The War That Came Early: West and East (20 page)

French tanks clanked up under cover of darkness. The people with
fancy kepis were serious about this, anyway. How much that meant … The only way to find out was to see how many
poilus
turned into cat’s-meat and how much ground they took doing it.

Dawn came early these days. Summer would be here soon. Luc hoped he would be here, too, so he could see it when it came. He waited for the balloon to go up, his mouth papery dry. He knew about all the barbed wire ahead. You could get hung up on the stuff, stuck like a fly on flypaper, waiting for machine-gun bullets to chew you up and leave you limp. How many French soldiers had died that way in the last war? How many more were about to?
Am I one of them?
That was the question you never wanted to ask yourself.

Behind him, the French artillery woke up early. 75s, 105s, 155s … They pounded away for all they were worth. The ground shook under his feet. He glanced back over his shoulder. All those muzzle flashes made it look as if the sun were rising in the west.

The Germans were
good
, damn them. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes after hell started coming down on their positions when their artillery started hitting the French forward trenches. Luc huddled there, trying to make himself as small as he could. Before long, he’d have to come out of the trench. He’d feel like an
escargot
without its shell. And the
Boches
had such sharp
escargot
forks!

An officer’s whistle shrilled. The sound seemed small and lost in the middle of the thunderous artillery duel. Sergeant Demange let out a yell that cut through the explosions like a sharp knife through soft cheese: “Come on, you old
cons!
This is what you punched your time cards for!”

Luc would never have volunteered for this—which mattered not a sou’s worth. He scrambled up the dirt steps that led out of the trench. His pack weighed him down, even stripped to the minimum as it was. It seemed heavy as an
escargot
’s shell. But it didn’t give him even that much protection.

As he went forward at a lumbering trot, he called fancy curses down on Denis Boucher’s head. Maybe the little bastard was screwing his half-faithful Marie right now. Maybe the military police had caught him. Even that would be better than this. Anything would be better than this.

Clang-whang!
That factory noise was an antitank round bouncing off
a tank’s armored carapace. If somebody inside the machine wasn’t working his rosary beads, he was wasting a hell of a chance. Yes, the Germans were alert. When weren’t they, damn them?

Clang! Blam! That
factory noise was an antitank round penetrating a tank’s steel hide and all the ammo inside going off at once. The turret blew three meters into the air and squashed a foot soldier when it came down. He didn’t have time to scream. He probably didn’t even have time to be surprised.

Machine guns rattled like malignant jackdaws. “Come on! Keep going!” Sergeant Demange shouted. “They aren’t aimed at you!”

One of the things Luc had found out was that they didn’t have to be aimed at you. They put out so many bullets, they could kill you any which way. But he couldn’t flop down and start digging himself a foxhole, not when he had to mind a squad. He yelled “Keep going!” too. Once they smashed through the German line, things would—well, might—get easier.

Tanks really did mash down barbed wire, no matter how thickly the Germans laid it. And, if you went in right behind them, they shielded you from the fire directly ahead. Watching ricochets spark off the tank in front of him made Luc wonder how many of them would have nailed him if the tank weren’t there. So what if its exhaust made him want to put on his gas mask? He might have been a Roman legionary advancing behind a big, fat shield.

This shield had weapons of its own. It stopped. So did Luc. Its cannon roared—once, twice. One of the machine guns that had been filling the air with death suddenly shut up. Even some of the new conscripts huddled behind the tank with Luc shouted happily. They knew every machine-gun nest that got ruined made them likelier to live.

The tank lurched forward—for about another fifteen meters. Then it hit a mine. That blew off its left track. It stopped. Hatches popped open. The crew jumped out. A tank that couldn’t move was a tank an antitank gun would murder any minute now. The tank men carried only pistols. That made them useless in an infantry fight. Luc didn’t know what they’d do now.

He didn’t have time to worry about it, either. They were coming up on the Germans’ foxholes and trenches. A
Boche
popped up with his hands high.
“Kamerad!”
he shouted hopefully.

