Hitler's war

Chapter Twenty two

“Moscow speaking,” the radio announced. It was 0600. Sergei Yaroslavsky drank a glass of sugared tea, hot from the samovar. Pilots and navigators jammed the ready room at the Byelorussian airstrip. A Stuka could have taken out the whole squadron with a well-aimed bomb. The Nazis were sleeping late-or later, anyhow. The Soviet flyers hungered for news, not least because it might tell them what they would be doing next.

Smoke from almost as many papirosi as there were Red Air Force officers in the ready room blued the air. Somebody got up and made the radio louder. When he sat down, someone else patted him on the back, as if to say Good job! Yes, they were all jumpy this early morning.

“Comrades! Soviet citizens! Our motherland has been invaded!” the news reader said solemnly. “Without provocation, without warning, the Empire of Japan has launched a multipronged attack against the Siberian districts of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic of the peace-loving USSR. Severe fighting is reported in several areas. All drives against the Trans-Siberian Railroad have already been blunted or soon will be-so Red Army commanders in the field have assured General Secretary Stalin. Under his leadership, victory of the Soviet workers and peasants is assured.”

Sergei nodded. So did almost everybody else in the ready room. Some officers, he was sure, had no doubts that what was coming out of the radio was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And if you did have doubts, looking as if you didn’t was even more important. People couldn’t suspect what they didn’t see.

The announcer went on and on about towns bombed from the air, atrocities on the ground, and numbers of Japanese soldiers killed. Except for civilians, he said not a word about Soviet casualties. There must have been some; chances were they were heavy. Sergei was sure he wasn’t the only one to notice the omission. Notice or not, the Red Air Force officers went right on nodding.

“Foreign Commissar Litvinov has pledged that this war against the Japanese will have a result different from that of the Tsar’s corrupt regime in 1905,” the newsreader finished. Sergei cheered and clapped his hands. So did everyone else. Nobody could be proud of Russia’s performance in the Russo-Japanese War.

After a pause, the announcer talked about fighting in the Soviet west. “The rasputitsa has made movement difficult for both sides,” he admitted. That wasn’t the smallest understatement Sergei had ever heard. Eastern Poland and western Byelorussia were somewhere between swamp and bog. The Germans still occasionally flew off paved runways. The Red Air Force was grounded.

“In western Europe, the fighting in France has reached what the Germans call a decisive phase,” the fellow went on. “The French government denies German claims that there is fighting inside the Paris city limits. The French and English admit heavy fighting continues east and northeast and even north of the French capital. They state they still hope to halt and eventually repel the latest German thrust, however.”

He spoke with an air of prissy disapproval, like an important man’s plump wife talking about the facts of life. As far as the USSR was concerned, the imperialists were hardly better than the Fascists. But the Soviet Union and England and France had the same enemies at the moment. Expedience could trump ideology.

And, sure enough, the newsreader sounded a little warmer when he said, “British and French bombing of German territory seems to be picking up-judging, at least, by the outraged bleats emanating from Hen Goebbels. If one listens to the Germans, their opponents take care to bomb only schoolhouses, orphanages, and hospitals.”

Sergei chuckled. Then he wondered why he was laughing. Yes, German propaganda was pretty ham-fisted. But wasn’t what poured out of Soviet radios just as clumsy?

That was something a good Soviet citizen wasn’t supposed to notice. After all, didn’t Pravda mean Truth? Maybe only someone who was serving in the military-maybe only someone serving in the military who’d spent some time in a foreign country-would notice the discrepancies. Once you spotted a few lies, though, you started wondering what else you heard was malarkey.

Across the table, Anastas Mouradian sat there smoking papirosi one after another. Did irony fill his liquid black eyes, or was that only Sergei’s imagination? Anastas was going to get in trouble one of these days. Anybody who looked ironic in the middle of the morning news was bound to get noticed. The only surprise was, it had already taken this long.

When the announcer shifted to increased production and overfulfillment of the Five-Year Plan’s norms, the officers started to relax. This was only fluff; they’d already got the meat from the news. If you were careful, you could smile about this stuff without risking too much.

At last, music replaced the news. “Two fronts,” remarked the flyer from Siberia, the guy who came from a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk and laughed at the cold weather here. Quickly, Bogdan Koroteyev added, “It’s not what we wanted, of course, but it’s what we’ve got.”

“We’ll win anyhow,” Anastas Mouradian said. Sergei nodded vigorously. He grinned at his crewmate. That was how you were supposed to talk! He had his doubts whether Anastas meant it, but what did that have to do with anything? The picture you showed the outside world was more important (to your survival, anyhow) than whatever you carried deep inside your heart.

“You’d better believe we will,” Lieutenant Colonel Borisov boomed. “We can whip the little yellow monkeys with one hand tied behind our back, and as soon as things are dry here we’ll show the Nazis and Poles what we can do.”

No one argued with the squadron commander. For one thing, he was the squadron commander. For another, what he said was bound to be the Party line. Russia hadn’t beaten the Japanese the last time around, but it was easy to blame that on Tsarist corruption, as the radio announcer had. The Red Army had performed well in recent border clashes.

Well, it had if you believed the news. Sergei wished he hadn’t started wondering about what he heard on the radio and read in the papers. It made him wonder about everything. Oh, well. What could you do? Doubting the official stories might give you a better notion of what was really going on. What was the phrase in the Bible? You saw through a glass, darkly-that was it. In the USSR, that was likely to be your closest approach to truth.

No enemy planes came overhead. If German or Polish bombers had taken off from paved runways, they were harassing other Soviet fields. And the SB-2s here couldn’t fly even if the pilots wanted to. As with the winter blizzards, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around and wait.

Somebody pulled out a bottle of vodka. It was early to start drinking. Sergei thought so, anyhow. By the way Bogdan Koroteyev tilted back the bottle, he started at this heathen hour all the time-or maybe he hadn’t stopped from the night before. Sergei took a swig, too, when the bottle came his way. Why not? You didn’t want to look like a wet blanket or anything.

* * *

Newsboys hawked the Volkischer Beobachter on every street corner in Berlin. “Decisive battle in France!” they yelled. DECISIVE BATTLE IN FRANCE! the newspaper headline shouted in what had to be 144-point type. The photo under the headline showed three Wehrmacht men, rifles in hand, leaping over some obstacle in unison. Except for the weapons and helmets, they might have been Olympic hurdlers. NOTHING CAN STOP OUR INFANTRY! the subhead boasted.

“Paper, lady?” asked a towheaded kid of about fourteen. If the war lasted long enough, he’d put on the same uniform the soldiers on the front page were wearing.

See how you like it then, you little son of a bitch, Peggy Druce thought. Aloud, all she said was, “Nein, danke.” In another block or two, she knew she’d have to do it again.

Boys, old men, women…The only men of military age were cops, soldiers and sailors on leave, and middle-aged fellows who’d been too badly wounded in the last war to have to wear the uniform this time around. She supposed some farmers and doctors and factory workers were also exempt, but she didn’t see them. Whatever jobs they had, they were busy doing them.

Another newsboy cried a different headline: “Soviet Russia now encircled in a ring of steel!” Several people stopped to pay a few pfennigs for his paper. The Germans like that idea. When they thought about it, they didn’t have to think that the Reich was fighting a two-front war.

