But one of the troopers was methodically bandaging his calf. Red soaked through the white cotton gauze. "How bad is it, Emile?" Luc asked.
"Hurts like a motherfucker, but I don't think it'll kill me," Emile answered. "Hell, if you get me a stick I bet I can walk on it."
"Chances are they'll send you home, then," Luc said.
"Not fucking likely-I grew up in Verdun," Emile said. The eastern town had held in the last war, but fallen in this one.
"Oh." Luc had forgotten that, if he ever knew it. "Well, they'll take you out of the line for a while, anyway."
"It'll do," Emile said. "I only wish to Christ they'd done it sooner."
Loud shouts came from around the corner. That was Sergeant Demange's voice. Of course he'd live through a strafing and a dive bombing. Luc didn't think anything could kill him. He'd probably never been born, but manufactured in some armaments plant during the last war. Maybe he had a serial number tattooed on his ass-or stamped into it.
Now he was trying to pull order out of chaos. He bawled for medics, for stretcher-bearers, for Peronne's firemen, for water, for anything else blasted houses and wounded people were likely to need. He might have restored something resembling calm, too, if the church of St. Jean hadn't chosen that moment to fall in on itself with a crash.
Shrieks from inside announced that people had sheltered there against the German biplanes. Sergeant Demange effortlessly shifted gears. "Come on!" he yelled to whoever might be listening. "Let get the sorry sons of bitches out!"
"Let's go," Luc told his men-or all of them except Joinville, who'd somehow disappeared after his slug of apple brandy. "We'll do what we can."
They followed him. He was proud of that. Till he'd got a corporal's stripes, no one had ever wanted to follow him. Maybe the rank helped make the man. He didn't feel like complaining any which way.
The church wasn't burning: a small thing on the scale of miracles, but Luc would take it. He flung aside stones and chunks of brickwork and tugged at beams. His hands were hard, but he tore them up anyhow. And the first woman he uncovered didn't need help: falling masonry had made sure she never would. He turned her over so he wouldn't have to look at what was left of her face.
He and the other soldiers-and some townsfolk-did pull several people out alive. That made him feel a little better. Joinville showed up about twenty minutes after he started heaving wreckage. "Where the hell were you?" Luc growled.
"I found that broad," the Gascon said with a lazy smile. "Never did it with nobody with no hair up top before. Didn't matter-she had plenty down below." He set to work as if he'd been there all along.
"Merde! I ought to kick your sorry ass!" Luc didn't know whether to laugh or to pound the soldiers's thick head with a brick.
He ended up laughing. Life is too short for anything else. Joinville's presence probably wouldn't have meant life for anyone who'd died. That being so, why resent him for tearing off a piece when he saw the chance? Because I didn't get to, goddammit. Yes, that one answered itself, didn't it? Luc bent to the task once more.
HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WATCHED the Hs-123s land one after another. The biplanes were as near obsolete as made no difference. But they could still carry the fight to the enemy, even if Stukas could do more and do it better.
Those Henschels could take it, too. One of them had a hole in the aluminum skin of the fuselage big enough to throw a cat through. It flew, and landed, as if it had just come off the assembly line. Rudel didn't like to think what that kind of hit would have done to his Ju-87. Nothing good-he was sure of that.
Groundcrew men pushed the biplanes toward revetments after they shut down their engines. Before long, the Henschels would fill all of them. Hans-Ulrich's squadron, and the Stukas the pilots flew, were heading east to teach the Red Russians a thing or two.
Sergeant Dieselhorst ambled up. "I was talking to one of the guys in the radio shack," he said. "Sounds like they gave that Peronne place a good pounding."
"All right by me," Rudel said. "But they can't carry cannon under their wings, you know-not a chance in the world."
"Ja, ja." Dieselhorst nodded. "But the scuttlebutt is, the Ivans have more panzers than England and France put together."
"Well, if they do, we'll just have to make sure it doesn't last." Hans-Ulrich spoke with the confidence-with the arrogance-of youth. Dieselhorst, an older man, smiled and nodded and said not another word.
The Stukas flew off to the east two days later. The sun was rising in Hans-Ulrich's face when he rose from the airstrip in France and setting behind him when he put down on the smooth, grassy runway at Tempel-hof, just outside of Berlin. He and Dieselhorst both eagerly hopped out of their Stuka; long flights were tough on the bladder.
Rudel was happier once he'd eased himself, but only for a little while. Then he noticed the armored cars crewed by Waffen-SS men near the edge of the airport. Their turrets were aimed at the just-arrived bombers. "What's that all about?" he asked.
"What do you think?" Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. "They don't want us to bomb up and go after the Chancellery."
"That's crazy!" Hans-Ulrich exclaimed. "We wouldn't do anything like that."
"They're kind of jumpy right now," Dieselhorst said dryly.
"You can't blame them, after… whatever happened here," Hans-Ulrich said. He didn't know the details of the plot against Hitler: only that it had failed. He was glad it had. Treason had brought down the Reich at the end of the last war, and now it was raising its ugly head again? If it was, it needed to be slapped down, and slapped down hard.
"We aren't going to do anything like that. They've already been through us once to make sure we don't." Dieselhorst looked around and lowered his voice before going on, "And they didn't need to do that."
"They thought they did. You can see why. If the Fuhrer couldn't trust the generals right under his eye, how can the Reich trust anybody without checking him out real well?" Rudel said.
"Sir…" Dieselhorst hesitated again, much longer this time. He finally shook his head and started to turn away. "Oh, never mind."
"Spit it out," Hans-Ulrich told him.
"You'll spit in my eye if I do."
"By God, I won't." Rudel raised his right hand with index and middle fingers extended and slightly crooked, as if taking an oath in court. "We watch each other's backs. Always."
"Always? Well, I hope so." Sergeant Dieselhorst's jaw worked, as if he were chewing on that. After another hesitation, he picked his words with obvious care: "You know, sir, there's a difference between not fancying the Fuhrer and being a traitor to the Reich."
"No there isn't!" Hans-Ulrich exclaimed.
Dieselhorst's chuckle held no mirth whatever. "I knew you'd say that. But a devil of a lot of people think there is. That's the biggest part of what this ruckus was all about."
"If you try to overthrow the Fuhrer of the German Reich in wartime, what are you but a backstabber?" Rudel demanded, as stern and certain as his father was about the tenets of their faith. If he hadn't promised Dieselhorst… But he had, and his word was good.
"Some people would say, a German patriot," the sergeant replied. "I don't know that that's true. But I don't know that it isn't, either. What I do know is, there's usually more than one way to look at things."
"Not this time," Hans-Ulrich said.
"I knew you'd say that, too." Dieselhorst stepped well away from the Stuka to light a cigarette. "Well, we'll go on and hit the Reds a good lick. If you think I'm going to sing songs about how wonderful Stalin is, you're even crazier than I give you credit for… sir." He blew out a stream of smoke.