Watch On The Rhine

by John Ringo

  We built this thing to deter the Germans from attacking straight into our industrial heartland, mused Merle, with a grin. We succeeded too. They obliged us by going through Belgium instead. Then we kept the forts up in pretty pristine condition for twenty years in case the Russians decided to get jolly. Maybe it really did help deter them too, never know. Now finally we are using them, after a frantic race to restore them, to hang on to this last corner of la belle patrie.

  "And they're working," he said aloud. "Killing the alien bastards in droves. And the damned government just had to throw that away by refusing to cooperate with the Germans."

  "Sir?" queried Merle's aide.

  "We could have had a couple of Boche armored corps here with us," answered Merle. "We could have had a few score infantry divisions too, to help us hold this line. But, no. Impossible. We would only let them help us if they were willing to let us dictate policy. Tell me, Francois, if you were the Germans, if you were anyone, would you let the government of France, any government of France, dictate policy to you?"

  "Certainement pas,"39 answered the captain, with a wry—and very cynically and typically French—grin. "Who could be so foolish?"

  "No one, and so no more would I. And so, though we are murdering those alien assholes by the bushel, they are still going to get through. They are going to take these forts, peel us like hard-boiled eggs, and then feast on the contents. And then they're going to go past us . . ."

  The command post suddenly shook more violently than the automatic cannons alone could account for. Merle was tossed from his seat by the shock.

  "Merde, what was that?" he asked, rising to his feet.

  "I don't know, mon colonel."

  The phone rang. After all these decades the telephone system still worked. The aide, Francois, answered. Merle saw his face turn white.

  As Francois replaced the ancient telephone on its hook he said, "Battery B. It's . . . gone. The aliens somehow penetrated all the way down to the ammunition storage area. Hardly anyone escaped. The area's been sealed off to prevent fire from spreading."

  Now Merle's face paled. "My God, there are twenty thousand civilians down there below the ammunition for that battery."

  "Lost, sir."

  "Do we still have communication with the Germans behind us?" Merle asked.

  "I believe so, sir. Why?"

  "Get me Generalleutnant Von der Heydte on the line. I am going to place this fortress under his command and ask him for any aid he can spare to save our people. While I am doing that I want you to begin calling the other sector commanders and giving them my suggestion they do the same. Fuck the government. We haven't had a decent one since Napoleon the First, anyway."

  * * *

  Saarlouis, Germany

  18 December 2007

  Von der Heydte was stunned. "The bloody frogs are asking us to do what?"

  "They want us to take over, sir. At least General Merle does, and some others. I understand we are getting calls all along the front. They can't hold. Their army, at least, knows it. And they have decided to ignore their government."

  "Okay . . . I can buy that. And they would be a useful addition to our effort if they will just cooperate."

  "General Merle sounded eager to cooperate, sir. His exact words were, 'Tell General Von der Heydte I am submitting myself and my entire command to his authority.' But there's a catch."

  "Aha! I knew it. What catch?"

  "Sir, they want us to open up our lines to permit the evacuation of several million civilians. Several hundred thousand in General Merle's sector alone."

  "Can we?"

  "Risky, sir. We could conceivably open a lane or perhaps two. I don't think we have the engineer assets to re-close more than two, anyway. But even they will be narrow passages. I doubt we can get everyone through. And, sir?"

  "Yes?"

  "Sir, they're a very proud people. You know Merle and the other frogs wouldn't be asking if they thought they had a prayer of holding on their own."

  "I see," and Von der Heydte did see. "We're going to have to put some of our own people out there and at risk to cover the evacuation."

  Von der Heydte thought some more, then walked over to observe his situation map. Noting the location of one division in particular, he dredged through his memory for an answer. Finding that answer he ordered, "Call Mühlenkampf. Yes, 'SS' Mühlenkampf. Ask if I can borrow his Charlemagne Division. Tell him he'll likely have a mutiny if he doesn't give them to me, because I am not above asking them to come directly. And tell him he is unlikely to get many of them back."

