Two Fronts

Chapter 19

Motor noises coming out of the east meant trouble. Theo Hossbach knew that as well as any man alive-as well as any German soldier alive in Russia, the only kind of men he cared about. Motor noises coming out of the west, like these right now, weren’t so bad. They were most likely German panzers moving up to the front … unless the Ivans had broken through somewhere else and were swinging around to stick it up this part of the line’s ass.

Theo made as if to swivel his ears toward the sounds, as if he were a cat. He knew guys who could wiggle their ears, but he wasn’t one of them, no matter how he tried. He did listen as hard as he could. After half a minute or so, he relaxed fractionally. Beside him, Adi Stoss blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and nodded. He seemed easier, too.

“Gasoline engines,” he said.

“Ja,” Theo agreed. The diesels that powered T-34s sounded different. He would have had a hard time explaining the difference to someone who didn’t already hear it, but it was there, all right.

Adi kept listening. So did Theo. What else was there to do, standing here in the middle of Russian nowhere-which had to be the most expansive nowhere in the world-next to a Panzer III that wasn’t running right this minute? And, even if those were gasoline engines …

“They sound funny,” Adi said. A moment later, he amended that: “They sound big.”

“Ja,” Theo repeated. He was less annoyed saying the same thing twice than he would have been if he’d had to come up with something new. He was also suspicious, as any cat or veteran would be at meeting something new. An unfamiliar gasoline engine was liable to belong to a Soviet machine, not one that sprang from the Reich’s factories.

The same unpleasant thought must have crossed Adi’s mind. He jerked a thumb toward the driver’s position. “Think I ought to hop in?” Crewmen on other panzers were asking one another the same question. Some of them weren’t asking-they were jumping in and firing up their chariots.

But Theo shook his head. He grudged another word: “Wait.”

Adi laughed harshly. “I may as well. Anything that sounds as nasty as that’d squash a Panzer III like a bug.” Now Theo nodded; again, they’d thought along with each other. Adi pointed down the rutted dirt track that led west: eventually, to something resembling civilization. “Here they come!”

Theo squinted, trying to make out the lines of the approaching machines. They advanced in line. He took that as a good sign. Ivans would have spread out so they weren’t firing right past-or maybe into-one another.

“They look like ours … I think,” Adi said slowly. “But sweet jumping Jesus! They’re fucking enormous!”

“Ja,” Theo said once more, concurring with both judgments at the same time. The panzers-there were half a dozen of them-did have a slab-sided, Germanic look. Russian machines used sloped armor much more: it helped deflect or defeat enemy fire. The Russian scheme was better; anyone who faced a T-34 would say the same thing, assuming he survived the encounter. But you didn’t need to be an engineer to tell the two design philosophies apart at a glance.

As for enormous … At first, Theo thought he was looking at some of the new Panzer IVs, the ones with the long-barreled 75s. He needed only that glance, though, and his ears, to be sure he was wrong. These beasts dwarfed Panzer IVs. They dwarfed every German panzer he’d ever seen up till now. About the only panzer they didn’t dwarf was the monstrous Russian KV-1.

Closer and closer they came. They had the black German cross on their turrets, not the Ivans’ red star. Of course, if the Russians were pulling some kind of stunt, they wouldn’t forget a detail like that. But Theo didn’t believe it. These were German panzers. They just weren’t German panzers he recognized. Details, details, he thought giddily.

Adi let out a low, awe-filled whistle. “Fry me for a pork chop if they don’t have 88s in their turrets. I told you they ought to do that!”

Theo whistled, too, on a nearly identical note. The 88 was the only German gun that could certainly make a T-34 say uncle. But a big, clumsy towed antipanzer cannon had trouble getting to the right place at the right time. When Russian roads were bad-which was to say, almost always-they had trouble getting anywhere.

“That guy in the long-snouted Panzer IV said something big was in the works,” Adi went on. “Boy, he wasn’t kidding. These critters are huge!”

