Hitler's war

Chapter Sixteen

German artillery crashed down on the French position. Luc Harcourt dug as hard as he could, trying to carve a cave into the front wall of his foxhole. If he could manage that, fragments would have a hard time biting him…barring a direct hit, of course. He wished he hadn’t had that last thought, but it did make him dig faster than ever.

The ground was muddy-almost too muddy to let him make the shelter he wanted. A cave-in could kill him, too, and much more ignominiously than a shell would have. But artillery was a worse risk. Five months of war had taught Luc to fear artillery more than anything but tanks. And what were tanks but artillery on tracks?

Luc almost had the hole he wanted when the shelling let up as suddenly as it had begun. He knew what that meant. His entrenching tool went back on his belt. He grabbed his rifle.

“They’ll be coming any second!” Sergeant Demange yelled from a trench near the foxhole, for the raw replacements and the idiots in his section. “Make ‘em pay for it, that’s all. We don’t have a hell of a lot of room to back up in.”

“Your sergeant is right.” That was Lieutenant Marquet-Luc thought that was his name, anyhow. He’d replaced the previous company commander a few days earlier, after Captain Remond stopped some shrapnel with his chest. He’d been alive when he went off to the aid station. Now, who could say? The lieutenant seemed brave enough. He did like to hear himself talk, though: “Three times in a lifetime, the Boches have attacked Paris. They took it once, to our shame. We held them the last time, to our everlasting glory. Which would you rather have now, my friends?”

All Luc wanted was to come through alive and in once piece. The only shame he worried about was letting his buddies down. They mattered to him. Paris? Next to the dirty, smelly, frightened men alongside of whom he fought, Paris wasn’t so much of a much.

Small-arms fire picked up. The Germans knew what was going on as well as the Frenchmen they were trying to murder. They wanted to get into the French fieldworks as fast as they could, while the poilus were still woozy from the barrage.

If they do that, I’m dead. The thought was enough to make Luc stick his head up and bring his rifle to his shoulder. A bullet cracked past, too close for comfort. He wouldn’t have had to worry about that if he’d stayed all nicely huddled in his young cave.

No, but then he would have had to worry about other things. Sure as hell, the Germans were loping forward. The men who ran straight up and down had less experience than the ones who folded themselves as small as they could. Most of the Boches did know enough to hit the dirt or dive behind something when French machine guns started chattering.

The Germans never got to Meaux the last time around. That meant all the damage in town was brand new. The thirteenth-century cathedral lay in ruins a couple of kilometers behind Luc. Guns and Stukas cared nothing for antiquities-and the French weren’t shy about placing observers in the steeples. If the bastards in field-gray kept pressing forward, pretty soon French guns would start shelling Meaux-and the Boches would have put men with binoculars up in high places.

As if thinking of French guns had called them up, several batteries of quick-firing 75s started banging away at the Germans. They’d slaughtered the Boches by the thousands in 1914, and all through the last war. Things were tougher now. German 105s outranged them and delivered bigger shells. The enemy knew better than to advance in tight-packed ranks, too. But when you needed to drop a lot of artillery on some unlucky place in a hurry, 75s were still hard to beat.

German medics in Red Cross smocks and armbands ran around gathering up the wounded. Luc left them alone as much as he could. War was tough enough without making it worse.

He thought so, anyhow. A medic fell, and then another one. Another German wearing the Red Cross emblem pointed angrily toward the French line…right about toward where Sergeant Demange was lurking. A moment later, that medic ducked, which meant a bullet hadn’t missed him by much. He could take a hint-he dove behind a battered stone wall.

“Naughty, Sergeant,” Luc called.

“So’s your mother,” Demange answered, which wasn’t exactly a ringing denial of anything.

Luc was in no position to tell him what to do. He had other things on his mind, anyway: “Have we got any tanks in the neighborhood? Do they?”

“Sure haven’t seen any of ours,” the sergeant said.

Since Luc hadn’t, either, he asked the next important question: “Have we got any antitank guns?”

