Theo stared at the orange glow inside the tube he'd just swapped in. "That does it," he said. "Now we'll be able to hear all the stupid orders we'll get from the shitheads back of the lines-and from Lieutenant Priller, too." His faith in those set over him had, well, limits. Ludwig suspected Theo didn't have much use for him, either. He also suspected-no, he was sure-he wouldn't lose any sleep about it.
The French 75s quieted down. Had somebody given them a target, or were they shooting at some jumpy officer's imagination? Ludwig laughed. He had no use for French higher-ups. Why did he think the men who ran the Wehrmacht had a better handle on what they were doing?
Because we're in France, and the damned Frenchmen aren't in Germany, he answered himself. And maybe that meant something and maybe it didn't. They'd all find out some time not long after 0600.
He slept by the Panzer II. So did the driver and the radioman. If shelling came close, they could dive under the panzer. The treads and the armored body would keep out anything this side of a direct hit.
Lieutenant Priller came along at half past four to make sure they were alert and ready to go. "We can do it," he said. "We're going to do it, too."
"Have we got any coffee?" Ludwig asked plaintively. And damned if they didn't. It wasn't the ersatz that came with army rations, mixed with burnt barley and chicory. It came from the real bean, no doubt taken from the French. It was dark and mean and strong. Ludwig dumped sugar into it so he could choke it down. Sure as hell, it pried his eyelids open.
As they had in the runup to the strike against Czechoslovakia, engineers had set out white tapes here to guide the panzers forward without showing a light. Rothe cupped a hand behind his ear, trying to hear if the French up ahead had any idea they were coming. He couldn't tell. Fritz had the engine throttled back, but its low rumble still drowned out the little sounds he was looking for. Nobody was shooting at the Germans as they moved up to the start line, anyhow.
Ludwig glanced down at the radium-glowing dial on his watch. 0530. A couple of hours later, he checked again. 0550. He laughed at himself. Time stretched like a rubber band when you were waiting for the balloon to go up.
When it did go up, it went all at once. One second, quiet above the engine noise. The next, German artillery crashed behind the panzers. German machine guns stuttered to life, spitting fire to either side. "Let's go!" Rothe yelled through the din. The engine grew deeper and louder. It had to work like a bastard to shove all that armored weight around.
A couple of French Hotchkiss machine guns returned fire, but not for long. The panzers and assault teams with submachine guns and grenades silenced them. Standing head and shoulders out of the turret, Ludwig whooped. The last thing he wanted was tracers probing toward him.
The Germans had jumped off just before earliest dawn. As day broke, the French landscape seemed to stretch out ever farther before them. Rothe fired a few machine-gun bursts at soldiers in khaki. If they were here, they were bound to be enemies. He was at the spearpoint of the field-gray forces pressing down from the northeast.
Bam! A French antitank gun belched flame. The 37mm round missed the Panzer II. A good thing-a hit would have turned it into blazing scrap metal. Rothe almost shit himself even so.
More to the point, he traversed the turret and fired several short bursts at the gun. Seeing bullets spark off its steel shielding, he gave it a few rounds from the 20mm cannon. Those got through. French artillerymen tumbled like ninepins. "There you go!" Fritz shouted. Theo, tending to his radio in the bowels of the Panzer II, couldn't see a damned thing.
But one stubborn Frenchman fired the gun again. The 37mm shot snarled past, a few meters over Ludwig's head. He shot back with the panzer's main armament. And he gave an order you didn't hear every day in armored warfare: "Charge! Run that gun down!"
"Jawohl!" Fritz said. The Panzer II's engine snarled. The stubborn French soldier was still alive behind the riddled shield, trying to serve the gun by himself. Seeing the panzer bearing down on him, he finally turned and fled. Ludwig shot him in the back with the machine gun. A guy like that was too dangerous to leave alive.
Crunch! The panzer clattered over the antitank gun. For a nasty moment, Ludwig feared the panzer would flip over, but it didn't. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw the new kink in the gun's barrel. Nobody would use that one against the Reich any more, which was the point.
Here and there, infantrymen with rifles fired at the panzers, trying to pick off their commanders. Every once in a while, they managed to do it, too. But the panzers had a whole slew of advantages. They were on the move. Their commanders could duck behind armor. And they carried a machine gun and a light cannon against a bolt-action rifle.
Staying on the move was the biggest edge. Even if you didn't take out an infantryman, you left him behind in a matter of seconds. Sooner or later, your own foot soldiers could deal with him. In the meanwhile, the panzers charged ahead, flowing around enemy hell in the rear.
But Coucy-le-Chateau was too big and too strong to go around. Some of the soldiers Ludwig shot at in the outskirts wore lighter khaki and steel derbies in place of darker uniforms and domed helms with vestigial crests. Englishmen! They didn't like machine-gun bursts any better than the French (or Ludwig, come to that).
A machine gun chattered from the middle of an apple orchard. The gun moved. Ludwig realized it was mounted on some sort of tank. He gulped, wondering if the enemy machine's cannon was taking dead aim at his panzer. Not nearly enough steel separated him from the slings and arrows of outrageous gunners.
But he realized little by little that the other panzer didn't carry a cannon. All it had was that machine gun-it might as well have been a German Panzer I.
It waddled out of the apple grove. It didn't seem able to do anything but waddle-a man running fast would have had no trouble outdistancing it. He fired three quick rounds from the 20mm gun. Two of them hit the turret, but they didn't come close to punching through. The Matilda might be slow. It might have a laughable armament-even a Panzer I sported a pair of machine guns, not a singleton. But it was damned hard to wreck.
It was if you tried to kill the crew, anyway. If you crippled it, though…Ludwig fired the 20mm at the Matilda's tracks and road wheels. Before long, the ungainly thing slewed sideways and stopped. Ludwig's panzer clanked past it. Now it was nothing but a well-armored machine-gun position. The infantry could deal with that.
Medieval-looking ramparts surrounded Coucy-le-Chateau. The hilltop chateau that gave the town its name had had chunks bitten out of it, probably in the last war. Mortar bombs from the chateau started falling among the German panzers. Half wrecked or not, the place had poilus or Tommies in it.
"Theo!" Ludwig said. "Let the artillery know they're firing from the ruin."
"Right," the radioman answered, which might have meant anything.
He-or somebody-must have done it, because 105s started knocking more pieces off the chateau. Then a flight of Stukas screamed down on it. Their bombs did what guns could only dream about. The enemy mortars fell silent.
More Stukas worked over Coucy-le-Chateau. One of them got shot down and crashed into the town, turning itself into a bomb. The rest roared away. The onslaught stunned the defenders. With narrow, winding streets, Coucy-le-Chateau might have been a nasty place to try to take. But some of the garrison fled west and south, while the rest couldn't surrender fast enough.
Breakthrough? Ludwig didn't know, but he had hopes.
January. The North Atlantic. A U-boat. The combination was not made in heaven, as Lieutenant Julius Lemp knew only too well.
Oh, he could take the U-30 down below periscope depth, and she'd escape the fearsome waves topside. The only trouble was, down below periscope depth she'd be about as useful to the war effort as if she were a five-year-old's toy in a Berlin bathtub.