His words made the youngster-three or four years younger than he was now-recoil in horror. “They wouldn’t do anything like that! They couldn’t get away with it!”
“My ass they couldn’t.” Luc scooped more hot bully beef out of the tin.
“You’re no help at all, dammit.” Charles stomped away from the hut in dudgeon as high as a corpse four days gone.
Luc finished the tin of monkey meat. Then he hunted up Lieutenant Demange. He recounted the conversation with Charles, adding, “You’d better tighten up the sentries, sir. He’s liable not to be the only one who’ll try and go over to the other side.”
“Yeah, chances are you’re right.” Demange shifted his Gitane to one side of his mouth and spat in disgust out of the other. “That stupid fucking Russian asswipe of a safe-conduct! Jesus God, the clowns like Charles are smart enough to see that their own government lies to them every chance it gets, so how come they aren’t smart enough to see all the other governments’re full of bullshit, too?”
“Beats me.” It seemed as obvious as an axiom of geometry to Luc. Had he thought that way before the war broke out? He had trouble remembering. He didn’t believe he had-he hadn’t worried much about politics at all then. So what, though? Lies and incompetence hadn’t come close to sinking France then. Things looked different these days.
Charles didn’t try to desert. Luc dared hope he’d put the fear of God into him. A couple of nights later, though, two other poilus did slip away. Lieutenant Demange swore in furious disgust.
Supplies came up in horse-drawn wagons. Both French and German trucks literally fell to bits when they had to deal with what were alleged to be Soviet roads. Horses didn’t break down, and wagons were easier to repair than motor vehicles. As long as Luc kept getting ammo and food, he didn’t care how.
With the Germans on their left flank and Hungarians to their right, the French pushed forward. Fighting well was the best way to improve your chances of staying alive. Luc didn’t have anything in particular against the Russians, the way he’d had against the Wehrmacht men when they tried to overrun his country. He shot at them anyhow, to keep them from shooting at him.
And, before long, the advancing French troops came upon a fresh grave in the woods with an Adrian helmet for a tombstone. They dug it up. In it lay one of the deserters. He hadn’t stopped a mistaken bullet. The Ivans had sported with him for a long time before they let him die. The French soldiers quickly buried him again.
“Where’s your safe-conduct?” Luc asked Charles. “Feel like using it now?”
“No, Sergeant,” the kid answered in a very small voice. As if on the training ground, Luc snapped, “What was that? I can’t hear you!”
“No, Sergeant,” Charles said again, rather louder this time.
“All right, then.” Luc let it go. He didn’t need to worry that Charles would skedaddle, not after the youngster saw what was left of that other damn fool. The Russians would have drawn more deserters had they treated people who went over to them well. But if they wanted to play the game the other way, they’d soon discover the French could, too.
Ivan Kuchkov patted the round drum that held his PPD’s ammunition with almost the same delight he would have used to pat a barmaid’s round backside. He never wanted to have anything to do with an infantry rifle again. You didn’t need to aim a PPD. You just pointed it and fired. If one bullet didn’t do for a Fascist, the next would, or the one after that.
A Nazi with a Mauser could hit him from much farther away than he could hit the Fritz with his submachine gun. In the kind of fighting they were doing, in woods and villages and towns, that seldom mattered. You mostly didn’t see your enemy till he was right on top of you. Then you needed to kill him in a hurry. The PPD was made with just that in mind.
His outfit kept falling back toward Smolensk. It infuriated him. He wanted to drive the Germans west, not to dance to their tune. The Red Army counterattacked whenever officers thought they saw a chance-or whenever orders came down from above. Sometimes the Russians gained a little ground. Even when they did, they rarely held it long.
He wasn’t sure about the name of the village where they were fighting now. It might have been called Old Pigshit, a handle it would have kept for centuries. Or it might have been rechristened something like Leninsk after the glorious Soviet Revolution. Either way, it was a stench in the nostrils-and a lot like the miserable hole in the ground where Ivan had grown up.
One way in which it differed from that particular hole in the ground was the broad expanse of grainfields and meadows to the north, south, and west. “Couldn’t be better country for panzers,” said Lieutenant Vasiliev. Ivan was convinced the political officer fucked pigs, but even a pigfucker got it right every once in a while.
About half the villagers had been rash enough to stick around instead of hightailing it to the east. Maybe they thought the Red Army would push the Nazis back, in which case they were optimists. Or maybe they thought things would get better once the Nazis took over, in which case they were really optimists.
Any which way, the politruk took charge of them. He set them digging deep, wide ditches across their fields and meadows, not so much to stop tanks as to channel their movements toward antitank guns.
A peasant with a gray mustache had the nerve to complain: “How the devil can we farm after we tear up the land like this?”
Lieutenant Vasiliev drew his Tokarev automatic from the leather holster on his belt. He held it up to the peasant’s head and pulled the trigger. The report was harsh, flat, undramatic. The peasant fell over. He kicked a few times and lay still. Blood puddled under him. A wrinkled woman in a headscarf shrieked.
“Any other questions?” the politruk asked pleasantly, reholstering the pistol. Vast silence, but for the woman’s sobs. The politruk nodded. “All right, then. Get back to work.”
And they did-all of them, including the babushka who’d just lost her husband. Sometimes life could be very simple.
Some of the soldiers dug alongside them. Others turned the village into a strongpoint. Field fortification was a Russian art. Maskirovka- camouflage-was another. Making buildings into places that were much stronger than they looked combined the two.
They got less done than Ivan wished they would have. German artillery started probing early in the afternoon. Not even the politruk ’s pistol could keep the muzhiks working after that. They ran for the trees, more afraid of the big shells bursting-and with reason. Artillery was the great butcher. Everything else was an afterthought beside it.
The soldiers stolidly labored on. Every so often, they flattened out in the antitank ditches when incoming shells sounded close. After the shelling moved on for a while, they stood up again, brushed themselves off, and went back to digging. A few shells hit in the ditches. A man or two walking around above ground got wounded by fragments.
Scouts fell back toward Old Pigshit or whatever it was, skirmishing as they came. “Stupid Germans aren’t far behind us,” one of them said as he jumped into a trench close to Ivan. Nemtsi, the Russian word for Germans, meant tongue-tied ones or mumblers; it went well with the notion of stupidity. The scout lit a papiros.
“Let me have one of those fuckers, will you?” Ivan said. The scout glanced his way, saw he was a sergeant, and gave him a smoke. Kuchkov had expected no less. After a couple of drags, he asked, “Have they got tanks along?”
“I saw some,” the scout answered. He carried a PPD, too. A Red Army soldier was more inclined to believe in firepower than in God.
“They would, the clapped-out cunts,” Ivan muttered. One of the scout’s eyebrows twitched. All soldiers swore, but Ivan was in a class by himself. He found another question: “Are their peckers up?”
“Why not? They’re advancing,” the scout said bleakly.
Ivan glanced over his shoulder. Maybe a company of KV-1s would clank forward and save the day like the warriors who whipped the Teutonic Knights in Alexander Nevsky. Now there was a flick for you! And maybe green monkeys will fly out of my ass, too, Ivan thought, mocking himself. Life wasn’t like a movie. Tanks didn’t show up from nowhere just because you needed them like anything. And wasn’t that a goddamn shame?