“Funny guy,” the cook said. “I’ve only heard that one five times in the past half-hour. You don’t want it, you can go hungry. You think I give a rat’s ass?”
Luc prodded a pale piece of pork with a forefinger. “I thought that’s what this was.” The cook swore at him in earnest then.
Washed down with vin extremely ordinaire, the stew wasn’t bad. Luc smoked a cigarette, then wrapped himself in a blanket inside what had been somebody’s house till a bomb blew out most of one wall. His buddies had a makeshift brazier going: a bucket half full of hot coals hung from a scrap-metal tripod so it didn’t set the floor on fire. It gave off less heat than Luc wished it would, but it was better than nothing.
He slept like a hibernating animal. Not only were nights endlessly long, but he’d never been so worn in his life. Some of the guys in his company fell asleep while they marched—and they kept going, too. He envied them—he didn’t seem able to do that himself.
Some time in the middle of the night, a hard hand shook him awake. He groped for his belt knife. Sergeant Demange’s low-voiced chuckle stopped him. “Take it easy,” the noncom said. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be holding a lily by now. But no. Go out and stand watch for a couple of hours.”
“Do I have to?” Luc asked around a yawn.
“Damn right you do. Suppose German parachutists came down out of the sky? What would we do without a warning?”
“At night?” Luc didn’t believe it. But the Fritzes had done all kinds of nasty things with parachutists. Maybe they’d make a night attack behind the French line. And no maybe about what Sergeant Demange would do if Luc gave him any more lip. With a martyred sigh, Luc got out of the blanket and put on his boots and his helmet. He was already wearing everything else, including his greatcoat.
His breath smoked inside the battered house. It smoked more when he stepped outside. The night was mostly clear. Stars glittered frigidly in a sky blacker than dried blood. Carolers would have loved a night like this. Right now, Luc would have bet nobody in Europe loved anybody else.
The war hadn’t gone to bed. Off to the northeast, the thunder of artillery went on. He could see flashes against the horizon. Ours or theirs? he wondered. After a moment, he decided it was probably both.
Just ahead lay towns whose names brought back thunderous memories of the last war’s early days: Charleroi and, a little farther east, Namur. The Germans were swarming this way again, like field-gray ants towards an enticing picnic feast. They’d fallen short of Paris the last time around. Either they would again or…
Luc didn’t want to think about or. He didn’t want to think about anything. He wanted to go back to sleep, or to fall asleep out here. Fear of the Boches didn’t hold him back. Fear of Sergeant Demange did.
After what seemed like forever but probably wasn’t, another soldier stumbled out of the house. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ve got it.” A moment later, he added, “Damn Sergeant Demange anyway,” under his breath.
“Sure,” Luc said. He went back inside, wondering whether Demange ever slept. On all the evidence, he seemed a piece of well-made machinery rather than a man. Maybe he ran on cigarette smoke and coffee.
Come to think of it, maybe I do, too. Luc found the blanket he’d so sorrowfully abandoned. He took off boots and helmet and lay down again. The blanket didn’t seem to do a thing to get him any warmer. He wondered if he’d lie there till dawn finally came. Next thing he knew, he was asleep.
“Wake up, you bum. You snore.”
“I do not,” Luc answered automatically, even before his eyes opened. Twenty minutes later, with some kind of mush and strong coffee inside him, he was marching again.
Refugees from Namur and Charleroi crowded the road. Some of them cheered the soldiers in their odd Walloon French. Others swore at them: “If we weren’t in the way between the Germans and your damned country, they’d leave us alone!”
“As far as I’m concerned, Hitler’s welcome to Belgium,” Sergeant Demange retorted. “And you cocksuckers deserve him, too. Now get the hell out of our way before we open up on you!”
He would have done it. Not only that, he would have laughed while he did it. The Belgians must have figured that out, because they tumbled off the road with haste that would have been funny if this were a film and not the ruination of their lives.
Then more Belgian soldiers started falling back past the oncoming French. “You can have a taste of those bastards,” a Walloon said. A couple of Flemings added something to that, but Luc didn’t know what it was. If they hadn’t worn Belgian uniform, he would have shot them. Their language sounded too goddamn much like German.
