Ludwig felt a tap on the back of his left leg. He ducked down into the turret. “Was ist los?” he asked the radio operator.
“Bridge up ahead,” Theo Hossbach answered. “We’ve got paratroops holding it. The Dutchmen are giving them a hard time.”
“I bet they are,” Rothe said. They hadn’t been ready for soldiers jumping out of Ju-52s and taking bridges and airports away from them. Well, who would have been? Nobody in the last war fought like that. Hell, in the last war even pilots didn’t wear parachutes. As far as Ludwig was concerned, that meant everybody who’d got into an airplane during the last war was out of his goddamn mind. The panzer commander brought his mind back to the business at hand. “Up ahead, huh? Which map square?”
“C-9,” Theo told him.
“C-9?” Ludwig repeated, and the radioman nodded. Rothe unfolded the map so he could see where he was—or where he thought he was, anyhow. Wrestling with the map inside the cramped turret made him feel like a one-armed paper hanger with the hives. At last, though, he got it open. “Well, Jesus Christ! We’re in C-10 now. Tell ‘em we’re on our way.”
“Will do.” Theo shouted into the microphone that connected the panzer to the platoon, company, regiment, and division commanders. Everybody could tell Ludwig what to do. Half the time, everybody seemed to be trying to tell him at once. But all German panzers came with radios, so they could work together. That hadn’t been true of the Czechs. The Wehrmacht was using captured Czech panzers—the more, the merrier. Before they went into German service, technicians installed radio sets in the machines that lacked them.
Machine-gun bullets clattered off the Panzer II’s steel flank. Ludwig did some shouting of his own: to Fritz, through the speaking tube. “Got you, Sergeant!” the driver yelled back. The panzer swung a little south of west.
That damned Dutch machine gun kept banging away. Ludwig wondered why. A Panzer II had less armor than it should have—he’d seen as much. One hit with any kind of cannon shell and you bought yourself a plot. But, by God, the beast did carry enough steel to keep out machine-gun bullets. And every round the silly Dutchmen wasted on the Panzer II was a round they weren’t shooting at the foot soldiers they could really hurt.
Most of the time, Rothe would have stuck his head out so he could see what was going on. Right this minute, that looked like a bad idea. Yeah, just a little, he thought with a wry chuckle. He had four vision ports in the turret: two on the left, one on the right, and one at the back. The bullets were spanging off the left side of the turret, so.…
There it was! The machine gun’s muzzle spat flame from the front of an apple orchard. Ludwig traversed the turret. He fired back at the enemy gun. The Dutch crew manning it had run for cover by the time his weapons bore on it. They’d seen danger coming and got out of there. That meant they’d harass somebody else pretty soon, but he didn’t know what he could do about it.
“That’s got to be the bridge, Sergeant.” Fritz’s voice came back through the speaking tube.
“It does?” With the turret swung to the left, Rothe couldn’t see much of what the driver was talking about. He brought it back to face straight ahead again. Sure enough, there was a bridge. And the people around it were shooting at the people on it and right by it. The soldiers hanging on to the bridge wore field-gray. The bastards attacking them were in Dutch gray-green. With leaves off the trees and grass going yellow, neither uniform offered a whole hell of a lot of camouflage.
The Dutch soldiers were too busy trying to drive the paratroopers off the bridge so they could blow it to pay much attention to advancing panzers—several other machines had come with Ludwig’s. One of them was a great honking Panzer III—a fifteen-and-a-half-tonne monster with two machine guns and a 37mm cannon that could fire a useful high-explosive shell.
It could, and it did. Three or four rounds from that cannon put two Dutch guns out of action. “Gott im Himmel, I wish we had one of those!” Ludwig knew he sounded jealous. He didn’t care. He wished the Wehrmacht had more of the big panzers, too. They could do things his lighter machine couldn’t—and they could take punishment that would turn the Panzer II into scrap metal…or into a bonfire.
He opened up with his machine gun. The Dutch soldiers scattered. They hadn’t looked for an attack from the rear. Well, too damn bad. They also seemed less willing than the Czechs had been to hold in place till they got killed. Say what you would about the Czechs, they had balls.
