“Ha! You’re right about that. And when we catch him, he’ll be sorry he didn’t run off to Venus or Mars.”
The NKVD man ducked out of Stas’ tent and let the flap fall. He shouted obscenity-filled orders to whatever friends he had out there. They’d comb the grounds around the airstrip. Were they moronic enough to turn on their torches while they did it? They probably were. Who was going to tell Chekists they couldn’t do something? You could wind up in a camp yourself if you tried.
I did it. I got away with it, too, Stas thought, not without pride. He was still cold—colder now, in fact, with all the icy air his visitors had let into the tent. He huddled under the blankets. Sleep was hopeless. He’d be pouring down tea tomorrow to keep his eyes open, or coffee if they had any.
Or maybe not. He’d need a replacement copilot if he was going to fly. Could they deliver somebody soon enough to do him any good? He’d have to see.
Out at the edge of the encampment, somebody yelled. A moment later, someone fired a long burst from a machine pistol. A moment after that, somebody let out a horrible scream. Was that Kulkaanen? Or were the NKVD brutes mowing one another down? Stas knew where his hopes lay.
As a Karelian, Kulkaanen probably knew even more about snow than the Russians coming after him did. Maybe he could get away. It still didn’t seem likely, but it was possible.
It was possible, but it didn’t happen. They brought him in near daybreak. They’d beaten the snot out of him for making them work so hard. Odds were he had worse coming. If they didn’t execute him, they’d give him twenty-five years in the gulag. They wouldn’t bother hanging a mere tenner on him, not after he’d gone and pissed them off.
And the war would grind on, whether run well or badly. Why couldn’t he have seen that? Any which way, no matter what he told his cousin, the goddamn war would grind on.
Chapter 25
Lieutenant Demange sidled up to Luc Harcourt and murmured into his dirty and none too shell-like ear: “Be ready.”
“Be ready for what?” Luc asked irritably. “I’d sure be ready for a holiday on the beach at Nice or somewhere like that, I’ll tell you.” The flat Russian landscape he saw at the moment wouldn’t have reminded him of the Riviera even if it weren’t draped in snow.
“Funny. Funny like the crabs,” Demange growled, the usual Gitane in the corner of his mouth jerking as he spoke.
“I don’t know if I’ve got crabs or not. I don’t give a good goddamn, either,” Luc said. “I’ve got regular lice, though, and fleas, and bedbugs. So who cares about the papillons d’amour?”
“It’s war. What d’you expect?” Demange’s narrow, bloodshot eyes flicked now this way now that. Luc tried to look every which way at once, too. The Ivans off to the east were supposed to be pretty quiet right this minute. But you’d never live to get old by counting on what the bastards on the other side were supposed to be doing. Demange went on, “Yeah, it’s war, but the political wheels are spinning again. That’s what you’ve got to be ready for.”
“Oh, God! Are we going through another round of that merde?” Luc looked around again, this time off toward the left. His regiment was stationed at the French expeditionary force’s left flank. Next to them in the line were the Boches. If he suddenly didn’t have to worry about the Russians any more, he would have to worry about the Fritzes instead.
“Could be,” Lieutenant Demange answered. “What I hear is, Daladier’s been talking with the English. If he decides they look like a better bet than Hitler, things here get sticky in a hurry.”
“No kidding!” Luc exclaimed. After a moment, he added, “You know, some of the guys in my section really do hate the Russians. You stay here for a while and they keep trying to kill you, that’ll happen.”
“Sure it will. So what?” Demange said. “We came here on account of some French jackass with a white mustache and fancy embroidery on his kepi told us to. If that same jerk, or another con just like him, says Stalin’s the hottest lay since Josephine Baker and we should make nice with him from now on, we fucking well will. That’s how the game is rigged, and you know it as well as I do.”
Luc’s sigh brought out fog almost as thick as the lieutenant’s cigarette smoke. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said unhappily. “You want I should warn the men something may be cooking, then?”
