Hitler's war

Chapter 7

Luc Harcourt had thought he knew what war was all about. He’d been in some skirmishes. He’d fired his rifle, and he’d come under fire. Artillery had gone off not too far from him. He’d had to worry about mines.

Now he discovered he’d been a virgin trying to figure out how to play with himself. He’d played at war. So had the Germans. Well, playtime was over. The bastards on the other side meant it. If he wanted to go on breathing, he had to mean it, too.

Shells bursting all around him had announced the new dispensation. This wasn’t just a little harassing fire. This was a storm of steel, the kind of thing men his father’s age talked about. The noise alone was enough to make you shriek-not only the thunderous bursts, but also the horrible screams and wails of fragments knifing through the air. Before long, the screams and wails of the wounded added to the chaos.

And he had to deal with things his old man’d never needed to worry about. Dive-bombers howled down out of the sky. If bursting artillery shells were terrifying, bombs were ten times worse. Shells could carry only so much explosive. Otherwise, they’d blow up before they got out of the gun barrel. Artillerymen disliked such misfortunes. The only limit to a bomb’s size, though, was whether a plane could get off the ground carrying it.

German fighters strafed French positions as soon as the bombers went away. Luc wondered where the devil the French fighters were. He didn’t see any.

Before long, he realized he’d shat himself somewhere during the bombardment. He tore off his drawers and threw them away. He wondered if he would ever be able to face his buddies. Then he wondered how many of them had fouled themselves, too.

He didn’t have long to worry about it. Somebody yelled, “Tanks!” If that wasn’t panic in the other soldier’s voice…well, why not?

He’d never seen a German tank-or, for that matter, a French one-in the earlier skirmishes. He’d never seen dive-bombers then, either. He hadn’t missed the dive-bombers one bit. He didn’t miss the tanks, either.

Better to hope they would miss him. Here they came, all right: snorting black monsters spitting fire from the guns in their turrets. German soldiers in field-gray loped along between them.

A shell from a French field gun hit a German tank. It spun sideways and stopped. Flame and greasy black smoke burst from it. A soldier scrambled out of an escape hatch, his black coveralls on fire. A burst of machine-gun fire cut him down before he could find somewhere to hide.

But the rest of the tanks kept coming. The machine gun fired at one of them. Bullets struck sparks from its armor, but that was all. Then the tank fired at the French machine gun. It fell silent.

Luc drew a bead on one of the German foot soldiers. He fired. The man went down. Dead? Wounded? Just scared shitless? (Luc knew too well how easy that was.) He never found out.

He did realize he’d have to fall back if he wanted to stay alive. The Nazis were going to overrun this forward position no matter what. Back in the last war, he would have had trenches to retreat through. They’d made positions kilometers deep. This one wasn’t. No one had taken the war, or the Germans, seriously enough to set up defenses in depth.

Oh, farther back, well out of artillery range, the Maginot Line was there to make sure no German advance got too far. That might end up making France happy. It didn’t do a goddamn thing for Luc.

Almost the first thing he saw when he scrambled out of the trench and fell back to the southwest was somebody else’s wadded-up underwear. Just for a minute, that made him feel much better. Then a tank’s machine gun stitched up the grass all around his feet. None of the bullets bit him, but he damn near- damn near-crapped himself again.

“Over here!” Sergeant Demange shouted. “We can still hold them off!”

Hold them off? Whatever the noncom was smoking, Luc didn’t think it came in Gauloises or Gitanes. But staying with somebody who had an idea about what to do next seemed better than running at random. Luc trotted toward Demange, who seemed in charge of a solid position anchored by a farmhouse.

“Jesus!” Luc said, huddling in the kitchen. None of the windows had any glass in them. He didn’t know why bombs and shells hadn’t flattened the farmhouse. Luck-had to be.

“Fuck Jesus,” Sergeant Demange said. “Fuck the Boches. Fuck everybody, especially our dumbshit generals.”

“What did the generals do?” Luc asked, trying to catch his breath.

“Rien,” Demange snarled with savage scorn. “Not a goddamn fucking thing. They let us sit here with our thumbs up our asses till the Germans were ready to hit us. And now the Germans are. And we’re ready, too-ready to take it on the chin.”

“We’ve got to fight hard for the sake of the international working class.” That was Valentin Laclos, one of the several Communists in the company.

Sergeant Demange withered him with a glare. “Fuck the international working class. And fuck you, too, Laclos. If Stalin was on Hitler’s side, you’d screech that we ought to lay down and open our legs for the Boches. You can’t even fart till Moscow tells you it’s okay.”

Luc admired the noncom’s seamless contempt for the world. De-mange despised everything and everybody. Chances were he even hated himself. If you had to ride herd on a bunch of snot-nosed soldiers, how could you do anything else?

More German artillery started landing around the farmhouse. As Luc had seen, the windows had already blown out, or rather, in; broken glass glinted on the floor. A shell fragment struck a stone wall and whined away.

“What do we do, Sergeant?” Luc asked.

“Fight, dammit,” Demange answered. “Not for the international whatever the hell. Fight because they’ll kill you for sure if you don’t.”

Not necessarily, Luc thought. If he threw down his rifle and threw up his hands, maybe he could sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp. Plenty of Frenchmen had done it the last time around. They’d had a thin time, though-literally. Black bread and turnips and cabbage and not enough of any of them…The Germans themselves were starving. They had precious little to spare for prisoners.

And there was no guarantee that surrendering meant becoming a POW. He’d heard French veterans talk about that. If you had the time, if you had the men, maybe you’d take captives back for interrogation. If you didn’t? It was their hard luck, that was all. He had no reason to believe the Boches acted any differently. He’d already seen you could kill somebody without hating him in the least.

One of the other guys in the farmhouse looked out a window. “Our side’s falling back again, Sergeant,” he reported.

Sergeant Demange muttered to himself. “We’d better do the same,” he said unhappily. “If we get surrounded and cut off, we’re liable to have to see if those Nazi cocksuckers’ll let us give up. I don’t like the odds.”

His thoughts came uncomfortably close to Luc’s. Once the sergeant made up his mind, he wasted no time. He divided the soldiers crowding the farmhouse into two groups. One he sent out. The other stayed behind in the strongpoint to give covering fire.

Luc got put in the second group. He couldn’t even complain, because Sergeant Demange headed it. While their buddies got away, they fired out the windows. A few bullets came back, but only a few.

“Germans aren’t here in numbers. That’s something, anyhow,” De-mange said, slapping a new clip onto his Fusil MAS36 and lighting a fresh Gitane from the one that had burnt down almost to his lips. He spat out the tiny butt and stuck the new smoke in his mouth. Then he pointed to the west-facing doorway. “All right. Let’s get out of here.”

They trotted away. Out in the open, Luc felt horribly naked. A shell could slice him to dogmeat out here. Somebody yelled. He almost shat himself one more time. Then he realized the shout came in French, not German. His asshole unpuckered. His heart came down out of his throat.

“Our guys,” Demange said laconically.