Peggy wouldn’t have called a half-assed fight over here and what might be a bigger, more serious one way the hell over there a ring of steel. A ring with gaps so big would fall off your finger pretty damn quick. But the Goebbels school of newspaper writing had perpetrated far worse atrocities. Even a Hearst headline man might have come up with this one.

A big, beefy cop came out of his tavern. He was in his fifties, with a big mustache he’d probably grown before the last war and never bothered to shave off. At the moment, he was using a prehensile lower lip to suck beer foam out of it. He saw Peggy watching him do it. To cover his embarrassment, he did just what she’d known he would: he held out his hand and said, “Papieren, bitte!”

Out came her American passport. “Here,” she said. “I’m a neutral, as you see.”

He scowled at the passport, and at her. “In the struggle against Bolshevism and world Jewry, there can be no neutrals,” he declared. Some Germans really did talk that way, the same as some Communists really did parrot the Moscow line. Then he said, “Come to the station with me, so my captain can decide what to do with you.”

“To the station?” Peggy yelped. “You’ve got no right!”

“I am an officer of police,” the cop said importantly. “Of course I have the right.” In Hitler’s Germany, he damn well did, too. He touched the billy club on his belt. “Do you defy my authority?” I’ll bust your head open if you do.

“No,” she said. “But let me see your papers, please. I will complain to my embassy, and I want to know who you are.”

“Ha! Much good it will do you!” He showed her his ID willingly enough. His name was Lorenz Muller. Peggy wrote it down. She didn’t think the embassy would be able to do anything, either, but it was the only card she had, so she played it with as much panache as she could.

The station was only a couple of blocks away. Except for his uniform and haircut, the desk sergeant looked like a desk sergeant back in the States: fat and bored but wary, in other words. Muller spewed out a stream of German, too fast for Peggy to follow it. The sergeant listened, then turned to her. “What happened?” he asked.

“I said I was a neutral, and I am-I’m an American. And he got angry at me and brought me here,” Peggy answered.

“An American? Let me see your passport, please.” When the desk sergeant said please, he sounded as if he meant it. Peggy handed him the passport. After studying it, he gave it back. “Yes, it is in order. Danke schon. You may go.”

“What?” Lorenz Muller spluttered furiously-for about a second and a half. Then, without raising his voice, the desk sergeant gave him the most thorough reaming out Peggy had ever heard. She understood maybe one word in three, but that was plenty. Muller would’ve needed to get plopped into a specimen jar as soon as he was born to be as congenitally idiotic as the sergeant claimed, and he would have had to be 165 years old to have acquired all the vices the sergeant imputed to him. By the time the man got done, nothing was left of Muller but a demoralized puddle of goo on the floor. So it seemed to Peggy, anyhow.

“I am sorry you ran into this…individual,” the desk sergeant told her. She’d never dreamt the word could sound so filthy. “By all means visit your embassy. A formal complaint will go into his record, which is good.”

By then, she didn’t want to. She found herself pitying Muller, which she wouldn’t have dreamt possible a few minutes earlier. As she walked out of the station, the sergeant tore into the cop again-something about getting the Reich in bad with an important neutral power. Let’s hear it for the Red, White, and Blue, Peggy thought. Yeah! Let’s!

In the end, she did go by the embassy. The underlings quickly shunted her up to Constantine Jenkins, whose job probably included dealing with obstreperous tourists. He heard her out and then said, “Sounds like the sergeant did worse to this fellow than we could manage in a month of Sundays.”

“Ain’t it the truth!” she said. “All the same, I do want you to make a formal complaint.”

“Just remember that the official head of the Prussian police is Hermann Goring,” Jenkins said. “He won’t listen. If he does listen, he won’t care.”

“I understand all that,” Peggy said. “I still want to get it on the record.”

“Okay. I’ll do it,” Jenkins promised. “Maybe it’ll keep some other American from getting dragged to a police station because he runs into a cop in a lousy mood.”

“That’d be good,” Peggy said. “See? I’m a public benefactor.” She’d been a lot of things in her time, but that was a new one.

Undersecretary Jenkins gave her a look that would have been fishy if not for the half-hidden amusement she spotted. “What you are is a troublemaker,” he said accurately. “And you enjoy making trouble for the Third Reich, too.”

“Who, me?” Peggy couldn’t possibly have been as innocent as she sounded. And, as a matter of fact, she wasn’t.

* * *

Hans-ulrich Rudel gulped from a big mug of steaming black coffee. Plenty of pilots in the squadron were keeping themselves going with benzedrine. Hans-Ulrich thought pills were even more unnatural than alcohol. He didn’t want to use them. If he had to, though, if it meant victory for the Reich…

And any one mission might. He knew that. They were so close, so close. The radio kept going on about the Battle of France, the decisive battle. If they could break through the enemy’s lines, he’d never be able to form new ones. Maybe nobody in the whole battle could see that as well as the flyers who went after the French strongpoints.

He wondered whether the Allied fighter pilots had that same sense of seeing the whole chessboard at once when they looked down from five or six thousand meters. Or were they just trying to spot the Stukas before the German dive-bombers roared down and blasted another bridge or train or battery of 75s to hell and gone?

He shrugged. He had more immediate things to worry about. The German attack had accomplished a lot. It had knocked the Low Countries out of the war. It had pushed French and English ground forces back from the middle of Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. The enemy was on the ropes.

But he wasn’t out, worse luck. And, while German supply lines had got longer and thinner, those of the Allies had contracted. The irony facing the Germans was that success made further success harder. Nobody on the other side could be in much doubt about what the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe had in mind any more, either. That made planning easier for the forces in khaki.

Which didn’t mean the forces in Feldgrau couldn’t still win. Hans-Ulrich was flying off an airstrip in northern France. Not long before, it had been a French strip. A couple of smashed French fighters still lay alongside the runway. German technicians had cannibalized them for usable parts-they were just scrap metal now.

Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Rudel hoped it came from his own side, giving the Allies hell. Otherwise, French and English guns would be pounding the Landsers. He thanked God he was no foot soldier. He slept soft, and in a real bed-a cot, anyway. He ate well. Most of the time, he was in no danger. The enemy could still kill him. That came with any kind of military life. But he wouldn’t be hungry and filthy and lousy when it happened, if it happened. He wasn’t scared all the time, either.

Of course, when he was, he was about as scared as any human being could be. That also held true for the infantry, though. It was true for the ground pounders a lot more often than it was for him, too.

Sergeant Dieselhorst came by, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He sketched a salute and asked, “Have they told you what we’re doing next?”

“Not yet.” Hans-Ulrich pointed toward Major Bleyle’s tent. “As soon as the boss lets me know, I’ll tell you.”

“If they haven’t hauled him off in the middle of the night,” Dieselhorst remarked.

Hans-Ulrich looked around in all directions. Nobody stood close to them, and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to what they were saying. Even so, he wagged a finger at the rear gunner. “If you aren’t careful, they’ll haul you off in the middle of the night,” he warned.

“Yeah, I know.” Dieselhorst made a sour face. “That’s not what I signed up for, dammit.”

“Neither did I,” Rudel said. “Who would have dreamt so many traitors to the Vaterland were still running around loose?”

“Yeah. Who?” Dieselhorst said tonelessly. The cigarette twitched as he eyed Hans-Ulrich. At last, almost against his better judgment, he went on, “Who knows how many of them really are traitors, too?”

“What else would they be, if the government arrested them?” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed.

