Hitler's war

Chapter 1

Guns thundered on both sides of the Ebro. General Sanjurjo’s Fascists had modern German and Italian pieces, guns that could put a shell on an outspread blanket five miles away. The Republic had a few Russian howitzers that weren’t bad. The rest were the artillery pieces the Republicans had started the fight with. After more than two years of civil war, they kept only vestiges of their original rifling-and they weren’t such hot stuff back when they were new.

Crouching in a foxhole west of the Ebro, Chaim Weinberg decided he feared his own side’s guns more than the Fascists’. When the enemy Spaniards or their German advisers opened up, at least you had a good notion of what they were shooting at. If it wasn’t you, you could relax.

But when the Republican artillery started shooting, you always needed to be on the jump. Those shells might come down on the Fascists’ head…or they might come down on yours. You never could tell. Neither could the poor, sorry bastards firing the guns.

“Aren’t you glad we came from the States?” asked Mike Carroll, another volunteer from the Lincoln Battalion.

Before Chaim could answer, somebody’s shell burst much too close. Shrapnel and shards of shattered stone screamed through the air. He listened for shrieks, but didn’t hear any. Luck. Nothing but dumb frigging luck.

“Aren’t you?” Carroll persisted.

“Chinga tu madre,” Chaim told him. He wouldn’t have said anything like that even in English before he sailed to Spain. Well, he was a new man now. That new man needed a shave (at the moment, he also needed a razor). He was scrawny and hungry. He was filthy. He was lousy. But damned if he wasn’t new.

He’d never fired a rifle before he got to Spain. Hell, he’d never even handled a rifle. He could field-strip his Mauser blindfolded now. He’d started out with a crappy French piece, and got this much better German one off a dead Nationalist soldier. Keeping it in cartridges was a bitch. But keeping the French rifle in ammo would have been a bitch, too. Logistics was only a bitter joke to the Republicans.

The shelling went on, but none of the other rounds burst close enough to make him pucker. He lit a cigarette. The tobacco was allegedly French. It smelled like horseshit. It tasted the way he imagined smoldering horseshit would taste, too.

“No pasaran,” Mike said, and then, “Gimme one of those.”

“Here.” Chaim handed him the pack.

Mike took a smoke from it. He leaned close to Chaim to get it going. After his first drag, he made a face. “Boy, that’s rotten.”

“Uh-huh.” Chaim held out his hand, palm up. Reluctantly, his buddy returned the cigarettes. Chaim stuck them back in the breast pocket of his ragged khaki tunic. “Only thing worse than rotten tobacco’s no tobacco at all.”

“No kidding,” Mike said.

Chaim took a cautious look out of the trench. Nothing special was going on in the Nationalist lines a few hundred yards away-everybody here talked about meters, but they seemed like play money to him. The shelling was just…shelling. A few people on both sides would get maimed or killed, and it wouldn’t move the war any closer to the end, not even a nickel’s worth.

“No pasaran,” Chaim echoed. “They’d fucking better not pass, not here, or we’re butcher’s meat.” He sucked in more smoke. “Hell, we’re dead meat anyway, sooner or later. I still hope it’s later, though.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Mike Carroll sounded like Boston. Before he came to Spain, he’d worked in a steel mill somewhere in Massachusetts. That was what he said, anyway. A lot of guys had stories that didn’t add up. Chaim didn’t get all hot and bothered about it. He didn’t tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about himself, either. The only thing that really mattered was that you hated Fascism enough to hop on a boat and try to do something about it.

“Amazing thing is, the Republic’s still in there kicking,” Chaim said. Mike nodded. General Sanjurjo and his pack of reactionary bastards must have thought their foes would fall apart in nothing flat. Who could have blamed them? They had the trained troops, and they had Mussolini and Hitler-which meant Italian and German materiel and soldiers-on their side.

But it didn’t pan out that way. The brutal farce of noninterference kept the Republicans from getting munitions and reinforcements. Like the rest of the men in the Lincoln Battalion, Chaim and Mike had to sneak over the border from France, dodging patrols every step of the way. Russia sent arms and advisers, though not enough to offset what the Fascists fed Sanjurjo.

And the Republicans squabbled among themselves. Did they ever! Anarchists and Trotskyists didn’t like admitting that, since Stalin was paying the piper, he could call the tune. They also complained that Communist units got the best weapons. Chaim was a Party member, even if he’d left his card in New York City when he sailed. Most (though not all) of the foreign volunteers-men from every corner of the Earth-were. But the Spaniards themselves did the bulk of the fighting and dying.

