And maybe the High Command knew what it was doing, and maybe it had its head up it ass. One reason you fought wars was to find out things like that.
Willi washed out his mess tin and stowed it on his belt. He put on his helmet and picked up his Mauser. The rifle was just over four kilos; it only seemed to weigh a tonne. He couldn’t even sling it. He had to carry it instead—the French were too damned close.
As if to remind him of that, a Hotchkiss machine gun stuttered awake. The malign rattle made his asshole pucker. Somewhere up ahead lay Laon, which the Germans had been bombing and shelling for days. How many French soldiers still crouched in the ruins with rifles and machine guns and grenades—waiting?
“Come on,” Lieutenant Krantz said. “We’ve got to move up, and that damned gun is in the way.”
Well, I’m awake now, Willi thought as he heaved himself to his feet. Raw terror burned away exhaustion. And anybody who had to stalk a well-sited machine gun—and this one would be, because the Frenchies knew how to play the game, too—made an intimate acquaintance with terror.
Farms in these parts were small. Stone fences separated one from another. Poilus lurked behind the fences. Every so often, one of them would pop up and shoot. Or a mortar team would lob a couple of bombs from God knew where. Willi hated mortars. You couldn’t hear the rounds coming till they got right on top of you, which was just exactly too late.
“There!” Wolfgang pointed. The machine gun was firing from a stone farmhouse’s window narrowed to a slit with more building stones. Willi swore under his breath. This one would be a bitch and a half to get rid of. The position was shielded against anything this side of an antitank gun.
Or maybe it wasn’t. Lieutenant Krantz spoke into the radio set a lance-corporal got to lug. Fifteen minutes later, a fellow with a couple of tanks on his back and a sinister-looking nozzle in his hand came forward. Everyone shied away from him. He didn’t seem to care, or maybe he was used to the response by now.
“Keep them busy, all right?” he said. The German soldiers nodded. You wanted a flamethrower man on your side to succeed, but you felt faintly guilty when he did. Nobody mourned a flamethrower man who got roasted by his own hellish device, either. And Willi had never heard of anyone who managed to surrender with that apparatus on his back.
But that wasn’t his worry, except at one remove. He raised up from behind a boulder and took a shot at the machine gun’s firing slit. He ducked back down as soon as he’d pulled the trigger—and a good thing, too, because the Hotchkiss promptly spat lead his way. The froggies in the farmhouse were mighty alert. Willi hoped the miserable bastard with the flamethrower had his life insurance paid up.
One of his buddies groaned. Somebody else yelled for a medic. If you poked a bear in its den, you were liable to get clawed. The last thing Willi wanted was to rise up again and shoot at the slit. He did it anyway, which proved what a strong thing Wehrmacht training was—and, even more, how powerful was his fear of looking bad in front of his squadmates. Without that fundamental fear, nobody could have fought a war.
When he rose up one more time, the muzzle of the Hotchkiss was pointing straight at him. Before the Frenchies could shoot him, though, the flamethrower man used his toy. Foomp! Even across several hundred meters, Willi heard the man-made dragon’s noise. Fire engulfed the machine gun and the firing slit—and whoever had the bad luck to be right behind them.
German soldiers whooped. Even so, nobody seemed especially eager to show himself. Maybe more Frenchmen had dragged their charred friends away from the trigger and were waiting to give optimists or fools—assuming there was a difference—a nasty surprise.
The flamethrower man solved that problem. He crawled right up to the farmhouse, stuck his nozzle into the firing slit, and…Foomp! He cocked his head to one side, as if listening. Then he waved. No more trouble here, the gesture said.
Willi still wasn’t enthusiastic about standing up, but he did. The soldiers trotted forward as smoke rose from the farmhouse. The breeze came out of the west, as it commonly did. Willi’s nose wrinkled. Along with woodsmoke, he caught the reek of burnt meat. The flamethrower had done its job, all right.
Even so, nobody wanted much to do with the fellow who carried it. He stood there, a little more smoke trailing from the snout of his infernal machine. Again, he didn’t seem particularly surprised or disappointed. Well, why would he? How many times had he seen this same response by now?
