Two Fronts

Chapter 8

“What the hell have you got there?” Mike Carroll asked, staring at the fat book Chaim Weinberg was reading. “New Hemingway.” Chaim held it up so Mike could see the spine-the cover was long gone. “It’s called For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it’s about the war here before the fighting started all over everywhere.”

“How is it?” Mike asked.

“Pretty damn good. I wish I could get a pretty girl to hop in my sleeping bag as easy as this guy Jordan does, though.”

“I was up on the Ebro when he was in Madrid,” Mike said. “Hemingway, I mean, not the guy in the book.”

“I understood you. So was I,” Chaim said. “I know some guys who knew him while he was here, though.”

“Oh, sure. Me, too.” Carroll nodded. The sun glared down on the trenches. Spring in Spain didn’t last long. It quickly rolled into summer, and summer in central Spain, like summer in central California, was nothing to joke about. Mike went on, “Didn’t Hemingway have that lady war correspondent hopping all over him then? What the hell was her name?”

“Gellhorn. Martha Gellhorn.” To show how he knew, Chaim flipped back to the very beginning of the book. “It’s dedicated to her. They’re married now, I think.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Mike nodded again. “Married and living in Cuba or some such place. That’s the nice thing about covering a war when you’re a reporter. You can leave once you’ve got your story, and then write a book while you’re pouring down rum and Coke thousands of miles away.”

“You got that right. He wrote a good book, though-I will give him that much,” Chaim said. “The stuff about what the Republicans and the Fascists did to each other when the war was breaking out … I’ve talked to enough Spaniards to have a notion of how it was, and what’s in here feels real.”

“Okay. Give it to me when you’re done with it, then,” Carroll said.

“Will do. Just so you know, it’s not one of your cheerful-type books. No matter how much screwing this Jordan guy does, no way in hell he’s gonna live to the end of it,” Chaim warned.

“I’m a big boy, Mommy.” Mike grinned to take away the sting.

Chaim grinned, too. “Fuck you, big boy.” They both laughed. Chaim wiggled his back so the forward wall of the trench didn’t dig into it in so many places-or at least so the trench wall dug into it in some different places-and went back to plowing through For Whom the Bell Tolls.

He was about fifty pages from the end when Nationalist howitzers opened up on the stretch of line the Internationals held. The nerve of the bastards! he thought as he huddled in the almost-bombproof he’d scraped in that forward wall. Couldn’t they even let a guy finish his book? He didn’t remember the Czech sniper’s monster rifle going off, so Sanjurjo’s men weren’t taking revenge for some newly fallen alleged hero.

Or he didn’t think they were. Hemingway had sucked him in deeply enough that he might not have noticed the Czech firing the antitank rifle. The damn thing was hard to ignore, though. Chances were the Nationalists were just being their usual asshole selves.

More 105s came down. How crazy would it be if an American International in Spain who was reading about an American International in Spain who was going to get killed by the goddamn Nationalists got killed by the goddamn Nationalists while he was reading? Well, not at the exact moment he was reading, but close enough to satisfy even the most dedicated coincidence-sniffer.

Chaim didn’t want to get killed. Well, Robert Jordan didn’t want to get killed, either, but that wouldn’t do him any good. The god named Hemingway was one merciless son of a bitch. Jordan could screw till the earth moved for him and Maria; his movie wouldn’t have a happy ending even so.

The earth was moving for Chaim, too, but he couldn’t enjoy it the way Jordan did in the book. The damn shell bursts were making it shake. If one of those shells came down too close, Chaim’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending, either.

Hey, he thought, I did some fancy fucking in Spain, too. I even have a kid to prove it. La Martellita was nothing like Maria. She was as tough as Pilar, if you could imagine Pilar beautiful. And if you could imagine Pilar beautiful, you could imagine just about anything.

After forty-five minutes or so, the shelling let up. No, the Nationalists didn’t mean anything in particular by it. They were throwing some hate around-that was all. Chaim had heard an English International give artillery fire that name. God knew it fit. Whenever Chaim said it himself, the people he was talking to always got it.

