Hitler's war

Chapter Twelve

January. The North Atlantic. A U-boat. The combination was not made in heaven, as Lieutenant Julius Lemp knew only too well.

Oh, he could take the U-30 down below periscope depth, and she’d escape the fearsome waves topside. The only trouble was, down below periscope depth she’d be about as useful to the war effort as if she were a five-year-old’s toy in a Berlin bathtub.

A five-year-old splashing around couldn’t whip up a worse storm in that tiny tub than God was kicking up out here on the broad ocean. One ten-meter wave after another rolled down on the U-30. Because she was so much smaller and had so much less freeboard than a surface warship, it was like taking one soggy right to the chin after another.

Lemp tied himself to the rail atop the conning tower so an extra-big wave wouldn’t sweep him out to sea. He wore oilskins, of course. He knew he’d get soaked anyhow. This way, it would take a little longer, though.

He wondered why he’d bothered bringing the binoculars with him. So much spray and stray water splashed the lenses, he might as well have peered through a couple of full beer steins. You had to try all the same. Why else did they send you out in filthy weather like this?

Another wave smashed over the bow. It splashed past the 88mm deck gun and crashed into the conning tower. Lemp got himself a faceful of ocean. “Fuck,” he said, spitting salt water. He would have made a bigger fuss had it been the first time, or even the fifth.

He looked at the binoculars. They were good and wet now. Ironically, that might make them easier to look through than when they’d just been spray-splashed. He raised them to his eyes and swept the horizon with a hunter’s intent patience.

He or one of the other watchstanders did this as long as there was enough daylight to see by. At night, he did take the boat down twenty-five or thirty meters so the men could cook a little and could rest without getting pitched out of their cramped bunks and hammocks.

Something glided past him on the wind: a petrel, on the prowl for fish, not ships. Stormy weather didn’t bother the bird. Lemp wished he could say the same.

The U-boat’s bow sank down into a trough. That meant the following wave would be worse than usual. And it was. If not for the fastening-and for his holding on to the rail for dear life-it would have swept him into the Atlantic. Would he have drowned before he froze? That was the only question there.

He wanted to ride on top of a crest, not get buried by one. Eventually, the U-30 did. That gave him those extra ten meters from which to look around. He didn’t expect to see anything but the scudding gray clouds that had kept him company ever since leaving Germany. His watch would be up pretty soon. Then he could descend into the U-boat’s crowded, stinking pressure hull, dry off, and change into his other, slightly less soaked, uniform.

When you didn’t expect to see something, you probably wouldn’t, even if it was there. Lemp almost missed the smoke trail to the northwest. His hands were smarter than his head. They snapped back of themselves and gave him another look at it. Without even noticing he’d done it, he stopped shivering. He stopped caring he was wet clean through.

He pulled out the plug on the speaking tube that let him talk to the helmsman and the engine room. “Change course to 310,” he ordered. “All ahead full.”

Hollow and brassy, the answer came back: “Changing course to 310, skipper. You found something?”

“I sure did,” Lemp said as the diesels’ building throb told him their crew had got the command, too. “Now we have to see what it is and whether we can run it down.”

He thought they had a decent chance. Not many freighters could match the U-30’s surface speed. And he could get mighty close before the ship spotted his exhaust: diesel fuel burned much cleaner than heavy oil, to say nothing of coal. The U-boat’s low, sharkish silhouette shouldn’t be easy to pick up, either.

The other side of the coin was, he couldn’t make seventeen knots in seas like this. Now that the U-30 had turned away from taking the swells bow-on, she got slapped in the port side instead. British corvettes-U-boat hunters-were said to roll on wet grass. The U-30 was doing the same thing. As long as she straightened up every time, Lemp couldn’t complain.

His stomach could, and did. He was a good sailor, but he seldom faced a challenge like this. He gulped, hoping lunch would stay down. If he was going to sink that ship, he had to get ahead of her before submerging to wait for her to reach him where he lay in wait. A U-boat’s greatest weakness was that it was slower submerged than its quarry was on the surface.

He ordered another course change, swinging closer to due north. The ship was making a very respectable turn of speed. In turn, that argued she was big and important: a ship England particularly wouldn’t want to see lost.

When the U-boat rose to the crest of another wave, Lemp got a good look at the enemy vessel. He whistled softly, though he couldn’t even hear himself through the howling wind. She had to be 15,000 tons if she was a gram!