The soldier who’d shouted stood in a halfway decent trench line. He and his pals had a couple of Hotchkiss machine guns and, better yet, a 37mm antitank gun in a sandbagged revetment. The gun had two rings painted on the barrel. Kill brags? Luc hoped so.

“As long as the dive-bombers don’t come, we’re fine,” somebody said.

“Where are our dive-bombers?” Luc asked plaintively. Nobody answered him.

That cannon did knock out a German tank at better than 300 meters. The machine guns settled the poor bastards who tried to bail out of it. Even so, Luc wondered again where the French panzers were. The next one he saw in this whole war would be the first.

And he wondered if blasting the one tank would bring a storm of vengeance down on everybody here. To his vast relief, it didn’t. Night came early. That would slow down the Germans…he hoped.

After dark, a runner jumped down into the trench. The French soldiers nearly killed him before they realized he was on their side. He brought orders: fall back once more.

“Why?” Sergeant Demange growled. “We’ve got ‘em stopped here.”

“Yes, but they’ve broken through on both sides of us. If we don’t retreat now, we won’t get the chance later,” the runner replied.

“Merde,” said the sergeant. Then he said something so foul, it made shit sound like an endearment. And then he said something he must have thought filthier yet: “All right, God damn it to hell and gone. We will retreat.”

* * *

The engine thundered to life. The big prop spun, then blurred into invisibility. The Ju-87 throbbed. “Alles gut?” Sergeant Dieselhorst shouted through the speaking tube.

“Alles gut, Albert,” Hans-Ulrich Rudel said after studying the gauges. You couldn’t trust them with everything. The way the plane sounded, the way it felt-those counted, too. They could warn of trouble the gauges didn’t know about yet. But everything did seem good this morning.

Groundcrew men pulled the chocks away from his wheels. A sergeant waved that he was cleared to take off. He pulled back on the stick. The dive-bomber sprang forward over the yellow, dying grass. The field was almost as smooth as concrete. The Dutchmen had done a devil of a job of keeping everything neat. Now Germany could take advantage of it.

Up went the Stuka’s sharklike nose. Rudel climbed as fast as he could. The sooner everybody got into formation, the sooner everybody could go do his job.

“Target-Rotterdam.” The squadron commander’s voice crackled in his earphones. “The Dutch there think they can go on eating herring and drinking beer while the war stays at the front. They’ve got the wrong idea, though. In this war, the front is everywhere.”

Hans-Ulrich grinned. “You hear that, Dieselhorst?”

“No, sir. What did he say?”

“‘In this war, the front is everywhere.’” The pilot quoted the squadron CO with savage relish.

His number-two wasn’t so impressed. “Not everywhere. Do they think the Tommies and the Ivans are going to bomb Berlin?”

“Don’t be silly,” Rudel said, though a tiny icicle of doubt slithered up his back. The Czechs had, there just before they quit. But that was only a last thumb of the nose, a defiant fleabite. It wasn’t as if they did any real damage.

One Stuka had to pull out of the formation with engine trouble. The rest droned on. The vibration filled every particle of Hans-Ulrich’s being, everything from his skin to his teeth to his spine to his balls. It wasn’t as much fun as getting laid, but it was as compelling.

Bf-109s loped along with the bombers to hold enemy fighters at bay. Four days into the assault on Holland, the air opposition wasn’t what it had been. The Dutch didn’t have many planes left, while English and French fighters didn’t seem to be operating this far forward.

Hans-Ulrich didn’t miss them a bit. The Ju-87 was terrific at smashing up ground targets. But even the Czech Avia biplanes had shot down too many dive bombers. For faster, more heavily armed fighters, Stukas were sitting ducks.

He could see where the front lay by the artillery bursts and by where the smoke was rising. General Staff officers with red Lampassen down the outside seams of their trousers scribed neat lines on maps and imagined they knew what war was all about. Even up here, buzzing along at 2,500 meters, Rudel could see and smell what war was doing to Holland. Better to Holland than to the Reich, he thought.

As soon as they crossed the front, Dutch AA opened up on them. All the Stuka pilots started jinking without waiting for orders. A little faster, a little slower, a little to the left or right, up a little, down a little-anything to keep from giving the gunners an easy target. The neat formation suffered. With luck, the planes wouldn’t.

But one of them, trailing smoke, turned back toward the east. That didn’t look good. Hans-Ulrich hoped the pilot and rear gunner came through all right. Next to that, getting the Ju-87 down in one piece was small potatoes.

A near miss made his own bus stagger in the sky like a man missing the last step on a flight of stairs. Shrapnel clanged against the left wing. Everything went on working. “Danke, Gott,” Rudel murmured. His father the minister would have come up with a fancy prayer, but that did the job.

“Alles gut?” Dieselhorst asked again.

“Alles gut,” Hans-Ulrich said firmly.

Holland wasn’t a big country. There lay Rotterdam, on both banks of the New Maas. It was a big shipping town, with the most important quays on the north side of the river. Most of the city, including the central square, was on the north bank, too.

“There’s the square we’re supposed to hit,” the squadron leader said. “Follow me down.” The underside of his wings flashed in the sun as he aimed his Ju-87 at Rotterdam’s heart like an arrow. One after another, the planes he led peeled off after him.

Acceleration shoved Hans-Ulrich against the back of his armored seat. Facing the other way, Albert Dieselhorst experienced dives very differently. He always thought the Stuka was trying to tear the straps off him and pitch him out over his machine gun and through the window behind him.

No antiaircraft fire here. The Dutch must not have thought Germany would attack the towns. Didn’t they pay attention to what happened in Czechoslovakia? If they didn’t, too bad for them.

Rudel yanked the bomb release lever. Suddenly, the Ju-87 was lighter and more aerodynamic. He pulled back on the stick to come out of the dive. The Stukas, he saw, weren’t the only planes working Rotterdam over. High above them, Do-17s-Flying Pencils to friend and foe alike-and He-111s sent bombs raining down on the port. They couldn’t put them just where they wanted them, the way a Ju-87 could. But all that high explosive was bound to blow somebody to hell and gone.

“Alles gut?” Dieselhorst asked one more time. “Sure looks good,” he added-he was the one who could see what the bombs had done.

“Couldn’t be better,” Hans-Ulrich answered, and flew back toward the airstrip from which he’d taken off.

* * *

Sergeant Alistair Walsh was where he was supposed to be: on the Dyle, in central Belgium. The whole BEF was on the line of the Dyle-the whole BEF, less what the Germans had blown sky-high. If what had happened to the rest of the force was anything like what had happened to Walsh’s unit, the BEF was missing more than it should have been.

One of the soldiers in Walsh’s platoon waved to him. “What’s up, Puffin?” Walsh asked. Everybody hung that name on Charlie Casper-he was short and round and had a big red nose.

He also had news: “Bloody goddamn Dutchmen just tossed in the sponge.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Walsh demanded in angry disbelief.

“Bloody goddamn wireless.”

“But they can’t,” Walsh said, though he knew too well that they could. He went on protesting: “They just started fighting-what?-five days ago. We all just started five days ago.” Except for a few useless rounds aimed at German planes, he had yet to fire a shot.

