Hitler's war

Chapter Fourteen

When Alistair Walsh saw a road sign saying how many kilometers it was to Paris, he knew things weren’t in good shape. The whole point to the war was keeping the Nazis away from Paris, the same as it had been with the Kaiser’s army the last time around.

They’d done it the last time-done it twice, in fact, in 1914 and then again in 1918. He wasn’t so sure they could now. The BEF stumbled back and stumbled back. People were starting to talk about the Miracle on the Marne in 1914. Well, they were getting too damn close to the Marne again, and they sure could use another miracle.

He yawned. What he could use was sleep. One of the things nobody talked about was how wearing modern war was. You were fighting or you were marching or they were shelling you or bombing you or you were trying to promote something to eat. What you weren’t doing was resting.

He wasn’t the only one frazzled almost to death. Even though February remained chilly, exhausted soldiers curled up like animals by the side of the road. Some slept in greatcoats, some wrapped in blankets, some as they were regardless of the cold. You had to look closely to see their chests rising and falling to make sure they weren’t corpses.

Exhausted civilians also slept by the roadside, singly and in family groups. They hadn’t done any shooting; other than that, they had as much right to be weary as the soldiers. One poor woman must have been a restless sleeper. She’d kicked off her blanket and thrashed around so her legs and backside were out in the biting breeze. Walsh got an eyeful as he trudged along.

One of the Tommies with him chuckled. “What we’re fighting for, right?” the fellow said.

“I’ve seen plenty worse,” Walsh allowed. “If I lay down beside her, though, I bet I’d cork off before I could try getting her knickers down.”

“Blimey! Me, too.” The other soldier’s face split in an enormous yawn. “Don’t know how I put one foot in front of the other any more.”

Behind them, German artillery thundered to life. Walsh jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s how.”

“Too right it is. Got a fag on you, Sarge?”

Walsh listened for screams in the air that would warn of incoming shells aimed their way. Hearing none, he reached into a tunic pocket and pulled out a packet of Gitanes. “Here. Got these off a dead Frenchman. Nasty things, but better than nothing.”

“I’d smoke whatever you’ve got and thank you for it. I’m plumb out, and I’m all-” The Tommy held out his arm in front of him and made his hand tremble.

“Know what you mean. I’ve run dry myself a couple of times.” Walsh proffered the French cigarettes. “Take two or three, then.”

“I’d be much obliged, if you don’t mind.” The soldier stuck one in his mouth and stashed the other two in a breast pocket of his grimy battledress. He struck a match and inhaled. “Cor!” he said in tones of deep respect. “Like smoking a bleeding blowtorch, ain’t it?”

Walsh had also lit a Gitane. After blowing out smoke, he coughed like a man in the last stages of consumption. “What’s that you say?” he inquired.

The other soldier laughed. He took a second, more cautious, drag. “Damn froggies like ‘em this way, don’t they?”

“I expect so. They’d make ‘em different if they didn’t,” Walsh said.

“Fuck.” The Tommy shook his head. “We ought to be on Adolf’s side.”

“Bugger that, mate,” Walsh said. “Germans shot me once, and it’s not for lack of trying they haven’t done it again. Yeah, the French are a bad lot, but those bastards in field-gray are worse.”

“Take an even strain, Sergeant. I was only joking, like.” But then the soldier added, “They make damn good soldiers, though.”

“They make damn good dead soldiers,” Walsh said. He also had a healthy regard for German military talent. He’d never met an English soldier who’d fought the squareheads who didn’t. To him, that only made Germans more dangerous. It didn’t mean he wanted to switch sides. He pointed to the town ahead. “Is that Senlis?” He probably butchered the pronunciation, but he didn’t care.

“I think so.” The soldier to whom he’d given a smoke also seemed glad to change the subject.

At its core, Senlis had what looked like really ancient walls with towers. The spires of a cathedral poked up from inside them. Walsh remembered that the Germans had burned the town and shot the mayor and several leading citizens in 1914. The damage had been made good in the quarter-century since. All the same, he didn’t want to fight alongside people who did things like that.

He also wasn’t eager to fight against them. Willing, yes, but not eager. They were too bloody good at what they did.

In front of those old, old walls-would they go back to Roman days?-an English captain with half a company’s worth of men was nabbing stragglers. “You and you!” he called to Walsh and the Tommy to whom he’d given some Gitanes. “You think we can hold this town, eh?”