“A Q-ship,” he muttered under his breath. In the last war, England had put disguised guns on several merchantmen. They looked like ordinary freighters…till an unwary U-boat skipper approached them on the surface, confident of an easy kill. Several such skippers had paid with their boats-and with their lives. Lemp shook his head. “Not me, by God! Not me.”

The enemy wasn’t zigzagging. She didn’t know he was around, then. Good, he thought, imagining what 15cm guns could do to his hull. And the U-30 was overhauling her. He smiled wolfishly Yes, she’d get a nasty surprise before long.

He went below. No time to change now. After the hunt would have to do. He’d kept his sausage and noodles down on the conning tower. He almost lost them for a second time leaving the cold, pure ocean air for the stinks and smokes of the pressure hull. His eyes also needed a moment to adjust from gray daylight to the dim orange lamps the U-boat used.

“Take her down to periscope depth, Peter,” he said.

“Periscope depth. Aye aye, skipper,” the helmsman said. Dive warnings hooted. Air hissed out of buoyancy tanks; water gurgled in to take its place. The U-30 could dive like an otter when she had to. The crew practiced all the time. If a destroyer or an airplane came after you, you had to disappear in a hurry or you’d disappear forever.

Lemp raised the periscope. The instrument wasn’t perfect. It got out of alignment, and the upper lens took even more splashes and spray than his binoculars did. But the periscope didn’t need to be perfect this time. Here came the merchant cruiser, fat and happy as if she had the world by the tail.

“Course 190. All ahead one third,” Lemp ordered, and the batteries that powered the U-30 underwater sent her toward her prey.

The target was making about ten knots. The torpedoes could do better than thirty. If the range was down to…he peered through the periscope again…900 meters, he needed to launch…now!

“Fire one!” he snapped, and then, “Fire two!” and then, “Fire three!”

Wham!…Whoosh! One after another, the fish leaped away from the U-boat. “All three gone, skipper,” the torpedomen reported.

“Ja,” Lemp agreed absently. In these waves, he couldn’t watch the wakes as well as he would have liked. On the other hand, the merchant cruiser would have a harder time seeing them coming, too.

At the very last moment, she started to turn away. The very last moment proved much too late. The first torpedo caught her up near the bow. The dull Boom! filled the U-30. The soldiers whooped and cheered. Somebody pounded Lemp on the back. Discipline on a submarine wasn’t the same as it was on a surface ship-nowhere close. The skipper kept his eyes on the periscope, so he never knew who it was.

A few seconds later, another, bigger, Boom! echoed through the water. The second torpedo hit the enemy ship just aft of amidships. “That does it.” Lemp spoke with quiet satisfaction. “We broke her back. She’s going down fast.”

He waited for the impact of the third torpedo, but it didn’t come. That one must have missed. He was annoyed. He hated to miss. But the two hits were plenty to sink the merchant cruiser. And that, after all, was the point of the exercise. He wouldn’t be too hard on himself.

A lot of boats out. A lot of heads bobbing in the water as the ship slid under. The survivors wouldn’t last long, not in seas like this. Lemp wondered if he’d sunk a troopship bringing soldiers from Canada to England. That would be an even stronger blow against the enemy than he’d thought he struck.

He also wondered if she’d got out an SOS. If destroyers, say, were hurrying this way on a rescue mission, he didn’t want to hang around any longer than he had to. “Surface,” he said. “Let’s skedaddle. We’ve done our job here.”

* * *

Peggy Druce finally had her bags packed. In a couple of hours, she would head for the train station. The train would take her out of Germany and into neutral Denmark. In Copenhagen, she would get on a lovely American liner, the Athenia. Before too long, she’d be in New York. Two hours by train from Philadelphia. A million billion miles from a Europe that had lost its mind.

Somebody knocked on the door.

A hotel flunky, she thought. As soon as she saw the uniform, she realized the man wasn’t from the hotel. It wasn’t a military uniform, but civilians in the Third Reich liked playing dress-up, too. This guy, unless she was wrong, came from the Foreign Ministry.

And this guy, unless she was very, very wrong, was Trouble. With a capital T.

“You are Miss, uh, Margaret Druce?” he asked in pretty good English.

“Missus,” Peggy corrected automatically. Just as automatically, she flashed her ring.

“Please to excuse me. And please to let me introduce myself. I am Konrad Hoppe, of the Sub-bureau for the Supervision of Interned Neutrals.” He didn’t click his heels, but he gave her a stiff little bow, something you’d never see in the States. As he straightened, he went on, “You were formerly scheduled to leave Germany today and to return to America in the near future.”