“And now they’ve bloody well stopped,” Puffin Casper said. “Bunch of damn rotters. Said the Germans bombed the hell out of that damn Rotter place, and they couldn’t take any more of that, so they went belly-up.”

Something seemed to have gone missing there. Whatever Puffin had heard, he hadn’t got it straight. But if the big news was right-and Walsh had no reason to doubt it was-what difference did the details make? Not bloody much, as Casper would have said.

Walsh looked north. “So they’ll hit us from that way and from the east,” he said. “Just what we need.”

“Frenchies’ll help us,” Puffin said.

“Well, maybe.” Walsh didn’t argue, not right out loud. Casper was only a kid. If he had confidence in the French army, more power to him. He might even end up right. The French Seventh Army, which was in place north of the BEF-on the far side of the Scheldt-was supposed to be big and strong. Maybe it was. Or maybe the BEF would have to go it alone. Back in 1918, British forces seemed to have done that when the Kaiser’s army hit them with one haymaker after another.

(That the French would have said the same about the British had never come to Walsh’s notice. If it had, he would have called the man bold-or rash-enough to give him such news a goddamn liar.)

Artillery rumbled, off to the east. Some of those were Belgian guns, firing at the advancing Germans. And some of them were German, making sure the bastards in field-gray kept on advancing. The gunfire was getting louder, which meant it was getting closer to the Dyle. Sooner or later-probably sooner-Walsh figured he would make the Germans’ acquaintance again.

An officer came up to him. For a second, he thought the man was British. Then he saw the funny rank badges. A Belgian, he realized. Ordinary Belgian soldiers looked like Frenchmen, mostly because of the Adrian helmets they wore. But officers had British-style uniforms.

“Where is your command post?” the Belgian asked in accented but understandable English.

“Why do you want to know…sir?” The British sergeant knew he sounded suspicious, but he couldn’t help himself. The Dutch had just thrown in the towel. What if the bloody Belgies were about to do the same thing? Their king hadn’t wanted to let any Allies in till the very last instant-which was liable to be too late.

But this fellow said, “The better to arrange cooperation between your forces and mine. You are a sergeant, is it not so?”

What do you think you’re doing, asking me questions? was what he meant. Walsh didn’t think he could get in much trouble for slowing up a wog, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way he was wrong. He pointed north. “Go that way, oh, three hundred yards, and you’ll see the regimental tent.”

“Yards?” The Belgian officer scratched his head.

“Yes, sir.” Alistair Walsh felt like scratching his, too. Then he figured out what had to be wrong. Stupid foreigners with their idiot measures. “Uh, three hundred meters.” Close enough.

The Belgian nodded. “Ah. Thank you.” Off he went, happy as a ram in clover.

“What do you want to bet they’re the next ones out?” Puffin Casper said dolefully.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Walsh agreed. “They’ll tear a nasty hole in our lines if they do bugger off, though.”

“They’ll care a lot about that, they will,” Puffin said.

More Belgian soldiers came back over the Dyle. Some of them still looked ready to fight. They were just blokes doing their jobs. Others had done all the work they aimed to do for a while. They slipped back toward the rear first chance they saw. Still others were walking wounded. Some of them seemed angry. Others seemed weary and in pain, as they no doubt were. Still others might have been relieved. They’d fought, they’d got hurt, and they were still alive. Nobody could expect them to do anything more.

Englishmen would have reacted the same way. The idea that foreigners could act just like ordinary people never failed to surprise Walsh.

And then, with the throb of airplane engines overhead, the only foreigners he cared about were the Germans. He ran for the closest trench and jumped in.

These weren’t dive-bombers, anyway. They stayed high overhead and let their bombs rain down on the general area of their targets. The whistles as the bombs fell weren’t quite so bad as the screaming sirens on those vulture-winged diving bastards. They sure as hell weren’t good, though.

When the bombs burst, it seemed as if a million of them were going off at once. Blast threw Walsh around. Blast could kill all by itself without fragments. It could tear lungs to shreds without leaving a mark on a body. Walsh had already seen that. He wished he hadn’t chosen this exact moment to remember it.

Engines of a different note made him look up. Fighters were tearing into the bomber formations. He let out a whoop. Somebody else sprawled in the trench said, “Blimey, there really is an RAF!” The soldier sounded astonished.

Walsh didn’t blame him. He hadn’t seen many British planes himself. But they were there now. Two broad-winged bombers tumbled out of the air, wrapped in smoke and fire. Parachutes sprouted in the sky. Walsh waited for the British pilots-he assumed they were his countrymen, though they might have been French-to machine-gun the descending German airmen. But they didn’t. He wondered why not. Not sporting? Were he hanging helpless from a silk half-bubble, he didn’t suppose he would have wanted a German blazing away at him.

“Blimey!” the other soldier said again. “That bugger’s going to come down right on our ‘eads, ‘e is.”

He didn’t quite. But he landed no more than fifty yards away. Walsh aimed his rifle at him. “Give up right now, you fucking bastard!” he bawled.

The German paid no attention to him. The fellow sprawled on the ground, clutching his ankle and howling like a dog with its tail caught under a rocking chair. The parachute flapped and billowed like a live thing, threatening to drag him away.

“Easiest prisoner I ever took,” Walsh said. “If he hasn’t broken that, I’m a Belgian myself.”

“But do you want to go out there and get ‘im?” the other British soldier asked. “What if more bombers come over?”

“Urr,” said Walsh, who hadn’t thought of that. Letting the German flyer’s countrymen blow him to pieces was a distinctly unattractive notion. But so was listening to him.

When Walsh said so, the other man replied, “Then shoot ‘im. Or if you don’t care to, I will.”

“No,” Walsh said. If he were lying there with a broken ankle, he would want a German to take him prisoner. And he thought there was a pretty good chance some German would. The bastards in field-gray fought hard. They’d fought hard even when they knew the game was up in 1918. They mostly fought fair, though. Of what army could you say more?

That made up his mind for him. He scrambled out of his hole and trotted toward the downed Luftwaffe man. The German saw his rifle and held up his hands. He gabbled something in his own language. If that wasn’t I give up!, Walsh really was a Belgian.

He pointed to the pistol on the flyer’s belt. “Throw that damn thing away, and make it snappy!” he said.

“Ja! Ja!” Maybe the German understood a little English, even if he didn’t seem to speak any. Or maybe the sergeant’s gestures made sense to him. Walsh kept his finger on the trigger while the man disarmed himself. If he turned out to be a fanatic, he’d be a dead fanatic pretty damn quick. But he didn’t. He tossed the little automatic-smaller and neater than the Enfield. 38 revolver that was the British standard in this war, to say nothing of the last go-round’s man-killing brute of a Webley and Scott. 455-into the bushes.

“All right.” Walsh knelt beside him and pointed to the trench from which he’d come. “I’m going to take you back there.” He got the German’s arm around his shoulder. Grunting as he rose, he went on, “This may hurt a bit.”

The airman hopped awkwardly on one leg. He tried not to let his other foot touch the ground at all. Sure as the devil, that ankle was ruined. Well, he’d done worse to plenty of Dutchmen and Belgians and Englishmen.