“Sure as hell hope so,” Demange answered. That was also less encouraging than Luc wished it were.

Meaux lay in a loop of the Marne. Maybe the Germans were having trouble getting their armor across the river. They’d managed farther east with far fewer problems than he wished they’d had-probably far fewer than they should have had. With luck, the Allies were figuring out how to make those crossings tougher. Without luck, the Boches were feinting here so they could knock the crap out of the French and English defenders somewhere else.

Even without tanks, they hadn’t given up in front of Meaux. More artillery came in, this barrage precisely aimed at the French forward positions. Luc cowered in his hole while hell fell all around him.

“Up!” Sergeant Demange screamed. “Up, you gutless assholes! They’re coming!”

Luc didn’t want to come up. Shell fragments did dreadful things. But he didn’t want to get shot or bayoneted in his foxhole, either. The Germans aimed to make the French keep their heads down so they’d make easy meat. The French couldn’t let them impose their will on the combat…Luc supposed.

He came up firing. A German had crawled to no more than thirty meters away. He had a potato-masher grenade in his right hand. Luc shot him before he could fling it. “Heilige Scheisse!” screamed the soldier in the coal-scuttle helmet. He clutched at himself. He must not have pulled the grenade’s fuse cord, because it didn’t go off after he dropped it.

Then French machine guns opened up, one of them from a spot where Luc hadn’t known his side had a machine gun. The Boches hadn’t known it was there, either. Several of them fell. Others ran back toward the river. Luc would have done the same thing in their boots. Flesh and blood had limits, and facing machine-gun fire out in the open went beyond them.

The German Luc had shot lay where he’d gone down. He wasn’t dead; he kept thrashing around and yelling and swearing.

“Make him shut up,” Sergeant Demange called. “Either blow his head off or go out there and bring him back.”

Neither possibility appealed to Luc. Killing a wounded man in cold blood felt like murder. If he were lying there wounded, he wouldn’t want the Germans taking pot shots at him.

But if he went out there to get the Boche, other soldiers in field-gray might nail him. He knew he had only a few seconds to make up his mind. Demange wouldn’t hesitate longer than that before shooting the German himself. He wouldn’t have second thoughts about it afterward, either.

“Je suis dans le merde,” Luc muttered. Up shit creek or not, he had to do something. He climbed out of the foxhole and crawled toward the wounded Boche.

Firing had slacked off. That could end any second, as he knew too well. None of the few rounds flying about came close-the Germans weren’t aiming at him, anyway.

“I’ll take you in,” he called to the soldier in field-gray, hoping the fellow understood French. “We’ll fix you up if we can.”

“Merci,” the man answered in gutturally accented French. “Hurts.”

“I bet,” Luc said. The bullet had torn up the German’s left leg. “Can you climb up on top of me?”

“I’ll try.” The Boche did it. He felt as if the fellow weighed a tonne-he was a bigger man than Luc, and weighted down with boots and helmet and equipment. Slowly-the only way he could-Luc crawled back toward the French line. Seeing what he was doing, the Germans paid him the courtesy of aiming away from him.

Other hands reached out to pull the wounded man off him. The German groaned as they got him down into the trenches. Luc had never been so glad to get under cover again himself. “Whew!” he said. “I felt naked out there.”

“You did good, kid,” Sergeant Demange said, and handed him a Gitane.

“Thanks.” Luc leaned close for a light.

“You didn’t go out there pretty damn quick, I was gonna plug the motherfucker,” Demange said.

“Yeah, I figured. That’s why I went.” Luc’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in harsh smoke.

“Maybe they’ll learn something off him,” the noncom said. “He’ll sing like a goddamn canary, and sergeants, they know stuff.” Not without pride, he tapped his own chest.

“Was he a sergeant? I didn’t notice,” Luc said. Demange rolled his eyes. Grinning, Luc added, “If I’d known that, I would’ve shot him for sure.”

“Funny man,” Demange said scornfully. “You got that crappy hash mark on your sleeve, so you think you’re entitled to be a goddamn funny man.”