Stretcher-bearers carried a moaning wounded man back toward the doctors. Chaim hoped it was one of the Spaniards who filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks these days. Not many Americans were left any more. He didn’t want to lose a friend-or even a jerk who spoke English.

For Whom the Bell Tolls had got dirty and a little crumpled when he dove for cover. He figured Hemingway would approve. From things he’d heard, the writer was a blowhard and drank like a fish, but the man could sure as hell put words on paper.

Back behind the line, Republican guns came to life. They started repaying the Nationalists for their bad manners. If only they could take out Sanjurjo’s artillery … But they didn’t seem interested in trying. They inflicted the same kind of misery on the enemy’s forward trenches as the Fascists had sent this way.

Chaim hated artillerymen. He didn’t know a foot soldier who didn’t. He suspected the Roman legionaries had hated the bastards who served the Parthian catapults-and their own as well. How could you not hate someone who could hurt you at a range where you couldn’t hurt him back? There the son of a bitch was, drinking coffee and smoking a cigar, maybe with some cute dancer on his lap, and all he had to do was yank that rope to blow you into the middle of next week. It wasn’t even close to fair. No matter where you were in the world, it had to look the same way.

When storming parties went forward, enemy machine-gun teams had a tough time surrendering. They dished out too much woe to atone for it by throwing up their hands. Artillerymen were the same way, only doubled and redoubled. The trouble was, storming parties rarely got far enough into the rear to give them what they deserved. That took more artillery, dammit.

After a while, the Republican gunners decided they’d done what they could for their benighted brethren in the trenches. Their cannon fell silent. Chaim waited to see if the Nationalist 105s would open up again. They didn’t. Maybe they were short on shells, maybe on outrage.

Either way, he settled down not far from where he’d sat before and went back to the novel. When things were quiet, you savored the moment. Looking back, he’d done more sitting around and waiting than fighting. That might be true, but when he did look back he knew he would remember the moments of terror and the even rarer moments of exaltation far better than he recalled the longer boring stretches.

When he looked back. If he looked back. If he lived to look back. He’d been in the war a long time, and he hadn’t once got badly hurt. That made him even luckier than a guy who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The gambler only won money and all the fine cars and champagne and loose, beautiful women it could buy. Chaim won the precious chance to be that guy.

If he stayed long enough, he’d catch it as surely as Robert Jordan was going to in the story. A shell would come down in the wrong place or he’d make the unwanted acquaintance of a machine-gun bullet or some Fascist would smash in his skull with an entrenching tool in a raid. In the long run, the house always won.

They’d been on the point of demobilizing the Internationals when the big European war blew up. That would have been his chance to leave with his honor still in one piece. But it hadn’t happened. He was still here-and still reading.

Robert Jordan blew the bridge. The Republic fucked up the attack he was supposed to blow the bridge for. Sure as hell, he got it. And so did the one halfway decent Nationalist Hemingway stuck in the book. War sucked, all right. Hemingway might be a drunken blowhard, but he sure as hell knew that.

Colonel Steinbrenner stood under the broad Russian sky, looking at the assembled pilots and radiomen and groundcrew personnel in their black coveralls. He’d climbed up onto a ration crate so they could all see him, too: not much of a podium, but it was what he had.

Hans-Ulrich had elbowed his way up toward the front of the squadron. He wanted to hear what the CO had to say. The cynical part of him that had sprung up during the war wondered why. He’d get the same orders no matter what Steinbrenner said now. But, cynical part or not, here he stood. Like Luther, he could do nothing else.

Steinbrenner raised both hands, almost like a minister offering benediction. The Luftwaffe men in front of him quieted down. A couple of guys who didn’t quiet down fast enough to suit their comrades got elbows in the ribs to encourage them

“Well, boys, it’s finally gone and happened,” Steinbrenner said. “We are being recalled to the West.”

A buzz ran through the flyers and groundcrew men. Rage and disappointment warred within Hans-Ulrich: rage that betrayal from England and France was forcing the Reich to shift the squadron away from the vital war against Bolshevism, disappointment that his affair with Sofia was being forcibly ended.

