He thought so, anyhow. A medic fell, and then another one. Another German wearing the Red Cross emblem pointed angrily toward the French line…right about toward where Sergeant Demange was lurking. A moment later, that medic ducked, which meant a bullet hadn't missed him by much. He could take a hint-he dove behind a battered stone wall.
"Naughty, Sergeant," Luc called.
"So's your mother," Demange answered, which wasn't exactly a ringing denial of anything.
Luc was in no position to tell him what to do. He had other things on his mind, anyway: "Have we got any tanks in the neighborhood? Do they?"
"Sure haven't seen any of ours," the sergeant said.
Since Luc hadn't, either, he asked the next important question: "Have we got any antitank guns?"
"Sure as hell hope so," Demange answered. That was also less encouraging than Luc wished it were.
Meaux lay in a loop of the Marne. Maybe the Germans were having trouble getting their armor across the river. They'd managed farther east with far fewer problems than he wished they'd had-probably far fewer than they should have had. With luck, the Allies were figuring out how to make those crossings tougher. Without luck, the Boches were feinting here so they could knock the crap out of the French and English defenders somewhere else.
Even without tanks, they hadn't given up in front of Meaux. More artillery came in, this barrage precisely aimed at the French forward positions. Luc cowered in his hole while hell fell all around him.
"Up!" Sergeant Demange screamed. "Up, you gutless assholes! They're coming!"
Luc didn't want to come up. Shell fragments did dreadful things. But he didn't want to get shot or bayoneted in his foxhole, either. The Germans aimed to make the French keep their heads down so they'd make easy meat. The French couldn't let them impose their will on the combat…Luc supposed.
He came up firing. A German had crawled to no more than thirty meters away. He had a potato-masher grenade in his right hand. Luc shot him before he could fling it. "Heilige Scheisse!" screamed the soldier in the coal-scuttle helmet. He clutched at himself. He must not have pulled the grenade's fuse cord, because it didn't go off after he dropped it.
Then French machine guns opened up, one of them from a spot where Luc hadn't known his side had a machine gun. The Boches hadn't known it was there, either. Several of them fell. Others ran back toward the river. Luc would have done the same thing in their boots. Flesh and blood had limits, and facing machine-gun fire out in the open went beyond them.
The German Luc had shot lay where he'd gone down. He wasn't dead; he kept thrashing around and yelling and swearing.
"Make him shut up," Sergeant Demange called. "Either blow his head off or go out there and bring him back."
Neither possibility appealed to Luc. Killing a wounded man in cold blood felt like murder. If he were lying there wounded, he wouldn't want the Germans taking pot shots at him.
But if he went out there to get the Boche, other soldiers in field-gray might nail him. He knew he had only a few seconds to make up his mind. Demange wouldn't hesitate longer than that before shooting the German himself. He wouldn't have second thoughts about it afterward, either.
"Je suis dans le merde," Luc muttered. Up shit creek or not, he had to do something. He climbed out of the foxhole and crawled toward the wounded Boche.
Firing had slacked off. That could end any second, as he knew too well. None of the few rounds flying about came close-the Germans weren't aiming at him, anyway.
"I'll take you in," he called to the soldier in field-gray, hoping the fellow understood French. "We'll fix you up if we can."
"Merci," the man answered in gutturally accented French. "Hurts."
"I bet," Luc said. The bullet had torn up the German's left leg. "Can you climb up on top of me?"
"I'll try." The Boche did it. He felt as if the fellow weighed a tonne-he was a bigger man than Luc, and weighted down with boots and helmet and equipment. Slowly-the only way he could-Luc crawled back toward the French line. Seeing what he was doing, the Germans paid him the courtesy of aiming away from him.
Other hands reached out to pull the wounded man off him. The German groaned as they got him down into the trenches. Luc had never been so glad to get under cover again himself. "Whew!" he said. "I felt naked out there."
"You did good, kid," Sergeant Demange said, and handed him a Gitane.
"Thanks." Luc leaned close for a light.
"You didn't go out there pretty damn quick, I was gonna plug the motherfucker," Demange said.
"Yeah, I figured. That's why I went." Luc's cheeks hollowed as he sucked in harsh smoke.
"Maybe they'll learn something off him," the noncom said. "He'll sing like a goddamn canary, and sergeants, they know stuff." Not without pride, he tapped his own chest.
"Was he a sergeant? I didn't notice," Luc said. Demange rolled his eyes. Grinning, Luc added, "If I'd known that, I would've shot him for sure."
"Funny man," Demange said scornfully. "You got that crappy hash mark on your sleeve, so you think you're entitled to be a goddamn funny man."
"Sergeant, if it meant I'd come through the war without getting shot, I'd never make another joke the rest of my life," Luc promised.
"Oh, yeah?" Sergeant Demange said. Luc's head bobbed up and down as if it were on springs. Demange spat out a tiny butt, crushed it underfoot, and lit a fresh Gitane. Then he returned to the business at hand: "Well, you don't need to worry about that, on account of it doesn't." Luc already knew as much. All the same, he wished Demange hadn't spelled it out. ANASTAS MOURADIAN WAS DRUNK. Yes, a blizzard howled outside. Even so, a proper Soviet officer wasn't supposed to do any such thing. Sergei Yaroslavsky knew that perfect well. He would have been angrier at Mouradian if he weren't drunk himself.
They couldn't fly. They had plenty of vodka. What were they going to do-not drink it? Try as he would, Sergei couldn't come up with a good reason for leaving it alone.
Ivan Kuchkov was bound to be drinking with his fellow enlisted men. If the Chimp got smashed, the rest of the aircrew should, too. It showed solidarity between enlisted men and officers. It also showed that neither enlisted men nor officers had anything better to do when they couldn't get an SB-2 off the ground to save their lives.
"If Hitlerite bombers show up now, if we have to take shelter outside, we've got plenty of antifreeze in our blood," Sergei said.
"Never mind Hitlerite bombers. What about Hitlerite soldiers?" When Mouradian was sober, he spoke excellent Russian. He stayed fluent when he got drunk, but his Armenian accent turned thick enough to slice.
Sergei laughed and laughed. When he got drunk, everything was funny. "Where would Hitlerite soldiers come from?"
"Out of the sky. With parachutes. Like they did in Holland and Belgium." Anastas looked around the inside of the tent, his eyes big and round like an owl's: he might have expect Nazi parachutists to pop up any minute now.
That owlish stare only made Sergei laugh harder than ever. He looked around the inside of the tent, too. Enough of the wind outside got in to make the flame from the kerosene lamp flicker. That wasn't why his wide, high-cheekboned face registered dismay. "We're out of pelmeni! And pickled mushrooms! Where'd they go?"
Mouradian patted his stomach. "Good. Not spicy enough, but good." Being a southerner, he liked everything full of fire. As far as Sergei was concerned, the mushrooms and the meat dumplings were fine this way. Russians had all kinds of snacks that went with vodka. Even a half-skilled cook at a forward airstrip could do a decent job with some of them.