Luc Harcourt had thought he knew what war was all about. He’d been in some skirmishes. He’d fired his rifle, and he’d come under fire. Artillery had gone off not too far from him. He’d had to worry about mines.
Now he discovered he’d been a virgin trying to figure out how to play with himself. He’d played at war. So had the Germans. Well, playtime was over. The bastards on the other side meant it. If he wanted to go on breathing, he had to mean it, too.
Shells bursting all around him had announced the new dispensation. This wasn’t just a little harassing fire. This was a storm of steel, the kind of thing men his father’s age talked about. The noise alone was enough to make you shriek—not only the thunderous bursts, but also the horrible screams and wails of fragments knifing through the air. Before long, the screams and wails of the wounded added to the chaos.
And he had to deal with things his old man’d never needed to worry about. Dive-bombers howled down out of the sky. If bursting artillery shells were terrifying, bombs were ten times worse. Shells could carry only so much explosive. Otherwise, they’d blow up before they got out of the gun barrel. Artillerymen disliked such misfortunes. The only limit to a bomb’s size, though, was whether a plane could get off the ground carrying it.
German fighters strafed French positions as soon as the bombers went away. Luc wondered where the devil the French fighters were. He didn’t see any.
Before long, he realized he’d shat himself somewhere during the bombardment. He tore off his drawers and threw them away. He wondered if he would ever be able to face his buddies. Then he wondered how many of them had fouled themselves, too.
He didn’t have long to worry about it. Somebody yelled, “Tanks!” If that wasn’t panic in the other soldier’s voice…well, why not?
He’d never seen a German tank—or, for that matter, a French one—in the earlier skirmishes. He’d never seen dive-bombers then, either. He hadn’t missed the dive-bombers one bit. He didn’t miss the tanks, either.
Better to hope they would miss him. Here they came, all right: snorting black monsters spitting fire from the guns in their turrets. German soldiers in field-gray loped along between them.
A shell from a French field gun hit a German tank. It spun sideways and stopped. Flame and greasy black smoke burst from it. A soldier scrambled out of an escape hatch, his black coveralls on fire. A burst of machine-gun fire cut him down before he could find somewhere to hide.
But the rest of the tanks kept coming. The machine gun fired at one of them. Bullets struck sparks from its armor, but that was all. Then the tank fired at the French machine gun. It fell silent.
Luc drew a bead on one of the German foot soldiers. He fired. The man went down. Dead? Wounded? Just scared shitless? (Luc knew too well how easy that was.) He never found out.
He did realize he’d have to fall back if he wanted to stay alive. The Nazis were going to overrun this forward position no matter what. Back in the last war, he would have had trenches to retreat through. They’d made positions kilometers deep. This one wasn’t. No one had taken the war, or the Germans, seriously enough to set up defenses in depth.
Oh, farther back, well out of artillery range, the Maginot Line was there to make sure no German advance got too far. That might end up making France happy. It didn’t do a goddamn thing for Luc.
Almost the first thing he saw when he scrambled out of the trench and fell back to the southwest was somebody else’s wadded-up underwear. Just for a minute, that made him feel much better. Then a tank’s machine gun stitched up the grass all around his feet. None of the bullets bit him, but he damn near—damn near—crapped himself again.
“Over here!” Sergeant Demange shouted. “We can still hold them off!”
Hold them off? Whatever the noncom was smoking, Luc didn’t think it came in Gauloises or Gitanes. But staying with somebody who had an idea about what to do next seemed better than running at random. Luc trotted toward Demange, who seemed in charge of a solid position anchored by a farmhouse.
“Jesus!” Luc said, huddling in the kitchen. None of the windows had any glass in them. He didn’t know why bombs and shells hadn’t flattened the farmhouse. Luck—had to be.
“Fuck Jesus,” Sergeant Demange said. “Fuck the Boches. Fuck everybody, especially our dumbshit generals.”
“What did the generals do?” Luc asked, trying to catch his breath.
“Rien,” Demange snarled with savage scorn. “Not a goddamn fucking thing. They let us sit here with our thumbs up our asses till the Germans were ready to hit us. And now the Germans are. And we’re ready, too—ready to take it on the chin.”
