“I heard you might be able to take up arms again for the cause after all,” she said gravely. “That’s good news-better than I expected when they brought you here.”
“Better than I expected, too, querida.” Chaim’s Spanish wasn’t smooth or grammatical, but it got the job done. “Wish I could take you in my arms.”
“No.” Her voice went hard and flat. “It’s over. Don’t you see that?”
“I see it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Chaim sighed. “How’s Carlos Federico?” He’d never expected to have a son named for Marx and Engels, especially not in Spanish.
“He’s well. Maybe I will bring him here again. It is good to see you are doing better, too. Now I must go.” And La Martellita did. Five chilly minutes-that was all he’d got. He could count himself lucky … or he could go back to daydreaming about Patience and Persistence.
German 105s pounded the trench line in which Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh crouched-well, cowered, if you wanted to get right down to it. In the last war, the Germans would have-had-shot 77s at him. Those were a lot less dangerous; they didn’t fly as far, and, because they came from flat-shooting guns rather than higher-trajectory howitzers, they had a smaller chance of coming down into the trench with you and going off.
He hadn’t thought in the last war that he’d still be soldiering in this one. But the other choice was going back into the Welsh coal mine from which the Army had plucked him. A soldier’s life, especially in peacetime, seemed better than that. So did anything else, hell very possibly included.
So he’d stayed in. He’d risen in the ranks, as far as a lad plucked from a Welsh coal mine could hope to rise. Staff sergeants saluted subalterns and first lieutenants. They called them sir. But, with their years of experience, they mattered more than the junior officers nominally set over them. A smart regimental colonel would sooner trust a senior sergeant than any lieutenant ever hatched, and would back him against quite a few captains, too.
All of which was fine when there were choices to be made and courses to be plotted. When Fritz was throwing hate around, all you could do was hunker down and hope it missed you. No, you could do one more thing besides. Walsh fumbled in the breast pocket of his battledress tunic, pulled out a packet of Navy Cuts, and stuck one in his mouth. The shelling hadn’t made his hands shake too much to keep him from striking a match.
He sucked in smoke. Logic said that couldn’t make anything better. Logic be damned, though. A cigarette relaxed him to some small but perceptible degree. He wasn’t the only one, either. Nobody in the front-line trenches ever quit smoking. Plenty of people who’d never had the habit before picked it up when the Germans started trying to kill them, though.
Sure as hell, the Cockney who’d pushed up against the muddy front wall of the trench next to him nudged him and said, “ ’Ere, Sarge, can I bum a fag orf yer?”
“Here you go, Jack.” Walsh handed him the packet.
“Fanks.” Jack Scholes took one and gave it back. He was young enough to be the staff sergeant’s son. He had close-cropped blond hair, a tough, narrow face with pointed features, and snaggle teeth. He looked like a mean terrier. He fought like one, too. He was the stubborn sort of soldier who took a deal of killing.
Walsh leaned close so Scholes could get a light from his cigarette. Most of the German fire was a couple of hundred yards long. That was about the only good news Walsh could find.
He’d just ground the tiny butt of his latest smoke under the heel of his boot when the barrage stopped. Beside him, Scholes flipped off the safety on his Lee-Enfield. “Now we see if the buggers mean it or not,” he said.
That was also how things looked to Walsh. If the Germans did mean it, they’d throw men and tanks into the attack and try to push the British forces back toward the border between Belgium and France. Otherwise, they’d sit and wait and make the Tommies come to them.
They’d done a lot of sitting and waiting lately. With positions hardened by reinforced concrete, with MG-42s waiting to turn any enemy attack into a charnel house, with tanks that had bigger guns and thicker armor than anything the Allies boasted, why shouldn’t the Nazis wait? The Western Front was narrow. Their foes had to come at them head-on. They could bleed them white without paying too high a butcher’s bill of their own.
But trusting the Germans to do the same thing every time didn’t pay. Several English Bren guns started shooting all at nearly the same time. A mournful shout spelled out what that meant: “Here they come!”
Scholes popped up onto the firing step, squeezed off a couple of rounds, and quickly ducked down again. Alistair Walsh stuck his head up for a look, but only for a look. In place of a rifle, he carried a Sten submachine gun, one of the ugliest weapons ever invented. The stamped metal pieces were more botched together than properly assembled. Some of them looked as if they’d been cut from sheet metal with tin snips; for all Walsh knew, they had. If you dropped a Sten, chances were it would either fall apart or go off and shoot you in the leg.
At close quarters, though, it spat out a lot of slugs in a hurry. A Lee-Enfield could kill out past half a mile. Inside a couple of hundred yards, the Sten was the horse to back.
The Germans weren’t inside a couple of hundred yards yet. They had to work through the gaps in their own wire, cross the space between their stuff and the stuff the English had put up, and get through that before they could start jumping down into the trenches.
Their machine guns made it dangerous for any Tommy to stick his head up over the parapet and shoot at them. Twenty feet down the trench from Walsh, an Englishman bonelessly toppled over backwards. A bullet had punched a neat hole in his forehead. It had probably blown half his brains back into his tin hat, but Walsh couldn’t see that-a small mercy.
Possibly a bigger mercy was that he hadn’t seen any German tanks moving up with the foot soldiers. He especially dreaded the fearsome Tigers, which smashed British armor as if it were made to the same shoddy standards as the Sten gun.
He popped up again and squeezed a short burst at the oncoming Germans, more to encourage his own men than to put the fear of God in the Fritzes. “Keep your peckers up!” he called to the soldiers in dirty khaki. “Stand firm and they’ll turn tail. Wait and see!”
They did, too. Some of them lurked in no-man’s-land for a while. A few machine-gun teams set up in shell holes so they could rake the English line from shorter range. You could do that with an MG-42. No other gun-certainly not the Bren, fine weapon though it was-combined mobility and firepower so well.
But MG-42s that came out of their concrete machine-gun nests were MG-42s that trench mortars could reach. The mortar bombs weren’t noisy leaving their tubes, and flew almost silently. They went bang only when they burst. One by one, the Fritzes’ gun crews either died or pulled back toward their own line.
As things quieted down, Jack Scholes turned to Walsh and asked, “ ’Ow’d you know they was bluffin’, loik?”
“No armor,” Walsh answered.
“Ah. Roight.” Scholes nodded. What trade would he ply if he weren’t a soldier? Sneak-thief was Walsh’s first guess. “They’d’ve been roight up our arse’ole wiv a few tanks along, eh?”
“Too right, they would,” Walsh said. “But without ’em they were just yanking our chain. They killed a few of us, we killed a few of them, and none of it will change the way the war turns out even a ha’penny’s worth.”
“Wot would?” Scholes sounded interested and intrigued, as if he weren’t used to thinking this way but found he liked it. “Droppin’ a bomb on ’Itler’s ’ead?”
“That ought to do something,” Walsh agreed.
“Too many back in Bloighty like the bastard, though,” Scholes said. “We never would’ve gone in wiv ’em if Winston ’adn’t bought ’imself that plot.”