"Come on," Lieutenant Krantz said. "We've got to move up, and that damned gun is in the way."
Well, I'm awake now, Willi thought as he heaved himself to his feet. Raw terror burned away exhaustion. And anybody who had to stalk a well-sited machine gun-and this one would be, because the Frenchies knew how to play the game, too-made an intimate acquaintance with terror.
Farms in these parts were small. Stone fences separated one from another. Poilus lurked behind the fences. Every so often, one of them would pop up and shoot. Or a mortar team would lob a couple of bombs from God knew where. Willi hated mortars. You couldn't hear the rounds coming till they got right on top of you, which was just exactly too late.
"There!" Wolfgang pointed. The machine gun was firing from a stone farmhouse's window narrowed to a slit with more building stones. Willi swore under his breath. This one would be a bitch and a half to get rid of. The position was shielded against anything this side of an antitank gun.
Or maybe it wasn't. Lieutenant Krantz spoke into the radio set a lance-corporal got to lug. Fifteen minutes later, a fellow with a couple of tanks on his back and a sinister-looking nozzle in his hand came forward. Everyone shied away from him. He didn't seem to care, or maybe he was used to the response by now.
"Keep them busy, all right?" he said. The German soldiers nodded. You wanted a flamethrower man on your side to succeed, but you felt faintly guilty when he did. Nobody mourned a flamethrower man who got roasted by his own hellish device, either. And Willi had never heard of anyone who managed to surrender with that apparatus on his back.
But that wasn't his worry, except at one remove. He raised up from behind a boulder and took a shot at the machine gun's firing slit. He ducked back down as soon as he'd pulled the trigger-and a good thing, too, because the Hotchkiss promptly spat lead his way. The froggies in the farmhouse were mighty alert. Willi hoped the miserable bastard with the flamethrower had his life insurance paid up.
One of his buddies groaned. Somebody else yelled for a medic. If you poked a bear in its den, you were liable to get clawed. The last thing Willi wanted was to rise up again and shoot at the slit. He did it anyway, which proved what a strong thing Wehrmacht training was-and, even more, how powerful was his fear of looking bad in front of his squadmates. Without that fundamental fear, nobody could have fought a war.
When he rose up one more time, the muzzle of the Hotchkiss was pointing straight at him. Before the Frenchies could shoot him, though, the flamethrower man used his toy. Foomp! Even across several hundred meters, Willi heard the man-made dragon's noise. Fire engulfed the machine gun and the firing slit-and whoever had the bad luck to be right behind them.
German soldiers whooped. Even so, nobody seemed especially eager to show himself. Maybe more Frenchmen had dragged their charred friends away from the trigger and were waiting to give optimists or fools-assuming there was a difference-a nasty surprise.
The flamethrower man solved that problem. He crawled right up to the farmhouse, stuck his nozzle into the firing slit, and…Foomp! He cocked his head to one side, as if listening. Then he waved. No more trouble here, the gesture said.
Willi still wasn't enthusiastic about standing up, but he did. The soldiers trotted forward as smoke rose from the farmhouse. The breeze came out of the west, as it commonly did. Willi's nose wrinkled. Along with woodsmoke, he caught the reek of burnt meat. The flamethrower had done its job, all right.
Even so, nobody wanted much to do with the fellow who carried it. He stood there, a little more smoke trailing from the snout of his infernal machine. Again, he didn't seem particularly surprised or disappointed. Well, why would he? How many times had he seen this same response by now?
Lieutenant Krantz pointed toward Laon. His officer's whistle squealed. "Come on!" he yelled. "Not far now! Follow me!"
An officer who said that made his troops want to do it. All the same, the infantrymen hesitated. That rattling clatter out of the east, getting louder now…"Panzers!" Willi said in delight. "Our panzers!" He hadn't seen many of them.
These two little Panzer Is were no more than mobile machine-gun nests. Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot, though. Both panzer commanders stood up in their turrets. They waved to the foot soldiers, who returned the compliment. "Come with us," one of the men in black coveralls shouted over engine noise. "Keep the French pigdogs away."
"And you keep them away from us," Lieutenant Krantz said. The panzer commander who'd spoken before nodded. Everybody needed help now and then.
Willi loped along to the left of the panzers. A French machine gun fired at them, which was stupid. Its bullets couldn't hurt them. One of the panzers crushed the sandbagged position, turning back and forth and round and round on top of it to make sure nothing in there survived.
Then a rifle of a sort Willi hadn't heard before went off-a big boom that would have set anyone's teeth on edge. What followed wasn't the ping of a ricochet, either. That round punched clear on through the baby panzer's thin frontal armor. The machine kept going in a straight line till it rammed a big oak and stopped. Driver's hit, Willi realized. German had antitank rifles, too, but you didn't expect to run up against one right after you'd finally picked up some armor.
War wasn't what you expected. It was what you got. What the surviving panzer got was out of there. Its crew knew that antitank rifle could do for them, too. And it did. Two rounds into the engine compartment turned the panzer into an immobile machine-gun nest. "We go on regardless," Lieutenant Krantz declared. Willi was still willing to advance. Able? He'd just have to see.
Vaclav Jezek sprawled behind a chunk of chimney that a shell hit had detached from a nearby house. He chambered another round in his antitank rifle and waited. The crew of that disabled Panzer I wouldn't stay inside long. A hit from any kind of artillery would mangle them and torch them at the same time. A couple of more hits from the antitank rifle might set the tank on fire.
Sure enough, the commander clambered out of the turret. The Czech was ready. Despite a muzzle brake and a padded stock, the antitank rifle slammed his shoulder when he pulled the trigger. He'd already seen that, although these 13mm armor-piercing rounds weren't designed to kill mere human beings, they did one hell of a job. The German in black coveralls never knew what hit him. He tumbled off the tank and lay still.
The driver was sneakier, or maybe smarter. He scuttled out and kept the tank's carcass between him and Jezek till he bolted for some trees. Jezek shot at him, too, but missed. "Shit!" he said in disgust.
Sergeant Halevy had dug himself a foxhole a few meters away, and fronted it with bricks and stones from the ruined house. "Don't get yourself in an uproar," he said. "You did what you were supposed to do. Neither one of those tanks'll bother us any more."
"Fuck it," Vaclav said. "I should have finished the other cocksucker, too."
"You can't kill all of them by yourself," the Jew said. "Remember, you've got to leave some for me."
"Heh," Jezek said. Before the shooting started, he'd had doubts about how well Jews would fight. Yeah, Hitler was giving them a hard time, but they were still Jews, weren't they? Once they had rifles in their hands, they seemed to do just fine.
"You'd better dig in," Halevy said. "If the tanks couldn't do for us, they'll see how the artillery works."
Without raising his head, Vaclav pulled the entrenching tool off his belt and started scraping out a foxhole of his own. Halevy knew how the Germans operated, all right. Even now, some junior officer with a radio or a field telephone was probably talking to his regimental HQ, telling the gunners at which map square the trouble lay. Fifteen minutes of 105 fire ought to soften things up, he'd say.