The other soldier didn’t say anything. It wasn’t quite what the Articles of War called mute insolence, but it wasn’t far removed, either. Sergeant Walsh said, “We can try, sir.” He didn’t agree with the officer, but he did admit the possibility.

That was plenty. “Fall in with me, then, the both of you,” the captain said. “If the Hun tries to take this place, we’ll give him what he deserves and send him off with his tail between his legs, what?”

How many years had it been since Walsh heard anybody call Germans Huns? More than he could remember. The captain was about his age, so he’d probably done time here in the last war.

Most of the civilians had cleared out of Senlis, which meant they were causing traffic headaches somewhere south and west of here. Soldiers could pick and choose the empty houses they tried to defend. Walsh went through his, but didn’t find anything worth eating or drinking. Too bad, he thought.

He had three privates with him. They were all Yorkshire farm boys, and spoke with an accent he had to work to follow. His might have sounded just as strange to them, but that was their lookout. They understood him well enough to keep watch at all the windows-and to give him a tin of M amp; V. He felt better after wolfing down the meat-and-vegetable stew.

Senlis got a couple of hours’ respite before the Germans turned their attention to it. Then artillery walked up to the town. Walsh crouched down with the three privates: they were Jim and Jock and, improbably, Alonzo. The house they’d taken over was made of stone. It would stop fragments unless it was unlucky enough to take a direct hit.

“Where’s our guns?” Alonzo complained. Goons, it came out when he said it. However it came out, it was a damn good question. The Germans always seemed to put their guns where they needed them. The Allies…sometimes did.

Stukas screamed down out of the sky, one after another. Crouching huddled under the kitchen table, Walsh cursed the vulture-winged monsters and their sirens. He also cursed the RAF, both for not shooting them down and for not having anything like them.

Several windows in the French house were already broken. The ones that weren’t blew in now, leaving small snowdrifts of glass spears on the floor. Walsh swore some more, resignedly. Sure as hell, he’d end up cutting his hand or his leg on them.

Somebody was yelling for a medic. Somebody else was screaming for his mother. One of the Yorkshire lads crossed himself. Alistair Walsh was no Catholic, but he understood the gesture. Nobody but a desperately hurt man made noises like that.

Before long, the screaming stopped. Walsh hoped the wounded man got morphine. More likely, the poor bugger passed out or just died. “Up, lads,” the sergeant told the privates. “I expect we’ll have company before long.”

“Won’t get no clotted cream from me,” Jock said, chambering a round in his Enfield with a snick! of the bolt.

Sure enough, here came the Germans. They moved up in little stuttering runs from one bit of cover to the next. Some of them had leaves and branches fixed to their helmets with bands cut from old inner tubes. No, no one could say they weren’t skilled at their murderous trade.

A Bren gun opened up a couple of houses away from Walsh’s. He liked the British army’s new light machine gun a lot. It really was light-you could pick it up and shoot from the hip if you had to. And it was air-cooled: no need to worry about pouring water (or, that failing, piss) into the metal cooling jacket around the barrel. Best of all, it worked reliably. What more could you want?

It made the Germans hit the deck. They started shooting at the house where it lurked. When they did, the muzzle flashes from their Mausers gave the British infantrymen good targets. Walsh fired and reloaded, then ducked down and crawled to another window to fire again.

Something bit him through the knee of his battledress. “Bloody glass,” he muttered.

The Bren gun barked again. German medics in Red Cross smocks ran up to recover casualties. Walsh didn’t shoot at them. Fair was fair. The Germans mostly didn’t shoot at British medics.

A lull followed. The Germans seemed surprised anyone was fighting hard to save Senlis. Since Walsh had been surprised when the captain made a fight for the place, how could he blame them?

“What happens now, Sergeant?” Alonzo asked.

“They could shell us some more. They could call in the Stukas again, or the tanks,” Walsh said. None of the three Yorkshiremen seemed to want to hear that. Walsh went on, “Or they could decide we’re a tough nut and try to go around us instead of pushing through.”

“That’d be good,” Alonzo said. Jack and Jock both nodded. After a moment, so did Alistair Walsh.

* * *

After Sarah Goldman’s Father tied his necktie every morning, he pinned his Iron Cross Second Class onto the breast pocket of his jacket. Samuel Goldman wanted to remind the Nazi thugs and Gestapo goons who came to scream at him that he’d done his duty for the Faterland in the last war and would have done it again this time if only they’d let him.