An airplane buzzed by overhead. Chaim automatically started to duck; German and Italian aircraft ruled the skies. But this was a Republican plane: a Russian biplane fighter. Its blunt forward profile made the Spaniards call it Chato -flat-nosed. It dove to shoot up the Nationalists’ trenches, then scooted off to the east.

“‘Bout time those mothers caught it for a change,” Mike said.

“Yeah,” Chaim agreed doubtfully. “But now we’ll get it twice as hard to make up, you know?” The Spaniards on both sides thought like that and fought like that. It made for a rugged kind of combat.

Mike started to answer. Before he could, a runner came up from the rear yelling, “War! War!”

Mike and Chaim started laughing like maniacs. “The fuck ya think we’re in now?” Chaim said. “A ladies’ sewing circle?”

“No, goddammit-a big war,” the runner said. “The Munich giveaway just fell apart. A Czech murdered some Sudeten Nazi big shot inside Germany-that’s what Hitler says, anyway. And he’s gonna jump on Czechoslovakia, and England and France can’t back down now. And if they get in, the Russians do, too.”

“Holy Jesus!” Mike said. Chaim nodded. If the gloves came off in the rest of Europe, they’d have to come off in Spain, too…wouldn’t they? No more noninterference? Hot damn! Maybe things here just evened up.

* * *

Corporal Vaclav Jezek crouched in a hastily dug trench just in front of Troppau. If the Germans came-when they came-this was one of the places they’d hit hardest. Slice through here in the north, push through from what had been Austria till a few months ago down in the south, and you would bite Czechoslovakia in half. Then you could settle with the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia-the important part of the country, as far as Vaclav was concerned-at your leisure.

The Czechoslovakian General Staff wasn’t blind, or stupid. Some of the heaviest fortifications in the whole country lay along this stretch of the border. If Vaclav stood up in the trench, he could see them: big, rounded, squarish lumps of reinforced concrete that had good fields of fire from high ground and plugged valleys through which tanks might otherwise charge freely.

He didn’t stand up. His khaki uniform and brown, bowl-shaped helmet offered good camouflage, but they weren’t perfect. Somewhere on the other side of the border, some bastard in a field-gray uniform and a black coal-scuttle helmet would be sweeping the area with heavy-duty field glasses. Vaclav didn’t want him marking this position.

Trucks and teams of horses rushed machine guns and cannon and ammunition to the Czechoslovak forts. Not all of them were done yet. The government hadn’t really got serious about them till the Anschluss . But with Nazi troops in Austria, Czechoslovakia was surrounded on three sides. Without fortifications, it wouldn’t last long. It might not last long with them, but they gave it the best-likely the only-chance it had.

Maybe the German with the field glasses wouldn’t be able to see too much. It was cool and overcast, with a little mist in the air: autumn in Central Europe, sure as hell. But some of the Sudeten shitheads were bound to be sneaking over the border to tell their cousins on the other side what was going on here. If Vaclav ran the world, he would have shipped them out or shot them to nip that crap in the bud. But would the big shots listen to a corporal who drove a taxi in Prague before he got called up? Fat chance!

The air might be cool and moist, but he smelled burning bridges all the same. Diplomats were going home by plane and train. Armies that hadn’t been mobilized were getting ready for the big plunge. The Poles, damn them, were concentrating opposite Teschen (spelled three different ways, depending on whether you were a German, a Czech, or a Pole). Didn’t they see they were the next course on Hitler’s menu? If they didn’t, how stupid were they?

“Got a smoke on you, Corporal?” asked Jan Dzurinda, one of the soldiers in Vaclav’s squad.

“Sure.” Jezek held out the pack. Dzurinda took a cigarette, then waited expectantly for a light. With a small sigh, Vaclav struck a match.

Dzurinda leaned close and got the cigarette started. He took a deep drag, then blew out two perfect smoke rings. “Thanks a bunch. Much obliged.”

“Any time,” Vaclav said. Dzurinda puffed away without a care in the world, blowing more smoke rings. Just hearing his voice made Corporal Jezek worry. Jan was a Slovak, not a Czech. Czech and Slovak were brother languages, but they weren’t the same. Czechs and Slovaks could tell what you were as soon as you opened your mouth.

And Czechs and Slovaks weren’t the same, either. Czechs thought of Slovaks as hicks, rubes, country bumpkins. Before the World War, Slovakia had been in the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary, and the Hungarians made a point of keeping the Slovaks ignorant and down on the farm. Things had changed since 1918, but only so much. The Czechoslovakian Army had something like 140 general officers. Just one was a Slovak.

