Last Orders

CHAPTER 6

Alistair Walsh eyed the new piece of military hardware with a veteran’s suspicion. “What in God’s name is that?” he asked.

“Somefin’ from the Yanks.” Jack Scholes brandished what looked more like a stovepipe than anything else Walsh could think of offhand. It was made of cheap sheet metal and painted the dark green the Americans called olive drab-they painted the trucks they sent across the Atlantic the same color. Scholes went on, “They call it a bazooka. Suppose to beat the PIAT all ’ollow.”

“Huh,” Walsh said thoughtfully. That would be good-that would be wonderful, in fact-if it turned out to be true. The PIAT (short for Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) was the Tommy’s personal antitank weapon. A powerful spring sent a shaped-charge bomb flying at enemy armor.

You could kill a tank with a PIAT. You could if you were brave and lucky and very close to the damn thing, at any rate. Otherwise, your chances of killing yourself were much better. People had done the job with it. But you could also rupture yourself cocking the miserable beast-that was a powerful spring. And the PIAT was almost impossible to cock lying down. You looked like a monkey humping a football when you tried. It was easiest (not easy, never easy, but easier) standing up. Of course, standing up gave Fritz a clear shot at you most of the time.

No wonder the PIAT wasn’t popular.

“What do you shoot through this bloody thing?” Walsh inquired. “Spit wads?”

“Gordo’s comin’ up wiv a sack o’ the bombs,” Scholes answered.

“Why am I not surprised?” Walsh said. Gordon McAllister was a hulking Scotsman. He wasn’t long on brains, but by God he was strong. People called him the Donkey, but not where he could hear them-not more than once, anyhow. When he spoke, which was seldom, he had a thick burr. It was hard to believe his accent, Walsh’s buzzing Welsh consonants and odd vowels (at least to an Englishman’s ears), and Scholes’ glottal Cockney all belonged to the same language.

McAllister came up a couple of minutes later, with a large canvas sack, also olive drab, slung over his shoulder. It clanked when he set it down. Scholes reached inside and displayed the round that went through a bazooka. “ ’Ere you go, Staff.”

Walsh whistled softly. A PIAT bomb looked like the makeshift it was. This thing … “Like something out of a Flash Gordon movie, isn’t it? Except for the paint job, I mean.” Like seemingly everything else that had anything to do with the American military, the round was painted olive drab.

“You’re a smart one, you are. It does at that, don’t it?” Scholes sent him an admiring glance. He went on, “You load it into the tube ’ere. There’s a battery, like, connected to the trigger, an’ it fires orf the rocket motor.” He chuckled. “They say you don’t want to be be’ind it when it goes-not ’arf you don’t.”

“I daresay. If there’s a rocket in that thing, it’ll fry your bacon for fair,” Walsh said. “How far will it shoot?”

“Couple ’underd yards for tanks, they tol’ us,” Scholes replied. “Farther’n that for ’ousebreakin’.”

“Right.” Walsh nodded. You could hit a house or a bunker out past three hundred yards with a PIAT, and you’d hurt it when you did. A tank? You might nail one at a hundred yards. Twenty-five or thirty made your odds better-if you didn’t buy your plot trying to sneak in so close.

“I want to go ’untin’, I do,” Scholes said. “Bag me a Tiger. Bleedin’ shyme I can’t take the ’ide ’ome an’ ’ang it on me wall.”

“Mind the claws,” Gordon McAllister rumbled. Like a lot of what he did say, that seemed very much to the point.

“Will it get through a Tiger’s armor?” Walsh asked with interest. A PIAT wouldn’t pierce the monster German tank from the front. Neither would anything else in the English or French armory. Too many brave tank crews and antitank gunners had found that out the hard way.

“It’s supposed to.” Jack Scholes didn’t sound entirely convinced, either. Walsh couldn’t blame him. No one who’d seen a Tiger in action had an easy time believing anything could stop it.

“So you and Gordo are trained up on this beast, are you?” the staff sergeant asked.