Maybe the Eisenkreuz did some good. The Goldmans remained in their home. The Nazis hadn’t hauled the rest of them off to Dachau or Buchenwald even if Saul had killed a member of the Master Race.

The Nazis hadn’t caught Sarah’s big brother, either. Saul had fled the labor gang…and, after that, he might have fallen off the face of the earth. Sarah had no idea what he’d done. Whatever it was, she admired it tremendously. The policemen with the swastika armbands also had no idea what he’d done. It drove them crazy.

“No, sir,” Samuel Goldman told a foul-mouthed Gestapo officer. “He has not telephoned us. You would know if he had, nicht wahr? You must be tapping our telephone line.”

“You bet your scrawny ass we are, Jew,” the secret policeman said. “But he could be talking to some other lousy kike who’s passing you coded messages.”

“It is not so, sir.” Sarah’s father kept his temper better than she dreamt of being able to do. Maybe he had a deeper understanding of what was at stake in this game. Or maybe he was just blessed with a disposition more even than hers.

“Ought to take you all out and give you a noodle,” the officer growled.

“I beg your pardon?” Somehow, Samuel Goldman still managed to keep the dignity a professor of ancient history and classics should have.

The Gestapo officer jumped up and walked around behind him. He put the tip of his outthrust index finger against the back of Samuel Goldman’s neck. “Bang!” he said, and then, “A noodle.”

“I see,” Sarah’s father replied, as coolly as if the man had explained how a new phonograph operated.

“Think you’ve got nerve, do you?” the Gestapo man growled. “You know what happens to assholes with nerve? They scream as loud as anybody else once we get to work on ‘em. Maybe louder, on account of we don’t fuckin’ like tough guys.”

Sarah and her mother listened from the kitchen, doing their best to keep quiet so they didn’t remind the goon they were there. Her mother’s face went pale as skimmed milk. Sarah’s own face was probably the same color, but she couldn’t see herself.

Out in the front room, her father stayed calm. “Nerve? Not a bit of it,” he answered. “It’s slang we didn’t use in the trenches, that’s all. You’ll know that’s true-you’re the right age.”

“Ja, ja,” the officer said impatiently. “You were in France. I fought in the East, against the Russians.”

“Ach so,” Samuel Goldman said. “Well, that was no fun, either. I had two friends who went to the Eastern Front and didn’t come back.”

“Kaupisch and Briesen,” the Gestapo man said. It wasn’t a question-he knew. Sarah asked her mother with her eyes how the officer knew something like that. Hanna Goldman shrugged helplessly.

“That’s right,” Sarah’s father said, his voice soft and sad.

“Both Aryans,” the officer said. “Not good Aryans, or they wouldn’t have made friends with a goddamn sheeny. Besides, I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to talk about your stinking, murdering turd of a son.”

If he’d said anything like that to Sarah, she thought she would have tried to brain him with an ashtray. Her father only sighed and said, “I don’t know any more than you do. I probably know less than you do, because you’ve been chasing him ever since the tragedy took place.”

“Why shouldn’t we just kill you or take you off to a camp because of what that little cocksucker did?” the Gestapo man snarled.

Had he seen Saul? Sarah had her doubts. He wouldn’t have called him little if he had. Saul was one meter eighty-eight centimeters tall; he weighed ninety kilos. You could say a lot of things about him, but not little, not if you wanted to stay within shouting distance of the truth.

As if the Gestapo cared! Or had to care.

Samuel Goldman sighed. “Because we had nothing to do with anything Saul may have done?” he suggested. Saul had done it, all right. Sarah would never forget the sound that shovel blade made smashing into the side of the work-gang boss’ head. Saul had had plenty of provocation, but he’d done it.

The Gestapo man snorted. “You aren’t even citizens of the Reich, only residents. I can do whatever I want with you. To you.”

“Yes, sir. I know you can,” Father said mournfully. “You asked why you shouldn’t. I gave you the best answer I could.”

“Are you playing games with me, Jewboy?” demanded the officer in the black uniform with the shiny metal buttons.

Sarah would have killed him for that, too, if she could. Her father didn’t even flinch. “Games? No, sir,” he replied. “All I’m doing is the best I can for my family and me. Wouldn’t you do the same in my place?”

“Like you’d catch me in a kike’s place! Fat chance!” the Gestapo man said. Sarah might have guessed he’d have no fellow-feeling. If you did, how could you do a job like his? Then he added, “If you see him, if you hear anything from him, you are to report it to us immediately. If you don’t, you’ll pay for it. Understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Samuel Goldman said. “I understand.”