“Give me a hand with this bugger,” Walsh called. Unenthusiastically, the other British soldier did.

Once in the hole, the flyer reached inside his coverall. He came closer to dying than he probably realized. But he came out with… “Zigaretten?” he said, proffering the packet.

“Thanks.” Walsh took one. So did the other soldier, who gave him a light. They both took a drag. “Bloody hell!” Walsh said. “Tastes like hay and barge scrapings.” If this was what the Germans were smoking, no wonder the bastards acted mean.

He gave the Luftwaffe man a Navy Cut. People said they were strong. God only knew they were cheap. But the new prisoner’s eyes went wide when he puffed on it. “Danke schon! Sehr gut!” he said. He reverently smoked it all the way down to the end. It probably had more real tobacco in it than he usually got in a week.

Stretcher-bearers took him off to the rear. If he got more proper cigarettes, odds were he was glad enough to go.

* * *

Christmas was right around the corner, but Peggy Druce found Berlin a singularly joyless place. She supposed she should count her blessings. If she weren’t from the neutral USA, she would have been interned, not just inconvenienced. All the same…

So many shops were empty. Hardly any cars rolled down the street. Even the trolleys operated on a wartime schedule, which meant you took a long time to get anywhere. The city was blacked out at night. As far as Peggy could tell, the whole damn country was blacked out at night.

Maybe all of Europe was blacked out. Peggy tried to imagine Paris dark at night. The picture didn’t want to form. The City of Light was bound to be as shrouded as any other European capital. After what the Germans did to Prague and Marianske Lazne and the rest of Czechoslovakia, they wouldn’t leave Paris alone. She supposed it was a genuine military target. But the idea of bombs falling on it made her almost physically ill.

She walked past a restaurant not far from the hotel where they’d put her up. She hadn’t the slightest desire to go inside. Like everyone else in Germany, she had a ration card. Even in a restaurant, she had to spend points on what she ate. Whatever she got, most of it would be cabbage and potatoes and black bread. Fats of any sort-butter, cheese, lard-were hard to come by. Milk and cod-liver oil were reserved almost exclusively for children and nursing and pregnant women.

A man with a white mustache walked past her. He tipped his hat as he went by. His wool suit had seen better years, but he couldn’t do much about that. The Germans had ration points for clothes, too. If you bought a topcoat, that was about it for the year. Peggy didn’t have all the clothes she wanted, either; most of what she’d brought to Czechoslovakia was still there. Or, maybe more likely, it was on some German woman’s back these days.

A team of horses drew an antiaircraft gun down the street. The horses might have come straight out of the Civil War. The field-gray uniforms on the soldiers were modern, though. As for the gun, it might have appeared from the future. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a piece of hardware that looked more lethal.

Newsboys held up papers full of headlines about German triumphs. People walked past without buying. If the Berliners were enthusiastic about the war, they hid it well.

“English and French air pirates bombard German towns!” a boy shouted. “Many innocent women and children murdered! Read about the latest enemy atrocities!”

Peggy almost stopped at the street corner to argue with him. Only the thought that her husband would have told her she was crazy made her keep her mouth shut. She admired Herb’s common sense, most of the time without wanting to imitate it. And she’d seen the fun the Nazis had knocking Czechoslovakia flat. If they were on the receiving end for a change, if this wasn’t all just propaganda and nonsense, boy, did they ever deserve it!

But the kid wasn’t to blame for that. He was only doing his job. The ones who were to blame were Hitler and Goebbels and Goring and Himmler, and she couldn’t very well tell them where to head in. If she took it out on the newsboy, what would happen to her? Neutral or not, American or not, she didn’t want a visit from the Gestapo.

Because she looked as shabby as everybody else, the Berliners assumed she was a German, too. They’d nod and say, “Guten Morgen.” She could manage that. She understood German tolerably well, but she spoke French much better. When people here expected much more than Good morning from her, she stumbled badly.

She hated that. She also hated being so dowdy. She’d made a life of standing out from the crowd. No one would ever have noticed her if she didn’t make a point of getting noticed. If she disliked anything, it was invisibility.

A few minutes later, ambling along on a day as gray and gloomy as her mood, she found a way to get noticed. She walked past a place whose window said ROTHSTEIN’S BUTCHER’S SHOP. It wasn’t bigger or fancier or more run down than the shops to either side: a secondhand bookstore to the left, a place that sold wickerwork purses and baskets to the right. The wickerwork place was busy-wicker, unlike leather, didn’t eat up ration points.

Rothstein’s, however, had a large sign taped in the window: GERMAN PEOPLE! DON’T BUY FROM DIRTY JEWS!

Next thing Peggy knew, she was walking through the door. Maybe a demon took hold of her. Only when the bell over the door jangled did she realize what she’d done. And she’d been so proud of herself for wanting to steer clear of the Gestapo! Well, so much for that.

Behind the counter, Rothstein looked astonished. “You aren’t one of my regulars!” he blurted. “You aren’t even-” He stopped, but Jewish hung in the air anyway.

“You’re right. I’m not. Give me a chicken leg, please.” Peggy had enough German for that. She could boil the leg on the hot plate in her room. It would make a better lunch-maybe lunch and supper-than she was likely to get in the hotel restaurant or a cafe. Not much good food left for civilians in Berlin.

Moving like a man in a dream, Rothstein weighed the leg. He was unmistakably a Jew, with a long nose and dark, curly hair. “It comes to 420 grams-almost a week’s ration for meat,” he said. “If you like, I will bone it, so it costs you fewer points.”

“Bitte,” Peggy said.

Deftly, he did. “Now it is only 290 grams. I need coupons for so much, and two Reichsmarks fifty.” As he spoke, he wrapped the chicken in-what else?-butcher paper.

Sixty cents American money, more or less. That was a hell of a lot for a leg. Peggy paid without blinking. She also handed over the swastika-marked ration coupons. Those were part of the game, too.

Rothstein gave her a meticulously written receipt. “Danke schon,” he told her. “You are very brave. You are also very foolish.”

“I hope not,” Peggy said. “Auf wiedersehen.” Till I see you again , it meant literally. She wondered if she was brave enough-or foolish enough-to come back.

She got out fast, but not fast enough. Somebody’d squealed on her. Two blackshirts were trotting up the street toward Rothstein’s. “What kind of Dummkopf do you think you are?” one of them roared. “How dare you go into that damned Jew’s place?”

“Let me see your papers,” the other one yelled. “Immediately!”

“Sure.” Peggy took out her American passport and brandished it like a priest turning a crucifix on a couple of vampires.

The SS men recoiled almost the way vampires would have, too. “Oh,” one of them said disgustedly. “All right. We can’t give you what you deserve for buying there. But we can make the Jew sorry for selling to you.”

“And we will,” the other added, gloating anticipation in his voice.

“He didn’t know I was an American.” If Peggy sounded appalled, it was because she was.

“He knew you weren’t one of his regular kikes. He’ll pay, all right.” The SS men stormed into the butcher’s shop. A moment later, Rothstein cried out in pain. Peggy burst into tears. Dammit, you couldn’t win here.

