German and French lines ran close together in front of Luc Harcourt’s position. When a Fritz came out in front of his side’s trenches, Luc could have potted him easy as you please. But the soldier in field-gray carried a couple of items that made him think twice. One was a large white flag of truce. The other, even more curious, was a megaphone.
Luc wondered where the hell he’d found it. Did the Germans issue them, say, one to a battalion? That took thoroughness to what struck him as an insane degree, but you never could tell with the Boches. Or had this fellow liberated it from the little French town whose ruins lay right behind the line?
Wherever he’d got it, he raised it to his lips and bellowed through it in gutturally accented French: “We would like a cease-fire! We won’t shoot if you don’t! We should all fight the Russian Jew Bolsheviks instead!” After repeating himself several times, he waved to the poilus on the far side of the barbed wire, gravely lowered the megaphone, and withdrew back to some place where things were apt to be safer.
“Give ’em a burst, Harcourt,” Lieutenant Demange rasped. “They came out with that same horseshit while they were squashing Czechoslovakia, remember? Then it was our turn, so they kicked us in the nuts instead.”
Luc did remember the eerie, almost unnatural quiet on the Western front till the German onslaught a couple of weeks before Christmas 1938. With some surprise, he realized he and Demange were two of the very few left in this company who could recall that quiet at firsthand. So many new fish in, so many veterans dead or wounded or down with one frontline sickness or another…
He squeezed the triggers on the Hotchkiss gun. Yes, for the moment it was still his baby, even if he wore a gold sergeant’s stripe. Half a strip’s worth of ammo roared toward the Germans’ line. Demange hadn’t told him to try to kill anybody, so he fired high. In war’s rough language, he was saying no without being rude.
Even if he was polite, he expected the Boches to shoot back. But they didn’t. The silence from their side of the line might have been a pointed comment about his burst.
“Be damned,” Joinville muttered. “Maybe they mean it this time.”
“Fuck ’em. Fuck their mothers. Fuck their grannies.” Villehardouin spoke only a little French, almost all of it filthy. He went on in Breton. Luc understood Breton no more than he understood Bulgarian, but it sounded vile. Joinville had picked up scraps of Tiny’s native tongue. He whistled and clapped his hands. Whatever Villehardouin said, it must have been juicy.
After sundown, German planes rumbled overhead. Searchlights and antiaircraft guns hunted for them, without much luck. But no bombs whistled down from the planes. They dropped leaflets instead. The leaflets carried the same message the Landser had shouted out. They also showed a cartoon: a wolf with a Jewish face and a Soviet officer’s red-starred cap attacking a pretty blonde labeled CIVILIZATION. A knight called WESTERN EUROPE was coming to her rescue with a sword.
The paper was cheap, brownish pulp. All the same… “Not the worst asswipe I’ve found lately,” Luc said. “And it’s a better present than most of the ones the Boches try to give us.”
“Boy, you’ve got that right,” Demange agreed. “I wonder if Hitler bit off more than he could chew over there on the other front.”
“Could be,” Luc said. “Germans never tried to make that kind of deal in the last war, did they?”
“I hope to shit, they didn’t,” the middle-aged veteran answered. “They knew we would’ve told ’em to stuff it. You’ve got to figure the fucking Nazis aren’t serious this time around, either.”
“How come? They sure are putting a lot of effort into it. I bet they’ve got guys yelling and planes dropping leaflets up and down the whole front.”
“Oh, sure. But so what?” Demange said. “The way it looks, they just want us to throw in with them on account of they’re so fucking cute, y’know? They aren’t saying they’ll pull out of France or the Low Countries. They aren’t saying they’ll turn loose of Denmark and Norway. They want to rape us, and they want us to come while they’re doing it. Shitheads should live so long.”
Luc grunted. Demange had a way with words-not always a pleasant way, but a way. Being nasty didn’t make him wrong. Luc hadn’t heard anything that made him think the Nazis were willing to pull back from what they’d grabbed. Thoughtfully, he said, “I wonder if any of that’s occurred to our diplomats, or to the English.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Demange advised. “Our boys are a bunch of hyenas in top hats and cutaways. And as for the English… Merde alors, the English fucking boil bacon. Anybody who does that can’t be long on brains.”
Luc hadn’t thought of it like that, which again didn’t mean the foul-mouth reluctant lieutenant didn’t have a point. “Any which way, I’ll be happy as long as this cease-fire holds.”
“Well, so will I,” Demange answered, lighting a fresh Gitane from the stub of his old one. Luc looked wistful, so Demange, muttering, handed him a cigarette, too. Then he continued, “We’d better not go to sleep like we did after old Czecho got it. Boches ‘re liable to be piling up tanks behind their line, ready to give us another clop in the teeth as soon as we squat over the slit trench with our pants at half mast.”
“You’d think our recon would notice something like that,” Luc said.
Demange laughed raucously. “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you? And you’d think those cons might’ve noticed something the last time, too. Did they? Not fucking likely! So how far can you trust ’em now?”
“I’ve learned not to trust the Boches, either-except to trust them to be sure to cause trouble,” Luc replied with dignity.
“Good job! Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look. Maybe.” Demange’s seamless scorn for all mankind had plenty of room to include Luc.
Come the next morning, the Germans still didn’t fire. They did show themselves, as if confident the poilus wouldn’t shoot at them without provocation. As Luc had seen many times before, German discipline was a formidable thing. He wondered if any of the Landsers walking around within easy rifle shot had given their officers a nasty look when they were ordered to come out from their nice, safe trenches. He knew damn well he would have.
He waited for Lieutenant Demange to tell him to open up on the Boches. If Demange gave the order, he would obey. He didn’t want to face French military justice, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. But he also didn’t want to start the fighting up again without orders.
And the orders did not come. Neither hard-bitten Demange nor any of his superiors seemed eager to provoke the enemy. Their attitude looked to be that they could fight if they had to, but that they weren’t going to start anything. Luc felt the same way.
The fellow with the megaphone came out again: “We will trade beer for wine, or tubes of meat paste for good tobacco.”
“Nobody answer,” Demange commanded. Informal commerce did happen now and again. The Germans knew their enemies liked that meat paste. And everybody knew the Fritzes made better beer but worse wine than people on this side of the Rhine. Lieutenant Demange wasn’t about to let such bargaining come out into the open, though.
“Beer tastes like stale piss anyway,” opined Joinville, like most men from the south of France a confirmed wine-bibber.
“How do you know what stale piss tastes like?” Luc asked. Joinville gave him a dirty look. Luc grinned back. Even in a cease-fire, you had to make your own fun.
Chapter 13
Every time the morning news came on the radio, Sergei Yaroslavsky tensed. He wasn’t the only flyer who did-far from it. The Germans and the Poles were giving the Red Army and Air Force all the trouble they needed and more besides. If the rest of the decadent capitalist powers lined up behind the Hitlerites, the homeland of the glorious October Revolution would be in deadly danger once more.