But this fellow said, “The better to arrange cooperation between your forces and mine. You are a sergeant, is it not so?”
What do you think you’re doing, asking me questions? was what he meant. Walsh didn’t think he could get in much trouble for slowing up a wog, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way he was wrong. He pointed north. “Go that way, oh, three hundred yards, and you’ll see the regimental tent.”
“Yards?” The Belgian officer scratched his head.
“Yes, sir.” Alistair Walsh felt like scratching his, too. Then he figured out what had to be wrong. Stupid foreigners with their idiot measures. “Uh, three hundred meters.” Close enough.
The Belgian nodded. “Ah. Thank you.” Off he went, happy as a ram in clover.
“What do you want to bet they’re the next ones out?” Puffin Casper said dolefully.
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Walsh agreed. “They’ll tear a nasty hole in our lines if they do bugger off, though.”
“They’ll care a lot about that, they will,” Puffin said.
More Belgian soldiers came back over the Dyle. Some of them still looked ready to fight. They were just blokes doing their jobs. Others had done all the work they aimed to do for a while. They slipped back toward the rear first chance they saw. Still others were walking wounded. Some of them seemed angry. Others seemed weary and in pain, as they no doubt were. Still others might have been relieved. They’d fought, they’d got hurt, and they were still alive. Nobody could expect them to do anything more.
Englishmen would have reacted the same way. The idea that foreigners could act just like ordinary people never failed to surprise Walsh.
And then, with the throb of airplane engines overhead, the only foreigners he cared about were the Germans. He ran for the closest trench and jumped in.
These weren’t dive-bombers, anyway. They stayed high overhead and let their bombs rain down on the general area of their targets. The whistles as the bombs fell weren’t quite so bad as the screaming sirens on those vulture-winged diving bastards. They sure as hell weren’t good, though.
When the bombs burst, it seemed as if a million of them were going off at once. Blast threw Walsh around. Blast could kill all by itself without fragments. It could tear lungs to shreds without leaving a mark on a body. Walsh had already seen that. He wished he hadn’t chosen this exact moment to remember it.
Engines of a different note made him look up. Fighters were tearing into the bomber formations. He let out a whoop. Somebody else sprawled in the trench said, “Blimey, there really is an RAF!” The soldier sounded astonished.
Walsh didn’t blame him. He hadn’t seen many British planes himself. But they were there now. Two broad-winged bombers tumbled out of the air, wrapped in smoke and fire. Parachutes sprouted in the sky. Walsh waited for the British pilots—he assumed they were his countrymen, though they might have been French—to machine-gun the descending German airmen. But they didn’t. He wondered why not. Not sporting? Were he hanging helpless from a silk half-bubble, he didn’t suppose he would have wanted a German blazing away at him.
“Blimey!” the other soldier said again. “That bugger’s going to come down right on our ‘eads, ‘e is.”
He didn’t quite. But he landed no more than fifty yards away. Walsh aimed his rifle at him. “Give up right now, you fucking bastard!” he bawled.
The German paid no attention to him. The fellow sprawled on the ground, clutching his ankle and howling like a dog with its tail caught under a rocking chair. The parachute flapped and billowed like a live thing, threatening to drag him away.
“Easiest prisoner I ever took,” Walsh said. “If he hasn’t broken that, I’m a Belgian myself.”
“But do you want to go out there and get ‘im?” the other British soldier asked. “What if more bombers come over?”
“Urr,” said Walsh, who hadn’t thought of that. Letting the German flyer’s countrymen blow him to pieces was a distinctly unattractive notion. But so was listening to him.
When Walsh said so, the other man replied, “Then shoot ‘im. Or if you don’t care to, I will.”
“No,” Walsh said. If he were lying there with a broken ankle, he would want a German to take him prisoner. And he thought there was a pretty good chance some German would. The bastards in field-gray fought hard. They’d fought hard even when they knew the game was up in 1918. They mostly fought fair, though. Of what army could you say more?
That made up his mind for him. He scrambled out of his hole and trotted toward the downed Luftwaffe man. The German saw his rifle and held up his hands. He gabbled something in his own language. If that wasn’t I give up!, Walsh really was a Belgian.
