Meaux was gone. Luc Harcourt could see the smoke in the east, much of which came from the lost town. Maybe the Boches were celebrating by burning everything they couldn’t steal. Or maybe French engineers had planted charges under everything they didn’t want the enemy to use. German prisoners who spoke French had nothing but admiration for the engineers.
As far as Luc was concerned, who torched or blew up what hardly mattered any more. No matter who did it, France caught hell. All he cared about was staying in one piece till the war ended.
No guarantee of that. Sergeant Demange was commanding the company. No replacement officer had come forward since Lieutenant Marquet stopped an antitank round with his stomach. It cut him in half. The top half lived, and screamed, much longer than Luc wished it would have.
Luc had a squad himself. A private first class wasn’t much of a non-com, but he’d gone this far without getting hit. That put him several long steps ahead of the scared conscripts he led.
The sergeant came by, his red-tracked eyes missing nothing. The Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched as he snapped, “Don’t let ‘em lay there with their thumbs up their asses, Harcourt. Set the sorry sods to digging. They’ll hate you now, but they’ll thank you as soon as the Germans start shelling us again.”
“Right, Sergeant,” Luc said wearily. He knew Demange was right, too, but he wanted nothing more than to lie there himself, and who cared where his thumb went? With a sigh, he hauled himself to his feet. “Come on, you miserable lugs. You can rest once you’ve got foxholes to rest in.”
They groaned. Some of them didn’t even have hard hands yet; their palms blistered and bled when they used shovels or entrenching tools. But they’d seen dead men—both bloodied and astonished after meeting death unexpectedly and bloated and stinking from lying in the fields four or five days unburied. They didn’t want anyone else seeing them like that: worse than getting caught naked. They weren’t eager, but they dug.
So did Luc. He already had a scrape of sorts. He improved it as fast as he could. There seemed to be a lull now, but how long would it last? Another twenty minutes? Another twenty seconds? No time at all?
“Don’t throw the dirt every which way!” he said in something not far from horror. “Sweet suffering Jesus, pile it in front of you! Don’t they teach you anything in basic these days?”
“They teach us how to march and how to shoot,” one of the new fish said. He had bloody hands and a pale, unweathered face. “From what they tell us, there isn’t anything else—or if there is, we can pick it up at the front.”
“They’re sending you out to get slaughtered. They ought to see the Boches face-to-face themselves. That’d teach them something—the ones who come back from it,” Luc said savagely.
Sure as hell, the shooting picked up before the soldiers finished their foxholes. They might be raw, but they weren’t complete idiots. They knew enough to jump into the holes and keep on digging while inside them. Luc didn’t think anybody got hit. He thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing.
He also thanked that God Who might or might not be there for sending nothing worse than small-arms fire his way. German machine guns fired faster than their French counterparts. Sergeant Demange said the same thing had been true the last time around, though both sides used different models now. Why couldn’t the French have caught up with their longtime foes, especially since the Germans hadn’t been allowed to mess with machine guns till they started laughing at the Treaty of Versailles?
Luc knew the answer to that. France hadn’t wanted to believe another war would come. The Germans, by contrast, embraced battle the way a man embraced his girl…although fire from the flank could send them running, too. But they had the better tools with which to do their job.
“Is that a tank?” one of the rookies asked fearfully.
“No, my dear,” Luc said after listening for a moment. “That’s a truck—one of our trucks, by God. Maybe we’ve got reinforcements moving in. We could sure use some—I’ll tell you that.
He almost shot one of the newcomers before he recognized the khaki greatcoat and the crested Adrian helmet. The French uniform had been modernized after 1918. It still looked old-fashioned next to what the Germans wore. The Boches seemed…streamlined, almost like oncoming diesel locomotives.
“Where are they?” shouted a corporal who sounded a hell of a lot like Sergeant Demange.
Demange himself gave an answer that was almost useful: “Look in the direction the bullets are coming from, mon vieux. You’ll find the Germans, I promise.”
“Funny,” the corporal said. “You see? I laugh.” And, having laughed a laugh that could have come straight off the cow on the label of a popular brand of cheese, he sent several shots toward the Boches.
