"Depends," Wolfgang Storch muttered. "How many goddamn Frenchies are in it now?"
"Questions?" Gross asked. Nobody said anything loud enough for him to hear it. Wolfgang's question was a good one, but the lieutenant wouldn't be able to answer it. They'd have to find out: the hard way, odds were.
Southwest…Willi looked up into the sky, but clouds covered it and told him nothing. He hoped it didn't start to snow while they were marching. That would be all they needed, wouldn't it?
Willi might not know southwest from artichokes, but a soft click and a slight rasp said Lieutenant Gross was opening his pocket compass. "This way," he said confidently. "Follow me."
Like the fellow at the end of the pontoon bridge, he spoke up every so often to let his men know where he was. Willi tramped along, trying not to think. He wished he were back in Breslau and home in bed, or even wrapped in a blanket in some shell hole. It was cold, and getting colder. Marching warmed, but only so much.
Some people did light up once they got far enough away from the bridge. The smell of harsh French tobacco filled the frosty air. Almost everybody smoked looted Gauloises or Gitanes in preference to the Junos and Privats and other German brands that came up along with the rations. The cigarettes the Wehrmacht got were supposed to be better than what civilians smoked back home. That only went to show better wasn't the same as good.
Ten or twelve kilometers. A couple of easy hours in the daylight. In black night, feeling his way along, stumbling or falling every so often, getting thwacked by branches that he couldn't see in the Hazelwood, Willi didn't have much fun. He also didn't go very fast. Neither did anyone else.
And there were Frenchmen in the Bois des Hazelles. Willi and his pals had to be coming to the end of it-the sky was starting to go from black to charcoal gray in the southeast-when someone called out, "Qui va?"
"Un ami," Lieutenant Gross said. Ami meant friend; Willi had picked that up from surrendering Frenchmen. Now-would it do the trick?
It didn't. The poilu gave forth with a fresh challenge, one Willi didn't get. Maybe he wanted a password. Whatever he wanted, Gross didn't have it. The shooting started a moment later.
The froggies, damn them, had a machine gun right there. It spat fire in the darkness. Tracers stabbed out at the oncoming Germans. They were scary as hell. Willi flopped down on his belly and crawled forward like a slug. He didn't want to get a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to.
As he crawled, he realized that those tracers weren't doing the guys at the Hotchkiss gun any favors. Every time the machine gunners opened up, they guided their enemies toward them. And it wasn't really light enough for them to see what they were aiming at. So…
Willi yanked the fuse cord on a potato-masher grenade. He flung it toward the machine gunners, who had no idea he was there. But the grenade hit a branch or something, because it didn't burst where he wanted it to. The Frenchmen serving the gun yelled, but they didn't scream. He froze. If they spotted him, he was sausage meat-and it was getting lighter.
Something off to one side distracted them. They turned the Hotchkiss in that direction and started banging away. They nailed somebody, too. That shriek sounded bad. But, while they were busy over there, Willi slithered behind a-hazel?-tree.
He pulled another grenade off his belt. He threw this one sidearm: not the way they taught you in basic, but he wanted to keep it low so it didn't bounce off anything. Then he flattened out again. If this one didn't do the job, though, he had the bad feeling flattening out wouldn't be enough to save his young ass.
Bang! He got screams this time. Then it was forward, as fast as he could scramble. He had no idea how badly hurt the Frenchmen were. He had to finish them before they or their buddies got that machine gun going again.
They were down. They were thrashing, not worried about the Hotchkiss at all. He shot them to make sure they didn't worry about anything else again. He was putting a fresh clip on his Mauser when a shape loomed up out of the morning twilight. He started to give it the bayonet, but checked himself when he recognized the familiar shape of a Stahlhelm.
With a dry chuckle, Corporal Baatz said, "I would've plugged you before you could drive that home."
"Let's go after the Frenchmen," Willi answered, and left it right there. He didn't think Baatz could have got him if he'd followed through, and he was half sorry he hadn't. Maybe more than half sorry.
More machine guns-and poilus with rifles, grenades, mortars, and all the other usual nastiness-crowded the Hazelwood. Methodically, the Germans cleaned them out and pressed on toward Charleville-Mezieres. Panzers drew tracks across the snow on the flat, open country south and east of the woods. Pillars of smoke rising to the cloudy sky marked the pyres of a couple that would go no farther. But the runners were the ones that mattered. The French tried to make a stand in front of the town. Cannon and machine-gun fire from the German army sent them tumbling back in retreat.
Willi looked around. There was Wolfgang. His bayonet had blood on it-not Arno Baatz's, but somebody's, all right. "Where's the lieutenant?" Willi asked him.
"Down. I bet he loses his arm," Wolfgang answered. "The fucking Hotchkiss got him just before somebody did for it."
"That was me," Willi said.
"Yeah? Well, it needed doing." Storch paused to light up. Then he said, "Sergeant Pieck caught one right through the foot, too. That means Awful Arno's got a section-maybe the platoon, till they give us a new officer."
"Jesus Christ! I knew I should have stuck him!" Willi explained how he'd almost bayoneted Baatz by the French machine gun. His buddy was good for even more reasons why he should have than he'd thought of for himself. Willi pulled a pack of Gauloises out of his pocket, but the familiar winged helmet shielded no more cigarettes. "Let me bum a butt off you."
"What a useless creature you are! First you didn't scrag the corporal, and now you steal my smokes." Wolfgang gave him his own pack. Willi did have a match. He got the cigarette going. The two Landsers tramped on. THE POLES HAD A GOOD medium bomber. The PZL P-37 could carry more than twice the bomb load of a Tupolev SB-2. Fortunately for the Red Army and Air Force, the Poles didn't have a hell of a lot of them. Whenever the enemy found a chance, he did his best to strike at the airstrips the Red Air Force used.
Sergei Yaroslavsky took those raids for granted. The Poles made them at high altitude, and they got out of Soviet airspace in a hurry. An occasional bomb gave the groundcrew some work to do repairing a runway. More often than not, the bombs missed by hundreds of meters or even by kilometers. Nothing to get excited about.
Then things changed. Sergei was barely awake when antiaircraft guns around the airstrip started banging away at sunrise. He tumbled out of his cot, wondering if the gunners had the galloping jimjams.
They didn't. Bombs crashed down on the runways and on the bombers near them. Not all the bombers were in revetments, the way they should have been. It hadn't seemed worth the trouble.
"Those aren't Elks!" somebody yelled-that was the P-37's nickname. "Those are motherfucking Stukas!"
"Bozhemoi!" Yaroslavsky shouted. A bombardier said something electric about the way the Devil's grandmother had buggered up the antiaircraft guns. Satan and his relatives might be as out of fashion as God, but people hadn't forgotten about them, either.
Sergei threw himself flat in the snow. That was all he could do now. One after another, the Fascist dive-bombers stooped on the airstrip like falcons after pigeons.