“Hold off a while longer. Like you say, some of the dumb shitheads like the Nazis better than the Reds. Wouldn’t do if one of ’em spilled the beans and brought the Germans down on our heads before we were ready to go over to the Russians.”
“You’re right.” Luc sounded more unhappy yet—and he was. “So you don’t think I’d do that, huh?”
“If you even thought about it, I’d blow your fucking head off before you got the chance to try,” Demange replied.
“Love you, too, Lieutenant.” Luc teased a few syllables’ worth of sour laughter out of Demange.
If the Red Army knew the French were thinking about changing sides, it didn’t let on. The Russians always had—sometimes quite literally—more artillery than they knew what to do with. They also had their horrible new barrage rockets that could lay a square kilometer waste in nothing flat. Winter weather troubled such toys much less than it interfered with infantry actions. The Russians pounded the French positions again and again.
Luc wondered if they were trying to tell the French generals that they could hurt the troops those generals commanded worse than the Nazis could. If they were trying to do that, he didn’t think it would work. Yes, the Russians could punish the expeditionary force. But the Germans could invade France—could invade, and had invaded, and might invade once more if France did switch back to England’s side.
None of which made him cower any less in the shallow scrapes he hacked out of the frozen ground when the Red Army pounded his countrymen’s positions. Shell fragments whined maliciously not far enough over his head. Blast from the rockets picked him up and slammed him down till he felt as if he’d lost a fifteen-rounder to Joe Louis.
The shelling did send one of the most pro-Nazi soldiers in his section away with a nasty thigh wound. Seeing the mess, Luc guessed the poor groaning bastard would lose the leg. He didn’t wish that kind of anguish on anybody—and Marcel had been a brave fellow even if he was a Fascist.
Two days after Marcel got hit, Lieutenant Demange quietly told Luc, “Now you can let your guys in on it. They need to know.”
“Oh, they do, do they?” Luc said tonelessly. He wasn’t at all sure he needed news like that himself. He glanced off to the left again. The closest German detachments were only a few hundred meters away. No barbed wire separated them from the French, as it did from the Russians. They were allies, after all … for the time being, anyhow.
Demange’s eyes slid in the same direction. He nodded glumly, as if at a question Luc hadn’t asked. “Yeah, it’s liable to get a little hairy,” he said. “We may end up playing flank guards. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“Fun. Right,” Luc said, still with no expression in his voice. Demange chuckled, thumped him on the back, and went off to brief some more noncoms.
Luc spread the word through his section. He quietly told off a few reliable poilus to keep an eye on the handful of others who might give them away to the Wehrmacht. “It’s politics, my dears,” he said over and over again. “Nothing we can do about it but roll with the punches.” He wished he had a better line. That one reminded him too much of the way the Russian rockets knocked him around.
“We’re crossing into the Reds’ lines, right?” one of his men asked. “How do we know when we’re supposed to do that? If we go too soon, the salauds’re liable to machine-gun us instead of letting us through.”
“They’ll give us the signal to move on.” Luc hoped like nobody’s business he wasn’t lying.
And, as a matter of fact, he turned out not to be. “When it’s time for us to go, the Russians’ll fill the sky with green flares,” Lieutenant Demange said. “Just like fucking traffic ligh
ts, Harcourt. Even the dumb-shits in your section ought to be able to remember that.”
“Here’s hoping. Some of those dimbulbs wouldn’t remember their heads if they didn’t have ’em stapled on,” Luc said. Demange grunted something that might have been laughter. How many times had he talked about ordinary soldiers the same scornful way? Sure as hell, Luc had got most of what he thought he knew about being a sergeant straight from the horse’s mouth.
The Russians shelled the stretch of German line that abutted the French positions. Perhaps for the sake of verisimilitude, perhaps just to remind the French that they weren’t buddies yet, they also shelled Luc’s regiment. A couple of luckless men got killed; a few more picked up wounds. French 75s and 105s indignantly joined the German guns that gave back counterbattery fire. Luc hoped like anything that they murdered some Ivans. He didn’t want anybody’s artillery coming down on his head.