Three or four He-123s swooped down on the Dutch troops. Next to Ju-87s, the Henschel biplanes looked like last week’s—hell, last war’s—news. That didn’t mean they couldn’t do the job. They shot up the Dutchmen and dropped bombs on their heads. The bombs weren’t big ones—Ju-87s could carry a lot more—but the Henschels put them right on the money.
Ju-87s had sirens to make them sound even scarier than they were. The He-123s didn’t. But, when they dove, they might have been firing God’s machine guns. Ludwig had heard that just the right engine RPMs on those babies could make them as demoralizing as all get-out. A lot of what you heard was bullshit. Not this. He forgot who’d told him, but the guy had the straight goods.
He stood up in the turret to get a better look around. A Dutchman fired a couple of wild rifle shots at him. He gunned the enemy soldier down with his MG34. Two more Dutch soldiers dropped their weapons and raised their hands.
Ludwig almost killed them in cold blood. At the last second, he caught himself. He pointed brusquely toward the rear. Keeping their hands high over their heads, they stumbled off into captivity…if they didn’t run into some other trigger-happy German soldier before anybody took charge of them.
Not my worry, Rothe thought. He was glad he hadn’t squeezed the trigger. They’d fought fair, and so had he. Sometimes, in the heat of battle, you did things you wished you hadn’t later. This time, Ludwig didn’t—quite.
His panzer stopped at the eastern end of the bridge. A paratrooper waved to him. “Good to see you, by God,” the fellow called. “It was getting a little hairy here.” His helmet fit his head more closely than the standard Wehrmacht model. He wore a coverall over his tunic, along with rubber knee and elbow pads.
And he wasn’t kidding. Several of his buddies lay sprawled or twisted in death. A medic tended to a wounded trooper. Other groaning men waited for whatever he could do for them.
“Can we cross the bridge?” Ludwig asked.
“Ja,” the paratrooper answered. “We pulled the wires on the demolition charges before the Dutchmen could set them off. And we’ve cleared the mines on the roadway and chucked them in the river. I think we got ‘em all.”
“Thanks a bunch.” Ludwig wished the paratrooper hadn’t added the last few words. The son of a bitch only laughed at him. He bent down and shouted into the speaking tube: “Take us across, Fritz.”
“Will do,” the driver said. “What’s on the other side?”
“More Dutchmen with guns,” Ludwig told him. “What the hell do you expect?”
“How about some gals with big tits?”
“Yeah, how about that?” Rothe said dryly. He wished he had a control that would let him pour ice water on Fritz. The driver was the horniest guy he’d ever run into. The worst part was, he did get laid a lot. Ludwig knew that if he used a no-holds-barred approach like that, all he’d get was his face slapped.
The Panzer II rumbled forward. Fritz did have the sense to take the bridge slowly. If the paratroopers had missed a surprise or two, he’d have a chance to stop or to go around it. Ludwig gave the roadway a once-over, too. They didn’t blow up, so he and Fritz didn’t miss anything important.
They went past not only dead German paratroopers but also quite a few dead Dutchmen. Some of them were in what looked like police uniforms. No, they hadn’t looked for soldiers to fall out of the sky so far behind their front. These must have been second-, or maybe third-, line defenders. Whoever they were, they’d fought hard. It hadn’t done them any good, though.
As soon as Ludwig he
ard a machine gun rattle to malignant life, he ducked down into the turret again. But the Dutch had put up a better fight on the east side of the bridge than they did here. Maybe losing it had broken their spirit. Or maybe they simply didn’t have what they needed for a proper defense here.
A car with half a dozen Dutch officers screamed up the road toward the bridge—and toward the panzer. “Aren’t you going to blast those shitheads?” Fritz demanded.
“Let’s see what they do first,” Ludwig answered.
They stopped right in front of the panzer. One of the officers started shouting at Ludwig in Dutch. He understood maybe one word in five. He thought they were telling him to turn around and drive the Nazis away. That was pretty goddamn funny.
“Sorry, friend,” he said. “We are the Nazis. And you’re prisoners, as of now.”