Sergeant Dieselhorst’s cigarette jerked again. “That’s right. You’re the milk drinker.” He might have been reminding himself. “Sometimes people get arrested because they tell friends the truth. Sometimes they get arrested because somebody with pull doesn’t like them. And sometimes, by God, they get arrested for no reason at all.”

“Dirty traitors tried to overthrow the Fuhrer and stab us in the back again!” Rudel said hotly. “Where would we be if they’d got away with it?”

“Better off?” Albert Dieselhorst suggested. Then he held up his hand. “And if you don’t care for that, go tell one of the pigdogs in a black shirt about it. You’ll have a new gunner faster than you can fart.”

“I don’t want a new gunner. I want-”

Before Hans-Ulrich could say what he wanted, Dieselhorst did it for him: “You want a good little boy who never makes trouble and never looks past the end of his nose unless he’s aiming at the enemy. You want somebody just like you. I wish I were, Lieutenant-you can bet your ass it’d make my life simpler. But I’ve got pals-better Germans than I’ll ever be-in concentration camps or dead because those SS bastards hauled ‘em out of bed in the middle of the night. This isn’t Russia, dammit. This is a civilized country, or it’s supposed to be.”

Had a flyer Rudel didn’t know well said anything like that, he would have reported the man to the SS without the least hesitation. But he was alive not least because Sergeant Dieselhorst was good at what he did. By any reasonable definition, Dieselhorst was a good German, a patriotic German. If he was talking this way…

“You’re upset. You’re not yourself,” Hans-Ulrich said.

Dieselhorst stamped out the cigarette. “I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re trying to say. This whole war is a lot more fucked up than you’ve figured out yet. And some of the people who’re running it-”

“Don’t say any more. I don’t want to listen to it,” Rudel said. “All I have to do is fly. The same with you, too.”

“Christ, Lieutenant, flying is the easy part-any jerk with an airplane can do that,” Dieselhorst said. “Trying to steer clear of the shit that pours down from on high, that’s where the going gets tough.”

“Well, let’s see what we have to do, that’s all.” Hans-Ulrich was grateful for the chance to turn away. As far as Sergeant Dieselhorst was concerned, he was part of the shit that poured down from on high. They’d gone through much too much together for Hans-Ulrich to feel easy about turning in the sergeant now. He’d keep his mouth shut-for the moment, anyway.

“Gisors,” Major Bleyle said a few minutes later. “They’re pushing supplies through there to the front near Beauvais.” He whacked a map with a pointer. “Gisors is about seventy kilometers northwest of Paris. You’ll recognize it by the castle and the cathedral. Here are some photos.” He passed around the reconnaissance shots. “Railroad and highway. Pick your targets when we get there. We’ll try to knock out both routes. Questions?” He waited. Nobody raised a hand. “All right, then. Good luck, everybody.”

Rudel and Dieselhorst stuck to business as the pilot taxied the Stuka out of the revetment and got it into the air. Hans-Ulrich felt bruised by their earlier encounter. He wondered if Dieselhorst did, too. One more thing he couldn’t ask…

Messerschmitt 109s accompanied the Ju-87s as they flew west. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen a 110 for quite a while. The two-engined fighters hadn’t lived up to expectations over the North Sea and England. Maybe they’d gone back to the shop for retooling. Or maybe the idea wasn’t as good as the high foreheads in the design bureau thought it would be.

Antiaircraft fire came up as soon as they crossed the front. It was heavy and alarmingly accurate. The Allies had more and more guns shooting at the Luftwaffe. They knew what was at stake here as well as the Germans did. French and British fighters attacked, too. The 109s darted away to take them on. Then more fighters jumped the dive-bombers.

They were French machines, not too fast and not too heavily armed. The 109s outclassed them. Stukas, unfortunately, didn’t. Hans-Ulrich threw his all over the sky, trying to dodge the enemy fighters. It was like trying to make a rhinoceros dance. Even when you did it, the result was none too graceful. Sergeant Dieselhorst’s machine gun chattered again and again.

“How you doing back there?” Rudel asked him.

“They haven’t shot me yet. That’s something, anyway,” the rear gunner answered. “How are we doing?”

It was a fair question-several bullets had hit the Stuka. “Everything shows green,” Hans-Ulrich said. A Ju-87 could take a lot of punishment. The war had shown that the dive-bomber needed to. Rudel’s head might have been on a swivel. “Now which way is Gisors?” He’d done so much frantic jinking, he didn’t know north from sauerkraut.

He spotted what he thought was the cathedral steeple a moment before Major Bleyle’s voice dinned in his earphones: “Abort! Break off! We’re losing too many planes!”

“Devil take me if I will,” Hans-Ulrich muttered to himself. To Sergeant Dieselhorst, he added, “I have the target. I’m going into my dive.”

“What about Bleyle’s orders?”

“What about ‘em?” Rudel shoved the control column forward. The Stuka’s nose went down. Acceleration slammed him back against the armored seat. Damned if that wasn’t a truck column on the road. Even if this wasn’t Gisors after all-plenty of little French towns had cathedrals-he’d do some damage. He yanked at the bomb-release lever, then pulled up for all he was worth.

In the rear seat, Sergeant Dieselhorst whooped. “What a fireworks show! They must have been hauling ammo!”

“Gut. Sehr gut,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Officially, of course, I never heard the major’s order to withdraw.”

“What order was that, sir?” Dieselhorst said innocently. Rudel laughed, then grimaced. Ignoring orders, disobeying orders…Once such things started, where did they stop? With trying to overthrow the Fuhrer?

But I helped the Reich more than I would have by obeying, he thought. Maybe the conspirators had felt the same way. He shrugged. He was loyal. He knew it. His superiors did, too.

Pretty soon, they’d refill the Stuka’s gas tank and bomb her up again, and he and Dieselhorst would go off and try this again. And, if they came back from that run, they’d do it one more time, and one more after that, till the war was won and they didn’t have to worry about it any more. As long as you looked at things the right way, they were pretty simple.

* * *

Somebody kicked Willi Dernen in the ribs. He grunted and folded up on himself and tried to go back to sleep. After a few seconds, the German marching boot thudded into him again. He grunted once more, louder this time. Reluctantly, his eyes opened.

“There you go,” Corporal Baatz said. “Time to get moving again.”

“Your mother, Arno,” Dernen said. With great determination, he screwed his eyes shut again.

Arno Baatz kicked him yet again, this time with real malice. He knew just where to put a boot to make it hurt most. Willi wondered how he knew. Had he learned in noncom school along with other bastardry, or maybe from an SS interrogator? Or was it just natural talent? It worked the same any which way. Willi sat up, clutching at the injured part. As with Macbeth, Baatz had murdered sleep. “Get it in gear,” he snapped. “Nobody put you on leave.”

Willi staggered to the bushes to take a leak. He was still yawning when he came back. No one who hadn’t been through a campaign had the faintest notion of how exhausting war was. Some men could get kicked almost to death without waking up, let alone marching. The mechanism simply wore down. Willi wasn’t there yet, but he wasn’t far from that dreadful place.

Maybe breakfast would help. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. He took out his mess tin and advanced on the field kitchen. The cooks spooned the tin full of slop. They called it porridge, but that gave it too much credit. They took everything remotely edible they could find and boiled it all together in a giant kettle. It ended up tasting the way library paste smelled.

