The Big Switch

Chapter 7

Life went on in spite of everything. Weeds began to grow in the Japanese trenches outside of Vladivostok. Sergeant Hideki Fujita admired the little bits of green amidst dun and dirty white. And, when one of the weeds sprouted little red flowers, he was as happy as if he’d raised it himself.

That meant the men in his section admired the flowers with him. If they were otherwise inclined, the certain knowledge that he would give scoffers a clout in the head kept them from showing it.

“Now I hope the Russians don’t shell the poor thing,” he said, and while he spoke he really was worried about it.

“Don’t fret, Sergeant- san,” Senior Private Hayashi said. “A week from now, a million of these things will pop up all over everywhere. We’ll get so sick of them, we’ll start to hate them.”

“I am not going to hate my plant,” Fujita declared. Hayashi, wise in the ways of noncoms, nodded and shut his mouth.

Except for the plant with the little red flowers, not much seemed to change around the besieged Russian city. Fifty meters here, a hundred meters there, the Japanese lines tightened. Maybe the Red Army men defending the place were scrawnier than they had been when Fujita got there. They still fought as hard as ever, though.

When Fujita wasn’t talking about his precious plant, he would talk about that. “Russians are funny people,” he said wisely, puffing a cigarette. “As long as a Russian has a rifle or a bayonet or an entrenching tool in his hands, he’s as dangerous as one of us would be. Maybe more so, because he’s sneakier.”

“ Hai,” breathed the soldiers gathered around him. After all, he was speaking plain truth. Besides, he outranked them. They weren’t going to argue. There were less painful ways to commit seppuku, if a man was so inclined.

He warmed to his theme: “But when a Russian’s had enough, he just throws down his rifle and throws up his hands and smiles at you like a dog. He expects you to pet him and feed him and take care of his messes from then on out.”

“Hai,” the soldiers chorused again-they’d all been in the trenches long enough to see the same thing for themselves.

“Disgraceful,” somebody added. The men nodded. By Japanese standards, surrender was disgraceful. Facing the choice between surrender and death, a Japanese soldier was trained to choose death every time. He had no honor left if he decided to live. Even worse, he smeared his whole family with his shame. If he gave up, gave in, none of his relatives would be able to hold up their heads ever again.

And, because a man base enough to surrender had no honor left, you could do whatever you pleased with him after he fell into your hands. Russians and other Westerners were said to treat prisoners of war kindly. To Fujita and his comrades, that was incomprehensible softness, even madness.

To most of them, anyhow. Educated Senior Private Hayashi said, “My father fought against the Russians at Port Arthur.” He waited for his own nods, and got them. Not many men in those muddy trenches didn’t have older relatives who’d gone through the Russo-Japanese War. He continued, “He told me orders then were to go easy on prisoners, to treat enemy wounded the same way we treated our own, and not even to be too hard on soldiers who gave up when they weren’t wounded.”

Fujita started to tell him he was full of crap. Before he could, though, another soldier said, “Yeah, I remember hearing the same thing from my old man. Pretty crazy stuff, ain’t it?”

Maybe it really was true, then. No one other than Fujita seemed inclined to contradict Hayashi. Instead of sticking out his own neck, he said, “Well, we aren’t dumb enough to keep on with that kind of nonsense nowadays.”

“Oh, no, Sergeant,” Hayashi said quickly. Fujita hid a smile behind the rituals of lighting another smoke. Hayashi’s education had made him smart enough to know where his next bowl of rice was coming from, anyhow. Fujita might not know so many kanji or be able to read and write Chinese, but he had the rank. A subordinate who annoyed him would pay and pay. His power might be petty, but for those in its grasp it was real as rain.

Behind the lines, Japanese guns thundered. Before long, Russian artillery answered. Wherever Fujita had faced the Red Army, he’d seen that it had cannon falling out of its asshole. More guns, guns with longer range… It was enough, more than enough, to make the poor sorry bastards who had to face those guns jealous.

Something a few kilometers behind Fujita’s position blew up with a rending crash. All the soldiers shook their heads in sorrow. “Eee!” Fujita said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “There’s some ammunition we won’t get to use against the round-eyed barbarians.”

