"We'll all choke on it-and then on the scotch. How's that?" Paul said. He swigged from the Calvados, then passed it along.
Luc thought that was mighty smart-not university-smart, maybe, but soldier-smart for sure. A man who had both scotch and applejack was a man who made his buddies jealous. A man who shared them made friends for life-or at least till one of the other guys got his hands on something nice.
Two big knocks of good, strong booze. Shelter from the winter weather. A soldier's life could be simple sometimes. A few tiny pleasures, and everything seemed wonderful.
The next morning, replacements came up to the front. Luc eyed them with mingled suspicion and contempt. They were too pale, too neat, too plump. They carried too much equipment. Their uniforms weren't dirty and torn. Their noncoms hardly knew how to swear.
"Poor darlings!" someone jeered. "Someone forgot to lock the nursery, and look where they ended up."
A shell burst half a kilometer away. Some of the new fish flinched. That made Luc want to start laughing. "They have to come closer than that to hurt you," he said. "Don't worry-they will."
A lieutenant as young and unweathered as his troops pointed an angry finger at him. "Where is your superior, soldier?" he snapped.
"I guess I'm him…sir," Sergeant Demange said, the usual Gitane bobbing in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. "What do you need?"
He was grimy and unshaven. He looked as if he'd killed better men than that baby lieutenant-and he had. The officer had the rank, but Demange had the presence. Luc watched the lieutenant's bravado leak out through the soles of his boots. "Tell that man to be more respectful," he managed, but his voice lacked conviction.
"Sure," Demange said, and then, to Luc, "Be more respectful, you hear?"
"Sorry, Sergeant." Luc went along with the charade.
"There you go, sir," Demange said to the lieutenant. "You happy now?"
Plainly, the lieutenant wasn't. Just as plainly, being unhappy wouldn't do him one goddamn bit of good. Demange's attitude and graying stubble said he'd fought in the first war, while the lieutenant hadn't done much fighting in this one yet. His tongue slid across the hairline mustache that darkened the skin just above his upper lip, but he didn't say anything more. He just kept on walking.
More German shells came in. Maybe the Boches were probing for that battery of 75s. Whatever they were doing, those rising screams in the air said this salvo was trouble. "Hit the dirt!" Luc yelled. He was already flat by the time the words came out. Several other veterans shouted the same thing-also from their bellies.
Bam! He felt as if a squad of Paris flics were beating on him with their nightsticks. Blast picked him up and slammed him back down again. "Oof!" he said-he came down on a rock that would bruise his belly and just missed knocking the wind out of him. Jagged fragments whined overhead. Several of them spanged off the barn's stone wall. One drew a bloody line across the back of Luc's hand. What he said then was worse than Oof!
More shells landed a couple of hundred meters away, and then more farther off still. Luc opened and closed his hands a couple of times. All his fingers worked-no tendons cut. Only a scratch, as these things went. It still hurt like blazes, though.
Cautiously, he raised his head. When he did, he forgot about his own little wound. One or two of the German shells had come down right by-maybe even among-the raw troops. They didn't know anything about flattening out. You could scream at them, but they needed a few seconds to get what you were saying and a few more to figure out what they should do.
All of which added up to a few fatal seconds too long.
Some of the soldiers were still standing. More were on the ground now-men and pieces of men. The air was thick with the stink of blood, as it might have been after explosions in a slaughterhouse. This wasn't quite that. This was explosions that produced a slaughterhouse.
A soldier stared stupidly at the spouting stump of his arm. Not three meters from him, the kid lieutenant stood there with his face white and twisted into a rictus of horror. "Merde," Luc muttered. He scrambled to his feet and ran over to the maimed kid. A leather bootlace did duty for a tourniquet. The spout became a tiny trickle.
And the soldier came out of shock and started to shriek. Luc dug the morphine syrette out of the fellow's wound kit and jabbed him with it. The drug hit hard and fast. The soldier's eyes closed and he passed out. Luc thought he would live if he hadn't bled too much. Unlike most battlefield wounds, the amputation was almost as neat as if a surgeon had done it.
The poor lieutenant still hadn't unfrozen. Some of his men were helping the veterans help their buddies, but he stood rooted to the spot. "You all right, sir?" Luc heard the rough sympathy in his own voice. This wasn't the first freeze-up he'd seen. It was a bad one, though. He tried again, louder this time: "You all right?"
"I-" The officer shook himself like a dog coming out of cold water. Then, violently, he crossed himself. And then he bent over and was sick. Spitting and coughing, he choked out, "I regret to say I am not all right at all."
"Well, this is pretty bad." Luc held out his canteen. "Here. Rinse your mouth. Get rid of the taste."
"Merci." The lieutenant did. As he handed the canteen back to Luc, he suddenly looked horrified and took off for the closest bushes at a dead run.
"He just realize he shat himself?" Sergeant Demange asked dryly.
"That's my guess," Luc said.
"He's not the first. He won't be the last, either," Demange said. "I've done it in both wars, Christ knows. You?"
"Oui." If the sergeant hadn't admitted it, Luc wouldn't have, either. But since he had…Luc knew that was a big brotherhood, sure as hell. It probably included more than half the people who'd ever come under machine-gun or artillery fire. More than half the people who'd ever been up to the front, in other words. "War's a bitch."
"And a poxed bitch to boot," Demange agreed. Luc found himself nodding. • • • SNOW FLEW AS NEAR HORIZONTALLY as made no difference. The wind howled out of the north. Anastas Mouradian looked out the window of the flimsy hut by the airstrip and shuddered. "I wish I were back in Armenia," he said in his accented Russian. "We have civilized weather down there."
Another officer swigged from a bottle of vodka and then set it down. They weren't going to fly today-why not drink? "Shit, this isn't so bad."
That was too much for Sergei Yaroslavsky "The Devil's grandmother, it's not! Bozhemoi, man! Where d'you come from?"
"Strelka-Chunya," the other man answered.
"Where the hell is that?"
"About a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk."
"A thousand kilometers…north of Irkutsk?" Sergei echoed. Then he said, "Bozehmoi!" again. Irkutsk lay next to Lake Baikal, in the heart of Siberia. Go north from there and you'd just get colder. He hadn't imagined such a thing was possible, which only went to show your imagination reached so far and no further. He made as if to doff his fur cap. "All right, pal. If you come from there, this isn't so bad-for you."
"But why would anybody want to go there in the first place?" Mouradian asked. That struck Sergei as a damn good question, too.
And the Siberian flyer-his name was Bogdan Koroteyev-had an answer for it: "My people are trappers. If you're going to do that, you have to go where the animals live."
Through the roaring wind, Sergei heard, or thought he heard, a low rumble in the distance. "Is that guns?" he asked.
"Or bombs going off." The Siberian had put away enough vodka so he didn't much care. "Damn Poles are stubborn bastards." He shoved the bottle across the rickety table. "Want a slug?"