The coffee, by contrast was pretty good. That was because it wasn’t Wehrmacht issue. Like the cigarettes the Landsers smoked, it was the good stuff, foraged from French farms and villages-and, no doubt, corpses. Wolfgang Storch already had a tin cup’s worth. “You know you’re beat to shit when even this stuff won’t make your heart turn over,” he said sadly.

“Tell me about it,” Willi agreed. He gulped the coffee anyway. He certainly didn’t move slower with it inside him. If he moved any slower, he’d be dead. The stink that fouled what should have been a fine spring morning reminded him how easy dying was these days. The Wehrmacht was still pushing forward, so what he smelled were mostly dead Frenchmen. Dead Germans were no sweeter to the nose, though.

Lieutenant Krantz took advantage of having most of his men gathered together. “We have to get through,” the platoon commander said earnestly. “We aren’t as far along as we ought to be. The more we fall behind schedule, the better the chance we give the enemy. If he stops us here, he can reinforce his positions north of Paris. That wouldn’t be good-not a bit.”

A few of the soldiers eating breakfast and smoking managed weary nods. Willi didn’t have the energy. He knew too damned well why they hadn’t come farther or gone faster. Anybody with a gram of sense did. The terrain in the Ardennes sucked, and they didn’t have enough panzers along to punch through the Frenchmen and their friends blocking the way west. Most of the goodies-and most of the air support-went to the right wing, the one punching ahead somewhere to the northwest. The plan had almost worked in the last war. The High Command had decided it just needed to make the fist a little bigger this time around.

And maybe the High Command knew what it was doing, and maybe it had its head up it ass. One reason you fought wars was to find out things like that.

Willi washed out his mess tin and stowed it on his belt. He put on his helmet and picked up his Mauser. The rifle was just over four kilos; it only seemed to weigh a tonne. He couldn’t even sling it. He had to carry it instead-the French were too damned close.

As if to remind him of that, a Hotchkiss machine gun stuttered awake. The malign rattle made his asshole pucker. Somewhere up ahead lay Laon, which the Germans had been bombing and shelling for days. How many French soldiers still crouched in the ruins with rifles and machine guns and grenades-waiting?

“Come on,” Lieutenant Krantz said. “We’ve got to move up, and that damned gun is in the way.”

Well, I’m awake now, Willi thought as he heaved himself to his feet. Raw terror burned away exhaustion. And anybody who had to stalk a well-sited machine gun-and this one would be, because the Frenchies knew how to play the game, too-made an intimate acquaintance with terror.

Farms in these parts were small. Stone fences separated one from another. Poilus lurked behind the fences. Every so often, one of them would pop up and shoot. Or a mortar team would lob a couple of bombs from God knew where. Willi hated mortars. You couldn’t hear the rounds coming till they got right on top of you, which was just exactly too late.

“There!” Wolfgang pointed. The machine gun was firing from a stone farmhouse’s window narrowed to a slit with more building stones. Willi swore under his breath. This one would be a bitch and a half to get rid of. The position was shielded against anything this side of an antitank gun.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Lieutenant Krantz spoke into the radio set a lance-corporal got to lug. Fifteen minutes later, a fellow with a couple of tanks on his back and a sinister-looking nozzle in his hand came forward. Everyone shied away from him. He didn’t seem to care, or maybe he was used to the response by now.

“Keep them busy, all right?” he said. The German soldiers nodded. You wanted a flamethrower man on your side to succeed, but you felt faintly guilty when he did. Nobody mourned a flamethrower man who got roasted by his own hellish device, either. And Willi had never heard of anyone who managed to surrender with that apparatus on his back.

But that wasn’t his worry, except at one remove. He raised up from behind a boulder and took a shot at the machine gun’s firing slit. He ducked back down as soon as he’d pulled the trigger-and a good thing, too, because the Hotchkiss promptly spat lead his way. The froggies in the farmhouse were mighty alert. Willi hoped the miserable bastard with the flamethrower had his life insurance paid up.

One of his buddies groaned. Somebody else yelled for a medic. If you poked a bear in its den, you were liable to get clawed. The last thing Willi wanted was to rise up again and shoot at the slit. He did it anyway, which proved what a strong thing Wehrmacht training was-and, even more, how powerful was his fear of looking bad in front of his squadmates. Without that fundamental fear, nobody could have fought a war.

When he rose up one more time, the muzzle of the Hotchkiss was pointing straight at him. Before the Frenchies could shoot him, though, the flamethrower man used his toy. Foomp! Even across several hundred meters, Willi heard the man-made dragon’s noise. Fire engulfed the machine gun and the firing slit-and whoever had the bad luck to be right behind them.

German soldiers whooped. Even so, nobody seemed especially eager to show himself. Maybe more Frenchmen had dragged their charred friends away from the trigger and were waiting to give optimists or fools-assuming there was a difference-a nasty surprise.

The flamethrower man solved that problem. He crawled right up to the farmhouse, stuck his nozzle into the firing slit, and… Foomp! He cocked his head to one side, as if listening. Then he waved. No more trouble here, the gesture said.

Willi still wasn’t enthusiastic about standing up, but he did. The soldiers trotted forward as smoke rose from the farmhouse. The breeze came out of the west, as it commonly did. Willi’s nose wrinkled. Along with woodsmoke, he caught the reek of burnt meat. The flamethrower had done its job, all right.

Even so, nobody wanted much to do with the fellow who carried it. He stood there, a little more smoke trailing from the snout of his infernal machine. Again, he didn’t seem particularly surprised or disappointed. Well, why would he? How many times had he seen this same response by now?

Lieutenant Krantz pointed toward Laon. His officer’s whistle squealed. “Come on!” he yelled. “Not far now! Follow me!”

An officer who said that made his troops want to do it. All the same, the infantrymen hesitated. That rattling clatter out of the east, getting louder now…“Panzers!” Willi said in delight. “Our panzers!” He hadn’t seen many of them.

These two little Panzer Is were no more than mobile machine-gun nests. Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot, though. Both panzer commanders stood up in their turrets. They waved to the foot soldiers, who returned the compliment. “Come with us,” one of the men in black coveralls shouted over engine noise. “Keep the French pigdogs away.”

“And you keep them away from us,” Lieutenant Krantz said. The panzer commander who’d spoken before nodded. Everybody needed help now and then.

Willi loped along to the left of the panzers. A French machine gun fired at them, which was stupid. Its bullets couldn’t hurt them. One of the panzers crushed the sandbagged position, turning back and forth and round and round on top of it to make sure nothing in there survived.

Then a rifle of a sort Willi hadn’t heard before went off-a big boom that would have set anyone’s teeth on edge. What followed wasn’t the ping of a ricochet, either. That round punched clear on through the baby panzer’s thin frontal armor. The machine kept going in a straight line till it rammed a big oak and stopped. Driver’s hit, Willi realized. German had antitank rifles, too, but you didn’t expect to run up against one right after you’d finally picked up some armor.

War wasn’t what you expected. It was what you got. What the surviving panzer got was out of there. Its crew knew that antitank rifle could do for them, too. And it did. Two rounds into the engine compartment turned the panzer into an immobile machine-gun nest. “We go on regardless,” Lieutenant Krantz declared. Willi was still willing to advance. Able? He’d just have to see.

