Eager as a puppy, Adalbert asked, "You know where they're going to throw us in, Sergeant?"

"Nope," Naumann answered. "Far as the generals are concerned, we're just a bullet. Point us at the enemy, and we knock him over."

Or he knocks us over. Theo remembered the antitank round slamming into his old Panzer II's engine compartment. He remembered opening his escape hatch and seeing nothing but flames. He'd followed his panzer commander out the turret hatch instead. Ludwig hadn't made it much farther. Theo had-which didn't stop that bullet from finding him a little later on.

The new Panzer II looked like the one that had burned. Theo's station was behind the turret, just in front of the bulkhead that separated the fighting compartment from the one housing the engine. He couldn't see out. The smells were familiar: oil, gasoline, cordite, leather, metal, sweat. He didn't smell much lingering fear, which argued that this panzer hadn't seen a lot of action.

He started fiddling with the radio. No matter what the manufacturer claimed, every set was different. Heinz Naumann said something. Theo ignored it. Indeed, he hardly heard it: like the radio, he was good at tuning out anything that didn't directly concern him.

Sometimes, he tuned out things that did concern him. Naumann spoke again: "I said, is it up to snuff?"

"Uh, it seems to be." Theo came back to the world.

"Good. Pay some attention next time, all right?"

"Whatever you say, Sergeant," Theo answered. Ludwig had tried to keep him connected, too. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. When Theo got interested in a radio, or in whatever was going on inside his own head, everything else could go hang.

They motored west, toward the front, the next morning. Naumann rode along standing up with his head and shoulders out of the turret. That was how a panzer commander was supposed to do things when not in combat. A lot of commanders looked out even when their machine was in action. The vision ports in the turret just didn't let you see enough. There was talk of building a Panzer II with a proper cupola for the commander. The Panzer III had one. So did a lot of foreign panzers. Not the II, not yet.