If Slovaks were rubes to Czechs, Czechs were city slickers to Slovaks. A lot of Slovaks thought the Czechs, who were twice as numerous, ran Czechoslovakia for their own benefit. They thought Slovakia got hind tit, and wanted more autonomy-maybe outright independence-for it.

Vaclav had no idea whether Jan belonged to Father Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, the main nationalist outfit. Hlinka had died six weeks before, but another cleric, Father Tiso, was heading the party now. The Nazis had brownshirts; the Slovak People’s Party had Hlinka Guards.

If the shooting started, how hard would Jan Dzurinda and thousands more like him fight for Czechoslovakia? A lot of Slovak People’s Party men figured Berlin would give them what they wanted if Prague didn’t. If you thought that way, how loyal would you be toward your nominal country?

Since Vaclav didn’t know and didn’t want to ask straight out, he lit a cigarette of his own. The harsh smoke relaxed him…a little. He said, “At least we’ve weeded most of the Germans out of the Army.” The Sudetens damn well weren’t loyal. They’d made that plain enough.

“Well, sure,” Jan Dzurinda said, which might mean anything or nothing.

Corporal Jezek decided to push a little harder. If the Slovaks were going to run off or give up first chance they got, how could the army hope to defend Czechoslovakia? The noncom said, “Now we have to run off the buggers on the other side of the frontier, eh?”

“Reckon so.” Dammit, Dzurinda did sound like a hick. He went on, “Anybody tries to shoot me, I expect I better nail him first.”

“Sounds good to me.” Jezek decided he had to be content with that. He could have heard plenty worse from a Slovak. Up and down the lines, how many worried Czech noncoms and lieutenants and captains were hearing worse from Slovaks right about now? How many who weren’t hearing worse were being lied to? He muttered to himself and lit another cigarette and wished his canteen held something stronger than water.

* * *

“Forward!” Sergeant Ludwig Rothe called softly. He laughed at himself as the Panzer II crawled toward the start line through the darkness of the wee small hours. With all the motors belching and farting around him, he could have yelled his head off without giving himself away to the Czechs on the other side of the border.

He rode head and shoulders out of the turret. He had to, if he wanted to see where he was going. They said later models of the Panzer II would boast a cupola with episcopes so the commander could look around without risking his life whenever he did. That didn’t do him any good. All he had was a two-flapped steel hatch in the top of the turret.

Engineers had set up white tapes to guide panzers and personnel carriers to their assigned jumping-off points. The whole Third Panzer Division was on the move. Hell, the whole Wehrmacht was on the move, near enough. Oh, there were covering forces on the border with France, and smaller ones on the Polish frontier and inside East Prussia, but everything that mattered was going to teach the Czechs they couldn’t mess around with good Germans unlucky enough to be stuck inside their lousy country.

Other panzers-more IIs and the smaller Panzer Is-were dim shapes in the night. Ludwig affectionately patted his machine. The Panzer II was a great improvement over the I.

The driver’s voice floated out through the speaking tube: “Kinda hate to leave Katscher. Found this little waitress there-she doesn’t know how to say no.”

“Jesus, Fritz!” Rothe said. “D’you pass shortarm inspection?”

Fritz Bittenfeld chuckled. “Doesn’t hurt when I piss, so I guess everything’s all right.”

“Wonderful,” the panzer commander muttered. Fritz only laughed. The third member of the crew-the radio operator, Theo Kessler-sat in the back of the fighting compartment. The only way he could see out was through peepholes. Ludwig wasn’t sure whether he couldn’t hear the conversation or just ignored it. But then, he wasn’t sure about Theo a lot of the time.

“Halt!” The command floated out of the night. Rothe relayed it to Bittenfeld, who was driving buttoned up. The panzer stopped. They were where they were supposed to be…unless some Czech infiltrator was screwing them over. Rothe shook his head. Natural to be nervous before the balloon went up, but that was pushing things.

Nothing left to do but wait. Ludwig pushed back the sleeve of his black panzer coveralls to get a look at the radium-glowing hands on his watch. A quarter to four. Right on time. Everything was supposed to start at 0600. That gave him something else to worry about. It would still be almost dark. If the clouds overhead lingered, it might really be dark.

And if the clouds lingered, the Luftwaffe wouldn’t be able to do as much as it was supposed to. How could you see what to bomb and shoot up if low clouds and fog blotted out the landscape?