“Sergeant, if it meant I’d come through the war without getting shot, I’d never make another joke the rest of my life,” Luc promised.

“Oh, yeah?” Sergeant Demange said. Luc’s head bobbed up and down as if it were on springs. Demange spat out a tiny butt, crushed it underfoot, and lit a fresh Gitane. Then he returned to the business at hand: “Well, you don’t need to worry about that, on account of it doesn’t.” Luc already knew as much. All the same, he wished Demange hadn’t spelled it out.

* * *

Anastas Mouradian was drunk. Yes, a blizzard howled outside. Even so, a proper Soviet officer wasn’t supposed to do any such thing. Sergei Yaroslavsky knew that perfect well. He would have been angrier at Mouradian if he weren’t drunk himself.

They couldn’t fly. They had plenty of vodka. What were they going to do- not drink it? Try as he would, Sergei couldn’t come up with a good reason for leaving it alone.

Ivan Kuchkov was bound to be drinking with his fellow enlisted men. If the Chimp got smashed, the rest of the aircrew should, too. It showed solidarity between enlisted men and officers. It also showed that neither enlisted men nor officers had anything better to do when they couldn’t get an SB-2 off the ground to save their lives.

“If Hitlerite bombers show up now, if we have to take shelter outside, we’ve got plenty of antifreeze in our blood,” Sergei said.

“Never mind Hitlerite bombers. What about Hitlerite soldiers?” When Mouradian was sober, he spoke excellent Russian. He stayed fluent when he got drunk, but his Armenian accent turned thick enough to slice.

Sergei laughed and laughed. When he got drunk, everything was funny. “Where would Hitlerite soldiers come from?”

“Out of the sky. With parachutes. Like they did in Holland and Belgium.” Anastas looked around the inside of the tent, his eyes big and round like an owl’s: he might have expect Nazi parachutists to pop up any minute now.

That owlish stare only made Sergei laugh harder than ever. He looked around the inside of the tent, too. Enough of the wind outside got in to make the flame from the kerosene lamp flicker. That wasn’t why his wide, high-cheekboned face registered dismay. “We’re out of pelmeni! And pickled mushrooms! Where’d they go?”

Mouradian patted his stomach. “Good. Not spicy enough, but good.” Being a southerner, he liked everything full of fire. As far as Sergei was concerned, the mushrooms and the meat dumplings were fine this way. Russians had all kinds of snacks that went with vodka. Even a half-skilled cook at a forward airstrip could do a decent job with some of them.

“We had a big plate of them,” Sergei said sadly. The plate was still there. But for a couple of crumbs from the pelmeni, it was bare. Sergei sighed. He pointed at Anastas. “Not even the fucking Germans would be crazy enough to drop parachutists in this weather.”

“God shouldn’t have been crazy enough to make this weather.” Mouradian must have been very drunk, or he wouldn’t have talked about God so seriously. It gave Sergei a hold on him, which wasn’t something anybody in the USSR wanted to give anyone else. Of course, there was something close to an even-money chance neither of them would remember anything about this come morning.

Even without dumplings or mushrooms, Sergei raised his tumbler. “Za Stalina!”

“To Stalin!” Anastas echoed. They both drank. The vodka was no better than it had to be. It went down as if Sergei were swallowing the lighted kerosene lamp. The really good stuff slid down your throat smooth as a kiss, then exploded in your stomach like a 500kg bomb. But this got you there, smooth or not.

Sergei sighed. If it was harsh now, he’d feel it worse in the morning. The good stuff didn’t make you think elephants in hobnailed boots were marching on top of your skull.

“We have aspirins?” he asked.

“Somewhere,” Mouradian said vaguely. Then he brightened. “We’ll have more vodka.”

“Da.” That cheered Sergei up, too: at least a little. Another dose of what made you feel bad could make you feel better. He reached for the bottle again. If he drank it now, he’d feel better right away.

“Leave me some,” Anastas said.

“Leave me some, sir,” Sergei said. The drunker you got, the more important military discipline seemed…unless, of course, it didn’t. He passed Mouradian the bottle. They drank till there was very little left to drink. They would have drunk till nothing was left to drink, but they both fell asleep first.

