Hitler's war

Chapter Eleven

Chaim Weinberg shivered in a trench. The war on the Ebro seemed to have frozen solid. The whole Spanish Civil War seemed to have frozen solid. The Soviet Union wasn’t sending aid to the Republic any more-Stalin was using the planes and tanks and guns himself. After the broader war broke out, a surge of aid had come from France and England, who’d ignored the Republican cause before. Now, with the Low Countries conquered and France herself invaded, they were ignoring it again.

The only good news was, Hitler and Mussolini were also ignoring General Sanjurjo’s Spanish Fascists. With the Royal Navy and the French actually paying attention to the Mediterranean, the reactionaries would have had a devil of a time getting anything through anyway.

And so both sides were running on momentum, using-and using up-what they’d had before the great powers forgot about them. Before long, one side or the other would run out. The side that still had something would win-unless seeing their proxies in trouble prodded rich sponsors into action again.

Meanwhile…Meanwhile, Weinberg lit a cigarette. It was a Gitane, part of the bounty that had flowed in from France. It was a damn sight better than native Spanish smokes, which tasted of straw and lots of other things besides tobacco. Chaim still longed for an American cigarette. With a Lucky or a Chesterfield, you didn’t feel as if you’d swallowed a welder’s torch every time you inhaled.

He smoked the Gitane down to a tiny butt, then stuck that in a leather pouch he wore on his belt next to his wound dressing. He’d got used to saving dog-ends when tobacco was even scarcer than it was now. Wrap half a dozen of them and you had yourself another cigarette. He would never have stooped so low in the States, but things were different here.

Nobody’d been trying to kill him in the States, for instance. He’d made a crude periscope: two hand-sized chunks from a broken mirror mounted on opposite ends of a stick. (Seven years of bad luck? Getting shot was bad luck. He hadn’t broken this mirror himself, but he would have without even blinking if he’d needed to.) He stuck it up over the lip of the trench to see what the enemy was up to.

Smoke rose here and there from the Fascists’ trenches. Nobody was shelling them; the artillery on both sides stayed quiet. But cold struck impartially. There were fires in the International Brigades’ position, too.

A khaki-clad Fascist soldier came head and shoulders out of his hole for a moment. He wasn’t a sniper-he was dumping a honey bucket. One good thing about the cold: no flies right now. The Spaniard ducked down again before a Republican sharpshooter could fire at him.

Chaim didn’t think it was sporting to shoot a man who was easing himself or getting rid of slops. But bastards on both sides had rifles with telescopic sights. They thought they weren’t earning their pay if they didn’t use them. And so, every now and then, men got shot at their most defenseless.

Not far away, Mike Carroll was cleaning his rifle. The French had used Lebels by the million in the last war. They’d been old-fashioned then, and they were obsolete now…which didn’t mean you still couldn’t kill people with them. How many different kinds of rifles, how many different kinds of ammunition, did the Republicans use? Too goddamn many-Chaim knew that.

Carroll paused. “Spot anything interesting?” he asked.

“Sure,” Weinberg answered. “Naked blond broad taking a sun-bath out in front of the Fascist line. Big tits, pretty face-what more could you want? Natural blonde, too. Either that or she peroxides her bush.”

The other American started to put down the rifle and grab for the periscope. Just too late, he caught himself. “Fuck you, you lying asshole,” he said. “You had me going.”

“Yeah, well, she’s a hell of a lot better than what’s really there.” Weinberg told him about the guy with the bucket.

“Whole war’s full of shit,” Carroll said. “Sanjurjo’s guys, you…Everything. And nobody gives a shit about us.”

“You just notice?” Chaim lit another Gitane. Mike Carroll looked like a puppy hoping for table scraps. Chaim handed him the pack. He took one with a nod of thanks and lit it with a Zippo. He fueled the lighter with kerosene-regular lighter fluid was impossible to come by on either side of the line here.

“Maybe we ought to go up to France,” Carroll said moodily. “More Fascists-worse Fascists-to kill there.”