Panzer crewmen from Theo’s company ran toward the new machines. They might have run toward a troupe of strippers with more eagerness. But then again, they might not have. Women were wonderful fun, no doubt about it. They reminded you why you were alive. But these panzers would help keep you that way. Which counted for more?

Theo found himself running, too. Adi loped along beside him. The driver could have outrun him-Adi could outrun just about anybody-but didn’t bother. “What do you call these babies?” he shouted to the man standing head and shoulders out of the cupola on the closest panzer’s tremendous turret.

“Panzerkampfwagen Mark V,” replied the fellow in the big machine. Theo wanted to throw a clod of dirt at him. What a bloodless answer! Mark I, Mark II, Mark III, Mark IV-yes, of course, Mark V. But something better was surely called for, wasn’t it? Grinning, the newcomer went on, “The other name is Tiger.”

“All right!” Adi pumped a fist in the air. Theo didn’t; that wasn’t his style. But he came closer than he usually did. Tiger! There was a name to conjure with! When a Tiger bit you, you stayed bit.

Someone else asked, “How far out can you hit with that gun?”

“Past two kilometers,” the panzer crewman-probably the commander, since he used the cupola-answered confidently. “And what we can hit, we can kill.”

There, Theo believed him. Jealousy stabbed the radioman: pure sea-green envy. He wasn’t sure his Panzer III’s 37mm gun could even reach out 2,000 meters. If it could, he wasn’t sure it would knock over a man, much less an enemy panzer. Life wasn’t fair.

Adi found a new question: “How many more of those beauties are coming after you?”

“More?” The Tiger crewman sounded offended. “What do you want, egg in your beer? We’re here. We’ll do for the Ivans. You think a T-34 can beat a panzer like this?”

“Um, the Ivans have a lot of ’em,” Adi said. The guy in the Tiger waved that aside. Theo wondered whether he’d ever fought Russians before. If he hadn’t, he was about to get an education. Yes, half a dozen of these brutes could turn a lot of T-34s to scrap metal. But the Red Army had a lot of T-34s. It had a hell of a lot of them, as a matter of fact. Sooner or later, they’d get lucky against the Tigers. They were bound to. Then what?

Theo found out the next day. They went hunting Russians: the Tigers, with a few Panzer IIIs along as guides. Theo’s was one of them. That left him less than thrilled. The Tigers were also splotchily whitewashed, which in spring made sure T-34s would find them.

Finding the Tigers, the Russian panzers roared to the attack. Smoky diesel exhaust spewed from their tailpipes. Maybe they thought the German machines were long-gunned Panzer IVs, against which they still stood an excellent chance. They discovered their mistake in a hurry. The Tigers could hit from as far out as that crewman claimed. And sloped armor didn’t keep out rounds from an 88. One T-34’s turret flew through the air and landed, upside down and blazing, by the chassis.

“The T-34 tips its hat to the Tiger!” someone from another panzer yelled in Theo’s earphones. He would have liked the joke better if he hadn’t heard it before.

Pretty soon, the surviving Russians decided they wanted to go on surviving. They fled. The Tigers raced after them, as well as anything that heavy could race. One of the Panzer III commanders shouted a radio warning to them. Arrogant in their land dreadnoughts, the Tiger crews went right on racing. One of them raced over a mine and threw a track. It slewed sideways and stopped. The others quit charging ahead at top speed, anyhow.

“Fucking told you so, you asslicks,” the Panzer III commander said. There in his small, old-fashioned machine, Theo smiled. He couldn’t have put it better himself.

France and England might be back in the war against Hitler, but Alistair Walsh still wasn’t sure how serious about it they were. He hoped it was just the same attitude he’d seen in the trenches the last time around: a sensible reluctance to get shot without the prospect of a decent reward.

Back then, the Germans had shown the same spirit. Not now. Now the Fritzes in Belgium were angry and embittered that they had a war on their hands. A wounded prisoner who spoke some English scowled at Walsh. “Your folk are traitors to Aryanhood. You are traitors to Western civilization.”

