The Fall of Night

Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Battle of France

Lorraine, France

“They’re on their way, Mon General,” the young officer said. He seemed painfully young for his role. “They’re sending in aircraft and helicopters.”

Lieutenant-General Vincent Pelletier nodded once; his command post had been carefully hidden with all the professionalism that the remains of the French Army could mount, hidden from Russian bombers. France had gone for seventy years without hostile bombers dropping bombs on French territory; now, it was as if seventy years had been swept away and Hitler’s legions had returned to terrorise the population. Pelletier knew that the fight was probably futile, but if… if he could give the Russians a bloody nose, if a provisional government could assume the reins of power, if… if… there might be room to save something from the wreckage of France. If…

Pelletier had been on an exercise when the Russians had launched their first attack, and then the streets of Paris and several other cities had dissolved into chaos, forcing him to try to bring together the remains of several French units to try to put an end to the chaos. He had done well, he knew he had, but it hadn’t been enough; his manpower had been so sharply reduced by the combined pressure of missile attacks and the insurgency — which had been specifically targeted on military and police personnel — that he had barely been able to save Paris. By the time he had battered a multi-sided insurgency into submission, or at least quiescence, the German line had broken and hundreds of refugees had started to stream into France, finally providing him with some intelligence of what was happening to the east. Two weeks of fighting an insurgency had taken a bitter toll; his forces had been drained of most of their ammunition and supplies… and what stores they'd had had been hit or looted by the rioters. The air force was non-existent… and, as for the Navy… well, most of the ships had either gone to try to cut the Algerian supply line, or had been destroyed in the opening attacks.

“Order our forces to deploy,” he said. “Tell every man that… France expects every man to do his duty.”

He had done the best he could, hoping that the Russians would outrun their supply lines, or the Germans would pull off a miracle, but it was not to be. His forces had been shattered and rebuilt; there hadn’t been anything like the time he had needed to create a proper army. He had even thought about offering the insurgents amnesty if they agreed to join up, but he knew that the Russians would just have brushed them aside, even if they could be trusted. The French reserves had been allowed to slip too far; his force would do what it could, but it wouldn’t be enough. He had dug in near Nancy… and all it would take to shatter his defence line was the Russians coming in from Belgium, even if French soldiers had done what they could to smash up the approach routes.

It was a British quote, but he couldn’t think of one that was more appropriate. There was nothing to do now, but wait. It would only take the Russians a few hours at most to reach the defence line; he hoped that he understood their strategy properly. His army was the last major obstacle that they would face before Spain; they had no choice, but to attempt to engage him. He had prepared as best as he could for the worst… and he had a sneaking suspicion that the ‘worst’ was about to happen…

How had it all happened? Pelletier turned it over and over again in his mind; how had it happened? There were parts of France only just beginning to wake up to the fact they were at war, other parts torn apart by one insurgent faction or another, from four different Islamic factions to students, nationalists and even socialists. The President was dead, the Prime Minister was dead; Pelletier couldn’t even use the nukes without the codes that had been lost when the emergency command centre had been bombed. France had failed to grasp a nettle, she had failed to either repair her damaged society, or to take precautions against an insurgency. They had believed themselves safe, invulnerable; they had been proven spectacularly wrong. They had concluded, rightly, that no insurgency could long succeed… but it hadn’t mattered; the Russians had used the Islamic groups as cannon fodder. They had soaked up French bullets that would otherwise have been fired at Russian soldiers.

Pelletier forced himself to sit back calmly. It would all be over soon.

“Fire,” General Shalenko said.

The Russians had moved up twenty-five MLRS units and hundreds of heavy guns, all transported through a largely undamaged German rail network, most of which hadn’t even been damaged by the fighting. Unlike in Britain, the German transport network had been left more or less alone — although the weight of thousands of heavy tanks was taking its toll — and it had been rapidly pressed into service, with the unwilling help of thousands of Germans who had been told that it was a choice between working or starving. The guns fired…

Russian satellites had pinpointed the location of most of the French defenders near Nancy, a large French city; the French had done a fairly good job of getting their forces into position to stand their ground. Shalenko knew better than to think that the French would simply run at the first shot; the Russians might well have done the French a favour by wiping out the higher command of the French Army. Political skills had been rewarded; military skills had been considered of secondary importance, at best. General Éclair had been that rarity, a competent general who was also a more-than-competent politician; had he survived Sudan, EUROFOR might have been able to recover in the opening days of the war and fight back successfully. The French armoured units would be almost immobile now, their fuel and weapons supplies limited; he had to remind himself not to assume anything. They could have used civilian fuel in their tanks… not that it would have mattered.

