“Maybe babies really do come from under cabbage leaves, too,” Nigel said. “Not likely, though.”
“We wouldn’t have so much fun makin’ ‘em if they did,” Bill said.
Walsh laughed at that. “Barrage should start at 1500. It’s”—he paused to look at his watch—“1310 now. As soon as the guns let up, we go forward—and may God go with us.”
On the Western Front in the last war, barrages sometimes lasted a week. They were supposed to kill all the enemy soldiers and flatten all the wire between the side doing the bombarding and a breakthrough. Well, theory was wonderful. Long barrages warned an attack was coming. They didn’t kill enough defenders, and the ones who lived always got to their machine guns before the attackers reached their line. One reason was that bombardments didn’t flatten enough wire, but did tear up the ground so attacking troops couldn’t move fast even when they most needed to.
Short and sweet worked better. Even in 1918, they’d figured that out. Enough to shock, enough to wound, not enough to throw away surprise. And then the infantry—and the tanks, when there were tanks—would go in and clean up the mess. They had driven the Germans back…in 1918.
Bill had a flask of applejack. He passed it around. Walsh took a nip with the other waiting British soldiers. A little Dutch courage never hurt anybody.
At 1500 on the dot, guns back in Paris opened up on the Germans in the suburbs. German counterbattery fire started right away. Walsh didn’t mind. As long as those 105s were shooting at the Allied guns, they weren’t pounding the front lines.
After not quite half an hour, the bombardment stopped. Up and down the front, officers’ whistles screeched. Walsh’s heart thuttered in his chest. He was probably pale as paste. He told himself it wouldn’t be so bad as going over the top. But he’d been a kid then. Now he knew all the nasty things that could happen to you. He didn’t want to get shot again. But he didn’t want to seem a coward in front of his men, either.
“Let’s go,” he said hoarsely, and they went.
He’d barely crossed the street before a Mauser round cracked past him. No, the bombardment hadn’t got everybody. How many Fritzes waited in foxholes and shattered buildings? Too damned many—he was sure of that.
He almost stumbled over a German crouching behind some rubble. The man was trying to bandage one hand with the other. He threw up both of them and bleated, “Kamerad!” when he saw Walsh.
Who would take care of prisoners? Anybody? Or would people behind the lines shoot them to save themselves the bother? Walsh knew such things happened. He bent down and threw the wounded German’s rifle into some bushes. Gesturing with his own weapon, he said, “Go on, go on.” What happened later wasn’t his worry.
“Danke!” the Fritz said. Off he went, both hands still above his head.
Walsh forgot about him as soon as he was gone. Plenty of other Germans ahead, and not all the bastards would be bleeding. He was glad to hear Bren guns banging away. They brought real firepower right up to the front. You could carry one and fire from the hip, or even from the shoulder.
You couldn’t move forward fast, not in this smashed suburb. Wreckage slowed you down too much. Stubborn Germans lurking in the wreckage were liable to slow you down for good. But the enemy seemed less stubborn than usual. Maybe the counterattack had surprised and dismayed them as much as it had Walsh. Stranger things must have happened, though he couldn’t come up with one offhand.
Something warned him to throw himself down behind a burnt-out Citroën. Only a few seconds after he did, two Germans with Schmeissers came out of what was left of a house. Walsh pulled the pin on a grenade and rose up onto his knees to send it flying. A soft thump, a guttural cry of alarm, and a bang, all packed close together. Shrieks followed. Both Fritzes were down. Walsh shot them one after the other to make sure they didn’t get up again. He scurried forward and grabbed a submachine gun and as many clips as the Germans carried. He slung his rifle so he could go forward carrying the Schmeisser. At close quarters, he wanted to be able to spray a lot of lead around.
Nigel came up and took the other German weapon. Walsh shared ammunition with him. “This is going better than I expected,” the youngster remarked.
“I was thinking the same thing.” In lieu of knocking wood, Walsh rapped his knuckles on his own tin hat. Nigel managed a haggard grin. Walsh gave him a Gitane—what he had—lit one of his own, and tramped ahead again.
