These machines were French, all right. By the look of them, they'd been around since the last war. But they had turrets and treads and cannon and enough steel to keep out small-arms fire. If they weren't exactly swift…well, so what?
One of them fired at an Italian tank. Clang! There was that horrible bell-like sound again. The Italian machine's armor wasn't thick enough to hold out an armor-piercing round. Somebody got out of an escape hatch in the turret before the tank brewed up. It didn't do him much good-a burst from a machine gun cut him down before he'd run ten meters.
Tanks on both sides stopped to fire at foes, then got moving again to make themselves harder to hit. The Italian tankettes kept on moving and shooting. They mounted only machine guns, and weren't dangerous to real tanks. They could do horrible things to infantry, though.
As the tanks slowed, so did the rest of the Nationalist advance. Joaquin flopped onto his belly behind a pile of rubble that had been a stone barn. Every so often, he rose up enough to fire. Then he crawled somewhere else before squeezing off another round. No sniper would draw an easy bead on him. Veterans learned things like that. The guys who didn't…didn't get to be veterans.
Sergeant Carrasquel crouched behind a fence not far away. Delgadillo waited for the sergeant to order him forward again. But the squad leader stayed where he was, firing every now and then. He kept his mouth shut. Maybe he'd decided the attack wouldn't get much farther no matter what.
Joaquin Delgadillo sure felt that way. The Republicans had been tough even while outnumbered and outgunned. This push, plainly, aimed to take back as much as possible from them while they still were.
It also seemed designed to get a lot of Nationalist soldiers killed. Mortar bombs started whispering down around Joaquin and Sergeant Carrasquel. Both men dug like moles. Joaquin hated mortars. The Republicans had been using a Russian model for a long time. Now they also had French tubes, and those were just as good or maybe even better.
Somebody yowled like a wildcat, which meant a jagged steel fragment had bitten him. Joaquin hoped it was no one he knew. You always hated to hear a buddy get it. That reminded you how easily you might stop something yourself.
"Ave Maria," Joaquin whispered. As he went through the Hail Mary in Latin, his left hand found the rosary in his tunic pocket. Keep me safe, he thought. Let Marshal Sanjurjo win, but please, God, keep me safe. THE NORTH SEA IN NOVEMBER was nowhere a skipper wanted to go. It was even less pleasant in a U-boat than it would have been in a larger surface warship. Lieutenant Julius Lemp guided U-30 north and east. He had to get around the British Isles to take up his assigned position in the mid-Atlantic.
He liked everything about his boat except the way it rolled and pitched in the heavy seas. Type VII U-boats made everything that had come before them seem like children's toys by comparison. They had outstanding range. They could make seventeen knots on the surface and eight submerged, and could go eighteen hours at four knots underwater.
During the last war, the British mined the northern reaches of the North Sea, trying to bottle up the U-boats. With hundreds and hundreds of kilometers between Scotland and Norway, they couldn't sew things up tight there the way they did in the Channel. But they could make life difficult, and they did.
They were supposed to be trying the same thing this time around. Lemp had orders to sink any minelayers he spotted. Odds against spying any were long: it was a big ocean, and he couldn't see very much of it, even with the Zeiss binoculars hanging around his neck. But his superiors were thorough. They wouldn't have got those wide gold stripes on their sleeves if they weren't.
Gray clouds scudded low overhead, driven by a strong west wind. In clear weather, Lemp would have scanned sky as well as sea with his binoculars. One thing had changed from the last war: airplanes were much more dangerous than they had been. They could carry bigger bombs, and carry them farther. And they all had radio sets, so they could guide enemy warships to a U-boat's path.
In this weather, though, a plane would have a devil of a time spotting the U-30. Lemp thought a pilot would have to be nuts even to take off, but he also thought pilots were nuts. Maybe it evened out.
About the most interesting thing he saw on his watch was a puffin that landed on the conning tower for a moment. With its plump, dignified body and the big beak in bright crayon colors, the bird looked as if a talented but strange child had drawn it. It also looked confused, as if wondering how this convenient little island had popped up in the middle of the sea. Then it noticed Julius Lemp-and then it was flying away again, as fast as it could.
"I don't like puffin stew," Lemp said. The wind blew his words away. Chances were the puffin wouldn't have believed him anyway. Birds didn't live to grow old by trusting people.
At 1400 on the dot, Ensign Klaus Hammerstein's shoes clanged on the iron rungs of the ladder leading up to the top of the conning tower. "I relieve you, sir," the youngster said formally, and then, "Anything I need to know?"
"Don't talk to puffins," Lemp replied, deadpan.
Hammerstein's left eyebrow-the sardonic one-rose a few millimeters. "Hadn't really planned to…sir." He took a deep breath, and his expression cleared. "Nice to get up here, isn't it?"
"Don't remind me. I'm going the other way." With a sigh, Lemp descended into the bowels of the U-30.
When the sun shone brightly, when the sky was blue, when the sea was smooth, you could easily think that coming off watch and going back into the iron coffin that let you do your job was like going from heaven to hell. With winter on its way in the North Sea, the change wasn't that bad, but it sure wasn't good.
Bowels…Julius Lemp wished he hadn't thought of that particular word, because it fit much too well. U-boats filled with every stench in the world; they might have been a distillery for bad smells. High on the list was the reek from the heads. Toilets that worked without putting the boat at risk of flooding were something German engineering was…almost up to. No U-boat had ever been lost because of a malfunctioning head-which didn't make the toilets a nice place to be around.
Unwashed bodies, musty clothes, and stale food added to the reek. U-boats carried enough drinking water. Water for washing was a luxury they didn't bother with. Seawater and saltwater soap were supposed to make up the lack. As with the heads, theory ran several lengths in front of performance.
Bilgewater added a swampy smell as old as the sea-as old as boats, anyhow. When you first came down into it, the combination was enough to knock you for a loop. After a while, you stopped smelling it-your brain blanked it out. But when you'd been breathing fresh salt air, the change was like getting a garbage can thrown in your face.
The sailors looked as if they might have been demons from hell, too. The orange light bulbs didn't help. More to it than those, though. A U-boat skipper couldn't insist on spit and polish the way officers in ordinary warships did. The men were too cramped together here-and U-boat crewmen were commonly harder cases than sailors in surface ships, too.
A lot of them started beards as soon as they left port. Shaving with saltwater soap was no fun. Even if it were, these guys were a raffish lot. They enjoyed flouting regulations. Lemp couldn't very well ream them out for it, not when he was sprouting strawberry-blond face fungus himself.
Off-duty men looked up from a game of skat. Nobody jumped to his feet and saluted. If you sprang to attention on a U-boat, you were liable to coldcock yourself on an overhead pipe. In that, U-boats were like panzers: being a shrimp helped.
He hadn't been below long when a shout floated down from the conning tower: "Ship ho! Ship off the starboard bow!"
That sent him scrambling up the ladder again. He wanted to see the ship for himself. No-he needed to see it for himself. If it was a warship, he would sink it if he could. No German surface units were in these waters. But if it was a freighter…Life got complicated then. Belgium and Holland, Norway and Denmark and Sweden were neutrals. Sinking a freighter bound for one of them could land the Reich in hot water. Freighters shaping a course for England, though, were fair game.