Getting up in the morning was as bad as Yaroslavsky had known it would be, or maybe a little worse. The first thing he did was drink half the remaining vodka. He would have drunk all of it, but Anastas snatched the bottle out of his hands. “To each according to his needs,” the Armenian croaked, and no one in the USSR, no matter how hung over, dared quarrel with unadulterated Marx.

Fortunately, the aspirins turned up. Sergei dry-swallowed three of them. Mouradian took four. As sour as Sergei’s stomach already was, the aspirins felt like a flamethrower in there. If he belched, he figured he could incinerate the whole airstrip.

Mouradian didn’t look or sound much happier. “Breakfast,” he said. The mere thought made Sergei groan. Then Anastas added, “They’ll have tea-coffee, too, maybe.”

“Well, maybe.” Sergei peeled back the tent flap and looked out. The sun shone brilliantly off snow. He squinted at the alarming landscape. “Don’t want to bleed to death through my eyeballs,” he muttered.

“Tell me about it!” Mouradian said fervently.

Both being brave men, they made it to the field kitchen. Shchi -cabbage soup-seemed safe enough to Sergei. Anastas stuck to plain brown bread. The cooks had one battered samovar full of tea, another full of coffee. After getting outside of some of that-and after the aspirins took hold-Sergei decided he’d live. Eventually, he would decide he wanted to.

The radio blared out music. Mouradian turned it down. Sergei would have loved to turn it off, but he didn’t dare. People might think you didn’t want to listen to the news. If you didn’t want to listen to the splendid achievements of the glorious Soviet state, people would wonder why not. Some of the people who wondered would have NKVD connections, too. And you’d be heading for a camp faster than you could blink.

Nobody complained about turning down the radio, though. Several other men eating breakfast had red-tracked eyes, sallow skin, and a hangdog expression. When it was snowing at an isolated airstrip, what were you going to do besides drink?

The song ended. An announcer gabbled about the overfulfillment of production norms at factories in Smolensk, Magnitogorsk, and Vladivostok. Not easy to imagine three more widely separated places. “Thus, despite the efforts of Fascists and other reactionaries, prosperity spreads throughout this great bulwark of the proletariat!” the announcer said.

Sergei had nothing against the bulwark of the proletariat. In his present fragile state, though, he didn’t much want to hear about it. He made himself seem attentive even so, as he would have during a dull lecture in school. The penalty for obvious boredom then would have been a rap on the knuckles, or maybe a swat on the backside. He might pay more now.

Music returned. He didn’t have to seem to be listening to that so closely. He couldn’t ignore it altogether, however, or show he didn’t like it. It wouldn’t have gone out without some commissar’s approval: without the state’s approval, in other words. And if the state approved, citizens who knew what was good for them needed to do the same.

At the top of the hour, a different announcer came on the air. This fellow sounded better educated than the joker who’d been bragging about production norms. “And now the news!” the man said.

Several people with Red Air Force light blue on their collar tabs perked up. News from around the world mattered. “Soviet forces continue to punish the Polish reactionaries and the Nazi bandits who support them,” the announcer crowed. “Over the past several days, Soviet infantrymen have driven another twenty kilometers deeper into Poland. Knowledgeable officers report that enemy resistance is beginning to crumble.”

Nobody said anything. Nobody even raised an eyebrow. Sergei didn’t think anyone actually fighting the Poles and Germans believed their resistance was crumbling. He knew damn well he didn’t. That particular item had to be aimed at bucking up civilian morale hundreds if not thousands of kilometers from the front.

“Foreign Commissar Litvinov has protested to the Japanese government about its troop buildup between puppet Manchukuo and progressive Siberia,” the announcer went on.

Hearing that made Sergei’s headache get worse. This borderland between the USSR and Poland was nowhere in particular. He tried to imagine fighting a war at the eastern edge of Siberia. That was Nowhere in Particular with capital N and P. The only reason either the Soviet Union or Japan cared about it was because of strategy. Other than that, the whole area could go hang.