He covered his ears as the weapons fired, launching thousands of missiles and shells into the air, firing in long rippling salvos. The Russians had taken the original design and run with it, improving on the idea and adding some refinements of their own. Every minute, the Russians would launch thirty rockets towards the French position, reloading and attacking again as quickly as they could, while the heavy guns would aim for more specific targeting, using satellites to watch the battlezone. The return fire was limited and badly coordinated; only one MLRS was struck by a French shell and blown to kingdom come by the blast. Counter-battery radars zeroed in on the location of the French batteries and pounded them, blasting their operators and their guns to dust. It had been a French General — Shalenko couldn’t remember who — who had said that ‘fire kills;’ the French were learning, once again, the truth of that maxim.

He tapped a command into the terminal that Anna held. Neither of them could hear each other under the noise of the guns. The command was simple enough; the battle had been planned beforehand, and so far was all going to plan. That wouldn’t survive for long, but Shalenko intended to push his advantage as much as possible. The command echoed through the network; ADVANCE!

Lieutenant Jean-Paul Foch felt his bones rattling as the Russian attack shook their line of makeshift bunkers; the pounding seemed never-ending. His unit had been shattered by the first Russian attacks and had been pulled back together with several other units, a company that held only fifty men, now assigned to holding a section of the line. Foch, who had only joined the Army because it offered more excitement than most jobs in France, was trembling; no one had ever expected that they would be fighting through France again… and he had now fought two different sets of enemies.

The bombardment was slowing; some of his men were twitching masses on the ground, despite the kicks from their comrades and the burly sergeant who had taken Foch under his wing. Foch’s ears were ringing; he could barely hear the shout of alarm as the first soldier crawled to their vision tube and peered out, seeing the advancing Russians closing in on their trench. Foch had prepared as best as he could — the sergeant had been a mass of good ideas and some discipline for the soldiers — but it was still terrifying as the soldiers rushed to their firing positions; the Russian bombardment had devastated the landscape. Foch had been born in Nancy; he didn’t want to think about what might have happened if some of the Russian shells had landed in the city. His three sisters lived there; one of them had never come home after the chaos began, the others had only been able to talk to him once before the Russians had started to move towards France. They had told him to run, to save himself; only the thought of failing the sergeant had kept him at his post. He would not run while he could hold himself in place.

He caught the sergeant’s eye and held up three fingers. He could still barely hear and knew that the others would have been deafened; the sergeant passed him a flare gun that they had liberated from a naval store as they had completed the task of suppressing the insurgency in Paris. They had planned for being temporarily deaf — at least he hoped it was temporary — and the green flash would be the sign to open fire. He watched the Russians as they moved forward, carefully watching for mines; Foch just wished that they had had any to emplace. France had only a few mines stockpiled and all of them had been designed for use against tanks; the various treaties against mines had robbed France of a desperately needed defence system. They had tried to rig up some mines, but they had all been primitive; they had probably been disabled by the bombardment.

“Fire,” he shouted, at the top of his voice, firing the flare into the air. It burst in a green flash of light; his soldiers opened fire, catching the Russians almost completely by surprise. A dozen Russians fell to the ground with lethal wounds, others threw themselves down and scrambled back as quickly as they could; mercilessly, the French defenders mowed them down before they could escape. A handful tried to throw grenades, but they all fell short, blasting holes in the barbed wire. He muttered a curse under his breath, wishing that he could hear himself; the Russians would be back at any moment.

“Sir,” a voice whispered, right in his ear. The sergeant had to have bellowed at the top of his own voice to be heard through the damage; Foch had heard tales of veterans from various wars who had never been able to hear again. The sergeant was pointing towards rising plumes of dust; for a long moment, Foch didn’t understand what he was looking at, and then he understood… just as the first armoured monster appeared, heading right towards the trench. The Russian tank was massive and seemingly unstoppable; the soldiers wavered as bursts of machine gun fire tore into the trench. “Here!”