“When they told me they were transferring us, they warned me, ‘You’d best be careful in the West-you’ll be going up against the hottest new RAF Spitfires and French Dewoitines,’ ” Steinbrenner went on. He raised one eyebrow till it almost disappeared under the patent-leather brim of his officer’s cap. “And I looked at them, and I said, ‘Ja? Und so?’”

The squadron exploded into laughter. Hans-Ulrich barked as loud as anyone else. Yes, modern RAF and Armee de l’Air fighters could hack Stukas out of the sky with the greatest of ease. But so could the biplane Po-153s the Red Air Force was still flying. The Ju-87 was not made to dogfight, or even to run away. You had to be an optimist to use it where you didn’t have unchallenged air superiority.

Which meant somebody in the Luftwaffe high command probably was an optimist. There wouldn’t be unchallenged air superiority in the West. The comment Colonel Steinbrenner had got from his superiors made that only too plain. Hans-Ulrich had been shot down once in the West and once here in the East. He and Sergeant Dieselhorst had managed to bail out both times. He supposed they might stay lucky once or twice more.

He also had the feeling they would need to. If they went hunting panzers in France, the gun pods would make their plane even less airworthy than it was without them. Maybe he could surprise enemy fighters with the 37mm guns. Any cannon that would do for a panzer would do for a Spitfire … if you could hit it. He’d knocked down a couple of enemy planes with the big guns. Again, he supposed he might stay lucky.

Or he might not. And if he didn’t, his story wouldn’t have the kind of ending a cinema audience liked.

“We fly west day after tomorrow,” Steinbrenner said. “Our new base will be in Belgium, not far from the French border. Groundcrew men will come by rail-we won’t mount you on the wings and drop you over the new airstrip.”

He got another laugh, this one mostly from the men in the black coveralls. Hans-Ulrich envied his ease up there in front of everybody. The pilot wished he could match it himself. He knew he had a long way to go.

When he and Albert Dieselhorst climbed into their Stuka for the journey into the wild, exotic, and almost forgotten West, Dieselhorst said, “Well, I won’t be sorry to get the hell out of Russia, and you can take that to the bank.”

“Neither will I,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. The next German he met who admitted being sorry to leave Russia would be the first. But he couldn’t help adding, “The Reich isn’t leaving. We’ve still got a lot of men here on the ground.”

“Some of them will head west, too,” Dieselhorst said. “If the froggies and the Tommies are serious, we sure don’t have enough troops there now to do more than annoy them.”

“Two-front war,” Rudel said gloomily. “Damn the Englishmen! It’s their fault.”

“It sure is.” Sergeant Dieselhorst chuckled, almost too low for Rudel to hear him. Hans-Ulrich didn’t swear very often. Maybe that meant he got more mileage out of the cussing he did use. Maybe it just meant he was a prig.

Bf-109s flew top cover as the Stukas buzzed back toward Byelorussia. If the Ivans had somehow heard the squadron was pulling back, it would be just like them to try to ambush it. But the planes escaped without harm, and came down somewhere not far outside of Minsk.

The Germans were putting their mark on occupied Byelorussia. White signs with black letters from an alphabet a man could read marked the airstrip and the roads around it. Opel trucks-gasoline tankers-rattled up to refuel the dive-bombers. Then the Stukas flew off again, their next stop not far from Bialystok.

Hans-Ulrich thought about asking for a little leave to give Sofia a proper good-bye. If she weren’t a Mischling, he thought he would have done it. After all, the worst Colonel Steinbrenner could tell him was no. But in this time of trouble for Germany, he didn’t want even the tolerant colonel noting how attached he’d got to a half-Jew. Sometimes the best thing you could do was keep your big yap shut.

Before the flight crews climbed back into their Ju-87s for the journey across the rest of Poland and back into the Vaterland, Sergeant Dieselhorst set a hand on Hans-Ulrich’s shoulder for a moment. “Every so often, life can be a real bastard, you know?” he said, rough sympathy in his voice.

“Ja,” Hans-Ulrich replied, and not another word. Whether or not Colonel Steinbrenner knew how he felt, his rear gunner sure did. Well, Dieselhorst wouldn’t blab. Hans-Ulrich was sure of that.