This kind of weather was normal for this time of year. Ludwig hoped the fellows with the General Staff’s red stripes on their trousers knew what the hell they were up to. If they didn’t, a lot of good Landers would get buried in makeshift graves with only a rifle and a helmet for a headstone.

As if picking that thought out of his head, Fritz said, “The Fuhrer knows what he’s doing. Those dirty Czechs, they deserve everything we’ll give ‘em. They can’t go murdering people inside Germany.”

“Sure,” Ludwig said. He thought the Czechs had a lot of nerve bumping off Konrad Henlein, too. But he was fretting about how much the Wehrmacht would take, not what it would dish out.

Again, Theo didn’t say a thing. Well, he didn’t have a speaking tube to Fritz. And he’d been wearing his earphones. Rothe wondered why. Radio silence was bound to be tighter than Fritz’s waitress’ works. The only signal that might come was one calling everything off because peace had broken out. The panzer commander didn’t expect that. Nobody else did, either.

Ludwig looked at his watch again. 0400. At this rate, he’d feel as if he’d aged a year before things started happening. He couldn’t even smoke. Somebody out there would skin him alive if he showed a match. And you had to be even more desperate for a butt than he was to light up inside the turret, what with all the ammo in there. Nothing to do but wait and fidget.

As 0600 neared, the sky slowly began to get light. A few minutes before the hour, he thought he heard thunder in the air. Then he realized it was nothing of the sort: it was untold hundreds or thousands of airplane engines, all of them roaring toward Czechoslovakia.

Fritz heard them, too. You’d have to be deaf not to. “Boy, those Czech assholes are really gonna catch it,” he said happily.

“Ja,” Ludwig said, and let it go at that.

Behind them, artillery started bellowing. Red flares leaped into the sky-the go signal! Without waiting for an order, Fritz put the Panzer II in gear and started forward. Other panzers were heading for the border-heading over the border-too. Half-seen German soldiers trotted along with them, clutching Mausers and hunching low to make themselves smaller targets.

A shell burst a couple of hundred meters away. Maybe it was a short round. More likely, it was the goddamn Czechs shooting back. Dirt and a couple of men flew up into the air. Poor bastards, Ludwig thought. He wondered what would happen if a 75 or a 105 hit his panzer. Then he wished he hadn’t.

More shells fell on the Germans. He’d thought the opening bombardment would silence the enemy guns. Evidently not. One shell did hit a little Panzer I. It slewed sideways and started to burn. Machine-gun ammunition inside started cooking off- pop-pop-pop! It sounded absurdly cheerful.

Somebody in a khaki uniform-almost brown, really-popped up from a hole in the ground and fired at the Germans. They were over the border, then. Ludwig traversed the turret and squeezed off a burst of machine-gun fire at the Czech soldier. He didn’t know whether he hit the man. If he made him duck and stop shooting, that would do.

Things inside Czechoslovakia didn’t look much different from the way they did on the German side of the line. The terrain was rugged. One reason the Czechs didn’t want to give back the Sudetenland was that the rough ground and the forts they’d built in it gave them their best shield against attack. Best or not, it wouldn’t be good enough…Ludwig hoped.

The panzer clanked past a house. It looked like the ones inside the Reich, too. Well, why not? Germans were Germans, on that side of the frontier or on this one. Past the house was a forest. Ludwig thought it seemed wilder than woods in Germany would have. The Czechs probably didn’t care for it the way they should.

Or maybe they wanted it all jungly and overgrown. A machine gun in there started spraying death at the German infantry. When a bullet cracked past Ludwig’s ear, he realized that machine gun could kill him, too. He ducked reflexively. He almost pissed himself. The Czechs were playing for keeps, all right.

They had more than machine guns in the woods, too. An antitank gun spat a long tongue of flame. A Panzer II just like Ludwig’s caught fire. A perfect smoke ring came out through the commander’s hatch. Ludwig didn’t see any of the crew get away.

“Do we go into that, Sergeant?” Fritz asked.

Ludwig understood why he hesitated. Open country was best for panzers. Out on the plains and meadows, you could see trouble coming. But somebody’d forgotten to issue a whole lot of plains and meadows to this part of Czechoslovakia. “Yes, we do,” Rothe answered. “Our job is to smash through their defensive lines. Once we do that, the rest of the country falls into our lap.”

“If they don’t blow our balls off first.” That wasn’t Fritz; it was Theo. So the radioman was listening after all. Ludwig would have come down on him for sounding defeatist if he weren’t so likely to be right.

