"I'd smoke whatever you've got and thank you for it. I'm plumb out, and I'm all-" The Tommy held out his arm in front of him and made his hand tremble.
"Know what you mean. I've run dry myself a couple of times." Walsh proffered the French cigarettes. "Take two or three, then."
"I'd be much obliged, if you don't mind." The soldier stuck one in his mouth and stashed the other two in a breast pocket of his grimy battledress. He struck a match and inhaled. "Cor!" he said in tones of deep respect. "Like smoking a bleeding blowtorch, ain't it?"
Walsh had also lit a Gitane. After blowing out smoke, he coughed like a man in the last stages of consumption. "What's that you say?" he inquired.
The other soldier laughed. He took a second, more cautious, drag. "Damn froggies like 'em this way, don't they?"
"I expect so. They'd make 'em different if they didn't," Walsh said.
"Fuck." The Tommy shook his head. "We ought to be on Adolf's side."
"Bugger that, mate," Walsh said. "Germans shot me once, and it's not for lack of trying they haven't done it again. Yeah, the French are a bad lot, but those bastards in field-gray are worse."
"Take an even strain, Sergeant. I was only joking, like." But then the soldier added, "They make damn good soldiers, though."
"They make damn good dead soldiers," Walsh said. He also had a healthy regard for German military talent. He'd never met an English soldier who'd fought the squareheads who didn't. To him, that only made Germans more dangerous. It didn't mean he wanted to switch sides. He pointed to the town ahead. "Is that Senlis?" He probably butchered the pronunciation, but he didn't care.
"I think so." The soldier to whom he'd given a smoke also seemed glad to change the subject.
At its core, Senlis had what looked like really ancient walls with towers. The spires of a cathedral poked up from inside them. Walsh remembered that the Germans had burned the town and shot the mayor and several leading citizens in 1914. The damage had been made good in the quarter-century since. All the same, he didn't want to fight alongside people who did things like that.
He also wasn't eager to fight against them. Willing, yes, but not eager. They were too bloody good at what they did.
In front of those old, old walls-would they go back to Roman days?-an English captain with half a company's worth of men was nabbing stragglers. "You and you!" he called to Walsh and the Tommy to whom he'd given some Gitanes. "You think we can hold this town, eh?"
The other soldier didn't say anything. It wasn't quite what the Articles of War called mute insolence, but it wasn't far removed, either. Sergeant Walsh said, "We can try, sir." He didn't agree with the officer, but he did admit the possibility.
That was plenty. "Fall in with me, then, the both of you," the captain said. "If the Hun tries to take this place, we'll give him what he deserves and send him off with his tail between his legs, what?"
How many years had it been since Walsh heard anybody call Germans Huns? More than he could remember. The captain was about his age, so he'd probably done time here in the last war.
Most of the civilians had cleared out of Senlis, which meant they were causing traffic headaches somewhere south and west of here. Soldiers could pick and choose the empty houses they tried to defend. Walsh went through his, but didn't find anything worth eating or drinking. Too bad, he thought.
He had three privates with him. They were all Yorkshire farm boys, and spoke with an accent he had to work to follow. His might have sounded just as strange to them, but that was their lookout. They understood him well enough to keep watch at all the windows-and to give him a tin of M amp; V. He felt better after wolfing down the meat-and-vegetable stew.
Senlis got a couple of hours' respite before the Germans turned their attention to it. Then artillery walked up to the town. Walsh crouched down with the three privates: they were Jim and Jock and, improbably, Alonzo. The house they'd taken over was made of stone. It would stop fragments unless it was unlucky enough to take a direct hit.
"Where's our guns?" Alonzo complained. Goons, it came out when he said it. However it came out, it was a damn good question. The Germans always seemed to put their guns where they needed them. The Allies…sometimes did.
Stukas screamed down out of the sky, one after another. Crouching huddled under the kitchen table, Walsh cursed the vulture-winged monsters and their sirens. He also cursed the RAF, both for not shooting them down and for not having anything like them.
Several windows in the French house were already broken. The ones that weren't blew in now, leaving small snowdrifts of glass spears on the floor. Walsh swore some more, resignedly. Sure as hell, he'd end up cutting his hand or his leg on them.
Somebody was yelling for a medic. Somebody else was screaming for his mother. One of the Yorkshire lads crossed himself. Alistair Walsh was no Catholic, but he understood the gesture. Nobody but a desperately hurt man made noises like that.
Before long, the screaming stopped. Walsh hoped the wounded man got morphine. More likely, the poor bugger passed out or just died. "Up, lads," the sergeant told the privates. "I expect we'll have company before long."
"Won't get no clotted cream from me," Jock said, chambering a round in his Enfield with a snick! of the bolt.
Sure enough, here came the Germans. They moved up in little stuttering runs from one bit of cover to the next. Some of them had leaves and branches fixed to their helmets with bands cut from old inner tubes. No, no one could say they weren't skilled at their murderous trade.
A Bren gun opened up a couple of houses away from Walsh's. He liked the British army's new light machine gun a lot. It really was light-you could pick it up and shoot from the hip if you had to. And it was air-cooled: no need to worry about pouring water (or, that failing, piss) into the metal cooling jacket around the barrel. Best of all, it worked reliably. What more could you want?
It made the Germans hit the deck. They started shooting at the house where it lurked. When they did, the muzzle flashes from their Mausers gave the British infantrymen good targets. Walsh fired and reloaded, then ducked down and crawled to another window to fire again.
Something bit him through the knee of his battledress. "Bloody glass," he muttered.
The Bren gun barked again. German medics in Red Cross smocks ran up to recover casualties. Walsh didn't shoot at them. Fair was fair. The Germans mostly didn't shoot at British medics.
A lull followed. The Germans seemed surprised anyone was fighting hard to save Senlis. Since Walsh had been surprised when the captain made a fight for the place, how could he blame them?
"What happens now, Sergeant?" Alonzo asked.
"They could shell us some more. They could call in the Stukas again, or the tanks," Walsh said. None of the three Yorkshiremen seemed to want to hear that. Walsh went on, "Or they could decide we're a tough nut and try to go around us instead of pushing through."
"That'd be good," Alonzo said. Jack and Jock both nodded. After a moment, so did Alistair Walsh. AFTER SARAH GOLDMAN'S FATHER TIED his necktie every morning, he pinned his Iron Cross Second Class onto the breast pocket of his jacket. Samuel Goldman wanted to remind the Nazi thugs and Gestapo goons who came to scream at him that he'd done his duty for the Vaterland in the last war and would have done it again this time if only they'd let him.
Maybe the Eisenkreuz did some good. The Goldmans remained in their home. The Nazis hadn't hauled the rest of them off to Dachau or Buchenwald even if Saul had killed a member of the Master Race.
The Nazis hadn't caught Sarah's big brother, either. Saul had fled the labor gang…and, after that, he might have fallen off the face of the earth. Sarah had no idea what he'd done. Whatever it was, she admired it tremendously. The policemen with the swastika armbands also had no idea what he'd done. It drove them crazy.