Vladivostok was the USSR’s window on the Pacific. It was a window frozen shut several months a year, but never mind that. Vladivostok also sat on the end of the world’s longest supply line: it was the place where the Trans-Siberian Railroad finally stopped. It wasn’t a million kilometers from Moscow-it only seemed that way.

What would happen if the little yellow monkeys who lived in Japan tried to seize the railroad and cut the town’s lifeline? How long before Vladivostok withered? How long before the Japanese could just walk in? Sergei was too young to remember the siege of Port Arthur and the Russo-Japanese War as a whole, but he knew about them. Few Soviet citizens didn’t. Even though the Tsar’s corrupt regime was to blame for the Russian defeat, it still rankled.

Brooding about it made him read some of what the radio newscaster was saying. When he started paying attention again, the man was saying, “And the French government has declared that the front is Paris. The French say they are determined to fight in the capital itself, and to fight on beyond it even if it falls. They did not have to do this during the last war. Whether they will live up to their promises, only time will tell.”

“If they’d done better by Czechoslovakia when the war started, they might not be in this mess now,” Anastas Mouradian said. “They’ll probably expect us to pull their chestnuts off the fire for them, too.”

“Too fucking bad if they do. We’ve got enough worries of our own,” Sergei said.

“German radio reports that Adolf Hitler has indignantly denied any military coup was attempted against him,” the announcer said. “Reliable sources inside Germany report that at least four prominent German generals have not been seen for several weeks, however.”

No one eating breakfast said anything to that. No one imagined anything could be safe to say. No one even wanted to look at anyone else. The look on your face could betray you, too.

Soviet generals-far more than four of them-started disappearing in 1937. Like some of the Old Bolsheviks who started getting it in the neck at the same time, a few confessed to treason in show trials before they were executed. Others were simply put to death, or vanished into the camps, or just…disappeared.

It wasn’t only generals, either. Officers of all ranks were purged. So were bureaucrats of all ranks, and so were doctors and professors and anyone who seemed dangerous to anyone else.

Now the same thing was happening in Germany? Sergei had sometimes thought that Communists and Nazis were mirror images of each other, one side’s left being the other’s right and conversely. He’d never shared that thought with anyone; had he tried, he would put his life in the other person’s hands. He wished the idea had never crossed his mind. Just having certain notions was deadly dangerous. They might show up on your face without your even realizing it. And if they did, you were dead.

Or maybe worse.

So did the enemy have to worry about the kinds of things that had convulsed the Soviet Union for the past couple of years? Good, Sergei thought. If both sides were screwed up the same way, the one he was on looked to have a better chance.

* * *

Ludwig Rothe lit a Gitane he’d got from a German infantryman who’d taken a pack from a dead French soldier. It was strong as the devil, but it tasted like real tobacco, not the hay and ersatz that went into German cigarettes these days.

“Have another one of those, Sergeant?” Fritz Bittenfeld asked plaintively.

“You look like a hungry baby blackbird trying to get a worm from its mama,” Ludwig said. Fritz opened his mouth very wide, as if he really were a nestling. Laughing, Ludwig gave the panzer driver a Gitane.

“Chirp!” Theo Hossbach said, flapping his arms. “Chirp!” He got a cigarette, too.

They’d all smoked them down to tiny butts when a blackshirt who’d been prowling around the panzer park finally got to them. “Can I talk to you boys for a minute?” he asked, a little too casually.

His shoulder straps were plain gray, with two gold pips. That made him the SS equivalent of a captain. How could you say no? You couldn’t. “What’s up, sir?” Ludwig tried to keep his voice as normal as he could.

“You men have served under Major Koral for some time-isn’t that so?” the SS man said.

“Ja,” Ludwig said. Fritz and Theo both nodded. No harm in admitting that, not when the blackshirt could check their records and find out for himself that Koral had led the panzer battalion since the war started.

“All right,” the SS man said, in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “How often have you heard him express disloyalty toward the Fuhrer and the Reich?”

