Winners or not, Willi wanted nothing to do with them. A glance from Wolfgang said he didn't, either. They walked past the underofficers and up to the bar. The man behind it was big, broad-shouldered, and fair. He looked much more like a German than a Frenchman. But a photo on the wall behind him showed him in the uniform of a French soldier in the last war. The patch he wore over one eye didn't hide all the scarring around the socket. It did explain why he hadn't got mobilized this time around.
"Guten Tag, Claude," Willi said, more respectfully than not.
"Guten Tag," the tapman answered. After he got wounded, he'd spent two years in a POW camp. He'd picked up some German there, and hadn't forgotten all of it. Other people of his generation had learned it from the Kaiser's soldiers who'd occupied the area. They still knew bits and pieces, too. "What you want, eh?" Claude went on.
"Beer, bitte," Willi said.
"Brandy for me, please," Wolfgang added. They both laid money-German money-on the zinc bar.
Claude sighed, but he took it. What choice did he have? "Go and sit," he said, pointing to an empty table-shrewdly, the one farthest from where Baatz and his buddies were. "Michelle, she bring."
"Now you're talking!" Wolfgang radiated enthusiasm…or something related to it, anyhow. A grin also stretched across Willi's face. Claude's daughter was about their age. Like her father, she was large and solid and fair. On her, it looked good.
She came out from a back room. Claude gave her the drinks. She carried them over to the soldiers. "Thank you, dear," Willi said auf Deutsch. He trotted out one of his handful of recently acquired French words: "Merci."
"Pas de quoi," she answered gravely, and went away. As far as anybody knew, she didn't sleep with soldiers. Everybody thought that was too damn bad.
Arno Baatz waved his mug. "Fill me up over here!" he called. Claude brought a pitcher of beer to his table and poured the mug full. That didn't satisfy Baatz. "How come those no-account lugs get the pretty girl and I get you?" he demanded.
Claude's one eye skewered him like a lepidopterist's collecting pin. "Because they is-are-polite," the tapman answered, and he walked back to the bar.
"What? I'm not?" Corporal Baatz yelled, beer-fueled outrage making him even shriller than usual. "You take that back!"
"Nein," Claude said with dignity.
Baatz jumped to his feet. "I'll show you, then, you stinking pigdog! Come fight like a man!"
Claude turned around and took one step back toward him: giving himself room to maneuver. Baatz rushed him. Willi wanted to avert his eyes. He couldn't stand the Unteroffizier, but no denying he was a rough man in a rough trade. He gave Claude one that should have dented a Panzer II. The barman blinked his good eye. Then he swung. His fist caught Arno Baatz right on the button with a noise like a cleaver smacking into a frozen side of beef. Baatz went straight over backwards. The back of his head smacked the stone floor. He didn't move. He didn't even twitch.
"Holy Jesus!" Willi said. "Did you kill him?"
Claude took the question seriously. He felt for the noncom's pulse. "He lives," he said laconically, and dropped Baatz's wrist. It fell back limply. Baatz might be alive, but he sure wasn't connected to the real world. The tapman looked to the other Germans at the corporal's table. "He hit me first. Please take him away. He is no more welcome here."
They didn't argue with him. Nobody in his right mind would have argued with Claude then-not without a Schmeisser in his hands, anyhow. Arno Baatz was as boneless as an octopus as they dragged him out of the tavern.
One of the Frenchmen drinking there sent up smoke signals from his pipe. He said something in his own language. Claude shrugged a massive shrug, as if to say, Well, what can you do? Willi guessed the customer had warned him he would get in trouble.
"We'll say he started it," Willi volunteered.
"It's the truth," Wolfgang agreed.
"Danke," Claude said. "For official business, this is good. For not official business…" He spread his hands and let his voice trail away.
Willi understood that. If Arno Baatz and his friends-assuming he had any, which struck the biased Willi as improbable-decided to come back with weapons, what would the officers set over them do about it? Anything? Even if they did, how much would that help Claude after the fact?
"Maybe we'll go forward again soon. Blizzards can't last forever-I don't think," Wolfgang said. "Then Awful Arno will be out of your hair."
"Ja. Maybe," Claude said. It was the first time Willi had heard him even slightly enthusiastic about the prospect of a German advance. He was a Frenchmen. The Germans had maimed him in the last war. You couldn't blame him for not wishing them well. But you also couldn't blame him for wanting Corporal Baatz the hell out of Watigny, even if that meant the Wehrmacht went forward.
The tapman ducked into the back room for a little while, then came out again. A couple of minutes later, so did Michelle. She brought Willi a beer and Wolfgang a brandy they hadn't ordered. When they tried to pay for them, she wouldn't take their money.
"Merci. Merci," Willi said. It didn't seem enough, but it was the best he could do.
They finished the free drinks and left. After they got outside and closed the door behind them again, Wolfgang said, "If she really wanted to thank us, she could have taken us into that back room while Papa looked the other way."
"She's not that kind of girl," Willi said.
"Yeah. Ain't it a shame?" Wolfgang's breath smoked even though he didn't have a cigarette in his mouth. After a couple of steps, he brightened. "Could be worse, you know? Old Arno sure got his."
"Boy, did he ever!" Willi agreed enthusiastically. They walked on through the snow, toward the house where they were quartered. FRENCH VILLAGERS STARED FEARFULLY AT Vaclav Jezek and the rest of the Czechs in his outfit. Vaclav knew why, too. Their uniforms weren't quite the right color, their helmets were the wrong shape, and they spoke some funny foreign language. To people who didn't know any better, that was plenty to turn them into Germans.
And, just to make things worse, they were coming from the east. If they were Germans, they would have smashed all the defenders ahead of them, but you couldn't expect civilians to think of things like that.
One of the locals came out with something. Vaclav had picked up a handful of French words, but not nearly enough to let him follow. "What did he say?" he asked the guy along as an interpreter.
Benjamin Halevy looked even less happy than he had before he heard the Frenchman's news. The Jewish sergeant pointed north and west. "Old geezer claims the Germans are already over there."
"Shit," Vaclav said. If that was true, they were in danger of getting cut off and surrounded. If…"Does he know his ass from a hole in the ground?"
He eyed the Frenchman. The guy was around fifty, and had some ugly scars on his jaw and left cheek. Maybe those weren't war wounds, but they sure looked like them. If this fellow had gone through the mill before, he wouldn't see a cow and imagine it was a German armored division.
Halevy went back and forth with him. After a last "Merci," the sergeant returned to Czech: "Sure sounds like he does. They pushed through the woods over there. This guy says he saw a couple of armored cars, but no tanks."
"Bad enough," Vaclav muttered. Several of his countrymen nodded. He went on, "Where are our tanks? Where are our armored cars?" Nobody answered him. The Germans always seemed to have armor when they broke through. They used their armor to break through. The French scattered it up and down the line, which meant they never had enough where they needed it most. That was one reason they were falling back and the Nazis moving up.