  * * *

  Fortress Hackenberg

  Thierville, Maginot Line, France

  19 December 2007

  The men in the dank and malodorous depths of the fortress still noticed her, even under the pale, flickering light. Though well past the bloom of youth, and despite the deprivations and terrors of the last nine months, Isabelle De Gaullejac was still quite a fine-looking woman beneath her grimy, unwashed face. Cleaned up, and when she could clean herself Isabelle was fastidious, those men would have called her "pretty"—if not beautiful.

  Still, there was beauty and then there was beauty. Standing, Isabelle had a bearing and obvious dignity that was proud, even almost regal. Whatever she lacked in classic line of features her girlish shape and posture up made for, and more.

  The pride was personal. The regality was perhaps the result of genetics, for she came from a family ennobled for over five hundred years.

  She had grown up in a real castle, not one of those palaces that went by the name. Her girlhood home had been a hunting castle used by King Henry, Henry the Fowler, in the Middle Ages. Thus, the cold, damp, dirty and detestably uncomfortable hell that was the bowels of Fort Hackenberg was no great shock to her. She had hated King Henry's castle as a girl. She hated Hackenberg now. But she could deal with the one as she had dealt with the other, through sheer will to endure.

  But it was with relief that she greeted the news the fort was to be evacuated. Gathering up her two sons, one teenaged and the other a mere stripling, she dressed them as warmly as the meager stocks of clothing they had been able to carry permitted. Expecting a long march to safety, she packed a bag of necessities. These included food, some medicine for the younger boy, who had picked up a cough in the fort, a change of clothing each, and a bottle of first rate Armagnac. Two of the wretched army blankets the family had been issued were also stuffed into the bag. She was not a small or weak woman and so, while the pack was heavy, she thought she could bear it, if her teenager, Thomas, could help a bit.

  One particle among a smelly sea of humanity, she stood at a rear entrance—when Germany had been the threat it had served as a sally port to the front—and held her boys under close rein while awaiting the word to move.

  Others gathered to her, many others. That air of royalty, of command, which she radiated drew the confused, the lost, the helpless and hopeless to her as if she were a magnet. She took it, as she took nearly everything, with calm.

  She was not calm inside, however. She had long since lost touch with her husband. Isabelle feared the worst.

  There was a murmur of sound from behind her. Isabelle turned to see a tall man, tall especially by French standards, easing his way through the crowded corridor. When he passed close by, she saw even in the dim light, that his uniform was midnight black. On his collar she saw insignia that made her want to spit at the soldier.

  He reached the thick steel doors at the end of the corridor and stood on something, a concrete block Isabelle assumed it was, perhaps one that held up one of the great steel doors. In clear French the man announced, "I am Captain Jean Hennessey of the 37th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, Charlemagne, and I am here to lead you to safety.

  "This fortress is going to fall very soon. Even now the rest of my battalion is taking up position to hold the crest and the interior of the fort as long as possible to allow all of you—as many of you as possible—the chance to escape. We are go
ing to have about a twelve-mile walk from here to a place where we can cross German lines. You represent food to the aliens, so they will try to cut down any they can to feed themselves once we are gone from the cover of this fortress. My battalion will do all it can to prevent that. Once we are out of enemy range, the battalion will execute a fighting withdrawal to cover your escape."

  Though a scion of royalty, Isabelle's politics had always been far to the left of center. She wanted desperately to shout Hennessey down, to curse him and the hated and hateful insignia he wore. But then the tug of one of her boys on her arm made her reconsider. She could not risk angering one who might be their salvation.

  Interlude

  Even Athenalras, no stranger to slaughter, was visibly subdued as he heard the reports of the massacre of his people as they attempted to drive forward across the entire front. He had always believed that numbers—numbers and courage—more than anything else decided fate on the Path of Fury, that mass above all would stagger and crush the enemy.