Their next stop was in Breslau, not far from where Hans-Ulrich had grown up. Signs at the airport were in German. Some smiling young women from a relief agency brought the Luftwaffe men sweets and something they called tea. What leaves or roots they’d brewed it from, Hans-Ulrich had no idea. It tasted like something halfway between licorice and cough medicine. But it was hot, and they were pleasant, and they had accents like his. He didn’t have to stop and puzzle out what they were saying, the way he’d so often needed to with Sofia.

After a little while, though, he realized how much he missed her clever tartness. He had no trouble understanding these girls, no, but what difference did it make if they had nothing interesting to say? And, after her sharp, angular features, the German girls seemed doughy.

When they went off to minister to another crew, he said as much to Dieselhorst. The older man’s smile was bittersweet. “Ah, sonny, you really did have it bad, didn’t you?” he said.

“No.” Hans-Ulrich shook his head. “I had it good. I didn’t know how good I had it.”

Dieselhorst patted him on the back. “That’s what I said.” Hans-Ulrich only frowned.

They flew across the Reich. As they got farther west, they flew over towns the RAF had bombed. The devastation in the Vaterland shocked Rudel. He’d visited the same kind of devastation on Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France, and Russia, but that wasn’t the same, not to him it wasn’t. Those were foreign countries, enemy lands. They weren’t Germany.

The squadron’s new home in Belgium was outside of Philippeville, a small town south of Charleroi, which had been the scene of a thunderous battle in the last war’s opening round. The people spoke French. The black-on-white signs in German seemed almost as alien here as they had in the Soviet Union.

No smiling, friendly girls greeted the Luftwaffe men. The snouts of 88mm flak guns pointed skyward to shoot at enemy raiders. Barbed wire held saboteurs at bay-people hoped.

Surveying the scene, Dieselhorst said, “Are you sure we left Russia?”

“Pretty sure,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “If we get shot down on this front, odds are they won’t stab us with pitchforks or start carving on us. We’re back in the land of the Geneva Convention.”

“Boy, sir, you sure know how to ease my mind,” Sergeant Dieselhorst observed, and Rudel found himself with no reply to that.

There were times when Sarah wondered whether she’d ever been married at all. Officially, her last name was Bruck now, not Goldman, but how often did you need to worry about your last name, or even remember you had one? She was living with her parents again, in her old room, almost as if the months with Isidor had never been.

Almost. Her clothes had gone to the Brucks’ flat above their bakery-and had gone up in flames when the bombs hit the place. She was left with no more than she’d had on her back the night of the RAF raid. Even Aryans in the Reich got scanty clothing rations; those for Jews were smaller still. Replacing what she’d lost would take, well, forever, or twenty minutes longer.

Mother shared what she had. But that was already shabby, and would only get shabbier faster from being worn by two people rather than one. Then, out of the blue, the rabbi who’d intoned prayers at Isidor’s small, sorry funeral showed up with a bundle.

“Not much,” he said, “and I know not stylish for a pretty young girl, but with luck better than nothing.”

The dresses and blouses must have come from little old Jewish women who’d died in Munster. Some of them hadn’t been stylish since the days when the Kaiser still ruled Germany. Not everything looked as if it even came close to fitting.

None of which mattered a pfennig’s worth to Sarah. What she couldn’t alter, her mother could. “Thank you so much!” she exclaimed, moved almost to tears. She’d never had much to do with the synagogue. Like her parents, she’d been secular, assimilated … and much good it did her once the Nazis started screaming about how the Jews-any Jews at all-were their misfortune.

“We try,” the rabbi answered. “We don’t always do as well as we wish we could, but we try.”

“Thank you,” Sarah said again. “Thank you for thinking of me.” Even if I never thought of you went unsaid but, no doubt, not uncomprehended.

No, not uncomprehended. “We are all in the same boat,” the rabbi said. “It may be the Titanic, but we are all in it together whatever it is. Alevai one day it will come to a safe harbor.”

“Alevai omayn!” Sarah agreed. The rabbi touched the brim of his hat and said his good-byes. His black suit was shiny in the seat and down the sleeves; his trousers showed a deftly mended rip. The six-pointed yellow star labeled Jude on his left lapel was noticeably newer and fresher than the coat it defaced.