Amazing how something as simple as an adverb could be scarier than the bombs that had rained down on Berlin at New Year’s. “What do you mean, formerly?” Peggy demanded, doing her goddamnedest not to show how frightened she was.

“Ah.” Herr Hoppe nodded, more to himself than to her. “Then you will not have heard any news this morning.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Don’t play riddles, if you don’t mind. If you’ve got something to say, come out and say it, already.”

“Very well, Mrs. Druce.” This time, Hoppe got it right. And, this time, he really did click his heels. “I regret that I must be the one to inform you that the Athenia went down in the North Atlantic yesterday, bound for Copenhagen from New York City. Loss of life is reported to be heavy.”

“Went down.” Numbly, Peggy entered the words. They sounded innocuous, almost antiseptic. Little by little, her wits started working. “What do you mean, ‘went down’? Went down how? Did a U-boat torpedo her?” That was the likeliest way she could think of for a ship to go down in the middle of the North Atlantic in wartime. “They can’t do that! She’s a neutral! She’s an American!”

They could do that. They could do anything they damn well pleased. Sometimes, as an American herself, she had trouble remembering that in spite of all the horrors she’d seen. Maybe that made her a fool. Maybe it left her one of the last sane people on this poor, benighted continent.

Konrad Hoppe, dutiful employee of the Sub-bureau for the Supervision of Interned Neutrals, looked pained. “So the BBC claims. But this is one more lie from a nation of liars. The government of the Reich has denied any involvement in the sinking of the Athenia. If it was not an accident, the British torpedoed or bombed it themselves, to stir up hatred against Germany in America.”

“That’s the nuttiest thing I ever heard in my life!” Peggy exclaimed.

“It is not,” Hoppe insisted. “For the British, it would make perfect sense. But why would the Reich sink an American ocean liner? Do you not think we learned our lessons on the folly of this in the last war?”

Peggy opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t imagine England doing anything so filthy. But she also had trouble believing Hitler wanted to antagonize the USA. Wouldn’t he be cutting his own throat if he did? He might be nuts, but he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t that stupid, anyhow, or Peggy didn’t think so.

“Maybe your guy just made a mistake,” she said after a few seconds of thought. “Have you ever crossed the Atlantic in January? I have, and it’s rough seas and nasty weather all the way.”

“Our submarine captains do not make such errors,” the Foreign Ministry official said stiffly. “It is impossible. And if you find the Atlantic in January so unappetizing, why did you book passage on the Athenia?”

To get the hell out of your stinking country. But if Peggy said something like that, some guys who wore different uniforms-those of the SS, say-were liable to have some sharp questions for her. Or pointed ones. Or hot ones. “To get away from the war,” she did say, a couple of heartbeats slower than she might have.

“I am afraid this is not possible for you at the moment,” Hoppe said.

“Can’t I go to Denmark anyway?” Peggy yelped. The lights were on in neutral Denmark. Denmark had never heard of rationing, except as something other people suffered. Much more to the point, Denmark was a civilized country. Once upon a time, Peggy would have said the same thing about Germany. No more. No more.

“I am very sorry.” Konrad Hoppe didn’t sound sorry. If anything, he sounded coldly amused. He got to tell foreigners no, and the Foreign Ministry paid him to do it. If that wasn’t heaven for the nasty little man, Peggy would have been amazed. A small, chilly smile on his lips, Hoppe went on, “That also for you is not possible.”

“How come?” She wouldn’t give up without a fight. “I’ve got the train ticket. I’ve got the Danish visa. Why can’t I use ‘em?”

“It is not the policy of the Reich to permit departures unless the return journey to the foreigner’s home may be completed without delay,” Hoppe droned.

“Why the-dickens not?” She wanted to say something hotter than that, but feared it would do her more harm than good.

“I am not obligated to discuss the Reich’s policies with those affected by them. I am obliged only to communicate them to you,” Hoppe said primly.

Fuck you, Charlie. Peggy didn’t say that, either. A few years earlier, she would have. Maybe she was finally growing up. She rolled her eyes. She didn’t think Herb would believe it. That made her roll them again. God only knew when-or if-she’d see her husband again.

She tried a different tack: “Okay, you’re not obligated. Could you do it because you want to, or because it’d be a civilized kind of thing to do?”

Yes, she’d throw that in Hoppe’s face. And his sallow cheeks did turn red. Russians got ticked off if you called them uncultured. Germans were almost as bad. A lot of them had an inferiority complex about France and England. And, oddly, that had got worse since Hitler took over. It was as if the Nazis were uneasily aware of what a bunch of bastards they were, and embarrassed when somebody called them on it.