* * *

Vaclav Jezek sprawled behind a chunk of chimney that a shell hit had detached from a nearby house. He chambered another round in his antitank rifle and waited. The crew of that disabled Panzer I wouldn’t stay inside long. A hit from any kind of artillery would mangle them and torch them at the same time. A couple of more hits from the antitank rifle might set the tank on fire.

Sure enough, the commander clambered out of the turret. The Czech was ready. Despite a muzzle brake and a padded stock, the antitank rifle slammed his shoulder when he pulled the trigger. He’d already seen that, although these 13mm armor-piercing rounds weren’t designed to kill mere human beings, they did one hell of a job. The German in black coveralls never knew what hit him. He tumbled off the tank and lay still.

The driver was sneakier, or maybe smarter. He scuttled out and kept the tank’s carcass between him and Jezek till he bolted for some trees. Jezek shot at him, too, but missed. “Shit!” he said in disgust.

Sergeant Halevy had dug himself a foxhole a few meters away, and fronted it with bricks and stones from the ruined house. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar,” he said. “You did what you were supposed to do. Neither one of those tanks’ll bother us any more.”

“Fuck it,” Vaclav said. “I should have finished the other cocksucker, too.”

“You can’t kill all of them by yourself,” the Jew said. “Remember, you’ve got to leave some for me.”

“Heh,” Jezek said. Before the shooting started, he’d had doubts about how well Jews would fight. Yeah, Hitler was giving them a hard time, but they were still Jews, weren’t they? Once they had rifles in their hands, they seemed to do just fine.

“You’d better dig in,” Halevy said. “If the tanks couldn’t do for us, they’ll see how the artillery works.”

Without raising his head, Vaclav pulled the entrenching tool off his belt and started scraping out a foxhole of his own. Halevy knew how the Germans operated, all right. Even now, some junior officer with a radio or a field telephone was probably talking to his regimental HQ, telling the gunners at which map square the trouble lay. Fifteen minutes of 105 fire ought to soften things up, he’d say.

And he’d get that artillery fire, too. The Germans were mighty damn slick about such things. Vaclav had seen as much in Czechoslovakia and here in France. They wouldn’t have been half so dangerous if they weren’t so blasted good at what they did.

He wondered how good the defenders were. Czechs, Frenchmen, Belgians driven back from their own country, Englishmen, Negro troops from some colony or other…Whatever the French marshals didn’t urgently need somewhere else seemed to be jammed into a military sausage around Laon. Now if the casing didn’t split and spill soldiers all over everywhere…

Sure as hell, here came the guns. Huddling in his scrape, Vaclav wished it were twice as deep, or even four times. He hated artillery more than anything else. German infantry made a fair fight. You could even face panzers. His monster rifle helped even the odds. But what could you do with artillerymen? Hope your own side’s guns slaughtered them-that was all. It didn’t seem enough.

Most of the shells were long-not very long, but Jezek took whatever he could get. If the troops a little farther back had hell coming down on their heads, he didn’t. He could think of plenty of times when the Nazis’ artillery had been right on target.

As soon as the shelling stopped, he came up out of his trench ready to fight. The Germans counted on stunning their opponents, at least for a little while. He kept an eye on the tank whose driver he’d shot, the one that had slammed into the oak. If the Germans could get the other driver into the machine, it might come back to life. He wouldn’t have wanted to sit down on a seat soaked with his predecessor’s blood, but war made you do all kinds of things you didn’t want to.

“We can do it!” Sergeant Halevy shouted in Czech. Then he said what was probably the same thing in French. In Czech, he went on, “They’ve got to be at the end of their tether. If we stop them, they’re really stopped.”

How could he know that? Nobody in the middle of a battle knew a damn thing. It sure sounded good, though.

The Germans came forward. Vaclav had known they would. They were bastards, but they were brave bastards. And they exposed themselves as little as they could, which made them smart bastards.

No new panzers rolled up, for which he thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing. He wasn’t thrilled about using the antitank rifle as an oversized sniper’s piece-the fight with the French quartermaster sergeant lingered painfully in his memory-but he wasn’t thrilled about getting killed in his hole, either.

He could, literally, have killed elephants with this rifle. Knocking over a few Nazis while they were still a long way off would make the rest go to ground and not move forward so fast. It would also make him wish some quartermaster sergeant could issue him a new shoulder, but that was one more thing he’d worry about later.

It worked out just the way he’d hoped. That stood out, because it happened so rarely in this war. He hit two Germans with four shots, which slowed the rest of them down to an amazing degree. Then, of course, the antitank rifle’s loud roar and big blast of fire from every round drew the enemy’s concentrated attention. Ordinary Mausers weren’t especially accurate out close to a kilometer off, but they made him keep down. And he could have done without the machine gun probing for him.

He really could have done without the mortar bombs that started raining down on the Allied front. They did their best to make up for the artillery’s poor performance. If one of them landed in your hole, you were dead, because you couldn’t do anything about it.

But then, for a wonder, Allied-probably French-mortars closer to Laon opened up on the Germans. So did a couple of batteries of 75s that had stayed quiet and hidden up till now. Those 75s were weapons from the last war, and outclassed these days-which didn’t mean they couldn’t kill you if they got the chance.

The German mortars quit firing, quite suddenly. Thus encouraged, Vaclav stuck his head up-and plugged a soldier in field-gray who’d made the mistake of coming out from behind the dead cow he’d been using for cover. Jezek ducked down again right away. A good thing, too, because nothing had taken out that German machine gun. It sent a long, angry burst after him.

“Fuck me!” Sergeant Halevy called from his nearby hole. “Maybe we really will stop these assholes.” He hadn’t believed it before, then. Well, who could blame him? Vaclav hadn’t believed it, either. He still wasn’t sure he did.

More French troops came up to join the ragtag and bobtail on the front line. They wore khaki instead of the last war’s horizon blue, but their uniforms still looked old-fashioned next to those the enemy wore. Still and all, Jezek wasn’t inclined to fuss. Old-fashioned or not, they were here and they were shooting at the Germans. What more could you want?

And the Germans themselves weren’t what they had been when the war broke out. They remained consummate professionals, and he’d remembered a moment before how brave they were. But they were also flesh and blood. They were every bit as worn out and ragged as the Allied troops they faced. It was like the later rounds of a championship prize fight. Both sides were bloodied, both half out on their feet, but they kept slugging away. The prize here was even sweeter than money. This fight was for power.

Damned if one of the German mortars didn’t start up again. Several of the Frenchmen who’d just come up screamed like damned souls. The butcher’s bill rose again. Thus encouraged, the men in field-gray put in another attack.

Vaclav blew the head right off one of them with the antitank rifle. And those Frenchmen had brought along several machine guns. The German weapon might be better, but the Hotchkiss sufficed for all ordinary purposes of slaughter. No infantry, no matter how good, could advance in the face of fire like that. Sullenly, taking as many of their wounded with them as they could, the Germans drew back.

When Vaclav reached for another clip, he discovered he’d run dry. Well, he had a pistol, and at least one of those Frenchmen didn’t need his rifle any more. Any which way, it didn’t look as if the Wehrmacht could break into Laon.

* * *

Alistair Walsh gave the junior Lieutenant who brought the order a hard look. He wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard it, or at least hadn’t understood it. “We’re going to do what…sir?” he said.