“Too bloody bad, mate,” Walsh said cheerily. “Want a fag?” He held out a packet of Navy Cuts.

“Danke.” The Landser took one. Walsh gave him a light. After a deep drag, he went on, “Wait until you see our geheime weapons. Then you sing a not so happy song.”

“What’s geheime?” asked Walsh, whose German didn’t run much further than Hande hoch!

“It is secret,” the German answered after a little thought of his own.

“What d’you mean, it’s secret? You’ll sing like a canary if we want you to,” Walsh growled. Neither of them had enough of the other’s language to clear up the confusion in a hurry. Light did dawn at last. Walsh went on, “Well, what kind of secret weapons have you got?”

“If I knew, they would not secret be,” the Fritz said. “But the Fuhrer has them promised, and the Fuhrer is always right.”

“My left one,” Walsh jeered. That meant nothing to the German, and the sergeant didn’t bother explaining. He sent the prisoner off to the rear to let someone who could really talk to him ask him questions. He even told the men taking him back not to do for him unless he tried to run for it. With one arm all bandaged up, that didn’t seem likely, but you never could tell.

The Tommies pushed toward Chimay, one more place that had seen a boatload of hard fighting a generation earlier. The Germans pushed back every chance they got. Whenever they had to abandon a farmhouse or a village, they booby-trapped it to a fare-thee-well. One luckless Englishman incautiously lifted a toilet seat and never got the chance to flush.

“Could have buried him in a jam tin, the bloody twit,” a pioneer told Walsh. He chuckled nastily. “He was bloody afterwards-I’ll tell you that.”

“Pity the Belgians didn’t warn him,” Walsh remarked.

“Those buggers?” The military engineer spat. “Likely tell! Odds are better they would’ve warned a German.”

Walsh spat, too. He knew what the other man was talking about. “You ever run up against the Walloon Legion?”

“The Rexists’ collabos?” The pioneer shook his head. “Haven’t had that pleasure yet. Nice to think I’ve missed something, any road.”

“They’re worse than the Germans, to hell with me if they’re not,” Walsh said. “Your Fritz, now, chances are he’s a conscript. He’s a good enough soldier-the Fritzes always seem to be, damn them. But he won’t always have that fire in his belly, if you take my meaning.”

“Oh, yes.” The pioneer nodded.

Thus encouraged, Walsh warmed to his theme: “The Walloon Legion, though, they’re all volunteers. They have to convince the Nazis they’re mean enough to deserve to carry a Mauser. And once they get to, they don’t dare let the side down. The next Rexist bastard who surrenders will be the first. They were Nazis before the shooting even started, and they likely expect we’ll shoot them out of hand.”

“And do we?” the other man asked in interested tones.

“I never have.” Walsh left it there. Quite a few English soldiers reckoned the Walloon Legion traitors and did give them short shrift. War was a nasty business any way you looked at it. He wondered whether it really had been glorious back before machine guns and poison gas. Maybe … as long as a poet was writing from a safe distance.

More English tanks accompanied the infantry than had been true the last time Walsh was on the Continent during the Germans’ winter rush toward Paris. These machines were faster and better armed than the early models, too. All the same, the high command didn’t have the panache with them that the chaps on the other team did. But Walsh was glad to have them around even so. They made him feel safer, whether he truly was or not.

For a little while, he hoped the Allies could do unto Germany as Hitler’s minions had done unto them a few years earlier. The English and French were pushing forward, after all. A reversed blitzkrieg would be sweet. His side had finally learned not to spread their armor all along the line in penny packets, but to mass it so it might actually accomplish something. The Fritzes were hard schoolmasters, but their lessons stuck.

He soon discovered they had more of those lessons than they’d taught in 1938 and 1939. That wounded POW who bragged of secret weapons might have known what he was talking about after all. British tanks rattled across the field between Chimay and another small town called Marienbourg. Walsh and his men loped along between them to discourage Landsers from sneaking up and chucking grenades through the tanks’ hatches.