Sarah and her mother sorted the clothes. “Well, we’ve got some work in front of us before you’ll want to go out in any of this,” Hanna Goldman said, as diplomatically as she could.

“Oh, sure.” Sarah nodded. “But it’s cloth!” She might have been one of the Children of Israel, talking about manna from heaven. She was one of the Children of Israel, she felt she was talking about manna, and the Third Reich was a desert beside which wandering through Sinai would have seemed a holiday by comparison.

She and her mother were still excited when her father came back from his shift on the labor gang. Benjamin Goldman’s mouth twisted when he saw the clothes. “Very nice,” he managed at last.

“I know they’re old,” Sarah said. “We can do things with them, though. We really can, honest.”

“She’s right,” Mother agreed.

“Oh, I believe you.” Believe her or not, Father sounded uncommonly bleak. “But those people shame me. We paid them no attention for so long, but they remember us. How can I not be ashamed?”

“The rabbi said we were all in the Titanic together,” Sarah said. The rabbi, actually, had said it better than that. He’d said it in a way Father might have, but Sarah couldn’t quite remember how. She had the gist, though: “How can we not help each other at a time like this?”

Her father’s mouth turned down on one side once more. “I never had the least trouble ignoring the frum.” He used the Yiddish word for observant as if it were from a foreign tongue. For an assimilated German Jew, it was. “I’m embarrassed, dammit. If we could find charity anywhere else …”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Mother said, her voice sharper than usual. “And we are beggars right now, whether it embarrasses you or not.”

Samuel Goldman sighed. “I wish I could tell you you’re wrong. Instead, I have to tell you you’re right, and you have no idea how much more that hurts.” In spite of everything, he still kept his touchy pride.

For a couple of days, playing with the old clothes and trying to turn them into something wearable kept Sarah too busy to worry about what she kept: a boatload of tsuris. Isidor had no brothers or sister. Sarah and Isidor’s uncle were the family heirs.

In a civilized society, it would have been a serious, even a solemn, business. In the Reich, it carried more than a few elements of farce. For one thing, quite a bit of her late husband’s family property had gone up in fire and smoke. For another, Munster’s Nazi hierarchy seemed bound and determined to steal what was left in the Brucks’ bank account.

Scowling at yet another threateningly official letter, Sarah put down her pinking shears for a moment. “The gonifs! It’s so unfair!” she burst out.

“And this surprises you because …?” Hanna Goldman had lived with Samuel for a lot of years now. She could do an excellent contralto impression of him. The voice might be too high, but the sardonic tone was perfect.

It teased a snort out of Sarah, but she quickly soured again. “They have everything!” she said. “Everything! And they want to take away some nothing that’s supposed to belong to a couple of Jews.” As far as she was concerned, Isidor’s uncle would have been welcome to whatever the Brucks had. She’d been part of the family only a little while. An inheritance like that would have made her hands feel slimy with blood if she were trying to take it from him.

But the Nazi hooligans were another story. Why had the Brucks died, anyhow? Because Hitler started his stupid war, that was why. If he hadn’t tried to rob the Czechs and Slovaks of whatever small store of happiness they possessed, her in-laws and husband would still be baking bread today.

And she couldn’t even scream Why didn’t the RAF bomb the stupid Fuhrer instead? Her mother would understand. Understand, nothing-her mother would agree with her. She still didn’t know for sure whether the house was bugged, though. The whole family would head straight for Dachau if the SS heard something like that from her.

Hitler had started the war, and the Nazis were intent on making-on stealing-a profit from it. What could one Jew do against a Juggernaut’s car? Try not to get crushed under the enormous wheels: that was all she could see. Long odds against managing even so little.

In lieu of her scream, she said, “Something needs to happen. Something good, I mean. We’ve had too much of the other stuff.”

“I know,” Mother said. “But what can you do?”

“Nothing.” Sarah let even more bitterness out. “Nothing is all they’ll let you do. They’re going to take away whatever the Brucks had, and they’re going to find some stupid reason to pretend it’s legal.”