The Gestapo man stormed into the kitchen. “You’re in there listening!” he yelled. “Think I don’t know? You understand me, too?” He glared at them till they both nodded, too. Then he stomped out of the house. He might have suddenly remembered he had other Jews in Munster to terrorize. Chances were he did.

“As if we’d really tell on Saul!” Sarah exclaimed as soon as he slammed the door. “I don’t think so!”

“But we will,” her father said. She stared at him, wondering if her ears were working right. He nodded. “ Ja. We will.”

“But-why? How?” That wasn’t Sarah. It was her mother, who sounded as bewildered as she felt.

“I’ll tell you why.” And Samuel Goldman did: “They’re liable to cook something up and send it to us, that’s why. Then, if we don’t report it, they can arrest us for protecting a fugitive. So chances are we have to play the game by their rules-and we have to hope Saul has the good sense to know we might be under this kind of pressure.”

Sarah was sure Saul would. Her father sounded anything but. She knew why, too. Devoted to the life of the mind, Samuel Goldman had never known what to make of his big, muscular son. Saul hadn’t done badly in school, but it wasn’t what he cared about. Father had to wonder whether somebody like that had any brains at all.

“Saul will do fine.” Mother had confidence in him, too, which made Sarah feel better. Hanna Goldman went on, “And if they didn’t catch him right away, they’ll have a harder time of it now. Harder and harder the longer he stays free.”

“I hope so,” Father said, but, again, he sounded far from certain.

This time, Sarah was inclined to agree with him, however little she wanted to. Germany was a land that ran on forms and papers. Food was rationed. So was clothing. Everyone had an identity card and had to show it a dozen times a day. How could a Jew on the run not get caught in the spiderweb of officialdom and bureaucracy? Sarah couldn’t imagine.

But so far Saul hadn’t. And if he hadn’t so far, maybe he could keep on doing whatever he was doing and stay free. Maybe. Sarah could hope so, anyhow. She could even pray, and she did, though she didn’t think she was very good at it. Maybe God valued sincerity over style. She could hope that was true, too-and she did.

* * *

A few kilometers up ahead lay a railway-junction town called Hirson. Willi Dernen did his best not to care. Northeastern France had winters almost as beastly as the ones he’d grown up with in eastern Germany. Willi was holed up in a village called Watigny, east of the place that mattered to the fellows with the fancy shoulder straps.

One of these days, they’d order him to go forward. And he would. He wasn’t thrilled about it, but he would. What they’d do to him if he didn’t was certain, and dreadful. What the Frenchmen would do to him after he did might not be so bad. If he was lucky.

For the moment, even the generals could see that advancing through waist-deep snowdrifts was asking to get your dick shot off. German guns pounded Hirson. The French replied, but not many shells came down on Watigny. There were German batteries north and south of the village, but none close by.

About half the people who’d lived here fled before the Wehrmacht arrived. Not all those houses were vacant. French refugees from farther north and east-to say nothing of Belgians and even Dutchmen-squatted in some of them. The Germans took the rest. Before long, they’d probably throw out the squatters, too. For the time being, the officers in charge of security were still sorting out who was who.

People from the older generation remembered the last time soldiers in Feldgrau came through these parts. Some of them were among the folks who’d run away. Others seemed gruffly tolerant of the occupiers. Their attitude said this was nothing new to them. They’d done it once, and they could do it again.

By order of the divisional commander, the local tavern stayed open. The exchange rate was pegged at ten francs to the mark. That made even privates like Willi rich men-or as rich as they could be in a place like Watigny, where getting by was as much as anyone could hope for.

The tavern still had beer and wine, as well as brandy that came in china crocks and was probably homemade. It got you crocked, all right. Willi had found that out by experience. It also left you with a mother of a hangover. Strong French coffee and strong German aspirins blunted a Katzenjammer, though.

Willi and Wolfgang Storch slogged through the snow toward the oasis. Orders were that no German soldier could go in alone. Nobody’d got knocked over the head here. Maybe it had happened somewhere else. Or maybe the High Command was scared of its own shadow. That was how it looked to Willi.

He opened the door. Both he and Wolfgang hurried inside. Then he closed the door again to block the cold wind whining through the streets.

It was gloomy inside, but the fire gave some warmth. Frenchmen sat at a couple of tables, drinking, smoking, murmuring in the language Willi didn’t speak. Corporal Baatz and a couple of other noncoms occupied another. They didn’t try to keep their voices down-they were the winners, after all.