  But the only thing staggering about his numbers were the numbers of the People he had lost. Their bodies draped like decorations upon the wire and ground all across the front. In psychic agony, for the Posleen leader did care for his people as a whole—if not so much for individuals, Athenalras' crest sagged. The tenar-mounted God Kings had suffered no less than the mass of the People attacking on foot. The loss of so many sons was like an icy blade plunged deep into Athenalras' bowels. "There are not enough tears to mourn the dead," he exclaimed. "I want to call off this attack."

  "It is their blasted fortifications," Ro'moloristen said, bitter, helpless fury boiling in his heart. "From this miserable hole called Liege, to another place they call Eben Emael, to here facing this Maginot line, we are trying to break their weapons by hurling bodies at them."

  "Can we get through? In the end, can we beat our way through?" asked Athenalras.

  The young God King's crest erected. "We can, my lord; we must! For something is becoming ever more clear. If we do not exterminate this species it will exterminate us! They are too good, too brave and above all too clever. With fewer numbers and worse weapons, infiltrated and betrayed by their political leadership, attacked with devastating power from space, they are still nearly a match for us. I have some sympathy for these thresh, yes, a degree of admiration, too. But give them as little as ten years of peace and the existence of these thresh dooms our people."

  Chapter 12

  Headquarters, Army Group Reserve

  Kapellendorf Castle, Thuringia

  20 December 2007

  Afraid even to whisper it, Mühlenkampf could not help but think, We're doomed.

  In the end, though they had hurt the Posleen fleet badly, the Planetary Defense Batteries, even supplemented by salvaged railguns, had failed. Mühlenkampf had known they would. Their presumptive failure had be the major reason behind the creation of Army Group Reserve in the first place.

  The landings had begun. Reports came of at least fifteen apparently major landings across Germany and Poland, along with hundreds of minor ones. The total numbers of enemy on the ground was staggering. Mühlenkampf's intelligence officer estimated that the total numbers were in the scores of millions.

  Germany and what remained of Poland were in danger of being literally inundated under an alien flood.

  In some places that flood was being controlled. Newly developed weapons had their influence, chief among them the neutron bombs that the extreme left would never have permitted had they been allowed continued influence. And, though there were never enough of them—there had not been time to build enough of them—and though they were not always in the right place to be used, even so, the enhanced radiation weapons left whole swathes of the enemy puking and dying at many of the landing sites.

  The enhanced radiation weapons, "neutron bombs" they were often called, were actually a regressive technological step in weapons development. They differed from more usual nuclear weapons only in not having the heavy uranium shell fitted around the central fissile core that made the nukes so much more powerful, blast-wise, than their predecessors. The uranium shell enhanced this blast by containing and harnessing the neutron emissions of that core.

  But the neutrons, unharnessed, were deadly enough in their own right. Emerging from the relatively small blast they acted like tiny bits of shrapnel, passing through bodies and killing the cells they passed through. Enough of them passing through a healthy human would kill within minutes. Moreover the death was miserably demoralizing to any who saw it and lived. Even at a considerable distance they would kill in anything from hours to days. Those deaths were more wretched still.

  Best of all, the smaller blast did less physical damage and left comparatively little residual radiation. Indeed, only where it struck steel or a steel alloy did the neutrons create a long-term radiation hazard, by making the metal itself give off gamma radiation.

  One bomb—a single one-hundred-fifty-five-millimeter shell—used timely, was said to have killed as many as one hundred thousand Posleen within twenty minutes of its detonation. Scores of ships had been captured intact, though highly radioactive, at that one site. Moreover, casualties in the nearby civilian towns had been negligible, as had environmental damage.

  Some Posleen the neutron bombs were not needed to destroy. One of the Posleen landings, for example, had had the misfortune of coming down between Erfurt and Weimar; smack in the middle of Army Group Reserve. The aliens' resistance there had been both brief and futile.

