He wasn't surprised when the Magyar did know that bit of English. Kossuth nodded. "Just so," the brigadier said. "And you want to draw extra attention to yourself here?"
"It's not about extra attention," Chaim said, which held… some truth. "It's about rights and freedoms. Why am I in Spain, if not for those?"
"I don't know. Why are you in Spain? Because you can raise more hell here than back home, I suspect." Kossuth drummed his fingers on the tabletop in front of him. His nails, Chaim noticed, were elegantly manicured. "Even if you do found this shul, how much would you care to wager that you will not attend services for longer than a month-six weeks at the outside?"
That might well have held more than some truth. "All the same," Chaim said.
To his surprise, Brigadier Kossuth's chuckle didn't emit puffs of dust. "Well, go on, then," Kossuth said. "I doubt you can lose our struggle against the forces of reaction all by yourself-though not, I am sure, for lack of effort. Now get out." Thus encouraged, if that was the word, Chaim got. LUC HARCOURT EYED THE THREE REPLACEMENTS who'd just joined his squad with a distinctly jaundiced eye. "Look, boys, try to keep your heads down till you start figuring things out, eh?" he said. "You don't keep them down, the Boches'll blow 'em off-and you won't learn much after that, by God. Right?"
"Right, Corporal," they chorused. One was Louis, one was Marc, and the other, poor devil, was Napoleon. At least he didn't stick his hand between two of the buttons on his tunic. He wasn't especially short, either. Or especially bright-he said, "But we want to kill Germans, Corporal."
"You'll get your chance," Luc promised. "Don't forget, though-they have a chance at you, too. That's not so much fun. Bet your ass it's not."
He stood back from himself, as it were, listening to what came out of his mouth. Damned if he didn't sound like a slightly smoother copy of Sergeant Demange. He hadn't been sanding his throat with Gitanes as long or as enthusiastically as Demange had, but the attitude was there. He didn't like Demange-he didn't think anyone could like Demange, or that the sergeant would acknowledge it if anyone did. But he'd learned how to take charge of other men from him. The method wasn't pretty, but it worked.
Off in the distance-far off in the distance: a couple of kilometers away, at least-a machine gun stuttered. Louis and Marc and even the bellicose Napoleon suddenly looked apprehensive. Yes, things could go wrong up here. This wasn't basic training any more.
Luc grinned at them: a sneering, acrid grin, also modeled on Sergeant Demange's. "That was one of ours, my dears," he said. "That won't kill you… except by accident, of course." The grin got nastier yet. He cocked his head to one side, listening and waiting. Sure as hell, the Germans didn't let the French burst go unanswered. An MG-34 fired back. Luc raised an index finger. "There! That's one of theirs!"
"But they both sound the same," Marc protested.
"You'd better learn the difference pretty goddamn quick, that's all I've got to tell you," Luc said. "Make a mistake there and you won't get a chance to make a whole lot more."
"What is the difference?" Louis asked-he couldn't hear it, either.
"Theirs fires faster," Luc answered. "They can change belts faster than we can change strips, too."
"It sounds like you're saying their guns are better than ours." Napoleon sounded as scandalized as a society matron at an indecent proposal.
"Damn straight they are," Luc said. "Look, the Boche is a bastard. He does all kinds of horrible shit, and he does it in France. But you'll only get killed for nothing if you think he's a stupid bastard. He knows what he's doing in the field, and his engineers know their business just as well."
The new fish gaped at him as if they'd caught an archbishop celebrating a Black Mass. "But-they're the enemy!" Louis sputtered.
"Very good. Nothing gets by you, does it?" Luc sure did sound like Sergeant Demange, and he didn't have to step away from himself to hear it now. "But they're not the stupid buffoons the papers make them out to be. They wouldn't be so fucking dangerous if they were. You get that, sonny?"
"I… think so, Corporal," the raw private answered.
"You'd better. All of you had better. Otherwise, somebody in the Ministry of War will send your family a wire no one wants to get. And you, you'll be a black-bordered photo gathering dust on the mantel, and you'll never suck on your girlfriend's titties any more or try to talk her into jerking you off. Do you get that?"
Louis nodded. So did Marc and Napoleon. Their eyes were big and round as gumdrops. They looked as if he'd hit them where they lived. He hoped he had. He wanted them to live. He also wanted them to learn the ropes as fast as they could. Troops new to the front did stupid things. That could get them killed in a hurry, and it could bring trouble down on the more experienced men who had to keep company with them. Luc didn't want to get killed for no better reason than that Marc, say, was an idiot.
Come to that, he didn't want to get killed at all.
He gave the new men a last once-over, as withering as he could make it. Louis flinched, so he didn't do too bad. Sergeant Demange would have had every one of them trembling in his clodhoppers. Well, they'd meet the sergeant soon enough-too soon to suit them, Luc was sure. "Let's go, you lugs," he said. "Keep your heads down. Don't let the Germans see you moving. They've got mortars and artillery zeroed in about every ten meters. If they start shooting at you, they can hit you. They can hit me, too."
He wished he could have the last handful of words back. He didn't want them to realize he could get jumpy himself. They heard the words, but they didn't hear the tone that informed them. They probably thought he'd give them all a kick in the slats if he got wounded. They didn't know a wounded man just lay there and thrashed and screamed and bled. Well, they'd find out.
Luc led them through trenches to the ruins of a village. Digging like moles, damming like beavers, the Frenchmen had done a lot to improve the ruins. Unless you were very tall, you could move around freely without worrying about sniper fire. There were underground galleries where you could eat and sleep and shelter from artillery fire. It wasn't the Maginot Line, but Luc had been in plenty of worse places.
Half a kilometer to the east, the German lines boasted about as many comforts. If you weren't advancing or retreating, you settled down and made yourself at home.
The new fish exclaimed at what the soldiers dug in here had done. Luc enjoyed eating well and sleeping soft, too. Unlike Napoleon and Louis and Marc, he knew too well that these good times wouldn't last. The Nazis had almost knocked France out of the war with their winter onslaught. They'd grabbed more of the country this time than they did in 1914, and made it harder for England to send help across the Channel. And, unlike Germany, France hadn't had its heart in the war from the beginning.
It did now. Getting your whole northeast occupied would do that to you. And the Germans were fighting Russia now. A lot of Frenchmen with Red leanings had seen the whole war as a struggle between two sets of oppressive imperialists: as none of their business, in other words. But if Hitler threatened the Soviet Union, the font of world revolution, obviously he was a monster who needed suppressing. The Communists were singing the Popular Front song again, as loud as they could.
So, eventually, there would be big pushes forward. They'd leave this place behind. The people who lived here would come back and try to put the pieces together again. None of the offensives yet had been the real thing. But it was coming. And all the horrors that went with a war of movement would come with it.