Winners or not, Willi wanted nothing to do with them. A glance from Wolfgang said he didn’t, either. They walked past the underofficers and up to the bar. The man behind it was big, broad-shouldered, and fair. He looked much more like a German than a Frenchman. But a photo on the wall behind him showed him in the uniform of a French soldier in the last war. The patch he wore over one eye didn’t hide all the scarring around the socket. It did explain why he hadn’t got mobilized this time around.

“Guten Tag, Claude,” Willi said, more respectfully than not.

“Guten Tag,” the tapman answered. After he got wounded, he’d spent two years in a POW camp. He’d picked up some German there, and hadn’t forgotten all of it. Other people of his generation had learned it from the Kaiser’s soldiers who’d occupied the area. They still knew bits and pieces, too. “What you want, eh?” Claude went on.

“Beer, bitte,” Willi said.

“Brandy for me, please,” Wolfgang added. They both laid money-German money-on the zinc bar.

Claude sighed, but he took it. What choice did he have? “Go and sit,” he said, pointing to an empty table-shrewdly, the one farthest from where Baatz and his buddies were. “Michelle, she bring.”

“Now you’re talking!” Wolfgang radiated enthusiasm…or something related to it, anyhow. A grin also stretched across Willi’s face. Claude’s daughter was about their age. Like her father, she was large and solid and fair. On her, it looked good.

She came out from a back room. Claude gave her the drinks. She carried them over to the soldiers. “Thank you, dear,” Willi said auf Deutsch. He trotted out one of his handful of recently acquired French words: “Merci.”

“Pas d e quoi,” she answered gravely, and went away. As far as anybody knew, she didn’t sleep with soldiers. Everybody thought that was too damn bad.

Arno Baatz waved his mug. “Fill me up over here!” he called. Claude brought a pitcher of beer to his table and poured the mug full. That didn’t satisfy Baatz. “How come those no-account lugs get the pretty girl and I get you?” he demanded.

Claude’s one eye skewered him like a lepidopterist’s collecting pin. “Because they is-are-polite,” the tapman answered, and he walked back to the bar.

“What? I’m not?” Corporal Baatz yelled, beer-fueled outrage making him even shriller than usual. “You take that back!”

“Nein,” Claude said with dignity.

Baatz jumped to his feet. “I’ll show you, then, you stinking pigdog! Come fight like a man!”

Claude turned around and took one step back toward him: giving himself room to maneuver. Baatz rushed him. Willi wanted to avert his eyes. He couldn’t stand the Unteroffizier, but no denying he was a rough man in a rough trade. He gave Claude one that should have dented a Panzer II. The barman blinked his good eye. Then he swung. His fist caught Arno Baatz right on the button with a noise like a cleaver smacking into a frozen side of beef. Baatz went straight over backwards. The back of his head smacked the stone floor. He didn’t move. He didn’t even twitch.

“Holy Jesus!” Willi said. “Did you kill him?”

Claude took the question seriously. He felt for the noncom’s pulse. “He lives,” he said laconically, and dropped Baatz’s wrist. It fell back limply. Baatz might be alive, but he sure wasn’t connected to the real world. The tapman looked to the other Germans at the corporal’s table. “He hit me first. Please take him away. He is no more welcome here.”

They didn’t argue with him. Nobody in his right mind would have argued with Claude then-not without a Schmeisser in his hands, anyhow. Arno Baatz was as boneless as an octopus as they dragged him out of the tavern.

One of the Frenchmen drinking there sent up smoke signals from his pipe. He said something in his own language. Claude shrugged a massive shrug, as if to say, Well, what can you do? Willi guessed the customer had warned him he would get in trouble.

“We’ll say he started it,” Willi volunteered.

“It’s the truth,” Wolfgang agreed.

“Danke,” Claude said. “For official business, this is good. For not official business…” He spread his hands and let his voice trail away.

Willi understood that. If Arno Baatz and his friends-assuming he had any, which struck the biased Willi as improbable-decided to come back with weapons, what would the officers set over them do about it? Anything? Even if they did, how much would that help Claude after the fact?

“Maybe we’ll go forward again soon. Blizzards can’t last forever-I don’t think,” Wolfgang said. “Then Awful Arno will be out of your hair.”

