Another tank hit a mine. This one didn't catch fire, but it did throw a track, slewing sideways and stopping in a horribly vulnerable position. If the attack suppressed the guns that could reach it, the men inside might yet live. Joaquin liked those odds…about as little as he liked his own.
"Forward!" an officer shouted. His whistle squealed. Delgadillo looked around again. He didn't see the man giving the orders. If the bastard didn't have the guts to stand up himself, who would stand up for him?
Then Sergeant Carrasquel rasped, "Come on, you lazy puto! You think I'm going to do this all by myself?"
He ran forward. The British machine guns didn't cut him down right away. Joaquin knew why, too: only the good died young. Joaquin thought of himself as good. But he knew the sergeant wouldn't agree. He also knew Carrasquel would hound him if alive and haunt him if dead. So he got up and loped after the noncom.
Crack! Crack! Any bullet you heard like that came much too close to your one and only irreplaceable carcass. When you heard a bunch of them, you were mighty damn lucky if you didn't get ventilated.
Tanks were good for taking out machine-gun nests, even the concrete positions the British had built near the border. Gibraltar wasn't very big. If you could get past the frontier defenses, you could go ahead and overrun the place…couldn't you?
Down by the harbor, or maybe in it, something blew up with a full-throated roar that staggered Joaquin. Maybe it was an ammunition dump, or maybe a cruiser. Whatever it was, it wouldn't trouble the Spaniards any more.
More guns poured deadly fire down on them. Joaquin hit the dirt again. He didn't care if Sergeant Carrasquel pitched a fit. What kind of defenses did England have here, anyway? A cannon or machine gun on every square centimeter of ground, and more buried to pop up and spew death? He wouldn't have been surprised. This had to be more than General Sanjurjo expected.
Stukas peeled off one by one and bombed enemy positions. One of the dive-bombers didn't rise into the sky again. It added its funeral pyre to the rest of the stinking, choking smoke in the air. Nobody was using gas, but sometimes it hardly seemed to matter.
Someone not far from Joaquin started shrieking for his mother. That only made him dig harder. More bullets snarled past him. The English seemed to have all the ammunition in the world. As he dug, he realized he had yet to see his first British soldier.
Alistair Walsh was alive and breathing and somewhere in France. He heartily approved of the first two. The last wasn't so good. He couldn't remember just when the BEF got driven back over the border. They gabbled away in French in the western part of Belgium, so he couldn't tell by any shift in language. But this was France, all right, and the Germans were still doing their damnedest to break through.
They hadn't managed yet. Walsh remembered the black days in the spring and early summer of 1918, when whole British regiments-Christ, divisions!-got swallowed up in the Kaiser's last offensive. This was worse. Then storm troops with submachine guns had spearheaded the German attacks. They were right bastards, but they went at the speed of shank's mare, like everybody else in the Great War.
Nowadays, the Nazis had tanks. They sliced through infantry like a hot knife through lard. The BEF and the French had tanks, too. Officers swore on a stack of Bibles-and swore profanely-that they had as many tanks as the Germans, maybe more. They sounded as if they knew what they were talking about. But whether they did or not, they never seemed to have enough of them at the places were it counted.
And so the bastards in field-gray-funny how the mere sight of that color, and the beetling shape of that helmet, could put your wind up-kept carving slices out of the Allies, forcing them to retreat if they didn't want to get cut off and surrounded. The Nazis made it over the Dyle in rubber boats. Machine guns knocked out the first boats, but German tanks and antiaircraft guns on the far side of the river silenced the machine guns. As soon as the Germans won a bridgehead, they ran pontoon bridges over the Dyle and got their tanks across. Things went downhill from there.
"Hey, Puffin!" Walsh said. "Got a fag on you?"
"Sure, Sergeant." Puffin Casper looked like hell. His greatcoat was filthy and torn. His tin hat sat at an anything but jaunty angle on his head. He hadn't shaved since God only knew when, and he hadn't bathed since a while before that. Walsh couldn't very well gig him-he was no lovelier, and no cleaner, himself. And he'd smoked his last cigarette an hour earlier.
He took a couple from the packet Puffin held out. "Thanks," he said, and cupped his hands in front of his mouth to get one lit in spite of the cold, nasty wind. It wasn't raining right this minute, and it wasn't snowing, either. Dirty gray clouds clotted the sky. Before long, it would be doing one or the other. Or maybe it would split the difference with sleet, which was worse than rain or snow.
Somebody not far away started cussing. The vile words held no special heat, as they might have if the swearer had mashed his thumb with a spanner. No, his fury was cold and disgusted. Walsh knew what that meant: he'd just heard bad news. If everyone around him was lucky, he'd found out his fiancee was having it on with the corner greengrocer. If not…
"What's buggered up now?" Walsh asked. Knowing was better than not knowing-he supposed.
"Bloody Belgies have packed it in," came the reply. "King Leopold's asking Hitler for an armistice."
"What? They can't do that!" Under other circumstances, the outrage in Walsh's voice would have set him laughing. True, the Allies had agreements not to seek separate peaces. But it wasn't as if the Dutch hadn't already done it. And it wasn't as if everybody didn't already know Leopold was a weak reed and halfway toward liking the Germans, either.
All the same, the news was a jolt. A corner of Belgium had stayed free all through the last war. The Belgian army had stayed in the field all through the last war, too. Now the whole country was spreading its legs for the Germans after three weeks.
"I know they can't," said the soldier with the news. "Sods are doing it anyway. And wherever they're holding the line, the Nazis can pour right on through."
"Christ!" Walsh hadn't thought of that. "Sweet suffering Jesus Christ!" Sweet suffering Jesus Christ had had a birthday not long before, not that anyone let it get in the way of the serious business of slaughter. Walsh found a real question to ask: "What are we doing about it?"
"Chamberlain's deplored it, the wireless said," the other soldier answered.
"Oh, that'll set Adolf's mustache quivering, that will. Deplored it, has he? Bleeding hell!" Walsh could have gone on for some time, but what was the point? Chamberlain had survived two votes of confidence since the war broke out, by a diminishing margin. One more might sink him. That wouldn't have broken Walsh's heart. He also feared it wouldn't have much effect on the way the BEF was fighting.
A British machine gun up ahead started barking. A moment later, another joined in. "Oh, bleeding hell," Walsh muttered again. He'd hoped things would stay quiet for a while. The weather was bad enough to have made any push in the last war bog down in mud and slush. But there were many more paved roads for wheels to use now, while tracks could force a way where even men on foot had trouble going.
To his glad surprise, he heard engines coming up from the southwest. "Matildas!" somebody yelled. The British tanks waltzed up to the line a few minutes later. Waltz was about all they could do; they made eight miles an hour on roads, and were slower off. They had thick armor-German antitank shells mostly bounced off of them. But they carried only a single rifle-caliber machine gun. Walsh would have wished for French machines that had some hope of keeping up with German panzers…and of knocking them out in a stand-up fight.
Still and all, any tanks were better than none. If panzers came after you and you couldn't hope to fight them, what choice did you have but to fall back? Walsh waved to the tank commanders, who rode head and shoulders out of their cramped turrets. "Give 'em hell!" he shouted.