Two Fronts (45 page)

Hans-Ulrich didn’t have any friends like that. Most of the time, he didn’t miss them. He was proud of being a white crow. Now, though, he really wanted to find out what his
Kameraden
thought.

He knew how he’d eventually learn, of course. Sergeant Dieselhorst would tell him. The other
Luftwaffe
men trusted the sergeant. And Dieselhorst trusted Rudel. You had better trust the man with whom you flew. If you didn’t, you’d both end up dead.

That didn’t necessarily make you friends, though. Hans-Ulrich knew the noncom thought he was a prig, and still wet behind the ears. He was stubbornly proud of his priggishness. In spite of being young—no, because of being young—he would have denied the other if Dieselhorst threw it in his face. Dieselhorst didn’t; he had other things on his mind.

“It’s stupid, you know,” he said without preamble. “It’s especially stupid if you’re stuck on the ground like a rat and you can’t go and fly away when you get in trouble. Sometimes the only choices you have are falling back and getting killed right where you are.”

“It’s a problem,” Hans-Ulrich admitted.

“It’s not a problem. It’s goddamn dumb, sir.” Sergeant Dieselhorst had the air of a man clinging to patience as if it were a cork life ring in the Atlantic. “The enemy will kill you if you hold your ground. Your own side will kill you if you retreat. What does that leave you?”

Victory!
was the word that leaped into Hans-Ulrich’s mouth. It didn’t leap out again, and into the cool spring air alongside the landing strip. He was much too sure Sergeant Dieselhorst would laugh at him if he came out with it. Instead, cautiously, he answered, “Not much.”

“Oh, yes, it does—on this front, anyhow,” Dieselhorst said. “I wouldn’t give up to the Russians for all the tea in China. Chances are they’d kill me for the fun of it, you know? And they’d have more fun before they let me die. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“Oh, you’re right about that.” Rudel had always figured he’d stick his pistol in his mouth if he looked like getting caught by the Ivans.

Dieselhorst’s grunt was oddly warming; it said something like
Well, you know a little bit, anyhow
. But he went on, “Here, though … You surrender to the Tommies or even the French, you’ve got a chance to see the end of the play. They may shoot you—that kind of shit just happens—but they won’t torture you. And if they’ll kill you for sure if you keep fighting but only maybe if you give up, what are you supposed to do?”

Surrender was treason to the
Vaterland
. Hitler’s decree left no doubts on that score. But Hans-Ulrich wanted to come back from the war alive, too. He didn’t say anything at all. Albert Dieselhorst grunted again, and the pilot felt as if he’d passed some obscure test.

FRENCH 75S AND 105S
boomed behind Aristide Demange. He sneered at the popguns, as he sneered at so much in life. He wished they were all 105s, as most of the Germans’ cannon were. Then they could give the
Boches
just as much hell as they’d had inflicted on them in this war. But no. Too much to hope for. The enormous stocks of 75s left over from 1918 would soldier on till the Nazis blew up the last of them—and the last of the artillerists who served them, too.

Shells from the guns of both calibers burst somewhere on the German side of the line. Smoke and dirt rose into the air. The show looked impressive. Demange knew too well that it looked more impressive than it was. The 75s fired with a flat trajectory. That gave them good range for a piece of their caliber. But, unless they caught you out in the open, they probably wouldn’t hurt you. Their shells couldn’t drop down into trenches and holes the way rounds fired from howitzers could. Along with their bigger ammo, that was what made howitzers so dangerous.

“Are we going to advance now?” François asked Demange. Was he still eager in spite of having watched his friends get gunned down in the last brilliant assault? If so, then he really was a few pins short of a cushion, or more than a few.

“Wait a bit,” Demange said. “Unless you feel like killing yourself now, I mean. In that case, be my guest.” He waved invitingly toward the barbed wire ahead. However inviting the wave was, though, no motion showed above the parapet in front of the hole where they crouched. He didn’t know a German sniper was peering this way through a scope, but he didn’t know one wasn’t, either.

François, whether dumb as rocks or with altogether too much in his trousers, looked at him as if he’d started speaking Albanian or something. “Don’t you want to beat the
Boches
?”

“Sure I do,” Demange answered. “I want to live through beating them, too. I want to gloat about it. I want to make them die for their fucking country. I don’t give a fart about dying for mine.”

“But—” François started. Demange wondered if he would come out with that
Dulce et decorum est
bullshit. It had been outdated centuries before the last war, but some provincials never got the news.

Before François got the chance to make an outdated jackass of himself, the Germans woke up and started shooting back. They never needed long. Their guns went after the French cannon that had annoyed them, and they started dropping mortar bombs near the trenches to discourage French foot soldiers like François from getting frisky.

“Down!” Demange yelled. He was already doing it. So were the
poilus
who’d been in the front lines for a while. The new fish took longer, the way they always did. They didn’t realize they were in trouble till they got hurt. That, of course, was just exactly too late.

Demange hated mortars even more than he hated a lot of other things. You couldn’t hear the bombs leaving the tubes. You mostly couldn’t hear them till they whistled down. Then you had to hope—you had to pray, if you happened to be a praying man, which he wasn’t—they didn’t whistle down right on top of you.

The shrieks that rose from the French positions all seemed to come from at least a hundred meters away. Fragments snarled through the air over Demange’s head. Dirt and perhaps some of those fragments pattered off his helmet.

He glanced over toward François. “Still got that hard-on to charge the
Boches
?”

“Maybe not so much, Lieutenant,” the new kid allowed.

“Well, then, maybe—just maybe, and I wouldn’t bet more than a sou on it—you aren’t as stupid as you look,” Demange said. François had started to smile at him. The expression congealed on his face like cooling fat.

