that is only in a few places. The other forts are all being reduced or already have been.”

  “Good,” grunted the senior God King.

  “Yes… well, yes and no, lord. Most of the thresh seem to have escaped through the next line of defenses in the center area. We have little more than our own dead to feed the host, though there are enough of those to feed them for some time. And the People attacking those other defenses, the line they call ‘Siegfried,’ are being chewed up rather badly. In is the same story in the east. Between rivers and fortifications we are paying a fearful price with little to show for it.”

  “What of the space-to-surface bombardment?” asked Athenalras.

  “Less effective against the line ‘Siegfried’ than it was against the line ‘Maginot,’ lord. This second line is built differently; smaller fortifications, and nearer to the surface. On the whole it has been a waste to risk a ship to come low enough to fire on single, small bunkers. There is some… thing out there which has been picking off the lower orbit vessels of the People; picking them off and then moving to a new firing position. The firing signature of this thing is the same as for one of our own ship-borne, kinetic energy weapons.”

  Athenalras grew even more somber at this news. “How many of these ‘things’ are there?”

  “No way to tell, lord. There could be many. There could be only the one.”

  “I wonder what new ‘gifts’ the threshkreen will have for us on the morrow, on their ‘Christmas.’ ”

  Chapter 13

  Tiger Anna, South of Magdeberg,

  Germany, 25 December 2007

  Behind Hans the sunless, predawn, sky flickered as if lit by a thousand strobe lights; the entire artillery — over three thousand guns — of Army Group Reserve, sending their gifts to the Posleen dug in well south of the city.

  The city itself was holding out still, most likely because fully half the Posleen that could have attacked it were instead facing southward against the looming threat of Army Group Reserve. Even so, the town was hard-pressed and begging frantically for succor from Mühlenkampf. The “gifts” to the Posleen were also a gift to Magdeberg’s defenders, heartfelt gifts sent with the promise of many more to come.

  Schultz, not needed at his gunner’s station for the nonce, helped bring round the morning’s repast, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, some long-shelf-life milk — “nuclear milk,” the men called it — a roll and some sort of unmentionable meat, a grayish, greasy, half-inch-thick slab of embalmed beef. Brasche, concentrating on the intelligence updates coming in via radio, absentmindedly took the eggs, roll and meat, but pointedly refused the milk. Schultz could not blame him; the price of extending the shelf life was milk that tasted of old gym socks. Nutritious it may have been. Good, it was not.

  “Gut,” — good — Hans muttered. The enemy were apparently not lifting their ships in an attempt to silence the army’s batteries, or — at least — not yet.

  The artillery was forced to fire into an intelligence void, to a great extent. Nothing humanly or remotely piloted was able to survive for more than the instant it took to be destroyed if they attempted flying above or even near the Posleen. Not one human-built satellite survived in space to look down upon the enemy. No human-piloted space-going vessel could hope to approach Earth, with the fleet largely destroyed and the few, wounded survivors huddled and licking their wounds somewhere in the direction of Proxima Centauri. A Himmit ship might have done some real good, had one been available. Sadly, none were.

  What could be done had been and was being. Florian Geyer had done everything humanly possible to get through the Posleen perimeter — tried everything, paid in full measure, and failed to do more than define the edges of that perimeter. A few towns within the area of infestation held out yet; these provided a little local intelligence — telling as much where the enemy was not as where he was — for the gunners to use in targeting. The maps also told a bit, though given the aliens’ very different military philosophy from that of their human opponents, Hans was skeptical of the value of map reconnaissance. The Posleen just didn’t think like human beings.

  The most valuable recon assets in the Germans’ hands were artillery-fired television cameras encased in time-fused shells that gave anywhere from a few to fifteen minutes of visual insight before falling too low to do any good. These were rare items, however. Like the precious neutron bombs, there had not been time to build many of them. They were also used, generally speaking, in conjunction with the artillery-fired neutron bombs, the cameras spotting useful targets and the atomic weapons then “servicing” those targets.