He wanted to turn around and stand up in the trench to take a look at the cloud of smoke rising from that blast. He wanted to, but he didn’t. That would be asking for a bullet in the back of the head from a Russian sniper. Peering through telescopic sights, waiting for a Japanese soldier to make a mistake and show himself, those round, pale eyes would be pitiless.

Despite that hit, the Russian guns fell silent again sooner than he’d expected. When he said as much, Senior Private Hayashi answered, “They’ve been doing that the past few days, haven’t they?”

He made it a question so he wouldn’t seem to contradict Fujita. And, making it a question, he made Fujita think back on it. Slowly, the sergeant nodded. “You know, maybe they have. I wonder what it means.”

“Maybe they’re running low on shells,” a soldier said hopefully.

“If they are, we’ve got them,” another man said.

“Not till they run out of machine-gun bullets, too,” the first soldier retorted. Fujita nodded again. He’d heard stories about the Russo-Japanese War, too. Machine guns were the slate-wipers even back then. They melted regiments into companies and companies into squads. From everything he could see, the Red Army used more of them now than it had in the old days.

“Sooner or later, we’ll beat them down,” Hayashi said. “Whether it’s soon enough to do us any good…”

He didn’t go on, or have to. Foot soldiers were expendable. Everybody knew it, including them. If Fujita’s regimental commander needed to take a height in front of him, he’d keep throwing men at it till he did. Why not? He could get reinforcements. Where would the Red Army find them?

The next day, the Russians raided off to the left of Fujita’s position. They were after ground or prisoners to interrogate. They also made off with the Japanese unit’s rice rations, which were about to be served. The Japanese troops got more a couple of hours later. The Russians got full bellies for a change.

More raids like that followed. Some of them succeeded in grabbing the booty. Others only cost the Red Army casualties. The Japanese began using field kitchens to bait traps. It worked as well with the Russians as it would have with any other wild beasts.

Because of such things, Fujita wasn’t astonished when white flags started flying in the Russian trenches. He got a glimpse of grim-faced Soviet officers coming through the Japanese lines to confer with his superiors.

It wasn’t peace, not yet. But it wasn’t war. You could stand up and show yourself, and the Russians wouldn’t shoot at you. Some of them came into the Japanese lines to beg. They weren’t starving yet, but they were skinny. A lot of them had very fine boots. Fujita acquired a buttery-soft pair for a couple of mess kits of rice.

A Red Army man who spoke a few words of Japanese said. “Nobody come help we. Why go on fight?”

Because giving up makes you a thing, not a person, Fujita thought. But he wanted the Russian’s belt, so he didn’t say what was in his mind. He went on dickering with the fellow, for all the world as if he’d personally grown the rice he was offering. He got the price he wanted. The Russian couldn’t say no, not if he aimed to get any food at all. Hunger was a terrible thing.

So was defeat. After three days of talks, the Red Army officers surrendered Vladivostok and the surrounding territory. They’d reached the same conclusion as the soldier with the belt: no one was coming to help them. Fujita wondered how many Russians were giving up and what the Japanese authorities would do with them all. He shrugged. It wasn’t his worry.

One of the bright lads in Willi Dernen’s company had managed to hook a radio to a car battery and make noise come out of it. The noise, at the moment, was a German newsman. “Radio Tokyo announced today that Vladivostok has at last passed under Japanese control, ending the second long siege in twentieth-century conflicts between the two countries. Having lost to Japan in the east, Russia will now surely also lose to the Reich in the west.”

“How do they figure that?” a soldier said. “Now Stalin’s only got us to worry about. He isn’t in a big two-front war any more, ’cause he’s already lost just about all of what he can lose way the hell over there.”

A considerable silence followed. No one seemed sure what to say about the comment. The Landser had a point, which only made matters worse. At last, Willi took a shot at it: “Why don’t you open your mouth a little wider, Anton? Then I can stick a land mine in there, and you’ll blow your own head off next time you talk.” If you haven’t done it already, he added, but only to himself.