The Red Army signaled early one frigid morning (there was no other kind in Russia at this season of the year), just as night was giving way to daybreak. One second, the predawn stillness held. The next, it might have been a Bastille Day fireworks show, except that all the stars and rockets and flares flying up in the east were green.
“Let’s go!” Luc called. “There’ll be ways through the wire. The flank guards will hold off the Boches while we move.” While France and Germany played at friendship, you weren’t supposed to call the Feldgrau boys Boches. It was an order widely ignored—he ignored it himself—but an order even so. The flank guards still weren’t supposed to fire until fired upon, which would probably get some of the poor bastards killed.
Luc carried his rifle at high port as he hurried across the snow-covered fields toward the gaps in the barbed wire that had better be there. No firing came from in front of him. That was encouraging. But, all at once, he heard MG-34s and Mausers open up off to the left. Swearing under his smoking breath, he hunched over and tried to hurry faster.
“GREEN FLARES,” Oberleutnant Wolfgang Gruber told Willi Dernen and the other men commanding squads in his company. “That’s what you’ve got to look for from the Russian lines. That’s the signal for the froggies to try and fuck us over.”
“What do we do then, sir?” Willi asked. To his surprise, he found he liked leading a squad. Because Awful Arno had done it for so long, he’d assumed he would hate the job. But no—and he didn’t think he was doing it badly. He added, “I mean, I won’t be sorry to get the Frenchies off our flank—I was always scared the Ivans would push through them to flank us out. Still …”
“When they turn their coats, we’ve got to make them pay,” Gruber answered. “Till then, we have to make nice. I guess there’s still some chance the guys in the striped pants and the cutaways can straighten things out again. I mean, I don’t want them on our flank any more than you do, Dernen, but I don’t want a hole in the line four divisions wide, either.”
Willi grunted and nodded. The Wehrmacht had managed to patch things up and keep going when the English turned traitor. Maybe the General Staff could figure out how to do it again, especially since they seemed to have some warning. But that wasn’t a game you wanted to play once, much less twice.
Gruber looked from one corporal and Obergefreiter to the next. “Any other questions?” he asked. Nobody said anything. Willi had asked the only one that mattered. The company CO nodded. “All right, then. Let your men know what’s going on.”
Adam Pfaff nodded cynically when Willi passed along the news. “No big surprise, is there?” he said. “Anybody who ever counted on a lousy Frenchman was just asking to get his pocket picked.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Willi said. “We got as much as we could out of the no-good pigdogs. Best thing we can do when they fly the coop is remind ’em why screwing around with the Reich is a bad idea.”
Pfaff nodded again. Most of the other guys in the squad bobbed their heads up and down, too. At the time, Willi thought he’d been plain enough. Later, though, he was faintly appalled at what had come out of his mouth.
Sharing a cigarette with the Obergefreiter with the gray Mauser, he explained why: “I sounded just like that cocksucking Baatz! Just like him, you hear me?”
“Take an even strain, man,” Pfaff said. “If you’re a noncom or making like a noncom, you’ve got to come out with that bullshit every now and then. You couldn’t do your job if you didn’t.”
“I don’t want to sound like Awful Arno,” Willi said. “Why couldn’t I sound like a good corporal instead?”
“Because you’ve had the dumb turd blabbing in your ear since the war started, that’s why,” his buddy answered. “Some of it’s bound to stick, the way shit sticks to the hair around your asshole.”
“There you go!” Willi liked the comparison. “Thanks. Now you made me feel better.”
“What are friends for?” Pfaff said modestly.
One thing friends were for, as far as Willi was concerned, was staying with you through thick and thin. The French flunked that test. The Germans started unobtrusively patrolling their right flank, where their positions adjoined those of their alleged allies. Willi noticed the froggies doing some unobtrusive patrolling of their own, keeping an eye on what the Landsers were up to. When Germans and Frenchmen couldn’t avoid noticing one another, they still waved and swapped smokes and rations, but it wasn’t the same as it had been.