“Disloyalty?” Ludwig echoed. He had trouble believing his ears. But the SS man nodded importantly. He seemed as full of his own righteousness as the more disagreeable kind of preacher. Picking his words with care, Ludwig said, “Sir, you do know, don’t you, that Major Koral’s already been wounded in action twice?”

“Yes, yes.” The SS man nodded impatiently, as if that were of no account. To him, it probably wasn’t. He went on, “I’m not talking about his military behavior. I’m talking about his political behavior.” You idiot, his gaze added. You’re supposed to know things like that without being told.

Sergeant Rothe bristled at so obviously being thought a moron. But then he chuckled to himself. If the blackshirt figured him for a Dummkopf, a Dummkopf he would be, by God. “Sir, the major just gives me orders. He doesn’t waste his time talking politics with noncoms.”

“What’s going on, anyway?” Theo sounded as innocent as an un-weaned baby. His dreamy features let him get away with that more easily than Ludwig could have.

The SS man didn’t hesitate before answering, “You will have heard that certain Wehrmacht generals betrayed their country by viciously plotting against the Fuhrer?”

Ludwig had heard that, all right, from Hitler’s own lips. Telling the SS man as much struck him as the very worst of bad ideas. “Gott im Himmel!” he exclaimed, as if it were a complete surprise. “I heard it, ja, but I thought it was only enemy propaganda.” Beside him, Theo and Fritz nodded.

“It’s true, all right,” the blackshirt said. “They were disgraces to the uniform they wore, disgraces to the Volk, disgraces to the Reich. And so we must purify the army of all their associates and of everyone who might have shared their vicious views. Now do you understand why I am inquiring about Major Koral?”

“He wouldn’t do anything like that,” Fritz said. “He wouldn’t put up with anybody else who did, either.”

Theo nodded again. “That’s right.”

“I think so, too,” Ludwig said.

“You might be surprised. You might be very surprised indeed,” the SS man said. “We’ve found treason in some places where no one would have thought to look for it if these generals hadn’t disgraced themselves.”

If Ludwig hadn’t heard it from the Fuhrer, he would have wondered what that meant. He did wonder what the SS and the Gestapo were up to now. Had they sniffed out more real treason, or had they “discovered” it regardless of whether it was really there? He didn’t ask this fellow that kind of question. That it could occur to him might be plenty to mark him as disloyal.

He did ask, “Why do you think Major Koral might be mixed up in this…this Scheisse?”

“Scheisse it is,” the SS man agreed. He pulled a scrap of paper from the right beast pocket of his tunic. “He has…let me see…a long history of association with General Fritsche, and also with General Halder. He may have been a Social Democrat before 1933-the record is not completely clear about that, but it is worrisome. And one of his cousins was formerly married to a Jew.”

If Fritsche and Halder were two of the generals who’d tried to overthrow the Fuhrer, that might mean something. Or, of course, it might not. Ludwig had a long history of association with his cats, but he’d never wanted to eat mice himself. The rest didn’t seem to mean much. The Social Democrats had been the biggest party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. They were about as exclusive as a blizzard. Ludwig had no great use for Jews, but he thought one of his cousins was married to one, too. He hoped to God the SS would never dig that out and use it against him.

“Sorry not to be more help, sir,” he said insincerely.

“Like the sergeant said, Major Koral’s always been brave in combat,” Theo added. “Didn’t he win the Iron Cross First Class? Didn’t they put him up for the Ritterkreuz?”

The Iron Cross First Class-just like the Fuhrer, Ludwig thought-one more thing he knew better than to say out loud. But the two awards weren’t really comparable. Lots of officers got the Iron Cross First Class now. For a common soldier in the Kaiser’s army to have won it the last time around was much more remarkable. Even the Knight’s Cross in this war wasn’t the same.

The SS man looked unhappy enough at Theo’s mild questions. “That has nothing to do with anything,” he said stiffly. “If you recall anything suspicious about him, report it to your superiors at once. At once, do you hear?” He tramped off, his back ramrod straight.