“Huh? What do you mean?” Maybe Anton was God’s innocent, because he sounded as if he had not a clue.

Willi wasn’t about to spell it out for him. Then again, he didn’t have to. Corporal Arno Baatz took care of things with his usual style: “He means you sound disloyal, that’s what. And you goddamn well do. If they say we’ll whip the lousy Russians, we’ll whip ’em, and that’s flat.”

“Oh, yeah?” Anton wasn’t in Awful Arno’s section, and had more leeway sassing him than Willi would have. “Has anybody told the lousy Russians about that?”

The Germans huddled in what had been some middle-class Frenchman’s parlor. The power was out; otherwise, the bright boy wouldn’t have needed his magic trick with the battery. Willi could watch Corporal Baatz turn red anyhow. “The Fuhrer knows what’s what!” he shouted. “We’ll tell the Russians when we march through Moscow!”

“Moscow? Have you got any idea how far from Poland that is?” Anton said.

“I’ve got an idea that someone doesn’t care a pfennig for Germany’s leadership,” Awful Arno said in a deadly voice. “And I’ve got a good idea of what happens to people like that, too.”

“Only if some stoolie rats them out,” somebody behind Baatz said. It should have been Anton, but maybe he really didn’t know what happened to those people. If he didn’t, he was one of God’s innocents.

Awful Arno whirled as if his ass were on ball bearings. “Who said that?” he yelled. He wasn’t red now; he was purple. “I’ll smash your face in!”

No one told him a thing. That made him angrier than ever. Now that he’d twisted in a new direction, he gave other people the chance to talk behind his back. And someone was quick to take advantage of it: “Shut up and let us listen to the music, Baatz.”

It was good music. Barnabas von Geczy was supposed to be Hitler’s favorite band leader. Listening to Komm mit nach Madeira, Willi wished he were on a subtropical beach with a girl, not stuck in a lousy French village with a bunch of smelly soldiers. A bunch of other smelly soldiers, he amended-he was none too clean himself. If the almost-engineer would rig up some hot water, now… Too much to hope for.

Corporal Baatz heaved himself to his feet and stormed out of the battered house. “He’s going to blab to the officers,” someone predicted gloomily.

“As long as he doesn’t blab to the SS,” Willi said. He scowled at Anton. “You and your big yap.”

“Me? What did I do? I was only looking at the military possibilities,” the other soldier said.

“That’s what you thought,” Willi said. “Don’t ask questions, man. Keep your trap shut and do your job. After the war’s over, we’ll straighten out whatever’s gone wrong.”

Anton eyed him. “Aren’t you the guy who…?” He paused, not sure how to go on.

“The guy who what?” Willi growled, though he didn’t have to be a bright boy himself to know.

“The guy whose buddy ran off,” Anton said.

“I don’t know what happened to Wolfgang. I wish I did.” Willi wasn’t lying. He’d warned Wolfgang Storch to run off because the SS was about to grab him. And run Wolfgang had-toward the French lines. Willi hoped he was sitting in a POW camp somewhere in southwestern France. He would be… if the poilus hadn’t plugged him instead. No way to know, not for Willi. Guys who tried to give up did get plugged sometimes, no matter what the Geneva Convention ordained.

“You clowns should put a cork in it, too,” another Landser said. “Or take it outside, anyway.”

Willi wanted to listen to the music, so he shut up. Anton left in a huff. Some people didn’t even know when they were getting themselves in trouble.

When the song ended, somebody sighed and said, “That’s not bad, but it isn’t jazz, either.”

All the other German soldiers in the battered parlor edged away from the music critic. In his own way, the fellow-Willi thought his name was Rolf-was as naive as poor dumb Anton. The way things worked in the Reich these days, your taste in records was a political choice. National Socialist doctrine branded jazz as degenerate music, nigger music. If you liked it, maybe you were a degenerate or a nigger-lover yourself. The Gestapo would be happy to find out.

As a matter of fact, Willi was fond of jazz, too. But he liked his own skin even better. He wouldn’t tell anybody he didn’t trust about anything that might be dangerous. If you wanted to get along, you had to think about such things. Or, better, you had to tend to them so automatically, you didn’t need to think about them.