He found one German fast asleep on what had been some French merchant’s bed. The artillery hadn’t wakened him; neither had the Allied infantry assault. Walsh knew just how the poor bugger felt: he’d felt that way himself. He carried away the German’s Mauser and dropped it in the mud. He left the man alone. Without a weapon, the fellow was no threat to anybody. And this would be Allied ground by the time he woke up.
“Damned if it won’t,” Walsh said in tones of wonder. Maybe the generals and even that snot-nosed subaltern knew what they were up to after all. And if they did, wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? Schmeisser at the ready, Walsh pressed on.
GERHARD ELSNER STRODE OVER TO Ludwig Rothe, who was adding oil to his panzer’s crankcase. “Still running all right?” the company CO asked anxiously—there’d been a lot of wear and tear in the drive across the Low Countries and France.
But Rothe answered, “You bet, Captain.”
“Good. That’s what I want to hear,” Elsner said. “Tomorrow morning we smash them. We go through south of Beauvais—between there and a village called Alonne. Three or four kilometers of open ground. We won’t have to fight in built-up places. That’s what they tell me, anyhow.”
“Here’s hoping they’re right—whoever they are. That gets expensive fast,” Rothe said. He turned to his driver and radioman. “But we’ll be ready, right?”
Fritz Bittenfeld and Theo Hossbach both nodded. Then Theo yawned. Everybody was beat. Ludwig was running on looted French coffee and on pills he’d got from a medic. The pills were supposed to keep a dead man going for a day and a half. Ludwig still wanted to hole up somewhere and go to sleep, so he figured he was about two steps worse off than dead.
“This is the breakthrough—the breakthrough,” Captain Elsner said. He ignored the yawn. He was running on nerves and maybe drugs, too, same as everyone else. “We crack the line, we pour through, we wheel around behind Paris, and we make every old fart who remembers 1914 sick-jealous of us. We can do it. We can, and we will. Heil Hitler!” His right arm shot up and out.
“Heil Hitler!” Ludwig echoed. He imitated the Party salute. So did Fritz and Theo. If Theo was a beat late—and he was—Captain Elsner pretended not to see that, too. He was a good officer. He cut some slack for any man who was good in the field, and Theo was. As far as Ludwig was concerned, all the Heil-ing was a bunch of Quatsch. But you’d get your head handed to you if you said that out loud. The failed coup against the Führer left everybody jumpy.
Then Theo stopped being dreamy and asked a sharp question: “When we go in, will we have infantry support?”
“As much of it as there is,” Captain Elsner answered. Panzegrenadiers in half-tracks and trucks could keep up with armor. Ordinary ground-pounders couldn’t. The panzers were supposed to pierce the enemy lines and let the foot-bound infantry pour through after them. Panzers helped infantry enormously. What they’d found out in Czechoslovakia and here in the west, though, was that infantry support also helped panzers. Foot soldiers moving up along with the armor stopped plenty of unpleasant surprises.
The attack was scheduled for 0530. Morning gave attackers the most daylight in which to do what they could. And morning also let the Germans come out of the rising sun, which made them tougher targets. Ludwig approved of that. He knew better than most people how vulnerable his steel chariot was.
As in the attack on Czechoslovakia and the one that launched this campaign, white tapes guided the panzers to their start line in the dark. But this operation wouldn’t be anywhere near so strong. Establishment strength for a pan
zer company was thirty-two machines. They’d been pretty much up to snuff before. After this grinding campaign across the Low Countries and France, Captain Elsner’s company had thirteen runners, and it was in better shape than a lot of others.
Well, the enemy’s taken his licks, too, Ludwig thought. All through the advance, he’d driven past Dutch and Belgian and French and British wreckage. He’d breathed air thick with the smells of death and burnt rubber and scorched paint and hot iron. That stench was in his coveralls now. Not even washing—not that he’d had much chance to wash—got rid of it.
Behind them, the sky lightened. Gray and then blue spread west. Rothe checked his watch. He’d synchronized it with the captain’s before they moved up. Any second now…Now! The eastern horizon blazed with light: not the sun, but muzzle flashes from the artillery pounding the poilus and Tommies up ahead.