“ Ja. Maybe,” Claude said. It was the first time Willi had heard him even slightly enthusiastic about the prospect of a German advance. He was a Frenchmen. The Germans had maimed him in the last war. You couldn’t blame him for not wishing them well. But you also couldn’t blame him for wanting Corporal Baatz the hell out of Watigny, even if that meant the Wehrmacht went forward.

The tapman ducked into the back room for a little while, then came out again. A couple of minutes later, so did Michelle. She brought Willi a beer and Wolfgang a brandy they hadn’t ordered. When they tried to pay for them, she wouldn’t take their money.

“Merci. Merci,” Willi said. It didn’t seem enough, but it was the best he could do.

They finished the free drinks and left. After they got outside and closed the door behind them again, Wolfgang said, “If she really wanted to thank us, she could have taken us into that back room while Papa looked the other way.”

“She’s not that kind of girl,” Willi said.

“Yeah. Ain’t it a shame?” Wolfgang’s breath smoked even though he didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth. After a couple of steps, he brightened. “Could be worse, you know? Old Arno sure got his.”

“Boy, did he ever!” Willi agreed enthusiastically. They walked on through the snow, toward the house where they were quartered.

* * *

French villagers stared fearfully at Vaclav Jezek and the rest of the Czechs in his outfit. Vaclav knew why, too. Their uniforms weren’t quite the right color, their helmets were the wrong shape, and they spoke some funny foreign language. To people who didn’t know any better, that was plenty to turn them into Germans.

And, just to make things worse, they were coming from the east. If they were Germans, they would have smashed all the defenders ahead of them, but you couldn’t expect civilians to think of things like that.

One of the locals came out with something. Vaclav had picked up a handful of French words, but not nearly enough to let him follow. “What did he say?” he asked the guy along as an interpreter.

Benjamin Halevy looked even less happy than he had before he heard the Frenchman’s news. The Jewish sergeant pointed north and west. “Old geezer claims the Germans are already over there.”

“Shit,” Vaclav said. If that was true, they were in danger of getting cut off and surrounded. If…“Does he know his ass from a hole in the ground?”

He eyed the Frenchman. The guy was around fifty, and had some ugly scars on his jaw and left cheek. Maybe those weren’t war wounds, but they sure looked like them. If this fellow had gone through the mill before, he wouldn’t see a cow and imagine it was a German armored division.

Halevy went back and forth with him. After a last “Merci,” the sergeant returned to Czech: “Sure sounds like he does. They pushed through the woods over there. This guy says he saw a couple of armored cars, but no tanks.”

“Bad enough,” Vaclav muttered. Several of his countrymen nodded. He went on, “Where are our tanks? Where are our armored cars?” Nobody answered him. The Germans always seemed to have armor when they broke through. They used their armor to break through. The French scattered it up and down the line, which meant they never had enough where they needed it most. That was one reason they were falling back and the Nazis moving up.

Halevy gave Vaclav a crooked grin. “Hey, pal, that’s why you’ve got your antitank rifle, right?”

Vaclav told him where he could put the antitank rifle. Halevy would have walked very straight if he’d tried. You could get your behind in a sling for telling off a noncom, but Vaclav’s behind was already in a sling because he was up at the front, so what did he care?

He would have expected a Jew to get stuffy about that kind of thing, maybe to threaten him with official regulations. But Sergeant Halevy just laughed and said something about his mother and troopships. From another guy, or under different circumstances, Vaclav would have tried to rearrange his face. He laughed now, too. They’d been through it together. They’d earned the right to zing each other.

“Seriously, we ought to head up that way,” Halevy said. “If your rifle can take out those cars, it’ll do us some good.”

Vaclav was no more enthusiastic about putting his dick on the chopping block than any other soldier in his right mind would have been. But he could see the need. “I’ll try it,” he said.

“Attaboy,” Halevy told him. He clapped another Czech soldier on the back. “Dominik, take point.”

“Right, Sergeant.” Dominik didn’t sound thrilled, but he never did. He was little and skinny and nervous as a cat in a room full of Rottweilers-all of which made him a goddamn good point man. He carried a captured German submachine gun. If he ran into trouble, he could spray a lot of lead at it.

“Let’s go,” the sergeant said. He moved right behind Dominik. He didn’t believe in staying away from trouble. None of the people who said Jews were a bunch of cowards had seen him in action. David had stayed right up there with everybody else, too, till he stopped one. And they both hated Nazis even more than Vaclav did, which he wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

“Bonne chance,” called the Frenchman who’d warned them about Germans. Luck, that meant, or something like it. Vaclav waved to the guy without looking back.