A loop of the Marne—whose course was complicated in these parts—curled up toward the French position from the south. The enemy would have to cross the river twice to get in behind Luc and his comrades. As he’d seen to his sorrow, they were good at such things, but he could hope they would think two crossings were too much trouble here.
He popped up out of his hole to fire at an oncoming gray shape in a coal-scuttle helmet. The shape went down. Luc ducked before he could decide whether he’d hit it or not. Thinking of it as a shape, a target, meant not thinking of it as a human being he might just have killed. If he didn’t think of it as a human being, he didn’t have to think so much about what he was doing in this damned foxhole.
And ducking in a hurry meant that none of the other shapes in field-gray had the chance to draw a bead on a khaki shape and wonder whether he’d hit it. Luc didn’t want some nice German young man to have him on his conscience.
The Nazis must also have decided that fording the Marne twice was more trouble than it was worth. But that didn’t mean they stopped coming. If they couldn’t go around the French here, they seemed determined to plow through them.
Sergeant Demange screamed for his men to hold fast till he realized they would all get killed or captured if they tried. One reason he made a good company commander was his aversion to dying. Luc shared the feeling. He wondered whether that would do him any good.
After fighting for a while in some woods, the French fell back into one of the riverside villages. Luc didn’t know which one it was. There were lots of them, each Something-sur-Marne. The soldiers had fun with that, calling them things like Ammo-Dump-sur-Marne and Blowjob-sur-Marne. A blowjob on the Marne would have been a hell of a lot more fun than what Luc was going through.
Most of the locals had long since bugged out. Luc would have, were he still a civilian. Nobody was paying those poor slobs to get shot at, and they didn’t have the weapons to shoot back.
But a few stubborn souls always stuck around. He wished one of them would have been a teenage girl with legs up to there, but no such luck. Most were grizzled men who’d done their bit the last time around and weren’t about to let a little gunfire drive them away from their stone houses and shops and farms. They were plenty tough. Their wives were even scarier, at least to Luc.
Several locals had varmint guns. They were ready to turn them against the Boches. “Big rats, but still gray,” one of them said with a raspy chuckle.
Sergeant Demange didn’t want them. “Dumb assholes won’t take orders,” he muttered to Luc. He was a little more polite to the embattled villagers and peasants, but only a little: “Let us do the job. You know what happens if the Germans catch a franc-tireur? The guy gets it, and then they shoot a bunch of hostages to remind everybody else to play by the rules.”
“They shot my cousin like that in 1914,” said another rifle-toting villager.
“Don’t you think you paid ‘em back after that?” Demange asked with surprising gentleness. The local had two fingers missing from his left hand and walked with a limp.
“Not enough,” he said. “Never enough.”
Demange could have argued with him. Instead, at his unobtrusive gesture, three soldiers sidl
ed up to the man and forcibly disarmed him. The other locals muttered, which bothered the sergeant not a bit. “I told you—let us do the job,” Demange said.
They might have squawked some more, but incoming artillery made everybody scramble for cover. A house that took a direct hit fell in on itself. A woman swore horribly. As soon as Luc saw that the house wouldn’t catch fire, he ran for the ruins. You couldn’t ask for better cover—and maybe, like lightning, 105s wouldn’t strike the same place twice.
Here came the Germans. They must have had some new guys among them. Seeing a village that had just got shelled, they figured nobody would be waiting for them in there. One of them got close enough for Luc to see how surprised—and offended—he looked when he got shot. It was almost funny, although no doubt not to the poor Boche. Well, too bad for him.
His buddies, the ones who hadn’t caught packets themselves, hit the dirt and started moving up the way they’d learned in training. Luc wished for a battery of 75s to tear them to pieces. Wishing didn’t produce any French guns. Small-arms fire, then.
But damned if a couple of French tanks didn’t show up a few minutes later. They were Renaults left over from the last war, without much armor and without much speed. Still, each one had a cannon and a machine gun, and there didn’t seem to be any German armor around. The Boches didn’t like getting shot up while unable to reply any better than anyone else would have. Luc would have bugged out, and so did the Germans.