He pointed to the pistol on the flyer’s belt. “Throw that damn thing away, and make it snappy!” he said.
“Ja! Ja!” Maybe the German understood a little English, even if he didn’t seem to speak any. Or maybe the sergeant’s gestures made sense to him. Walsh kept his finger on the trigger while the man disarmed himself. If he turned out to be a fanatic, he’d be a dead fanatic pretty damn quick. But he didn’t. He tossed the little automatic—smaller and neater than the Enfield .38 revolver that was the British standard in this war, to say nothing of the last go-round’s man-killing brute of a Webley and Scott .455—into the bushes.
“All right.” Walsh knelt beside him and pointed to the trench from which he’d come. “I’m going to take you back there.” He got the German’s arm around his shoulder. Grunting as he rose, he went on, “This may hurt a bit.”
The airman hopped awkwardly on one leg. He tried not to let his other foot touch the ground at all. Sure as the devil, that ankle was ruined. Well, he’d done worse to plenty of Dutchmen and Belgians and Englishmen.
“Give me a hand with this bugger,” Walsh called. Unenthusiastically, the other British soldier did.
Once in the hole, the flyer reached inside his coverall. He came closer to dying than he probably realized. But he came out with…“Zigaretten?” he said, proffering the packet.
“Thanks.” Walsh took one. So did the other soldier, who gave him a light. They both took a drag. “Bloody hell!” Walsh said. “Tastes like hay and barge scrapings.” If this was what the Germans were smoking, no wonder the bastards acted mean.
He gave the Luftwaffe man a Navy Cut. People said they were strong. God only knew they were cheap. But the new prisoner’s eyes went wide when he puffed on it. “Danke schön! Sehr gut!” he said. He reverently smoked it all the way down to the end. It probably had more real tobacco in it than he usually got in a week.
Stretcher-bearers took him off to the rear. If he got more proper cigarettes, odds were he was glad enough to go.
CHRISTMAS WAS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER, but Peggy Druce found Berlin a singularly joyless place. She supposed she should count her blessings. If she weren’t from the neutral USA, she would have been interned, not just inconvenienced. All the same…
So many shops were empty. Hardly any cars rolled down the street. Even the trolleys operated on a wartime schedule, which meant you took a long time to get anywhere. The city was blacked out at night. As far as Peggy could tell, the whole damn country was blacked out at night.
Maybe all of Europe was blacked out. Peggy tried to imagine Paris dark at night. The picture didn’t want to form. The City of Light was bound to be as shrouded as any other European capital. After what the Germans did to Prague and Marianske Lazne and the rest of Czechoslovakia, they wouldn’t leave Paris alone. She supposed it was a genuine military target. But the idea of bombs falling on it made her almost physically ill.
She walked past a restaurant not far from the hotel where they’d put her up. She hadn’t the slightest desire to go inside. Like everyone else in Germany, she had a ration card. Even in a restaurant, she had to spend points on what she ate. Whatever she got, most of it would be cabbage and potatoes and black bread. Fats of any sort—butter, cheese, lard—were hard to come by. Milk and cod-liver oil were reserv
ed almost exclusively for children and nursing and pregnant women.
A man with a white mustache walked past her. He tipped his hat as he went by. His wool suit had seen better years, but he couldn’t do much about that. The Germans had ration points for clothes, too. If you bought a topcoat, that was about it for the year. Peggy didn’t have all the clothes she wanted, either; most of what she’d brought to Czechoslovakia was still there. Or, maybe more likely, it was on some German woman’s back these days.
A team of horses drew an antiaircraft gun down the street. The horses might have come straight out of the Civil War. The field-gray uniforms on the soldiers were modern, though. As for the gun, it might have appeared from the future. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a piece of hardware that looked more lethal.
Newsboys held up papers full of headlines about German triumphs. People walked past without buying. If the Berliners were enthusiastic about the war, they hid it well.
“English and French air pirates bombard German towns!” a boy shouted. “Many innocent women and children murdered! Read about the latest enemy atrocities!”
