Theo Hossbach stood in front of the goal of what had to be the worst football pitch he’d ever seen. The Polish field was frozen and lumpy. The ball could have used more air, but nobody could find a valve that fit its air inlet. Nobody much cared, either. The German soldiers were back of the line for a while. The Ivans weren’t shooting at them, so they were letting off some steam.

The match was panzer black against infantry Feldgrau. Theo was the radio operator in a Panzer II. His black coverall wasn’t warm enough. His teammates heated themselves up running and falling and bumping into one another-and into the Landsers on the other side. A goalkeeper just stood there, waiting for something horrible to happen… and freezing while he waited. Theo didn’t complain. He never did. Come to that, he rarely said anything at all. He lived as much of his life as he could inside his own head.

If he had been moved to complain, he would have bitched about the quality of the match in front of him. Both sides would have been booed off the pitch if they’d had the gall to try to charge admission to an exhibition like this. He wasn’t the best ’keeper himself, but he liked to watch well-played football. This was more like a mob of little kids running and yelling and booting the ball any which way.

One of the guys in black missed a pass he should have been able to field blindfolded. A fellow in field-gray seized control of the ball. The mob thundered toward Theo. He tensed. A good defense would have stopped the attack before it got anywhere near him. Unfortunately, a good defense was nowhere to be found, not here.

He also tensed because there was liable to be an argument if one got past him. He hated arguments. And the makeshift goals were made for them. A couple of sticks pounded into the ground marked each one’s edges; a string ran from the top of one stick to the top of the other at more or less the right height. No net to stop the ball. Did somebody score or not? There’d already been two or three shouting matches.