"If my girlfriend said that, I might be interested," Luc answered, which won him a snort from the sergeant. But he had to say more than that, no matter how little he wanted to. "What have you got in mind?"
"How'd you like to head up a machine-gun crew?" Demange asked. "Bordagaray came down venereal, the stupid slob. Maybe he knows your girlfriend, too."
"Or your mother," Luc suggested, which got him another snort. Then he paused thoughtfully. It was a better choice than Demange was in the habit of offering him. "You know, that might not be so bad. But who'll take my squad?"
"Any jackass can run a squad. I mean, you do, for Christ's sake," Demange said. Luc grinned crookedly; the sergeant loved to praise with faint damn, or sometimes not so faint. Demange took a deep drag, coughed, and went on, "So do you want it? It's yours if you do."
"Sure. I'll take it," Luc said. The army rule was not to volunteer, but this was different. He hoped so, anyhow. You could kill a lot of Boches with a machine gun. Of course, they also got especially interested in killing you. If they overran your position, you wouldn't have much chance to surrender. But they hadn't been interested in advancing lately, so that wouldn't come into play… he hoped. "Bordagaray's gun, you said?"
"That's right." Sergeant Demange nodded. "Joinville and Villehardouin are waiting for you like you're the Second Coming."
"I'd like a second coming right now. Or even a first one," Luc said. Demange gave him an obscene gesture to speed him on his way. He walked down the trench to the sandbagged revetment that held the machine gun. The other two crewmen eyed him with the apprehensive curiosity veterans gave any newcomer. Joinville was a short, dark Gascon like the disgraced Bordagaray. Villehardouin, by contrast, came from Brittany. He was big and blond, and understood French better than he spoke the national language. Unless he thought about it ahead of time, Breton came out of his mouth more often than not.
Luc hadn't had much to do with machine guns since training, but he remembered how to use one. It wasn't heart surgery. You aimed it, you fired it, you tapped the side of the gun to traverse it, and you tried to use short bursts. His instructor-who would have reminded him of Demange if the fellow hadn't been half again as big-had had some eloquent things to say about that.
It was a Hotchkiss, a serious machine gun, not the lighter Chatellerault. One man could carry a Chatellerault and move forward with an attack. One man could serve it, too, though a two-man crew worked better. The Hotchkiss gun had soldiered all the way through the last war, and looked to be good for this one and maybe the next one as well. The thick doughnut-shaped iron fins on the heavy barrel dissipated heat-sometimes they glowed red when the work got rough-and let you keep laying down death as long as you needed to.
There was a story about a Hotchkiss section at Verdun in 1916-a place far worse than any Dante imagined-that fired 100,000 rounds at the Boches with nothing worse than a few minor jams. Somebody must have lived through it to let the story spread. Hundreds of thousands in old French horizon-blue and German field-gray hadn't.
"How are we fixed for ammunition?" Luc asked.
Joinville-his Christian name was Pierre-nudged a couple of wooden crates with his foot. "Both full," he said. He had a funny accent himself, though nowhere near so bad as Villehardouin's. And his voice held a certain measured approvaclass="underline" Luc knew the right question to ask first.
He nodded now. "C'est bon," he agreed. And good it was. You fed an aluminum strip full of cartridges into the gun, chambered the first round, fired till the strip ran dry, then put in another one. No, nothing to it… except that you were liable to get killed doing your job, of course. But, once they made you put on the uniform, that could happen to you all kinds of ways.
Luc took the canteen off his belt and tossed it to Joinville. "Have a knock of this," he said. "Then pass it to Tiny."
The Gascon sipped the non-regulation brandy. He whistled respectfully. "That's high-octane, all right," he said, and gave Villehardouin the canteen. The burly blond-tagged, as soldiers often were, on the system of opposites-also drank. He said something that wasn't French but definitely was admiring. When he handed the canteen back to Luc, it felt lighter than it had before he turned it loose.
Cost of doing business, Luc thought, not much put out. You wanted the guys you worked with to like you. You especially wanted them to like you when they could help keep you alive. Pierre might have thought he'd get to command the Hotchkiss gun himself now that Bordagaray was on the shelf. If he tried to undercut Luc, he might be able to pull it off yet.
"Anything I need to know about this particular gun?" Luc asked.
"If you ever get the chance, you ought to boresight it," Joinville said. "Till you can, don't trust the sights too far. If you do, you'll end up missing to the right."
"Got you. Thanks," Luc said. The sights were less important than they were on a rifle, because the Hotchkiss gave you so many more chances. Still, that was worth knowing. Another relevant question: "German snipers give you much trouble?" The Boches knew what was what. They'd knock off machine-gun crews in preference to ordinary rifleman. Who wouldn't?
"We're still here," Joinville answered. He said something incomprehensible to Tiny. The Breton nodded vigorously. Luc scratched his head. Had Pierre picked up some of the big peasant's language? That was interesting. Most Frenchmen, Luc among them, put Breton only a short step above the barking of dogs and the mooing of cows.
Well, he could wonder about it some other time. For now, he peered out through a gap between sandbags at the German lines a few hundred meters. Not much to see. Sure as hell, the Germans did know their business. They weren't dumb enough to show themselves when they didn't have to. He'd been worrying about Boche snipers. The boys in Feldgrau would worry about men peering through scope-sighted rifles from under the brims of Adrian helmets.
"I wouldn't mind if it stays quiet," Luc remarked.
Joinville eyed him. "You may turn out all right," he said. "I was afraid you'd want to shoot at every sparrow you saw. Some new guys are like that, and it just brings shit down on our heads."
"I may be a new guy on a machine gun, but I've been in since before the fighting started," Luc said. "If I haven't figured out the price of eggs by now, I'm pretty fucked up, eh?"
"You never can tell." Joinville's grin took most of the sting from the words.
And Tiny Villehardouin brightened. He'd heard a French word he understood. "Fuck your mother!" he said cheerfully.
"Yeah, well, same to you, buddy," Luc replied. He didn't think Tiny would try to murder him for that. When he turned out to be right, he breathed a small sigh of relief. You didn't want to fight a guy that size without a lot of friends at your back.
Tiny threw back his head and laughed. Luc glanced over at Pierre Joinville. The Gascon gave back a small, discreet nod, as if to say Villehardouin was like that all the time. Luc shrugged with, he hoped, equal discretion.
Then something else occurred to him. He asked Villehardouin, "You know the commands, right?"
"Ah, oui," Tiny said. "'Shoulder tripod!' 'Carry gun!' 'Advance!' 'Lower weapon!'" He looked proud of his linguistic prowess.
Luc glanced at Pierre Joinville again. This time, Joinville looked elaborately innocent. The gun weighed twenty-five kilos. The tripod had to be a couple of kilos heavier yet. Tiny was anything but. Still, to burden one man with both seemed excessive. "That's how Corporal Bordagaray did it," Joinville said. "Me, I lugged cartridges."
Which meant the former gun commander hadn't carried anything heavy. Rank did have its privileges. Did it have so many? "Well, I don't think we're going anywhere any time soon," Luc said. "We'll see how we handle things when we do."