Upsetting the Balance by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

miraculous.
    For all their good points, 88s had drawbacks, too. They couldn’t fire shells as heavy as the larger guns, and they couldn’t throw the shells they did fire as far. That meant—
    “We’ll probably see action in the next few kilometers,” Jäger said.
    “Bumping up against whatever the artillery boys are shooting at, you mean, sir?” Meinecke said. At Jäger’s nod, he went on, “Makes sense to me. Besides, south of Rouffach is where they told us we’d start running into the enemy, isn’t it? They have to be right once in a while.”
    “Your confidence in the High Command does you credit, Sergeant,” Jäger said dryly, which set the gunner and the loader to laughing again. “I just hope the Lizards use the same kind of flank guards we did when we got stretched thin fighting the Russians.”
    “How’s that,
Herr Oberst
?” Meinecke asked. “Me, I was playing games with the Tommies in the desert before they stuck me in the Flying Circus here.” When Panther and Tiger panzers started rolling off the assembly lines, the
Wehrmacht
put only the best crewmen into them.
    “You, you didn’t miss a thing,” Jäger said, mimicking his gunner’s diction. “But sometimes we’d have to concentrate our German troops at the
Schwerpunkt,
the decisive place, and cover our flanks with Romanians or Hungarians or Italians.”
    “God save us.” Wolfgang Eschenbach used up half his daily quota of speech.
    “They weren’t the worst soldiers I’ve ever seen,” Jäger said. “They might not have been bad at all if they were decently equipped. But sometimes the Russians managed to hit them instead of us, and it got pretty ugly. I’m hoping the Lizards are concentrating all their best troops up where they’re trying to advance. I’d just as soon not have to fight the first team all the time.”
    “Amen to that,” Eschenbach said; Jäger confidently expected him to fall silent till the morning.
    The colonel stood up in the cupola again. That was a good way to get shot, but it was also far and away the best way to see what was going on, and if you didn’t know what was going on, you had no business commanding a panzer, let alone a (rather battered) regiment of them. Slamming the lid down and peering through the periscopes made you feel safer, but it also made you miss things that were liable to get you killed.
    Northbound shells whistled overhead, undoubtedly the Lizards’ response to the Germans’ 88s. Jäger hoped the artillerymen had moved their pieces elsewhere before the shells came down on them.
    The countryside began to have the look of a land at war: wrecked and burned farm buildings, smashed trees, bloated dead animals, shell craters pocking fields. Jäger clucked sadly at the charred wreck of a German half-track. The Panther rolled past trenches and foxholes that showed the earlier limits of the German push to the south.
    Stooping to get down into the turret for a moment, Jäger said, “We’re moving forward, anyhow.” Against the Lizards, that was no small novelty, and boosted his hopes that they had only second-line troops on their flanks. Like a jack-in-the-box, he popped up out of the cupola again.
    Through the rasping roar of the Panther’s big Maybach engine came the rattle of small-arms fire ahead. A couple of German MG42s were in action, their rapid rate of fire unmistakable—they sounded as if a giant were ripping enormous bolts of thick, tough cloth between his hands. Jäger was glad the German infantry had the machine guns; since all Lizard foot soldiers carried automatic weapons, the poor
Landsers
needed all the help they could get.
    The German panzers deployed for action, moving into their blunt wedge formation: two companies forward, Jäger’s command panzer and another company in the middle to support them, and a fourth company in the rear as a reserve. They chewed brown, muddy lines through the green of growing crops.
    Without warning, a streak of fire lanced through the