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.
"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.