“Good luck,” Chaim said. Mike winced. He had about as much chance of getting up to France without authorization as he did of sprouting wings and flying there. Political officers behind the International Brigades’ lines checked everybody’s papers. If you didn’t have orders to pull you out, you were in trouble.

Even if you got past the commissars, plenty of other Republican officials in towns and on trains would want to know where you were going and who said you were supposed to go there. If they didn’t like your answers, they would either shoot you or chuck you into a Spanish jail. Not many things were worse than front-line combat, but a Spanish jail was one of them.

“All of a sudden, the States don’t look so bad, you know?” Mike said with a grin that was supposed to mean he was half kidding, anyway.

“Maybe they’ll let you repatriate,” Chaim said. Sometimes the Internationals wanted nothing but willing fighters. Sometimes they figured you had to be willing or you wouldn’t have volunteered. It all depended on the officer, on how the fighting was going-sometimes, people said, on the phases of the moon.

“Ah, fuck it,” Mike said: the usual comment of every line soldier in every war since the beginning of time. “I’m just blowing off steam, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Chaim said. And he did, too. It wasn’t as if he’d never pissed and moaned since he got here. “All I wish is, people would remember us. We were a big deal till the rest of Europe blew up. Who gives a shit about Spain now? Stalin’s forgotten all about it.” That was a dangerous thing to say; the International Brigades toed Moscow’s line. But a love of truth was part of what had led Chaim to Spain. He wouldn’t give it up even here.

Mike Carroll had a tobacco pouch on his belt, too. He stuck the remains of the Gitane into it. “Well, so has Hitler,” he answered. “That’s not so bad.”

“You know who remembers?” Chaim said. He waited till Carroll raised a questioning eyebrow. “Us and the Spaniards, that’s who. It’s not just fucking politics and games and shit for us. It really matters. Do you want that fat prick over there”-Chaim pointed toward the Fascists’ lines-“running this whole goddamn country?”

He’d never talked that way in New York City. Back home, he’d always had the feeling his mother was listening and would wash his mouth out with soap. But everybody swore on the battlefield. By now, Chaim could cuss in English, Yiddish, Spanish, Catalan, German, French, and Russian. Talk without swear words seemed as bland as food without salt and pepper.

“If I wanted that, I’d be over there myself,” Mike Carroll said. The Italians and Germans who fought on Sanjurjo’s side had no choice. But for them, only a handful of foreigners-mostly English and Irishmen-had joined the enemy. Men from all over the world opposed the Fascists. If that didn’t say something…

Before Chaim could decide what would be true if that didn’t say something, a rifle bullet cracked between him and Carroll. Both of them hit the dirt. “We’ve been standing up and waving our arms too damn much,” Mike said ruefully. “They got a sniper to take a shot at us.”

“Yeah.” Chaim hadn’t quite pissed himself, but he’d come mighty close. Well, so had the bullet. “Good thing he’s a shitty sniper.” A good marksman would have hit one of them. Maybe this guy couldn’t decide which one to aim at.

“Spaniards.” Mike Carroll’s shrug punctuated that-but didn’t expose him to any more rifle fire. “They’re brave as all get-out-the guys on both sides. But…” His voice trailed away.

Chaim knew what he was talking about. “Yeah. But,” he said, making the word sound like a complete sentence. It might as well have been. Spaniards didn’t keep proper lookout. They didn’t like digging trenches. They didn’t bother cleaning their weapons unless somebody screamed at them-and a lot of the time not then, either. Their logistics were a joke. Food and ammunition came to the front when they felt like it. That was how things looked, anyhow. Their hospitals were almost as bad as their jails.

But they were brave. Point them at an objective and they’d take it or die trying. Tell them they had to hold a strongpoint and it was?No pasaran! You were embarrassed to falter or fall back, because you knew they wouldn’t. If only they would pull themselves together…

“Don’t hold your breath,” Mike said when Chaim suggested that. Then the other American asked, “Do you think we can nail that sniper?”

There was a serious suggestion. “Worth a try,” Chaim said. “He’ll make this whole stretch of trench dangerous unless we do get rid of him. How do you want to work it?”

