"Ja." Wolfgang nodded. "Took longer than it should have, too."
"Everything takes longer than it's supposed to," Willi said. "No matter how smart the generals are, the bastards on the other side have generals, too."
Wolfgang laughed at him. "Generals? Smart? What have you been drinking? Whatever it is, I want some, too."
"Oh, come on. You know what I mean. If the guys with the red stripes on their trousers"-Willi meant the General Staff-"don't end up smarter than the generals on the other side, we're in trouble."
"But everybody knows the generals on the other side are a bunch of jerks," Wolfgang said. "So how smart do our fellows need to be?"
Before Willi could answer, more panzers rumbled up. Shouting sergeants ordered them under such trees as there were. Not all of them would fit there. Soldiers spread camouflage netting over the ones that had to stay out in the open. Not many French reconnaissance planes came over, but the Wehrmacht didn't believe in taking chances when it didn't have to.
Wolfgang Storch pointed back toward the French soldiers they'd been watching. "Hope those assholes don't hear the racket and start wondering what's up."
"Don't worry about it," Willi told him. They laughed. Why not? Their side was doing things. The enemy was sitting around. If the French had no stomach for a fight but one came to them anyway… "BURN EVERYTHING," SERGEANT DEMANGE SAID. "When we pull back into France, we want the Germans to remember we were here." The cigarette in the corner of his mouth jerked up and down as he spoke.
One of the guys in Luc Harcourt's squad splashed kerosene against the side of a barn. Luc grabbed a burning stick from the cookfire and touched it to a wet place. He had to jump back, or the flames might have got him. The barn sent a black plume of smoke into the leaden sky.
Other soldiers were torching the farmhouse near the barn. "Hey, Sergeant?" Luc called.
Demange eyed him as if he were a chancre on humanity's scrotum. But then, Demange looked at everybody and everything that way. "What do you want, kid?" he said. Make it good, or else lurked menacingly under the words.
"If we're doing everything we can to hurt the Boches, how come we're pulling out, not going forward?" As far as Luc could see, the whole halfhearted invasion was nothing but a sad, unfunny joke. Now it was ending without even a punch line.
"Well, we went in to give the Czechs a hand, oui?" the sergeant said.
"Sure," Harcourt answered. "So?"
"So now there's no more Czechoslovakia, so what's the point of hanging around any longer? That's how I heard it from the lieutenant, so that's what the brass is saying." Demange looked around to make sure no officers were in earshot. Satisfied, he went on, "You ask me what the real story is, we're scared green."
Maybe Demange would end up in trouble for defeatism if somebody reported him to the lieutenant. More likely, he'd eat the platoon commander without salt. And what he said made an unpleasant amount of sense. "We haven't fought enough to see how tough the Nazis really are," Luc said.
"You know that. I know that. You think the old men in the fancy kepis know that?" Demange made as if to wipe his ass, presumably with the collected wisdom of the French General Staff. "Come on, get moving!" the underofficer added. "I think you just want to stand around and gab instead of working."
Luc liked work no better than anyone else in his right mind. Even standing around with thirty-odd kilos on his back wasn't his idea of fun. But the fire warmed the chilly morning. He sighed as he trudged away. Pretty soon, tramping along under all that weight would warm him up, too, but not so pleasantly.
Every once in a while, somebody off in the distance would fire a rifle or squeeze off a burst from a machine gun. For the most part, though, the Germans seemed content to let the French leave if they wanted to.
Here and there, the retreating French troops passed men warily waiting in foxholes and sandbagged machine-gun nests. The rear guard would give the Boches a hard time if they were inclined to get frisky. The soldiers Luc could see looked serious about their job. They probably thought they were saving the French army from destruction. And maybe they were right.
Maybe. But it didn't look that way now.
Luc's company marched out of Germany at almost exactly the place where they'd gone in a month earlier. Luc eyed the customs post, now wrecked, that marked the frontier. Men had suffered there. And for what? Maybe the important people, the people who ran things, understood. Luc had no idea.
"It's the capitalists who are making us pull out," Jacques Vallat said. He'd been drafted out of an army factory in Lyon, and was as Red as Sergeant Demange's eyes. "The fools are more afraid of Stalin than they are of Hitler."
"Shut your yap, Vallat," the sergeant said without much heat. "Just keep picking 'em up and laying 'em down. When you get to be a general, then you can talk politics."
"If I get to be a general, France has more trouble than she knows what to do with," Vallat replied.
"You said it. I didn't." Demange might have come out of an auto factory in Lyon himself. He showed no weariness, or even strain. By the way he marched, he could have tramped across France with no more than some gasoline and an oil change or two.
Luc wished he had that endless, effortless endurance. He was a lot harder than he had been when he got drafted, but he knew he couldn't match the sergeant. Demange was a professional, a mercenary in the service of his own country. With a white kepi on his head, he wouldn't have been out of place in the Foreign Legion.
"Back in France," Paul Renouvin said. "Funny-it doesn't look any different. Doesn't feel any different, either."
"Oh, some, maybe," Luc said. "When I camp tonight, I won't have the feeling some bastard's watching me from the bushes."
"No, huh? You don't think the Germans'll sneak after us?" Paul said.
"Merde!" Luc hadn't thought of that. He'd figured that, once the French pulled back from Germany, the Boches would leave them alone. Why not? The Germans had pretty much left them alone while they were inside Germany.
"We're going to pay for this," Jacques Vallat predicted. "We had our chance, and we didn't grab it. Now they're done in Czechoslovakia. Where do they go next?"
"Didn't I tell you once to shut up?" Sergeant Demange's voice stayed flat, but now it held a certain edge. "You want to go pissing and moaning, go piss and moan to the captain."
"He'd throw me in the stockade," Vallat said with gloomy certainty.
"You'd deserve it, too," Demange said. "Running your mouth when you don't know shit…But if you're in the stockade, you can't do anything useful. Tonight, you fill up everybody's canteen."
Jacques' sigh was martyred. Everyone took turns at the different fatigue duties. That one was more fatiguing than most. And the men had already been marching all day. Not that the day was very long. Darkness came early, and with it rain. Luc's helmet kept the water off his head, and the greatcoat let him stay pretty dry, but marching through rain and deepening twilight wasn't his cup of tea.
But tents and hot food and strong coffee waited for the soldiers who'd withdrawn from Germany. It wasn't as good as ending up in bed with a pretty girl-but what was? Nobody was shooting at him. He had a full belly, and he was warm. When you were a soldier, that seemed better than good enough. PEGGY DRUCE HAD HOT FOOD, even if most of it was boiled potatoes and turnips. She had coffee. The Germans insisted it was the same stuff they drank. If it was, she pitied them. Nobody was shooting at her. She'd never thought she would have to worry about that…till the day she did.
She was a neutral, which meant the Germans treated her better than the English and French they'd also caught at Marianske Lazne. She got plenty of potatoes and turnips and godawful coffee. They had enough to keep body and soul together, but not much more. And if she were a Jew…
Till the war started, she'd looked down her snub nose at Jews. If you weren't one, you did. She'd taken it for granted, the same way she'd taken for granted that nothing bad could ever happen to her. She was an American. She had money. She had looks.