The company commander snorted. Still, no doubt Riecke had a point. Even after almost a year of painful instruction at the hands of the Germans, the Bolsheviks were still in. the habit of committing their armor by dribs and drabs instead of massing it for maximum effect. That was how the dead T-34 had come to grief: rumbling along without support, it had been set upon and destroyed by three Panzer IIIs.

Still… “Think how fine it would be to have a big one and know what to do with it.”

“It is enjoyable, sir,” Riecke said complacently. “Or were you talking about panzers again?”

“You’re incorrigible,” Jager said, and then wondered if it was just that the captain was still on the sunny side of thirty. Promotion came quickly on the Russian front. Good officers led their troops forward rather than sending up orders from the rear. That meant good officers died in larger numbers, a twisted sort of natural selection that worried Jager.

He felt every one of his own forty-three years. He’d fought in the trenches in France in 1918, in the last push toward Paris and then in the grinding retreat to the Rhine. He’d first seen tanks then, the clumsy monsters the British used, and knew at once that if he ever went to war again, he wanted them on his Side for a change. But they were forbidden to the postwar Reichswehr. As soon as Hitler took the gloves off and started rearming Germany, Jager went straight into armor.

He took another couple of mouthfuls of stew, then asked, “How many panzers do we have up and running?”

“Eleven,” Riecke answered. “Maybe we’ll be able to get another one going in the morning, if we scrounge around for some fuel line.”

“Not bad,” Jager said, as much to console himself as to reassure Riecke. On paper, his company should have had twenty-two Panzer IIIs. In fact, it had had nineteen when the Russians launched their attack. On the eastern front, getting that close to paper strength was no small accomplishment.