Hanging around in the trenches was pretty safe. Oh, you might be unlucky, but your odds were decent. But if the French advanced… There he'd be, out in the open, just waiting for a shell fragment or a machine-gun bullet to do something dreadful. And how much would his clever hands help then?
They could slap on a wound bandage. They could give him a shot of morphine so he didn't hurt so much. It seemed… inadequate.
He hunted up Sergeant Demange. If anybody was likely to know what was going on, Demange was the man. He greeted Luc with his customary warmth: "What the fuck do you want?"
"Love you, too, Sarge," Luc said. Demange grunted and waited. He wouldn't wait long. He'd start snarling-or worse. Luc hurried ahead: "Are we really going to give the Feldgraus one in the teeth?"
"Sure as hell looks that way," Demange answered. "Any other questions? No? Then piss off, why don't you?"
Instead of pissing off, Luc asked, "How bad will it be?"
"All things considered, I'd sooner get a blowjob," the sergeant said, and lit a fresh Gitane.
"Merci beaucoup." Luc left. Behind him, Demange didn't even bother laughing. And yet he'd found out what he needed to know. The attack was coming, and the sergeant wasn't looking forward to it. Demange had done his attacking in 1918. The dose he'd got then cured him of eagerness forever after.
Luc gauged the temper of the new fish instead. When the war first broke out-good God! was it really a year ago now?-he and his buddies had tiptoed into Germany, then tiptoed right back out again. They'd been waiting to get kicked in the teeth. As soon as the Boches were ready, they'd got what they were waiting for, too.
The new guys weren't intimidated by the Germans, or by the idea of advancing against them, the way Luc and his buddies had been. Or maybe their officers weren't intimidated the way the fellows with the fancy kepis had been a year earlier. They thought they could go forward and win. That was half the battle right there. If you weren't licked before you even set out, you had a chance.
4 October 1939. 0530. The day. The hour. Luc had his machine-gun team ready. Villehardouin and Joinville were pretty much self-winding. They tolerated Luc not least because he didn't try to pretend they couldn't do it without him. They knew damn well they could. So did he.
It was chilly and drizzly in the wee small hours, but nowhere near enough rain came down to bog the tanks that had rattled forward under cover of darkness. At 0435, right on schedule, the French artillery roared to life. "See how you like that, cocksuckers!" Luc yelled through high-explosive thunder.
German artillery started shooting back inside of five minutes. Some of the Boches' shells went after the French batteries. Others pounded the front line. The Germans knew their onions. A big barrage meant the French were going to follow it up. The worse the Germans could hurt them, the better… if you were a German.
At 0530, whistles shrilled in the French trenches. "Forward!" officers shouted. Tanks growled toward the German lines, cannon blasting and machine guns braying. Joinville and Villehardouin lugged the machine gun and its tripod ahead. A pair of glum new fish carried crates full of ammunition strips. Luc had his rifle and an infantryman's usual equipment. For the moment, nothing more-rank did have its privileges. But he would turn into a beast of burden in a hurry if one of his crew went down. A machine gun was important in the grand scheme of things, a corporal's dignity much less so.
The French guns increased their range so they didn't land shells on the advancing poilus. The German guns shortened range so they did. A round from a 105 came down right on top of a tank. Fire fountained from the stricken machine. A black column of smoke mounted to the sky. Machine-gun ammo cooked off with cheerful little popping noises.
"Poor buggers," Joinville said.
"Wouldn't even be that much left of us if the shell hit here," Luc answered. The Gascon grunted and nodded.
A German MG-34 the bombardment hadn't silenced started spitting death across the field. Luc envied the Boches their weapon. It was lighter than a Hotchkiss gun, and it fired faster, too. You could carry it and fire it from the hip if you had to. He tried to imagine firing the twenty-odd kilos of the Hotchkiss from the hip. The picture wouldn't form, and for good reason.
Tracers from the German machine gun sparked closer to the Hotchkiss crew. "Down!" Luc yelled. He followed his own order, diving into a shell hole.
"We set up?" Joinville asked.
Anything that gave Luc an excuse not to stand again sounded good right then. "Yeah, let's," he said. Joinville and Villehardouin got the heavy Hotchkiss onto the even heavier tripod. One of the new guys fed a strip into the weapon. Staying as low as he could, Luc peered over the forward lip of the shell hole. The MG-34's bullets had gone past it; now they cracked by again, maybe a meter and a half above the ground: chest-high on an upright man.
Those shapes in the misty, rainy morning twilight were Germans: Germans trying to get away from oncoming Frenchmen. Having been a Frenchman trying to get away from more oncoming Germans than he cared to remember, Luc relished the sight of field-gray backs. He fired a couple of bursts at them. Maybe he'd knock some of them down. He'd sure as hell make the ones he didn't hit run faster.
A French tank shelled the MG-34 into silence. "Come on," Luc said. "Let's get moving again." His crew hid their enthusiasm very well, but they obeyed. Luc didn't want to hit his own countrymen in front of the gun.
Tanks smashed paths through the German wire. Here and there, Fritzes still stayed and fought in their battered holes. One by one, they died or gave up. A Landser with a scared, whipped-dog grin on his face showed himself, hands high. "Ami!" he said.
"C'mere, friend," Luc said, and relieved him of his watch and wallet. Some of these Germans carried fat wads of francs-on their side of the line, French money wasn't worth much. Luc gestured with his rifle. "Go on back."
"Danke! Uh-merci!" the new prisoner said. Hands still over his head to show he'd surrendered, he stumbled off into captivity. He didn't have to worry about the war any more.
Luc did. "Let's go," he said. They pushed on through the shattered German defenses. It couldn't be this easy, could it? It had never been this easy before-he was goddamn sure of that. He had no idea how long it would stay easy, either. As long as it did, he'd go along with it. OF COURSE THE REPUBLICANS set up a radio outside the POW camp in the park in Madrid. And of course they always tuned it to their own stations. Joaquin Delgadillo hadn't listened to those when he fought in Marshal Sanjurjo's army. It wasn't that the Nationalists jammed them, though they did. And the Republicans jammed Nationalist radio. Sometimes the whole dial sounded like waterfalls and sizzling lard.
But this was Radio Madrid, and they were right next to the sender. It overpowered the jamming with ease. The Republican announcer might have been standing right there, reading from a script. "And now the news," he said. "French and English armies have gone over to the offensive against the German invaders. Gains of several kilometers are reported. So are rumors that German commanders in France have been sacked because their troops retreated."
"Sacked? I'm surprised they didn't shoot them," someone behind Joaquin said. He found himself nodding. Both sides in Spain had executed officers who went back when their superiors thought they should go forward. As for common soldiers… That went without saying. Common soldiers always got it in the neck-or the back of the head, depending.