Something moved in amongst the bare-branched trees of an orchard ahead. “That’s a tank,” a Tommy called.

“Well, what if it is?” one of his buddies replied. “We’ve got a few o’ them buggers our own selves.”

Walsh felt very much the same way. He wasn’t scared to death of Panzer IIIs or IVs any more, not when he had armor of his own at hand. Odds were his side would have more machines than the Nazis did, so sooner or later Fritz would have to pull back.

This tank came out of the orchard into the open when the Tommies were still more than a mile away. At first, Walsh thought it was a Panzer IV with a long gun: a formidable opponent, but one who had to be suicidal to show himself like that. It did seem large for a Panzer IV. Even so …

As soon as it opened fire, he realized it was no Panzer IV. Two shots smashed two English Valentines. The other English tanks started shooting back. Their AP rounds bounced off the German monster’s armor. Almost contemptuously, it knocked out another Valentine, and then a Matilda II.

The English crews were brave. They tried to get closer, to give their plainly outclassed guns some kind of chance against this … whatever it was. That only made them easier targets. Methodically, as if it had all day, the German tank murdered them. One pillar of greasy black smoke after another marked their pyres.

“They put an 88 in the dirty bastard!” Alistair Walsh heard the horror in his own voice. With an 88 and the thick armor they obviously also had, that German crew could kill every single tank bearing down on them. If they got enough ammo, chances were they could kill every tank England had on the Continent.

His countrymen inside the Matildas and Valentines needed only a couple of minutes more to come to the same conclusion. They broke off their attack and scurried back toward Chimay as fast as they could go. That wasn’t fast enough for two of them. The German behemoth didn’t disdain knocking them out as they retreated.

Then its coaxial machine gun also started chattering, as if to warn the English foot soldiers: All right, I know you’re there, and that’s close enough. By then, Walsh required no more convincing. He wouldn’t find out this afternoon what Marienbourg looked like. If he was very lucky, he’d get another glimpse of the ruins of Chimay.

The very idea of flying against enemy panzers inside Belgium affronted Hans-Ulrich Rudel. “They’ve got no business messing about here!” he fumed to his radioman and rear gunner. “They agreed this was part of the Reich’s sphere of influence when they made peace with us.”

Sergeant Dieselhorst was considerate enough to blow his stream of cigarette smoke away from Hans-Ulrich. “And then they unagreed when they broke the truce … sir,” he said, plainly giving his pilot the benefit of the doubt by using the honorific.

“But they aren’t supposed to do that,” Rudel complained.

“Well, the only way to stop them is to blow them up,” Dieselhorst answered. “If we don’t do that in Belgium, chances are we’ll have to do it inside of Germany. Then we’d be blowing up our own people, too.”

“Mm. You’ve got something there, I suppose.” Rudel’s nod was reluctant, but a nod nonetheless. “Much better that we should blow up Belgians. Especially these miserable Walloons. They’re nothing but a bunch of Frenchmen flying the wrong flag.”

This time, Albert Dieselhorst pointed to the medal Hans-Ulrich wore around his neck every waking moment when he wasn’t bathing or entertaining someone of the female persuasion. “I saw in one of the service papers that they gave a Ritterkreuz to a Walloon.”

“You’re joking!” Hans-Ulrich said.

“So help me.” Dieselhorst raised his right hand, first and second fingers slightly crooked above it, as if he were swearing an oath. “For conspicuous bravery against the Ivans. The Fuhrer presented it to him personally.”

All that detail convinced Hans-Ulrich the noncom wasn’t making up the story to annoy him. He smelled politics just the same. “Must be to keep the Rexists happy-and to keep them in line.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Sergeant Dieselhorst chuckled raspily. “Even if that sounds more like something I’d come out with than what I’d expect from you. I’m surprised you didn’t notice the piece, though. From what it said, Hitler really liked that guy.”