Normally, that tone from a staff sergeant old enough to be his father would have wilted a subaltern. But this youngster, just up to the front from somewhere to let him keep his uniform clean and even pressed, was strengthened by the Holy Writ from Headquarters. “We’re going to counterattack,” he repeated brightly. “Can’t very well let the Boches have their own way all the time, eh?”

“Counterattack with what?” Walsh demanded. “Christ on His cross, it’s everything we can do”- and a little more besides, he added silently-“to hang on where we are.”

“Forces to be committed include-” The subaltern rattled off several regiments, British and French. “Those should be plenty to shift the Germans hereabouts, don’t you think?”

“Well, they would be,” Walsh said.

He finally got a frown from the young officer. “What do you mean? Aren’t they in this vicinity? This is where they are reported to be.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Walsh muttered. He did his best to explain the facts of life: “Well, sir, pieces of them are, you might say. What’s left of them after the Boches spent these past weeks banging on them with hammers and rocks.”

“What is your estimate of their relative combat effectiveness?” the subaltern asked.

“Sir, I’m just a sergeant,” Walsh said. A staff sergeant who’d served in the last war wasn’t just a sergeant. Walsh wondered whether the second lieutenant understood that. About even money, he guessed. With a mental sigh, he went on, “The only reason we haven’t come to pieces, near as I can see, is that the Germans have it about as bad as we do.” He had much more sympathy for the Fritzes in the front line-poor bloody infantry just like him-than he did for the starched, gormless creature standing before him now. No matter what you thought, a single pip on each shoulder strap didn’t turn you into God’s anointed.

“I…see,” the subaltern said slowly. Maybe he did have some notion of Walsh’s station after all. Or maybe not: “I am here to deliver these orders, not to adjust them. The attack will go in. Is that clear?”

“Sir, it’s bleeding madness,” Walsh said. The lieutenant only waited. Walsh sighed and swore. God’s anointed or not, those pips meant the youngster could break him like a rotten stick…after which the attack would go in anyway. Sure as hell, sometimes the real enemy wore the same uniform as you. A precise salute. “Yes, sir. I’ll tell the men”: an equally precise reproach.

The subaltern’s cheeks reddened, as if he’d been slapped. He felt that, all right. “I should be honored to go forward with you,” he said.

“Never mind, sir,” Walsh said wearily. “It’s not your fault. It’s just war.”

When Bill got the word, he grimaced and shrugged. “Well, we’re fucked now.” In his broad northern accent, it came out fooked, which only added to the point.

“It’s bloody murder, is what it is,” Nigel said. “I thought Field Marshal Haig did his worst in the last war.” He had an education, all right-he hadn’t been born when Haig was doing his worst.

Walsh, who’d lost a slightly older cousin in the mud at Passchendaele, was inclined to agree. What could he do, though? Not a damned thing except go forward as long as the German guns let him. “No help for it,” he said. “Maybe the Germans really are on the ropes.”

“Maybe babies really do come from under cabbage leaves, too,” Nigel said. “Not likely, though.”

“We wouldn’t have so much fun makin’ ‘em if they did,” Bill said.

Walsh laughed at that. “Barrage should start at 1500. It’s”-he paused to look at his watch-“1310 now. As soon as the guns let up, we go forward-and may God go with us.”

On the Western Front in the last war, barrages sometimes lasted a week. They were supposed to kill all the enemy soldiers and flatten all the wire between the side doing the bombarding and a breakthrough. Well, theory was wonderful. Long barrages warned an attack was coming. They didn’t kill enough defenders, and the ones who lived always got to their machine guns before the attackers reached their line. One reason was that bombardments didn’t flatten enough wire, but did tear up the ground so attacking troops couldn’t move fast even when they most needed to.

Short and sweet worked better. Even in 1918, they’d figured that out. Enough to shock, enough to wound, not enough to throw away surprise. And then the infantry-and the tanks, when there were tanks-would go in and clean up the mess. They had driven the Germans back…in 1918.

Bill had a flask of applejack. He passed it around. Walsh took a nip with the other waiting British soldiers. A little Dutch courage never hurt anybody.

At 1500 on the dot, guns back in Paris opened up on the Germans in the suburbs. German counterbattery fire started right away. Walsh didn’t mind. As long as those 105s were shooting at the Allied guns, they weren’t pounding the front lines.

After not quite half an hour, the bombardment stopped. Up and down the front, officers’ whistles screeched. Walsh’s heart thuttered in his chest. He was probably pale as paste. He told himself it wouldn’t be so bad as going over the top. But he’d been a kid then. Now he knew all the nasty things that could happen to you. He didn’t want to get shot again. But he didn’t want to seem a coward in front of his men, either.

“Let’s go,” he said hoarsely, and they went.

He’d barely crossed the street before a Mauser round cracked past him. No, the bombardment hadn’t got everybody. How many Fritzes waited in foxholes and shattered buildings? Too damned many-he was sure of that.

He almost stumbled over a German crouching behind some rubble. The man was trying to bandage one hand with the other. He threw up both of them and bleated, “Kamerad!” when he saw Walsh.

Who would take care of prisoners? Anybody? Or would people behind the lines shoot them to save themselves the bother? Walsh knew such things happened. He bent down and threw the wounded German’s rifle into some bushes. Gesturing with his own weapon, he said, “Go on, go on.” What happened later wasn’t his worry.

“Danke!” the Fritz said. Off he went, both hands still above his head.

Walsh forgot about him as soon as he was gone. Plenty of other Germans ahead, and not all the bastards would be bleeding. He was glad to hear Bren guns banging away. They brought real firepower right up to the front. You could carry one and fire from the hip, or even from the shoulder.

You couldn’t move forward fast, not in this smashed suburb. Wreckage slowed you down too much. Stubborn Germans lurking in the wreckage were liable to slow you down for good. But the enemy seemed less stubborn than usual. Maybe the counterattack had surprised and dismayed them as much as it had Walsh. Stranger things must have happened, though he couldn’t come up with one offhand.

Something warned him to throw himself down behind a burnt-out Citroen. Only a few seconds after he did, two Germans with Schmeissers came out of what was left of a house. Walsh pulled the pin on a grenade and rose up onto his knees to send it flying. A soft thump, a guttural cry of alarm, and a bang, all packed close together. Shrieks followed. Both Fritzes were down. Walsh shot them one after the other to make sure they didn’t get up again. He scurried forward and grabbed a submachine gun and as many clips as the Germans carried. He slung his rifle so he could go forward carrying the Schmeisser. At close quarters, he wanted to be able to spray a lot of lead around.

Nigel came up and took the other German weapon. Walsh shared ammunition with him. “This is going better than I expected,” the youngster remarked.

“I was thinking the same thing.” In lieu of knocking wood, Walsh rapped his knuckles on his own tin hat. Nigel managed a haggard grin. Walsh gave him a Gitane-what he had-lit one of his own, and tramped ahead again.

He found one German fast asleep on what had been some French merchant’s bed. The artillery hadn’t wakened him; neither had the Allied infantry assault. Walsh knew just how the poor bugger felt: he’d felt that way himself. He carried away the German’s Mauser and dropped it in the mud. He left the man alone. Without a weapon, the fellow was no threat to anybody. And this would be Allied ground by the time he woke up.

“Damned if it won’t,” Walsh said in tones of wonder. Maybe the generals and even that snot-nosed subaltern knew what they were up to after all. And if they did, wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? Schmeisser at the ready, Walsh pressed on.