He might not have known Dutch, but the Dutch officers understood German. The looks on their faces when they realized that panzer wasn’t theirs…“You should let us go,” said the one who’d yelled in Dutch before—he spoke good German, too. “We made an honest mistake.”
“In your dreams, pal,” Ludwig said sweetly. The panzer’s machine gun and cannon were mighty persuasive.
“YOU! DERNEN!” ARNO BAATZ HAD a voice as effortlessly penetrating as a dentist’s drill.
“Yes, Corporal?” Willi Dernen did his best to sound meek and mild. He didn’t want trouble from a lousy Unteroffizier, not now, not when they were about to give the poilus the big one right in the teeth. Guys promoted to noncom went off to a special school for a while. Willi didn’t know what went on there, but he figured it was where they turned you into a son of a bitch if you weren’t one already.
Baatz glared at him, there in the gloom of earliest dawn. “Have you got your full ammunition supply?”
“Yes, Corporal,” Willi repeated—truthfully. Only a dope didn’t bring along as many rounds and as many rations as he could, and Frau Dernen hadn’t raised any dopes.
Had he been lying, Baatz would have had to feel him up to prove it. You still couldn’t see anything more than ten centimeters from the end of your nose. That didn’t bother Willi. A Frenchman who could see you was a Frenchman who could blow your brains out.
Muttering, the corporal stomped off to harass somebody else. Beside Willi, Wolfgang Storch chuckled almost silently. “Awful Arno’s on the rag early today, isn’t he?”
“What was that, Storch?” Baatz snapped. His ears stuck out like jug handles. Maybe that was what made them so sharp.
“Nothing, Corporal,” Wolfgang said. Baatz went right on muttering, but he didn’t come back. He might have heard, but he hadn’t understood. Just like a corporal, Willi thought.
Before Willi could say that out loud and get a laugh from Storch, hundreds—no, thousands—of German guns opened up. Everywhere from the North Sea to the Swiss border, they hurled death and devastation at the enemies of the Reich. Through the thunder, Willi heard the steadier rumble of aircraft engines overhead. Their takeoffs must have been timed so they’d cross the border just when the artillery bombardment opened. Right now, the damned Frenchies would be thinking hell had opened up on earth. And they wouldn’t be so far wrong.
Lieutenant Neustadt blew his whistle. He looked so young, it almost seemed a boy’s plaything when he did. But his voice, more bass than baritone, gave that the lie: “Forward! Now we get to see France for ourselves!”
The French had seen little bits of Germany. Willi aimed to do more than that. He wanted to goose-step through Paris in a victory parade. His great-grandfather had done it after the Franco-Prussian War. His father never stopped complaining that he hadn’t got the chance. Willi wanted it.
There was the place just on the German side of the border where the French troops had camped when he and Wolfgang spied on them. There was the crossing point the Germans had booby-trapped when they pulled back after the real war against Czechoslovakia started. Now Willi needed to look back over his shoulder to see it. That meant, that had to mean, he was in France.
If you stood on the other guy’s soil, you were winning. The last time around, the Allies never did drive Germany all the way out of France and Belgium. Things fell apart on the home front before they could. And here the Wehrmacht was again.
A rifle boomed up ahead. A French machine gun opened up, its fire noticeably slower than a German MG-34’s. Somebody not too far from Willi fell over and grabbed at his leg. He yelped and ki-yied like a dog hit by a car. “Medic!” The shout went up from half a dozen throats.
“Keep moving!” Arno Baatz yelled. “Even if they’ve mined the fields, keep moving!”
Even if they’ve mined the fields? Willi thought. He suddenly didn’t want to move at all. Corporal Baatz had a way of encouraging his men, all right. Lieutenant Neustadt’s whistle shrilled. “We need to go forward!” he called. “Victory lies ahead! Paris, too!” That made a pretty good antidote to Baatz’s minefields.
French shells screamed in—not many, but enough to send men and pieces of men flying. Willi’s father had talked about the goddamn French 75s in the last war. Here they were again, and just as horrific if you were on the receiving end.
In the last war, Germany couldn’t do much about them. Now Stukas swooped down on the French batteries, underwing sirens wailing like damned souls. Bombs going off were much louder than shells. The French artillery quieted down in a hurry. Willi trotted past a gun pit a few minutes later. He looked at what was left of the 75 and its crew. Gulping, he wished he hadn’t.