Charleroi had got the bejesus knocked out of it in the first war. Luc supposed it must have been rebuilt since, but it had got pounded again. Some of the wrecked buildings were still smoking. The Nazis had just worked it over, then. Half a rag doll lay in the gutter. At another time, it might have been poignant enough to move Luc to tears. But he’d seen men who looked like that. He glanced at the doll and marched on.
Out beyond Charleroi, some of Colonel de Gaulle’s tanks were firing at the enemy. German shells landed around them. Without waiting for orders, Luc yanked the entrenching tool off his belt and started digging in. If Sergeant Demange didn’t like it, he’d say so. A look out of the corner of Luc’s eyes told him the noncom was digging, too. Nodding to himself, Luc made the dirt fly.
SOME FRENCH KING A LONG TIME ago said, “Paris is worth a Mass.” Vaclav Jezek had learned that in history class. As far as he was concerned, Paris was mostly a mess. By steamer from Constanta to Marseille, dodging Italian subs and seaplanes. By train from Marseille to Paris. By taxicab to the Czech embassy, which served as headquarters for the government in exile.
By taxi again to a camp outside Paris. The camp held about a regiment’s worth of Czechoslovakian soldiers: mostly Czechs, with a sprinkling of antifascist Slovaks and Ruthenians. Hardly anyone had his own weapon. The French wasted little time passing out rifles. They were eager to get all their friends into the fight against Hitler’s legions.
Next to none of them spoke any Czech, though. They did the same thing as the Pole who’d interned Vaclav: they used German. It worked—most Czechs knew at least some, and could translate for the ones who didn’t. But speaking the enemy’s language with your friends was humiliating and infuriating.
The Germans seemed to know where the camp was. Their bombers visited it every so often. This wasn’t the first time Vaclav had had to sprint for a trench—far from it. The bombers also visited Paris. On the radio, the Germans claimed to be hitting only military targets. That would have been funny if it didn’t make Jezek want to cry.
Three days before Christmas, his platoon jammed itself into a bus. A generation earlier, buses had hauled French troops from Paris to the war-saving Battle of the Marne. Some of the machines the Czechoslovak regiment used looked to be of vintage close to 1914.
It was cold outside. It didn’t stay cold inside the bus for long, not when it was full of twice as many men as it was supposed to carry. Everybody lit a cigarette. Inside of seconds, the smoke made Vaclav’s eyes sting. He didn’t care. He was smoking furiously himself. Gauloises packed a heftier jolt than the miserable excuses for tobacco he’d got since he was interned.
The driver, a middle-aged Frenchman, chain-smoked with his passengers. A patch covered his left eye but didn’t hide all the damage a bullet or shell fragment had done to his face. He seemed to manage all right with one eye, at least as far as driving went.
Whatever springs the bus might have had once upon a time had long since gone to the big coachwork shop in the sky. Vaclav felt every pothole, every rock. “I wonder if we’ll have any kidneys left by the time we get wherever we’re going,” he said to the soldier sitting next to—half on top of—him.
“Why worry?” the other man replied. His dark, curly hair and hooked nose said he was a Jew. Vaclav normally had little use for Jews, but he supposed you could count on
them to fight the Nazis. This fellow went on, “If we’ve still got ‘em when we get there, the Germans’ll blow ‘em out of us, right?”
Vaclav eyed him. Maybe you weren’t so smart if you supposed something like that. “If you don’t think we can beat them, why did you sign up for this?”
“You gotta try.” The Jewish soldier paused to light a Gitane. He spoke Czech like a big-city man; if he wasn’t from Prague, Vaclav didn’t know anything. After sucking in smoke, he added, “Damn Poles don’t like Jews any better than the Germans do.”
“I guess not.” Vaclav hadn’t thought of that; it was nothing he’d ever needed to worry about.
“So how about you, goy?” That wasn’t Czech or German, but Vaclav had no trouble working out what it meant. “How come you’re here? How come you aren’t yelling, ‘Heil Hitler!’?”
Who do you think you are, asking me questions like that? After a moment, Vaclav tried to shrug. Inside the crowded bus, it wasn’t easy. “Fuck Hitler,” he said simply.