“We ought to call a sharpshooter of our own,” Carroll said. Chaim gave him the horse laugh. Republican snipers were few, far between, and none too good. The other American’s ears turned red. “Okay, okay. Which of us do you think is a better shot?”

“I am,” Chaim answered without false modesty. “Let me find a position where I can look out without getting drilled. Then you hold up a cap on a stick, and I’ll see what I can see.”

“I’ll do it. Wave when you’re ready,” Mike said.

“Yeah.” Chaim worked his way fifty yards down the trench. Some bushes-brown and leafless in the winter cold-offered cover there. Cautiously, he peered out through them. Nobody fired at him. He brought his rifle up over the top and rested it on the dirt. Then, carefully keeping his hand below the level of the parapet, he signaled to his buddy.

Up went the cap. A shot rang out. Mike not only jerked the cap down but also let out a scream. Chaim saw where the sniper fired from, but the Fascist ducked away before he could plug him. Now…Was the maricon dumb enough to shoot from the same position twice in a row? Everybody knew you shouldn’t, but some boys did anyhow. Only one way to find out…

“Move a little and pop up again,” Chaim called, as softly as he could.

Mike did. He even put the cap on the stick sideways this time, so it would look different. Chaim peered down his rifle barrel. He had the range, he had windage…

He had a target. Yeah, the guy on the other side was greedy and stupid, all right. He showed one shoulder and his head, and that was all Chaim needed. He pressed the trigger, not too hard. Red mist exploded from the enemy sniper as he slumped back into his trench.

“You get him?” Carroll asked.

“Uh-huh. Don’t have to worry about that for a while, anyway.” Chaim might have been talking about delousing or killing a rat. He’d got rid of a nuisance-that was all. Well, now the nuisance wouldn’t get rid of him. Nothing else counted. He lit another Gitane.

* * *

It was a fine, bright morning in western Belgium-colder than an outhouse in East Prussia in February, but sunny and clear. The sun came up a little earlier than it had a month earlier, at the end of December. Chances were spring would get here eventually: no time real soon, but eventually.

Breath smoking in the chilly sunrise air, Hans-Ulrich Rudel walked to the squadron commander’s hut to see what was up. Something would be. He was sure of that. This time of year, days with decent flying weather were too few and far between to waste.

Other Stuka pilots nodded to him. He nodded back. He didn’t have a lot of buddies here. Not likely a milk drinker would, not when most of the flyers preferred brandy and loose women. But he kept going out and doing his job and coming back. That won him respect, if no great liking.

Cigarette smoke blued the air inside the hut. Hans-Ulrich didn’t like that, either, but complaining was hopeless. He tried not to breathe deeply.

“We’re going to bomb England again,” Major Bleyle announced. That got everyone’s attention, as he must have known it would. He went on, “They’ve been hitting our cities-miserable air pirates. What can we do but pay them back? We will strike at Dover and Folkestone and Canterbury, just on the other side of the Channel. Questions?”

Hands flew up, Rudel’s among them. The squadron commander pointed to somebody else-he didn’t much like Hans-Ulrich, either. But the other pilot said about what Rudel would have: “How are we going to come back in one piece? Stukas are sitting ducks for English fighters.”

“We’ll have an escort,” Bleyle said.

“We had an escort the last time, too,” the pilot pointed out. “Some of the enemy planes kept the 109s busy, and the rest came after us.”

“We’ll have a better escort this time,” the squadron commander answered. “Not just 109s, but 110s, too.”

The pilots all paused thoughtfully. Bf-110s were brand new. If half what people said was so, they were formidable, no doubt about it. The big, two-engined fighters mounted two 20mm cannon and four machine guns in the nose, plus another, rear-facing machine gun on a mount like the one in the Stuka. If all that firepower hit an enemy aircraft, the poor devil would go down.

“And there’ll be Heinkels and Dorniers overhead,” Major Bleyle added. “The enemy won’t be able to concentrate on us the way he did before. We’re going to knock eastern England flat. Let’s see how they like it.”