He sat there, listening and smoking, for another hour. After a repeat of the news, an opera tenor started blasting out an aria. He got up and left then. The Fuhrer loved Wagner. It put Willi in mind of cats being choked to an overwrought musical accompaniment.

For the time being, the Germans had the village pretty much to themselves. Only a few French families had stayed behind when the Wehrmacht rolled through. The rest packed up whatever they could and ran. Now they were stuck somewhere on the wrong side of the line… if they hadn’t got bombed or machine-gunned from the air while they were on the road.

Off to the west, French 75s barked: a very distinctive sound. The shells didn’t come down on the village, for which Willi thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing. It wasn’t as if plenty hadn’t already landed here. One of these days before too long, the Germans would fall back some more. Poilus in khaki would take the place of Landsers in field-gray. And German 105s would kill a few French soldiers, mutilate a few more, and knock down some houses that had stayed lucky so far.

And then, maybe, the people who’d run for their lives would come back to see what was left of the things around which they’d built their civilian existence. And they would cry and wail and swear at the Germans and shake their fists… and somebody would yank on a booby-trap left behind for the poilus and blow off her hand. Then the crying and wailing and cursing would start all over again, louder than ever.

“War is shit,” Willi muttered, sincerely if with no great originality. He started to cross the main street, the only one in town you couldn’t piss across. Then he stopped. The main drag ran east and west, straight enough to let somebody out there look a long way down it. If the froggies had posted a sniper, he’d be looking this way through a rifle-mounted telescope. Willi had done a little sniping, enough to start to get the feel for it.

He didn’t know the French had put a guy with a rifle out there. No far-off rifleman had punched Anton’s ticket for him. No sniper had got rid of Awful Arno, either. Too bad, Willi thought.

Rolf came out, too, a minute or so behind Willi. No surprise: if you liked jazz, dark deeds on the Rhine wouldn’t be your cup of tea. Rolf crossed the street without hesitation. “You might want to watch-” Willi began.

He couldn’t even finish the sentence before Rolf fell over, shot through the head. The distant report arrived after the bullet. Rolf didn’t even twitch. He just lay there, bleeding. He must have died before he hit the ground. Willi shuddered. It could have been him. Oh so easily, it could have been him.

Going with Pete McGill. had done wonders for Vera’s English. The White Russian girl hadn’t known much before they hooked up with each other. Now she was pretty fluent. Half the time, she even remembered not to roll her r’s. Pete was proud of her-it showed how smart she was. She was a good deal smarter than he was, but that hadn’t occurred to the Marine yet.

If Vera was really smart, her being smarter than Pete never would occur to him. Worrying about whether the girl you love loves you back or is calculating the best way to use you to get what she wants is not likely to make an affair last.

At the moment, Pete wasn’t worrying about anything. He’d just got what he wanted, and his heart was still beating like a drum. Shanghai had any number of places where a man and a woman could walk in together, sign the guest book as Mr. and Mrs., and be asked no questions. This was one of them. The room was small, but the mattress was fairly new and the sheets were clean. He wouldn’t have fussed if they weren’t, but Vera might have. Women are picky, he thought.

He rolled half away from her and turned on the lamp on the nightstand. With a little startled squeak, she made as if to cover herself. “Don’t do that, babe,” he said. “I love to look at you.”

When he did, his manhood stirred again. Before long, they’d start another round. In the meantime, a different urge seized him. He rummaged in the trousers of his civilian slacks (till midnight tomorrow, he didn’t have to look like a leatherneck) till he found his Luckies.

As he tapped one against the nightstand, he held out the pack to Vera. “Want one?”

“Sure,” she said. The word came out just like that-perfect. She might have been born in the States. She took a cigarette, tapped it down on her nightstand, and waited for a light. Pete had to dig out his matches. If he’d been thinking, he would have grabbed them with the butts. If he’d been thinking, he would have been someone else altogether.

