Tilting the Balance

“Then don’t wear it. I don’t fancy mine, now that you mention it.” Along with Mauser rifles, both Englishmen had received German helmets. Wearing that coal scuttle with its painted swastika set Bagnall’s teeth on edge, to say nothing of worrying him lest he be mistaken for a Nazi by some Russian more eager for revenge against the Germans than to attack the Lizards.

“Don’t like to leave it off, either,” Embry said. “Puts me too much in mind of the last war, when they went for a year and a half with no tin hats at all.”

“That is a poser,” Bagnall admitted. Thinking about the infinite slaughter of World War I was bad enough anyhow. Thinking how bad it had been before helmets was enough to make your stomach turn over.

Alf Whyte came walking toward them. He had his helmet on, which made his silhouette unnervingly Germanic. He said, “You chaps ready to find out about the way our fathers fought?”

“Sod our fathers,” Bagnall muttered. He stamped his feet up and down. Russian felt boots kept them warm; boots were the one part of his flying suit he’d willingly exchanged for their local equivalents.

Other small groups of men gathered in Pskov’s market square, chatting softly among themselves in Russian or German. It was a more informal muster than any Bagnall had imagined; the occasional female voice among the deeper rumbles only made the scene seem stranger.

The women fighters were as heavily bundled against the cold as their male counterparts. Pointing to a couple of them, Embry said, “They don’t precisely put one in mind of Jane, do they?”

“Ah, Jane,” Bagnall said. He and Alf Whyte both sighed. The Daily Mirror’s marvelous comic-strip blonde dressed in one of two ways: very little and even less. Bagnall went on, “Even Jane would dress warmly here. And the Russians, even dressed like Jane, wouldn’t much stir me. The ones I’ve seen are most of them lady dockwallopers or lorry drivers.”

“Too right,” Whyte said. “This is a bloody place.” All three Englishmen nodded glumly.

A couple of minutes later, officers-or at least leaders-moved the fighters out. Bagnall’s rifle was heavy; it made him feel lopsided and banged his shoulder at every step he took. At first it drove him to distraction. Then it became only a minor nuisance. By the time he’d gone a mile or so, he stopped noticing it.

He did expect to see some difference in the way the Russians and Germans went off to war. German precision and efficiency were notorious, while the Red Army, although it had a reputation for great courage, was not long on spit and polish. He soon found what such cliches were worth. He couldn’t even tell the two groups apart by their gear: many Russian partisans bore captured German equipment, while about an equal number of Hitler’s finest eked out their own supplies with Soviet stocks.

They even marched the same way, in loose, widespread groups that got looser and more spread out as the sun rose. “We might do well to emulate them,” Bagnall said. “They have more experience at this kind of thing than we do.”

“I suppose it’s to keep too many from going down at once if they’re caught out in the open by aircraft,” Ken Embry said.

“If we’re caught out in the open, you mean,” Alf Whyte corrected him. As If with one accord, the three RAF men spread out a little farther.

Before long, they entered the forest south of Pskov. To Bagnall, used to neat, well-trimmed English woods, it was like stepping into another world. These trees had never been harvested; he would have bet money that many of them had never been seen by mortal man till this moment. Pine and fir and spruce held invaders at bay with their dark-needled branches, as if the only thing they wanted in all the world was for the men to go away. The occasional pale gray birch trunks among them startled Bagnall each time he went past one; they reminded him of naked women (he thought again of Jane) scattered among matrons properly dressed for the cold.

Off in the distance, something howled. “A wolf!” Bagnall said, and grabbed for his rifle before he realized there was no immediate need. Wolves had been hunted out of England for more than four hundred years, but he reacted to the sound by instinct printed on his flesh by four hundred times four hundred generations.

“We’re rather a long way from home, aren’t we?” Whyte said with a nervous chuckle; he’d started at the wolf call, too.

“Too bloody far,” Bagnall said. Thinking about England brought him only pain. He tried to do it as little as he could. Even battered and hungry from war, it felt infinitely more welcoming than wrecked Pskov, tensely divided between Bolsheviks and Nazis, or than this forbidding primeval wood.