“I believe…” Hoppe’s voice trailed away. A little muscle under one eye twitched, the only visible sign of what had to be a struggle inside him. Human being against Nazi functionary? Peggy knew which way she would have bet. But she would have lost, because the Foreign Ministry official went on, “I believe it is to keep people from blaming the Reich for disrupted schedules when those are not of our making.”

Who sank the Athenia? Peggy wondered again. But Hoppe would only deny it one more time if she threw it in his face. If Goebbels was saying the British had done it, that was Holy Writ inside the Third Reich. Hoppe probably believed it himself, even if it seemed like obvious horse manure to Peggy.

“Well, suppose I sign a pledge that says I won’t be offended?” Peggy proposed. “If I badmouth you in the papers or anything, you can haul it out and tell people what a liar I am.”

He shook his head. “No. That is not good. You would claim you signed the document under duress. We have experience with others who prove ungrateful after going beyond our borders.”

And why do you suppose that is? Peggy knew goddamn well why it was. Konrad Hoppe seemed not to have the faintest idea. That he didn’t-that so many like him didn’t-was one measure of modern-day Germany’s damnation.

“I really wouldn’t,” Peggy said. Honest! Cross my heart and hope to die! She would have promised anything and done damn near anything to escape the Reich. If he’d propositioned her, she wouldn’t have loosened his teeth for him. She wouldn’t have come across, but still…

“I am sorry. I have not the discretion to permit this.” Now Hoppe did sound as if he might mean it, anyhow.

“Who does?” Peggy asked. “Ribbentrop?”

“Herr von Ribbentrop may have the authority.” Konrad Hoppe stressed the aristocratic von, which the Nazi Foreign Minister, as Peggy understood it, had bought. “He may, I say.”

“He’s the head of the Foreign Ministry, right?” Peggy said. “If he doesn’t, who does, for crying out loud?”

“Above the Foreign Minister-above everyone-is always the Fuhrer.” Hoppe pointed out the obvious.

“Oh, my aching back!” Peggy burst out. “How am I supposed to get Hitler to pay attention to my case? There’s a war on.”

“I am afraid I can offer on that score no suggestions,” the Nazi bureaucrat answered. “If you will excuse me…” He bowed once more and walked out without waiting to see whether Peggy would excuse him or not.

She thought about getting on the train for Denmark even if the Foreign Ministry said she couldn’t. She not only thought about it, she headed for the station.

She presented her ticket. Then she had to present her passport. The conductor-he wasn’t quite a conductor, but a more prominent kind of official, with a uniform a U.S. major general would have envied-checked her name against a list. As soon as he did that, she knew her goose was cooked. Damn Teutonic thoroughness anyway!

His Toploftiness looked up from the sheet of paper. “I am sorry, but for you travel is verboten,” he said.

“It’s not fair! It’s not right!” she squawked.

The railroad official shrugged. “I am sorry. I can about that nothing do. I do not the orders give. I only carry them out.”

“Right,” Peggy said tightly. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Go back to your hotel,” the man replied. “Wait for German victory. It will soon come. Then, I have no doubt, you will be able where you please to travel. Although, since you are here in the Reich at this world-historical time, why would you anywhere else care to go?”

Peggy could have told him. She came that close- that close-to doing it. In the end, she held her tongue. Yeah, maybe she really and truly was growing up. Or maybe-and more likely-the Gestapo could scare the bejesus out of an immature person, too.

* * *

Vaclav Jezek loved his new antitank rifle. The damn thing was long and heavy. It kicked like a mule. The round it fired was as big as his thumb. Despite that, it wouldn’t penetrate all the armor on a first-rate German panzer. But against side or rear panels, it had a good chance of punching through. Then it would do something nasty to the men inside the metal monster, or maybe to the engine.

He didn’t like the way he’d got his hands on the antitank rifle. The Frenchman who had lugged it around lost the top of his head to a bullet or shell fragment. He wasn’t pretty when Vaclav found him. He’d bled all over the weapon, too. Now, though, you could hardly see the stains.

Somebody moved in the bushes a few hundred meters ahead. Jezek swung the rifle in that direction. It shot nice and flat out to a kilometer and more. What you could see, you could hit, and what you could hit…Using the antitank rifle against a mere soldier was like killing a flea by dropping a house on it. Vaclav didn’t care. He wanted Germans dead, and he wasn’t fussy about how they got that way.

