"If the State really were all-wise and all-powerful, Frau Breisach would have taken Saul's letter straight to the Gestapo," Mother said. "Some people still remember what human decency means."
"Never mind human decency. The Breisachs know us," Father said. "That counts for more, I'd say. I wouldn't bet a pfenning that they'd help some strange Jew. But we've lived across the street from them since the last war. We aren't strangers-we're neighbors. People first, Jews second, you might say. All over Germany, gentiles are probably going, 'Well, I don't have a good word to say about most Jews, but Abraham down the street? He's all right.'"
"I wonder how much good it will do," Sarah said.
"Some, anyhow." Father nodded toward the now anonymous ashes in the fireplace. "And I'm jealous of your brother."
"For heaven's sake, why?" Mother got that out before Sarah could.
"He made it into the Wehrmacht," Father answered. "I fought for Germany before. I would have done it again. I am a German, dammit, whether the Nazis want to let me be one or not."
"Isn't getting shot once enough for Germany?" Mother asked pointedly.
"If I hadn't, the goons would have treated us even worse than they did," Father said. "Hitler says Jews haven't got any guts-but he can't say that about front-line soldiers from the last war. So we have it better than most Jews-not good, but better."
"Oh, joy," Sarah said in a hollow voice. "If this is better, I don't want worse."
Father nodded solemnly. "You'd better not. The difference between bad and worse is much bigger than the difference between good and better. So when you think about the difference between better and worse…"
He sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about. Chances were he did. What had life in the trenches been like? Sarah had read All Quiet on the Western Front-who hadn't? She'd seen the movie, too. But her father had really gone through all those things, and maybe more besides. It was probably like the difference between reading about kissing and kissing, only more so.
Mother started to laugh. "What's funny?" Sarah asked. She sure didn't see anything.
Still in a low voice to foil the microphones that might not be there at all, her mother answered, "Our only son's just gone into the Wehrmacht. And I'm happy! Happy! He has a better chance of staying safe there than he would if he were still running around the countryside somewhere."
Sarah laughed, too. When you put it that way, it was funny. Her father put things in perspective, the way he usually did: "If you have to go that far for a laugh, you've got more tsuris than you need."
He hardly ever dropped a Yiddish word into his German. It would have made him seem less German, more openly Jewish. It might even have made him seem that way to himself. Sarah stared at him now. She understood tsuris, of course-understood what the word meant and, these days, also understood the thing.
"We do have more tsuris than we need," Mother said. Neither Sarah nor Samuel Goldman tried to tell her she was wrong.
It could have been worse, though. If the Gestapo caught up with Saul after he clouted that work boss…What would they have done to him? Whatever it was, Sarah made herself think about something else.
"Do you suppose the British bombers will come over tonight?" she said. That was something else, all right, but not a better something else.
"Let them." Her father sounded almost gay. "Bombs don't care if we're Jews. Bombs can fall on Gestapo headquarters, too…alevai." Two Yiddish words from him in two minutes. What was the world coming to?
"Of course, the Gestapo men can run into a shelter," Sarah said.
"So what? Even that doesn't always help," Father said. And he was right. Sarah felt like a German, too, if not so strongly as Father did. But she had trouble believing any German would cry if a bunch of Gestapo men got blown up.
German artillery crashed down on the French position. Luc Harcourt dug as hard as he could, trying to carve a cave into the front wall of his foxhole. If he could manage that, fragments would have a hard time biting him…barring a direct hit, of course. He wished he hadn't had that last thought, but it did make him dig faster than ever.
The ground was muddy-almost too muddy to let him make the shelter he wanted. A cave-in could kill him, too, and much more ignominiously than a shell would have. But artillery was a worse risk. Five months of war had taught Luc to fear artillery more than anything but tanks. And what were tanks but artillery on tracks?
Luc almost had the hole he wanted when the shelling let up as suddenly as it had begun. He knew what that meant. His entrenching tool went back on his belt. He grabbed his rifle.
"They'll be coming any second!" Sergeant Demange yelled from a trench near the foxhole, for the raw replacements and the idiots in his section. "Make 'em pay for it, that's all. We don't have a hell of a lot of room to back up in."
"Your sergeant is right." That was Lieutenant Marquet-Luc thought that was his name, anyhow. He'd replaced the previous company commander a few days earlier, after Captain Remond stopped some shrapnel with his chest. He'd been alive when he went off to the aid station. Now, who could say? The lieutenant seemed brave enough. He did like to hear himself talk, though: "Three times in a lifetime, the Boches have attacked Paris. They took it once, to our shame. We held them the last time, to our everlasting glory. Which would you rather have now, my friends?"
All Luc wanted was to come through alive and in once piece. The only shame he worried about was letting his buddies down. They mattered to him. Paris? Next to the dirty, smelly, frightened men alongside of whom he fought, Paris wasn't so much of a much.
Small-arms fire picked up. The Germans knew what was going on as well as the Frenchmen they were trying to murder. They wanted to get into the French fieldworks as fast as they could, while the poilus were still woozy from the barrage.
If they do that, I'm dead. The thought was enough to make Luc stick his head up and bring his rifle to his shoulder. A bullet cracked past, too close for comfort. He wouldn't have had to worry about that if he'd stayed all nicely huddled in his young cave.
No, but then he would have had to worry about other things. Sure as hell, the Germans were loping forward. The men who ran straight up and down had less experience than the ones who folded themselves as small as they could. Most of the Boches did know enough to hit the dirt or dive behind something when French machine guns started chattering.
The Germans never got to Meaux the last time around. That meant all the damage in town was brand new. The thirteenth-century cathedral lay in ruins a couple of kilometers behind Luc. Guns and Stukas cared nothing for antiquities-and the French weren't shy about placing observers in the steeples. If the bastards in field-gray kept pressing forward, pretty soon French guns would start shelling Meaux-and the Boches would have put men with binoculars up in high places.
As if thinking of French guns had called them up, several batteries of quick-firing 75s started banging away at the Germans. They'd slaughtered the Boches by the thousands in 1914, and all through the last war. Things were tougher now. German 105s outranged them and delivered bigger shells. The enemy knew better than to advance in tight-packed ranks, too. But when you needed to drop a lot of artillery on some unlucky place in a hurry, 75s were still hard to beat.
German medics in Red Cross smocks and armbands ran around gathering up the wounded. Luc left them alone as much as he could. War was tough enough without making it worse.