Peggy almost stopped at the street corner to argue with him. Only the thought that her husband would have told her she was crazy made her keep her mouth shut. She admired Herb’s common sense, most of the time without wanting to imitate it. And she’d seen the fun the Nazis had knocking Czechoslovakia flat. If they were on the receiving end for a change, if this wasn’t all just propaganda and nonsense, boy, did they ever deserve it!
But the kid wasn’t to blame for that. He was only doing his job. The ones who were to blame were Hitler and Goebbels and Göring and Himmler, and she couldn’t very well tell them where to head in. If she took it out on the newsboy, what would happen to her? Neutral or not, American or not, she didn’t want a visit from the Gestapo.
Because she looked as shabby as everybody else, the Berliners assumed she was a German, too. They’d nod and say, “Guten Morgen.” She could manage that. She understood German tolerably well, but she spoke French much better. When people here expected much more than Good morning from her, she stumbled badly.
She hated that. She also hated being so dowdy. She’d made a life of standing out from the crowd. No one would ever have noticed her if she didn’t make a point of getting noticed. If she disliked anything, it was invisibility.
A few minutes later, ambling along on a day as gray and gloomy as her mood, she found a way to get noticed. She walked past a place whose window said ROTHSTEIN’S BUTCHER’S SHOP. It wasn’t bigger or fancier or more run down than the shops to either side: a secondhand bookstore to the left, a place that sold wickerwork purses and baskets to the right. The wickerwork place was busy—wicker, unlike leather, didn’t eat up ration points.
Rothstein’s, however, had a large sign taped in the window: GERMAN PEOPLE! DON’T BUY FROM DIRTY JEWS!
Next thing Peggy knew, she was walking through the door. Maybe a demon took hold of her. Only when the bell over the door jangled did she realize what she’d done. And she’d been so proud of herself for wanting to steer clear of the Gestapo! Well, so much for that.
Behind the counter, Rothstein looked astonished. “You aren’t one of my regulars!” he blurted. “You aren’t even—” He stopped, but Jewish hung in the air anyway.
“You’re right. I’m not. Give me a chicken leg, please.” Peggy had enough German for that. She could boil the leg on the hot plate in her room. It would make a better lunch—maybe lunch and supper—than she was likely to get in the hotel restaurant or a café. Not much good food left for civilians in Berlin.
Moving like a man in a dream, Rothstein weighed the leg. He was unmistakably a Jew, with a long nose and dark, curly hair. “It comes to 420 grams—almost a week’s ration for meat,” he said. “If you like, I will bone it, so it costs you fewer points.”
“Bitte,” Peggy said.
Deftly, he did. “Now it is only 290 grams. I need coupons for so much, and two Reichsmarks fifty.” As he spoke, he wrapped the chicken in—what else?—butcher paper.
Sixty cents American money, more or less. That was a hell of a lot for a leg. Peggy paid without blinking. She also handed over the swastika-marked ration coupons. Those were part of the game, too.
Rothstein gave her a meticulously written receipt. “Danke schön,” he told her. “You are very brave. You are also very foolish.”
“I hope not,” Peggy said. “Auf wiedersehen.” Till I see you again, it meant literally. She wondered if she was brave enough—or foolish enough—to come back.
She got out fast, but not fast enough. Somebody’d squealed on her. Two blackshirts were trotting up the street toward Rothstein’s. “What kind of Dummkopf do you think you are?” one of them roared. “How dare you go into that damned Jew’s place?”
“Let me see your papers,” the other one yelled. “Immediately!”
“Sure.” Peggy took out her American passport and brandished it like a priest turning a crucifix on a couple of vampires.
The SS men recoiled almost the way vampires would have, too. “Oh,” one of them said disgustedly. “All right. We can’t give you what you deserve for buying there. But we can make the Jew sorry for selling to you.”
“And we will,” the other added, gloating anticipation in his voice.
“He didn’t know I was an American.” If Peggy sounded appalled, it was because she was.