Czechs and Frenchmen and a few Englishmen were all intermingled here. They shouldn’t have been, but the latest German drive had thrown the defenders in the Ardennes into confusion. Jezek had seen that in Czechoslovakia, to his sorrow. After a panzer thrust pierced the line you were trying to hold, you had to scramble like a madman to piece together a new one farther back. And the Germans were still pushing forward, and shelling you, and bombing you…

“Anybody have more clips for the antitank rifle?” he called in Czech. He could have said the same thing in German, but it probably would have got him shot. He didn’t speak French or English.

But one of the French noncoms assigned as liaison to the Czechs translated for Vaclav. The man’s Czech was none too good, but he spoke French fine. And a couple of soldiers coughed up the fat clips Vaclav needed.

“Thanks,” he said as he stowed them in a sack on his belt-they were too big for standard ammunition pouches.

“Any time, pal. I bet I’ve hated the Nazis longer than you have,” the sergeant said. He had a slight guttural accent, curly auburn hair, and a formidable plow of a nose.

Another Jew. They’re fucking everywhere, Jezek thought. The guy named David was back of the lines with a bullet through his leg right now. He’d get better. Whether the line would wasn’t so obvious.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Vaclav said aloud. This fellow wouldn’t duck out of the fight the way the damned Slovaks did, anyhow.

German 105s started tearing up the landscape a few hundred meters off to the south. Nobody in Vaclav’s bunch even flinched. That wasn’t close enough to worry about. The noncom said, “Maybe there’ll be some cows down, and we can get ourselves fresh beef.”

“Or pork.” The words came out of Vaclav’s mouth before he thought about them.

He didn’t faze the noncom in French uniform. “I’ve eaten it,” the guy said. “Beats the crap out of going hungry.”

“Yeah, well, what doesn’t?” Jezek replied.

They never got the chance to see if the Germans had done some worthwhile butchery for a change. Stukas screamed down from a treacherously clear sky. “Down!” Several soldiers yelled the same thing at the same time. Vaclav and the Jewish sergeant were two of them. They both fit action to word. Vaclav was already tearing at the muddy ground with his entrenching tool when the first bombs hit nearby.

Blast jumped on him with hobnailed boots. Fragments of bomb casing screeched malevolently through the air. He kept on impersonating a mole. Stukas came in bigger waves than this.

Sure as hell, more of them wailed down on him and his buddies. He’d heard they had sirens mounted on their landing gear to make them sound even scarier than they would have otherwise. As far as he was concerned, that was overdoing it. The damn things were scary enough anyhow.

The sergeant lay on his back, firing up at them with his rifle. That took guts, but it was bound to be a waste of ammo. How could you hit something that was going 500 kilometers an hour?

People were shrieking and wailing in a godawful Babel of languages. Medics ran here and there, slapping on bandages and lugging wounded soldiers away on stretchers. The medics wore Red Cross armbands and smocks. Some of them had painted Red Crosses in white circles on either side of their helmets. Every so often, they got shot anyway. German medics wore the same kind of outfits. Vaclav had never aimed at one of them on purpose. Still, he was sure they stopped bullets, too.

A French officer shouted something. It might as well have been in Japanese for all the sense it made to Vaclav. The redheaded Jew- just like Judas, Jezek thought-translated: “We’ve got to get back over the Semoy. They’re going to blow the bridges pretty soon, he says, to help stop the Germans.”

“They think that will?” Vaclav didn’t believe it for a minute. The Nazis were too good with pontoon bridges and rubber boats and parachutists and what have you.

“That’s what he says.” After a moment, the sergeant added, “Do you want to get stuck here?”

“Well-no,” Vaclav admitted-the only answer that question could have.

A crackle of machine-gun fire made him hit the dirt again. Here came an obsolete but nasty little Panzer I, spitting bullets from both guns in the turret. No French tanks anywhere close by, of course. They were like policemen-never around when you needed them.

But a Panzer I wasn’t so goddamn tough. Vaclav had heard they were originally intended as nothing more than training vehicles. They got thrown into combat when Hitler jumped Czechoslovakia. Even their frontal armor was only thirteen millimeters thick. That kept out small-arms fire. Anything more…

He worked the bolt and chambered a round. He wasn’t shooting at a Stuka; the little German tank made a fine target. The tank commander, who was also the gunner, sat right between the machine guns. As always, the antitank rifle kicked like a son of a bitch. He’d have a nasty bruise on his shoulder. He didn’t care, though, not when the Panzer I’s machine guns suddenly fell silent.

