But a Panzer I wasn't so goddamn tough. Vaclav had heard they were originally intended as nothing more than training vehicles. They got thrown into combat when Hitler jumped Czechoslovakia. Even their frontal armor was only thirteen millimeters thick. That kept out small-arms fire. Anything more…
He worked the bolt and chambered a round. He wasn't shooting at a Stuka; the little German tank made a fine target. The tank commander, who was also the gunner, sat right between the machine guns. As always, the antitank rifle kicked like a son of a bitch. He'd have a nasty bruise on his shoulder. He didn't care, though, not when the Panzer I's machine guns suddenly fell silent.
"Good shot!" the Jewish sergeant yelled. The tank drove on, but so what? The driver couldn't shoot while he was driving.
And the Allied soldiers on this side of the Semoy couldn't stop the Nazis. Vaclav thanked God no German bombers struck while he was tramping over the bridge. He would have thanked God a lot more had He done worse to the enemy sooner. In a world where you didn't get many big favors, you needed to be properly grateful for the small ones. "COME ON! THIS WAY!" THE engineer called in a low, urgent voice. Willi Dernen assumed he was an engineer, anyhow. It was the middle of the night, and as black as the Jew Suss' heart outside. The man went on, "The pontoon bridge is right here. It has rope rails, so hang on to those. And so help me God, you assholes, we'll drown the first fucking Dummkopf who lights a cigarette before he's half a kilometer away from it!"
Who would be that stupid? Willi wondered. But the question answered itself. A Dummkopf would, that was who. Like every other outfit in the world, the Wehrmacht had its share and then some. A jerk who decided he needed a smoke right now would damn well light up, and so what if he gave the game away to some watching Frenchman?
Willi's feet thudded on planks. He reached out and found the rope. It guided him across the Semoy. The bridge swayed under his weight and that of his comrades, almost as if he were on the deck of a boat.
"You heard the man," Corporal Baatz said loudly. "No smoking!"
The engineer spoke in a deadly whisper: "Whoever you are, big-mouth, shut the fuck up!"
Snickers ran through Baatz's squad. One of them was Willi's. He was only an ordinary Landser; he didn't have the rank to tell Awful Arno where to head in. The engineer sure did-or acted as if he did, which was every bit as good. Baatz didn't let out another peep, even to protest.
Somebody up ahead said, "Careful. You're coming to the end of the bridge." Maybe fifteen seconds later, he said it again, and then again, to let the troops gauge where he was. Willi almost tripped anyhow, when the planking gave way to mud.
"Second platoon, form up on me!" That was Lieutenant Georg Gross, who'd taken Neustadt's place after the former platoon commander bought his plot. Gross seemed like a pretty good guy, even if he didn't ride herd on Arno Baatz hard enough to suit Willi. To an officer, Baatz probably looked like a pretty good noncom. That only showed officers weren't as smart as they thought they were.
Somebody stepped on Willi's foot. "Ouch!" he said-quietly. "Watch it," he added.
"Sorry," the other soldier said, and then, "Willi?"
"Wolfgang?" Willi chuckled. "Well, that's one way to find each other in the dark."
"Listen to me, men," Lieutenant Gross said. "Listen to me, dammit! The objective is Charleville-Mezieres, southwest of here." The way he pronounced the town's name said he spoke French, as Neustadt had before him. Much good it had done the other platoon leader. Gross went on, "We've got about ten kilometers of marching to do before we get there, maybe twelve. We'll go through the Bois des Hazelles-the Hazelwood-for part of the way. It should give us some cover."
"Depends," Wolfgang Storch muttered. "How many goddamn Frenchies are in it now?"
"Questions?" Gross asked. Nobody said anything loud enough for him to hear it. Wolfgang's question was a good one, but the lieutenant wouldn't be able to answer it. They'd have to find out: the hard way, odds were.
Southwest…Willi looked up into the sky, but clouds covered it and told him nothing. He hoped it didn't start to snow while they were marching. That would be all they needed, wouldn't it?
Willi might not know southwest from artichokes, but a soft click and a slight rasp said Lieutenant Gross was opening his pocket compass. "This way," he said confidently. "Follow me."
Like the fellow at the end of the pontoon bridge, he spoke up every so often to let his men know where he was. Willi tramped along, trying not to think. He wished he were back in Breslau and home in bed, or even wrapped in a blanket in some shell hole. It was cold, and getting colder. Marching warmed, but only so much.
Some people did light up once they got far enough away from the bridge. The smell of harsh French tobacco filled the frosty air. Almost everybody smoked looted Gauloises or Gitanes in preference to the Junos and Privats and other German brands that came up along with the rations. The cigarettes the Wehrmacht got were supposed to be better than what civilians smoked back home. That only went to show better wasn't the same as good.
Ten or twelve kilometers. A couple of easy hours in the daylight. In black night, feeling his way along, stumbling or falling every so often, getting thwacked by branches that he couldn't see in the Hazelwood, Willi didn't have much fun. He also didn't go very fast. Neither did anyone else.
And there were Frenchmen in the Bois des Hazelles. Willi and his pals had to be coming to the end of it-the sky was starting to go from black to charcoal gray in the southeast-when someone called out, "Qui va?"
"Un ami," Lieutenant Gross said. Ami meant friend; Willi had picked that up from surrendering Frenchmen. Now-would it do the trick?
It didn't. The poilu gave forth with a fresh challenge, one Willi didn't get. Maybe he wanted a password. Whatever he wanted, Gross didn't have it. The shooting started a moment later.
The froggies, damn them, had a machine gun right there. It spat fire in the darkness. Tracers stabbed out at the oncoming Germans. They were scary as hell. Willi flopped down on his belly and crawled forward like a slug. He didn't want to get a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to.
As he crawled, he realized that those tracers weren't doing the guys at the Hotchkiss gun any favors. Every time the machine gunners opened up, they guided their enemies toward them. And it wasn't really light enough for them to see what they were aiming at. So…
Willi yanked the fuse cord on a potato-masher grenade. He flung it toward the machine gunners, who had no idea he was there. But the grenade hit a branch or something, because it didn't burst where he wanted it to. The Frenchmen serving the gun yelled, but they didn't scream. He froze. If they spotted him, he was sausage meat-and it was getting lighter.
Something off to one side distracted them. They turned the Hotchkiss in that direction and started banging away. They nailed somebody, too. That shriek sounded bad. But, while they were busy over there, Willi slithered behind a-hazel?-tree.
He pulled another grenade off his belt. He threw this one sidearm: not the way they taught you in basic, but he wanted to keep it low so it didn't bounce off anything. Then he flattened out again. If this one didn't do the job, though, he had the bad feeling flattening out wouldn't be enough to save his young ass.
Bang! He got screams this time. Then it was forward, as fast as he could scramble. He had no idea how badly hurt the Frenchmen were. He had to finish them before they or their buddies got that machine gun going again.
They were down. They were thrashing, not worried about the Hotchkiss at all. He shot them to make sure they didn't worry about anything else again. He was putting a fresh clip on his Mauser when a shape loomed up out of the morning twilight. He started to give it the bayonet, but checked himself when he recognized the familiar shape of a Stahlhelm.