One by one, the Stuka pilots nodded. Most of them had seen enough to know war wasn’t always as easy as they wished it would be. They’d signed up to take whatever happened, the bad along with the good. Hans-Ulrich suspected things would turn out to be harder than the squadron CO made them sound. By the thoughtful looks on the other men’s faces, so did they. But if the people set over you told you to try, what else could you do?

He took the word to Sergeant Dieselhorst. The gunner and radioman shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said. “Maybe she’ll have engine trouble. We can hope, anyway.”

“It won’t be that bad,” Rudel said.

“No, I suppose not…sir.” Dieselhorst spoiled it by adding, “It’ll be worse.”

The Stuka had no engine trouble. Some groundcrew man’s head would have rolled if it did. The mechanics and armorers gassed it up and bombed it up. It roared down the runway and lumbered into the air with the others.

Bf-109s and 110s took station around the dive-bombers. The 110s- Zerstorers, they called them: destroyers-certainly looked formidable. With all that firepower in the nose, they packed a mean punch. Idly, Hans-Ulrich wondered how maneuverable they were. He laughed. His own Ju-87 dodged like a rock.

There was the North Sea. There ahead lay England. The popular song dinned in his head. He was going up against England. If the enemy bombed the Reich, the Luftwaffe would repay blood with blood, murder with murder.

He saw ships-boats-whatever they were-on the sea. Did they belong to the Kriegsmarine or the Royal Navy? Were they radioing a warning to the English mainland now? Was that how the RAF had been so quick to attack the Stukas the last time they raided southeastern England? Rudel shrugged. Not his worry, though he did think he’d mention it if he happened to remember after he got back to Belgium.

If I get back to Belgium. He did his best to stifle that thought. You didn’t want to go into battle with your head full of doubts and worries. He was no more eager to go into this battle than any of his squadron mates. The Ju-87 was terrific when it enjoyed air superiority. When it didn’t…

Several 109s seemed to leap out ahead of the pack. Following their path with his eyes, Hans-Ulrich spied another plane out ahead of the oncoming German air armada. Tracers from the Messerschmitts blazed toward the stranger, which dove and spun down toward the ocean. It wasn’t a fighter. They charged after it and sent it smoking into the water.

Someone in the squadron voiced on the radio what Hans-Ulrich was thinking: “Now-did he get word out before we shot him down?”

“We’ll find out,” somebody else said in sepulchral tones.

And they did. English fighter planes rose to meet them: biplane Gladiators, monoplane Hurricanes, and a handful of new, sleek Spitfires. The RAF fighters bored in on the Luftwaffe bombers. They wanted no more to do with the escorts than they had to. The 109s and 110s couldn’t hurt their country. Bombers could.

What was going on higher in the sky, where the Heinkels and Dorniers had escorts of their own? Rudel couldn’t check. He was too busy trying to stay alive. Even a Gladiator could be dangerous.

Sergeant Dieselhorst fired a burst. “Get anything?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

“Nah,” the rear gunner answered. “He’ll bother somebody else, though.” That suited the pilot fine.

Cannon fire from a nearby Me-110 knocked down a Hurricane. A moment later, another Hurricane bored in on the two-engined German fighter. That combat didn’t last long. The Hurricane easily outturned the 110, got on its tail, shot it up, and shot it down.

Hans-Ulrich saw he was over some kind of city. He thought it was Dover, but it might have been Folkestone or any other English port. It lay by the sea-he could tell that much. And he could tell it was time to unload the frightfulness he’d brought across the ocean. He yanked the bomb-release lever. The Stuka suddenly felt lighter and nimbler.

“Now we get the devil out of here?” Dieselhorst’s voice came brassy through the speaking tube.

“Now we get out of here,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. No point in lingering. The Stuka sure wasn’t agile enough to dogfight against a British fighter.

A broad-winged He-111, afire from the nose back, plunged into the North Sea just off the coast from the town that was probably Dover. An enormous cloud of steam and smoke rose: a couple of thousand kilos’ worth of bombs going off when the Spade hit. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen any parachutes. Four men dead, then.

“You know what happens next, don’t you?” Dieselhorst said.