“Good shot!” the Jewish sergeant yelled. The tank drove on, but so what? The driver couldn’t shoot while he was driving.

And the Allied soldiers on this side of the Semoy couldn’t stop the Nazis. Vaclav thanked God no German bombers struck while he was tramping over the bridge. He would have thanked God a lot more had He done worse to the enemy sooner. In a world where you didn’t get many big favors, you needed to be properly grateful for the small ones.

* * *

“Come on! This way!” The engineer called in a low, urgent voice. Willi Dernen assumed he was an engineer, anyhow. It was the middle of the night, and as black as the Jew Suss’ heart outside. The man went on, “The pontoon bridge is right here. It has rope rails, so hang on to those. And so help me God, you assholes, we’ll drown the first fucking Dummkopf who lights a cigarette before he’s half a kilometer away from it!”

Who would be that stupid? Willi wondered. But the question answered itself. A Dummkopf would, that was who. Like every other outfit in the world, the Wehrmacht had its share and then some. A jerk who decided he needed a smoke right now would damn well light up, and so what if he gave the game away to some watching Frenchman?

Willi’s feet thudded on planks. He reached out and found the rope. It guided him across the Semoy. The bridge swayed under his weight and that of his comrades, almost as if he were on the deck of a boat.

“You heard the man,” Corporal Baatz said loudly. “No smoking!”

The engineer spoke in a deadly whisper: “Whoever you are, big-mouth, shut the fuck up!”

Snickers ran through Baatz’s squad. One of them was Willi’s. He was only an ordinary Landser; he didn’t have the rank to tell Awful Arno where to head in. The engineer sure did-or acted as if he did, which was every bit as good. Baatz didn’t let out another peep, even to protest.

Somebody up ahead said, “Careful. You’re coming to the end of the bridge.” Maybe fifteen seconds later, he said it again, and then again, to let the troops gauge where he was. Willi almost tripped anyhow, when the planking gave way to mud.

“Second platoon, form up on me!” That was Lieutenant Georg Gross, who’d taken Neustadt’s place after the former platoon commander bought his plot. Gross seemed like a pretty good guy, even if he didn’t ride herd on Arno Baatz hard enough to suit Willi. To an officer, Baatz probably looked like a pretty good noncom. That only showed officers weren’t as smart as they thought they were.

Somebody stepped on Willi’s foot. “Ouch!” he said-quietly. “Watch it,” he added.

“Sorry,” the other soldier said, and then, “Willi?”

“Wolfgang?” Willi chuckled. “Well, that’s one way to find each other in the dark.”

“Listen to me, men,” Lieutenant Gross said. “Listen to me, dammit! The objective is Charleville-Mezieres, southwest of here.” The way he pronounced the town’s name said he spoke French, as Neustadt had before him. Much good it had done the other platoon leader. Gross went on, “We’ve got about ten kilometers of marching to do before we get there, maybe twelve. We’ll go through the Bois des Hazelles-the Hazelwood-for part of the way. It should give us some cover.”

“Depends,” Wolfgang Storch muttered. “How many goddamn Frenchies are in it now?”

“Questions?” Gross asked. Nobody said anything loud enough for him to hear it. Wolfgang’s question was a good one, but the lieutenant wouldn’t be able to answer it. They’d have to find out: the hard way, odds were.

Southwest…Willi looked up into the sky, but clouds covered it and told him nothing. He hoped it didn’t start to snow while they were marching. That would be all they needed, wouldn’t it?

Willi might not know southwest from artichokes, but a soft click and a slight rasp said Lieutenant Gross was opening his pocket compass. “This way,” he said confidently. “Follow me.”

Like the fellow at the end of the pontoon bridge, he spoke up every so often to let his men know where he was. Willi tramped along, trying not to think. He wished he were back in Breslau and home in bed, or even wrapped in a blanket in some shell hole. It was cold, and getting colder. Marching warmed, but only so much.

Some people did light up once they got far enough away from the bridge. The smell of harsh French tobacco filled the frosty air. Almost everybody smoked looted Gauloises or Gitanes in preference to the Junos and Privats and other German brands that came up along with the rations. The cigarettes the Wehrmacht got were supposed to be better than what civilians smoked back home. That only went to show better wasn’t the same as good.

Ten or twelve kilometers. A couple of easy hours in the daylight. In black night, feeling his way along, stumbling or falling every so often, getting thwacked by branches that he couldn’t see in the Hazelwood, Willi didn’t have much fun. He also didn’t go very fast. Neither did anyone else.