“He’s lucky, whoever he is,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“I guess so,” Sergeant Dieselhorst replied, in tones ambiguous enough that Rudel had trouble telling whether he was agreeing or showing doubt. The sergeant went on, “Any which way, if we find Tommies or real French fries in amongst the Walloons, we’ve got to do for them.”

“Ja,” Hans-Ulrich said, still with no marked enthusiasm. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to kill Englishmen and Frenchmen. He did, with all his heart. He hated them far more fiercely than he had when the war was new. If only they’d stayed on the Reich’s side against the godless Reds, the filthy doctrine of Communism might have been wiped off the face of the earth by now.

As things were, Russia not only remained in the fight, the Ivans were gaining ground in the East. And, like so many rooks and carrion crows, England and France were doing their best to peck bits off Germany even before she was dead.

That she might die was what infuriated and depressed Hans-Ulrich at the same time. He could see that the Fuhrer’s foreign policy had failed, and might have failed disastrously. He could see it, yes, but he had no idea what to do about it or even what to think. It was an eventuality for which nothing in his life or training prepared him.

Right now, the only thing he saw worth doing-and the only thing that would keep him out of the stockade-was to fly against the foe whenever he got the chance … and whenever the Luftwaffe decided he could do it. With two fronts to cover, German fighters were spread thin. With none of them in the neighborhood, anything the RAF and the Armee de l’Air flew shot Stukas down without breaking a sweat.

These days, he couldn’t do as he’d done against the Russians: smash a panzer, rise into the sky to dive again, smash another, and then repeat several more times. Unlike the Reds, the Western Allies had almost as many radio sets as the Germans. Their planes would be on you by the time you were swooping down on your second panzer. So you blasted one, got out of there as fast as you could, and then tried to find another one to kill somewhere else.

It was inefficient. When Hans-Ulrich complained about it, Sergeant Dieselhorst returned him to reality with a single pungent line: “Getting a shell through the motor and going down in flames is pretty fucking inefficient, too … sir.” After that, Hans-Ulrich found other things to complain about.

An order from the Fuhrer came to all men fighting on the ground and in the air. No one was to retreat any more, Hitler declared. German forces were to die where they stood if they couldn’t advance. Thus we best protect the sacred soil of the Reich against enemy desecration, the directive thundered.

No one in the squadron said anything after Colonel Steinbrenner read the order aloud. The CO’s voice showed nothing of what he thought about the typewritten words on the sheet of paper he held. He might have been reading out the Fuhrer’s laundry list.

He might have been, but he wasn’t. Nobody said anything while the squadron was assembled in a mass, no. But after Colonel Steinbrenner turned away, small knots of friends formed and started hashing it out. They were knots whose members trusted one another not to betray them to the Gestapo.

Hans-Ulrich didn’t have any friends like that. Most of the time, he didn’t miss them. He was proud of being a white crow. Now, though, he really wanted to find out what his Kameraden thought.

He knew how he’d eventually learn, of course. Sergeant Dieselhorst would tell him. The other Luftwaffe men trusted the sergeant. And Dieselhorst trusted Rudel. You had better trust the man with whom you flew. If you didn’t, you’d both end up dead.

That didn’t necessarily make you friends, though. Hans-Ulrich knew the noncom thought he was a prig, and still wet behind the ears. He was stubbornly proud of his priggishness. In spite of being young-no, because of being young-he would have denied the other if Dieselhorst threw it in his face. Dieselhorst didn’t; he had other things on his mind.

“It’s stupid, you know,” he said without preamble. “It’s especially stupid if you’re stuck on the ground like a rat and you can’t go and fly away when you get in trouble. Sometimes the only choices you have are falling back and getting killed right where you are.”

“It’s a problem,” Hans-Ulrich admitted.

“It’s not a problem. It’s goddamn dumb, sir.” Sergeant Dieselhorst had the air of a man clinging to patience as if it were a cork life ring in the Atlantic. “The enemy will kill you if you hold your ground. Your own side will kill you if you retreat. What does that leave you?”