McAllister’s long-jawed head bobbed up and down. “It’s dead easy,” Scholes said. “Gordo shoves the round in till it clicks, like. ’E stands so I don’t singe ’is whiskers when I shoot. I fire it off. Then I duck, on account of the Fritzes’ll shoot at where I was.”

“Think so, do you?” Walsh’s tone was dry. If that thing with fins was a rocket, it would leave the tube trailing fire. Yes, something like that might draw a German’s interest. But something that let a foot soldier take out a tank from a couple of hundred yards away would draw any Tommy’s interest, and never mind the chances he took using it.

Walsh wondered whether the Germans already knew about the new tank-buster from America. Maybe some other English or French units had used them. Or maybe some of the Belgians had blabbed. This part of Belgium was full of French-speaking Walloons. Some of them liked the Nazis even if they did speak French, dammit.

Two mornings later, they were ordered forward for a reconnaissance in force against the German positions. Scholes carried the bazooka. McAllister lugged the sack of rounds. Walsh wondered what would happen if a rifle bullet hit one of those rockets. He didn’t wonder long. They’d bury Gordo in the proverbial jam tin, that was what.

An MG-42 started buzzing away ahead of them. The Tommies hit the dirt. That horrible thing spat out so many bullets, one of them was bound to punch your ticket if you stayed on your feet. Walsh peered through bushes. There it was, muzzle flashes winking malevolently. Sure as hell, it sat in a concrete emplacement, safe against anything but a direct hit from an artillery shell. Or … a bazooka round?

“See the bugger, Jack?” Walsh called, not lifting his head far from the dirt. “Can you hit it from where you’re at?”

“I’ll give it a go,” Scholes answered. Then he said something Walsh couldn’t make out, probably to Gordo.

There was a roaring whoosh! and, yes, a blast of fire. The forward end of the tube had a screen of wire mesh sticking out around it to keep the rocket motor from roasting the man who launched it. A moment later, the round slammed into the machine-gun nest. There was another blast then, a bigger one. The MG-42 abruptly fell silent.

“Cor!” Scholes said. “Bastard really works, don’t it?”

“It’ll give Fritz something to think about, all right,” Walsh agreed.

What the Germans thought soon became plain enough. They thought they needed to eliminate anybody who carried something that could smash up a hardened machine-gun position. In their jackboots, Walsh would have thought the same thing. They didn’t seem to have any more machine guns close by, but they raked the ground with fire from rifles and Schmeissers.

Then another machine gun did speak up: one mounted in the turret of a Panzer IV. A moment later, the tank’s bow gun started shooting, too. This time, Walsh didn’t shout for Scholes. If the kid from the East End of London couldn’t figure out what needed doing … he had to be hurt or dead. In which case, Gordon McAllister would take hold of the bazooka … unless he was hurt or dead, too.

Before Walsh could worry about what he’d do in that case, the bazooka belched fire and went whoosh! again. The rocket flew from it and slammed into the Panzer IV’s turret. A fraction of a second later, the German tank brewed up as spectacularly as any Walsh had ever seen. He would have shot the tankmen in their black coveralls had any of them made it out through a hatch, but none did.

The burning tank set the bushes by it on fire, too. The blaze flushed a few more Fritzes out of their holes. Walsh cheerfully banged away at them with his Sten gun. It was long range for a machine pistol, but he didn’t care. Hitler’s lads had something brand new to give them nightmares when they curled up under their blankets. And wasn’t that nice?

Arno Baatz paused at the western edge of a field of growing grain. He thought the grain was barley, not wheat, but he wasn’t sure-he was a city man. He was sure it was a damn sorry field of whatever the hell it was. It had been badly tended ever since it was planted, and not long before this panzers and halftracks had run through it and knocked half of it flat. Crows pecked at the unripe heads of grain the armored fighting vehicles had threshed.

He cared about that no more than he cared about whether it was wheat or barley. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and thrust it up over his head to gauge the wind. Adam Pfaff laughed at him. “Since when did you turn Red Indian?” Pfaff asked.