And there were Frenchmen in the Bois des Hazelles. Willi and his pals had to be coming to the end of it-the sky was starting to go from black to charcoal gray in the southeast-when someone called out, “Qui va?”

“Un ami,” Lieutenant Gross said. Ami meant friend; Willi had picked that up from surrendering Frenchmen. Now-would it do the trick?

It didn’t. The poilu gave forth with a fresh challenge, one Willi didn’t get. Maybe he wanted a password. Whatever he wanted, Gross didn’t have it. The shooting started a moment later.

The froggies, damn them, had a machine gun right there. It spat fire in the darkness. Tracers stabbed out at the oncoming Germans. They were scary as hell. Willi flopped down on his belly and crawled forward like a slug. He didn’t want to get a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to.

As he crawled, he realized that those tracers weren’t doing the guys at the Hotchkiss gun any favors. Every time the machine gunners opened up, they guided their enemies toward them. And it wasn’t really light enough for them to see what they were aiming at. So…

Willi yanked the fuse cord on a potato-masher grenade. He flung it toward the machine gunners, who had no idea he was there. But the grenade hit a branch or something, because it didn’t burst where he wanted it to. The Frenchmen serving the gun yelled, but they didn’t scream. He froze. If they spotted him, he was sausage meat-and it was getting lighter.

Something off to one side distracted them. They turned the Hotchkiss in that direction and started banging away. They nailed somebody, too. That shriek sounded bad. But, while they were busy over there, Willi slithered behind a-hazel?-tree.

He pulled another grenade off his belt. He threw this one sidearm: not the way they taught you in basic, but he wanted to keep it low so it didn’t bounce off anything. Then he flattened out again. If this one didn’t do the job, though, he had the bad feeling flattening out wouldn’t be enough to save his young ass.

Bang! He got screams this time. Then it was forward, as fast as he could scramble. He had no idea how badly hurt the Frenchmen were. He had to finish them before they or their buddies got that machine gun going again.

They were down. They were thrashing, not worried about the Hotchkiss at all. He shot them to make sure they didn’t worry about anything else again. He was putting a fresh clip on his Mauser when a shape loomed up out of the morning twilight. He started to give it the bayonet, but checked himself when he recognized the familiar shape of a Stahlhelm.

With a dry chuckle, Corporal Baatz said, “I would’ve plugged you before you could drive that home.”

“Let’s go after the Frenchmen,” Willi answered, and left it right there. He didn’t think Baatz could have got him if he’d followed through, and he was half sorry he hadn’t. Maybe more than half sorry.

More machine guns-and poilus with rifles, grenades, mortars, and all the other usual nastiness-crowded the Hazelwood. Methodically, the Germans cleaned them out and pressed on toward Charleville-Mezieres. Panzers drew tracks across the snow on the flat, open country south and east of the woods. Pillars of smoke rising to the cloudy sky marked the pyres of a couple that would go no farther. But the runners were the ones that mattered. The French tried to make a stand in front of the town. Cannon and machine-gun fire from the German army sent them tumbling back in retreat.

Willi looked around. There was Wolfgang. His bayonet had blood on it-not Arno Baatz’s, but somebody’s, all right. “Where’s the lieutenant?” Willi asked him.

“Down. I bet he loses his arm,” Wolfgang answered. “The fucking Hotchkiss got him just before somebody did for it.”

“That was me,” Willi said.

“Yeah? Well, it needed doing.” Storch paused to light up. Then he said, “Sergeant Pieck caught one right through the foot, too. That means Awful Arno’s got a section-maybe the platoon, till they give us a new officer.”

“Jesus Christ! I knew I should have stuck him!” Willi explained how he’d almost bayoneted Baatz by the French machine gun. His buddy was good for even more reasons why he should have than he’d thought of for himself. Willi pulled a pack of Gauloises out of his pocket, but the familiar winged helmet shielded no more cigarettes. “Let me bum a butt off you.”

“What a useless creature you are! First you didn’t scrag the corporal, and now you steal my smokes.” Wolfgang gave him his own pack. Willi did have a match. He got the cigarette going. The two Landsers tramped on.

* * *

The Poles had a good medium bomber. The PZL P-37 could carry more than twice the bomb load of a Tupolev SB-2. Fortunately for the Red Army and Air Force, the Poles didn’t have a hell of a lot of them. Whenever the enemy found a chance, he did his best to strike at the airstrips the Red Air Force used.

