Somewhere off in the distance, a machine gun started chattering, and a few seconds later another one. A frown twisted Jager’s stubbly face as he ate. The Russians were supposed to have been kaput around these parts for most of a week. But then, nobody lived to grow old by counting Russians out too soon. The previous winter had proved that.

As if drawn by a magnet, Jager peered through the darkness toward the hulk of a T-34 that sat, turret all askew, perhaps fifty meters away. The killed tank was only a vague shape in the darkness, but even a glimpse could make fearful sweat start under his arms.

“If only we had panzers like that,” he murmured. He stuck his spoon into the stew still on his tin plate, stroked the black ribbon of his wound badge. Thanks to a T-34, he would have a furrow in his calf till the day he died. The rest of the crew of the Panzer III he’d been in at the time hadn’t been so lucky; only one other man had bailed out, and he was back in Germany getting pieced together one operation at a time.

Simply measured tank against tank, a Panzer III, even, one with the new, long 50mm gun, had no business taking on a T-34. The Russian tank boasted a cannon half again as big, thicker armor cleverly sloped to deflect shells, and an engine that was not only more powerful than a Panzer IIIs but a diesel to boot, so it wouldn’t go up in flames the way the. German machine’s petrol-powered Maybach so often did.

“It’s not so bad as all that, sir.” The cheerful voice at his shoulder belonged to Captain Ernst Riecke, his second-in-command.

“Ha. You heard me muttering to myself, did you?” Jager said.

“Yes, sir. You ask me, it’s the same in tanks as it is in screwing, sir.”

Jager raised an eyebrow. “This I have to hear.”

“Well, in both cases knowing what to do with what you’ve got counts for more than how big it is.”