Trees and bushes and rocks. The western part of the Ardennes was as wild and rugged as anything in Czechoslovakia. Vaclav would have bet the Germans couldn’t get any armor through here, but he would have lost if he had. He’d already escaped from tanks in these parts: Panzer Is and IIs, and also some captured Czech T-35s. Those infuriated him. Yes, everybody grabbed whatever he could get his hands on-his own antitank rifle and Dominik’s machine pistol showed as much. But seeing Czech tanks fight against Czech soldiers made him want to cry.

Dominik waved urgently. Vaclav dove behind the closest bush. He didn’t know what was up ahead, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way. Sergeant Halevy twiddled fingers at him. Ever so cautiously, Vaclav slithered forward. He swore under his breath every time a knee or an elbow broke a twig.

Then he froze-German voices up ahead. The breeze swung, and he got a whiff of cigarette smoke. “God in heaven, I’m tired,” one of the Fritzes said. “I could sleep for a month.”

“Just a little going on, Klaus.” If those dry tones didn’t come from a sergeant, Vaclav would eat his boots.

“Ja,” Klaus said, and then, “What the hell was that?”

That was Vaclav’s antitank rifle scraping through some dry bushes. The goddamn thing was more than a meter and a half long-almost as long as he was tall. It wasn’t just heavy; it was also unwieldy as all get-out. Jezek froze.

“I didn’t hear anything,” the noncom said.

“I sure thought I did,” Klaus replied.

“Want to check it out?”

“Nah. I just want to sit here and grab a smoke.”

“Sounds good to me. Let me bum one off you,” the sergeant said.

Even more warily than before, Vaclav crawled forward. He spotted an armored car between a couple of chestnuts. Hoping the noise wouldn’t give him away, he chambered a round. The Germans didn’t have kittens, so he got away with it. A couple of those long, fat rounds through the engine compartment and that armored car wouldn’t go anywhere for a while.

He waggled the fingers on his left hand to let Sergeant Halevy know he was in position. The rest of the Czechs opened up on the Germans. His noise covered by theirs, he punched one through the armored car’s thin steel side and into the engine.

He was about to shoot at it again when a German with a submachine gun popped up out of nowhere. Vaclav shot him instead. A round designed to pierce armor did horrible things to flesh. It seemed to blow out half the German’s insides. The poor bastard fell over with a grunt and never stirred after that. It was over fast for him, anyhow.

Shoulder aching-even with muzzle brake and padded stock, the antitank rifle kicked harder than a kangaroo-Vaclav reloaded. Here came the other armored car. He fired at where the driver would sit, once, twice. The car slid to the left and slammed into a tree.

That seemed to take the vinegar out of these Germans. They either ran off or gave up. “Good job!” Sergeant Halevy called to Vaclav. “Don’t you wish it was this easy all the goddamn time?”

“Jesus!” Vaclav exclaimed. “I’m just glad it was this easy once.” Halevy laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.

* * *

Lieutenant Julius Lemp stood at stiff attention. When a rear admiral reamed you out, you had to stand there and take it and pretend it didn’t hurt. The process was a lot like picking up dueling scars, except you had no sword of your own.

“You thick-skinned idiot!” Karl Donitz didn’t raise his voice, which only made things worse. “Did you want to drag the United States into this war?”

“No, sir,” Lemp replied woodenly He stared straight at a spot three centimeters in front of Donitz’s nose.

The round-faced chief of U-boat operations was not a man who stood out in a crowd. Donitz was supposed to be a pretty good guy, too. He had a reputation for sticking up for his captains. But nobody would stick up for you when you screwed up the way Lemp had.

“U-boats brought the Americans in the last time,” Donitz said. “We try not to make the same mistakes twice, you know.” He waited.

“Yes, sir.” Again, something mechanical might have spoken through Lemp.

“I’ve had to calm down Goebbels and von Ribbentrop and the Fuhrer,” Donitz said. “They all wanted your scalp.” He waited.

What am I supposed to say now? Lemp wondered. He tried, “I’m honored, sir.” In a way, he was. If the Propaganda Minister and the Foreign Minister and Hitler himself noticed you, you’d done something out of the ordinary, no doubt about it.

Rear Admiral Donitz’s pale eyes grew cold as the seas off Greenland. “I wouldn’t be, if I were you,” he said, and his voice was as icy as his face. “Dr. Goebbels had to put together a whole propaganda campaign to shift the blame away from us. Now there’s some doubt about who sank the Athenia -but not among us, eh?”