“I’ll be fucked,” Sergeant Demange said. “Wasn’t sure we’d get away with it this time. Well, I’d rather be lucky than good.”
He was good, which meant he could afford to talk like that. But luck counted, too. If a shell came down on your hole, how good you were didn’t matter. Luc shivered inside his own foxhole. He was still here. Maybe it was only fool luck, but he’d take it any which way.
SPRING SEEMED TO BE COMING early to eastern Poland and western Byelorussia. As far as Sergei Yaroslavsky was concerned, that was a mixed blessing. The warmer, clearer weather meant he could fly more often against the Poles and Germans. But it also meant the thaw would start pretty soon. And when it did, all the dirt airstrips in this part of the world would turn to mud. Nobody would do much flying till the ground dried out and hardened up again.
Rasputitsa. The mud time. Russian had a word for it. It came in both fall and spring; in fall because of rain, in spring from melting snow. The spring rasputitsa was worse, and lasted longer. Not just airplanes would be grounded. Armies would slow to a crawl, if they moved at all.
Sergei didn’t think the Soviet generals had intended to keep on fighting the Poles till the rasputitsa came. He didn’t think they’d intended to draw the Nazis in on the Poles’ side, either.
He did keep what he thought to himself. If he said something like that out loud, he’d end up in a place where the spring thaw started in June…if it ever did. The USSR had plenty of places like that, and plenty of people had found out more about them than they ever wanted to know.
He had the feeling he wasn’t the only one in his squadron thinking thoughts the NKVD wouldn’t like. Meals became oddly constrained. Men seemed to be chewing on more than sausage and black bread, swallowing more than tea and vodka. You couldn’t ask another pilot or navigator what was on his mind. If he told you, he proved himself a fool with a death wish. He was much more likely to say something innocuous and peg you for an informer. Sergei knew he didn’t trust a couple of his fellow pilots. You had to watch out. If the enemy didn’t get you, your own side would.
His bombardier had a simple solution. “Fuck ‘em all,” Ivan Kuchkov declared. “Fuck their mothers. Fuck their grannies, too, the filthy old cunts.” To him, that wasn’t mat. It was the way he talked. Maybe he didn’t know where ordinary Russian stopped and mat started. Maybe he just didn’t care.
“Some of these people you have to be careful around,” Sergei said…carefully.
“I suppose,” Kuchkov said with a noncom’s sigh about the foibles of his superiors. “The guys who think they have big dicks are the guys who’re big pricks, all right.”
“Right.” Yaroslavsky wondered why he bothered. He stood a better chance of talking a thunderstorm into changing its ways than he did of persuading Ivan.
But not even the NKVD could send a thunderstorm to a camp in Siberia. Ivan Kuchkov wasn’t so lucky. The blocky bombardier amazed Sergei by winking at him. “Don’t get your tit in a wringer, Captain,” he said. “They never come after the likes of me. I’m not worth bothering with.”
“How many other people have thought the same thing?” Sergei said. “How many of them turned out to be wrong?”
“Poor sorry fuckers,” Kuchkov said. Sergei started to nod, then caught himself. He’d already said more to Ivan than to any of his fellow officers, even Anastas Mouradian. If Ivan was a fellow with a pipeline to the NKVD, he’d said more than enough to hang himself.
He eyed the bombardier’s broad, rather stupid face. Ivan Kuchkov was a Russian peasant of purest ray serene. Surely he didn’t have the brains to inform on anybody…did he?
You never could tell. That was the first rule. There was that iron-jawed commissar who looked even more like a village pig butcher than Kuchkov did. What was his name? Khrushchev, that was it. Yes, he sure seemed the type who’d take off his shoe and pound it on the bar if he got into an argument. And if that didn’t work, he’d pound it on your head.
But, regardless of what he looked like, he was nobody’s fool. He’d lived through the purges, after all, when so many hadn’t. So maybe dear Ivan wasn’t as dumb as he let on, either.