* * *

Gerhard Elsner strode over to Ludwig Rothe, who was adding oil to his panzer’s crankcase. “Still running all right?” the company CO asked anxiously-there’d been a lot of wear and tear in the drive across the Low Countries and France.

But Rothe answered, “You bet, Captain.”

“Good. That’s what I want to hear,” Elsner said. “Tomorrow morning we smash them. We go through south of Beauvais-between there and a village called Alonne. Three or four kilometers of open ground. We won’t have to fight in built-up places. That’s what they tell me, anyhow.”

“Here’s hoping they’re right-whoever they are. That gets expensive fast,” Rothe said. He turned to his driver and radioman. “But we’ll be ready, right?”

Fritz Bittenfeld and Theo Hossbach both nodded. Then Theo yawned. Everybody was beat. Ludwig was running on looted French coffee and on pills he’d got from a medic. The pills were supposed to keep a dead man going for a day and a half. Ludwig still wanted to hole up somewhere and go to sleep, so he figured he was about two steps worse off than dead.

“This is the breakthrough- the breakthrough,” Captain Elsner said. He ignored the yawn. He was running on nerves and maybe drugs, too, same as everyone else. “We crack the line, we pour through, we wheel around behind Paris, and we make every old fart who remembers 1914 sick-jealous of us. We can do it. We can, and we will. Heil Hitler!” His right arm shot up and out.

“Heil Hitler!” Ludwig echoed. He imitated the Party salute. So did Fritz and Theo. If Theo was a beat late-and he was-Captain Elsner pretended not to see that, too. He was a good officer. He cut some slack for any man who was good in the field, and Theo was. As far as Ludwig was concerned, all the Heil-ing was a bunch of Quatsch. But you’d get your head handed to you if you said that out loud. The failed coup against the Fuhrer left everybody jumpy.

Then Theo stopped being dreamy and asked a sharp question: “When we go in, will we have infantry support?”

“As much of it as there is,” Captain Elsner answered. Panzegrenadiers in half-tracks and trucks could keep up with armor. Ordinary ground-pounders couldn’t. The panzers were supposed to pierce the enemy lines and let the foot-bound infantry pour through after them. Panzers helped infantry enormously. What they’d found out in Czechoslovakia and here in the west, though, was that infantry support also helped panzers. Foot soldiers moving up along with the armor stopped plenty of unpleasant surprises.

The attack was scheduled for 0530. Morning gave attackers the most daylight in which to do what they could. And morning also let the Germans come out of the rising sun, which made them tougher targets. Ludwig approved of that. He knew better than most people how vulnerable his steel chariot was.

As in the attack on Czechoslovakia and the one that launched this campaign, white tapes guided the panzers to their start line in the dark. But this operation wouldn’t be anywhere near so strong. Establishment strength for a panzer company was thirty-two machines. They’d been pretty much up to snuff before. After this grinding campaign across the Low Countries and France, Captain Elsner’s company had thirteen runners, and it was in better shape than a lot of others.

Well, the enemy’s taken his licks, too, Ludwig thought. All through the advance, he’d driven past Dutch and Belgian and French and British wreckage. He’d breathed air thick with the smells of death and burnt rubber and scorched paint and hot iron. That stench was in his coveralls now. Not even washing-not that he’d had much chance to wash-got rid of it.

Behind them, the sky lightened. Gray and then blue spread west. Rothe checked his watch. He’d synchronized it with the captain’s before they moved up. Any second now… Now! The eastern horizon blazed with light: not the sun, but muzzle flashes from the artillery pounding the poilus and Tommies up ahead.

“Get a move on, Fritz!” Ludwig shouted into the speaking tube.

“Right you are, boss!” Bittenfeld put the panzer in gear. Tracks rattling and clanking, it growled forward. Because of the crew’s experience, they took point for their platoon. Ludwig could have done without the honor. The point man commonly discovered trouble by smashing his face against it.

French 75s and occasional 105s answered the German barrage. Ludwig didn’t want to duck down into the turret so soon-he couldn’t see out nearly so well. But, with fragments sparking off the panzer’s side armor, he didn’t want to get sliced up, either. You acquired experience by not getting killed.

“They’re alert today,” Fritz remarked.

“They would be,” Ludwig agreed gloomily.

“I’m going to miss the waitress at that estaminet in Fouquerolles.” The driver cheerfully mangled the French word and the name of the village where they’d stayed not long before. “Limber as an eel, she was.”

“Can’t you think of anything but pussy?” Ludwig asked, knowing the answer was no.

Machine-gun bullets clattered off the right side of the turret. “Guten Morgen!” Theo said from his seat in the back of the fighting compartment.

“I’ll give them a good morning, by God!” Rothe said, and then, to Bittenfeld, “Panzer halt!”

“Halting,” Fritz responded, and the Panzer II shuddered to a stop. Ludwig traversed the turret. There was the gun, still spitting bullets. Machine gunners never learned. You could fire at a panzer till everything turned blue, and you still wouldn’t penetrate the armor. Of course, each crew that made the mistake lived to regret it-but rarely for long.

Ludwig fired several rounds from the 20mm cannon. Those would punch through whatever sandbags protected the machine gun. They’d punch through the soldiers serving the gun, too. Sure as hell, it shut up. Maybe the crew was lying low. More likely, those men wouldn’t fire that piece again, not at a panzer and not at horribly vulnerable infantrymen, either.

But Ludwig also saw a burning Panzer II a few hundred meters away. A machine gun couldn’t do for one, but anything bigger damn well could. And if an antitank-gun crew was drawing a bead on this stopped panzer…“Get moving!” Ludwig yipped into the speaking tube.

A 135-horsepower engine wasn’t supposed to be able to throw 8,900 kilos of steel around like a Bugatti at Le Mans. All the same, when Fritz hit the gas the panzer jumped like one of the many barmaids he’d goosed. Ludwig almost got thrown out of his seat.

He spied armored shapes up ahead. Their lines were rounder than those of Germany’s slab-sided panzers. “Get on the horn, Theo,” he said. “Tell the captain the enemy’s got armor in the neighborhood.”

“I’m doing it,” Hossbach said, “but I bet he already knows.”

Elsner hadn’t known when he briefed the company. Maybe one of those French machines had taken out the other Panzer II. They had more armor and bigger guns than most German panzers-they were easily a match for the Czechs’ tanks.

Well, we beat those, Rothe thought. The next interesting question was what French armor was doing right at the Schwerpunkt here. Was it dumb luck, or had the enemy guessed much too right? If the breakthrough was going to happen, it would have to be a breakthrough indeed. “Panzer halt!” Rothe commanded again.

He fired at the closest enemy panzer. Yes, he was outgunned, but the 20mm could break a French char’s armored carapace. The enemy machine caught fire. The crew bailed out. He gunned them down with the coaxial machine gun as they ran for cover. An ordinary machine gun was plenty to kill ordinary soldiers.

“Step on it, Fritz!” he said-not a command in the manual, but also not one easy to mistake. Again, the driver did his best to pretend he was at the Grand Prix.

That might have been why the antitank round slammed into the engine and not the fighting compartment. All three crewmen screamed “Scheisse!” at the same time. The panzer stopped. It wouldn’t go anywhere again.

“Get out!” Ludwig yelled. The French or British gunners were bound to be reloading. When they did…He didn’t want to be there.

Theo opened the hatch behind the turret. Then he slammed it shut again. “Fire!” he said.