“Oh, shut up,” Baatz said. “Shut up unless you know a better way to tell which direction it’s from, I mean.” He waited. Pfaff kept quiet, so Arno assumed he didn’t know any better way. As a matter of fact, he’d already assumed that. He nodded importantly. “It’s coming out of the west. That’s what we need.”

“Jawohl,” Pfaff muttered, perhaps sarcastically, perhaps not.

Baatz didn’t gig him the way he would have most of the time; the Unteroffizier had other things on his mind. Puffing out his chest, he called to the troops of his squad, who stood with him, lined up along the edge of the grainfield: “Get your torches ready, men!”

“It’s not motherfucking close-order drill,” Pfaff said. Baatz ignored him again; he was treating it as if it were. And the Obergefreiter had his torch-a stick with a lump of tallow and straw at one end-ready along with everybody else.

“Light your torches!” Arno Baatz commanded. He loved giving orders. He started his torch with a flint-and-steel lighter. Some of the Landsers had ones like it. Others used matches to get theirs burning. Baatz bellowed again: “Swing your torches over your heads!”

They did, all of them counterclockwise. The flames in the tallow swelled; black smoke trailed the circling torches. It would have been pretty on a practice field. But this wasn’t practice. This was war.

“Throw your torches!” Baatz yelled. The soldiers obeyed, as if they were flinging potato-masher grenades. They didn’t get that kind of distance with the torches, but they didn’t need to.

Down fell the flaming lumps of tallow and straw, in amongst the growing grain-and, better yet, in amongst the dying, yellowing strips of grain the armored vehicles’ tracks had crushed. Each torch started a little fire. The fires grew and spread through the field, pushed on by the wind Baatz had successfully identified. Smoke climbed into the sky. The crows flew away, screeching with fear.

“Well, all right! The Reds won’t march through that any time soon,” Baatz said, inflating his chest again. “And when they do try it, we can put a machine gun in those woods over there and shoot them down like the mad hounds they are.” He pointed to the trees that overlooked the burning field.

Then he scowled at Obergefreiter Pfaff, waiting for him to come out with some crack along the lines of When are you getting your field marshal’s baton? He would have jumped all over Pfaff for that. Talk of a field marshal’s baton was all the more galling to a man who couldn’t even get promoted to Feldwebel. But the senior private just said, “The Ivans won’t be able to eat that grain, either.”

The grain wasn’t that close to ripeness. Baatz grunted and nodded even so. The Russians would eat it anyway if they happened to be hungry. They ate bugs and slugs and newts and mushrooms and ferns and anything else they could get their hands on. The Red Army didn’t give its men any more in the way of rations than it could help. Munitions, yes. Food? The Ivans were on their own for that. They foraged like wild animals. The resemblance didn’t always end there, either.

So, scorched earth. If the Wehrmacht had to fall back, the Russians wouldn’t be able to do much with the land they advanced through. It made perfect military sense to Baatz. It might not have if the Red Army were retreating through Germany and burning and wrecking as it did, but that never once crossed his mind. The Red Army in the Vaterland? Unimaginable!

“Come on, boys,” he said, his sense of self-importance restored. “We’ve got another ten kilometers to go before we make it to our rest line.”

Predictably, the men groaned. They didn’t like wearing out their boots marching. Baatz didn’t like it himself; he was a heavyset fellow. But he had his orders. Give him orders and he’d carry them out. He’d make sure everybody to whom he gave orders carried them out, too.

Slyly, Adam Pfaff said, “If we fall back ten kilometers every day, how many days till we’re retreating through Berlin? It’s like a problem in a math book, isn’t it?”

“It’s no such thing!” Baatz sounded furious, and he was. “We’re just shortening our front and getting into more defensible positions. That’s the only thing we’re doing-the only thing, you hear me?”

He hoped Pfaff would argue with him. Miserable barracks lawyer, Baatz thought. But arguing here would come within millimeters of defeatism, and defeatism was a capital crime.

Instead of arguing, Pfaff just kept marching along. He left Baatz’s words hanging in the air, all by themselves. Somehow, that worked better than any fancy hairsplitting might have.