Their SB-2 got off the ground to fly a mission against a Luftwaffe airstrip in eastern Poland. As Sergei guided the bomber into formation with the others, he wondered when the rasputitsa would close down operations. Muck had flown from the Tupolev’s tires as it roared down the strip, but it got airborne. Make the mud a little thicker, a little gooier, and it wouldn’t.
One way to deal with the problem would have been to pave runways. That never crossed Yaroslavsky’s mind. Soviet authorities didn’t pave highways between towns, not least because invaders could have used paved roads, too. But if the highways weren’t paved, airstrips weren’t likely to be, either.
“Here’s hoping we give the Nazis a nice surprise,” Anastas Mouradian said.
“That would be good,” Sergei agreed.
“Better than good,” his copilot said. “If we don’t surprise them, they’re liable to surprise us, and getting surprised by a bunch of Germans doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”
“Er—right.” Sergei gave the Armenian a funny look. Did Mouradian talk that way because he was making a joke or because his Russian was slipping? Maybe it was both together; Anastas did like to make jokes, but they didn’t always come out the way he wanted.
Maybe that was why Stalin and Beria and Mikoyan and the other formidable fellows from the Caucasus cut such a swath through Soviet politics—the Russians who were trying to deal with them couldn’t figure out what the devil they were talking about till too late. Yaroslavsky didn’t say that to Anastas. One more time—you never could tell. If the Armenian took it wrong, it might end up as a one-way ticket to a labor camp.
And then Sergei forgot about it. Me-109s tore into the Soviet bombers. The plane just in front of his spun down toward the dappled ground trailing flame from its left engine. Another SB-2, fortunately farther away, blew up in midair. That felt worse than a near miss from an antiaircraft shell; Sergei’s bomber staggered as if bouncing off a wall.
One of the rear machine guns chattered. Kuchkov’s voice came through the voice tube: “These pricks are all over everywhere like crabs on cunt hair! Do something about it, for Christ’s sake!”
Off to Sergei’s left, a Soviet bomber dropped its load over nothing in particular, broke formation, and scooted for Byelorussia. That looked like cowardice. Another SB-2 went down, and then another. However the Fascists had found out about this attack, they were all over it
. What had seemed cowardice a moment before began to look more and more like good sense.
Sergei fired the forward machine gun at a 109. Tracers didn’t come close. The German fighter flipped away with almost contemptuous ease. During the Spanish Civil War, the SB-2 outran and outclimbed Nationalist fighters. Everybody said so. But those German and Italian biplanes must have been mighty clumsy. As Yaroslavsky had first seen in Czechoslovakia, the bomber was no match for a Messerschmitt.
One more SB-2 tumbled in flames. That was enough—no, too much—for Sergei. “Dump the bombs, Ivan!” he yelled into the speaking tube. “We’re heading for home!”
“Now you’re talking, boss!” Kuchkov said. Grating metallic noises said he was opening the bay and pulling release levers as fast as he could. Half a dozen 220kg bombs whistled toward the ground. “They’re bound to come down on some mother’s head,” Kuchkov called cheerfully.
He wasn’t even wrong; Sergei could console himself with that thought. He hauled the SB-2 around and roared east at full throttle. Maybe it could outrun an Italian Fiat. Next to a 109, he might have been piloting a garbage scow. The airspeed indicator said he was making better than 400 kilometers an hour. All the same, he felt nailed in place in the sky. When a Messerschmitt could get up over 550, how could anybody blame him, either?
Kuchkov’s ventral machine gun barked again. The bombardier let out a shout of triumph—or was it surprise? “Nailed the fucker!” he roared.
“Damned if he didn’t.” Anastas Mouradian certainly sounded surprised. As bomb-aimer, he had a better view below than Sergei did. “The pilot managed to get out and hit the silk.”
“Too bad. Only means he’ll be flying against us again before too long,” Sergei said. He tried to look every which way at once, including in his rearview mirror. German fighters were bad enough when you knew they were around. If they took you by surprise, you were dead. It was about that simple.
He flew over the Poles and Russians. Soldiers from both sides fired at the SB-2. That always happened. They weren’t likely to hit anything.
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