Sometimes, of course, the
cons
with the white mustaches and the gold and silver leaves on their kepis were stupider than even a guy fresh out of basic ever dreamt of being. Or rather, those
cons
had the chance to be stupid on a scale a raw private couldn’t begin to imagine. When François wanted to advance against the Germans, a word from Demange sufficed to quash him. When the fools with the fancy hats ordered an army corps to advance, nobody could quash them … except the bastards in
Feldgrau
, of course.

The Germans had some new toys that the
cons
in the expensive kepis didn’t seem to know about. By now, even jerks like François knew the Tiger tank by name and had acquired a healthy respect—make that fear—for it. The generals ordered French armor forward as if the Tiger were no more than a gleam in some Nazi engineer’s eye. French tank-men, however, like the frogs in the saying, died in earnest. When they came up against Tigers, they—and their machines—also died in large numbers.

And the Germans pulled a new machine gun out from under their coal-scuttle helmets. Demange didn’t know what French generals thought of the German MG-34. He hated it himself. It fired much faster than any French machine gun, spraying murder out for a thousand meters from wherever it happened to lurk. And it could lurk anywhere. It was aircooled and light, and could be fired from a tripod, a bipod, or even, in an emergency, from the hip.

Prisoners said the new Nazi machine gun was called the MG-42. Demange supposed that stood for the year in which it went into production, the year now vanished with all the others that had gone before. Whatever the name stood for, the gun stood for trouble.

It made the MG-34 seem retarded, which Demange wouldn’t have believed possible till he saw—and heard—it for himself. Once you heard an MG-42 in action, you’d never mistake it for anything else. It fired so fast, shots blurred together into a continuous sheet of noise.

Naturally, firing that fast heated the barrel red-hot in short order. The efficient
Boches
issued an asbestos mitt to their machine-gun crews. In a pinch, some cloth would also let you take off the hot barrel so you could replace it with a cool one. The whole business needed only a few seconds. Then you went right back to slaughtering whatever you could see.

With French tanks smashed like dropped eggs, with French infantry falling as if to a harvester of death, the corps’ attack didn’t get far. Demange ordered his company to entrench even before word came down from On High that the generals had decided that they weren’t going to sweep triumphantly into Berlin after all. He took a certain sour pride in suffering fewer casualties than the other companies in the regiment.
Fewer
, unfortunately, didn’t mean
few
; they’d got badly mauled. But they could—he hoped they could—fight back if the Fritzes decided to counterattack.

The Germans would be taking a chance if they did. Demange deliberately placed his new line at the western edge of one of their minefields. If they wanted to hoist themselves on their own petards trying to come to grips with his
poilus
, they were welcome to, as far as he was concerned.

His men would also have trouble advancing from their position, of course. He didn’t worry about that. If Corps HQ wanted him to go forward, they could damn well send some sappers to help clear the way. He didn’t think they’d do that any time soon. Their last rush of blood to the head—or, more likely, to the cock—had proved too expensive.

He couldn’t complain about the zeal with which his men dug in. Dirt flew from their entrenching tools as if their mothers’ sides of the family were all moles. They’d been out in the open a couple of times now, exposed to shellfire and to those horrifying machine guns. The farther away from that they got, the happier they were.

There was François, doing his best to burrow all the way to New Zealand. “So how do you like advancing now, kid?” Demange inquired.

François had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, much the way Demange did (even if it was a Gauloise). It twitched as he answered, “Fuck that shit … sir.”

Demange grunted laughter and thumped him on the back. “There you go. It sounds better than it is, just like everything else. Well, everything except fucking.” François laughed, too. He sounded jaded, like a veteran. Hell, he’d lived through two attacks. He was a veteran now.

Spring rain turned the trenches northwest of Madrid into mudholes. It might not have been as bad as the Russian spring
rasputitsa
, when a winter’s worth of snow melted all at once and turned everything into a quagmire, but it wasn’t fun, either. Instead of warthogs and hippos, Nationalist and Republican soldiers clumped through these mudholes. Neither side’s officers were enthusiastic about ordering attacks in such weather; they would only bog down. The brass relied on machine guns, and on snipers like Vaclav Jezek, to remind their foes the war was still on.

After night fell, Vaclav crawled back to the line from the shell-pocked horror of no-man’s-land. He was filthy from head to foot. He’d wriggled through puddles and muck he couldn’t see to avoid. When he pissed and moaned about it, Benjamin Halévy said, “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. You aren’t a whole lot dirtier than anybody else.”

A shout rang out from the rear: “Chow’s coming!”

Halévy added, “And you’re just in time for supper. Could be worse.”

“I suppose,” Vaclav said dolefully.

Supper did only so much to lift his spirits. The stew was red with paprika and fiery with chilies. The cooks were Spaniards. They liked it that way. Vaclav didn’t. He ate it anyhow. The gravy held turnips and potatoes and God knew what all else. If he was lucky, the meat he spooned up was goat. If he wasn’t so lucky, it was donkey—or possibly Nationalist, though it didn’t seem tough or stringy enough for that.

Whether he liked the chow or not, he emptied his mess tin. Hunger made the best sauce. He was washing out the tin in a galvanized pail when another visitor from behind the lines arrived: “Mail call!”

Vaclav went right on washing the tin. The rest of the Czechs went on with whatever they were doing, too. Who was likely to write to them in the island of exile? The fellow with the waxed-canvas sack called out a few names. He made a hash of them: he was an International, but not a Czech. Then he said, “Jezek! Vaclav Jezek!” He pronounced the sniper’s first name
Vaklav
, not
Vatslav
, but foreigners did that more often than not.

Taken by surprise, Vaclav dropped the mess tin in the mud and had to rinse it again. “I’m here!” he said, first in Czech and then in German, which a non-Czech had a better chance of following.