When they got back to the rest line, they found themselves only a couple of hundred meters from a field kitchen. “Goulash cannon!” Pfaff said happily. There, Baatz wasn’t inclined to quarrel. Seeing the pipe sticking up from the wheeled cart with the stove and boiler made him happy, too. He wouldn’t have to fill his belly with hard crackers smeared with butter from a tinfoil tube or dried fruit or any of the other delicacies he carried on his person.

He brought his mess tin over to the field kitchen. The boiler was full of stew, with turnips and carrots and onions and chicken and duck and whatever else the cooks could scrounge, all done together … done and done and done, till the chicken tasted like onions and the carrots tasted like duck and everything tasted like everything else. It wasn’t anything he would have made for himself or ordered in an eatery. It was wonderful all the same. When you’d been marching all day, anything that plugged up the hole in your belly was wonderful.

Adam Pfaff cleaned out his mess kit after making what was in it disappear. When he came back from the nearby creek, he stretched out on the ground at full length and lit a cigarette. Blowing a long stream of smoke up into the sky, he said, “I got a pretty decent supper in me. Nobody’s trying to kill me right this minute. Life’s not so bad, you know?”

“No, not so bad,” Baatz said. “Now if they’d set up a brothel anywhere around here …”

“That’d be nice,” Pfaff agreed. “But I’ll tell you-if they let me sleep till noon tomorrow, I’d like that just about as much. I’ve got to be a year and a half behind on shuteye since they conscripted me.” He yawned till something in his jaw cracked like a knuckle.

When you watched someone else yawn, you wanted to yawn yourself. Baatz yielded to temptation before he even thought he might fight it. Then he wagged a finger at Pfaff. “You rotten pigdog, you! Now you’ve gone and reminded me how tired I am, too. Noon? I could curl up in a cave somewhere and sleep till spring like a bear.”

“Wouldn’t that be great?” Pfaff said.

They both woke before sunup. The Russians were shelling the snot out of the German line somewhere not far enough north of where they were. Ivan hadn’t tried a summer advance before this year, but he had his tail up now. Baatz and Pfaff and the rest of the Landsers filled their mess tins from the goulash cannon one more time and emptied them as fast as they could. Then they started tramping west again. Pfaff said nothing more of math problems. Arno Baatz thought about them anyhow.

The Japanese Navy had flown more G4Ms in to Midway. They replaced the bombers destroyed by American air raids. Revetments protected a plane against blast and fragments. Nothing protected it when a bomb burst right on top of it. All you could do was get rid of the wreckage so you could use the revetment again.

Hideki Fujita didn’t like seeing what a bomb could do to an airplane. It made him think about what an antiaircraft shell could do, or a burst of heavy machine-gun bullets from an American fighter.

He didn’t want to think about such things, but he didn’t have much choice. If more G4Ms had come here, they’d come to be used. Before long, the Japanese would likely be dropping more germ weapons over Oahu. That meant he would have to climb into one of those bombers and do some of the dropping. He’d chosen such things when he volunteered to come to Midway.

G4Ms had enormous range. They could fly from here to Oahu and back. As far as bombers went, they were fast. That was the good news. The bad news was, they were nowhere near so fast as the latest fighters. And, to get that great range, they were as light as possible, which meant they were flimsy. They caught fire easily, too. If you got intercepted, if you got hit, you would die. It was about that simple.

Fujita marveled that no bomb had smashed the bacteriological-warfare unit’s little tent compound. That was luck, nothing else but. Some kami watched over rats and fleas and test tubes and the men who tended them.

Whether it was a good kami or one of the other kind, he wasn’t so sure any more. A few days later, sweating like a pig in his flying togs’ fur and leather, he climbed into a G4M’s bomb bay and hooked himself to the oxygen line. The engines thundered to life. The plane bounced down the poorly repaired runway and lumbered up into the air.

Off to the west, in the direction of the Home Islands, the sun sank toward the Pacific. It soon set. The G4M droned on through the darkness. America and Japan raided each other’s bases at night. The quarter moon spread sparkles of light across the blue-black water.