Harry Turtledove

Hitler's War

People were saying the Maginot Line would save France. People were saying it would have to save France. Luc Harcourt didn’t give a damn about what people were saying. All he knew was, he was getting sick of being marched backward and forward and inside out.

He’d been bombed and shelled and shot at in the retreat from the German frontier. He’d been bombed in the encampment behind the Maginot Line where raw reinforcements filled out the regiment. Fortunately, those little billets-doux had fallen from planes flying high above, not from the Boches’ nasty dive-bombers. They landed all around the camp, but hardly any on it.

Now he and his surviving buddies and the strangers in their clean uniforms who’d just joined them were moving up toward the front again. This time, from what Sergeant Demange said, they’d end up in southern Belgium. If we get there in one piece, Luc thought.

That wasn’t obvious. Hell, whether they’d get there at all wasn’t obvious. They’d started out from the transit camp in trucks. Luc hadn’t much cared for that-as if his opinion mattered a sou’s worth. But if German planes shot up your truck, wouldn’t you roast like a pork loin in the oven? Of course you would-and your meat would end up smelling like burnt pork, too.

No German planes harried the trucks. That didn’t mean they carried Luc and his comrades very far toward the front. German bombers had done their worst to the roads leading north and east. If a truck couldn’t get through, if it sank to the axles when it tried to use the muddy fields instead of the cratered roads…

If all that happened-and it did-you got out and you damn well walked. “Here we are, back in 1918,” Sergeant Demange said, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth twitching as he talked.

“This isn’t so bad, Sarge,” Luc said. “Back then, you wore horizon-blue. Now you’re in khaki.”

“Oh, shut up, smartass. Once they get muddy, all uniforms are the same color,” Demange said. “The only thing you know about a guy in clean new clothes is that he doesn’t come up to the front much, so you can’t trust him.”

Ahead, the rumble of artillery got steadily louder. The Frenchmen were heading its way-and it was heading theirs. And behind them came a rumble of engines- something had got past the unholy mess the Nazis had made of the roads. “Move to one side, damn you!” someone yelled.

When Luc saw French tanks, he was only too glad to stand aside and let them go by. The officer who’d shouted, a tall colonel with a small mustache and a big nose, stood very straight in the cupola of the lead machine. The French tanks were larger and had smoother lines than the German machines Luc had already seen too closely. By the determined look on the colonel’s face, he didn’t want to stop till he got to Berlin.

“He’s a fishing pole, isn’t he?” Luc remarked.

“Two fishing poles,” Sergeant Demange answered. That was what Luc thought he heard, anyway: deux galles. But Demange went on, “Colonel de Gaulle knows more about tanks than anybody else on our side, I think.”

“Is that who he is?” Luc had heard of de Gaulle, though he hadn’t known him by sight. The tall officer did indeed advocate tanks so tirelessly-and tiresomely-that he infuriated his superiors. “Did you serve under him last time?”

“Nah. Wish I would have.” Sergeant Demange spat out a tiny butt and ground it into the mud with his boot. He lit another Gitane, then continued, “If I remember straight, he got wounded and captured early on last time around, and sat out most of the war in a POW camp.”

“Lucky stiff,” muttered somebody in back of Luc. He almost turned around to find out who let his mouth run ahead of his brain like that. A tiny bit louder, and Sergeant Demange would have heard it, in which case God help whoever it was. On second thought, Luc didn’t want to know. If he didn’t, the ferocious little sergeant couldn’t squeeze it out of him.

The last tank growled past. None of the other commanders looked to be within ten centimeters of Colonel de Gaulle. Maybe that was just as well for them. They couldn’t have much room inside the turret when they needed to duck down and fight.

Luc’s company stopped at a field kitchen as daylight leached from the sky. A cook with a double chin-cooks never went hungry-shoveled potatoes and cabbage and stewed pork into his mess tin. He stared at his supper with resigned dismay. “Which side are we on, anyway?”

“Funny guy,” the cook said. “I’ve only heard that one five times in the past half-hour. You don’t want it, you can go hungry. You think I give a rat’s ass?”

Luc prodded a pale piece of pork with a forefinger. “I thought that’s what this was.” The cook swore at him in earnest then.

Washed down with vin extremely ordinaire, the stew wasn’t bad. Luc smoked a cigarette, then wrapped himself in a blanket inside what had been somebody’s house till a bomb blew out most of one wall. His buddies had a makeshift brazier going: a bucket half full of hot coals hung from a scrap-metal tripod so it didn’t set the floor on fire. It gave off less heat than Luc wished it would, but it was better than nothing.

He slept like a hibernating animal. Not only were nights endlessly long, but he’d never been so worn in his life. Some of the guys in his company fell asleep while they marched-and they kept going, too. He envied them-he didn’t seem able to do that himself.

Some time in the middle of the night, a hard hand shook him awake. He groped for his belt knife. Sergeant Demange’s low-voiced chuckle stopped him. “Take it easy,” the noncom said. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be holding a lily by now. But no. Go out and stand watch for a couple of hours.”

“Do I have to?” Luc asked around a yawn.

“Damn right you do. Suppose German parachutists came down out of the sky? What would we do without a warning?”

“At night?” Luc didn’t believe it. But the Fritzes had done all kinds of nasty things with parachutists. Maybe they’d make a night attack behind the French line. And no maybe about what Sergeant Demange would do if Luc gave him any more lip. With a martyred sigh, Luc got out of the blanket and put on his boots and his helmet. He was already wearing everything else, including his greatcoat.

His breath smoked inside the battered house. It smoked more when he stepped outside. The night was mostly clear. Stars glittered frigidly in a sky blacker than dried blood. Carolers would have loved a night like this. Right now, Luc would have bet nobody in Europe loved anybody else.

The war hadn’t gone to bed. Off to the northeast, the thunder of artillery went on. He could see flashes against the horizon. Ours or theirs? he wondered. After a moment, he decided it was probably both.

Just ahead lay towns whose names brought back thunderous memories of the last war’s early days: Charleroi and, a little farther east, Namur. The Germans were swarming this way again, like field-gray ants towards an enticing picnic feast. They’d fallen short of Paris the last time around. Either they would again or…

Luc didn’t want to think about or. He didn’t want to think about anything. He wanted to go back to sleep, or to fall asleep out here. Fear of the Boches didn’t hold him back. Fear of Sergeant Demange did.

After what seemed like forever but probably wasn’t, another soldier stumbled out of the house. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ve got it.” A moment later, he added, “Damn Sergeant Demange anyway,” under his breath.

“Sure,” Luc said. He went back inside, wondering whether Demange ever slept. On all the evidence, he seemed a piece of well-made machinery rather than a man. Maybe he ran on cigarette smoke and coffee.

Come to think of it, maybe I do, too. Luc found the blanket he’d so sorrowfully abandoned. He took off boots and helmet and lay down again. The blanket didn’t seem to do a thing to get him any warmer. He wondered if he’d lie there till dawn finally came. Next thing he knew, he was asleep.

