Tilting the Balance

“I was talking with a Jerry last night. ” Bagnall paused, and not just to take another breath. He had a little German and no Russian, so he naturally found it easier to talk with the Wehrmacht men than with Pskov’s rightful owners. That bothered him. He was so used to thinking of the Germans as enemies that dealing with them in any way felt treasonous, even if they loved the Lizards no better than he.

“And what did the Jerry say, pray tell? ” Whyte asked when he didn’t go on right away.

Thus prompted, Bagnall answered, “There’s a Lizard… I don’t know what exactly-forward observation post, little garrison, something-about twenty-five kilometers south of Pskov. We’re supposed to put paid to it. ”

“Twenty-five kilometers? ” As a navigator, Whyte was used to going back and forth between metric and imperial measures. “We’re to hike fifteen miles through the snow and then fight? It’ll be nightfall by the time we get there. ”

“I gather that’s pare of the plan, ” Bagnall said. Whyte’s scandalized tone showed what an easy time England had had in the war. The Germans and, from what Bagnall could gather, the Russians took the hike for granted: just one more thing they had to do. They’d done worse marches to get at each other the winter before.

He munched cold black bread as he shuffled along. While he paused to spend a penny against the trunk of a birch tree, a Lizard jet wailed by, far overhead. He froze, wondering if the enemy could have spotted the advancing human foes. The trees gave good cover, and most of the fighters wore white smocks over the rest of their clothes. Even his own helmet had whitewash splashed across it.

The leaders of the combat group (or so his German of the night before had called it) took no chances. They hurried the fighters along and urged them to scatter even more widely than before. Bagnall obeyed, but worried. He’d thought nothing could be worse than fighting in these grim woods. But suppose he got lost in them instead? The shiver that brought had nothing to do with cold.

On and on and on. He felt as If he’d marched a hundred miles already. How was he to fight after a slog like this? The Germans and Russians seemed to think nothing of it. A British Tommy might have felt the same, but the RAF let machines carry warriors to combat. In a Lanc, Bagnall could do things no infantry could match. Now, quite literally, he found the shoe on the other foot.

The sun swung through the sky. Shadows lengthened, deepened. Somehow, Bagnall kept up with everyone else. As shadows gave way to twilight, he saw the men ahead of him going down on their bellies, so he did, too. He slithered forward. Through breaks in the forest he saw a few houses-huts, really-plopped down in the middle of a clearing. “That’s it? ” he whispered.

“How the devil should I know? ” Ken Embry whispered back. “Somehow, though, I don’t think we’ve been invited here for high tea. ”

Bagnall didn’t think the village had ever heard of high tea. By its look, he wondered if it had heard of the passing of the tsars. The wooden buildings with carved walls and thatched roofs looked like something out of a novel by Tolstoy. The only hint of the twentieth century was razor wire strung around a couple of houses. No one, human or Lizard, was in sight.

“It can’t be as easy as it looks, ” Bagnall said.

“I’d like it if it were, ” Embry answered. “And who says it can’t? We-”

Off in the distance a small pop! interrupted him. Bagnall had been involved in dropping countless tons of bombs and had been on the receiving end of more antiaircraft fire than he cared to think about, but this was the first time he’d done his fighting on the ground. The mortar tired again and again, fast as its crew-Bagnall didn’t know whether they were Russians or Germans-could serve it with bombs.

Snow and dirt fountained upward as the mortar rounds hit home. One of the wooden houses caught fire and began to burn merrily. Men in white burst from the trees and dashed across the clearing: Bagnall wondered if the village really was a Lizard outpost after all.

He fired the Mauser, worked the bolt, fired again. He’d trained on a Lee-Enfield, and vastly preferred it to the weapon he was holding. Instead of angling down to where it was easy to reach, the Mauser’s bolt stuck straight out, which made quick firing difficult, and the German rifle’s magazine held only five rounds, not ten.

Other rifles started hammering, and a couple of machine guns, too. Still no response came from the village. Bagnall began to feel almost sure they were attacking a place empty of the enemy. Relief and rage fought in him-relief that he wasn’t in danger after all, rage that he’d made that long, miserable march in the snow.

Then one of the white-cloaked figures flew through the air, torn almost in two by the land mine he’d stepped on. And then muzzle flashes began winking from a couple of the village buildings as the Lizards returned fire. The charging, yelling humans began to go down as if scythed.

Bullets kicked up snow between Bagnall and Embry, whacked into the trees behind which they hid. Bagnall hugged the frozen earth like a lover. Shooting back was the last thing on his mind. This was, he decided in an instant, a much uglier business than war in the air. In the Lanc, you dropped your bombs on people thousands of feet below. They shot back, yes, but at your aircraft, not at your precious and irreplaceable self. Even fighter aircraft didn’t go after you personally-their object was to wreck your plane, and your gunners were trying to do the same to them. And even if your aircraft got shot down, you might bail out and survive.

It wasn’t machine against machine here. The Lizards were doing their best to blow large holes in his body so he’d scream and bleed and die. Their best seemed appallingly good, too. Every one of however many Lizards there were in the village had an automatic weapon that spat as much lead as one of the raiders’ machine guns and many times as much as a bolt-action rifle like his Mauser. He felt like Kipling’s Fuzzy-Wuzzy charging a British square.