Foch grinned as the sergeant passed him one of the Knife missile launchers, rapidly activating the missile launcher and putting it to his shoulder, taking a bearing on the tank. The Knife had been another joint European project, but unlike most of them, it was loved by all of the soldiers — not least because it had escaped being tagged with the irritating ‘euro’ prefix. The missile was reputed to be able to burn through the frontal armour of an American tank; he hoped that it would make short work of the Russian monster that was closing in on them. The Russian tank was painted green, he noticed; the driver was swinging the machine guns around…

He fired; the force of the rocket launcher pushing him backwards as the rocket screeched out of the launcher and directly into the Russian tank, which glowed red and exploded as its ammunition detonated. The soldiers whooped and concentrated on mowing down the Russian soldiers who had revealed themselves following the tank; the sergeant was carrying another Knife instead of a heavy machine gun, watching for more Russian tanks appearing to try to attack them. A second tank appeared, and then a third; Foch reached for the second flare gun and prepared to use it…

The sergeant caught onto his arm. The red flare gun was the signal to retreat. The first enemy tank was grinding up towards them as the sergeant passed Foch the Knife and picked up a bag of explosives they had been using to set booby-traps and makeshift mines everywhere, hefting it in one strong hand. Foch stared at him for a moment, and then a burst of fire brought him back to reality; he fired the second Knife on one quick motion, even as the sergeant threw the bag of explosives and detonators under the third Russian tank. There was a savage explosion; the Russian tank was blown over by the blast, rolling over and over until it caught fire and burned merrily away. More Russian soldiers had appeared, this time with mortars and other light weapons; the Frenchmen kept their heads down as the rounds started to fall near their trench.

Something at the corner of his eye caught his attention. Foch swung around to see a black aircraft, flying very close to the ground, closing in rapidly from the west. The black cross of the aircraft seemed to be hanging in the sky as it closed in… and started to open fire, shredding his men like paper dolls. Foch opened his mouth to call a retreat… and then hot bursts of pain tore through his body, and then darkness swept him away in its comforting embrace.

“We are breaking through the main defence line,” Anna said. Shalenko nodded; the casualties had been heavier than he had expected, but the French had almost no reserves at all. Their only armoured units had moved out to engage the Russian armour and had been picked off from the air by Russian bombers; far too many Frenchmen had retreated into the nearest town, where they were engaging the Russian soldiers in house-to-house combat. Russian bombers were roaming the skies unchallenged after the first hail of SAM missiles; everything that even looked suspicious was targeted for destruction. “The commander of 2^nd Shock is requesting permission to exploit the breakthrough.”

“Granted,” Shalenko said shortly. The breakthrough had to be exploited as quickly as possible; the French Army had proven itself a tough opponent and if it managed to retreat into Nancy, he would have to flatten the town to kill them all, or starve them out in a long siege. “Has there been any progress on locating the enemy command post?”

“Intelligence believes that it has a rough location,” Anna said. “Do you want it targeted?”

“I want a commando team to move in,” Shalenko said. They had sent several hundred additional commandos behind French lines, waiting for opportunities like this one. “I want the commander alive if possible.”

He turned his attention back to the advance.

“Inform the reserves that they are to move back into the pre-prepared defences at Nancy,” Pelletier ordered, as calmly as he could. The sheer violence of the Russian attack had stunned him; it was the Second World War fought with modern weapons, and total command of the air. One of his handful of armoured units had been picked off from the air without ever having a chance to take a shot at the enemy. He could bleed the Russians out in Nancy; perhaps the remaining citizens would forgive his memory, one day, for the devastation that was about to be visited on their city. “I want…”

There was a burst of firing from outside. He cursed as his subordinates grabbed weapons; they all knew what that meant. Russian doctrine called for decapitating the enemy force as quickly as possible; he was only surprised that they hadn’t ordered a bomber to take a JDAM and blow the command post away before anyone knew what had hit them. The remaining French SAM missiles had been fired off against other bombers and there were no more left to contest the air. The command post shook as grenades — he had been in the infantry; he recognised the noise — detonated, sending chips of plaster falling down from the ceiling. The Russian commandos burst in… and some of his people raised their weapons, preparing to fight to the end. There were a series of quick shots and the armed personnel fell to the ground, dead. Blood and gore scattered everywhere…

“Which of you is the commander?” The Russian snapped. Pelletier saw his fate in that instant; collaboration, infamy beyond anything heaped on any past Frenchman, the treason to end all treason. He didn’t delude himself; he might have been wearing battle-dress instead of a fancy uniform, but the Russians would know who he was once they compared his face to their files. There really was no other choice; Pelletier had never fancied the role of Darlan and his fellows for himself. “If the commander makes himself known to us…”

Pelletier was still raising his pistol when they shot him through the head. He died with a smile on his face, laughing at them; they had failed, in the end, to take him prisoner and ruling France would be just that bit harder. The final thought before darkness failed to quell the smile; France had made her last stand…

And lost.