“That’ll do.” The Jew nodded. “I’m David. Who the hell are you?”
“Vaclav.” Jezek laughed. “Like everybody else, almost.”
David started singing the Christmas song about Good King Wenceslaus. He knew all the words. Vaclav must have looked flabbergasted, because the Jew started to laugh. “I’ve been hearing it ever since I was born,” David said. “Hell, I must have heard it while I was still inside my mom. I’d better know it.”
“I guess.” Vaclav hadn’t thought about that, either. If you were a Jew, you had your own stuff. But everybody else’s stuff had to land on you, too, whether you wanted it or not. If that wasn’t weird, what was?
After a few seconds, somebody else started singing about Good King Wenceslaus. It was that season of the year. A moment later, the Czech carol filled the bus like cigarette smoke. “Well, I see what you mean,” Vaclav said.
David nodded again. “Bet your ass. It’s always like this.”
The driver didn’t speak any Czech. To him, the carol was just noise. He didn’t need long to get sick of it. He yelled something in French. Not enough of the Czech soldiers spoke enough French for it to do any good. Then the driver screamed, “Shut up, you fucking pigdogs!” auf Deutsch. Maybe he’d learned it in a prison camp or something. That got people’s attention—maybe not in a good way, but it did.
“Ah, your mother,” David said, first in Czech, then in Yiddish.
Vaclav realized things were starting to go wrong when a gendarme—or maybe he was a military policeman—waved the bus onto a detour. The new road was narrow and twisty. The driver started swearing. So did the Czech soldiers as they slid from side to side.
Then the side road petered out—or maybe there was a crater up ahead. “Heraus!” the driver said as the bus’ door wheezed open.
“What do we do now?” Vaclav asked.
“What else?” David said. “We walk.”
Walk they did. Vaclav had lost his conditioning after getting interned. Tramping along with a forty-kilo pack on his back wasn’t his idea of a good time. The road seemed uphill both ways. Despite spatters of sleet, he soon started sweating. He threw down a cigarette butt and heard it hiss to extinction in an icy puddle.
That sparked a thought: “They say smoking is bad for your wind.”
“Screw ‘em,” David replied. He had another cigarette in his mouth.
Airplane motors droned high overhead. Bombs whistled down out of the clouds. They fell at random across the French countryside. The low ceiling grounded the German Stukas. Vaclav didn’t miss them—those bastards could put one right on top of an outhouse if they saw you walk in there to take a crap.
His platoon, of course, wasn’t the only unit on the march. He sometimes wondered if there was anybody in France who wasn’t. They went past a bunch of Frenchmen who’d got hit by one of those randomly falling bombs—a 250-kilo job, or maybe a 500. It wasn’t pretty. If the swine that went through a meat-packing plant wore uniforms, they would have looked a lot like this about halfway through.
Czech medics did what they could to help their French counterparts. You had to hope the French would have done the same for a Czech outfit. The rest of the platoon went around the blood and the moans and the shattered bodies. Vaclav didn’t look closely at them. He’d already seen more death and devastation than he ever wanted to remember.
And now you’re volunteering to be part of it again? he asked himself. You could have sat tight in that internment camp. It wasn’t exciting, but nobody was out to blow your balls off, either.
His shrug made the straps on that heavy pack dig into his shoulders. Too late to worry about it now. He’d been bored in the camp. Maybe he’d been stupid to leave. But if everybody sat tight, if nobody tried to stop Hitler, wouldn’t the little bastard with the ugly mustache end up telling the world what to do?
It looked that way to Vaclav. He glanced over at David, slogging along beside him. David had his own reasons to hate the Nazis, all right. Most of the time, Czech and Jew would have been wary around each other. Not here. The Germans had brought them together. A miracle of sorts, or maybe just proof of the old saying, The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Bombs turned a roadside meadow into a lunar landscape. Cattle lay sprawled like soldiers. They weren’t bloated and stinking. Some of them still moved and lowed piteously, so they’d gone down in this latest bombardment. Part of the weight Vaclav carried was rations. All the same…
“Fresh meat!” David got the words out before he could.