Lieutenant Krantz pointed toward Laon. His officer’s whistle squealed. “Come on!” he yelled. “Not far now! Follow me!”
An officer who said that made his troops want to do it. All the same, the infantrymen hesitated. That rattling clatter out of the east, getting louder now…“Panzers!” Willi said in delight. “Our panzers!” He hadn’t seen many of them.
These two little Panzer Is were no more than mobile machine-gun nests. Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot, though. Both panzer commanders stood up in their turrets. They waved to the foot soldiers, who returned the compliment. “Come with us,” one of the men in black coveralls shouted over engine noise. “Keep the French pigdogs away.”
“And you keep them away from us,” Lieutenant Krantz said. The panzer commander who’d spoken before nodded. Everybody needed help now and then.
Willi loped along to the left of the panzers. A French machine gun fired at them, which was stupid. Its bullets couldn’t hurt them. One of the panzers crushed the sandbagged position, turning back and forth and round and round on top of it to make sure nothing in there survived.
Then a rifle of a sort Willi hadn’t heard before went off—a big boom that would have set anyone’s teeth on edge. What followed wasn’t the ping of a ricochet, either. That round punched clear on through the baby panzer’s thin frontal armor. The machine kept going in a straight line till it rammed a big oak and stopped. Driver’s hit, Willi realized. German had antitank rifles, too, but you didn’t expect to run up against one right after you’d finally picked up some armor.
War wasn’t what you expected. It was what you got. What the surviving panzer got was out of there. Its crew knew that antitank rifle could do for them, too. And it did. Two rounds into the engine compartment turned the panzer into an immobile machine-gun nest. “We go on regardless,” Lieutenant Krantz declared. Willi was still willing to advance. Able? He’d just have to see.
Vaclav Jezek sprawled behind a chunk of chimney that a shell hit had detached from a nearby house. He chambered another round in his antitank rifle and waited. The crew of that disabled Panzer I wouldn’t stay inside long. A hit from any kind of artillery would mangle them and torch them at the same time. A couple of more hits from the antitank rifle might set the tank on fire.
Sure enough, the commander clambered out of the turret. The Czech was ready. Despite a muzzle brake and a padded stock, the antitank rifle slammed his shoulder when he pulled the trigger. He’d already seen that, although these 13mm armor-piercing rounds weren’t designed to kill mere human beings, they did one hell of a job. The German in black coveralls never knew what hit him. He tumbled off the tank and lay still.
The driver was sneakier, or maybe smarter. He scuttled out and kept the tank’s carcass between him and Jezek till he bolted for some trees. Jezek shot at him, too, but missed. “Shit!” he said in disgust.
Sergeant Halévy had dug himself a foxhole a few meters away, and fronted it with bricks and stones from the ruined house. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar,” he said. “You did what you were supposed to do. Neither one of those tanks’ll bother us any more.”
“Fuck it,” Vaclav said. “I should have finished the other cocksucker, too.”
“You can’t kill all of them by yourself,” the Jew said. “Remember, you’ve got to leave some for me.”
“Heh,” Jezek said. Before the shooting started, he’d had doubts about how well Jews would fight. Yeah, Hitler was giving them a hard time, but they were still Jews, weren’t they? Once they had rifles in their h
ands, they seemed to do just fine.
“You’d better dig in,” Halévy said. “If the tanks couldn’t do for us, they’ll see how the artillery works.”
Without raising his head, Vaclav pulled the entrenching tool off his belt and started scraping out a foxhole of his own. Halévy knew how the Germans operated, all right. Even now, some junior officer with a radio or a field telephone was probably talking to his regimental HQ, telling the gunners at which map square the trouble lay. Fifteen minutes of 105 fire ought to soften things up, he’d say.
And he’d get that artillery fire, too. The Germans were mighty damn slick about such things. Vaclav had seen as much in Czechoslovakia and here in France. They wouldn’t have been half so dangerous if they weren’t so blasted good at what they did.