Tonight, the pilot flew south of the usual course. American carriers sometimes lurked partway up the chain of islets that led from Midway to the main Hawaiian islands. Their fighters would come up at night, hunting for bombers. Every once in a while, they’d catch one. But what they couldn’t find, they couldn’t catch.

Fujita shivered. Now that he was at altitude, he was glad for the gear in which he’d sweltered on the ground. Even in these subtropical latitudes, it was frigid up here at six or seven thousand meters. He wished he had more clothes, thicker clothes, to put on.

The pilot’s and copilot’s voices came faintly back to him through the speaking tube. They had nothing to say to him yet; they chatted with each other about how the plane was doing. As far as he could tell, it was doing fine. Listening to them gave him something to do while he sat there shivering in the dark. He hoped they had their navigating in good order.

They must have been about halfway to Oahu when the two men in the cockpit suddenly exclaimed together. The moon had shown them a string of bombers flying north and west. As they were going to hit Honolulu, so the Americans were taking a fresh whack at Midway.

“Zakennayo!” Fujita muttered. If the Yankees cratered the runways again, landing would be an adventure. He couldn’t do anything about that but worry. Worry he did.

He also hoped the American pilots hadn’t noticed the G4Ms, the way the Japanese pilots had seen their planes. If this raid was like the others, the Americans would have far more bombers in the sky to notice.

If the Americans had seen them, they would radio the news back to Honolulu. Then the night sky would light up with even more fireworks than usual when the Japanese flyers came overhead. Fujita hoped the moon was down by the time they arrived. They’d be harder to see then. It would be close. Moonset should be somewhere near midnight, which was also about when they were supposed to reach Oahu.

Nothing to do but wait and brood. Every so often, Fujita would check the luminous dial on his watch. He kept thinking forty-five minutes or an hour had gone by since the last time he’d looked at its radium-painted hands. He kept finding out it was only ten or fifteen minutes.

At last, when he was sure he’d spent a week in the air and the plane would either fly on forever or run out of gas and crash into the Pacific, the pilot’s voice came metallically through the speaking tube: “Be ready, Bombardier! We are nearing the target.”

“Hai!” Fujita couldn’t help adding, “Good to hear it, sir.”

No response to that. A few minutes later, though, the pilot said, “Open the bomb-bay doors.”

“Hai!” Fujita repeated. He cranked them open. The moon wasn’t quite down. He could see ocean far below, and then dark land. Freezing wind tore at him. The American blackout got better every time he flew over Honolulu. If he wasn’t wrong, they were coming up from the south. Raiding from that unexpected direction might keep the Americans from realizing they were there till they’d dropped their bombs and headed back toward Midway.

Or, of course, it might not. In fact, the thought had hardly passed through Fujita’s mind before lights winked on, all those thousands of meters down below. Some of those were the muzzle flashes of antiaircraft guns. Others were searchlight beams stabbing up to pin the Japanese planes on their bilious blue beams so the gunners could see what they were shooting at.

The G4M started jinking violently, going faster and slower, higher and lower, left and right to confuse the gunners. Gulping, Fujita feared his stomach was a few jinks behind the plane. Then he gulped again, for a different reason. Not far enough away, the antiaircraft shells began to burst. Fire and smoke lay at the heart of each explosion. Fragments flew much farther. And the blast from the bursts threw the bomber around, too.

“Bombs away!” the pilot shouted. “Let them fall!”

“Bombs away!” Fujita echoed. He yanked hard on the levers that released the pottery bomb casings full of fever and death. At least one of the G4Ms flying with his had ordinary explosives aboard. He saw the bombs burst down there as he closed the bomb-bay doors to make the plane more aerodynamic. The faster they got out of there, the better their chance of making it back to Midway.

By the way the pilot gunned the bomber’s motors, he didn’t want to hang around here, either. All the Japanese in the Midway garrison said the flat little island was a hellhole. Fujita had said so himself. When the other choice was getting shot down, though, the hellhole seemed heavenly by comparison.

