Neustadt shouted to them in French. Willi didn't speak a word of it. The French soldiers stood up with their hands high. In their long greatcoats and crested helmets, they looked as if they'd come from the last war. The lieutenant jerked his thumb toward the east. Nodding, babbling with gratitude for not getting shot out of hand, the poilus stumbled away into captivity.
"They'll have watches. They'll have cash," Wolfgang said discontentedly. "Now the rear-echelon assholes'll clean 'em out."
"Don't get your bowels in an uproar," Willi said-he was less inclined to grumble than his friend. "You think they're the only froggies we'll catch?"
"Well…no," Storch admitted. "But maybe they had extra-good stuff. We'll never find out."
Up ahead, a Panzer I was burning. Something heavier than a machine gun had hit the little panzer and knocked it out. One crewman in black coveralls lay dead a few meters away. The other-the driver-hadn't made it all the way out. He was on fire, too. Willi gulped again. The stink reminded him of a pork roast forgotten in the oven.
But other panzers kept pushing forward. They shot up or ran over French machine-gun nests. That made life a lot easier for the foot soldiers who followed in their wake. Willi didn't mind not facing machine guns, not even a little bit.
More Frenchmen surrendered. As he'd predicted, Willi got himself a small wad of francs and a watch with a case that looked like gold. There were corpses to plunder, too, if you had the stomach for it. Dead men and pieces of dead men…Willi was astonished at how fast he got used to them or developed a knack for not thinking about them. Definitely better not to wonder whether this crumpled chunk of shredded meat had played the concertina or that one always puked when he got plowed.
Some people didn't care. He went past one body that had a finger on the left hand neatly sliced off, presumably so the slicer could get at a ring. Willi hoped he wouldn't do anything like that. He also hoped he wouldn't end up a body lying there for someone else to frisk.
It could happen. Not all the poilus were ready to give up. The French fought from foxholes and trenches. They fought from behind fences, and from farmhouses. They didn't fight with the coordination of the German war machine, but they fought. They reminded Willi of a guy who got staggered in a barroom brawl but swung back instead of falling over.
Why didn't they fall over, dammit? Life would have been so much simpler-to say nothing of easier-if they had.
More 75s screamed in. The Wehrmacht troops did some screaming of their own. One of the first things you learned in training was to flatten out when you got shelled. Willi tried to get flatter than a hedgehog squashed on the Autobahn.
"The lieutenant's down!" somebody yelled. Willi looked around without raising his head. Sure as hell, there was Lieutenant Neustadt, both hands clapped to his belly and a godawful shriek coming out of his mouth. Stretcher-bearers ran up and lugged him away. Willi swore under his breath. That didn't look good.
"We have to keep going!" Sandwiched between Neustadt and Corporal Baatz, Sergeant Lutz Pieck hadn't shown much personality up till now. All of a sudden, the platoon was his, personality or not.
Keep going they did-till they ran up against four French machine guns with interlocking fields of fire. You couldn't advance against those, not unless you'd written your suicide note. Willi took his entrenching tool and started digging a hole.
Sergeant Pieck sent a runner back. Before long, a mortar team came up. The men started dropping bombs on the machine gun nests. They silenced three of them. The soldiers stalked the fourth and put it out of action with grenades. One machine gunner came out with his hands up. Corporal Baatz shot him in the face. He fell over and never twitched again. Willi knew he might have done the same thing. You couldn't use one of those murder mills and then expect to give up as if you'd got caught playing bridge.
Pieck looked as if he wanted to say something about it, but what could he say? Only the Last Trump would bring the Frenchman back to life. And Arno Baatz was a mean bastard who didn't listen to anybody. Pieck pointed west instead. "Forward!" he commanded, and forward they went.
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!"