Washed down with vin extremely ordinaire, the stew wasn't bad. Luc smoked a cigarette, then wrapped himself in a blanket inside what had been somebody's house till a bomb blew out most of one wall. His buddies had a makeshift brazier going: a bucket half full of hot coals hung from a scrap-metal tripod so it didn't set the floor on fire. It gave off less heat than Luc wished it would, but it was better than nothing.
He slept like a hibernating animal. Not only were nights endlessly long, but he'd never been so worn in his life. Some of the guys in his company fell asleep while they marched-and they kept going, too. He envied them-he didn't seem able to do that himself.
Some time in the middle of the night, a hard hand shook him awake. He groped for his belt knife. Sergeant Demange's low-voiced chuckle stopped him. "Take it easy," the noncom said. "If I wanted you dead, you'd be holding a lily by now. But no. Go out and stand watch for a couple of hours."
"Do I have to?" Luc asked around a yawn.
"Damn right you do. Suppose German parachutists came down out of the sky? What would we do without a warning?"
"At night?" Luc didn't believe it. But the Fritzes had done all kinds of nasty things with parachutists. Maybe they'd make a night attack behind the French line. And no maybe about what Sergeant Demange would do if Luc gave him any more lip. With a martyred sigh, Luc got out of the blanket and put on his boots and his helmet. He was already wearing everything else, including his greatcoat.
His breath smoked inside the battered house. It smoked more when he stepped outside. The night was mostly clear. Stars glittered frigidly in a sky blacker than dried blood. Carolers would have loved a night like this. Right now, Luc would have bet nobody in Europe loved anybody else.
The war hadn't gone to bed. Off to the northeast, the thunder of artillery went on. He could see flashes against the horizon. Ours or theirs? he wondered. After a moment, he decided it was probably both.
Just ahead lay towns whose names brought back thunderous memories of the last war's early days: Charleroi and, a little farther east, Namur. The Germans were swarming this way again, like field-gray ants towards an enticing picnic feast. They'd fallen short of Paris the last time around. Either they would again or…
Luc didn't want to think about or. He didn't want to think about anything. He wanted to go back to sleep, or to fall asleep out here. Fear of the Boches didn't hold him back. Fear of Sergeant Demange did.
After what seemed like forever but probably wasn't, another soldier stumbled out of the house. "Go back to sleep," he said. "I've got it." A moment later, he added, "Damn Sergeant Demange anyway," under his breath.
"Sure," Luc said. He went back inside, wondering whether Demange ever slept. On all the evidence, he seemed a piece of well-made machinery rather than a man. Maybe he ran on cigarette smoke and coffee.
Come to think of it, maybe I do, too. Luc found the blanket he'd so sorrowfully abandoned. He took off boots and helmet and lay down again. The blanket didn't seem to do a thing to get him any warmer. He wondered if he'd lie there till dawn finally came. Next thing he knew, he was asleep.
"Wake up, you bum. You snore."
"I do not," Luc answered automatically, even before his eyes opened. Twenty minutes later, with some kind of mush and strong coffee inside him, he was marching again.
Refugees from Namur and Charleroi crowded the road. Some of them cheered the soldiers in their odd Walloon French. Others swore at them: "If we weren't in the way between the Germans and your damned country, they'd leave us alone!"
"As far as I'm concerned, Hitler's welcome to Belgium," Sergeant Demange retorted. "And you cocksuckers deserve him, too. Now get the hell out of our way before we open up on you!"
He would have done it. Not only that, he would have laughed while he did it. The Belgians must have figured that out, because they tumbled off the road with haste that would have been funny if this were a film and not the ruination of their lives.
Then more Belgian soldiers started falling back past the oncoming French. "You can have a taste of those bastards," a Walloon said. A couple of Flemings added something to that, but Luc didn't know what it was. If they hadn't worn Belgian uniform, he would have shot them. Their language sounded too goddamn much like German.
Charleroi had got the bejesus knocked out of it in the first war. Luc supposed it must have been rebuilt since, but it had got pounded again. Some of the wrecked buildings were still smoking. The Nazis had just worked it over, then. Half a rag doll lay in the gutter. At another time, it might have been poignant enough to move Luc to tears. But he'd seen men who looked like that. He glanced at the doll and marched on.
Out beyond Charleroi, some of Colonel de Gaulle's tanks were firing at the enemy. German shells landed around them. Without waiting for orders, Luc yanked the entrenching tool off his belt and started digging in. If Sergeant Demange didn't like it, he'd say so. A look out of the corner of Luc's eyes told him the noncom was digging, too. Nodding to himself, Luc made the dirt fly. SOME FRENCH KING A LONG TIME ago said, "Paris is worth a Mass." Vaclav Jezek had learned that in history class. As far as he was concerned, Paris was mostly a mess. By steamer from Constanta to Marseille, dodging Italian subs and seaplanes. By train from Marseille to Paris. By taxicab to the Czech embassy, which served as headquarters for the government in exile.
By taxi again to a camp outside Paris. The camp held about a regiment's worth of Czechoslovakian soldiers: mostly Czechs, with a sprinkling of antifascist Slovaks and Ruthenians. Hardly anyone had his own weapon. The French wasted little time passing out rifles. They were eager to get all their friends into the fight against Hitler's legions.
Next to none of them spoke any Czech, though. They did the same thing as the Pole who'd interned Vaclav: they used German. It worked-most Czechs knew at least some, and could translate for the ones who didn't. But speaking the enemy's language with your friends was humiliating and infuriating.
The Germans seemed to know where the camp was. Their bombers visited it every so often. This wasn't the first time Vaclav had had to sprint for a trench-far from it. The bombers also visited Paris. On the radio, the Germans claimed to be hitting only military targets. That would have been funny if it didn't make Jezek want to cry.
Three days before Christmas, his platoon jammed itself into a bus. A generation earlier, buses had hauled French troops from Paris to the war-saving Battle of the Marne. Some of the machines the Czechoslovak regiment used looked to be of vintage close to 1914.
It was cold outside. It didn't stay cold inside the bus for long, not when it was full of twice as many men as it was supposed to carry. Everybody lit a cigarette. Inside of seconds, the smoke made Vaclav's eyes sting. He didn't care. He was smoking furiously himself. Gauloises packed a heftier jolt than the miserable excuses for tobacco he'd got since he was interned.
The driver, a middle-aged Frenchman, chain-smoked with his passengers. A patch covered his left eye but didn't hide all the damage a bullet or shell fragment had done to his face. He seemed to manage all right with one eye, at least as far as driving went.
Whatever springs the bus might have had once upon a time had long since gone to the big coachwork shop in the sky. Vaclav felt every pothole, every rock. "I wonder if we'll have any kidneys left by the time we get wherever we're going," he said to the soldier sitting next to-half on top of-him.
"Why worry?" the other man replied. His dark, curly hair and hooked nose said he was a Jew. Vaclav normally had little use for Jews, but he supposed you could count on them to fight the Nazis. This fellow went on, "If we've still got 'em when we get there, the Germans'll blow 'em out of us, right?"