Before the Shock

The long winter leave was done. Now, as the mobilization trains crawled toward Orel, Kursk, Kharkov and Dniepropetrovsk, leave was becoming just a memory, the sharper because of what lay ahead.

The skiing at Garmisch, in the crisp air on the crisp snow, was done. The hard studies at the Kriegsakademie in Berlin and the Panzerschule outside Berlin were over.

Now there would be no more beer in the warm, smoke-blue Bierhauser; no more long walks from the military hotels in the mountains of the Austrian Semmering; no more regular hours at the interim job, sitting at a neat desk reading clean papers; no more Magic Flute, or Siegfried, or Rosenkavalier; no more leave.

Now there was to be only the quick shock of spring. For the lieutenants, for the corporals, there was not even certainty as to what bitter job would have to be done. They could only guess: southern Russia, probably, between Orel and the Crimea, logically, a drive for oil and toward India. Most of the reinforcements were pouring into that sector. Only the Fuehrer and his intimates could say when the drive would begin. The Russians were putting on one last effort to take the German key points; they were attacking all along the line, but especially in the central part of the front, around Smolensk. In the far north, where winter still gripped the land, they were said to be sending reinforcements into Leningrad on a double-track railway over the ice of Lake Ladoga; in the far south also they were moving up reinforcements. There the land was thawing into the same awful gumbo that had sucked at hub caps back in the autumn, before the winter leave.

Perhaps, the lieutenants and corporals guessed, the German blow would descend when the current Russian push spent its power.

Wherever, whatever, whenever, it was bound to be harsh and huge. If it succeeded, there might be a wonderful long leave: victory, peace. If it failed, there might never be any of the good winter things again. This battle would be final.

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