“Wake up, you bum. You snore.”

“I do not,” Luc answered automatically, even before his eyes opened. Twenty minutes later, with some kind of mush and strong coffee inside him, he was marching again.

Refugees from Namur and Charleroi crowded the road. Some of them cheered the soldiers in their odd Walloon French. Others swore at them: “If we weren’t in the way between the Germans and your damned country, they’d leave us alone!”

“As far as I’m concerned, Hitler’s welcome to Belgium,” Sergeant Demange retorted. “And you cocksuckers deserve him, too. Now get the hell out of our way before we open up on you!”

He would have done it. Not only that, he would have laughed while he did it. The Belgians must have figured that out, because they tumbled off the road with haste that would have been funny if this were a film and not the ruination of their lives.

Then more Belgian soldiers started falling back past the oncoming French. “You can have a taste of those bastards,” a Walloon said. A couple of Flemings added something to that, but Luc didn’t know what it was. If they hadn’t worn Belgian uniform, he would have shot them. Their language sounded too goddamn much like German.

Charleroi had got the bejesus knocked out of it in the first war. Luc supposed it must have been rebuilt since, but it had got pounded again. Some of the wrecked buildings were still smoking. The Nazis had just worked it over, then. Half a rag doll lay in the gutter. At another time, it might have been poignant enough to move Luc to tears. But he’d seen men who looked like that. He glanced at the doll and marched on.

Out beyond Charleroi, some of Colonel de Gaulle’s tanks were firing at the enemy. German shells landed around them. Without waiting for orders, Luc yanked the entrenching tool off his belt and started digging in. If Sergeant Demange didn’t like it, he’d say so. A look out of the corner of Luc’s eyes told him the noncom was digging, too. Nodding to himself, Luc made the dirt fly.

* * *

Some French King a long time ago said, “Paris is worth a Mass.” Vaclav Jezek had learned that in history class. As far as he was concerned, Paris was mostly a mess. By steamer from Constanta to Marseille, dodging Italian subs and seaplanes. By train from Marseille to Paris. By taxicab to the Czech embassy, which served as headquarters for the government in exile.

By taxi again to a camp outside Paris. The camp held about a regiment’s worth of Czechoslovakian soldiers: mostly Czechs, with a sprinkling of antifascist Slovaks and Ruthenians. Hardly anyone had his own weapon. The French wasted little time passing out rifles. They were eager to get all their friends into the fight against Hitler’s legions.

Next to none of them spoke any Czech, though. They did the same thing as the Pole who’d interned Vaclav: they used German. It worked-most Czechs knew at least some, and could translate for the ones who didn’t. But speaking the enemy’s language with your friends was humiliating and infuriating.

The Germans seemed to know where the camp was. Their bombers visited it every so often. This wasn’t the first time Vaclav had had to sprint for a trench-far from it. The bombers also visited Paris. On the radio, the Germans claimed to be hitting only military targets. That would have been funny if it didn’t make Jezek want to cry.

Three days before Christmas, his platoon jammed itself into a bus. A generation earlier, buses had hauled French troops from Paris to the war-saving Battle of the Marne. Some of the machines the Czechoslovak regiment used looked to be of vintage close to 1914.

It was cold outside. It didn’t stay cold inside the bus for long, not when it was full of twice as many men as it was supposed to carry. Everybody lit a cigarette. Inside of seconds, the smoke made Vaclav’s eyes sting. He didn’t care. He was smoking furiously himself. Gauloises packed a heftier jolt than the miserable excuses for tobacco he’d got since he was interned.

The driver, a middle-aged Frenchman, chain-smoked with his passengers. A patch covered his left eye but didn’t hide all the damage a bullet or shell fragment had done to his face. He seemed to manage all right with one eye, at least as far as driving went.

Whatever springs the bus might have had once upon a time had long since gone to the big coachwork shop in the sky. Vaclav felt every pothole, every rock. “I wonder if we’ll have any kidneys left by the time we get wherever we’re going,” he said to the soldier sitting next to-half on top of-him.

“Why worry?” the other man replied. His dark, curly hair and hooked nose said he was a Jew. Vaclav normally had little use for Jews, but he supposed you could count on them to fight the Nazis. This fellow went on, “If we’ve still got ‘em when we get there, the Germans’ll blow ‘em out of us, right?”

Vaclav eyed him. Maybe you weren’t so smart if you supposed something like that. “If you don’t think we can beat them, why did you sign up for this?”

“You gotta try.” The Jewish soldier paused to light a Gitane. He spoke Czech like a big-city man; if he wasn’t from Prague, Vaclav didn’t know anything. After sucking in smoke, he added, “Damn Poles don’t like Jews any better than the Germans do.”

“I guess not.” Vaclav hadn’t thought of that; it was nothing he’d ever needed to worry about.

“So how about you, goy?” That wasn’t Czech or German, but Vaclav had no trouble working out what it meant. “How come you’re here? How come you aren’t yelling, ‘Heil Hitler!’?”

Who do you think you are, asking me questions like that? After a moment, Vaclav tried to shrug. Inside the crowded bus, it wasn’t easy. “Fuck Hitler,” he said simply.

“That’ll do.” The Jew nodded. “I’m David. Who the hell are you?”

“Vaclav.” Jezek laughed. “Like everybody else, almost.”

David started singing the Christmas song about Good King Wenceslaus. He knew all the words. Vaclav must have looked flabbergasted, because the Jew started to laugh. “I’ve been hearing it ever since I was born,” David said. “Hell, I must have heard it while I was still inside my mom. I’d better know it.”

“I guess.” Vaclav hadn’t thought about that, either. If you were a Jew, you had your own stuff. But everybody else’s stuff had to land on you, too, whether you wanted it or not. If that wasn’t weird, what was?

After a few seconds, somebody else started singing about Good King Wenceslaus. It was that season of the year. A moment later, the Czech carol filled the bus like cigarette smoke. “Well, I see what you mean,” Vaclav said.

David nodded again. “Bet your ass. It’s always like this.”

The driver didn’t speak any Czech. To him, the carol was just noise. He didn’t need long to get sick of it. He yelled something in French. Not enough of the Czech soldiers spoke enough French for it to do any good. Then the driver screamed, “Shut up, you fucking pigdogs!” auf Deutsch. Maybe he’d learned it in a prison camp or something. That got people’s attention-maybe not in a good way, but it did.

“Ah, your mother,” David said, first in Czech, then in Yiddish.

Vaclav realized things were starting to go wrong when a gendarme-or maybe he was a military policeman-waved the bus onto a detour. The new road was narrow and twisty. The driver started swearing. So did the Czech soldiers as they slid from side to side.

Then the side road petered out-or maybe there was a crater up ahead. “Heraus!” the driver said as the bus’ door wheezed open.

“What do we do now?” Vaclav asked.

“What else?” David said. “We walk.”

Walk they did. Vaclav had lost his conditioning after getting interned. Tramping along with a forty-kilo pack on his back wasn’t his idea of a good time. The road seemed uphill both ways. Despite spatters of sleet, he soon started sweating. He threw down a cigarette butt and heard it hiss to extinction in an icy puddle.