“What’s that?” Rudel asked. He looked every which way. He didn’t see any Indians, which was what Luftwaffe pilots called enemy planes. That let him ease back on the throttle a little. The Continent loomed ahead. He’d probably make it to the airstrip.

“They come over tonight or tomorrow night and bomb the crap out of some of our towns,” Dieselhorst said. “Where does it end? With our last two guys coming out of the ruins and going after their last guy with a club?”

“That’s not for us to worry about. That’s for the Fuhrer.” But Hans-Ulrich couldn’t leave it there. “As long as we’ve got two guys and they’ve got one, as long as our two get their one, we win. And we’re going to. Right?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the gunner answered. Nobody could or wanted to imagine Germany losing two wars in a row. Losing one had been bad enough.

But when Hans-Ulrich put down at the Belgian airstrip, he waited and waited, hoping against hope that more Stukas would come home safe. A few had returned before him. A few more straggled in afterwards. But so many were lost over England or the North Sea…The squadron would need a new CO, among other reinforcements. Hans-Ulrich hoped the Reich would have two men with clubs coming out of the ruins, not just one.

* * *

Every night, the panzers in Sergeant Ludwig Rothe’s platoon reassembled-or they tried to, anyhow. By now, Rothe’s crew was the most experienced one left in the platoon. Neither he nor his driver nor his radioman had got badly hurt. Given how thin-skinned Panzer IIs were, that was something close to miraculous.

Rothe had commanded the platoon on and off on the drive across the Low Countries and into France. Lieutenants and their panzers were no more invulnerable to flying shells than anybody else. But the platoon had an officer in charge of it again: a second lieutenant named Maximilian Priller.

He was dark and curly-haired. He had a whipped-cream-in-your-coffee, strudel-on-the-side Viennese accent. Before the Anschluss, he’d served in the Austrian Army. Like a lot of German soldiers, Rothe looked down his nose at Austrians as fighting men. He had nothing bad to say about Lieutenant Priller, though. No matter how Priller talked, he knew what to do with panzers.

“Our next stop is Coucy-le-Chateau.” Priller pointed the place out on a map he unfolded on his knees. His German sounded funny in Ludwig’s ears, but he spoke fluent French. “Well, not our next stop-where we go through next. It’s only about five kilometers ahead. We ought to drive the enemy out by the middle of the morning. Questions, anybody?”

“Do we soften them up with artillery first, or do we break through with the panzers?” another sergeant asked.

“With the panzers. That way, we’ve got surprise working for us.” Priller cocked an eyebrow. “We see who gets the surprise-us or them.”

The four sergeants who commanded the other panzers in the platoon all chuckled, Ludwig among them. It was laugh or scream, one. Maybe the French troops in front of the Germans would panic and flee. On the other hand, maybe they’d be waiting with panzers of their own, minefields, antitank guns: all the things that made life in the panzer force so…interesting.

“We’ve bent them back a long way,” Max Priller said. “If we break through here, we drive the sword into their heart. We want them all disordered. Then we can race them to Paris. Better than even money we win.”

“Paris…” Ludwig and a couple of the other sergeants said together. Back in the Middle Ages, knights went on quests for the Holy Grail. In the twentieth century, Paris was the Holy Grail for Germany. The Kaiser’s army had come so close. Armchair generals kept talking about von Kluck’s turn. If he hadn’t made it, or if the Russians hadn’t caused so much trouble off in the East…

Russia was making trouble again. The Wehrmacht had done well here, or Ludwig thought it had. In a month, it had knocked Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg out of the fight. The radio said German bombers were giving England hell to pay back the British terror raids on German cities. Maybe this attack would have gone smoother in better weather. Only God could know something like that, though.

“Tell your men,” Priller said. “We go at 0600.”

It would still be dark. Somebody’d get a surprise, all right. Well, what could you do? Rothe went back to his panzer. Fritz was toasting some bacon he’d liberated from a farmhouse. Theo was swapping tubes in and out of the radio, trying to figure out which one was bad.

Fritz looked up from the little cookfire. “It’s going to be bad,” he said. “I can see it on your face. How bad is it?”

