A British machine gun up ahead started barking. A moment later, another joined in. "Oh, bleeding hell," Walsh muttered again. He'd hoped things would stay quiet for a while. The weather was bad enough to have made any push in the last war bog down in mud and slush. But there were many more paved roads for wheels to use now, while tracks could force a way where even men on foot had trouble going.
To his glad surprise, he heard engines coming up from the southwest. "Matildas!" somebody yelled. The British tanks waltzed up to the line a few minutes later. Waltz was about all they could do; they made eight miles an hour on roads, and were slower off. They had thick armor-German antitank shells mostly bounced off of them. But they carried only a single rifle-caliber machine gun. Walsh would have wished for French machines that had some hope of keeping up with German panzers…and of knocking them out in a stand-up fight.
Still and all, any tanks were better than none. If panzers came after you and you couldn't hope to fight them, what choice did you have but to fall back? Walsh waved to the tank commanders, who rode head and shoulders out of their cramped turrets. "Give 'em hell!" he shouted.
"That's what we're here for," a tank commander answered in elegant Oxbridgian tones. Walsh's own accent was decidedly below the salt. After mixing with men of every class in the last war and since, he could make sense of all kinds of accents, from Received Pronunciation to Cockney to broad Yorkshire to Scots burr. They reminded him the whole country was in the fight.
The Matilda's rattled forward. Walsh dug his foxhole deeper and wider, and built up the earthwork in front of it. He also looked around to decide where he'd go if he had to get out in a hurry. You didn't want to have to worry about that at the last minute. He who hesitated then was lost.
A cannon barked-one of the Germans' 37mm antitank guns. They were small and light enough to keep up with advancing troops. A split second later, the shell whanged off a Matilda. The British tank's machine gun never hesitated. Walsh grinned. Sure as hell, Matildas were tough old gals.
But then a bigger gun boomed. This time, the noise of the impact was Whang! Blam! That Matilda brewed up. So did another one a moment later. Hitler's boys had an 88mm antiaircraft gun. In their thoroughness, they'd also seen fit to stock it with armor-piercing ammunition. Walsh didn't think a tank in the world could keep out an 88mm shell.
Puffin knew that report for what it was, too. "Bad luck they've got an 88 here," he said.
"Too fucking right it is," Walsh agreed. He wondered if the German monster had taken out the tank commander with the posh accent. He hoped not, for whatever that was worth.
Another Matilda went up in flames. The rest of them started pulling back. They couldn't even escape in a hurry. Whang! Blam! Another gout of flame, another column of smoke-another pyre.
And here came the German infantry. They loped forward in loose order, diving for cover whenever somebody fired at them. They shot back from their bellies. They had machine guns. Their air-cooled models were lighter and easier to lug along than most of the weapons the British used.
"Panzers!" The shout rang out from half a dozen throats at once.
The German machines were a hell of a lot faster than the poor Matildas. Most of their commanders also drove standing up in the turret. Walsh drew a bead on one. He pressed the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder. The German threw up his hands, then slumped over sideways. It was a Panzer I-if the commander was wounded or dead, the driver couldn't man the guns. (Well, he could, but then he couldn't drive.) The machine turned around almost in its own length and got out of there.
Others came on. So did the foot soldiers they shepherded. Bullets thudded into the mud in front of Walsh. None got through. All the same, the neighborhood wasn't healthy any more.
Walsh scrambled out of his hole and ran for the stone fence he'd spotted not far away. Out in the open, he felt worse than naked-he felt like a snail with its shell pulled off. Bullets cracked past him and stitched the mud near his feet.
With a gasp not far from a wail, he threw himself down behind the fence. Then he popped up and fired at the Germans. Four men threw themselves flat because of one bullet. They were out in the open, too, and knew how vulnerable they were. Walsh shot at one of them. The man twisted, grabbing his leg.
"Sorry, pal," Walsh said. Most of the time, you didn't see the enemy you hit. Here he'd done it twice in a few minutes. Instead of making him proud, it just made him hope the Germans wouldn't do the same thing to him. HUDDLING IN A SLIT TRENCH with half-frozen mud on the bottom wasn't what Hans-Ulrich Rudel had had in mind when the war started. That didn't mean he wasn't doing it. His squadron's latest airstrip lay a few kilometers west of Oostende, on the Strait of Dover. You could damn near spit from Belgium to England here.
And you could damn near spit from England to Belgium. The RAF had come over every night since Belgium threw in the towel. Night bombing wasn't very accurate, but you didn't want to stay in your nice, cozy sleeping bag when the bombs whistled down. A couple of intrepid souls had tried it. One of them was in the hospital, the other dead.
Fragments from a big one that hit much too close whined past overhead. "Those miserable pigdogs!" Hans-Ulrich said around a yawn. He was amazed at how little sleep he could get by with. "We ought to bomb them for a change, keep them up all night."
"How do you know we aren't?" somebody else said. There in the chilly darkness, Rudel couldn't tell who it was.
"We'd hear about it on the radio if we were," he answered. "They wouldn't keep something like that quiet-they'd brag about it."
"Er hat Recht," another Luftwaffe man said. The rest of the shivering Germans must have thought Hans-Ulrich was right, too, because nobody contradicted him. The Reich boasted about what it did to its enemies. And why not? They deserved what they got for presuming to oppose it.
"And here, we really could do it," Hans-Ulrich said musingly. He'd spent the war plastering positions on the Continent. That needed doing, of course, but if the English thought they could send bombers out from their island without getting any attention in return they had to be out of their minds.
Another big bomb burst nearby. The English were either good or lucky. "It'll be a mess come morning," someone said dolefully.
That proved all too true. The runways were cratered. One Ju-87 was a write-off in spite of the revetments in which the bombers hid. Another had taken enough damage to keep it out of the air for a while. A snorting steamroller and a pick-and-shovel crew started setting the strip to rights. Hans-Ulrich fumed. The day was bright and clear-perfect flying weather, no matter how cold it was-but here he sat, stuck on the ground.
Damn the English anyway!
Without the steamroller, setting things straight would have taken even longer than it did. Three days went by before the strip was flyable again. The British bombers came over by night twice more, but their aim wasn't so good. The airstrip came away unscathed.
When the fourth morning also promised good weather, the squadron commander summoned his pilots and said, "Wir fahren gegen England." He paused for a moment, then went on, "No, I'm not throwing a song title at you. We are going to go against England." He eyed Rudel. "Maybe someone from the High Command was in the trench with you a few nights ago, because I got the order yesterday."
"Yes, sir," Hans-Ulrich said. He hoped the tune from "Wir fahren gegen England" wouldn't get stuck in his head. It was catchy.