Luc admired the noncom's seamless contempt for the world. De-mange despised everything and everybody. Chances were he even hated himself. If you had to ride herd on a bunch of snot-nosed soldiers, how could you do anything else?
More German artillery started landing around the farmhouse. As Luc had seen, the windows had already blown out, or rather, in; broken glass glinted on the floor. A shell fragment struck a stone wall and whined away.
"What do we do, Sergeant?" Luc asked.
"Fight, dammit," Demange answered. "Not for the international whatever the hell. Fight because they'll kill you for sure if you don't."
Not necessarily, Luc thought. If he threw down his rifle and threw up his hands, maybe he could sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp. Plenty of Frenchmen had done it the last time around. They'd had a thin time, though-literally. Black bread and turnips and cabbage and not enough of any of them…The Germans themselves were starving. They had precious little to spare for prisoners.
And there was no guarantee that surrendering meant becoming a POW. He'd heard French veterans talk about that. If you had the time, if you had the men, maybe you'd take captives back for interrogation. If you didn't? It was their hard luck, that was all. He had no reason to believe the Boches acted any differently. He'd already seen you could kill somebody without hating him in the least.
One of the other guys in the farmhouse looked out a window. "Our side's falling back again, Sergeant," he reported.
Sergeant Demange muttered to himself. "We'd better do the same," he said unhappily. "If we get surrounded and cut off, we're liable to have to see if those Nazi cocksuckers'll let us give up. I don't like the odds."
His thoughts came uncomfortably close to Luc's. Once the sergeant made up his mind, he wasted no time. He divided the soldiers crowding the farmhouse into two groups. One he sent out. The other stayed behind in the strongpoint to give covering fire.
Luc got put in the second group. He couldn't even complain, because Sergeant Demange headed it. While their buddies got away, they fired out the windows. A few bullets came back, but only a few.
"Germans aren't here in numbers. That's something, anyhow," De-mange said, slapping a new clip onto his Fusil MAS36 and lighting a fresh Gitane from the one that had burnt down almost to his lips. He spat out the tiny butt and stuck the new smoke in his mouth. Then he pointed to the west-facing doorway. "All right. Let's get out of here."
They trotted away. Out in the open, Luc felt horribly naked. A shell could slice him to dogmeat out here. Somebody yelled. He almost shat himself one more time. Then he realized the shout came in French, not German. His asshole unpuckered. His heart came down out of his throat.
"Our guys," Demange said laconically.
The soldier who'd shouted stood in a halfway decent trench line. He and his pals had a couple of Hotchkiss machine guns and, better yet, a 37mm antitank gun in a sandbagged revetment. The gun had two rings painted on the barrel. Kill brags? Luc hoped so.
"As long as the dive-bombers don't come, we're fine," somebody said.
"Where are our dive-bombers?" Luc asked plaintively. Nobody answered him.
That cannon did knock out a German tank at better than 300 meters. The machine guns settled the poor bastards who tried to bail out of it. Even so, Luc wondered again where the French panzers were. The next one he saw in this whole war would be the first.
And he wondered if blasting the one tank would bring a storm of vengeance down on everybody here. To his vast relief, it didn't. Night came early. That would slow down the Germans…he hoped.
After dark, a runner jumped down into the trench. The French soldiers nearly killed him before they realized he was on their side. He brought orders: fall back once more.
"Why?" Sergeant Demange growled. "We've got 'em stopped here."
"Yes, but they've broken through on both sides of us. If we don't retreat now, we won't get the chance later," the runner replied.
"Merde," said the sergeant. Then he said something so foul, it made shit sound like an endearment. And then he said something he must have thought filthier yet: "All right, God damn it to hell and gone. We will retreat." THE ENGINE THUNDERED TO LIFE. The big prop spun, then blurred into invisibility. The Ju-87 throbbed. "Alles gut?" Sergeant Dieselhorst shouted through the speaking tube.
"Alles gut, Albert," Hans-Ulrich Rudel said after studying the gauges. You couldn't trust them with everything. The way the plane sounded, the way it felt-those counted, too. They could warn of trouble the gauges didn't know about yet. But everything did seem good this morning.
Groundcrew men pulled the chocks away from his wheels. A sergeant waved that he was cleared to take off. He pulled back on the stick. The dive-bomber sprang forward over the yellow, dying grass. The field was almost as smooth as concrete. The Dutchmen had done a devil of a job of keeping everything neat. Now Germany could take advantage of it.
Up went the Stuka's sharklike nose. Rudel climbed as fast as he could. The sooner everybody got into formation, the sooner everybody could go do his job.
"Target-Rotterdam." The squadron commander's voice crackled in his earphones. "The Dutch there think they can go on eating herring and drinking beer while the war stays at the front. They've got the wrong idea, though. In this war, the front is everywhere."
Hans-Ulrich grinned. "You hear that, Dieselhorst?"
"No, sir. What did he say?"
"'In this war, the front is everywhere.'" The pilot quoted the squadron CO with savage relish.
His number-two wasn't so impressed. "Not everywhere. Do they think the Tommies and the Ivans are going to bomb Berlin?"
"Don't be silly," Rudel said, though a tiny icicle of doubt slithered up his back. The Czechs had, there just before they quit. But that was only a last thumb of the nose, a defiant fleabite. It wasn't as if they did any real damage.
One Stuka had to pull out of the formation with engine trouble. The rest droned on. The vibration filled every particle of Hans-Ulrich's being, everything from his skin to his teeth to his spine to his balls. It wasn't as much fun as getting laid, but it was as compelling.
Bf-109s loped along with the bombers to hold enemy fighters at bay. Four days into the assault on Holland, the air opposition wasn't what it had been. The Dutch didn't have many planes left, while English and French fighters didn't seem to be operating this far forward.
Hans-Ulrich didn't miss them a bit. The Ju-87 was terrific at smashing up ground targets. But even the Czech Avia biplanes had shot down too many dive bombers. For faster, more heavily armed fighters, Stukas were sitting ducks.
He could see where the front lay by the artillery bursts and by where the smoke was rising. General Staff officers with red Lampassen down the outside seams of their trousers scribed neat lines on maps and imagined they knew what war was all about. Even up here, buzzing along at 2,500 meters, Rudel could see and smell what war was doing to Holland. Better to Holland than to the Reich, he thought.
As soon as they crossed the front, Dutch AA opened up on them. All the Stuka pilots started jinking without waiting for orders. A little faster, a little slower, a little to the left or right, up a little, down a little-anything to keep from giving the gunners an easy target. The neat formation suffered. With luck, the planes wouldn't.
But one of them, trailing smoke, turned back toward the east. That didn't look good. Hans-Ulrich hoped the pilot and rear gunner came through all right. Next to that, getting the Ju-87 down in one piece was small potatoes.
A near miss made his own bus stagger in the sky like a man missing the last step on a flight of stairs. Shrapnel clanged against the left wing. Everything went on working. "Danke, Gott," Rudel murmured. His father the minister would have come up with a fancy prayer, but that did the job.