More rifle fire came from behind a stone fence. The Landsers moved to outflank the defenders even before Corporal Baatz started yelling commands. Willi plopped down in a shell hole and banged away at the poilus by the fence. After a few minutes, one of them waved something white.
Neustadt shouted to them in French. Willi didn’t speak a word of it. The French soldiers stood up with their hands high. In their long greatcoats and crested helmets, they looked as if they’d come from the last war. The lieutenant jerked his thumb toward the east. Nodding, babbling with gratitude for not getting shot out of hand, the poilus stumbled away into captivity.
“They’ll have watches. They’ll have cash,” Wolfgang said discontentedly. “Now the rear-echelon assholes’ll clean ‘em out.”
“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” Willi said—he was less inclined to grumble than his friend. “You think they’re the only froggies we’ll catch?”
“Well…no,” Storch admitted. “But maybe they had extra-good stuff. We’ll never find out.”
Up ahead, a Panzer I was burning. Something heavier than a machine gun had hit the little panzer and knocked it out. One crewman in black coveralls lay dead a few meters away. The other—the driver—hadn’t made it all the way out. He was on fire, too. Willi gulped again. The stink reminded him of a pork roast forgotten in the oven.
But other panzers kept pushing forward. They shot up or ran over French machine-gun nests. That made life a lot easier for the foot soldiers who followed in their wake. Willi didn’t mind not facing machine guns, not even a little bit.
More Frenchmen surrendered. As he’d predicted, Willi got himself a small wad of francs and a watch with a case that looked like gold. There were corpses to plunder, too, if you had the stomach for it. Dead men and pieces of dead men…Willi was astonished at how fast he got used to them or developed a knack for not thinking about them. Definitely better not to wonder whether this crumpled chunk of shredded meat had played the concertina or that one always puked when he got plowed.
Some people didn’t care. He went past one body that had a finger on the left hand neatly sliced off, presumably so the slicer could get at a ring. Willi hoped he wouldn’t do anything like that. He also hoped he wouldn’t end up a body lying there for someone else to frisk.
It could happen. Not all the poilus were ready to give up. The French fought from foxholes and trenches. They fought from behind fences, and from farmhouses. They didn’t fight with the coordination of t
he German war machine, but they fought. They reminded Willi of a guy who got staggered in a barroom brawl but swung back instead of falling over.
Why didn’t they fall over, dammit? Life would have been so much simpler—to say nothing of easier—if they had.
More 75s screamed in. The Wehrmacht troops did some screaming of their own. One of the first things you learned in training was to flatten out when you got shelled. Willi tried to get flatter than a hedgehog squashed on the Autobahn.
“The lieutenant’s down!” somebody yelled. Willi looked around without raising his head. Sure as hell, there was Lieutenant Neustadt, both hands clapped to his belly and a godawful shriek coming out of his mouth. Stretcher-bearers ran up and lugged him away. Willi swore under his breath. That didn’t look good.
“We have to keep going!” Sandwiched between Neustadt and Corporal Baatz, Sergeant Lutz Pieck hadn’t shown much personality up till now. All of a sudden, the platoon was his, personality or not.
Keep going they did—till they ran up against four French machine guns with interlocking fields of fire. You couldn’t advance against those, not unless you’d written your suicide note. Willi took his entrenching tool and started digging a hole.
Sergeant Pieck sent a runner back. Before long, a mortar team came up. The men started dropping bombs on the machine gun nests. They silenced three of them. The soldiers stalked the fourth and put it out of action with grenades. One machine gunner came out with his hands up. Corporal Baatz shot him in the face. He fell over and never twitched again. Willi knew he might have done the same thing. You couldn’t use one of those murder mills and then expect to give up as if you’d got caught playing bridge.
Pieck looked as if he wanted to say something about it, but what could he say? Only the Last Trump would bring the Frenchman back to life. And Arno Baatz was a mean bastard who didn’t listen to anybody. Pieck pointed west instead. “Forward!” he commanded, and forward they went.
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