Vaclav eyed him. Maybe you weren't so smart if you supposed something like that. "If you don't think we can beat them, why did you sign up for this?"
"You gotta try." The Jewish soldier paused to light a Gitane. He spoke Czech like a big-city man; if he wasn't from Prague, Vaclav didn't know anything. After sucking in smoke, he added, "Damn Poles don't like Jews any better than the Germans do."
"I guess not." Vaclav hadn't thought of that; it was nothing he'd ever needed to worry about.
"So how about you, goy?" That wasn't Czech or German, but Vaclav had no trouble working out what it meant. "How come you're here? How come you aren't yelling, 'Heil Hitler!'?"
Who do you think you are, asking me questions like that? After a moment, Vaclav tried to shrug. Inside the crowded bus, it wasn't easy. "Fuck Hitler," he said simply.
"That'll do." The Jew nodded. "I'm David. Who the hell are you?"
"Vaclav." Jezek laughed. "Like everybody else, almost."
David started singing the Christmas song about Good King Wenceslaus. He knew all the words. Vaclav must have looked flabbergasted, because the Jew started to laugh. "I've been hearing it ever since I was born," David said. "Hell, I must have heard it while I was still inside my mom. I'd better know it."
"I guess." Vaclav hadn't thought about that, either. If you were a Jew, you had your own stuff. But everybody else's stuff had to land on you, too, whether you wanted it or not. If that wasn't weird, what was?
After a few seconds, somebody else started singing about Good King Wenceslaus. It was that season of the year. A moment later, the Czech carol filled the bus like cigarette smoke. "Well, I see what you mean," Vaclav said.
David nodded again. "Bet your ass. It's always like this."
The driver didn't speak any Czech. To him, the carol was just noise. He didn't need long to get sick of it. He yelled something in French. Not enough of the Czech soldiers spoke enough French for it to do any good. Then the driver screamed, "Shut up, you fucking pigdogs!" auf Deutsch. Maybe he'd learned it in a prison camp or something. That got people's attention-maybe not in a good way, but it did.
"Ah, your mother," David said, first in Czech, then in Yiddish.
Vaclav realized things were starting to go wrong when a gendarme-or maybe he was a military policeman-waved the bus onto a detour. The new road was narrow and twisty. The driver started swearing. So did the Czech soldiers as they slid from side to side.
Then the side road petered out-or maybe there was a crater up ahead. "Heraus!" the driver said as the bus' door wheezed open.
"What do we do now?" Vaclav asked.
"What else?" David said. "We walk."
Walk they did. Vaclav had lost his conditioning after getting interned. Tramping along with a forty-kilo pack on his back wasn't his idea of a good time. The road seemed uphill both ways. Despite spatters of sleet, he soon started sweating. He threw down a cigarette butt and heard it hiss to extinction in an icy puddle.
That sparked a thought: "They say smoking is bad for your wind."
"Screw 'em," David replied. He had another cigarette in his mouth.
Airplane motors droned high overhead. Bombs whistled down out of the clouds. They fell at random across the French countryside. The low ceiling grounded the German Stukas. Vaclav didn't miss them-those bastards could put one right on top of an outhouse if they saw you walk in there to take a crap.
His platoon, of course, wasn't the only unit on the march. He sometimes wondered if there was anybody in France who wasn't. They went past a bunch of Frenchmen who'd got hit by one of those randomly falling bombs-a 250-kilo job, or maybe a 500. It wasn't pretty. If the swine that went through a meat-packing plant wore uniforms, they would have looked a lot like this about halfway through.
Czech medics did what they could to help their French counterparts. You had to hope the French would have done the same for a Czech outfit. The rest of the platoon went around the blood and the moans and the shattered bodies. Vaclav didn't look closely at them. He'd already seen more death and devastation than he ever wanted to remember.
And now you're volunteering to be part of it again? he asked himself. You could have sat tight in that internment camp. It wasn't exciting, but nobody was out to blow your balls off, either.
His shrug made the straps on that heavy pack dig into his shoulders. Too late to worry about it now. He'd been bored in the camp. Maybe he'd been stupid to leave. But if everybody sat tight, if nobody tried to stop Hitler, wouldn't the little bastard with the ugly mustache end up telling the world what to do?
It looked that way to Vaclav. He glanced over at David, slogging along beside him. David had his own reasons to hate the Nazis, all right. Most of the time, Czech and Jew would have been wary around each other. Not here. The Germans had brought them together. A miracle of sorts, or maybe just proof of the old saying, The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Bombs turned a roadside meadow into a lunar landscape. Cattle lay sprawled like soldiers. They weren't bloated and stinking. Some of them still moved and lowed piteously, so they'd gone down in this latest bombardment. Part of the weight Vaclav carried was rations. All the same…
"Fresh meat!" David got the words out before he could.
The platoon commander was a fresh-faced lieutenant named Svabinsky. Maybe he could have kept the soldiers from running into the field, maybe not. But he didn't even try. "Beefsteaks!" he said happily, and pulled the bayonet off his belt.
They weren't exactly beefsteaks. No butcher worth half his pay would have given them such a fancy name. They were chunks of meat haggled off the carcasses by hungrily enthusiastic amateurs. Toasted over a roaring fire, Vaclav's had a charred crust and a bloody interior. He didn't care. The gobbet was big enough to make his belly shut up. What else mattered in the field?
He rolled himself in a blanket and lay down by the fire. Lieutenant Svabinsky made sure people fed it through the night. Some time in the middle of the long, cold darkness, the blaring of car horns woke Vaclav. People shouted in French and French-accented German and even, once or twice, in Czech. Road damage might have stopped the buses, but the French army had cobbled together this swarm of automobiles to bring the Czechoslovakian soldiers up to the front.
As Vaclav stumbled towards one of them-they showed no lights, of course-he laughed through a yawn. The French were in a fix, the same way his own country had been. But they were trying to muddle through. He couldn't imagine the efficient Germans coming up with a mad arrangement like this.
He piled into a car. As soon as it was packed, the driver took off. Vaclav hoped the fellow knew where he was going. He must have. Even staying on the road couldn't have been easy, but the Frenchman did it. Vaclav dozed off again, jerking awake whenever the car hit a pothole.
Somebody outside said something in a language that sounded like German. Vaclav's eyes flew open. Morning twilight let him see a soldier in a French-looking uniform. What came out of the man's mouth still sounded like German. A Belgian, Vaclav realized. Are we in Belgium already?
The soldier turned out to speak French, too. That helped the driver, though not Vaclav. The Czech was glad to have a little light. The road was worse than ever, and wound through rugged, heavily wooded country. "What is this place?" Vaclav asked in German.
"They call it the Ardennes," the driver answered in the same tongue.
"Why do they want us here?" Vaclav said. "You'd have to be crazy to try and push an attack through terrain like this."
With a magnificent Gallic shrug, the driver said, "With people like the Germans, who can tell?" Somebody yelled and waved. The Frenchman hit the brakes. The car-a battered old Citroen-lurched to a stop. "You get out here."