Victory! was the word that leaped into Hans-Ulrich’s mouth. It didn’t leap out again, and into the cool spring air alongside the landing strip. He was much too sure Sergeant Dieselhorst would laugh at him if he came out with it. Instead, cautiously, he answered, “Not much.”

“Oh, yes, it does-on this front, anyhow,” Dieselhorst said. “I wouldn’t give up to the Russians for all the tea in China. Chances are they’d kill me for the fun of it, you know? And they’d have more fun before they let me die. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“Oh, you’re right about that.” Rudel had always figured he’d stick his pistol in his mouth if he looked like getting caught by the Ivans.

Dieselhorst’s grunt was oddly warming; it said something like Well, you know a little bit, anyhow. But he went on, “Here, though … You surrender to the Tommies or even the French, you’ve got a chance to see the end of the play. They may shoot you-that kind of shit just happens-but they won’t torture you. And if they’ll kill you for sure if you keep fighting but only maybe if you give up, what are you supposed to do?”

Surrender was treason to the Vaterland. Hitler’s decree left no doubts on that score. But Hans-Ulrich wanted to come back from the war alive, too. He didn’t say anything at all. Albert Dieselhorst grunted again, and the pilot felt as if he’d passed some obscure test.

French 75S and 105S boomed behind Aristide Demange. He sneered at the popguns, as he sneered at so much in life. He wished they were all 105s, as most of the Germans’ cannon were. Then they could give the Boches just as much hell as they’d had inflicted on them in this war. But no. Too much to hope for. The enormous stocks of 75s left over from 1918 would soldier on till the Nazis blew up the last of them-and the last of the artillerists who served them, too.

Shells from the guns of both calibers burst somewhere on the German side of the line. Smoke and dirt rose into the air. The show looked impressive. Demange knew too well that it looked more impressive than it was. The 75s fired with a flat trajectory. That gave them good range for a piece of their caliber. But, unless they caught you out in the open, they probably wouldn’t hurt you. Their shells couldn’t drop down into trenches and holes the way rounds fired from howitzers could. Along with their bigger ammo, that was what made howitzers so dangerous.

“Are we going to advance now?” Francois asked Demange. Was he still eager in spite of having watched his friends get gunned down in the last brilliant assault? If so, then he really was a few pins short of a cushion, or more than a few.

“Wait a bit,” Demange said. “Unless you feel like killing yourself now, I mean. In that case, be my guest.” He waved invitingly toward the barbed wire ahead. However inviting the wave was, though, no motion showed above the parapet in front of the hole where they crouched. He didn’t know a German sniper was peering this way through a scope, but he didn’t know one wasn’t, either.

Francois, whether dumb as rocks or with altogether too much in his trousers, looked at him as if he’d started speaking Albanian or something. “Don’t you want to beat the Boches?”

“Sure I do,” Demange answered. “I want to live through beating them, too. I want to gloat about it. I want to make them die for their fucking country. I don’t give a fart about dying for mine.”

“But-” Francois started. Demange wondered if he would come out with that Dulce et decorum est bullshit. It had been outdated centuries before the last war, but some provincials never got the news.

Before Francois got the chance to make an outdated jackass of himself, the Germans woke up and started shooting back. They never needed long. Their guns went after the French cannon that had annoyed them, and they started dropping mortar bombs near the trenches to discourage French foot soldiers like Francois from getting frisky.

“Down!” Demange yelled. He was already doing it. So were the poilus who’d been in the front lines for a while. The new fish took longer, the way they always did. They didn’t realize they were in trouble till they got hurt. That, of course, was just exactly too late.

Demange hated mortars even more than he hated a lot of other things. You couldn’t hear the bombs leaving the tubes. You mostly couldn’t hear them till they whistled down. Then you had to hope-you had to pray, if you happened to be a praying man, which he wasn’t-they didn’t whistle down right on top of you.

The shrieks that rose from the French positions all seemed to come from at least a hundred meters away. Fragments snarled through the air over Demange’s head. Dirt and perhaps some of those fragments pattered off his helmet.