Sergei Yaroslavsky took those raids for granted. The Poles made them at high altitude, and they got out of Soviet airspace in a hurry. An occasional bomb gave the groundcrew some work to do repairing a runway. More often than not, the bombs missed by hundreds of meters or even by kilometers. Nothing to get excited about.

Then things changed. Sergei was barely awake when antiaircraft guns around the airstrip started banging away at sunrise. He tumbled out of his cot, wondering if the gunners had the galloping jimjams.

They didn’t. Bombs crashed down on the runways and on the bombers near them. Not all the bombers were in revetments, the way they should have been. It hadn’t seemed worth the trouble.

“Those aren’t Elks!” somebody yelled-that was the P-37’s nickname. “Those are motherfucking Stukas!”

“Bozhemoi!” Yaroslavsky shouted. A bombardier said something electric about the way the Devil’s grandmother had buggered up the antiaircraft guns. Satan and his relatives might be as out of fashion as God, but people hadn’t forgotten about them, either.

Sergei threw himself flat in the snow. That was all he could do now. One after another, the Fascist dive-bombers stooped on the airstrip like falcons after pigeons.

Pigeons could at least try to get away. To mix the metaphor, the bombers on the ground were sitting ducks. And, while the pilots of those Ju-87s might be goddamn Nazi bastards, they were also more than competent professionals. One after another, they released their bombs, fired a burst from their forward machine guns, pulled out of their dives, and zoomed off to the northwest. They might almost have performed an aerial ballet.

The Germans had a word for that kind of ballet (they would): a Totentanz, a dance of death. Here, they were dishing it out. The Soviets had no choice but to take it.

Machine-gun bullets thudded into the snowbank, much too close to Sergei. Little white powdery puffs shot up into the air at the impacts. If a round hit him, a little red fountain might join the white. He burrowed into the drift. Burrowing wouldn’t do him a kopek’s worth of good, but he did it anyway. Fear and instinct drove harder than reason.

Not all the explosions came from German bombs. The SB-2s had been gassed up and bombed up. Before long, they would have taken off and punished the semifascist Poles. Well, behind the semifascist Poles loomed the Fascist Germans. And, no matter how virtuous the Soviets might be, they were getting hammered this morning.

Ever so cautiously, Sergei stuck up his head. The Stukas were gone, which didn’t make the airstrip a safe place. An SB-2 a couple of hundred meters away was burning like the inside of a blast furnace. Ammunition for the plane’s guns cooked off with a cheerful popping noise, spraying bullets every which way. And then one of the bombs-or maybe all of the bombs-blew.

What had been a fire turned into a fireball. Stunned, half deafened, Sergei burrowed into the snow again. Something large and hot smashed down well behind him-the explosion had thrown it a long, long way. He could tell it was hot because even his afflicted ears made out the hiss of steam coming off it as the snow put it out.

Another Tupolev bomber blew up, not quite so spectacularly-or maybe it was just farther away. Several more were on fire. One hadn’t burned, but was broken in half behind the bomb bay. Intact SB-2s were the exception, not the rule. Whatever punishment the Poles were going to get would have to come from some other airstrip today.

Sergei made himself stand up. He looked around to see what he could do that might help. Other dazed survivors were also emerging from the snow like hares coming out of their burrows. Steaming patches here and there marked big chunks of wreckage.

And bloody patches here and there marked dead and wounded men. What looked like a chunk of aileron had decapitated the best mechanic at the airstrip. Sergei swore, but nobody could do anything for that poor son of a bitch now. The fellows who thrashed and writhed still had hope. Some of them did, anyhow.

Stooping beside a groundcrew man who groaned as he clutched a shattered ankle, Sergei wondered what kind of hope the man had. If he didn’t bleed to death or die of gangrene or septicemia, he’d survive. The bomber pilot was no doctor, but he didn’t see how the groundcrew man would keep that foot. What kind of life did a cripple have?

You should have wondered about that sooner, he thought. But pilots seldom got crippled. If anything went wrong in the air, or if your plane got shot down, you were likely to buy the whole plot, not part of one. Nobody in the USSR bought or sold or owned land, but Soviet flyers talked the same way as their Western counterparts.

After doing what he could to bandage the groundcrew man and telling a few reassuring lies, Sergei looked northwest once more: after the long-gone Stukas. In Czechoslovakia, he’d seen the Germans were good. Now he saw how good they could be with the advantage of surprise. How smart were we to get into a war with people like this? he wondered.