It hadn't happened. Too goddamn bad.
A French captain spotted the enormous rifle Vaclav had slung over his left shoulder. He said something in his own language. Vaclav only shrugged and looked blank. "Do you want me to understand him?" Halevy asked-in Czech.
Vaclav didn't even have to think about it. "Nah," he said. "He'll pull me off to do something stupid that'll probably get me killed. I'd rather go on back to camp."
"Makes sense," the Jew agreed. Like Vaclav, he stared at the French officer as if he had no idea the fellow was talking to them. The Frenchman said something else. Vaclav and Halevy went right on impersonating idiots. The captain tried bad German. Jezek understood that. He also understood the captain did have something dangerous for him to try. He didn't let on that he understood one damn thing. He was willing to risk his life: as he'd thought before, that was why he wore the uniform. But he wasn't willing to get himself killed without much chance of hurting the enemy.
"Ah, screw you both," the captain said in German when the Czechs wouldn't admit they followed him. They went right on feigning ignorance. The Frenchman gave up. Vaclav had his ammo, and he didn't have to try anything idiotic. As far as he was concerned, the day was a victory so far. ONCE UPON A TIME-probably not very long ago-the froggies had had themselves a big old supply dump outside a place called Hary Willi Dernen eyed what was left of it with something not far from disgust. The Frenchmen had hauled away whatever they still had a use for, then poured gasoline on the rest and set fire to it. The stink of stale smoke was sour in his nostrils.
"Come on. Get moving," Arno Baatz growled. "Nothing worth grabbing in this miserable place."
"Right, Corporal," Willi said. Whenever Baatz talked to him these days, he had to fight like a son of a bitch to keep from giggling.
Every once in a while, that showed in the way he sounded. The underofficer favored him with his best glare. "Did I say something funny?"
"No, Corporal," Willi answered hastily, and bit down hard on the inside of his cheek so the pain would drive mirth from his voice. Awful Arno remembered getting slugged in the tavern back in Watigny. He knew it had happened, anyway-you couldn't very well not know when you woke up with an enormous bruise on your chin and a knot on the back of your head.
But Baatz showed no sign of remembering that Willi and Wolfgang Storch had been in there to see his piteous overthrow. He also didn't remember he'd been jealous because Michelle brought drinks to them but not to him. He'd stopped a good one, all right. And that was highly convenient. Since he didn't remember, he didn't blame them for the damaged state of his skull.
Lieutenant Erich Krantz had replaced Lieutenant Gross the same way Gross had replaced Neustadt. Gross had kept his arm after all; he might even come back to duty one day. Neustadt hadn't been so lucky. Krantz was here now-at least till he stopped something. Junior lieutenants seemed to have an unfortunate knack for doing that.
And, if the enemy didn't get them, they were liable to do themselves in. Krantz stooped and started to pick up a charred board. "Sir, you might want to be careful with that," Willi said, getting ready to shove the officer aside if Krantz didn't feel like listening.
But the lieutenant did hesitate. "What? Why?" he asked.
Corporal Baatz butted in: "Sir, Dernen's right." He didn't say that every day, so Willi let him go on: "The French pulled out of here just a little while ago. That's the kind of thing they might booby-trap."
"Is it?" Krantz looked surprised and intrigued. "Well, how about that? All right, I won't mess with it."
"That's a good idea, sir," Baatz said. His narrow, rather piggy eyes said Krantz should have figured this out for himself. Luckily for him, it wasn't easy to gig a man-especially a noncom-on account of the look on his face. And Baatz looked mean and scornful most of the time, so maybe the lieutenant didn't notice anything strange.
Krantz was looking south and west. "Now that we've driven the French out of here, we should be able to go on to Laon without much trouble."
We? As in you and your tapeworm? Willi thought. The way it looked to him, the froggies had hung on so hard at Hary because it shielded Laon. They were probably digging in a little closer to the city even now-as well as anyone could in this miserable freezing weather.
Krantz was an officer. Wasn't he supposed to know stuff like that because he was an officer? He didn't have much experience, obviously. And if he kept poking around in a gutted supply dump, he wouldn't live long enough to get any, either. Willi didn't want to be standing close by when something Krantz was playing with went boom.
He couldn't say anything like that to the lieutenant. Yes, the Fuhref's Wehrmacht was a much more democratic, easygoing place than the Kaiser's army had been. Old sweats who'd put in their time in the trenches in the last war all said so. Of course, Hitler was an old sweat himself. He'd fought almost from first to last without getting seriously wounded. The way things were on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, that was either amazing luck or proof of the Gott mit uns on a Landser's belt buckle. (But that was just the Prussian buckle the last time around, not the national one. Hitler had served in a Bavarian regiment, and would have had a different motto in front of his belly button.)
Yes, the Wehrmacht was more democratic now. Still, a private couldn't explain the facts of life to an officer. Not even Corporal Baatz could. A grizzled Feldwebel might have done it. But Sergeant Pieck was wounded, too, and hadn't been replaced. Krantz would have to learn on his own-if he lasted.
As if to show the platoon commander he wasn't ready for General Staff Lampassen on the outer seams of his trouser legs, the French put in a counterattack later that afternoon. Whether Krantz had or not, Willi'd been fearing one. He was no General Staff officer, either, but he could see what a long southern flank the Germans held. The Wehrmacht had gone around the Maginot Line to the north, not through it. Evidently, the generals had counted on keeping the enemy too busy up there to worry about down here. Unfortunately, what you counted on wasn't always what you got.
By the time the 75s started whistling in, Willi already had himself a foxhole. It had belonged to a poilu, who'd dug himself a cave in the northern wall to protect himself from German shells coming in from that direction. Willi hacked and scraped at the nearly frozen dirt in the southern wall of the hole with his entrenching tool to try to make himself the same kind of shelter from French artillery.
No splinters flayed his flesh or broke his bones, so he supposed he'd done well enough. No shells burst especially close to him, so he couldn't prove a thing. But proof didn't matter. All that mattered was, he didn't get hurt.
He wasn't sorry to let the Frenchmen come at him for a change. Sometimes-mostly when there were panzers around-attackers had the edge. More often, defenders crouched in the best shelter they could find or make and tried to murder the fellows coming at them.
His mouth went dry. He recognized that creaking, clanking rumble. As far as he knew, the Germans didn't have any panzers in the neighborhood. If the French did, it wasn't such a good day to crouch in a foxhole.
Boom! The report behind him was one of the sweetest sounds he'd ever heard. A split second later, he heard another one. That unmusical Clang! was an antitank round slamming into a French panzer. And the smaller pops and blams that followed marked ammunition cooking off inside the stricken machine. Willi wouldn't have wanted to be a French panzer crewman, not right then, not for anything.
He stood up and fired at the foot soldiers loping along with the hastily whitewashed French panzers. The poilus threw themselves flat and shot back at him. Boom! The 37mm antitank gun had found another target-found it and missed it. Behind their steel shield, the German artillerymen frantically reaimed and reloaded. Meanwhile, the French panzer's turret swung inexorably toward them.