He glanced over toward Francois. “Still got that hard-on to charge the Boches?”

“Maybe not so much, Lieutenant,” the new kid allowed.

“Well, then, maybe-just maybe, and I wouldn’t bet more than a sou on it-you aren’t as stupid as you look,” Demange said. Francois had started to smile at him. The expression congealed on his face like cooling fat.

Sometimes, of course, the cons with the white mustaches and the gold and silver leaves on their kepis were stupider than even a guy fresh out of basic ever dreamt of being. Or rather, those cons had the chance to be stupid on a scale a raw private couldn’t begin to imagine. When Francois wanted to advance against the Germans, a word from Demange sufficed to quash him. When the fools with the fancy hats ordered an army corps to advance, nobody could quash them … except the bastards in Feldgrau, of course.

The Germans had some new toys that the cons in the expensive kepis didn’t seem to know about. By now, even jerks like Francois knew the Tiger tank by name and had acquired a healthy respect-make that fear-for it. The generals ordered French armor forward as if the Tiger were no more than a gleam in some Nazi engineer’s eye. French tank-men, however, like the frogs in the saying, died in earnest. When they came up against Tigers, they-and their machines-also died in large numbers.

And the Germans pulled a new machine gun out from under their coal-scuttle helmets. Demange didn’t know what French generals thought of the German MG-34. He hated it himself. It fired much faster than any French machine gun, spraying murder out for a thousand meters from wherever it happened to lurk. And it could lurk anywhere. It was aircooled and light, and could be fired from a tripod, a bipod, or even, in an emergency, from the hip.

Prisoners said the new Nazi machine gun was called the MG-42. Demange supposed that stood for the year in which it went into production, the year now vanished with all the others that had gone before. Whatever the name stood for, the gun stood for trouble.

It made the MG-34 seem retarded, which Demange wouldn’t have believed possible till he saw-and heard-it for himself. Once you heard an MG-42 in action, you’d never mistake it for anything else. It fired so fast, shots blurred together into a continuous sheet of noise.

Naturally, firing that fast heated the barrel red-hot in short order. The efficient Boches issued an asbestos mitt to their machine-gun crews. In a pinch, some cloth would also let you take off the hot barrel so you could replace it with a cool one. The whole business needed only a few seconds. Then you went right back to slaughtering whatever you could see.

With French tanks smashed like dropped eggs, with French infantry falling as if to a harvester of death, the corps’ attack didn’t get far. Demange ordered his company to entrench even before word came down from On High that the generals had decided that they weren’t going to sweep triumphantly into Berlin after all. He took a certain sour pride in suffering fewer casualties than the other companies in the regiment. Fewer, unfortunately, didn’t mean few; they’d got badly mauled. But they could-he hoped they could-fight back if the Fritzes decided to counterattack.

The Germans would be taking a chance if they did. Demange deliberately placed his new line at the western edge of one of their minefields. If they wanted to hoist themselves on their own petards trying to come to grips with his poilus, they were welcome to, as far as he was concerned.

His men would also have trouble advancing from their position, of course. He didn’t worry about that. If Corps HQ wanted him to go forward, they could damn well send some sappers to help clear the way. He didn’t think they’d do that any time soon. Their last rush of blood to the head-or, more likely, to the cock-had proved too expensive.

He couldn’t complain about the zeal with which his men dug in. Dirt flew from their entrenching tools as if their mothers’ sides of the family were all moles. They’d been out in the open a couple of times now, exposed to shellfire and to those horrifying machine guns. The farther away from that they got, the happier they were.

There was Francois, doing his best to burrow all the way to New Zealand. “So how do you like advancing now, kid?” Demange inquired.

Francois had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, much the way Demange did (even if it was a Gauloise). It twitched as he answered, “Fuck that shit … sir.”

Demange grunted laughter and thumped him on the back. “There you go. It sounds better than it is, just like everything else. Well, everything except fucking.” Francois laughed, too. He sounded jaded, like a veteran. Hell, he’d lived through two attacks. He was a veteran now.