Somebody up ahead shouted something. Vaclav almost understood it. Polish and Czech were closely related-not so closely as Czech and Slovak, but still…A word here and there came through, even if each of them seemed to carry an extra syllable or two.
Vaclav stood still. He thought that was what the Pole was telling him to do. "I give up!" he shouted back. "You can intern me!"
The Pole came out from behind a tree. He wore a greenish uniform, not brown like Vaclav's (not filthy and tattered like Vaclav's, either) or German field-gray. The bayoneted rifle he carried looked extremely businesslike. Moving slowly and carefully, Vaclav unslung his own piece and laid it on the ground in front of his feet.
With a nod, the Pole advanced on him. They tried to talk. It was an exercise in near misses and frustration. Then the Pole-a big blond fellow-raised an ironic eyebrow and asked, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
"Ja," Jezek said miserably. Two Slavs, having to go back and forth in German!
"Gut," the Pole said. "Jetzt konnen wir wirklich einander verstehen." And they could really understand each other now, no matter how much Vaclav loathed the idea. Still in German, the Pole went on, "Give me your name and rank and unit."
Dully, Vaclav did. "What will you do with me?" he asked.
"We have a camp a few kilometers to the north," the Polish soldier answered. "Did you say you wanted to be interned before?"
"Ja," Vaclav said again.
"I thought so, but I wasn't sure," the Pole said. "Well, you will be. You are not a prisoner of war, not here. Poland and Czechoslovakia are not formally at war."
"No. You just grabbed," Jezek said bitterly.
With a shrug, the big man in the green uniform answered, "So did you Czechs, after the last war. Otherwise, the coal mines down there would have been ours all along. And then you act like your shit doesn't stink."
"Oh, mine does. I know that," Vaclav said. "But if you are friends with Hitler, he will make you sorry."
"Better him than Stalin and the damned Reds," the Pole retorted.
"You find friends where you can. At least the Russians did something for us. More than France and England did," Vaclav said.
"What did you expect? They're full of Jews," the Pole said. No wonder he liked Hitler better than Stalin. He stooped, picked up Vaclav's rifle, and slung it over his own shoulder. Then he pointed north. "The camp is that way. Get moving, Corporal Jezek."
Shoulders slumped in despair, Vaclav got moving.
The night was cool and damp. Most nights were, as October moved toward November. Willi Dernen peered at the Frenchmen who'd nipped off a few square kilometers of German soil.
They were warmer than he was. They'd started a fire and sat around it. From 300 meters, he could have potted them easily. Orders were not to piss them off, no matter what. If they wanted to sit on their asses as if they hadn't crossed the border, they were welcome to.
If they'd really come loaded for bear…
Willi's shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He was a blond, stolid watchmaker's son from Breslau, all the way over on the other side of the Reich. He could hardly follow the German they spoke here, and the locals had trouble with his accent, too. But he'd been on the Westwall since France and England declared war. He knew what would have happened had the French put some muscle into a push instead of tiptoeing over the border.
They would have smashed the Westwall as if they were made of cardboard. Not a Landser here thought any differently. The Westwall was Goebbels' joke on the democracies. On paper, and on the radio, it was as formidable as the Maginot Line. For real, construction gangs were still frantically building forts and obstructions. And the Westwall didn't have nearly enough troops to man what was already built.
Most of the Wehrmacht had gone off to kick Czechoslovakia's ass. What was left…the French outnumbered somewhere between three and five to one. That was the bad news. The good news was, they didn't seem to know it.
One of the Frenchmen pulled out a concertina and began to play. The thin, plaintive notes made Willi shake his head. How could the guys on the other side listen to crap like that? Horns, drums, fiddles-that was music.
Beside Dernen, Wolfgang Storch whispered, "We ought to plug him just so he'll shut up, you know?"
Trust Wolfgang to come up with something like that, Willi thought. He whispered back: "Damn you, you almost made me laugh out loud. That wouldn't be so good."
"Why not?" Storch said. "Probably make the Frenchmen piss themselves."
Willi did snort then, not because Wolfgang was wrong but because he was right. Willi had come that close to pissing himself when he was part of a firefight right after the French came over the border. The guy next to him took one right in the belly. The noises Klaus made…You didn't want to remember things like that, but you couldn't very well forget them. When Willi went to sleep, he heard Klaus shrieking in his nightmares. He smelled the other man's blood, like hot iron-and his shit, too.
One of the Frenchmen looked up. The guy with the concertina stopped playing. All of the men in khaki looked around. Willi pretended he wasn't there as hard as he could. It must have worked, because none of the enemy soldiers got to his feet or anything. Tiny in the distance, one of them shrugged a comically French shrug. The concertina player started up again.
"Let's head back and report in," Wolfgang said.
"Now you're talking. You and your stupid jokes." It was hard to stay really mad when you were whispering in a tiny voice, but Willi gave it his best shot. "We wouldn't've got in a jam if you weren't such a damn smartass."
"Your mother," Wolfgang answered sweetly.
Both Germans drew back as softly as they could. The French soldier with the concertina went on playing. Willi took that as a good sign. Maybe the Frenchmen were using the noise as cover. That would be a smart thing to do. It would also be an aggressive thing to do. The French might be smart. They'd shown no sign of aggressiveness.
All the same, Willi wanted no part of a nasty surprise. All it would take was a sergeant who'd been through the mill the last time around. Willi's father was a guy like that. When he and his buddies got together and drank some beer, they'd start telling stories. Like any kid, Willi listened. There probably weren't a lot of guys his age who hadn't heard stories like that. Some veterans, though, didn't care to talk. Willi hadn't understood that, not till Klaus got it. He did now.
They'd gone about half a kilometer when a no-doubt-about-it German voice challenged them: "Halt! Who goes there?"
"Two German soldiers: Dernen and Storch," Willi answered. He and Wolfgang were out in the middle of a field. The Landser who owned that voice might have been…anywhere.
"Give the password," the man said.
"Sonnenschein," Willi and Wolfgang chorused. A Frenchman poking around could have picked it up from them, but the French didn't do much of that kind of poking.
"Pass on," the sentry said.
They did. The Germans were ready for anything. The French didn't seem to be. They didn't have to be, either-they had numbers, and the Wehrmacht didn't. But they acted as if that would go on forever. And it wouldn't.
Willi got a glimpse of just how true that was when he and Wolfgang finished making their report. They ducked out of Colonel Bauer's tent and found themselves in the middle of chaos. Soldiers were jumping down from trucks whose headlights were cut down to slits by masking tape. Some of the belching, farting monsters there weren't trucks at all. They were panzers.
Both Willi and Wolfgang gaped at them. Willi hadn't seen a panzer up till now in all the time he'd spent on the Western Front. He supposed there were a few, in case the French decided they were serious about attacking here. But he sure hadn't seen any.
"It must be all over in Czechoslovakia," he said.