He lit a match. His cheeks hollowed as he applied the flame to the tip of the cigarette. Smoke filled his mouth, then his lungs. He dropped the match in the glass ashtray next to the lamp.

Vera leaned close for a light from the hot red coal at the end of his Lucky. As she too sucked in smoke, he cupped her breast with his free hand. She made a little noise that might have been a purr or a laugh. Once she had the cigarette going, she said, “You!”

She didn’t say Men! That would have reminded Pete there’d been others-and how many others?-before him. She was more than smart enough to steer clear of that kind of tactical error.

She did say, “I like your American tobacco.”

The way she said it made Pete feel he’d grown the weed, harvested it, and cured it himself. “Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it?” he said. He’d smoked Chinese tobacco every now and then. It was like inhaling a blowtorch flame. Any smokes were better than none, but still…

After she’d leaned across him to grind out her cigarette (the room had only the one ashtray, and was lucky to have that), and after he’d taken more friendly liberties with her person while she did it, she asked, “How much longer will the Marines stay in Shanghai?”

“I’ve got no idea,” he said, and he might have been proud of having no idea. As a matter of fact, he was. Like any well-trained hunting dog, he went where he was told and did what he was told. He didn’t need to worry about that kind of thing for himself, and so he didn’t. The question did provoke a little more response in him, though: “How come?”

“Because the Japanese can run over you any time they please. Because I do not want anything bad to happen to you,” Vera said.

Pete grunted. Ever since the Japs overran Peking, he’d known that was true. More often than not, a Marine’s pride kept him from admitting it, even to himself. “They mess with us, they’ve got a war on their hands. A war with the USA. They got to know we’d kick their behinds around the block so darn fast, it’d make their heads swim.” That he censored the automatic Marine curses showed she wasn’t just a joy girl for him-he really cared.

“They bombed the Panay. There was no war,” Vera said.

“They apologized afterwards. That’s why,” Pete answered uneasily. “ ’Sides, they’re busy fighting a war with the Russians. They wouldn’t want to tangle with two big countries at once. Japs are crazy, sure, but they aren’t that kind of crazy.”

“They have what they want from Russia. They have Vladivostok.” Vera’s English was a lot better, yeah, but the way she pronounced the town’s named showed what her native language was. “Now Russia has a hard time fighting them.” She spoke with as much assurance as a general.

Pete was good and sure he would never want to suck on a general’s bare tits, though. “What can I do about it?” he said. “I’m nothing but a two-striper. Nobody’s gonna pay attention to me.”

“Talk to your officers. Let them know your concern.” Let them know my concern, Vera meant. Pete vaguely sensed that, but only vaguely. She went on, “Some of what you tell them will go into what they tell the people over them, the people back in America.”

How could she be so sure of that? How much experience of the way the military mind worked did she have? When the question came to him like that, Pete shied away from it. It was almost as if his Corps buddies were razzing him about her. Hell, he didn’t need them. He was doing it to himself, right there inside his own head.

What was going through his mind must have shown on his face. Vera suddenly looked impish. “When you turned on the light, I thought it was because you wanted to watch,” she said. “Here. I give you something to watch.”

And she did. Did she ever! She couldn’t have been more distracting if she’d caught fire. She needed experience with men to know how to do what she was doing, too, but Pete didn’t care. While she was doing it, he didn’t care about anything.

After she got done doing it, he wanted to roll over and sleep for a week. Instead, he smoked another cigarette. Then he did something along those lines for her, too. That went a long way toward proving his love. He never would have done anything like it for anyone he didn’t really want to please. If it also proved Vera washed more often and more carefully than other women he’d known-well, he didn’t consciously notice.

He did notice she gave every sign of being pleased when he did it: one more encouragement for him to do it again. “How am I supposed to go dance tomorrow?” she said. “My legs are all unstringed.”

He thought that was supposed to be unstrung, but he wasn’t sure enough to tell her so. Correcting a girl who’d just paid you a compliment like that wasn’t the smartest thing you could do, either. Pete might not have been the highest card in the deck, but he could see that. Squeezing the breath out of her seemed a better idea. It was more fun, too.