Into the woods. Other panzers were pushing forward, too. Things were better-or seemed better, anyhow-when you had company. There was, of course, the saying about misery.

A bullet struck sparks as it spanged off the panzer’s hull. That left Ludwig with a couple of really unpleasant choices. If he stayed where he was, he was much too likely to get shot. But if he ducked down inside the turret and shut the hatch, he would have the devil’s own time seeing where he was going. All kinds of bad things were liable to happen to the panzer then.

He stayed where he was. Every so often, he fired a short burst from his machine gun. The other panzer commanders were doing the same thing. Foot soldiers banged away, too. With enough lead in the air, the Czechs would be too busy taking cover and dying to shoot back much.

He hoped. Boy, did he!

The Panzer II emerged from the woods onto open ground that had taken a beating from bombs and artillery. As soon as it did, Ludwig wished it hadn’t, because there sat a Panzer I, burning like nobody’s business. The commander had tried to get out of the turret, but he hadn’t made it. Something nasty lurked in the next stretch of trees.

“There it is!” Fritz screamed. “One o’clock! Panzer! Goddamn Czech panzer!”

The Czech LT-35 was a light tank, as its initials suggested. It was still bigger and heavier and better armored than a Panzer II. And the bastard carried a 37mm gun: a real cannon that could fire a real HE round as well as armor-piercing ammo. The Panzer II’s 2cm main armament had decent AP rounds, but they just weren’t big enough to carry a useful amount of high explosive.

One good thing about the Panzer II’s little gun, though: it was an automatic weapon, firing from ten-round magazines. Ludwig traversed the turret toward the LT-35, all the while wishing for a power assist. He’d just about brought the gun on target when the Czechs fired. Their AP round chewed a groove in the field a few meters to his left. They’d be reloading as fast as they could…

His 2.5X sight brought the target a lot closer. The trigger was on the elevating wheel. He squeezed off a four-round burst. Smoke rose from the Czech tank. “Hit!” Fritz yelled. “You hit the son of a bitch!”

“Do you have to sound so surprised?” Actually, Ludwig was surprised he’d hit the panzer at all. The gun was noisy enough to make him glad he was sober. “Come on-put the beast back in gear. We don’t want to hang around in one spot, or some other bastard’ll draw a bead on us.”

He breathed a sigh of relief as the panzer raced toward the cover of the woods. He hadn’t wanted to go into the first belt, but he’d discovered being out in the open was dangerous, too. It was a war, for Christ’s sake. Everything was dangerous. He just hoped it would be more dangerous for the Czechs.

* * *

Bombs started falling on Marianske Lazne-Marienbad, if you liked the old German name better-at six o’clock in the morning. Peggy Druce hadn’t gone to bed till three. Just because you were here to take the waters (which smelled like rotten eggs, tasted almost as bad, and kept you on the pot like you wouldn’t believe) didn’t mean you couldn’t do other things, too. Peggy’d been playing fiery bridge with an English couple and a young man who might have come from almost anywhere.

Everyone thought she was crazy for coming over from Philadelphia with the war clouds thickening by the day. Even after Henlein got shot, she’d pooh-poohed the idea that things would actually go boom. “We already had one war this century,” she’d said. She remembered very precisely, because she was squeezing every trick from a small slam in diamonds. “Wasn’t that enough to teach the whole world we don’t need another one?”

Well…no.

The first explosions might almost have been mistaken for thunder. The couple right after that burst much too close to the Balmoral-Osborne Hotel de Luxe to leave any doubt about what they were. They knocked Peggy out of bed and onto the floor with a bump and a squawk. She said something most unladylike when she scrambled up again, because she’d cut both feet on shards of glass that hadn’t been there a moment before.

People were yelling and screaming and-probably-jumping up and down. Peggy threw a robe over her silk peignoir. She made as if to rush for the door, then caught herself. Her feet would be raw meat and gore if she tried. The only shoes she could grab in a hurry were last night’s heels. They’d have to do.

Out she went-but not without her handbag, which held passport and cash and traveler’s checks. Everybody else in the hall was in the same state of dishabille. People dashed for the elevator: the lift, everyone called it here, in the English fashion. Peggy was almost there when the lights went out.

Shrieks filled the air as darkness descended. She turned around and went the other way, against the confused tide. If the lights weren’t working, the goddamn elevator wouldn’t, either. The stairs were…that way.