“Get a move on, Fritz!” Ludwig shouted into the speaking tube.
“Right you are, boss!” Bittenfeld put the panzer in gear. Tracks rattling and clanking, it growled forward. Because of the crew’s experience, they took point for their platoon. Ludwig could have done without the honor. The point man commonly discovered trouble by smashing his face against it.
French 75s and occasional 105s answered the German barrage. Ludwig didn’t want to duck down into the turret so soon—he couldn’t see out nearly so well. But, with fragments sparking off the panzer’s side armor, he didn’t want to get sliced up, either. You acquired experience by not getting killed.
“They’re alert today,” Fritz remarked.
“They would be,” Ludwig agreed gloomily.
“I’m going to miss the waitress at that estaminet in Fouquerolles.” The driver cheerfully mangled the French word and the name of the village where they’d stayed not long before. “Limber as an eel, she was.”
“Can’t you think of anything but pussy?” Ludwig asked, knowing the answer was no.
Machine-gun bullets clattered off the right side of the turret. “Guten Morgen!” Theo said from his seat in the back of the fighting compartment.
“I’ll give them a good morning, by God!” Rothe said, and then, to Bittenfeld, “Panzer halt!”
“Halting,” Fritz responded, and the Panzer II shuddered to a stop. Ludwig traversed the turret. There was the gun, still spitting bullets. Machine gunners never learned. You could fire at a panzer till everything turned blue, and you still wouldn’t penetrate the armor. Of course, each crew that made the mistake lived to regret it—but rarely for long.
Ludwig fired several rounds from the 20mm cannon. Those would punch through whatever sandbags protected the machine gun. They’d punch through the soldiers serving the gun, too. Sure as hell, it shut up. Maybe the crew was lying low. More likely, those men wouldn’t fire that piece again, not at a panzer and not at horribly vulnerable infantrymen, either.
But Ludwig also saw a burning Panzer II a few hundred meters away. A machine gun couldn’t do for one, but anything bigger damn well could. And if an antitank-gun crew was drawing a bead on this stopped panzer…“Get moving!” Ludwig yipped into the speaking tube.
A 135-horsepower engine wasn’t supposed to be able to throw 8,900 kilos of steel around like a Bugatti at Le Mans. All the same, when Fritz hit the gas the panzer jumped like one of the many barmaids he’d goosed. Ludwig almost got thrown out of his seat.
He spied armored shapes up ahead. Their lines were rounder than those of Germany’s slab-sided panzers. “Get on the horn, Theo,” he said. “Tell the captain the enemy’s got armor in the neighborhood.”
“I’m doing it,” Hossbach said, “but I bet he already knows.”
Elsner hadn’t known when he briefed the company. Maybe one of those French machines had taken out the other Panzer II. They had more armor and bigger guns than most German panzers—they were easily a match for the Czechs’ tanks.
Well, we beat those, Rothe thought. The next interesting question was what French armor was doing right at the Schwerpunkt here. Was it dumb luck, or had the enemy guessed much too right? If the breakthrough was going to happen, it would have to be a breakthrough indeed. “Panzer halt!” Rothe commanded again.
He fired at the closest enemy panzer. Yes, he was outgunned, but the 20mm could break a French char’s armored carapace. The enemy machine caught fire. The crew bailed out. He gunned them down with the coaxial machine gun as they ran for cover. An ordinary machine gun was plenty to kill ordinary soldiers.
“Step on it, Fritz!” he said—not a command in the manual, but also not one easy to mistake. Again, the driver did his best to pretend he was at the Grand Prix.
That might have been why the antitank round slammed into the engine and not the fighting compartment. All three crewmen screamed “Scheisse!” at the same time. The panzer stopped. It wouldn’t go anywhere again.
“Get out!” Ludwig yelled. The French or British gunners were bound to be reloading. When they did…He didn’t want to be there.
Theo opened the hatch behind the turret. Then he slammed it shut again. “Fire!” he said.
“Follow me out, then,” Rothe told him. He jumped out the turret hatch on the side away from that deadly round.