Luc gestured with his rifle. The German climbed out of his hole, babbling thanks for not getting killed on the spot. Luc gestured again. The
Boche
stumbled back toward Beauvais. If he was lucky, no Frenchman would plug him before he got there. If he wasn’t … Well, too bad, old man.

“Fuck me if I don’t think we can do this after all!” Sergeant Demange yelled. Luc was starting to think the same thing. He hadn’t seen any German tanks yet, and his own side still had plenty running. He tramped on toward the east.

“LET’S HAVE ONE MORE RADIO CHECK
, Theo,” Heinz Naumann said.

“Right, Sergeant,” Theo Hossbach answered resignedly. The radio set had worked perfectly half an hour earlier. They hadn’t moved since. What could have gone wrong? But Naumann had the prejump jitters. Nothing to do but humor him. Theo hooked in with the company, regimental, and divisional networks. The set still worked fine.
“Alles gut,”
he reported.

“Danke,”
Naumann said. “Won’t be long now.”

Theo didn’t answer. The radioman’s position in a Panzer II left him in a zone of no time and no place. He sat behind the turret and in front of the engine compartment. He couldn’t see out unless he opened the hatch in the rear decking and stuck his head through it to look around. You didn’t want to do that unless all your other choices were worse: cooking like a pork roast inside a burning panzer, for instance. No time and no place would do.

In an odd way, they even suited Theo. Some people who knew him called him self-sufficient. Rather more called him dreamy. All he knew was, most of the time the world within his head was more interesting than anything that went on outside. Being stuck in the bowels of all this complicated ironmongery bothered him much less than it would have troubled most other people.

Sometimes you couldn’t ignore the outside world no matter how hard you tried. When hundreds of guns opened up behind you and thousands of shells crashed down in front of you, the world beyond the panzer’s armored skin made you notice it. And the company commander bawled “Forward!” into his earphones.

“Forward!” Theo told Naumann.

“Forward!” The panzer commander passed the word to Adalbert Stoss.

“Forward!” The driver put the panzer in gear. The Polish plain could hardly have made better panzer country. The terrain was so smooth, they might almost have been rolling across a manicured practice ground. The only difference was, the Red Army wouldn’t have been waiting at the edge of a practice ground.

Theo wondered how big that difference would turn out to be. All winter long, the Red Army had had a devil of a time beating the Poles. The Poles were brave—Theo had seen that in the couple of weeks since the panzer division traveled halfway across Europe. But the gear the Poles had …

He shook his head. Their army might have done all right in the last war. They had rifles and machine guns and field artillery. They also had cavalry regiments that went into battle with lances, as if the twentieth century—to say nothing of the nineteenth—had never happened. Their tanks were rusty French relics, and they didn’t own very many. Panzer IIs could have run rings around them and shot them up with ease, and Theo knew the shortcomings of his own mechanical mount all too well.

Bang!
Somebody might have smacked the panzer turret with a hammer. Or, much more likely, somebody might have taken a shot at Heinz Naumann, who, like any good panzer commander, rode head and shoulders out of the turret whenever he could. Theo didn’t need to see out. Heinz damn well did.

He didn’t need to get killed, though. When people started trying to blow your head off, you ducked back inside and used the vision ports. They didn’t show much, but they were a hell of a lot better than getting shot. And, no sooner than Naumann had pulled himself inside his case-hardened steel cocoon, several more bullets spanged off the turret and the right side of the panzer.

“Halt!” he ordered, and Adi Stoss did. Heinz traversed the turret to the right. Then he stopped working the traversing gear and said “Forward!” again.

“What’s up?” Stoss asked.

“Somebody else took out the foxhole before I could,” Naumann answered.
“Those
Russians won’t bother anybody from now on.”