  The problem was, though — as Hans knew, that the enemy had had a chance to spread out and dig in. There were few concentrations, few that the cameras had found anyway, that justified the use of the deadly little enhanced radiation packages. Moreover, one of the genuinely effective defenses against the brief burst of high-intensity neutrons the bombs emitted upon detonation was simple earth; and the Posleen had dug in deep in the few days granted them.

  Meanwhile, Magdeberg — and Berlin, past that — called frantically and continuously for aid.

  Federal Chancellery, Berlin, Germany, 25 December 2007

  The chancellor looked over the situation displayed on one of the three view-screens that filled one wall of his deep underground office. In blues and reds this screen showed graphically the state both of the defending forces, in blue, and the aliens, in red, infesting Germany and pressing at her borders. He had been satisfied, over the last two days, to see two of the large red splotches disappear as Army Group Reserve under Mühlenkampf eliminated all but one of the landings south and southeast of Magdeberg. Other, local, reserves had seen to some few others.

  Matched against the good news, however, was a pile of bad. The Siegfried line in the west defending the Rhein and the Rheinland was holding, true. But casualties were atrocious, indentations had been made, and the state of resupply, given how many Posleen-controlled areas lay athwart supply routes, was perilous.

  In the east things were worse, much worse. The Vistula line was simply crumbling and, nightmare of nightmares, the enemy had managed to seize at least one bridge over the river at Warsaw.

  The story of how this had happened was somewhat confused. As near as could be determined, though, a great flood of humanity had been on the bridge in desperate flight when the Posleen first appeared. Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to commit mass murder by blowing the bridge, the defenders had delayed just a bit too long. The enemy’s flyers had massed and blasted the defending demolition guard to ruin before the bridge could be dropped. A hasty counterattack was put in using whatever was locally available. That having failed, however, and the aliens pouring across at the rate of several hundred thousand per hour, the German and Polish formations strung out along the river were about to be forced into conducting a desperate fighting withdrawal to the Oder-Niesse line.

  And the Oder-Niesse line is less than a sham, thought the chancellor. There are few heavy fortifications. Those that exist are very old and weak and were low priority for renovation in any case. The river itself is as little as three feet deep in places. And even where it is deep enough to drown the bastards there are places where it has frozen over.

  Tearing his eyes from the distressing display, the chancellor turned to his senior soldier, Field Marshal von Seydlitz. “Kurt?” he asked, “Is there a chance we can hold the river? Regain the bridge?”

 
“Essentially none, sir,” Seydlitz responded, wearily. He was about a week behind on sleep. “I had considered that the neutron weapons might make a difference. But my nuclear weapons staff has pointed out two distressing facts. One is that we have only half a dozen of the things close enough to get in range to be fired at the crossing. The other is that the bombs work best with a highly concentrated area target. The Posleen are concentrating before crossing, true. But once they reach this side they are dispersing very rapidly. Moreover, those actually on the bridge at any given time represent a very unremunerative linear target. We might kill as few as twenty thousand per round among those who have already crossed, perhaps five or six thousand of those actually on the bridge. We can eliminate anything up to one million by hitting the far side with all six weapons.”

  Seydlitz sighed. “The General Staff calculates that this will slow them down by perhaps an hour. Herr Kanzler, the hour saved now is not as important as holding the Oder-Niesse line later. We will need those weapons then.”

  “The Oder-Niesse line?” asked the chancellor.

  “It isn’t much but it’s all we have,” answered Seydlitz.

  “Give the orders. Fall back. Cover the retreat of as many Polish civilians as possible.”

  Seydlitz nodded an acknowledgment, then continued. “We’re still going to lose many of the troops and by the time they reach the Oder they may be nothing much more than a demoralized rabble for a while… but I agree we should run while we can.

  “But, Herr Kanzler, we have another problem, though it is an indirect one and won’t become insurmountable until the Siegfried line collapses.”

  “The Rhein bridges?” asked the chancellor.

  “Yes, sir. For now the enemy who seized both sides of the bridges from above is staying put. But they have infested an area of more than twenty-five kilometers radius, are digging in frantically, and are seriously inconveniencing supply to the men on the Siegfried line covering the Rheinland.”