"Down!" Walsh yelled again, and fit action to word.
When a bullet struck flesh, it made a wet, slapping noise. He remembered that from the last time around, however much he wished he didn't. German airplanes had strafed trenches in 1918. It hadn't seemed nearly so horrid or dangerous then. For one thing, he'd been a fool of a kid twenty years earlier. For another, the German air force, like the Kaiser's army, had been on the ropes. And, for one more, he wasn't in a trench now.
More screaming engines made him grab his entrenching tool to see what he could do about digging in. Then a few people started cheering as if they'd lost their minds. Suspecting they had, he warily looked up. British Hurricane fighters were mixing it up with the bastards with the hooked crosses on their tails. Walsh started cheering, too.
A Hurricane went into a flat spin and slammed into the ground, maybe half a mile away. A black, greasy column of smoke marked the pilot's pyre. Then, trailing smoke and flames, one of the German fighters crashed into a stand of trees even closer to where Walsh lay.
He yelled like a man possessed. So the Germans could die. That cloud of smoke, broader and lower than the one rising from the Hurricane, was the first proof of it he'd seen in this war.
Another Hurricane, also smoking but not so badly, limped off to the west, out of the fight. Sergeant Walsh hoped the pilot managed to put it down safely, or at least to bail out if he couldn't land it. To his vast relief, the German fighters seemed to have had enough. Like the dive-bombers before them, they flew back toward the Vaterland.
He tried standing up again. As he did, he noticed he wasn't the only bloke emerging from a half-dug scrape. The other chaps in khaki weren't so bloody stupid. If the buggers on the other side started banging away at you, of course you'd do what you could to keep from getting ventilated.
But the advancing column had stuck its dick in the meat grinder. One tank lay on its side, blown off its tracks by a bomb that burst right next to it. Several trucks burned. Others weren't going anywhere soon, not with from one to four flat tires or with bullets through the engine block…or with dead or wounded drivers. What bombs and machine-gun bullets had done to the foot soldiers was even worse. And as for that mob of refugees…
A woman who might have been pretty if she weren't dirty and exhausted and terrified screamed in Dutch or Flemish. She wasn't wounded-not as far as Walsh could see, anyhow. She was just half crazy, maybe more than half, because of everything that had happened to her.
Walsh had a devil of a time blaming her. A few days ago, she'd been a shopkeeper's wife or a secretary or something else safe and comfortable. Then the roof fell in on her life-literally, odds were. Now she had nothing but the clothes on her back and whatever was in the cute little handbag she carried. How long before she'd start selling herself for a chunk of black bread or a mess of fried potatoes?
How many more just like her were there? Thousands, tens of thousands, all over Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and eastern France. And their husbands, and their brats, and…"Oh, bloody hell. Bloody hell," Walsh muttered under his breath.
Still, civilians weren't his worry, except when they got in the way and kept him from getting to where he needed to be to do his job. Sorting out his soldiers and keeping them moving damn well was.
Captain Ted Peters came over to him. The young officer looked as if he'd just walked into a haymaker. This was his introduction to combat, after all. Combat, meet Captain Peters. Peters, this is combat. Walsh shook his head. He had to be punchy himself, or his brain wouldn't be whirling like that.
"Well, Sergeant, I'm afraid you're the new platoon commander," Peters said. "Lieutenant Gunston stopped a large fragment of bomb casing with his belly. Gutted him like a sucking pig."
"Christ!" Walsh said.
"A bit of a rum go, I'm afraid," Peters said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came down the pike. He did his best to ignore the ammunition cooking off in burning vehicles, the cries of wounded men and women and kids and animals, and the stenches of burning paint and burning rubber and burning flesh and fear and shit.
When the company commander didn't say anything more, Walsh did: "I should say so! We've got ourselves all smashed up, and we haven't even set eyes on a goddamn German."
"I did," Captain Peters answered, not without pride. "One of those dive-bombers was so low when he pulled up that I could see him through the glass of his cockpit. And I got a good look at his rear gunner. The bastard almost punctured me after the plane pulled out of its dive."
"What are we going to do when we have to fight them face to face, sir?" Walsh asked. "How the devil can we, when it looks like they've got more airplanes than we do?"
"We shot down one of their fighters, after all," the officer said. "I'm sure we'll do better with practice, too."
"Right…sir," Sergeant Walsh said tightly. He wasn't sure of any such thing. England's chosen method of fighting seemed to be stumbling from one disaster to the next till she figured out how to beat the set of foes who had been beating her. It worked the last time around only because the USA stuck its oar in the water. Things were moving faster now, much faster. Would-could-muddling through work at all?
Captain Peters had no doubts. Or, if he did, he didn't let them show, which was the mark of a good officer. Walsh didn't let the privates and corporals he led see his doubts, either-or he hoped like hell he didn't, anyhow. "All we can do is go on," Peters said. "We have to clear these civilians out of the way and take up our assigned positions. We'll have the French and the Belgians fighting along with us. The Boches will end up sorry they ever started this war-you mark my words."
"Right…sir," Alistair Walsh said again. No, he didn't believe a word of it. But you also couldn't let your superiors see your doubts. You couldn't even-or maybe you especially couldn't-let yourself see them. SERGEANT LUDWIG ROTHE SPOTTED A TRUCK out somewhere close to a kilometer away. He raised his field glasses to his eyes. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot up his own side by mistake. But the magnified image showed it was a French model, and bound to be full of Dutchmen.
"Panzer halt!" he yelled into the speaking tube.
"Jawohl! Halting," Fritz Bittenfeld answered. The Panzer II jerked to a stop.
Rothe peered through the TZF4 sighting telescope. It was only two and a half power-downright anemic after the binoculars. But it let him draw a bead with the 20mm cannon. He wouldn't have opened up on enemy armor from farther out than 600 meters. The panzer's main armament wouldn't penetrate serious protection from farther out than that. It would chew up soft-skinned vehicles as far as it could reach, though.
The trigger was on the elevating handwheel, to the left of the gun. Ludwig fired a three-round burst. The Dutch truck stopped as if it had run into a stone wall. Smoke poured out from under the hood. Rothe fired another burst, which emptied the magazine. He slapped in another ten-round clip. The other guys might-hell, they did-use bigger rounds in their main armament, but he could shoot a lot quicker than they could. Sometimes that made all the difference in the world.
Sometimes it didn't matter a pfennig's worth. Not far away, another Panzer II burned like billy-be-damned. It had stopped a 105mm shell fired over open sights at point-blank range. None of the crew had got out. That was no surprise-hitting a Panzer II with a 105 was like swatting a mosquito with a table. The Dutch artillerymen who'd fought the gun were dead now, which didn't do that panzer crew one goddamn bit of good.