“You know something, sir?” he said to Rochus Mauer, not quite out of the blue.
“What’s that?” the engineering officer asked.
“Politics is way too important to be left to politicians. All they ever do is make a hash of it.”
Captain Mauer smiled. He had a rather foxy face, with bushy eyebrows, a russet mustache, and a pointed chin. “I won’t try to tell you you’re wrong, Commander. Politicians do make a hash of things. But do you know what else? Generals who end up running things make a hash of them, too. If you put engineers in charge, we’d only find some different way to foul them up.”
“What’s the answer, then?” Lemp asked.
“I haven’t got one,” Mauer said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. We’re people. Making messes is what we do. Love affairs should be great. And they are-till we see someone else we’d rather have. We spoil our children, or else we’re so mean we make them hate us. We lie. We cheat. We steal. Is it any wonder our countries do the same?”
“When you put it like that, I guess not,” Lemp replied.
Off in the distance, a machine gun rattled like one of those venomous American snakes. Lemp cocked his head toward the noise, gauging whether it was close enough to mean trouble. A couple of minutes later, a cannon answered. The machine gun fired another burst. The cannon spoke again, and then again. The machine gun stayed quiet after that. Lemp hoped the cannon belonged to the Salvation Committee.
“If all the men carried automatic rifles, machine guns wouldn’t matter so much,” Captain Mauer said.
“I understood that rifle rounds are so strong, it’s hard to make an automatic rifle sturdy enough to stay reliable but light enough for a man to carry,” Lemp said.
“From what I hear, they’ve developed a round halfway between the pistol cartridge a Schmeisser fires and a full-sized rifle round,” Mauer answered. “It does the job. I haven’t seen the weapon yet, but they’re calling it a Sturmgewehr.”
“An assault rifle?” Lemp echoed. “Well, isn’t that interesting?”
CHAPTER 24
Aristide Demange sourly eyed the Germans going on about their business in southern Belgium. The truce between the new government in Germany and the Allies was holding. The business the Boches were going about was packing up and getting ready to go home. The matter-of-fact way they went at it suggested they’d been tourists here for the past few years, or possibly men who’d been assigned to work in a foreign land.
That might have been how they felt about it. Demange knew goddamn well how he felt about it. His trigger finger itched, that was how. There they were, figures in Feldgrau, some of them only a couple of hundred meters away. They weren’t even trying to stay under cover. Of course he wanted to kill them!
Not all the French soldiers felt the same way, but some of them did. “Doesn’t seem natural,” one said, pointing toward the Germans. “Whenever I spot one of those cons, I know I’m supposed to shoot him. I know he’ll shoot me if I don’t, too.”
“That’s about the size of it.” Demange nodded. “Only now we can’t.”
“Now we can’t.” The poilu nodded. “Seems a shame to let ’em go back to Bocheland without putting some holes in ’em, n’est-ce pas? In a few years, we’ll have to kick ’em out of here again, chances are.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Demange said. “But knocking ’em flat so they’d know better than to try that kind of crap, the politicians have no stomach for it. It would cost a lot of lives, which they care about a little, and it would cost of lot of money, which they care about a lot. Keep taxes high and you might lose the next election, God forbid.”
A truck rolled up, over on the other side of the wire. Some of the Germans piled into it. A couple of them kissed Belgian women good-bye before they did. One Fritz-an officer, by his cap-shook hands with a Belgian in a top hat. They exchanged bows. They didn’t brush cheeks, but it was plainly a near-run thing. The officer got into the truck, too. Smoke belching from its exhaust, it headed off to the east.
Louis Mirouze came up in time to see the truck disappear behind a grove of beat-up apple trees. “Some more of them gone,” the second lieutenant said.
“They aren’t gone,” Demange said. “If they were gone, they’d be under those fat black crosses they use on their military graveyards. They’re just going back to get ready for the next round.”
“It could be. I think it’s all too likely, in fact,” Mirouze said. “But I also think that won’t happen tomorrow or next week or next year. What will you do in the meanwhile?”
“Whatever the fat cochons set over me tell me to do. What else?” Demange answered. “They’d have to cut me out of this goddamn uniform. I don’t know how to take it off any more. How about you, kid?”
Mirouze’s sallow cheeks turned pink. “You will laugh.”
“Try me.”
“At the university, I was a student of American literature. Well, no-of American writing. I am particularly interested in the popular magazines: the stories of the Old West, the crime stories, the love stories, the prize-fighting stories, the stories about rocket ships and Martians with eyes on stalks.”
He was right-Demange did laugh. Then the older man asked, “Can you get a job teaching about that kind of stuff?”
“You are a practical type,” Mirouze said with respect. “I read these things because I enjoy them. They fascinate me. America must be a very strange place. I have no idea whether I can get that kind of position. I won’t starve if it turns out not to be possible. There is always work for someone who can translate between English and French.”
“You aren’t wrong about that,” Demange agreed. “You would’ve come in handy if there were ever any limeys or Yanks within fifty kilometers of where we’re at. How come you didn’t say anything before about how you get a bulge in your trousers about this American merde?”
The younger man blushed once more. “I told you-you would have laughed. I found out very soon that you-please excuse me-did not always take me seriously.”
If anything, that was an understatement. Demange had hardly ever taken Second Lieutenant Mirouze seriously. The rule, however, did have its exceptions. “I took you seriously whenever we messed with the Boches. You need a wheelbarrow to carry your balls, and that makes up for a lot of other crap.”
“For which I thank you very much, sir,” Mirouze said gravely. “If you could have seen how frightened I always was inside-”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Rien, you hear?” Demange broke in. “The only people who aren’t scared are the ones who’re too dumb to know what can happen to ’em, and you aren’t like that.”
“There are some others,” Mirouze said. “Hitler had many things wrong with him, but stupid he was not. He enjoyed the soldier’s life in the last war, though, the fighting along with the rest.”
“A few like that, yes,” Demange allowed. “Not many. A lot of them get killed in a hurry. Some of the others grow up to be generals or politicians. They send out the next batch to get killed for them.”
Louis Mirouze sent him a quizzical look. “If you feel that way about it, why do you stay a soldier?”
“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I’m fucking good at it, that’s why. Our con of a colonel wanted to get me shot last Christmas, and he didn’t give a shit if he threw away the whole company as long as I stopped one. But we took that village without losing a man, and we all slept warm in it, too.”
“If you had a higher rank, you could accomplish more.”
“If I had a higher rank, I’d be a con myself,” Demange retorted. Something in Mirouze’s face made him chuckle and shift his Gitane from one side of his mouth to the other. “All right, all right. If I had a higher rank, I’d be a bigger con. There. You happy now?”