He wished she didn’t have to go on working as a taxi dancer. He gave her what he could, but he didn’t have enough to put her up the way she’d want to be put up if she quit. A Marine corporal was rich by Shanghai standards, but not rich enough to support a mistress. You needed an officer’s pay for that.

Besides, he didn’t want a mistress. He wanted a wife. That thrilled his superiors, too. It was one more reason they wouldn’t listen to him if he came to them with stories of what the Japs were liable to do. Since he didn’t see how he could explain that to Vera, he didn’t try.

As they were walking back to the dance hall above which she lived, she waved at the European-style buildings all around. “All this? Pretty soon-poof!” She snapped her fingers. “What do you say? Rented time?”

“Borrowed.” Pete only shrugged. “Nothing I can do about it, babe. I don’t know if anybody can do anything about it.”

“The Japs can,” Vera said. “That is the point.”

She wouldn’t let it alone. If Pete hadn’t been head over heels, that would have bothered him. It bothered him a little anyhow, but he overlooked being bothered. Yes, he was in love, all right.

They’d done something unspeakable to Sergeant Demange. Luc Harcourt laughed and laughed. “A lieutenant? At your age? When you’ve been cussing out officers since before you had to shave? What is the world coming to?”

“Ah, fuck off,” Demange said. His eternal cigarette quivered in fury. “I didn’t ask ’em to do it. God knows I didn’t want ’em to do it. But you can’t tell the assholes no-they don’t listen to you.”

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant, sir,” Luc said, and gave Demange the fanciest salute he’d torn off since training-ground days.

“It won’t change anything,” Demange insisted. “I’ve been running this fucking platoon full of cocksuckers anyway.”

“Hey, but now that you’re a lieutenant they’ll figure you can run a company, or maybe a battalion,” Luc answered. “Everybody knows how screwed up our high command is. They just went and proved it, that’s all.”

Demange said something about his mother that violated at least eight of the Ten Commandments. Then he added, “The real proof that those shitheads have lost it will be when they make you a sergeant.”

“Now that you can’t do it, somebody’s got to disgrace the rank,” Luc said reasonably. Demange’s reply took care of the last two Commandments.

Luc wasn’t eager to become a sergeant. If he kept avoiding bullets, though, he would before too long. Slots opened up as people’s luck ran out. You didn’t always need to meet a bullet. Somebody in another company in the regiment had tripped over a length of barbed wire he hadn’t seen and broken an ankle. He’d be out of action for weeks, the lucky salaud.

Woods rose up ahead. Beyond them lay the village of Serzy-et-Prin. Beyond that, a good way beyond it, lay Reims, which was a real city. The Boches held Reims. They held Serzy-et-Prin, too. And there were bound to be bastards in coal-scuttle helmets in among the trees.

Demange pointed east, toward the woods. “Goddamn leaves would have to start sprouting just when they could hide some Fritzes.” His scorn was so seamlessly perfect, it covered all of mankind and had room for Mother Nature as well. When Luc said as much, Demange spat. “That clapped-out old whore? All she’s ever given me are lice.”

“Like you’re the only one.” Just thinking about them made Luc want to scratch. He nodded toward the trees himself. “You going to order us in? Joinville and Villehardouin are ready to lug the Hotchkiss.”

“Don’t blame it on me,” Demange said. “When the generals decide it’s time to go, we’ll go. Till then, I’ll sit on my ass as long as I can.”

He spat out the last Gitane’s tiny butt and lit up the next. “How about one for me?” Luc asked.

Demange looked shocked. “What? You think officers waste tobacco on enlisted men? Fuck off, cochon!”

“Fuck off yourself… sir,” Luc said. The new lieutenant gave him a cigarette. They smoked together, eyeing the woods they’d have to clear out sooner or later. Like Demange, Luc hoped it would be later. Luc pointed toward the new grass sprouting in the cratered field in front of the trees. “You’ve got to know the Fritzes have had time to lay mines there.”

“As sure as your sister’s got crabs,” Demange agreed. “All part of the overhead.”