Peggy liked to think she looked ten years younger than her forty-five. She hadn’t put on weight, and peroxide kept her hair about the same color it had always been. But, in spite of her misplaced optimism the night before, she had a coldly practical streak. When she was Peggy Eubank, growing up a devil of a long way from the Main Line, her mother told her, “Kid, you’re eleven going on twenty-one.” If Mom had been half as smart as she thought she was, she would’ve been twice as smart as she really was. But she’d hit that nail right on the head.

And so-the stairs. Peggy found the door as much by Braille as any other way. The stairwell wasn’t very light, either. Somebody bumped into her and said, “Excusez-moi.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Peggy said, and then, “C’est la guerre.” And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth?

Gray early-morning light spilled out of the door that led to the lobby. Three flights of stairs had made Peggy’s feet start to hurt, but more broken glass crunched under her soles. She would hurt worse if she took off the heels.

The lobby looked like hell, and smelled pretty bad, too. It reminded her of a butcher’s shop with a whole bunch of fresh meat. Some of this meat came in trousers and dresses and nightclothes, though. Stewards and bellhops-they had different titles here, but basically the same jobs-were doing what they could to help the wounded. One of them was noisily sick on the floor, which only made the stink worse.

And, in what looked at first like a scene from a Three Stooges tworeeler, a couple of men near the front desk were punching and kicking each other and poking each other in the eye. Even with more bombs going off not terribly far away, they went at it hammer and tongs. But one of them swore in Czech, the other in guttural German. The big war had started, and so had their own little private one.

“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed a man standing next to Peggy. His voice said he was the fellow who’d bumped her on the stairs. “C’est-” He broke off, at a loss for words.

“It’s hell on wheels,” Peggy said. “You understand? Comprenez?”

“Yes. But what am I to do?” He spoke good British English. “I was for two years a prisoner in the last war. If the Boches come here, they will intern me again, as an enemy alien. I do not wish this at all.”

If the Germans came to Marianske Lazne? No, when they came. The border wasn’t more than a long spit to the west. Peggy had her passport. The United States was neutral. The Nazis would treat her better than that poor Frenchman…if they or the Czechs didn’t blow her to the moon while they were bashing each other over the head. Right this minute, that looked like a pretty big if.

“Maybe you can get a train out of town if you hustle,” she said.

“It could be, Mademoiselle,” he said, not noticing the ring on her finger. Herb was still in Philadelphia. He’d been set to join her in Paris in a couple of weeks. Well, that wouldn’t happen now. All kinds of things wouldn’t happen, and all kinds of worse ones would. The man went on, “Will you accompany me? This is no more-no longer-a good place to be.”

He was dead right-no, live right-about that. “Let’s go,” Peggy said.

As soon as she got her first look at a bomb crater, she wasn’t sure outside was the best place to be. Marianske Lazne sat in a valley with pines and firs all around. The hotels and other buildings were mostly Austro-Hungarian leftovers from before the war (before the last war, she thought). They had more architectural gingerbread than the wicked witch’s house in the Grimm fairy tale.

Right now, Peggy was trapped in a grim fairy tale of her own. Some of those buildings had chunks bitten out of them. Several were burning. Wounded people, bodies, and pieces of bodies lay in the streets. And everybody who wasn’t wounded or blown to bits seemed to be running toward the train stations.

All kinds of people took the waters here. Some were ordinary Czechs and Slovaks. Some were Germans. Some came from other European countries. Peggy spotted half a dozen Jews in long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats. If the Frenchman beside her didn’t want to deal with the Germans, they really didn’t want to-and who could blame them?

There was a shriek in the air, getting louder by the moment. The Frenchman knocked her down and lay flat on top of her. She started to scream. Then more explosions shook Marianske Lazne, and she realized he hadn’t gone mad and wasn’t trying to assault her right out in the middle of the street.

“Artillery!” he bawled in her ear. “When you hear that sound, for God’s sake get down!”

Peggy did scream then, but on a note different from the one she might have used a moment earlier. Through the shell bursts she heard more shrieks, men’s and women’s and Lord only knew whose. Something warm and wet and sticky splashed her hand. She looked at it. It was blood-not hers, or she didn’t think so. With a little disgusted cry, she wiped it off her robe. No, not hers: no more welled out.

More and more shells landed on and around Marianske Lazne. How many guns did the Germans have, anyway? “Make it stop!” she yelled to the Frenchman. “Jesus, make it stop!”

“I wish I could, Mademoiselle,” he replied.

Peggy heard guns going off, too, in the woods around the spas. The Czechs were making a fight of it, anyhow, or trying to. But Marianske Lazne was within artillery range of the border, as she knew much, much too well. How long could this little country hold off Hitler’s armored legions?

