His panzer stopped at the eastern end of the bridge. A paratrooper waved to him. "Good to see you, by God," the fellow called. "It was getting a little hairy here." His helmet fit his head more closely than the standard Wehrmacht model. He wore a coverall over his tunic, along with rubber knee and elbow pads.
And he wasn't kidding. Several of his buddies lay sprawled or twisted in death. A medic tended to a wounded trooper. Other groaning men waited for whatever he could do for them.
"Can we cross the bridge?" Ludwig asked.
"Ja," the paratrooper answered. "We pulled the wires on the demolition charges before the Dutchmen could set them off. And we've cleared the mines on the roadway and chucked them in the river. I think we got 'em all."
"Thanks a bunch." Ludwig wished the paratrooper hadn't added the last few words. The son of a bitch only laughed at him. He bent down and shouted into the speaking tube: "Take us across, Fritz."
"Will do," the driver said. "What's on the other side?"
"More Dutchmen with guns," Ludwig told him. "What the hell do you expect?"
"How about some gals with big tits?"
"Yeah, how about that?" Rothe said dryly. He wished he had a control that would let him pour ice water on Fritz. The driver was the horniest guy he'd ever run into. The worst part was, he did get laid a lot. Ludwig knew that if he used a no-holds-barred approach like that, all he'd get was his face slapped.
The Panzer II rumbled forward. Fritz did have the sense to take the bridge slowly. If the paratroopers had missed a surprise or two, he'd have a chance to stop or to go around it. Ludwig gave the roadway a once-over, too. They didn't blow up, so he and Fritz didn't miss anything important.
They went past not only dead German paratroopers but also quite a few dead Dutchmen. Some of them were in what looked like police uniforms. No, they hadn't looked for soldiers to fall out of the sky so far behind their front. These must have been second-, or maybe third-, line defenders. Whoever they were, they'd fought hard. It hadn't done them any good, though.
As soon as Ludwig heard a machine gun rattle to malignant life, he ducked down into the turret again. But the Dutch had put up a better fight on the east side of the bridge than they did here. Maybe losing it had broken their spirit. Or maybe they simply didn't have what they needed for a proper defense here.
A car with half a dozen Dutch officers screamed up the road toward the bridge-and toward the panzer. "Aren't you going to blast those shitheads?" Fritz demanded.
"Let's see what they do first," Ludwig answered.
They stopped right in front of the panzer. One of the officers started shouting at Ludwig in Dutch. He understood maybe one word in five. He thought they were telling him to turn around and drive the Nazis away. That was pretty goddamn funny.
"Sorry, friend," he said. "We are the Nazis. And you're prisoners, as of now."
He might not have known Dutch, but the Dutch officers understood German. The looks on their faces when they realized that panzer wasn't theirs…"You should let us go," said the one who'd yelled in Dutch before-he spoke good German, too. "We made an honest mistake."
"In your dreams, pal," Ludwig said sweetly. The panzer's machine gun and cannon were mighty persuasive. "YOU! DERNEN!" ARNO BAATZ HAD a voice as effortlessly penetrating as a dentist's drill.
"Yes, Corporal?" Willi Dernen did his best to sound meek and mild. He didn't want trouble from a lousy Unteroffizier, not now, not when they were about to give the poilus the big one right in the teeth. Guys promoted to noncom went off to a special school for a while. Willi didn't know what went on there, but he figured it was where they turned you into a son of a bitch if you weren't one already.
Baatz glared at him, there in the gloom of earliest dawn. "Have you got your full ammunition supply?"
"Yes, Corporal," Willi repeated-truthfully. Only a dope didn't bring along as many rounds and as many rations as he could, and Frau Dernen hadn't raised any dopes.
Had he been lying, Baatz would have had to feel him up to prove it. You still couldn't see anything more than ten centimeters from the end of your nose. That didn't bother Willi. A Frenchman who could see you was a Frenchman who could blow your brains out.
Muttering, the corporal stomped off to harass somebody else. Beside Willi, Wolfgang Storch chuckled almost silently. "Awful Arno's on the rag early today, isn't he?"
"What was that, Storch?" Baatz snapped. His ears stuck out like jug handles. Maybe that was what made them so sharp.
"Nothing, Corporal," Wolfgang said. Baatz went right on muttering, but he didn't come back. He might have heard, but he hadn't understood. Just like a corporal, Willi thought.
Before Willi could say that out loud and get a laugh from Storch, hundreds-no, thousands-of German guns opened up. Everywhere from the North Sea to the Swiss border, they hurled death and devastation at the enemies of the Reich. Through the thunder, Willi heard the steadier rumble of aircraft engines overhead. Their takeoffs must have been timed so they'd cross the border just when the artillery bombardment opened. Right now, the damned Frenchies would be thinking hell had opened up on earth. And they wouldn't be so far wrong.
Lieutenant Neustadt blew his whistle. He looked so young, it almost seemed a boy's plaything when he did. But his voice, more bass than baritone, gave that the lie: "Forward! Now we get to see France for ourselves!"
The French had seen little bits of Germany. Willi aimed to do more than that. He wanted to goose-step through Paris in a victory parade. His great-grandfather had done it after the Franco-Prussian War. His father never stopped complaining that he hadn't got the chance. Willi wanted it.
There was the place just on the German side of the border where the French troops had camped when he and Wolfgang spied on them. There was the crossing point the Germans had booby-trapped when they pulled back after the real war against Czechoslovakia started. Now Willi needed to look back over his shoulder to see it. That meant, that had to mean, he was in France.
If you stood on the other guy's soil, you were winning. The last time around, the Allies never did drive Germany all the way out of France and Belgium. Things fell apart on the home front before they could. And here the Wehrmacht was again.
A rifle boomed up ahead. A French machine gun opened up, its fire noticeably slower than a German MG-34's. Somebody not too far from Willi fell over and grabbed at his leg. He yelped and ki-yied like a dog hit by a car. "Medic!" The shout went up from half a dozen throats.
"Keep moving!" Arno Baatz yelled. "Even if they've mined the fields, keep moving!"
Even if they've mined the fields? Willi thought. He suddenly didn't want to move at all. Corporal Baatz had a way of encouraging his men, all right. Lieutenant Neustadt's whistle shrilled. "We need to go forward!" he called. "Victory lies ahead! Paris, too!" That made a pretty good antidote to Baatz's minefields.
French shells screamed in-not many, but enough to send men and pieces of men flying. Willi's father had talked about the goddamn French 75s in the last war. Here they were again, and just as horrific if you were on the receiving end.
In the last war, Germany couldn't do much about them. Now Stukas swooped down on the French batteries, underwing sirens wailing like damned souls. Bombs going off were much louder than shells. The French artillery quieted down in a hurry. Willi trotted past a gun pit a few minutes later. He looked at what was left of the 75 and its crew. Gulping, he wished he hadn't.
More rifle fire came from behind a stone fence. The Landsers moved to outflank the defenders even before Corporal Baatz started yelling commands. Willi plopped down in a shell hole and banged away at the poilus by the fence. After a few minutes, one of them waved something white.