That sparked a thought: “They say smoking is bad for your wind.”

“Screw ‘em,” David replied. He had another cigarette in his mouth.

Airplane motors droned high overhead. Bombs whistled down out of the clouds. They fell at random across the French countryside. The low ceiling grounded the German Stukas. Vaclav didn’t miss them-those bastards could put one right on top of an outhouse if they saw you walk in there to take a crap.

His platoon, of course, wasn’t the only unit on the march. He sometimes wondered if there was anybody in France who wasn’t. They went past a bunch of Frenchmen who’d got hit by one of those randomly falling bombs-a 250-kilo job, or maybe a 500. It wasn’t pretty. If the swine that went through a meat-packing plant wore uniforms, they would have looked a lot like this about halfway through.

Czech medics did what they could to help their French counterparts. You had to hope the French would have done the same for a Czech outfit. The rest of the platoon went around the blood and the moans and the shattered bodies. Vaclav didn’t look closely at them. He’d already seen more death and devastation than he ever wanted to remember.

And now you’re volunteering to be part of it again? he asked himself. You could have sat tight in that internment camp. It wasn’t exciting, but nobody was out to blow your balls off, either.

His shrug made the straps on that heavy pack dig into his shoulders. Too late to worry about it now. He’d been bored in the camp. Maybe he’d been stupid to leave. But if everybody sat tight, if nobody tried to stop Hitler, wouldn’t the little bastard with the ugly mustache end up telling the world what to do?

It looked that way to Vaclav. He glanced over at David, slogging along beside him. David had his own reasons to hate the Nazis, all right. Most of the time, Czech and Jew would have been wary around each other. Not here. The Germans had brought them together. A miracle of sorts, or maybe just proof of the old saying, The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Bombs turned a roadside meadow into a lunar landscape. Cattle lay sprawled like soldiers. They weren’t bloated and stinking. Some of them still moved and lowed piteously, so they’d gone down in this latest bombardment. Part of the weight Vaclav carried was rations. All the same…

“Fresh meat!” David got the words out before he could.

The platoon commander was a fresh-faced lieutenant named Svabinsky. Maybe he could have kept the soldiers from running into the field, maybe not. But he didn’t even try. “Beefsteaks!” he said happily, and pulled the bayonet off his belt.

They weren’t exactly beefsteaks. No butcher worth half his pay would have given them such a fancy name. They were chunks of meat haggled off the carcasses by hungrily enthusiastic amateurs. Toasted over a roaring fire, Vaclav’s had a charred crust and a bloody interior. He didn’t care. The gobbet was big enough to make his belly shut up. What else mattered in the field?

He rolled himself in a blanket and lay down by the fire. Lieutenant Svabinsky made sure people fed it through the night. Some time in the middle of the long, cold darkness, the blaring of car horns woke Vaclav. People shouted in French and French-accented German and even, once or twice, in Czech. Road damage might have stopped the buses, but the French army had cobbled together this swarm of automobiles to bring the Czechoslovakian soldiers up to the front.

As Vaclav stumbled towards one of them-they showed no lights, of course-he laughed through a yawn. The French were in a fix, the same way his own country had been. But they were trying to muddle through. He couldn’t imagine the efficient Germans coming up with a mad arrangement like this.

He piled into a car. As soon as it was packed, the driver took off. Vaclav hoped the fellow knew where he was going. He must have. Even staying on the road couldn’t have been easy, but the Frenchman did it. Vaclav dozed off again, jerking awake whenever the car hit a pothole.

Somebody outside said something in a language that sounded like German. Vaclav’s eyes flew open. Morning twilight let him see a soldier in a French-looking uniform. What came out of the man’s mouth still sounded like German. A Belgian, Vaclav realized. Are we in Belgium already?

The soldier turned out to speak French, too. That helped the driver, though not Vaclav. The Czech was glad to have a little light. The road was worse than ever, and wound through rugged, heavily wooded country. “What is this place?” Vaclav asked in German.

“They call it the Ardennes,” the driver answered in the same tongue.

“Why do they want us here?” Vaclav said. “You’d have to be crazy to try and push an attack through terrain like this.”

With a magnificent Gallic shrug, the driver said, “With people like the Germans, who can tell?” Somebody yelled and waved. The Frenchman hit the brakes. The car-a battered old Citroen-lurched to a stop. “You get out here.”

Getting out was harder than squeezing in had been. Vaclav stretched and twisted to work the kinks out of his back. He wished he had some coffee.

“Youse is the Czechs?” What the French officer spoke sounded more like bad Polish than Czech, but Vaclav could-barely-follow it. The Frenchman went on, “Come these ways-I will shove you into positions.” He was trying, anyhow.

And maybe the Czechs did need to be shoved into positions. Artillery growled up ahead. It wasn’t too close, but it was there. Maybe the Germans were crazy. Or maybe this was a feint, with the main force up in the north, the way it looked.

His shrug wasn’t so fancy as the driver’s but it would do. He didn’t have to decide whether the Nazis were making a big push here or a little one. All he had to do was go where people told him and shoot at anybody and anything decked out in German field-gray.

He wasn’t the only Czech soldier yawning as a ragged column formed. He figured he could just about manage what they needed from him.

* * *

“Stille nacht! Heilige NACHT!” Hans-Ulrich Rudel sang, along with the rest of the flyers and groundcrew men at the forward base in Holland. They had a tree, brought west from Germany and decorated with gingerbread men and candles and tinsel and ornaments made from scrap metal by mechanics in between patch jobs and other repairs on the Stukas.

Hans-Ulrich had heard that carol and all the others since before the day he first knew what the words meant. With his father a churchman, it couldn’t very well have been any different. But at his father’s house, and at his father’s church, the songs hadn’t seemed to mean so much. People sang them because they’d always sung them, sang them without thinking about what the words really said.

Things were different here. You don’t know what life is worth till you lay it on the line, Rudel thought. Everybody here knew this Christmas might be his last. That made it count for ever so much more than it had back in peacetime.

One of the other pilots raised a glass of schnapps. “Absent friends,” he said, and knocked back the shot.

“Absent friends,” the Luftwaffe men chorused. Most of them had something strong to hand, too.

Hans-Ulrich didn’t. A groundcrew man clucked at him. “Shouldn’t drink toasts in water. It’s unlucky.”

“Not water,” Rudel replied with dignity. But his eggnog was unfortified.

“Close enough. Too damn close.” The other pilot raised his glass again. “And here’s to close enough and too damn close, as long as the bastards miss.”

“Amen!” Hans-Ulrich drank to that, too, even if it was with plain eggnog.

Off in the distance, guns boomed. The ceiling was too low to let planes take off and land, but the war went on. One of the groundcrew men, a graying, wrinkled fellow with only three fingers on his left hand, said, “Wasn’t like this the first Christmas in the last war.”

“I’ve heard about the truce, Franz,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Was it really as big a thing as people say-our Landsers playing football with the Tommies, and all that?”