“We’ve got to fight hard for the sake of the international working class.” That was Valentin Laclos, one of the several Communists in the company.
Sergeant Demange withered him with a glare. “Fuck the international working class. And fuck you, too, Laclos. If Stalin was on Hitler’s side, you’d screech that we ought to lay down and open our legs for the Boches. You can’t even fart till Moscow tells you it’s okay.”
Luc admired the noncom’s seamless contempt for the world. De-mange despised everything and everybody. Chances were he even hated himself. If you had to ride herd on a bunch of snot-nosed soldiers, how could you do anything else?
More German artillery started landing around the farmhouse. As Luc had seen, the windows had already blown out, or rather, in; broken glass glinted on the floor. A shell fragment struck a stone wall and whined away.
“What do we do, Sergeant?” Luc asked.
“Fight, dammit,” Demange answered. “Not for the international whatever the hell. Fight because they’ll kill you for sure if you don’t.”
Not necessarily, Luc thought. If he threw down his rifle and threw up his hands, maybe he could sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp. Plenty of Frenchmen had done it the last time around. They’d had a thin time, though—literally. Black bread and turnips and cabbage and not enough of any of them…The Germans themselves were starving. They had precious little to spare for prisoners.
And there was no guarantee that surrendering meant becoming a POW. He’d heard French veterans talk about that. If you had the time, if you had the men, maybe you’d take captives back for interrogation. If you didn’t? It was their hard luck, that was all. He had no reason to believe the Boches acted any differently. He’d already seen you could kill somebody without hating him in the least.
One of the other guys in the farmhouse looked out a window. “Our side’s falling back again, Sergeant,” he reported.
Sergeant Demange muttered to himself. “We’d better do the same,” he said unhappily. “If we get surrounded and cut off, we’re liable to have to see if those Nazi cocksuckers’ll let us give up. I don’t like the odds.”
His thoughts came uncomfortably close to Luc’s. Once the sergeant made up his mind, he wasted no time. He divided the soldiers crowding the farmhouse into two groups. One he sent out. The other stayed behind in the strongpoint to give covering fire.
Luc got put in the second group. He couldn’t even complain, because Sergeant Demange headed it. While their buddies got away, they fired out the windows. A few bullets came back, but only a few.
“Germans aren’t here in numbers. That’s something, anyhow,” De-mange said, slapping a new clip onto his Fusil MAS36 and lighting a fresh Gitane from the one that had burnt down almost to his lips. He spat out the tiny butt and stuck the new smoke in his mouth. Then he pointed to the west-facing doorway. “All right. Let’s get out of here.”
They trotted away. Out in the open, Luc felt horribly naked. A shell could slice him to dogmeat out here. Somebody yelled. He almost shat himself one more time. Then he realized the shout came in French, not German. His asshole unpuckered. His heart came down out of his throat.
“Our guys,” Demange said laconically.
The soldier who’d shouted stood in a halfway decent trench line. He and his pals had a couple of Hotchkiss machine guns and, bet
ter yet, a 37mm antitank gun in a sandbagged revetment. The gun had two rings painted on the barrel. Kill brags? Luc hoped so.
“As long as the dive-bombers don’t come, we’re fine,” somebody said.
“Where are our dive-bombers?” Luc asked plaintively. Nobody answered him.
That cannon did knock out a German tank at better than 300 meters. The machine guns settled the poor bastards who tried to bail out of it. Even so, Luc wondered again where the French panzers were. The next one he saw in this whole war would be the first.
And he wondered if blasting the one tank would bring a storm of vengeance down on everybody here. To his vast relief, it didn’t. Night came early. That would slow down the Germans…he hoped.
After dark, a runner jumped down into the trench. The French soldiers nearly killed him before they realized he was on their side. He brought orders: fall back once more.
“Why?” Sergeant Demange growled. “We’ve got ‘em stopped here.”
“Yes, but they’ve broken through on both sides of us. If we don’t retreat now, we won’t get the chance later,” the runner replied.