The platoon commander was a fresh-faced lieutenant named Svabinsky. Maybe he could have kept the soldiers from running into the field, maybe not. But he didn’t even try. “Beefsteaks!” he said happily, and pulled the bayonet off his belt.
They weren’t exactly beefsteaks. No butcher worth half his pay would have given them such a fancy name. They were chunks of meat haggled off the carcasses by hungrily enthusiastic amateurs. Toasted over a roaring fire, Vaclav’s had a charred crust and a bloody interior. He didn’t care. The gobbet was big enough to make his belly shut up. What else mattered in the field?
He rolled himself in a blanket and lay down by the fire. Lieutenant Svabinsky made sure people fed it through the night. Some time in the middle of the long, cold darkness, the blaring of car horns woke Vaclav. People shouted in French and French-accented German and even, once or twice, in Czech. Road damage might have stopped the buses, but the French army had cobbled together this swarm of automobiles to bring the Czechoslovakian soldiers up to the front.
As Vaclav stumbled towards one of them—they showed no lights, of course—he laughed through a yawn. The French were in a fix, the same way his own country had been. But they were trying to muddle through. He couldn’t imagine the efficient Germans coming up with a mad arrangement like this.
He piled into a car. As soon as it was packed, the driver took off. Vaclav hoped the fellow knew where he was going. He must have. Even staying on the road couldn’t have been easy, but the Frenchman did it. Vaclav dozed off again, jerking awake whenever the car hit a pothole.
Somebody outside said something in a language that sounded like German. Vaclav’s eyes flew open. Morning twilight let him see a soldier in a French-looking uniform. What came out of the man’s mouth still sounded like German. A Belgian, Vaclav realized. Are we in Belgium already?
The soldier turned out to speak French, too. That helped the driver, though not Vaclav. The Czech was glad to have a little light. The road was worse than ever, and wound through rugged, heavily wooded country. “What is this place?” Vaclav asked in German.
“They call it the Ardennes,” the driver answered in the same tongue.
“Why do they want us here?” Vaclav said. “You’d have to be crazy to try and push an attack through terrain like this.”
With a magnificent Gallic shrug, the driver said, “With people like the Germans, who can tell?” Somebody yelled and waved. The Frenchman hit the brakes. The car—a battered old
Citroën—lurched to a stop. “You get out here.”
Getting out was harder than squeezing in had been. Vaclav stretched and twisted to work the kinks out of his back. He wished he had some coffee.
“Youse is the Czechs?” What the French officer spoke sounded more like bad Polish than Czech, but Vaclav could—barely—follow it. The Frenchman went on, “Come these ways—I will shove you into positions.” He was trying, anyhow.
And maybe the Czechs did need to be shoved into positions. Artillery growled up ahead. It wasn’t too close, but it was there. Maybe the Germans were crazy. Or maybe this was a feint, with the main force up in the north, the way it looked.
His shrug wasn’t so fancy as the driver’s but it would do. He didn’t have to decide whether the Nazis were making a big push here or a little one. All he had to do was go where people told him and shoot at anybody and anything decked out in German field-gray.
He wasn’t the only Czech soldier yawning as a ragged column formed. He figured he could just about manage what they needed from him.
“STILLE NACHT! HEILIGE NACHT!” Hans-Ulrich Rudel sang, along with the rest of the flyers and groundcrew men at the forward base in Holland. They had a tree, brought west from Germany and decorated with gingerbread men and candles and tinsel and ornaments made from scrap metal by mechanics in between patch jobs and other repairs on the Stukas.
Hans-Ulrich had heard that carol and all the others since before the day he first knew what the words meant. With his father a churchman, it couldn’t very well have been any different. But at his father’s house, and at his father’s church, the songs hadn’t seemed to mean so much. People sang them because they’d always sung them, sang them without thinking about what the words really said.
Things were different here. You don’t know what life is worth till you lay it on the line, Rudel thought. Everybody here knew this Christmas might be his last. That made it count for ever so much more than it had back in peacetime.
One of the other pilots raised a glass of schnapps. “Absent friends,” he said, and knocked back the shot.
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