  Despite these little successes, Mühlenkampf still thought, we're doomed.

  "Well, first things first," he announced to his staff. "And the first thing is to smash through to Berlin to relieve both its defenders and its people. On the way I want to eliminate the alien infestation between Magdeberg, Dessau and Halle. Then we'll spread out to clear up the area behind the Vistula line. There's not much between Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein, so the Berliners should be able to make out on their own if they have to withdraw later."

  * * *

  Siegfried Line, Germany

  21 December 2007

  It had been a nightmare for Isabelle, her two sons, and the thousands of other refugees fleeing the Posleen onslaught with them. Emerging for the first time in weeks from embattled and falling Fort Hackenberg, she had been immediately plunged into a very close simulacrum of hell. All around, seemingly at random, fell horrid, frightening bolts from the sky. To their din was added the freight train rattle of German and French artillery passing overhead. Behind her, muffled by the high ground, the torrent of human artillery lashing out from the fortress and other places to rip at the enemy was like a distant but ferocious thunderstorm. Ahead of her, the ground had been plowed and beaten into a moonscape. Also from behind came the occasional flash of a Posleen railgun round striking down at the refugees.

  Any refugee that was hit was left for dead; the enemy's railguns destroyed mere flesh beyond hope of recovery. An occasional pistol shot sounding from the rear announced those few occasions when a straggler, or a wounded refugee, was given a final mercy.

  Captain Hennessey led the way, one of his sergeants bringing up the rear of the column. Isabelle's long, child-dragging strides would have placed her beside him if she had permitted it. Even the desire to get herself and her boys safely away from even random enemy fire was not great enough to make her willing to foul herself by proximity to the French SS man, however. She did find she was close enough to hear him speak into the radio from time to time, and even to hear what was said to him.

  The news from that radio was frightening: reports of death, destruction and defeat as the covering battalion from Division Charlemagne was decimated and driven back, again and again, by the massive alien assault. Some of the news made Hennessey stiffen with pain, she could see. Some made his chest swell with pride and his bearing assume a regal posture to match her own.

  Once, perhaps, she saw him reach up to wipe something from the general vicinity of his eyes.
<
br />   The sounds of fighting, distant but growing closer, put speed to the refugees' feet. The overflight of artillery grew, if anything, more intense as Charlemagne's soldiers, much reduced in numbers, were forced to call for and depend on it more with each lost man and combat vehicle.

  At length, Isabelle saw Hennessey relax. The German border was in sight.

  He was met by another soldier in the field gray of the more traditional German regular army, the Bundeswehr. Briefly, she wondered if there would be some scene of hostility between the two, coming from different services and even different nations. But, no, the two met as if long-lost brothers, placing hands on shoulders and shaking hands briskly, illuminating the scene with gleaming smiles.

  An old woman with a timid smile came up to Isabelle, drawn apparently by the younger woman's shining inner strength. "Madame?" the older one asked, "what is going to be done with us? Where shall we go, what shall we do?"

  "That is a very good question, madame," Isabelle answered. "Let me go and find out."

  With that, Isabelle forced down her disgust. In truth, that was somehow easier now than she would have expected. Dragging her two children behind her, she walked directly up to Hennessey and the German. Then she stopped and asked the men the same questions.

  The German answered, in rather cultured French, actually, "From here, you will be billeted temporarily in some of the public buildings in Saarlouis. We are arranging food and bedding, medical care too, but it will take a little time and you may spend the night hungry and cold. We did not expect this, you see."

  "I see," she said, quietly then paused to think. Behind her the long snaking column of refugees advanced miserably through a fairly narrow marked lane. A loudspeaker announced, in appallingly bad French she thought, that the refugees must stay within the markings as the land to either side was heavily mined. He also began to announce the same message the German had given to Isabelle, so she thought no more about the old woman.

  For reasons she could not articulate, she resisted joining the stream and stayed there by the side of the French and German officers, watching that human flood pass by.