“I know people who watched the games,” Franz answered. “I know one guy who played. I didn’t see ‘em myself-my regiment was opposite the Frenchmen. We didn’t play football with them. But we did come up out of the trenches and meet in no-man’s-land, damned if we didn’t. We traded cigarettes and rations and stuff you could drink, and we all said what a bunch of assholes our officers were…No offense, sir.”

Everybody laughed. Rudel made sure his laughter was louder than anyone else’s. You couldn’t let the men think you were a stuffed shirt, even if you were-maybe especially if you were. Hans-Ulrich knew he was, at least by most people’s standards.

He shrugged. He had his father’s stern Lutheran God, and he had the Fuhrer (whom he saw as God’s instrument on earth), and he had his Stuka (which was his own instrument on earth). As long as he had them, he didn’t need to worry about anything else.

Or so he thought, till bombs started walking toward the hut where he and his countrymen were celebrating Christmas. The weather might be lousy here, but it was good enough farther west to let planes take off, and the English or French were paying a call.

They were bombing blind, of course, up there above the clouds. Let it fall, and it’s bound to come down on somebody’s head. That had to be what they were thinking, and they were right. The Luftwaffe did the same thing when the weather was bad, as it so often was at this season.

Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to be the first one running for a trench. He also didn’t want to wait too long and go sky-high in case the bombardiers got lucky. The line between courage and foolhardiness could be a fine one.

Franz took the bull by the horns. “I’m never going to go up for the goddamn Ritterkreuz,” he said, and dashed out the door.

Where one man went, others could follow without losing pride. A zigzag trench ran only a few meters outside the hut for such occasions as these. As Hans-Ulrich jumped down into it-his boots squelched in mud-he tried to imagine winning the Knight’s Cross to the Iron Cross himself. He’d got an Iron Cross Second Class a week before: an early Christmas present, his CO called it. But you could win an Iron Cross Second Class just by staying alive at the front for a couple of weeks-oh, not quite, but it seemed that way.

Franz had the ribbon for one, no doubt from the last war. Back then, the Iron Cross Second Class was almost the only medal an enlisted man could win. Hitler had an Iron Cross First Class, which made him an exceptional hero, because he’d never even reached sergeant.

And then Hans-Ulrich stopped worrying about Hitler’s Iron Cross or anything else but living through the next few minutes. The enemy planes up there were bombing blind, but they couldn’t have done better on a sunny, clear summer’s day. They might not have done so well, because high-altitude bombing was turning out to be one of the big disappointments of the war. It was neither as accurate nor as terrifying and intimidating as the experts had claimed it would be.

Which didn’t mean winding up on the wrong end of it was any fun. Now Rudel got a taste of what he gave the foe. The earth shook under him like a blancmange. The noise was impossible, overwhelming. Blast did its best to tear his lungs out from the inside.

After the longest six or eight minutes of Hans-Ulrich’s life, the bombers droned away. “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” he said. Then he said it again, louder, because he couldn’t hear himself the first time. He stuck his head up and looked over the lip of the trench.

The hut still stood, but it leaned drunkenly Its windows were blown out-or, more likely, in. Bomb craters turned the landscape into a miniature Verdun. Something a few hundred meters away was burning enthusiastically-a truck, Hans-Ulrich saw.

Sergeant Dieselhorst stuck his head up a few meters from Hans-Ulrich. “I wouldn’t mind not doing that again,” the rear gunner remarked, and then, apropos of nothing that presently surrounded him, “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Rudel echoed automatically. “Where were you? You weren’t singing carols-I know that.”

“I should hope not,” the noncom said. “If you want to waste your time that way, go ahead, but I was doing something more important: I was sleeping, by God.” He pointed to some trees not far away. “I was happy as a clam under there, but then the goddamn bombs started coming down.”

He sounded irate in a particular way. Hans-Ulrich nodded, because he felt that same indignation. When he went out and dropped a fat one on a French truck column, that was business. But when the sons of bitches on the other side tried to blow him to the moon, it felt like dirty pool. How dare they do such a thing? Didn’t they know the Fuhrer and the Reich were going to win any which way? Why were they working so hard in what was bound to be a forlorn hope?

And why were they coming so close to killing him? That was the real question.

“I wonder if we’ve got any fighters up there,” somebody said. “If we do, those Allied shitheads’ll be sorry in a hurry.”

Hans-Ulrich nodded. He’d listened to Me-109 pilots going on about what sitting ducks British and French bombers were. They couldn’t run, they couldn’t hide, and they couldn’t fight back. He would have liked that better if his Stuka weren’t in the same boat. No matter how scary it seemed to the troops on the ground, it couldn’t get out of its own way. If the Messerschmitts didn’t keep enemy fighters away from them, Ju-87s would tumble out of the sky as often as the Western Allies’ bombers did.

“We ought to pay those damned sky pirates back,” someone else said, lifting a phrase popular in German papers.

Dieselhorst’s snort put paid to that. In case it hadn’t, the sergeant went on, “How? We can’t take off. Even if the weather didn’t stink, some of that load came down on the airstrip. They’re going to have to flatten it out again before we can use it. We might as well drink and play skat, because we aren’t flying for a while.”

A sergeant feeling his oats could sound more authoritative than any major ever hatched. Sergeants mysteriously, mystically knew things. Officers could command, but they didn’t have that amazing certainty.

“Anybody think more of those fuckers are coming?” asked a ground-crew man in greasy, muddy coveralls. By his tone, he wanted somebody like Dieselhorst to pat him on the head and say something like, No, don’t worry about it. You’re safe now.

But no one said anything of the kind. Hans-Ulrich realized he wouldn’t have minded some reassurance, either. When the silence had stretched for a bit, the groundcrew man swore again. Maybe that made him feel a little better, anyhow. Rudel didn’t usually grant himself even that safety valve, though some of the close calls he’d had on missions made him slip every now and then. He always felt bad about it afterwards, but coming out with something ripe made him feel better when he did it.

He climbed out of the trench and brushed mud and dirt off of himself. “We might as well go back,” he said. “The best way to get even with the enemy is to have a good time.”

When the Luftwaffe men went back inside their shelter, they found that blast and wind had blown out most of the candles on the Christmas tree. A pilot with a cigarette lighter got them going again. He flicked the lighter closed and put it in his pocket. “God only knows how long I’ll be able to get fuel for it,” he said. “Then it’s back to matches-as long as we have matches.”

He wore an Iron Cross First Class. Nobody could accuse him of being a coward or a defeatist…but he sounded like one. Hans-Ulrich wanted to take him aside and talk some sense into him. But when he tried to do that, the people he was talking to had a way of getting angry instead of appreciating his advice. He didn’t like it, which didn’t mean he hadn’t noticed it. He kept his mouth shut.

Caroling some more would have been nice, but nobody seemed to want to. That made a certain amount of sense: if you were listening for airplane engines, you didn’t want to be noisy yourself. Rudel missed the music all the same.

Sergeant Dieselhorst had come in with the rest of them. He was drinking schnapps. Soon enough, he was laughing and joking with the rest of the men. Hans-Ulrich wished he could fit in so easily-or at all.