“We hit the town up ahead at 0600,” Ludwig answered bluntly.

Theo paused with a tube in each hand. He looked down at them, muttering; Rothe guessed he was remembering which one he’d just pulled and which was about to go in. Fritz stared up from the sizzling slab of bacon. “Fuck,” he said.

“I know,” Ludwig said. “What can you do, though?” He pointed to the bacon. “Is that done? Let me have some if it is.”

Off in the distance, some guns opened up. French 75s, Ludwig thought, recognizing the reports. The damned things dated back to before the turn of the century. They’d been the great workhorses of the French artillery during the last war; Ludwig’s father swore whenever he talked about them. They could fire obscenely fast. This time around, German 105s outranged them. That did you no good if you ended up on the wrong end of things, though.

These shells came down a good distance away. Fritz cut the bacon into three pieces. “Well, maybe we’ll surprise them,” he said. “They don’t seem to know where we’re at…Here you go, Sergeant.”

“Danke.” Ludwig blew on his share, then took a bite. It tasted about the same as bacon would have back home. He might have had it boiled there, but he might not, too. He gulped. “Yeah, maybe we will,” he said, and bit into the bacon again.

Theo stared at the orange glow inside the tube he’d just swapped in. “That does it,” he said. “Now we’ll be able to hear all the stupid orders we’ll get from the shitheads back of the lines-and from Lieutenant Priller, too.” His faith in those set over him had, well, limits. Ludwig suspected Theo didn’t have much use for him, either. He also suspected-no, he was sure-he wouldn’t lose any sleep about it.

The French 75s quieted down. Had somebody given them a target, or were they shooting at some jumpy officer’s imagination? Ludwig laughed. He had no use for French higher-ups. Why did he think the men who ran the Wehrmacht had a better handle on what they were doing?

Because we’re in France, and the damned Frenchmen aren’t in Germany, he answered himself. And maybe that meant something and maybe it didn’t. They’d all find out some time not long after 0600.

He slept by the Panzer II. So did the driver and the radioman. If shelling came close, they could dive under the panzer. The treads and the armored body would keep out anything this side of a direct hit.

Lieutenant Priller came along at half past four to make sure they were alert and ready to go. “We can do it,” he said. “We’re going to do it, too.”

“Have we got any coffee?” Ludwig asked plaintively. And damned if they didn’t. It wasn’t the ersatz that came with army rations, mixed with burnt barley and chicory. It came from the real bean, no doubt taken from the French. It was dark and mean and strong. Ludwig dumped sugar into it so he could choke it down. Sure as hell, it pried his eyelids open.

As they had in the runup to the strike against Czechoslovakia, engineers had set out white tapes here to guide the panzers forward without showing a light. Rothe cupped a hand behind his ear, trying to hear if the French up ahead had any idea they were coming. He couldn’t tell. Fritz had the engine throttled back, but its low rumble still drowned out the little sounds he was looking for. Nobody was shooting at the Germans as they moved up to the start line, anyhow.

Ludwig glanced down at the radium-glowing dial on his watch. 0530. A couple of hours later, he checked again. 0550. He laughed at himself. Time stretched like a rubber band when you were waiting for the balloon to go up.

When it did go up, it went all at once. One second, quiet above the engine noise. The next, German artillery crashed behind the panzers. German machine guns stuttered to life, spitting fire to either side. “Let’s go!” Rothe yelled through the din. The engine grew deeper and louder. It had to work like a bastard to shove all that armored weight around.

A couple of French Hotchkiss machine guns returned fire, but not for long. The panzers and assault teams with submachine guns and grenades silenced them. Standing head and shoulders out of the turret, Ludwig whooped. The last thing he wanted was tracers probing toward him.

The Germans had jumped off just before earliest dawn. As day broke, the French landscape seemed to stretch out ever farther before them. Rothe fired a few machine-gun bursts at soldiers in khaki. If they were here, they were bound to be enemies. He was at the spearpoint of the field-gray forces pressing down from the northeast.

Bam! A French antitank gun belched flame. The 37mm round missed the Panzer II. A good thing-a hit would have turned it into blazing scrap metal. Rothe almost shit himself even so.