“Merde,” said the sergeant. Then he said something so foul, it made shit sound like an endearment. And then he said something he must have thought filthier yet: “All right, God damn it to hell and gone. We will retreat.”
THE ENGINE THUNDERED TO LIFE. The big prop spun, then blurred into invisibility. The Ju-87 throbbed. “Alles gut?” Sergeant Dieselhorst shouted through the speaking tube.
“Alles gut, Albert,” Hans-Ulrich Rudel said after studying the gauges. You couldn’t trust them with everything. The way the plane sounded, the way it felt—those counted, too. They could warn of trouble the gauges didn’t know about yet. But everything did seem good this morning.
Groundcrew men pulled the chocks away from his wheels. A sergeant waved that he was cleared to take off. He pulled back on the stick. The dive-bomber sprang forward over the yellow, dying grass. The field was almost as smooth as concrete. The Dutchmen had done a devil of a job of keeping everything neat. Now Germany could take advantage of it.
Up went the Stuka’s sharklike nose. Rudel climbed as fast as he could. The sooner everybody got into formation, the sooner everybody could go do his job.
“Target—Rotterdam.” The squadron commander’s voice crackled in his earphones. “The Dutch there think they can go on eating herring and drinking beer while the war stays at the front. They’ve got the wrong idea, though. In this war, the front is everywhere.”
Hans-Ulrich grinned. “You hear that, Dieselhorst?”
“No, sir. What did he say?”
“‘In this war, the front is everywhere.’” The pilot quoted the squadron CO with savage relish.
His number-two wasn’t so impressed. “Not everywhere. Do they think the Tommies and the Ivans are going to bomb Berlin?”
“Don’t be silly,” Rudel said, though a tiny icicle of doubt slithered up his back. The Czechs had, there just before they quit. But that was only a last thumb of the nose, a defiant fleabite. It wasn’t as if they did any real damage.
One Stuka had to pull out of the formation with engine trouble. The rest droned on. The vibration filled every particle of Hans-Ulrich’s being, everything from his skin to his teeth to his spine to his balls. It wasn’t as much fun as getting laid, but it was as compelling.
Bf-109s loped along with the bombers to hold enemy fighters at bay. Four days into the assault on Holland, the air opposition wasn’t what it had been. The Dutch didn’t have many planes left, while English and French fighters didn’t seem to be operating this far forward.
Hans-Ulrich didn’t miss them a bit. The Ju-87 was terrific at smashing up ground targets. But even the Czech Avia biplanes had shot down too many dive bombers. For faster, more heavily armed fighters, Stukas were sitting ducks.
He could see where the front lay by the artillery bursts and by where the smoke was rising. General Staff officers with red Lampassen down the outside seams of their trousers scribed neat lines on maps and imagined they knew what war was all about. Even up here, buzzing along at 2,500 meters, Rudel could see and smell what war was doing to Holland. Better to Holland than to the Reich, he thought.
As soon as they crossed the front, Dutch AA opened up on them. All the Stuka pilots started jinking without waiting for orders. A little faster, a little slower, a little to the left or right, up a little, down a little—anything to keep from giving the gunners an easy target. The neat formation suffered. With luck, the planes wouldn’t.
But one of them, trailing smoke, turned back toward the east. That didn’t look good. Hans-Ulrich hoped the pilot and rear gunner came through all right. Next to that, getting the Ju-87 down in one piece was small potatoes.
A near miss made his own bus stagger in the sky like a man missing the last step on a flight of stairs. Shrapnel clanged against the left wing. Everything went on working. “Danke, Gott,” Rudel murmured. His father the minister would have come up with a fancy prayer, but that did the job.
“Alles gut?” Dieselhorst asked again.
“Alles gut,” Hans-Ulrich said firmly.
Holland wasn’t a big country. There lay Rotterdam, on both banks of the New Maas. It was a big shipping town, with the most important quays on the north side of the river. Most of the city, including the central square, was on the north bank, too.
“There’s the square we’re supposed to hit,” the squadron leader said. “Follow me down.” The underside of his wings flashed in the sun as he aimed his Ju-87 at Rotterdam’s heart like an arrow. One after another, the planes he led peeled off after him.
