Sure as hell, there was an International, scrambling from one bit of maybe-cover to the next. The fellow had red hair and foxy features. Wherever he came from, he was no Spaniard. Catching sight of Joaquin, he started to bring his rifle to his shoulder.
Too late. Joaquin fired first. The foxy-faced man from God knew where clutched at himself and started to crumple. Joaquin didn't wait to find out whether he was dead or only wounded. Down he went again. Some other hard case from the middle of Europe or across the sea might be drawing a bead on him right now.
Most Spaniards on both sides were lousy shots. Without false modesty, Joaquin knew he wasn't. He had been, but Sergeant Carrasquel cured him of it. Carrasquel was a veteran of the fighting in Spanish Morocco. He knew how to make a rifle do what it was supposed to do: hit what you aimed at. All the survivors in his squad shot well.
And so did the Internationals. Some of them had learned soldiering a generation earlier, in a harsher, less forgiving school than even Spanish Morocco. The younger Reds had picked up their trade from the veterans-and anyone who lived through a few weeks of fighting made an infinitely better soldier than a raw recruit.
Joaquin wriggled like a lizard to find a fresh place from which to shoot. No one before had been watching the rubble pile from which he'd fired. Somebody would be now. He was grimly certain of that. You didn't want to give them two chances at you. For that matter, you didn't want to give them one chance at you. All too often, though, you had no choice.
He raised himself up high enough to see over his new pile of bricks. Once upon a time, this miserable wreckage had housed the department of agriculture. He'd seen a shattered sign that said so. The ruins had changed hands a lot of times since then, though.
Joaquin gasped. There squatted an International, not three meters away. The Red looked just as surprised-and just as horrified-as Joaquin felt. Neither man had had the faintest idea the other was around. They both fired at the same instant. They were both veterans, both experienced fighting men, both presumably good riflemen.
They both missed.
"Fuck!" Joaquin said fervently. He grabbed a broken brick and flung it at the International. The brick didn't miss. It thudded against the other man's ribs and kept him from working the bolt on his French rifle. The fellow said something hot and guttural. Then he jumped down behind Joaquin's rubble pile and tried to stick him with his bayonet.
With a desperate parry, Joaquin drove aside the long knife on the end of the other rifle. He'd learned bayonet fighting. Sergeant Carrasquel made sure you learned everything that had anything to do with soldiering. He'd learned it, but he'd never had to use it before. He knocked the International's feet out from under him with the barrel of his own rifle.
Then they were clawing and grappling and kneeing and gouging, there in the dirt. They were a couple of wild animals, snapping for each other's throats. One of them would get up again, the other wouldn't. It was as simple and mindless as that. In the end, what else did war come down to?
A rifle cracked. It wasn't Joaquin's. When he heard it, he figured it had to be the International's. And if it was, he had to be dead, and hearing the reverberations from the next world. He prayed he would rise to heaven, not sink down to hell.
But the foreigner was the one who groaned and went limp. Hardly believing he could, Joaquin shoved the man's suddenly limp body away from him. He bloodied his hands doing it-a human being held a shocking amount of gore.
There on the ground a couple of meters off to one side sprawled Sergeant Carrasquel, rifle in hand. "You had a little trouble there," he remarked.
"Only a little," Joaquin said, as coolly as he could with his heart threatening to bang its way out of his chest. After a moment, he managed to add, "Gracias."
"De nada," Carrasquel said. "If you would've shot the asshole in the first place, you wouldn't've had to dance with him."
"Dance? Some dance!" Joaquin laughed like a crazy man. Relief could do that to you. Then he lit a cigarette and waited for whatever horror came next. LUC HARCOURT SEWED a second dark khaki hash mark onto the left sleeve of his tunic. He sewed much better now than he had before he got conscripted. Work with needle and thread wasn't something the French army taught you. It was something you needed to learn, though, unless you wanted your uniform to fall apart. You had to make repairs as best you could; the French quartermaster corps was unlikely to minister to your needs.
Sergeant Demange came by. Things were quiet in front of Beauvais, the way they had been on the border before the Germans made their big winter push. Luc wished that comparison hadn't occurred to him. He was proud that the poilus and Tommies had stopped the Nazis at Beauvais and not let them get around behind Paris the way they planned. He was even proud he'd made corporal, which surprised him: he sure hadn't cared a fart's worth about rank when the government gave him a khaki suit and a helmet.
The Gitane that always hung from the corner of Demange's mouth twitched when he saw what Luc was doing. "Sweet suffering Jesus!" he said. "They'll promote anything these days, won't they?"
"It must be so," Luc answered innocently. "You're a sergeant, after all."
You had to pick your spots when you razzed a superior. After he'd just razzed you was a good one. Demange wasn't just a superior, either. He was a professional, old enough to be Luc's father-old enough to have got wounded in 1918. He was a skinny little guy without a gram of extra fat. No matter how old he was, Luc, six or eight centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier, wouldn't have wanted to tangle with him. Demange had never heard of the rule book, and knew all kinds of evil tricks outside of it.
He grunted laughter now, even if it didn't light his eyes. "Funny man! You know what that two-centime piece of cloth is, don't you? It's all the thanks you're gonna get for not stopping a bullet yet."
"If they keep promoting me for that, I hope I'm a marshal of France by the time the war's over." Luc poked himself with the needle. "Nom d'un nom!"
He made Demange laugh again, this time in real amusement. "The war may go on a long time, sonny, but it ain't gonna last that long."
"Well, maybe not." Luc chuckled, too. It wasn't a bad line, and a sergeant's jokes automatically seemed funny to the men he led.
German 105s started going off in the distance. Luc looked at his watch. Yes, it was half past two. Those shells would land on a road junction a kilometer and a half to the south. When the Boches weren't trying to pull the wool over your eyes, they could be as predictable as clockwork.
"Dumb cons," Sergeant Demange said with a contemptuous wiggle of his Gitane. "Like we're going to run anything through there at this time of day! What kind of jerks do they think we are?"
"The same kind they are, probably," Luc answered.
"Then they really are dumb," Demange said. "Maybe Englishmen wouldn't notice what they're up to, but we're French, by God! We've got two brain cells to rub together, eh?"
"Most of us do. I'm not so sure about our officers," Harcourt said.
That was safe enough. Any sergeant worth his miserable joke of a salary looked down his nose at the men set over him (privates looked at sergeants the same way, something sergeants tended to forget). And Demange had been a noncom a very long time. "Oh, officers!" he said. "You're right-officers can't find their ass with both hands half the time. But they'll have sergeants to keep 'em from making donkeys of themselves."
"Sure, Sergeant," Luc said, and left it right there. Yes, lieutenants and captains did need sergeants at their elbow. But that said more about their shortcomings than about any great virtues inherent in sergeants. So it seemed to a new-minted corporal, anyhow.
Demange stamped out his cigarette just before the coal singed his lips. Then he lit another one and strode off to inflict himself on somebody else in the platoon.