“The Reds can’t be in good shape, either,” Riecke said. His voice turned worried, just for a moment: “Can they?”

“We’ve bagged enough of them, the last three weeks,” Jager said. That was true enough; a couple of hundred thousand Russians had trudged off into captivity when the Germans pinched off the opening through which they’d poured. The enemy threw away more than a thousand tanks and two thousand artillery pieces. Bolshevik losses the summer before had been on an even more colossal scale.

But before he crossed from Romania into Russia, he’d never imagined how immense the country was; how the plains seemed to stretch on and on forever; how thin a division, a corps, an army, could spread just to hold a front, let alone advance. And from those limitless plains sprang seemingly limitless streams of men and tanks. And they all fought, ferociously if without much skill. Jager knew too well the Wehrmacht was anything but limitless. If every German soldier slew two Red Army men, if every panzer knocked out two T-34s or KVs, the Russians had a net gain.

Riecke lit a cigarette. The flare of the match briefly showed the dirt ground into fatigue lines he’d not had a month before. Yet somehow he still looked boyish. Jager envied him that; at the rate he himself was going gray, he’d look like a grandfather any day now.

The captain passed him the pack. He took a cigarette, leaned closer to light it from Riecke’s. “Thanks,” he said, shielding the glowing coal with one hand: no point giving a sniper a free target. Riecke also hid his smoke.

After they’d crushed out the cigarettes under their bootheels, Riecke said suddenly, “Are we, going to get new models anytime soon, sir? What does your brother say?”

“Nothing he shouldn’t, which means I don’t know for certain,” Jager answered. His brother Johann worked as an engineer for Henschel. His letters were always censored with special zeal, lest they fall into enemy hands on the long road between Germany and somewhere south of Kharkov. But brothers had ways with words that censors could not follow. After a moment, Jager added, “It might be possible, though I thought size didn’t concern you…?”