Near misses shook the G4M for another long couple of minutes. One fragment tore a hole in the plane’s thin aluminum skin a meter behind Fujita. Had it hit him, it would have gutted him like a salmon. The wind screamed through the hole. No fluid leaked out of it, though, and no torn cables writhed in that wind. The bomber kept flying.

Fujita stayed nervous till the cockpit crew’s chatter told him the plane had got past Kauai on the way back to Midway. That meant American fighters were unlikely to come after them. They would probably make it back … and find out what the U.S. bombers had done to their base.

Or they would unless they met the returning American bombers head-on. The Yankee planes bristled with machine guns. The G4M might be able to outrun them, but it would never win an air-to-air gunfight.

The sun was just rising when the bomber jounced to a stop on the runway. The pilot came in slow, just above stalling speed, and braked so hard Fujita could smell burning rubber from the tires. He stopped as short as he could, so the plane had the smallest chance of going into a crater and flipping over. Fujita scrambled out onto the tarmac. He was at sea level again, and sweating hard again, too. He didn’t care. He’d made it one more time.

Benjamin Halévy stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. He offered Vaclav Jezek the pack. Vaclav took one. “Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Up yours, Sergeant,” Halévy replied. They grinned at each other.

Before the war, Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews. But the Jewish conscripts in the Czechoslovakian army had hung in and fought the Nazis along with the Czechs, while Poles and Ruthenians and especially Slovaks either just gave up or went over to the enemy. Jews had even better reasons than Czechs for hating Hitler and his minions, and that wasn’t easy.

Halévy wasn’t, or wasn’t exactly, a Czech Jew. His parents had gone from Prague to Paris after the last war. He’d been a French sergeant and, because he spoke both French and Czech, a liaison between his own armed forces and those of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile. When France made its temporary truce with Hitler, he’d accompanied the Czech soldiers into exile in Republican Spain. He couldn’t stomach fighting on the German side.

He was a lieutenant here for the same reason Jezek was a sergeant. The Spaniards had an inferiority complex about their own fighting skills. They automatically promoted foreigners one grade. A lot of Vaclav’s pay still came in promises, but they were bigger promises than they would have been otherwise.

After blowing out smoke, Vaclav asked, “Do Sanjurjo’s bastards promote the Germans and Italians on their side, too?”

“I know they do with the Germans,” Halévy said. “I’m not so sure they bother with Mussolini’s boys. I mean, would you promote an Italian?”

“Not unless I wanted him to cook noodles for me,” Vaclav answered, and they both laughed. The German Legion Kondor had good men, picked men, in it. There were more Italians in Spain, but they were mostly conscripts who didn’t want to be here, and fought like it.

Vaclav’s canteen was full of harsh red wine. He swigged from it. He had a better chance of steering clear of the trots with wine than with water. And the trots were something nobody in the trenches needed, much less someone who spent a lot of his time quietly waiting in no-man’s-land. Hard to wait quietly when you had to yank down your trousers and squat.

He hadn’t gone out this morning. He couldn’t have said why. He hadn’t felt lucky when he woke up before sunrise-that was as close as he could come. No one in the little Czech force gave him any trouble about it. They’d all served together for a long, long time. They knew he wasn’t malingering. He’d done plenty to Sanjurjo’s Nationalists, and chances were he would again. Only not today.

Not today. Tomorrow. Mañana. That was one of the Spanish words Vaclav did know. You couldn’t be in Spain long without learning it. When he said it, he commonly meant tomorrow. A Spaniard who said it might mean tomorrow, too. Or he might mean in a few days-I don’t quite know when. Or he might mean go away and quit bothering me. It all depended on how he said it.

Czechs had spent a lot of centuries living next door to Germans. Attitudes rubbed off, even if no one intended that they should. When a Czech said in an hour, that was what he meant. When he said tomorrow, he meant that, too. Discovering how abstract and theoretical time could be in Spain came as a painful surprise.

It cost lives, too. If an artillery barrage came in two hours late-and such things happened all the time here-foot soldiers who should have attacked a softened-up position advanced against one with the defenders ready and waiting. They usually paid the price for it, too.