“No, sir. I did it, all right.” Lemp still didn’t change expression. Yeah, sometimes you had to stand there and take it. This was one of those times.

“I’d run you out of my office if you told me anything else,” Donitz said. “If you screw up like this again, I won’t be able to help you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.” Men who served on U-boats weren’t normally long on military discipline. This was one of those occasions where formality was mandatory, though. You took your abuse by the numbers.

“A notation about your error will go into your service jacket,” Donitz said, which meant Lemp would be a long time seeing another promotion.

“Yes, sir,” Lemp said one more time. He couldn’t get into more trouble as long as he kept saying that, and he was in plenty already.

“Next time we send you out, for God’s sake try not to sink anything flying the Stars and Stripes,” Donitz said.

“I will, sir,” Lemp replied. But he couldn’t help adding, “You are going to send me out again?”

“Yes, yes.” The commander of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat forces sounded impatient. “You’ve proved you can hit what you aim at. We need that in our skippers. I have to dress you down, because you aimed at the wrong ship. I have my orders, too, you understand.”

Did that mean he’d been going through the motions before? It sure sounded that way to Lemp. If he had, he could take his act on stage. He’d make more money with it than he ever could in a naval career. “I see,” the U-boat skipper said cautiously-one more phrase that stayed pretty safe.

Donitz looked altogether different when he smiled. “All right, then,” he said. “Dismissed. And you can tell your crew we won’t send them to a camp.”

Lemp saluted. “Yes, sir. I’ll do that. Some of them have been worried about it.” Some of them had been scared shitless. You didn’t want to say that to a rear admiral, though. Lemp didn’t like the idea of living in a place where making an honest mistake could land you in this much trouble. But, no matter what else the Vaterland was, it was the Vaterland.

“Go on, go on.” Donitz had spent all the time with him he was going to. Stacks of papers smothered the admiral’s desk. It wasn’t as if he had nothing else going on.

After one more salute, Lemp made his escape. He was glad he’d worn his greatcoat. Germany had enough coal to keep furnaces going and heat buildings, but Wilhelmshaven was bloody cold outside. Screeching gulls wheeled overhead. The air smelled of the sea and, more faintly, of fuel oil-familiar odors to a U-boat skipper.

Donitz’s office wasn’t far from the harbor, and from the seaside barracks that housed U-boat crewmen when they came in to port. Lemp made for the two-story red-brick building with dormer windows where the sailors from the U-30 were staying. A sailor wearing a Stahlhelm and carrying a rifle stood guard outside. He saluted Lemp. The skipper and his crew weren’t quite under arrest-but they weren’t quite not under arrest, either.

Returning the salute, Lemp said, “You can relax, Jochen. I think they’ll give you some other duty soon.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Jochen said.

Lemp walked on in. The sailors crowded the wardroom, smoking and playing cards and reading newspapers. It wasn’t nearly so crowded as the long steel tube of the U-30 would have been, though. Everything stopped when the men saw Lemp. They searched his face as anxiously as they would have searched the horizon when Royal Navy destroyers were in the neighborhood.

“It’s over,” Lemp said. “The admiral read me the riot act, but they’ll let us put to sea again.”

The sailors cheered. They stamped their feet. A couple of them whistled shrilly. Only later did Lemp wonder why. As long as they stayed in harbor, they were safe. Any time they went hunting, they laid their lives on the line. And they were glad to do it. If that wasn’t madness…

Of course it was. He had a case of the same disease. So did the British sailors who tried to bring merchantmen into their harbors, and the other sailors who set out to sink U-boats. So did the soldiers in German Feldgrau, and so did the bastards in assorted shades of khaki who tried their best to stop the Wehrmacht.

Without that kind of madness, you couldn’t have a war. Julius Lemp took it for granted. So did men far more important than he.

“What did Donitz say?” asked a machinist’s mate.

“That we were bad boys for sinking an American liner. That we could have got the Reich into all kinds of trouble. But we didn’t,” Lemp answered. “He also said he needed people who could shoot straight.”

More cheers rose. These were so loud and raucous, Jochen stuck his nose into the wardroom to see what was going on. Nobody told him. Miffed, he slouched back outside. The soldiers started clapping and stomping again.

“We’ll go out there and do some more straight shooting,” Lemp said. The men shouted agreement. They were good fellows, all right-and crazy the same way he was.