Getting out was harder than squeezing in had been. Vaclav stretched and twisted to work the kinks out of his back. He wished he had some coffee.
"Youse is the Czechs?" What the French officer spoke sounded more like bad Polish than Czech, but Vaclav could-barely-follow it. The Frenchman went on, "Come these ways-I will shove you into positions." He was trying, anyhow.
And maybe the Czechs did need to be shoved into positions. Artillery growled up ahead. It wasn't too close, but it was there. Maybe the Germans were crazy. Or maybe this was a feint, with the main force up in the north, the way it looked.
His shrug wasn't so fancy as the driver's but it would do. He didn't have to decide whether the Nazis were making a big push here or a little one. All he had to do was go where people told him and shoot at anybody and anything decked out in German field-gray.
He wasn't the only Czech soldier yawning as a ragged column formed. He figured he could just about manage what they needed from him. "STILLE NACHT! HEILIGE NACHT!" Hans-Ulrich Rudel sang, along with the rest of the flyers and groundcrew men at the forward base in Holland. They had a tree, brought west from Germany and decorated with gingerbread men and candles and tinsel and ornaments made from scrap metal by mechanics in between patch jobs and other repairs on the Stukas.
Hans-Ulrich had heard that carol and all the others since before the day he first knew what the words meant. With his father a churchman, it couldn't very well have been any different. But at his father's house, and at his father's church, the songs hadn't seemed to mean so much. People sang them because they'd always sung them, sang them without thinking about what the words really said.
Things were different here. You don't know what life is worth till you lay it on the line, Rudel thought. Everybody here knew this Christmas might be his last. That made it count for ever so much more than it had back in peacetime.
One of the other pilots raised a glass of schnapps. "Absent friends," he said, and knocked back the shot.
"Absent friends," the Luftwaffe men chorused. Most of them had something strong to hand, too.
Hans-Ulrich didn't. A groundcrew man clucked at him. "Shouldn't drink toasts in water. It's unlucky."
"Not water," Rudel replied with dignity. But his eggnog was unfortified.
"Close enough. Too damn close." The other pilot raised his glass again. "And here's to close enough and too damn close, as long as the bastards miss."
"Amen!" Hans-Ulrich drank to that, too, even if it was with plain eggnog.
Off in the distance, guns boomed. The ceiling was too low to let planes take off and land, but the war went on. One of the groundcrew men, a graying, wrinkled fellow with only three fingers on his left hand, said, "Wasn't like this the first Christmas in the last war."
"I've heard about the truce, Franz," Hans-Ulrich said. "Was it really as big a thing as people say-our Landsers playing football with the Tommies, and all that?"
"I know people who watched the games," Franz answered. "I know one guy who played. I didn't see 'em myself-my regiment was opposite the Frenchmen. We didn't play football with them. But we did come up out of the trenches and meet in no-man's-land, damned if we didn't. We traded cigarettes and rations and stuff you could drink, and we all said what a bunch of assholes our officers were…No offense, sir."
Everybody laughed. Rudel made sure his laughter was louder than anyone else's. You couldn't let the men think you were a stuffed shirt, even if you were-maybe especially if you were. Hans-Ulrich knew he was, at least by most people's standards.
He shrugged. He had his father's stern Lutheran God, and he had the Fuhrer (whom he saw as God's instrument on earth), and he had his Stuka (which was his own instrument on earth). As long as he had them, he didn't need to worry about anything else.
Or so he thought, till bombs started walking toward the hut where he and his countrymen were celebrating Christmas. The weather might be lousy here, but it was good enough farther west to let planes take off, and the English or French were paying a call.
They were bombing blind, of course, up there above the clouds. Let it fall, and it's bound to come down on somebody's head. That had to be what they were thinking, and they were right. The Luftwaffe did the same thing when the weather was bad, as it so often was at this season.
Hans-Ulrich didn't want to be the first one running for a trench. He also didn't want to wait too long and go sky-high in case the bombardiers got lucky. The line between courage and foolhardiness could be a fine one.
Franz took the bull by the horns. "I'm never going to go up for the goddamn Ritterkreuz," he said, and dashed out the door.
Where one man went, others could follow without losing pride. A zigzag trench ran only a few meters outside the hut for such occasions as these. As Hans-Ulrich jumped down into it-his boots squelched in mud-he tried to imagine winning the Knight's Cross to the Iron Cross himself. He'd got an Iron Cross Second Class a week before: an early Christmas present, his CO called it. But you could win an Iron Cross Second Class just by staying alive at the front for a couple of weeks-oh, not quite, but it seemed that way.
Franz had the ribbon for one, no doubt from the last war. Back then, the Iron Cross Second Class was almost the only medal an enlisted man could win. Hitler had an Iron Cross First Class, which made him an exceptional hero, because he'd never even reached sergeant.
And then Hans-Ulrich stopped worrying about Hitler's Iron Cross or anything else but living through the next few minutes. The enemy planes up there were bombing blind, but they couldn't have done better on a sunny, clear summer's day. They might not have done so well, because high-altitude bombing was turning out to be one of the big disappointments of the war. It was neither as accurate nor as terrifying and intimidating as the experts had claimed it would be.
Which didn't mean winding up on the wrong end of it was any fun. Now Rudel got a taste of what he gave the foe. The earth shook under him like a blancmange. The noise was impossible, overwhelming. Blast did its best to tear his lungs out from the inside.
After the longest six or eight minutes of Hans-Ulrich's life, the bombers droned away. "Der Herr Gott im Himmel!" he said. Then he said it again, louder, because he couldn't hear himself the first time. He stuck his head up and looked over the lip of the trench.
The hut still stood, but it leaned drunkenly Its windows were blown out-or, more likely, in. Bomb craters turned the landscape into a miniature Verdun. Something a few hundred meters away was burning enthusiastically-a truck, Hans-Ulrich saw.
Sergeant Dieselhorst stuck his head up a few meters from Hans-Ulrich. "I wouldn't mind not doing that again," the rear gunner remarked, and then, apropos of nothing that presently surrounded him, "Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas," Rudel echoed automatically. "Where were you? You weren't singing carols-I know that."
"I should hope not," the noncom said. "If you want to waste your time that way, go ahead, but I was doing something more important: I was sleeping, by God." He pointed to some trees not far away. "I was happy as a clam under there, but then the goddamn bombs started coming down."
He sounded irate in a particular way. Hans-Ulrich nodded, because he felt that same indignation. When he went out and dropped a fat one on a French truck column, that was business. But when the sons of bitches on the other side tried to blow him to the moon, it felt like dirty pool. How dare they do such a thing? Didn't they know the Fuhrer and the Reich were going to win any which way? Why were they working so hard in what was bound to be a forlorn hope?
And why were they coming so close to killing him? That was the real question.