In the Czech army, as in the Wehrmacht, an artillery officer whose guns didn’t fire when they were supposed to would get it in the neck. He’d wind up a corporal, one posted where the fighting was hottest. Among the Spaniards, Republicans and Nationalists alike, people just shrugged. Such things were sad, absolutely, but what could you do?

Maybe the weather had something to do with it. Jezek drank more wine. “Christ, it’s hot!” he said. You never saw weather like this in Central Europe. This would kill you if you gave it half a chance. Here in Spain, sunstroke wasn’t just a word.

“It is,” Halévy agreed. He’d turned brown as an Arab, brown as old leather, under the harsh Spanish sun. Like most Czechs, Vaclav was much fairer than the Jew. He’d burned and peeled, burned and peeled, over and over again, till he finally started to tan. He knew he wouldn’t tan like Halévy if he stayed here another fifty years.

Before he could say anything else, the Nationalists’ artillery woke up. That didn’t happen every day any more-nowhere close. Marshal Sanjurjo got most of his tubes from Germany and Italy. Since France backed away from her deal with Hitler, the marshal hadn’t been able to get many any more. The ones he had were old and worn. They’d lost a lot of accuracy. Spanish-made shells (on both sides of the line) were much too likely to be duds.

Artillery could still kill you, though. Jezek grabbed his antitank rifle and folded himself up into a ball in the bottom of the trench. Any pillbug that happened to see him would have been impressed. But his bet was that any pillbugs down here were folding themselves into balls, too.

He opened his eyes for a second. Beside him, Benjamin Halévy was also doing his best to occupy as little space as he could. Not all the Nationalists’ shells were duds, dammit. Some of them burst with thunderous roars near the Czechs’ trench line. Dirt fountained up into the air. Clods fell down and thumped Vaclav. He flinched every time one did, afraid it would be a speeding, whining fragment and not a harmless lump of earth.

While he lay there, his hands were busy under him. He stuck a five-round box into the slot on his elephant gun and worked the bolt to chamber the first cartridge. He’d left the monster rifle unloaded. He hadn’t thought he would need to do any shooting from the trench. But if Sanjurjo’s men were shelling like this, what was it but the prelude to an infantry attack?

Halévy had to be thinking the same thing. As soon as the artillery barrage eased off, he bounced to his feet, yelling, “Up! Up, dammit! They’ll be coming after us any second now!”

Vaclav scrambled onto the firing step. Grunting, he heaved up the heavy antitank rifle and rested the bipod on the dirt of the parapet. Sure as hell, soldiers in German-looking helmets and pale yellowish khaki were swarming out of the Nationalists’ trenches and foxholes like angry ants.

He didn’t worry about picking off officers now. He pulled the trigger as soon as he got one of Sanjurjo’s men in his crosshairs. When you hit some poor bastard dead center with a round intended to pierce two or three centimeters of hardened steel, you almost tore him in half. The luckless Spaniard’s midsection exploded into red mist. He didn’t crumple; he toppled.

The thumb-sized cartridge case clinked off the top of Vaclav’s boot after he worked the bolt again. He killed another Nationalist a few seconds later. This one did a graceful pirouette into a shell hole. He wouldn’t come out again, either, not with most of his head blown off.

Ordinary rifles were banging away from the Czech line, too, along with a couple of machine guns. When Republican artillery woke up and started giving no-man’s-land a once-over, the Nationalists decided they wouldn’t be breaking through to Madrid today after all. Some hunkered down in whatever cover they could find while others scurried back to their start line. Even Fascist Spaniards were recklessly brave, but war was a Darwinian business. The longer it went on, the more pragmatists survived.

Somebody not far away was wailing for his mother in Czech. Vaclav and Halévy shared pained looks. That sounded bad, and the poor guy wouldn’t be the only Czech hurt or killed, either. The government-in-exile’s army had been a regiment when it got to Spain. It was a lot smaller than that now, and kept shrinking all the time.