After what seemed forever, the bombardment eased. Peggy raised her head and looked around. She wished she hadn’t. Her husband had fought in the Great War. He’d never talked much about what he’d done and what he’d seen. If it was anything like this…Peggy understood why not. She would spend the rest of her life wishing she could forget what artillery did to the civilians in Marianske Lazne. She remembered one thing Herb had said, talking to someone else who’d seen the elephant: “Artillery-that’s the killer.” Jesus, he wasn’t kidding.

As politely as she could, she tapped the Frenchman on top of her on the shoulder. “Could you move, please? You’re squashing me.” He had to weigh close to 200 pounds, and there was nothing between her and the sidewalk but two layers of silk.

“I do apologize,” he said, and rolled to one side. “This is…very bad. Very, very bad. But if you hear that sound in the air, you must get down at once, without hesitation. It is your best chance to save yourself.”

“God forbid I ever hear it again,” Peggy said. The Frenchman crossed himself.

No trains went out. No trains came in. Maybe the Germans had bombed the tracks. Maybe Czechoslovakia was using the railroads to haul troops around. Peggy saw no dun-colored Czech uniforms in town. Every so often, though, the guns in the woods boomed. What kind of forts lay between the border and Marianske Lazne? How long would the Germans take to break through them. Two good questions. Peggy had no good answers.

The town was full of clinics. They weren’t equipped for carnage like this, but they did their best. Unhurt people did what they could for the wounded. Peggy carried stretcher after stretcher. She got more blood on her robe, but hardly noticed. The hotels set out the usual massive spread of cold cuts for breakfast. She ate…somewhere.

About ten o’clock, the mist retreated and a wan sun came out. Airplane motors throbbed overhead. Peggy looked up. She’d never seen anything like those ungainly vulture-winged planes before. One after another, they peeled off in dives. It was fascinating to watch. But the shrieks they let out as they dove reminded her of incoming artillery. She got down, as the polite but portly Frenchman had said she should.

People gave her funny looks-for a few seconds, till the first bomb went off and the vulture-winged planes started machine-gunning the town as they zoomed away.

Half a dozen Czech biplane fighters showed up then. They looked like last year’s models next to the vulture-winged jobs with the swastikas on their tails, but they shot down two of them. Peggy wasn’t the only one cheering her head off.

She went on lugging stretchers till her feet started to bleed. Somebody gave her a pair of flats. They were too big, but still an improvement. She moved more casualties, and more, and more yet.

By midafternoon, she heard small-arms fire off to the west. It kept getting closer. She feared she knew what that meant: the Germans were pushing the Czechs back. She spotted more of the Nazi dive-bombers. Now that they’d delivered their terror message, they were doing serious work, pounding Czech positions.

The hotels kept putting out food. It was about all they could do. One displayed a sign in several languages: WE HAVE LOCKED UP OUR GERMANS. That was brave. It might also have been stupid. If the Nazis rolled into town, they wouldn’t be happy.

When the Nazis rolled in, Peggy feared. That evening, she got a blanket and a chair and counted herself lucky. Sleep wouldn’t come, no matter how exhausted she was. She would have looked to play more bridge, but fireplace and candles didn’t give enough light. The electricity stayed off. She sat there and listened to the advancing gunfire.

About midnight, Czech soldiers fell back through Marianske Lazne. One of them, dirty, weary, harried-peered into the hotel. He shook his head and walked on. The Czechs didn’t try to fight in the town. Peggy supposed she should have been grateful to them for not causing more civilian casualties. She hoped it wouldn’t hurt their defense.

Rattling, clanking German vehicles entered Marianske Lazne at 3:17, Czech cuckoo-clock time. Peggy went out to look. She almost got shot. A peremptory wave from a tough-looking, black-uniformed man in a tank sent her reeling back into the hotel. Under new management, she thought, and finally started to cry.

* * *

Luc Harcourt didn’t like Sergeant Demange. What private in his right mind did like his sergeant? Demange was little and skinny and tough, with a tongue sharper than a bayonet. He looked unwontedly serious now as he gathered his squad together. Without preamble, he said, “The French Republic is at war with Germany.”

Along with the rest of the men, Luc stared at the sergeant. He was just a conscript himself. All he’d ever wanted to do was serve his time and get out. The first thing he found out when he put on the uniform and the Adrian helmet was that nobody gave a damn about what he wanted.

Demange paused to light a Gitane. He even smoked like a tough guy, with the cigarette hanging down from the corner of his mouth. “England is with us,” he said. “And the Russians have declared war on Germany, too.”