“He knew you weren’t one of his regular kikes. He’ll pay, all right.” The SS men stormed into the butcher’s shop. A moment later, Rothstein cried out in pain. Peggy burst into tears. Dammit, you couldn’t win here.
People were saying the Maginot Line would save France. People were saying it would have to save France. Luc Harcourt didn’t give a damn about what people were saying. All he knew was, he was getting sick of being marched backward and forward and inside out.
He’d been bombed and shelled and shot at in the retreat from the German frontier. He’d been bombed in the encampment behind the Maginot Line where raw reinforcements filled out the regiment. Fortunately, those little billets-doux had fallen from planes flying high above, not from the Boches’ nasty dive-bombers. They landed all around the camp, but hardly any on it.
Now he and his surviving buddies and the strangers in their clean uniforms who’d just joined them were moving up toward the front again. This time, from what Sergeant Demange said, they’d end up in southern Belgium. If we get there in one piece, Luc thought.
That wasn’t obvious. Hell, whether they’d get there at all wasn’t obvious. They’d started out from the transit camp in trucks. Luc hadn’t much cared for that—as if his opinion mattered a sou’s worth. But if German planes shot up your truck, wouldn’t you roast like a pork loin in the oven? Of course you would—and your meat would end up smelling like burnt pork, too.
No German planes harried the trucks. That didn’t mean they carried Luc and his comrades very far toward the front. German bombers had done their worst to the roads leading north and east. If a truck couldn’t get through, if it sank to the axles when it tried to use the muddy fields instead of the cratered roads…
If all that happened—and it did—you got out and you damn well walked. “Here we are, back in 1918,” Sergeant Demange said, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth twitching as he talked.
“This isn’t so bad, Sarge,” Luc said. “Back then, you wore horizon-blue. Now you’re in khaki.”
“Oh, shut up, smartass. Once they get muddy, all uniforms are the same color,” Demange said. “The only thing you know about a guy in clean new clothes is that he doesn’t come up to the front much, so you can’t trust him.”
Ahead, the rumble of artillery got steadily louder. The Frenchmen were heading its way—and it was heading theirs. And behind them came a rumble of engines—something had got past the unholy mess the Nazis had made of the roads. “Move to one side, damn you!” someone yelled.
When Luc saw French tanks, he was only too glad to stand aside a
nd let them go by. The officer who’d shouted, a tall colonel with a small mustache and a big nose, stood very straight in the cupola of the lead machine. The French tanks were larger and had smoother lines than the German machines Luc had already seen too closely. By the determined look on the colonel’s face, he didn’t want to stop till he got to Berlin.
“He’s a fishing pole, isn’t he?” Luc remarked.
“Two fishing poles,” Sergeant Demange answered. That was what Luc thought he heard, anyway: deux galles. But Demange went on, “Colonel de Gaulle knows more about tanks than anybody else on our side, I think.”
“Is that who he is?” Luc had heard of de Gaulle, though he hadn’t known him by sight. The tall officer did indeed advocate tanks so tirelessly—and tiresomely—that he infuriated his superiors. “Did you serve under him last time?”
“Nah. Wish I would have.” Sergeant Demange spat out a tiny butt and ground it into the mud with his boot. He lit another Gitane, then continued, “If I remember straight, he got wounded and captured early on last time around, and sat out most of the war in a POW camp.”
“Lucky stiff,” muttered somebody in back of Luc. He almost turned around to find out who let his mouth run ahead of his brain like that. A tiny bit louder, and Sergeant Demange would have heard it, in which case God help whoever it was. On second thought, Luc didn’t want to know. If he didn’t, the ferocious little sergeant couldn’t squeeze it out of him.
The last tank growled past. None of the other commanders looked to be within ten centimeters of Colonel de Gaulle. Maybe that was just as well for them. They couldn’t have much room inside the turret when they needed to duck down and fight.
Luc’s company stopped at a field kitchen as daylight leached from the sky. A cook with a double chin—cooks never went hungry—shoveled potatoes and cabbage and stewed pork into his mess tin. He stared at his supper with resigned dismay. “Which side are we on, anyway?”
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