Theo and Fritz both made it out after him. Bullets cracking past them said out wasn’t the best place to be, not when it was in the middle of a horribly bare field. Ludwig pointed to some bushes a couple of hundred meters away. Crouching low, zigzagging, the panzer crewmen ran for them. Not much of a hope, but some.
Ludwig didn’t understand why he crashed to the ground. Then he did, because it started to hurt. He shrieked and clutched at himself. It was a bad one. He knew that right away. Then he groaned again, because Fritz went down, too. Damned if Theo didn’t make it to the bushes. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.
“Medic!” Ludwig cried. “Med—” Another bullet caught him, and he didn’t hurt at all after that.
LUC HARCOURT CROUCHED IN A FOXHOLE. ALL around him, French and German tanks blazed away at one another—and at any poor damned infantrymen their crews happened to spot. He felt like a tiny ratlike ancient mammal stuck in the middle of a horde of battling dinosaurs. They might kill him without even realizing he was there.
Well, he’d had at least some small share of revenge. When a Panzer II started burning, the crew tried to make it out. They escaped the tank, but he shot one of them before the bastard could find a hole and pull it in after himself.
“How many of us did you get, you fucker?” he muttered as he slapped a fresh clip onto his rifle. “You won’t get any more.”
He wanted to huddle there, not moving, not looking up, rolled into a ball like a pillbug so he made as small a target as he could. He wanted to, but he didn’t. If the Boches got this far, they’d kill him as easily as if they were squashing a pillbug. What they said in training turned out to be true: your best chance of living was acting like a soldier. He’d thought it was a bunch of patriotic crap when he heard it the first time, but no.
Speaking of crap, his drawers were clean—well, not dirty on account of that, even if he couldn’t remember the last time he changed them. He knew the modest pride of going through fear and coming out the other side. He’d fouled himself before, yes, but not now. Like Sergeant Demange, he was past that…till the next time things got even worse than this, anyhow.
A French tank stopped not far from his hole. The commander popped out of the cupola like a jack-in-the-box. He pointed at the Germans. “Advance!” he yelled. “If we stop them here, we can break them!” He disappeared again. The tank fired its cannon at, well, something. Luc didn’t pop up himself to see what. The noise all around was worse than loud. It made his brain want to explode out through his ears.
The tank fired again. The machine gun in its bow also banged away—again, Luc couldn’t see what it was shooting at. Then the tank rumbled forward. The commander hadn’t urged him to do anything the man wasn’t willing to try himself. Of course, he had twenty or thirty millimeters of hardened stee
l shielding him from the unpleasant outside world. But, to be fair, he also had worse things aimed at him than foot soldiers were likely to face.
Still…Advance? It almost seemed a word in a foreign language. The French Army and the BEF had got booted out of Belgium and beaten back across northern France. They’d given up more ground than their fathers (or, more often, their mourned uncles who hadn’t lived to sire children) did in 1914. The Channel ports were lost, which meant the Tommies would have a harder time getting into the fight. Advance? After all that?
If they kept retreating, the Boches would win. Luc hated that thought. The Germans were good at what they did. On the whole, they fought clean—or no dirtier than the French. But so what? They were still Boches.
He popped up and fired at some Germans. They dove for cover. That was all he’d wanted—they were too far off for him to have much chance of hitting them. But if they were hiding behind trees or digging new scrapes for themselves, they weren’t advancing against the defenders here.
Defenders? That wasn’t one tank commanded by a homicidal—or suicidal—maniac. More French armor was going forward against the troops in field-gray A crew of artillerymen manhandled a 37mm antitank gun into a position a couple of hundred meters farther east than it had held before. Even khaki-clad infantrymen—no great swarm of them, but some—were climbing out of their holes and trenches and moving toward the Boches.
Maybe twenty meters away, Sergeant Demange was watching the show from his foxhole. He looked as astonished as Luc felt. He looked almost astonished enough to let the Gitane fall out of his mouth: almost, but not quite. He caught Luc’s eye. “This is something you don’t see every day,” he shouted. He had to say it two or three times before Luc understood.
“It sure is,” Luc answered. “Do you want to join the party?” Were he a new fish, he would have waved—and given a German sniper or machine gunner something to draw a bead on. He knew better now.
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