Several people in the trench told him what he could do with his fun. Somebody who knew his classics quoted Goethe's Gotz von Berlichen: "Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lechen." Even if it was poetry, Lick my ass got the point across.
He climbed out of the trench. Something was burning: a Stuka in a half-blasted revetment. The orange flames sent a dim, flickering light across the airstrip. "Got to put that out," a flyer said. "If the damned Englishmen see it, they're liable to come back."
Groundcrew men started playing a hose in the Ju-87. That would take a while to do any good. Gasoline and oil liked to keep burning. And the ammo in the Stuka's machine guns started cooking off. The popping seemed absurdly cheerful. "Hope none of those rounds hits anybody," Hans-Ulrich said.
"Jesus Maria!" somebody said-a Catholic, by the oath. "That'd be all we need."
Somebody else was exhausted, relentlessly pragmatic, or both: "Only thing I hope is, I can get back to sleep."
"Amen!" the Catholic said. Sure enough, he sounded like a Bavarian.
The burning dive-bomber gave just enough light to let Hans-Ulrich have an easy time going back to his tent. He lay down on the cot-and then remembered his face was muddy. If he hadn't been a minister's son, he might have quoted Gotz von Berlichen himself. Being one, he knew that thinking the words was as bad as saying them. He sometimes swore in the heat of action, but never in cold blood-and he always regretted it afterwards.
When he got up and came out the next morning, the fellow in the next tent greeted him with, "Who's the nigger?"
"Funny, Manfred. Fun-ny," Hans-Ulrich said. "You should take it to the movies."
"Go drink some milk, preacher's son," Manfred jeered. "You'll feel better."
Hans-Ulrich's hands balled into fists. He took a step toward the other flyer. "Enough, both of you," a more senior officer said. "Do you want to get tossed in the clink? Save that Scheisse for the enemy, hear me?"
Reluctantly, Manfred nodded. Even more reluctantly, so did Hans-Ulrich. He was sick of being the white crow in the squadron. He couldn't even say that: somebody would have told him he was the white crow because he drank so much milk.
If he'd changed his ways and drunk schnapps, everybody would have liked him. The notion didn't cross his mind.
Other people razzed him about his dirty face, but not so viciously as Manfred had. Some other pilots and rear gunners had also got muddy, though none quite so muddy as Rudel. While they ate, a grunting bulldozer repaired damage to the airstrip.
German bombers-Spades and Flying Pencils-droned past overhead, bound for England. Bf-109s would protect the Heinkels and Dorniers from RAF fighters, and they could protect themselves better than Stukas. All the same, Hans-Ulrich wondered how much longer the Luftwaffe would go over the enemy island by day. Nighttime bombing was less accurate, but also much less expensive.
He wasn't sorry not to cross the North Sea again. He counted himself lucky to have made it back the times he'd tried it. Maybe the twin-engine bombers would have better luck. Maybe.
His own mission lay to the southwest. The French were bringing materiel up from Paris to the front that still shielded their capital from the Wehrmacht's onslaught. If the Luftwaffe could smash up those trucks and trains, enemy troops would get less of what they needed to keep up the fight.
"Ready?" he asked Sergeant Dieselhorst.
The man in the rear seat looked at him. "Nah. I'll bug out as soon as we get airborne."
Rudel's ears heated. "Me and my big mouth. Let's go get 'em."
"Now you're talking," Dieselhorst said.
Bombed up, gassed up, their Stuka rumbled down the runway. Hans-Ulrich pulled back on the stick. The Stuka's nose lifted. The plane would never be pretty. Though the design was fairly new, plenty of aircraft looked more modern: the nonretractable landing gear made the Ju-87 seem older than it was. But the beast got the job done. Next to that, what were looks?
A few black puffs of smoke appeared in the sky as the Stuka squadron crossed over the front line, but only a few. This wasn't the kind of barrage that would have greeted the Germans over England-nowhere close. The French didn't seem as serious about the war as the British. But they hadn't rolled belly-up yet, either. We just have to keep thumping them till they do, Hans-Ulrich thought.
Was that river glittering in the sun the Marne? Hans-Ulrich thought so: the farthest the Kaiser's armies reached in the last war. The Wehrmacht was almost there, too, though it had started rolling in dead of winter and had to take out Holland as well as Belgium.
Silver sausages gleamed above Paris: barrage balloons. The English used them over their towns, too. They didn't keep places from getting bombed. They did keep dive-bombers from stooping on targets. Hans-Ulrich shuddered, imagining what would happen if he tore off the Stuka's wing against a mooring cable. He'd feel like an idiot…but not for long.
Well, he didn't have to worry about that, anyhow-not yet. The squadron's targets lay in front of Paris. Captain Mehler's voice filled his earphones. "I think that's what we want down below," the new squadron leader said. "Let's hit 'em."
"Here we go," Hans-Ulrich said into the speaking tube, warning Sergeant Dieselhorst.
"Jawohl," the gunner and radioman said. "I was listening, too."
Hans-Ulrich tipped the Ju-87 over into a dive. Acceleration slammed him back in his seat. It would be trying to tear Dieselhorst out of his. Hans-Ulrich had never heard of a rear gunner's straps and harness failing-a good thing, too. That wasn't pretty to think about.
Down below, the highway swelled. Yes, that was a truck convoy. As the shriek from the Stukas' sirens mounted, soldiers started bailing out and running like ants. Too late, fools. Too late.
Everything had a red tinge. Rudel was right on the edge of blacking out. He pulled the bomb-release lever, then yanked back on the stick as hard as he could to bring the Stuka out of its deadly plunge. Behind him, the poilus would just have discovered hell on earth.
"You all right?" Sergeant Dieselhorst's voice said he wasn't sure about himself, let alone Rudel.
"I-think so." Hans-Ulrich made himself nod. As they usually did after a steep dive, his thoughts needed a few seconds to come back to normal. He muzzily recalled the Stukas in Spain that had crashed before the Luftwaffe installed that gadget to pull out of dives if pilots didn't.
He fought for altitude. He'd got up to 2,500 meters when Dieselhorst's machine gun started chattering. "Dodge!" the gunner yelled. "French fighter!"
Hans-Ulrich threw the big, clumsy Ju-87 around the sky in ways the manufacturer never intended. An open-cockpit Dewoitine monoplane zoomed past-obsolescent, but flying. A 109 could have hacked it out of the air with the greatest of ease. It still outclassed a Stuka, though.
Here it came for another pass. Hans-Ulrich saw the skeleton with a harrow painted on its dark green flank. The machine guns firing through the Grim Reaper's propeller disk blazed. Rudel jinked again-right into the stream of bullets.
His engine coughed and quit and started smoking. A round punched through both sides of the cockpit in front of him before he had time to blink. "We've got to get out!" he yelled to Dieselhorst, praying the sergeant would answer.
"I was hoping you'd be here to tell me that," Dieselhorst said. "Sounds good to me. Are we still inside French territory, or did we make it back to our own lines?"
"Only one way to find out." Rudel eyed the gauges. "Don't waste time, either-we're losing altitude."
He yanked back on the canopy. The Stuka's glasshouse had two movable parts: one for the pilot, the other for the gunner-radioman. Hans-Ulrich hoped the bullet that almost nailed him hadn't messed up the track along which his part slid. He breathed a sigh of relief when it retracted smoothly enough.