More to the point, he traversed the turret and fired several short bursts at the gun. Seeing bullets spark off its steel shielding, he gave it a few rounds from the 20mm cannon. Those got through. French artillerymen tumbled like ninepins. “There you go!” Fritz shouted. Theo, tending to his radio in the bowels of the Panzer II, couldn’t see a damned thing.

But one stubborn Frenchman fired the gun again. The 37mm shot snarled past, a few meters over Ludwig’s head. He shot back with the panzer’s main armament. And he gave an order you didn’t hear every day in armored warfare: “Charge! Run that gun down!”

“Jawohl!” Fritz said. The Panzer II’s engine snarled. The stubborn French soldier was still alive behind the riddled shield, trying to serve the gun by himself. Seeing the panzer bearing down on him, he finally turned and fled. Ludwig shot him in the back with the machine gun. A guy like that was too dangerous to leave alive.

Crunch! The panzer clattered over the antitank gun. For a nasty moment, Ludwig feared the panzer would flip over, but it didn’t. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw the new kink in the gun’s barrel. Nobody would use that one against the Reich any more, which was the point.

Here and there, infantrymen with rifles fired at the panzers, trying to pick off their commanders. Every once in a while, they managed to do it, too. But the panzers had a whole slew of advantages. They were on the move. Their commanders could duck behind armor. And they carried a machine gun and a light cannon against a bolt-action rifle.

Staying on the move was the biggest edge. Even if you didn’t take out an infantryman, you left him behind in a matter of seconds. Sooner or later, your own foot soldiers could deal with him. In the meanwhile, the panzers charged ahead, flowing around enemy hell in the rear.

But Coucy-le-Chateau was too big and too strong to go around. Some of the soldiers Ludwig shot at in the outskirts wore lighter khaki and steel derbies in place of darker uniforms and domed helms with vestigial crests. Englishmen! They didn’t like machine-gun bursts any better than the French (or Ludwig, come to that).

A machine gun chattered from the middle of an apple orchard. The gun moved. Ludwig realized it was mounted on some sort of tank. He gulped, wondering if the enemy machine’s cannon was taking dead aim at his panzer. Not nearly enough steel separated him from the slings and arrows of outrageous gunners.

But he realized little by little that the other panzer didn’t carry a cannon. All it had was that machine gun-it might as well have been a German Panzer I.

It waddled out of the apple grove. It didn’t seem able to do anything but waddle-a man running fast would have had no trouble outdistancing it. He fired three quick rounds from the 20mm gun. Two of them hit the turret, but they didn’t come close to punching through. The Matilda might be slow. It might have a laughable armament-even a Panzer I sported a pair of machine guns, not a singleton. But it was damned hard to wreck.

It was if you tried to kill the crew, anyway. If you crippled it, though…Ludwig fired the 20mm at the Matilda’s tracks and road wheels. Before long, the ungainly thing slewed sideways and stopped. Ludwig’s panzer clanked past it. Now it was nothing but a well-armored machine-gun position. The infantry could deal with that.

Medieval-looking ramparts surrounded Coucy-le-Chateau. The hilltop chateau that gave the town its name had had chunks bitten out of it, probably in the last war. Mortar bombs from the chateau started falling among the German panzers. Half wrecked or not, the place had poilus or Tommies in it.

“Theo!” Ludwig said. “Let the artillery know they’re firing from the ruin.”

“Right,” the radioman answered, which might have meant anything.

He-or somebody-must have done it, because 105s started knocking more pieces off the chateau. Then a flight of Stukas screamed down on it. Their bombs did what guns could only dream about. The enemy mortars fell silent.

More Stukas worked over Coucy-le-Chateau. One of them got shot down and crashed into the town, turning itself into a bomb. The rest roared away. The onslaught stunned the defenders. With narrow, winding streets, Coucy-le-Chateau might have been a nasty place to try to take. But some of the garrison fled west and south, while the rest couldn’t surrender fast enough.

Breakthrough? Ludwig didn’t know, but he had hopes.