He wondered how good the defenders were. Czechs, Frenchmen, Belgians driven back from their own country, Englishmen, Negro troops from some colony or other…Whatever the French marshals didn’t urgently need somewhere else seemed to be jammed into a military sausage around Laon. Now if the casing didn’t split and spill soldiers all over everywhere…
Sure as hell, here came the guns. Huddling in his scrape, Vaclav wished it were twice as deep, or even four times. He hated artillery more than anything else. German infantry made a fair fight. You could even face panzers. His monster rifle helped even the odds. But what could you do with artillerymen? Hope your own side’s guns slaughtered them—that was all. It didn’t seem enough.
Most of the shells were long—not very long, but Jezek took whatever he could get. If the troops a little farther back had hell coming down on their heads, he didn’t. He could think of plenty of times when the Nazis’ artillery had been right on target.
As soon as the shelling stopped, he came up out of his trench ready to fight. The Germans counted on stunning their opponents, at least for a little while. He kept an eye on the tank whose driver he’d shot, the one that had slammed into the oak. If the Germans could get the other driver into the machine, it might come back to life. He wouldn’t have wanted to sit down on a seat soaked with his predecessor’s blood, but war made you do all kinds of things you didn’t want to.
“We can do it!” Sergeant Halévy shouted in Czech. Then he said what was probably the same thing in French. In Czech, he went on, “They’ve got to be at the end of their tether. If we stop them, they’re really stopped.”
How could he know that? Nobody in the middle of a battle knew a damn thing. It sure sounded good, though.
The Germans came forward. Vaclav had known they would. They were bastards, but they were brave bastards. And they exposed themselves as little as they could, which made them smart bastards.
No new panzers rolled up, for which he thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing. He wasn’t thrilled about using the antitank rifle as an oversized sniper’s piece—the fight with the French quartermaster sergeant lingered painfully in his memory—but he wasn’t thrilled about getting killed in his hole, either.
He could, literally, have killed elephants with this rifle. Knocking over a few Nazis while they were still a long way off would make the rest go to ground and not move forward so fast. It would also make him wish some quartermaster sergeant could issue him a new shoulder, but that was one more thing he’d worry about later.
It worked out just the way he’d hoped. That stood out, because it happened so rarely in this war. He hit two Germans with four shots, which slowed the rest of them down to an amazing degree. Then, of course, the antitank rifle’s loud roar and big blast of fire from every round drew the enemy’s concentrated attention. Ordinary Mausers weren’t especially accurate out close to a kilometer off, but they made him keep down. And he could have done without the machine gun probing for him.
He really could have done without the mortar bombs that started raining down on the Allied front. They did their best to make up for the artillery’s poor performance. If one of them landed in your hole, you were dead, because you couldn’t do anything about it.
But then, for a wonder, Allied—probably French—mortars closer to Laon opened up on the Germans. So did a couple of batteries of 75s that had stayed quiet and hidden up till now. Those 75s were weapons from the last war, and outclassed these days—which didn’t mean they couldn’t kill you if they got the chance.
The German mortars quit firing, quite suddenly. Thus encouraged, Vaclav stuck his head up—and plugged a soldier in field-gray who’d made the mistake of coming out from behind the dead cow he’d been using for cover. Jezek ducked down again right away. A good thing, too, because nothing had taken out that German machine gun. It sent a long, angry burst after him.
“Fuck me!” Sergeant Halévy called from his nearby hole. “Maybe we really will stop these assholes.” He hadn’t believed it before, then. Well, who could blame him? Vaclav hadn’t believed it, either. He still wasn’t sure he did.
More French troops came up to join the ragtag and bobtail on the front line. They wore khaki instead of the last war’s horizon blue, but their uniforms still looked old-fashioned next to those the enemy wore. Still and all, Jezek wasn’t inclined to fuss. Old-fashioned or not, they were here and they were shooting at the Germans. What more could you want?
And the Germans themselves weren’t what they had been when the war broke out. They remained consummate professionals, and he’d remembered a moment before how brave they were. But they were also flesh and blood. They were every bit as worn out and ragged as the Allied troops they faced. It was like the later rounds of a championship prize fight. Both sides were bloodied, both half out on their feet, but they kept slugging away. The prize here was even sweeter than money. This fight was for power.