She imagined herself writing an indignant letter to the Fuhrer. She imagined her clever words persuading him that his henchmen were overstepping. She imagined him being so impressed, he decided he’d been foolish to hate Jews all these years.

Then she imagined the attendants at the asylum strapping her into a straitjacket so she couldn’t hurt herself or anyone else. Hitler wouldn’t listen to her. Hitler never listened to anybody. That was part, and not such a small part, of what made him Hitler. No, he didn’t listen to anybody. He made everyone else listen to him instead. And if you didn’t, if you wouldn’t … Well, that was what places like Dachau were for.

They were going to steal the Brucks’ estate, or confiscate it, or whatever other label they’d slap on it to make it seem good to them. She wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Except hate them. And she was already awfully good at that.

Summer in Egypt. Alistair Walsh swore at himself for volunteering for … this. He’d been swearing at himself ever since the Germans pulled Musso’s fat out of the fire at Tobruk. Now the question was whether Fritz would spread his fire all the way to Alexandria and beyond to the Suez Canal.

Fritz, damn him, had a dashing panzer general, and the dashing panzer general had the bit between his teeth. Walsh had seen photos of him. He didn’t look like anything special: kind of pudgy, more like a Bavarian tavernkeeper than a fifth-generation Junker trying out the General Staff’s latest bit of trickery.

But, no matter what Walther Model looked like, he knew his trade as well as any starchy Prussian with a poker up his arse. German tanks kept driving deep into the desert and coming back into view anywhere the hard-pressed English commanders didn’t expect them.

No one would have accused the English officers defending Egypt of much in the way of dash. They weren’t the Donkeys who’d led the King’s Army during the last war-Walsh didn’t suppose they were, anyhow-but they weren’t a great deal better.

Every time Model drove deep into the desert like a dolphin after tunny in the sea and then came up for air in their rear, it took them by surprise. Every time they got taken by surprise, they retreated. They’d be back in Alexandria pretty soon. And wouldn’t that make a pretty kettle of tunny, by God?

Of course, General Model wouldn’t be able to go around them and flank them out of Alexandria, the way he had so often farther west. Alistair Walsh didn’t suppose he would, anyhow. Wouldn’t the Nile get in the way? You couldn’t cross that on little rubber rafts the way the Wehrmacht had paddled over so many smaller streams in France.

Could you?

That Walsh had to wonder didn’t speak well for his confidence in his country’s officer corps. If I were in charge … he thought, but then, If I were in charge, what? The officers weren’t doing any too well, true. But it wasn’t as if he had any better ideas himself.

He didn’t even have the better ’ole Bruce Bairnsfather’s Tommies had sheltered in during the last dust-up. He rode in the back of a lorry whose engine hacked and wheezed with too much inhaled sand. All the lorries were alleged to have desert-strength air filters. So were all the tanks. Lorries and tanks nevertheless went down for the count with depressing regularity.

The soldiers jammed in there with him shared cigarettes and food. One of them squeezed liver paste from a tinfoil tube onto a cracker. As far as Walsh was concerned, that paste was the best ration in anybody’s army. Pointing at the tube, he said, “Took that off a dead Fritz, did you, Algie?”

“No, Sergeant. Off a prisoner,” Algie answered. He was half Walsh’s age, and red and peeling from sunburn. Gingery whiskers sprouted on his cheeks and chin and upper lip. He hadn’t found a chance to shave any time lately, and wouldn’t have cared to any which way: the sun would have left his skin as tender and sensitive as a baby’s. He stuffed the cracker into his mouth. With it still full, he added, “Not half bad.”

“That’s a tasty one, all right,” Walsh agreed.

He didn’t sound wistful or expectant. He made a point of not sounding that way. He was nonetheless a staff sergeant: perhaps not God Incarnate to a private soldier, but certainly no lower than His vicegerent on earth. Algie held out the tube to him. “Want some for yourself?”

“Obliged,” Walsh said, and he meant it. He’d have to find some way to pay back the youngster before too long. In the meantime … In the meantime, he’d eat. You grabbed food and sleep whenever you could. You never could tell how long you’d have to do without them.

