But he didn't want a new radioman. Theo spent too much time in his own little world, but most days he did a good job. If he doubted whether Germany was always wise…well, so did Ludwig. Gruffly, the sergeant clapped the other man on the shoulder. "We'll take care of that after the war, too. They'll have to listen to us then."
"Nobody has to do anything." Theo spoke with unwonted conviction. But then he must have realized he'd taken things as far as they could go, or more likely a few centimeters farther. He seemed to shrink back into himself. "Well, we'd better worry about the Frenchies right this minute, eh?"
"Now you're talking!" Relief filled Ludwig's voice. Something else on-he hoped-the French side of the line went up with a hell of a bang. That relieved him, too. He knew how hideously vulnerable to antitank rounds the Panzer II was. As with the previous bang, the fewer of them the enemy could aim at him, the better.
The panzers rattled forward an hour or so later. Foot soldiers in Feldgrau loped along with the armor. One of them waved to Ludwig, who stood head and shoulders out of the cupola. He nodded back. Panzers could do things the infantry only dreamt about. Everybody knew that, and had known it all along. But the war had taught a different lesson: that panzers needed infantrymen, too. Without them, enemy soldiers could get in close and raise all kinds of hell with grenades and bottles full of blazing gasoline and whatever other lethal little toys they happened to carry.
Stukas screamed down out of the sky. Fire and smoke and dirt rose into the air a few hundred meters ahead. Even at that distance, blast from the big bombs rattled Ludwig's teeth. What it was doing to the bastards in khaki on whom the bombs fell…Ludwig felt a curious mixture of sympathy and hope that nobody up ahead was in any shape to fight any more.
A forlorn hope, and he knew it. Some of them would be dead. Some would be maimed, or too shellshocked to know sausage from Saturday. But there were always some lucky, stubborn assholes who'd…He hadn't even finished the thought before a French machine gun started banging away.
A Landser toppled, clutching at his chest. Other German foot soldiers hit the dirt. Ludwig was back inside the turret a split second before several bullets rattled off the panzer's armor. Small-arms ammo couldn't get through. That never stopped machine gunners from trying.
"Scheisse," Fritz said. Like Ludwig, the driver must have hoped the Stukas would do all their work for them.
Ludwig swung the turret toward the closest French machine gun. He fired back, hot 20mm cartridge cases clattering down onto the fighting compartment's floor. The enemy Hotchkiss fell silent. The panzer pushed on.
Meaux was gone. Luc Harcourt could see the smoke in the east, much of which came from the lost town. Maybe the Boches were celebrating by burning everything they couldn't steal. Or maybe French engineers had planted charges under everything they didn't want the enemy to use. German prisoners who spoke French had nothing but admiration for the engineers.
As far as Luc was concerned, who torched or blew up what hardly mattered any more. No matter who did it, France caught hell. All he cared about was staying in one piece till the war ended.
No guarantee of that. Sergeant Demange was commanding the company. No replacement officer had come forward since Lieutenant Marquet stopped an antitank round with his stomach. It cut him in half. The top half lived, and screamed, much longer than Luc wished it would have.
Luc had a squad himself. A private first class wasn't much of a non-com, but he'd gone this far without getting hit. That put him several long steps ahead of the scared conscripts he led.
The sergeant came by, his red-tracked eyes missing nothing. The Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched as he snapped, "Don't let 'em lay there with their thumbs up their asses, Harcourt. Set the sorry sods to digging. They'll hate you now, but they'll thank you as soon as the Germans start shelling us again."
"Right, Sergeant," Luc said wearily. He knew Demange was right, too, but he wanted nothing more than to lie there himself, and who cared where his thumb went? With a sigh, he hauled himself to his feet. "Come on, you miserable lugs. You can rest once you've got foxholes to rest in."
They groaned. Some of them didn't even have hard hands yet; their palms blistered and bled when they used shovels or entrenching tools. But they'd seen dead men-both bloodied and astonished after meeting death unexpectedly and bloated and stinking from lying in the fields four or five days unburied. They didn't want anyone else seeing them like that: worse than getting caught naked. They weren't eager, but they dug.
So did Luc. He already had a scrape of sorts. He improved it as fast as he could. There seemed to be a lull now, but how long would it last? Another twenty minutes? Another twenty seconds? No time at all?
"Don't throw the dirt every which way!" he said in something not far from horror. "Sweet suffering Jesus, pile it in front of you! Don't they teach you anything in basic these days?"
"They teach us how to march and how to shoot," one of the new fish said. He had bloody hands and a pale, unweathered face. "From what they tell us, there isn't anything else-or if there is, we can pick it up at the front."
"They're sending you out to get slaughtered. They ought to see the Boches face-to-face themselves. That'd teach them something-the ones who come back from it," Luc said savagely.
Sure as hell, the shooting picked up before the soldiers finished their foxholes. They might be raw, but they weren't complete idiots. They knew enough to jump into the holes and keep on digging while inside them. Luc didn't think anybody got hit. He thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing.
He also thanked that God Who might or might not be there for sending nothing worse than small-arms fire his way. German machine guns fired faster than their French counterparts. Sergeant Demange said the same thing had been true the last time around, though both sides used different models now. Why couldn't the French have caught up with their longtime foes, especially since the Germans hadn't been allowed to mess with machine guns till they started laughing at the Treaty of Versailles?
Luc knew the answer to that. France hadn't wanted to believe another war would come. The Germans, by contrast, embraced battle the way a man embraced his girl…although fire from the flank could send them running, too. But they had the better tools with which to do their job.
"Is that a tank?" one of the rookies asked fearfully.
"No, my dear," Luc said after listening for a moment. "That's a truck-one of our trucks, by God. Maybe we've got reinforcements moving in. We could sure use some-I'll tell you that.
He almost shot one of the newcomers before he recognized the khaki greatcoat and the crested Adrian helmet. The French uniform had been modernized after 1918. It still looked old-fashioned next to what the Germans wore. The Boches seemed…streamlined, almost like oncoming diesel locomotives.
"Where are they?" shouted a corporal who sounded a hell of a lot like Sergeant Demange.
Demange himself gave an answer that was almost usefuclass="underline" "Look in the direction the bullets are coming from, mon vieux. You'll find the Germans, I promise."
"Funny," the corporal said. "You see? I laugh." And, having laughed a laugh that could have come straight off the cow on the label of a popular brand of cheese, he sent several shots toward the Boches.
A loop of the Marne-whose course was complicated in these parts-curled up toward the French position from the south. The enemy would have to cross the river twice to get in behind Luc and his comrades. As he'd seen to his sorrow, they were good at such things, but he could hope they would think two crossings were too much trouble here.
He popped up out of his hole to fire at an oncoming gray shape in a coal-scuttle helmet. The shape went down. Luc ducked before he could decide whether he'd hit it or not. Thinking of it as a shape, a target, meant not thinking of it as a human being he might just have killed. If he didn't think of it as a human being, he didn't have to think so much about what he was doing in this damned foxhole.