Willi wondered what would happen if he asked some French noncom about green flares. He figured it was even money whether the guy had kittens or tried to murder him on the spot. Probably just as well he didn’t know enough French even to frame the question. Of course, he might run into a Frenchman who could verstehen some Deutsch …?
He never did so much as find the chance to ask. Patrolling got more dangerous: Russian artillery fire picked up. He noticed that the Ivans were also hitting the French positions off to the right of where the German part of the line ended. He hoped they were killing bunches of the men who were plotting to go over to them. It would serve the French right, by God!
All he really wanted to do was get out of Russia—eventually, get out of the war—in one piece himself. If doing that involved massacring every Ivan from here to Omsk, he would. If it involved sitting on his ass instead, he’d do that. He wasn’t fussy. He didn’t know anyone who’d been at the front for a while and didn’t feel the same way.
So he didn’t complain when the Russian artillery fire eased off again. If the Reds were hauling their guns twenty kilometers north to hit the Germans there, that was all right with him. His boys had been taking it in the neck for a while. Now it was some other poor bastards’ turn.
And then, one clear, cold morning, a new fish named Erich Something-or-other shook him awake. “Sorry to bother you, Herr Obergefreiter,” the kid said: to an ordinary rifleman, even Willi’s picayune rank mattered. Erich went on, “They’re shooting off green flares. Bunches of them, in fact.”
“Ah, fuck!” Willi said, wriggling out of his blanket like a bad-tempered butterfly emerging from its pupa. He looked eastward. Sure as hell, green fire was everywhere. He sighed and swore and lit the day’s first smoke. “All right. We’re on with the French again, then. Are the rest of the guys awake?”
“Most of them,” Erich answered. “We didn’t want to bother everybody, in case this wasn’t what you warned us about.”
“Give the sleepyheads a good, swift kick in the ass, in that case. This sure won’t be anything else.” Willi grabbed for his scope-sighted rifle. The longer the range at which he could pick off treacherous froggies, the better.
Oberleutnant Gruber spoke to most of the company: “The French figure they can get away with yanking the Führer’s mustache. We’re going to make them sorry, you hear me? The more poilus we kill here, the more we kill right now, the fewer we’ll have to worry about on the Western Front later on. So let’s go get ’em!”
The Landsers raised a cheer. Willi joined it, but he had the feeling he’d heard something most of them had missed
. If France was back in the war, there would be a Western Front again, wouldn’t there? The Wehrmacht had come so close, so goddamn teasingly close, to Paris. Well, close only counted if you were chucking hand grenades. He had a couple of potato-mashers on his belt. He’d use them if he couldn’t get rid of the enemy from farther away.
He trudged south and east through the snow, toward the boundary between the German and French sectors. Shooting had already broken out. As he remembered from the fighting in France, it was easy to tell whose machine guns were going off. MG-34s fired a lot faster than the crap the froggies used. French rifles didn’t sound the same as Mausers, either. He hadn’t had to worry about them for a while, but all that stuff came back in a hurry.
There was a Frenchman, scurrying east to the vodka and borscht the Reds would give him for turning his coat. Willi dropped to one knee, to steady his aim and to make himself a smaller target. Exhale … Don’t squeeze the trigger. Touch it gently, like a tit … The Mauser pushed back against his shoulder. In his scope, the Frenchman staggered, stumbled, and fell.
He worked the sniping rifle’s downbent bolt and slogged forward again. He knocked over a couple of more poilus, both of them from a range where an ordinary Mauser without a scope probably would have missed. He felt sorry for them. How could he not, when it was a risk he took himself? But he knew they would have shot him without a qualm. Do unto others before they could do unto you. If that wasn’t war’s Golden Rule, it should have been.
A French noncom up ahead was trying to rally his section. It was another long shot, but Willi didn’t hesitate. Down went the noncom. His men scattered like partridges. Willi slapped a new clip into the rifle.
As he did, a bullet cracked past his head. Not all the froggies were running, dammit. He flattened out in the snow. Where was that French son of a bitch? Willi couldn’t spot him. That was scary. You always hated it when the guy who was trying to kill you was good at what he did.
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