As far as Walsh was concerned, the only ration that even came close to the German liver paste was tinned steak-and-kidney pie. It wasn’t as good, but it was plenty good enough-and you didn’t have to kill or capture somebody to get your hands on it. As long as he had the real prize, he’d enjoy it. He tried to remember not to make too much of a pig of himself as he squeezed the tube onto a cracker of his own.

His belly growled when food first hit it, then grew quiet and contented. He pulled out a packet of Navy Cuts, lit one, and passed the packet first to Algie. One fag wasn’t enough to give for a squeeze from that tube, but it made a start.

The lorry rumbled along. The road, such as it was, was bad. Along with the wheezy rumble, the lorry gave forth with an irregular series of thuds and bangs. And so Walsh and his comrades didn’t hear the German fighters till the 109s were right on top of their column.

His head had just come up in alarm when machine-gun bullets stitched through the rear compartment of the lorry. Blood splattered. Men tried to topple, wounded or dead. The driver let out a hideous shriek. The machine slewed sideways and went into the sand. The driver’s foot must have come off the pedal, because it quickly slowed to a stop.

“Out!” Walsh yelled. “Out and take cover!”

Some of the men were already moving when he shouted. They got the wounded out of the lorry as gently as they could. One man they left behind: a 7.92mm round had gone in one side of his head and blown off most of the other. No medic would help him-nor would anything else this side of Judgment Day.

Walsh ran around the lorry to get the driver out if he could. “It hurts!” the man moaned. “It hurts!” There was blood all over that compartment, too.

But he was lucky, even if he didn’t think so. He’d got shot through the right nether cheek-no wonder his foot came off the accelerator! “Come on, dammit!” Walsh said, hauling him out from behind the wheel by main force. “That’s a Blighty wound, or it is if you don’t get hit again.”

“Hurts!” was all the driver said.

He was liable to get hit again. Walsh was liable to get hit, too. The Bf-109s still buzzed above the stricken convoy like wasps above a jam jar.

Sure as hell, here came another one, seemingly straight at Walsh. Its machine guns winked malevolently. He fired his Lee-Enfield at it. He had a better chance of knocking it down than he did of flapping his arms and flying to the moon, but not a much better chance. He knew as much. He fired anyway. What did he have to lose?

Bullets stitched through the sand all around him, kicking up spurts that got in his eyes and spoiled his aim-if a rifleman on the ground shooting at a fighter going upwards of 300 miles an hour could be said to enjoy anything so refined as aim.

Then the Lee-Enfield fell from Walsh’s hands. All at once, they were both clutching his left calf. He didn’t know how they’d got there, but the damn thing hurt like blazes. Bright red blood seeped out between his fingers. That bubbling, obscenity-filled shriek came from his wide-open mouth.

“Catch one, Sergeant?” a soldier asked.

“Too bloody right I did,” Walsh answered, now through clenched teeth-he’d bitten down hard on that shriek.

He took a hand away from the hole in his leg and fumbled for one of the wound dressings on his belt. He’d got scrapes and cuts and nicks in this go-round, but he hadn’t really got shot since 1918. He’d forgotten how very much fun it wasn’t.

He unsheathed his bayonet and used it to cut away his trouser leg. The wound was through-and-through, but it didn’t look too bad. If it stayed clean, if it didn’t get infected … Like the driver, he’d got himself a Blighty one. It wouldn’t kill him, but he couldn’t possibly fight for some little while.

Now that the first shock had passed, his fingers knew what to do. Gauze pads slowed the bleeding. More gauze and tape held the pads in place. If he had to, he might be able to stump along for a little ways, using his rifle as a stick.

He didn’t have to. Stretcher-bearers lugged him and the driver with the wounded arse to an aid station. A doctor poured alcohol on Walsh’s leg, which almost made him rise off the canvas cot like Lazarus. “Sorry, old man,” the medico said, “but we do need to clean it out, what?”

“Fucking hell … sir,” Walsh wheezed-doctors were officers by courtesy, and had to be treated as such. Tears ran down the veteran’s grimy, unshaven cheeks. “That hurts worse than getting hit to begin with.” The sawbones only shrugged. It wasn’t his leg.