Acceleration shoved Hans-Ulrich against the back of his armored seat. Facing the other way, Albert Dieselhorst experienced dives very differently. He always thought the Stuka was trying to tear the straps off him and pitch him out over his machine gun and through the window behind him.
No antiaircraft fire here. The Dutch must not have thought Germany would attack the towns. Didn’t they pay attention to what happened in Czechoslovakia? If they didn’t, too bad for them.
Rudel yanked the bomb release lever. Suddenly, the Ju-87 was lighter and more aerodynamic. He pulled back on the stick to come out of the dive. The Stukas, he saw, weren’t the only planes working Rotterdam over. High above them, Do-17s—Flying Pencils to friend and foe alike—and He-111s sent bombs raining down on the port. They couldn’t put them just where they wanted them, the way a Ju-87 could. But all that high explosive was bound to blow somebody to hell and gone.
“Alles gut?” Dieselhorst asked one more time. “Sure looks good,” he added—he was the one who could see what the bombs had done.
“Couldn’t be better,” Hans-Ulrich answered, and flew back toward the airstrip from which he’d taken off.
SERGEANT ALISTAIR WALSH WAS WHERE HE was supposed to be: on the Dyle, in central Belgium. The whole BEF was on the line of the Dyle—the whole BEF, less what the Germans had blown sky-high. If what had happened to the rest of the force was anything like what had happened to Walsh’s unit, the BEF was missing more than it should have been.
One of the soldiers in Walsh’s platoon waved to him. “What’s up, Puffin?” Walsh asked. Everybody hung that name on Charlie Casper—he was short and round and had a big red nose.
He also had news: “Bloody goddamn Dutchmen just tossed in the sponge.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Walsh demanded in angry disbelief.
“Bloody goddamn wireless.”
“But they can’t,” Walsh said, though he knew too well that they could. He went on protesting: “They just started fighting—what?—five days ago. We all just started five days ago.” Except for a few useless rounds aimed at German planes, he had yet to fire a shot.
“And now they’ve bloody well stopped,” Puffin Casper said. “Bunch of damn rotters. Said the Germans bombed the hell out of that damn Rotter place, and they couldn’t take any more of that, so they went belly-up.”
Some
thing seemed to have gone missing there. Whatever Puffin had heard, he hadn’t got it straight. But if the big news was right—and Walsh had no reason to doubt it was—what difference did the details make? Not bloody much, as Casper would have said.
Walsh looked north. “So they’ll hit us from that way and from the east,” he said. “Just what we need.”
“Frenchies’ll help us,” Puffin said.
“Well, maybe.” Walsh didn’t argue, not right out loud. Casper was only a kid. If he had confidence in the French army, more power to him. He might even end up right. The French Seventh Army, which was in place north of the BEF—on the far side of the Scheldt—was supposed to be big and strong. Maybe it was. Or maybe the BEF would have to go it alone. Back in 1918, British forces seemed to have done that when the Kaiser’s army hit them with one haymaker after another.
(That the French would have said the same about the British had never come to Walsh’s notice. If it had, he would have called the man bold—or rash—enough to give him such news a goddamn liar.)
Artillery rumbled, off to the east. Some of those were Belgian guns, firing at the advancing Germans. And some of them were German, making sure the bastards in field-gray kept on advancing. The gunfire was getting louder, which meant it was getting closer to the Dyle. Sooner or later—probably sooner—Walsh figured he would make the Germans’ acquaintance again.
An officer came up to him. For a second, he thought the man was British. Then he saw the funny rank badges. A Belgian, he realized. Ordinary Belgian soldiers looked like Frenchmen, mostly because of the Adrian helmets they wore. But officers had British-style uniforms.
“Where is your command post?” the Belgian asked in accented but understandable English.
“Why do you want to know…sir?” The British sergeant knew he sounded suspicious, but he couldn’t help himself. The Dutch had just thrown in the towel. What if the bloody Belgies were about to do the same thing? Their king hadn’t wanted to let any Allies in till the very last instant—which was liable to be too late.
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