“Dégagé?” Maurice asked.
Struggling with his college French, Major Kelly looked for an epithet he wanted. “Chevalier d'industrie.”
Maurice actually bristled. He stood stiffly, face twisted, his greasy hair trying to stand straight up on his neck, his eyes blazing. “You call me a swindler?”
Realizing he had gone too far, reminding himself that he had never been very good at maintaining discipline, the major said, “That was not how I meant it. I meant—'One who lives by his wits.' ”
Maurice unbristled. “Thank you, Major,” he said. “I am honored to be so considered by a man I respect as much as I respect you.”
As Beame delivered the cans of gasoline to the two young men on the backhoe, Kelly said, “Now, what information has cost me so dearly?”
Maurice was suddenly nervous. “A Panzer unit is moving towards the front, complete with an armored supply convoy and approximately a thousand infantrymen.”
Major Kelly wiped at his nose. Looking at Maurice, he had begun to feel that his own nose was bedecked with bright pearls of grease. His nose was dry. That was a relief. “I don't really see that this is worth a backhoe, Maurice.”
“The Panzers are coming on this road,” Maurice said.
“This road?” Kelly looked southward, across the river, unwilling to accept the possibility that he would have to blow up his own bridge to keep the German tanks from crossing over to the camp.
“You did not hear me right,” Maurice said, as if reading the other man's thoughts. “The Panzers are coming to the front. They will be coming up behind you, from the northeast, from this side.”
Kelly turned away from the river and looked across the clearing to the trees, the single break in them where the dusty road came through. No military traffic had yet used this road, not since they had been here. They were in the backlands, in an unimportant part of France. Now, all of that had changed. “Oh, God. We're all dead.”
“Not necessarily,” Maurice said.
Kelly thought of the huge, lumbering Panzer tanks, the supply trucks, the thousand German infantrymen, all moving through this camp, across this bridge, and he couldn't see any way they weren't going to be made dead. “We haven't any mortar or artillery. We aren't a fighting unit. The only thing we have to protect ourselves are our rifles and grenades. How many Panzers did you say?”
“Twelve.”
“We're dead.”
“Not necessarily,” Maurice repeated. “There are things I could rent you, bits and pieces, certain machines that have come into my possession… ”
“Artillery?”
“No,” Maurice said.
“What, then?”
“German jeeps, uniforms, a German truck.”
Kelly thought about it. “You have these things, really?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Grâce à Dieu.”
Major Kelly was certain God hadn't delivered the German equipment to Maurice, but he didn't feel like arguing about that just now. “I don't see what these things will do to help us,” he said.
“With little trouble,” Maurice said, “you could make the Germans think that this is a camp of theirs.”
“Masquerade as Germans?”
“Exactly.”
“But none of us is fluent in German!” Kelly said. “The moment we have to speak to one of them—”
“You will have to talk to no one,” Maurice said. “The Germans will not stop. Their orders are to rush, and they are wasting no time in reaching the front. They will pass through here with little more than a nod to you.”
“The Stuka pilots know we're not German, and they must have reported us to someone,” Kelly said. “They bomb us all the time. If the Stuka pilots know, the Panzer commanders are going to know, too.”
“Possibly not,” Maurice said. “In Germany, the air force tells the army nothing, for all the services are fiefdoms and jealously guard their own secrets.”
“It won't work.”
“What else can you do?” Maurice asked.
Kelly thought about it some more. “Nothing.”
“Then let us hurry. The Panzers will be here tonight.”
10
Lieutenant Slade tugged at his Nazi uniform where the tightly buttoned jacket fit much too snugly over his hips. He would have liked to ask Nurse Pullit to help him let out the seams of the jacket so that he would not look so hippy and fat, but there'd been no time. “I don't like this plan one bit,” he said. Thinking of his career, he said, “And I want my opinion to go down in the record right now, this minute.” He looked at Major Kelly who wore a black SS uniform complete with silver skulls and a sheathed dagger at the waist. Lieutenant David Beame wore an excellently fitting oberleutnant's uniform and looked dashing. The major and Beame were so resplendent, in fact, one might have thought they were on their way to a dance. It was a good thing there wasn't any dance, though, because Slade would have been embarrassed for any woman — aside from Lily Kain whom he considered nothing more than a cheap hussie — to see him in his tight uniform. “I think what we're doing is all wrong,” The Snot said. “It's degrading and unpatriotic— and it definitely smacks of cowardice.” He could not understand why both their uniforms should fit so well, while his was tight across the hips. Had they planned this? Had the rest of them got together and made certain that his uniform would fit too snugly across the hips and therefore make him seem ludicrous and silly? Maurice would not be above that. It was quite within Maurice's abilities to purposefully supply Slade with an ill-fitting uniform, making him the brunt of private and public jokes. “What we should do,” Lieutenant Slade said, “is make a stand. I'm not saying we would win. But we could deal them a hard blow, and perhaps a decisive blow. We would have the advantage of surprise. And even if that wasn't enough, if we lost, we'd still all make our mark in the history of this war.” Another thing that bothered Slade was the fact that his uniform was that of a private in the German army. If he had to wear a German uniform, it seemed only proper that he should have one of a rank at least equal to his own. Major Kelly, after all, was wearing a lieutenant-general's uniform, and Beame was dressed as an officer. It was degrading to be sitting here in the backseat of the jeep, wearing a tight uniform several ranks below his own. He wanted to cry. He just wanted to cry.
Kelly and Beame didn't want to cry. They wanted to scream and run. Instead, they watched the convoy of German vehicles move slowly down from the highlands toward the clearing, the camp, and the bridge.
Only one road entered the clearing. It came from the northeast, a rudely paved lane that dropped out of the foothills and slanted gradually into the flat land around the river. From where they sat, they could see for more than a mile along that road, to the top of one of the hills where it fell away, out of sight. In the darkness, the lane was studded with what appeared to be an endless stream of headlights. The first of these vehicles was no more than a quarter of a mile away from them, just entering the flat land a thousand yards ahead of the big Panzers. In a couple of minutes, it would be here. Soon after, the mammoth tanks would pass them close enough to be touched. Already, at a few minutes past eleven o'clock, fully an hour ahead of when Maurice had said to expect them, the heavy pounding of tank-tread trembled the earth. The roar of the massive engines, still so distant, was beginning to make conversation almost impossible.
Still, Lieutenant Slade managed to talk. He said, “You know we can't hope to fool them, anyway. Kraut uniforms and an armored kraut jeep don't make us krauts. They'll spot us right off.”