“Sounds good.” The driver goosed the panzer again. They rattled on. In his mind, Theo pictured a map. Poland had a horn in the far northeast that separated the USSR from Lithuania. It
had
separated Russia from Lithuania, anyhow; with the Red Army in Wilno, the Soviets were going to border the little Baltic state. The Lithuanians were both furious because they wanted Wilno themselves (they called it Vilnius) and scared shitless because the Soviet Union was a thousand times their size. Now that Germany was jumping in with both feet, Lithuania might join the fight against Stalin. And if she did, Germany and Russia might notice.

Then Heinz said “Halt!” again. A moment later, he added, “Russian panzer!” He slewed the turret to the left for all he was worth.

Not being able to see out didn’t usually bother Theo. At times like this, though … How fast was the enemy panzer’s turret traversing? The sweat that dripped from his armpits had nothing to do with how hot it was inside the Panzer II. Fear made it foul and rank. Would a red-hot cannon round tear through the flimsy armor around him and set everything in here on fire? Or would it ricochet around inside and tear up the whole crew? All kinds of nice things to think about, and he couldn’t do anything about any of them.

For that matter, how well could Heinz shoot? They’d all find out right about … 
now
. The turret stopped traversing. Theo could see Naumann’s left hand stab at the trigger on the elevating handwheel. The 20mm cannon barked—once, twice, three times. Heinz waited, then fired once more.

“You got him! He’s burning!” Adi said excitedly.

“
Ja
,” Heinz agreed. The coaxial machine gun’s trigger was on the traverse handwheel, to his right. He squeezed off a couple of short bursts from the MG34, then grunted in satisfaction. “All right—we don’t have to worry about the crew any more. Forward again, Adi.”

“Forward,” Stoss echoed.
“Jawohl!”
He hadn’t sounded so respectful before Heinz killed his first enemy panzer. Theo could understand that. He was breathing easier, too.

Naumann squeezed off several more bursts from the machine gun. He didn’t tell Adi to stop, or even to slow down. “Don’t know if I got the damn Russians or not, but I sure as hell did make ’em duck,” he said.

And that might be good enough. Foot soldiers who couldn’t shoot back might as well not be there. And the German and Polish infantry advancing with and behind the panzers would soon make sure the Ivans weren’t there any more. The Red Army might have seized Poland’s northeastern horn, but it was about to get taken in the flank and cut off from its homeland. How would the Reds like that?

Not very much, Theo suspected. What could they do about it, though? How good were they, really? Before long, the
Wehrmacht
would find out.

A machine-gun burst rattled off the panzer’s flank. Pebbles on a tin roof, the bullets might have been. They might have, but they weren’t.

Huge blasts from somewhere up ahead made all the racket that had gone before them seem small. “Stukas, I hope,” Theo said to Heinz.

“You’d better believe it,” the panzer commander answered. “A whole bunch of Russians just went up in smoke.… Didn’t get the panzers, though, dammit.”

Theo didn’t see how you could expect to wreck a panzer from the air. Only a direct hit would knock one out, and what were the odds of that?

When they stopped for the evening, Heinz said they’d come better than twenty kilometers. Theo believed it, though they might have been going round in circles for all he could prove. One stretch of Polish plain looked like another. That burnt-out Russian panzer hadn’t been anywhere close by, though. Theo examined the hulk curiously.

The more he looked, the more formidable it seemed. It was almost the size of a Panzer III, and had a bigger gun than the III’s 37mm. Instead of going straight up and down, the armor sloped to help deflect enemy fire. Theo glanced over at Heinz Naumann, who was also eyeing the Russian machine. “Did you kill one of these?”

“Uh-huh.” Heinz sounded unwontedly thoughtful. “I wouldn’t want to
stop a round from that gun. What d’you think? Forty-five millimeters? Fifty?”

“Forty-five, I’d guess,” Theo said.

“Smash through our plate like it was tinfoil either way,” Heinz said. “Next question is, how many of these fuckers have the Ivans got?”

“Well,” Theo answered, “we’ll find out.”

Chapter 9