Well, they could try if they wanted to. A Stuka was a tough target for a rifleman. Even if a bullet or two did hit, the Ju-87’s cockpit and engine were armored against small-arms fire. Infantrymen, poor fools, weren’t. Rudel’s thumb came down on the firing button. His forward-facing machine guns chattered. The enemy soldiers ran every which way through the snow.
Sergeant Dieselhorst gave them a parting burst as the dive-bomber climbed away from the stricken train. “They’re froggies, I think, Herr Oberleutnant,” he said. “I’m pretty sure some of them were wearing the helmets with the crest.”
“Good,” Hans-Ulrich said savagely. “They need to know they can’t play those games without paying the price.”
“Damn straight, sir.” But then Dieselhorst went on, “What kind of price will we have to pay when the war in the west starts cooking again?” Since Hans-Ulrich had no good answer for that, he pretended not to hear, but droned on back toward the airstrip west of Smolensk.
Lieutenant Aristide Demange had traveled in cattle cars before. In the last war, the French Army used them all the goddamn time: often enough to make stencils for painting the legend 8 HORSES OR 36 MEN on their sides. In the last war, the French Army’d used anything and everything it could find. Things hadn’t changed much in the generation since, either. If it was there, you grabbed it. Legalities and other details would wait till later.
But the Red Army made Demange’s countrymen look like a bunch of pikers. Fighting against the Russians, he’d seen they were in grim earnest. Now the French expeditionary force was in Soviet hands. The Ivans wanted them the hell out of their country. What they wanted, they got. And they didn’t worry about legalities even a little bit. Legalities were whatever the commissars said they were. Anybody who didn’t like it headed for Siberia or got a bullet in the back of the neck.
When Demange was a sergeant, he’d always tried to make his men more afraid of him than they were of the enemy. He’d done a damn good job of it, too. But, from everything he could see, all of Red Russia worked that way.
No doubt the generals and colonels who’d led this force in the biggest French invasion of Russia since Napoleon’s day were riding north in the same kind of luxury high Soviet officers enjoyed when they weren’t at the front, classless society or no classless society. No doubt. People who weren’t generals or colonels headed north however the commissars wanted them to. And if the commissars felt like getting some of their own back … They might be godless Communists, but they were also human beings.
So Demange and too many men from his company were sardined into a cattle car the French Army would have been ashamed to use in the most desperate hours of funneling men forward into the Verdun charnel house. You could watch the sleepers go by through spaces between the floorboards as the train rattled up the tracks toward … wherever the hell it was going. Nobody’d bothered to tell Demange where that was.
Nobody’d bothered to muck out the car, either. As far as Demange could tell, nobody’d bothered to muck out the car since Tsar Nicholas was running things, or maybe Tsar Alexander before him. The Frenchman would never again doubt what bullshit smelled like.
Sanitary arrangements were a couple of honey buckets with covers. When somebody needed to crap, Demange told off a poilu to stand in front of his chosen bucket and hold up a greatcoat to give some rudimentary privacy. By what Demange had seen in the USSR, the covers on the buckets represented no small concession to French sensibilities from the Red Army.
His men were hardened to Russian conditions. They bitched about the stinks in the cattle car, but if you put a bunch of poilus fresh from the front in heaven they’d bellyache about that. Demange discounted it. Besides, some of the soldiers had vodka in their canteens instead of pinard or-God forbid! — water. They were the ones who pissed and moaned the loudest, and who fell asleep first. Hearing them snore, Demange wouldn’t have minded a good slug of liquid lightning himself. He knew how to hold his booze. He wouldn’t go out like a flashlight with a used-up battery.
Two French soldiers played piquet. Four more made what would have been a bridge table if only they’d had a table. One fellow leaned against the filthy boards of the cattle-car wall with a pocket New Testament a few centimeters in front of his nose. How anybody could go through more than five minutes of combat and still believe in God was beyond Demange, but Maxime was a long way from the worst man in his company. As long as that stayed true, the lieutenant didn’t care how stupid he was every other way.
Demange stubbed out the tiny butt of one Gitane and lit another. While he was awake, he smoked. His cigarettes dangled from the corner of his thin-lipped mouth. Alert poilus gauged his mood by the angle of the dangle. Of course, the gamut of those moods ran from bad to worse. He wasn’t about to waste his rare happiness on his men, the cons. He inhaled deeply. Gitanes were good and strong. The smoke helped him ignore the other foul odors in the cattle car.
He’d just blown out a long stream of gray when he cocked his head to one side. He was trying to hear better-which, in its own way, was pretty goddamn funny, considering how often he’d fired a rifle right next to his ear. If by some accident he lived through the war, he’d be deaf as a horseshoe five years later. And this train, clunking along over a railroad that needed way more maintenance than it ever got, didn’t exactly make the ideal listening platform.
All the same, this new background noise didn’t sound like anything that belonged with the train. It was getting louder, too, as if coming up from behind. It sounded like … “Fuck!” he said softly when he realized what it sounded like. He didn’t get the chance to yell before machine-gun bullets tore through the cattle car’s back wall and roof.
Something stung his cheek. Automatically, his hand went up to it. His fingers came away bloody. For a bad second or two, he wondered if he’d got half his face shot away and just didn’t feel it yet. His hand rose again. No: he was still pretty much in one piece. Either a round had just grazed him or he’d got nicked by a flying splinter or something.
Not all of his men were so lucky. The iron tang of blood suddenly warred with the rest of the stinks. One of the bridge players was down. With most of the left side of his head blown off, he wouldn’t get up again, either. The poilu beyond him clutched at his leg and howled like a wolf. The same bullet might have got them both.
Other wounded men added their shrieks to the din. At least one other poor bastard looked to be dead, too. And, to add insult to injury, a bullet had holed one of the honey buckets below the waterline. Only the goddamn thing didn’t hold water.
The train slowed, then stopped. At first, Demange swore at the engineer. Why wasn’t he going flat out, damn him? But that was a question with an obvious answer. If the German Stuka-Demange thought it was a Stuka, anyhow-had shot up the locomotive along with the cars behind it, the train wasn’t going anywhere because it couldn’t.
And if it couldn’t … Demange knew what he would do if he were flying that ugly, ungainly bastard. “We’ve got to get out of here, dammit!” he yelled. “That cocksucker’ll come around again for another pass now that he’s got a target he can’t miss.” That he hated Germans didn’t keep him from giving them the professional respect they were due.
There was a seal on the door. The Ivans didn’t want their guests wandering around. They just wanted them out. He’d been told there would be hell to pay if that seal got broken. Well, too bad. There was already hell to pay, and his men were doing the paying. He broke the seal and slid the door open. He supposed he should have counted himself lucky that some subcommissar hadn’t nailed it shut.