“Follow me out, then,” Rothe told him. He jumped out the turret hatch on the side away from that deadly round.

Theo and Fritz both made it out after him. Bullets cracking past them said out wasn’t the best place to be, not when it was in the middle of a horribly bare field. Ludwig pointed to some bushes a couple of hundred meters away. Crouching low, zigzagging, the panzer crewmen ran for them. Not much of a hope, but some.

Ludwig didn’t understand why he crashed to the ground. Then he did, because it started to hurt. He shrieked and clutched at himself. It was a bad one. He knew that right away. Then he groaned again, because Fritz went down, too. Damned if Theo didn’t make it to the bushes. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.

“Medic!” Ludwig cried. “Med-” Another bullet caught him, and he didn’t hurt at all after that.

* * *

Luc Harcourt crouched in a foxhole. All around him, French and German tanks blazed away at one another-and at any poor damned infantrymen their crews happened to spot. He felt like a tiny ratlike ancient mammal stuck in the middle of a horde of battling dinosaurs. They might kill him without even realizing he was there.

Well, he’d had at least some small share of revenge. When a Panzer II started burning, the crew tried to make it out. They escaped the tank, but he shot one of them before the bastard could find a hole and pull it in after himself.

“How many of us did you get, you fucker?” he muttered as he slapped a fresh clip onto his rifle. “You won’t get any more.”

He wanted to huddle there, not moving, not looking up, rolled into a ball like a pillbug so he made as small a target as he could. He wanted to, but he didn’t. If the Boches got this far, they’d kill him as easily as if they were squashing a pillbug. What they said in training turned out to be true: your best chance of living was acting like a soldier. He’d thought it was a bunch of patriotic crap when he heard it the first time, but no.

Speaking of crap, his drawers were clean-well, not dirty on account of that, even if he couldn’t remember the last time he changed them. He knew the modest pride of going through fear and coming out the other side. He’d fouled himself before, yes, but not now. Like Sergeant Demange, he was past that…till the next time things got even worse than this, anyhow.

A French tank stopped not far from his hole. The commander popped out of the cupola like a jack-in-the-box. He pointed at the Germans. “Advance!” he yelled. “If we stop them here, we can break them!” He disappeared again. The tank fired its cannon at, well, something. Luc didn’t pop up himself to see what. The noise all around was worse than loud. It made his brain want to explode out through his ears.

The tank fired again. The machine gun in its bow also banged away-again, Luc couldn’t see what it was shooting at. Then the tank rumbled forward. The commander hadn’t urged him to do anything the man wasn’t willing to try himself. Of course, he had twenty or thirty millimeters of hardened steel shielding him from the unpleasant outside world. But, to be fair, he also had worse things aimed at him than foot soldiers were likely to face.

Still…Advance? It almost seemed a word in a foreign language. The French Army and the BEF had got booted out of Belgium and beaten back across northern France. They’d given up more ground than their fathers (or, more often, their mourned uncles who hadn’t lived to sire children) did in 1914. The Channel ports were lost, which meant the Tommies would have a harder time getting into the fight. Advance? After all that?

If they kept retreating, the Boches would win. Luc hated that thought. The Germans were good at what they did. On the whole, they fought clean-or no dirtier than the French. But so what? They were still Boches.

He popped up and fired at some Germans. They dove for cover. That was all he’d wanted-they were too far off for him to have much chance of hitting them. But if they were hiding behind trees or digging new scrapes for themselves, they weren’t advancing against the defenders here.

Defenders? That wasn’t one tank commanded by a homicidal-or suicidal-maniac. More French armor was going forward against the troops in field-gray A crew of artillerymen manhandled a 37mm antitank gun into a position a couple of hundred meters farther east than it had held before. Even khaki-clad infantrymen-no great swarm of them, but some-were climbing out of their holes and trenches and moving toward the Boches.

Maybe twenty meters away, Sergeant Demange was watching the show from his foxhole. He looked as astonished as Luc felt. He looked almost astonished enough to let the Gitane fall out of his mouth: almost, but not quite. He caught Luc’s eye. “This is something you don’t see every day,” he shouted. He had to say it two or three times before Luc understood.

“It sure is,” Luc answered. “Do you want to join the party?” Were he a new fish, he would have waved-and given a German sniper or machine gunner something to draw a bead on. He knew better now.

“Do I look that fucking stupid?” Demange said. Luc wanted to tell him yes, but didn’t have the nerve. Sure as the devil, a sergeant who scared you more than the Boches did wasn’t the worst thing to have around. Then the veteran didn’t just surprise Luc: he flabbergasted him. He scrambled from his foxhole and scurried toward a crater a bursting 105 had dug. As soon as he got there, he called, “Somebody’s got to do it, right?”

No doubt somebody did. Luc wondered whether one of the somebodies had to be him. Regretfully, he decided he couldn’t hang back when even a cold-blooded pragmatist like Demange was advancing.

Coming up out of a hole felt like a snail shedding its shell and turning into a slug. Luc grimaced and shook his head as he ran for a crater of his own. No, he didn’t want to think about slugs, not when the lead variety were snarling all over the place.

His dive into the shell hole would have won no worse than a bronze at the last Olympics. Luc shook his head again. Those were Hitler’s games, and to hell with him.

Time for another look around. German and French tanks burned nearby. The thick black smoke that rose from them hid the field as well as any barrage of smoke shells German artillery laid down.

Luc fired at another Boche. Again, he had no idea whether he hit him. In a way, that wasn’t so bad. One less fellow on his conscience. He wished that particular organ had a switch he could flick or a plug he could pull. He didn’t like to think about all the things he’d done, but sometimes they bubbled up whether he wanted them to or not.

“Come on!” Sergeant Demange rasped. “What did that American Marine say in the last war? ‘Do you want to live forever?’”

Airplanes swooped low over the battlefield, machine guns yammering. Luc had started to move, but froze again, not that that would do him any good if those probing bullets found him.

They didn’t. The fighters weren’t Messerschmitts. They were English Hurricanes, the roundels on their broad wings looking inside out to Luc because the red was in the center instead of the blue. And they were shooting up the Germans.

“See how you like it, cochons, salauds!” he whooped joyously. He’d been on the other end of strafing too many times. Here as so many other places in war, it was better to give than to receive. Now…Did the English have anything like the Stuka, so they could really give the Germans what-for?

They didn’t seem to, but maybe what they did have was enough. The Boches enjoyed air attack no more than anybody else. Only a few of them ran-they were good troops. But it took the starch out of them just the same. And, a moment after the Hurricanes roared away, a French tank knocked out what had to be the enemy’s command vehicle. From then on, the few German tanks still moving didn’t work together so smoothly any more.

“Come on!” Sergeant Demange said again, more urgently this time. “It was like this in the summer of ‘18, too. If we hit ‘em a good lick, we’ll get ‘em.” We’ll get ‘em-on les aura. The slogan from the last war should have seemed as dated as ground-scraping skirts. Somehow, it didn’t.

Luc scrambled out of the shell hole and trotted forward. Sure as hell, the Germans were pulling back. Yes, they were pros. They had rear guards with machine guns to make sure nobody chased them hard. But they were pulling back. They weren’t breaking through. They wouldn’t break through. And if they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t win the war in a hurry. What would happen once they saw that, too? Luc lit a Gauloise. That was their worry, not his. He kept on advancing.