“Oh, joy,” Paul Renouvin said. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d been at a university somewhere before the draft got him, and he liked showing off how much he knew. “That would matter a lot more if Russia bordered Germany. Or even Czechoslovakia.”

Sergeant Demange looked as if he wanted to spit in Renouvin’s eye. He contented himself with blowing smoke in the college kid’s face. “Shut up, punk,” he rasped. “The point is, we’ve got allies, dammit. So when we march into Germany, it’s not like we’re marching in all by ourselves.”

We? Luc wondered. We as in France, or we as in this squad? He wanted to know-it was his neck, after all. But he didn’t ask. One way or the other, he figured he’d find out pretty damn quick.

And he did. “We move out in half an hour,” the sergeant said. “Remember, we’re doing this for the poor goddamn Czechs.” He sounded like a guy telling his girl they’d be doing it for love. Who cared why? They’d be doing it.

“What happens if the Boches shoot at us?” somebody asked.

“Well, we’re supposed to be cautious,” Demange said. “But we’re supposed to move forward, too, so we will. And we’ll shoot back, by God.”

“My father did this in 1914,” Luc said. “Red kepi, blue tunic, red trousers-there are photos at home. Not color photos, of course, but you know what the colors were.” Several of the other soldiers nodded.

So did Sergeant Demange. “They were targets, that’s what,” he said. “I did it myself in 1918. We wore horizon-blue by then. Not as good as khaki”-he tapped his sleeve-“but Christ, better than red. How many times your old man get wounded?”

“Twice,” Luc answered, not without pride.

“Sounds about right. He was luckier than a lot, that’s for goddamn sure.” Demange glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes now. If we aren’t marching at 0630 on the dot, I’ll be in trouble. And if I’m in trouble, you sorry assholes are in big trouble.”

Luc wondered why 0630 was so sacred. Would the war be lost if they started five minutes late? As far as Czechoslovakia was concerned, they were starting three days late. The Czechs said they were still fighting hard. The Germans claimed enormous victories. Somebody was lying. Maybe two somebodies were.

The border bulged south below Saarbrucken. At 0630 on the dot-Sergeant Demange and his ilk knew how to get what they wanted-French soldiers started moving into the bulge. A few French guns fired at the German positions ahead. A few German guns shot back. Both sides seemed halfhearted. Lou had been through much scarier drills.

Fields on the German side of the border looked-surprise!-just like fields on the French side. The only way Luc could be sure he’d crossed into Germany was by looking over at a German frontier post, abandoned now, that lay athwart a two-lane macadam road a few hundred meters off to the southeast.

Soldiers from another company poked through the frontier station as if they’d just occupied Berlin. Then, without warning, something over there went boom! Sergeant Demange hit the dirt. For a moment, Luc thought he’d been hurt. But then he got up and brushed wheat stubble off himself, altogether unselfconscious. “You hear a noise like that, you better get flat,” he remarked. “I bet those Nazi cocksuckers booby-trapped the station.”

Something had blown out part of one wall. Now the French soldiers over there scurried around like ants in a disturbed hill. Luc saw one man lying in the roadway. Even from this distance, he would have bet the poor bastard wouldn’t get up again.

“Lesson number one,” the sergeant said. “If it looks like they want you to pick it up, they probably do. Wouldn’t be surprised if there are mines in these fields, too.”

“Merde alors!” Luc muttered. The very ground under his feet might betray him. He tried to walk like a ballerina, on tippytoe. It didn’t work very well in army-issue clodhoppers with a heavy pack on his back. Feeling foolish, he gave up after a few steps.

A belt of trees lay ahead. Did Germans lurk there? Sure as hell, they did. A spatter of rifle fire came from the woods. After the first bullet cracked past him, Luc needed no urging to flatten out. Prone, he fired back. His MAS36 slammed against his shoulder. In between rounds, he dug a scrape for himself with his entrenching tool.

Very cautiously, the French advanced. They took a few casualties, which made them more cautious yet. The Germans didn’t make much of a fight, though. They melted back toward their fancy Westwall. It wasn’t supposed to be as good as the Maginot Line-nothing was, not even the Czech forts-but everybody said it was tough even so.

When Luc finally reached the woods, he found several countrymen exclaiming over a dead German. The redheaded guy in field-gray had taken one in the chest. He didn’t look especially unhappy-just surprised. Luc wondered if he’d killed the Boche himself. Not likely, but not impossible, either. He felt like a warrior and a murderer at the same time.