Damned if one of the German mortars didn’t start up again. Several of the Frenchmen who’d just come up screamed like damned souls. The butcher’s bill rose again. Thus encouraged, the men in field-gray put in another attack.
Vaclav blew the head right off one of them with the antitank rifle. And those Frenchmen had brought along several machine guns. The German weapon might be better, but the Hotchkiss sufficed for all ordinary purposes of slaughter. No infantry, no matter how good, could advance in the face of fire like that. Sullenly, taking as many of their wounded with them as they could, the Germans drew back.
When Vaclav reached for another clip, he discovered he’d run dry. Well, he had a pistol, and at least one of those Frenchmen didn’t need his rifle any more. Any which way, it didn’t look as if the Wehrmacht could break into Laon.
ALISTAIR WALSH GAVE THE JUNIOR LIEUTENANT who brought the order a hard look. He wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard it, or at least hadn’t understood it. “We’re going to do what…sir?” he said.
Normally, that tone from a staff sergeant old enough to be his father would have wilted a subaltern. But this youngster, just up to the front from somewhere to let him keep his uniform clean and even pressed, was strengthened by the Holy Writ from Headquarters. “We’re going to counterattack,” he repeated brightly. “Can’t very well let the Boches have their own way all the time, eh?”
“Counterattack with what?” Walsh demanded. “Christ on His cross, it’s everything we can do”—and a little more besides, he added silently—“to hang on where we are.”
“Forces to be committed include—” The subaltern rattled off several regiments, British and French. “Those should be plenty to shift the Germans hereabouts, don’t you think?”
“Well, they would be,” Walsh said.
He finally got a frown from the young officer. “What do you mean? Aren’t they in this vicinity? This is where they are reported to be.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Walsh muttered. He did his best to explain the facts of life: “Well, sir, pieces of them are, you might say. What’s left of them after the Boches spent these past weeks banging on them with hammers and rocks.”
“What is your estimate of their relative combat effectiveness?” the subaltern asked.
“Sir, I�
�m just a sergeant,” Walsh said. A staff sergeant who’d served in the last war wasn’t just a sergeant. Walsh wondered whether the second lieutenant understood that. About even money, he guessed. With a mental sigh, he went on, “The only reason we haven’t come to pieces, near as I can see, is that the Germans have it about as bad as we do.” He had much more sympathy for the Fritzes in the front line—poor bloody infantry just like him—than he did for the starched, gormless creature standing before him now. No matter what you thought, a single pip on each shoulder strap didn’t turn you into God’s anointed.
“I…see,” the subaltern said slowly. Maybe he did have some notion of Walsh’s station after all. Or maybe not: “I am here to deliver these orders, not to adjust them. The attack will go in. Is that clear?”
“Sir, it’s bleeding madness,” Walsh said. The lieutenant only waited. Walsh sighed and swore. God’s anointed or not, those pips meant the youngster could break him like a rotten stick…after which the attack would go in anyway. Sure as hell, sometimes the real enemy wore the same uniform as you. A precise salute. “Yes, sir. I’ll tell the men”: an equally precise reproach.
The subaltern’s cheeks reddened, as if he’d been slapped. He felt that, all right. “I should be honored to go forward with you,” he said.
“Never mind, sir,” Walsh said wearily. “It’s not your fault. It’s just war.”
When Bill got the word, he grimaced and shrugged. “Well, we’re fucked now.” In his broad northern accent, it came out fooked, which only added to the point.
“It’s bloody murder, is what it is,” Nigel said. “I thought Field Marshal Haig did his worst in the last war.” He had an education, all right—he hadn’t been born when Haig was doing his worst.
Walsh, who’d lost a slightly older cousin in the mud at Passchendaele, was inclined to agree. What could he do, though? Not a damned thing except go forward as long as the German guns let him. “No help for it,” he said. “Maybe the Germans really are on the ropes.”
Hitler's War Page 47