“Oh, boy.” Luc took his canteen off his belt. It was full of pinard. He drank some, then passed the rough red wine to Demange. The veteran’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he took a good swallow. Just for the moment, with nobody shooting at them and no order to advance, life didn’t seem so bad.

The order to advance came the next day. Luc would have been more upset had he been more surprised. “Well, if we’ve got to catch the shaft, there are worse places to do it-I suppose,” Joinville said. Villehardouin came out with something in Breton that Luc didn’t understand at all. As Luc had told Demange, they were ready. So was the gun: he checked it himself. By now, he could do everything with a Hotchkiss gun but build one.

And so were the Germans. Whether a deserter warned them or they figured it out for themselves, they shelled the French positions on and off through the night. Luc huddled in a shallow foxhole, trying to doze. He didn’t get much sleep, but the hole was deeper toward dawn than it had been at sundown.

“Come on, you sorry, silly cons,” Lieutenant Demange called when the eastern sky began to go gray. “Time to earn our sous. ” He made more as a lieutenant than he had as a sergeant, but you didn’t make a career of the Army to get rich.

“You heard the man,” Luc told his machine-gun crew. They stumbled forward. There still wasn’t enough light to see much. You’d never spot the mine that waited for you. You’d never spot wire, either, though Luc looked for some almost hopefully. A broken ankle didn’t seem half bad.

Then, all of a sudden, he could see just fine. German parachute flares lit up the field brighter than noontime. French soldiers cried out in horror. “Down!” Demange screamed. “Get down. They’re gonna give it to us.”

Give it to them the Boches did. Their artillery opened up one more time. Now it was deadly accurate, thanks no doubt to forward observers watching the poilus scramble and dive for cover. For good measure, German machine guns at the edge of the woods raked the field. Traces might have been lines of blood drawn in the air.

When people started shooting at you, you flattened out. Demange had that right. Luc did his best to imitate a frog squashed by a tank. But he couldn’t just lie there and pile dirt in front of himself with his entrenching tool. Commanding a machine gun meant he had to shoot back. If the Hotchkiss could knock out the German machine gunners, he and his buddies would have a much better chance of seeing the sun go down this afternoon.

Joinville and Villehardouin had hit the dirt, too. They were already putting the machine gun on its tripod. Luc crawled over to them, not getting a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to. “Fuck the fuckers!” Villehardouin said: the clearest thing Luc had heard from him in days.

He got down behind the Hotchkiss and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared through a strip of ammo. He probably wouldn’t have any hearing left by the time he got out of the Army, but he didn’t care.

Joinville fed fresh strips into the machine gun. One of the ammunition carriers was down, wounded or dead. Villehardouin crawled back to recover the crate. Luc fired, first at one MG-34, then at another. How many of the monsters did those Nazi cochons have? The other thing was, they all seemed to be shooting at him, and with better and better accuracy as sunrise neared.

“What I wouldn’t give for a couple-three tanks right now,” Joinville said. Luc nodded, not that that did either one of them any good. The brass didn’t seem to have laid on any armor for this little dance. The Fritzes didn’t have any in the neighborhood, so why should la belle France waste hers?

Why? To keep us from getting murdered, Luc thought. But that wasn’t the biggest worry in the brass’s minds, now or ever. The old men with all the gold braid and leaves on their kepis measured things out on their maps and went from there. Casualties? Just part of the overhead, as Demange said.

What Demange said now was, “Back! Get back! We can’t break in there in a million years! Machine gun, give us covering fire!”

“Thanks a bunch, Lieutenant,” Luc said under his breath. But it was the right order, even if it might make him a casualty. He tapped the gun with the heel of his hand, again and again, traversing it so it sprayed the whole front of the woods with fire and made lots of Boches keep their heads down. The more Germans who ducked, the more of his own buddies who’d get back to their holes. How he and the rest of the Hotchkiss crew would get back was an… interesting question.

To his surprise, it got an answer. The French artillery, which should have shelled the woods before the infantry moved out, chose that moment to wake up. Under cover of the badly timed barrage, the machine gunners made it back to what passed for safety in these parts. Luc drained his pinard to celebrate. He figured he’d earned it.