“Jesus Christ on roller skates!” Fritz said. “I think I’d sooner go to the dentist than get another little visit like that.”

“You can spread that on toast and call it butter,” Theo agreed. Ludwig supposed it was agreement, anyhow. The radioman came out with the strangest things sometimes.

Fritz Bittenfeld found a new question: “Should we go tell the major he’s got hounds sniffing on his trail?”

“If we see him in the field, sure,” Ludwig said. “But those fucking goons’ve got to be keeping an eye on him. If we go blab, what happens to us? We stick our dicks in the sausage grinder, that’s what?”

“Oh, that smarts!” Theo said in shrill falsetto. Ludwig and Fritz both laughed. Better to laugh than to grab at yourself, which was what Ludwig’s figure of speech made him want to do. Assuming it was a figure of speech, of course. With the SS, you could never be sure. And if they did it for real…Ludwig wanted to grab at himself again.

Bitterly, Fritz said, “It’s a hell of a note when you find out combat’s not the worst thing that can happen to you.”

“Yeah, it’s a hell of a note, all right,” Ludwig said. “You going to tell me it isn’t true? I can deal with the Czechs and the French and the English. I can even deal with the Russians if I have to. My old man fought in the East the last time around. Yeah, I can cope with that-bet your ass I can. But heaven help me if I’ve got to try and handle the cocksuckers who think they’re on my side.”

He kept his voice down. No one but his buddies could possibly have heard him. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he wonder if he could trust Fritz and Theo. They all trusted one another with their lives on the battlefield. But political matters were different-and, as Fritz had said, worse.

If he and the driver and the radioman couldn’t trust one another…Ludwig swore under his breath. This was the nastiest thing the SS did, right here. If you weren’t sure you could count on people who’d already saved your bacon more times than you could remember, then what?

You were screwed, that was what.

“We’re as bad as the Russians, you know?” Theo said, which was too close for comfort to what Ludwig was thinking. The radio operator went on, “Pretty soon I’m going to start praying for cloudy weather.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ludwig demanded.

“Well, if my shadow isn’t there, I don’t have to worry that it’ll betray me to the Gestapo when I’m not looking,” Theo answered. That either made no sense at all or altogether too much.

“Maybe it isn’t there because it’s off betraying you to the Gestapo.” Later, Ludwig wondered about himself. At the time, what he said seemed logical enough-to him, anyhow.

It didn’t faze Theo, either. “Nothing would surprise me any more,” he said. “Shadows aren’t to be trusted. No matter how much you feed ‘em, they never get any fatter than you do. And have you ever seen one that wasn’t as dark as a nigger, even when it was walking on a snowbank?”

Fritz looked from one of his crewmates to the other. “I think you’ve both gone round the bend,” he declared.

“Zu befehl,” Theo said- at your service. He clicked his heels, as if he were a Prussian grandee or an Austrian gentleman with more noble blood than he knew what to do with.

A battery of French 75s near Meaux started shelling the panzer park at extreme long range. Only a few shells came close enough to drive the Germans into the holes they’d dug. They had dug holes, of course; whenever they stopped for more than a few minutes, they dug. Anyone would have thought Wehrmacht men-and their French and English counterparts-descended from moles rather than monkeys.

“Wonder if the SS shithead has enough sense to take cover,” Fritz remarked.

“Nobody’ll miss him if he doesn’t,” Ludwig said. “With a little luck, even the Frenchmen won’t miss him.” Fritz and Theo both groaned. Neither tried to tell him he was wrong.

After a while, when the French guns didn’t blow up any ammunition dumps or show other tangible evidence of success, they eased off. The panzer crews came up above ground. And there was the blackshirt, a pistol in hand, leading Major Koral to a waiting auto with a swastika flag flying above its right fender. Face pale and set, the major got in. The car sped away, back toward Germany.

“What is this world coming to?” Ludwig wondered out loud.

“Nothing good,” Fritz answered. “Dammit, we’ve still got a war to fight.”

“So does Major Koral,” Theo added. Koral would likely lose his. And who would get the blame if the Wehrmacht also lost its?