Now Aristide Demange had a name for the prissy second lieutenant who’d been running this company after the late Captain Alexandre stopped a machine-gun burst with his belly and chest. The con was called Louis Mirouze. He practically exuded spit and polish.
Past making sure his men kept their weapons in good working order, Demange didn’t care about spit and polish. He would have got rid of Mirouze in a heartbeat except for one thing: the youngster was recklessly brave. He took chances Demange thought suicidal, and hardly seemed to notice he was doing it. An officer like that had no trouble getting his men to follow him.
Things in southern Belgium being what they were, too often officers had to try to get men to follow them straight into the blast furnace. It wasn’t as if the Germans didn’t know they were there and didn’t know they were coming. It wasn’t as if the Boches hadn’t had plenty of time to get ready for them, either.
One attack on a farm village that-surprise! — turned out to be much more strongly fortified than it looked thinned the company of men whose names Demange hadn’t even learned. The doctors would learn some of those names as they tried to put the poor bastards back together. Others would be for the graves detail to find out.
After they drew back to their start line, Demange took Mirouze aside and said, “We would’ve been better off if you hadn’t tried to push so hard there.”
“I thought we could take the place,” Mirouze answered. “We were ordered to, so we had to do our best.”
Demange rolled his eyes. “Spare me! The jerks who give those orders don’t know their assholes from their sisters. All that happened was, we took more casualties than we needed to ’cause you wouldn’t see it was hopeless.”
“If we could’ve got into that lane-” Mirouze started.
“Merde!” Demange cut him off. “That was no good, either. What do you want to bet they had a couple of MG-42s around the corner waiting to chop us into ground round? You get into trouble when you start sending the poilus out to die and they see they haven’t got a chance in hell to carry out their mission.”
He knew the hard way how true that was. In 1917, several French divisions had mutinied instead of making the big attack the clowns in the fancy kepis told them to put in. The government and the Army eventually got things under control again by mixing executions and concessions, but it was close. More importantly, they managed to keep the Boches from finding out about the mutiny. The Kaiser’s bastards could have torn a hole in the line kilometers wide, but they never moved.
Louis Mirouze wasn’t around yet in 1917. He might have learned about the mutinies in his training, but they were just school lessons to him. And who ever gave a damn about school lessons? Nobody, not since Cain sneaked away from Adam to play hooky. Abel stuck around for all the classes. No wonder Cain went and murdered him!
“We have to keep the pressure on the enemy,” Mirouze insisted. “It keeps him from sending reinforcements against the Russians.”
“Fuck the Russians. Let them take care of themselves. I’m worrying about us,” Demange said. “Only reason Stalin’s better than Hitler is, he’s farther away.”
“You are of course an expert on this, sir?” Mirouze asked with frigid politesse.
“Hell of a lot more than you are, kid,” Demange said. “I was fucking in Russia with our expeditionary force. I’ve seen the place. The only reason more Russians don’t go over to Hitler is, he jumps on ’em even harder’n Stalin does. Proves he’s a damn fool in the end, you ask me. But plenty’d sooner see him than Uncle Joe any which way. Russia! Pah!” He spat out his cigarette butt with the disgusted exclamation and lit a new one.
“I … did not know you had served in the Soviet Union,” Mirouze said slowly.
“All kinds of things you don’t know, aren’t there, buddy?” Demange growled. “And, like I said a little while ago, we do what we’ve got to do, sure, but you won’t win the goddamn war all by your lonesome. This stinking company won’t win the war all by its lonesome, either. So try to keep the guys alive, all right? They’ll like you for it, and you won’t need to worry about getting shot in the back ‘by accident,’ know what I mean?”
Louis Mirouze’s expression said he knew only too well. Such things did happen-usually when you couldn’t pin them on anybody. Then the youngster’s eyes narrowed as he studied Demange. He had to know Demange had won a field promotion. Nobody his age who hadn’t would be just a lieutenant. The French Army’s tolerance for fuckups was enormous, but not limitless-not unless you were a general, anyway.
No doubt Mirouze was wondering whether Demange had shot an officer in the back “by accident” while he was a common soldier or a noncom. Demange hadn’t, not personally, even if there were a good many officers whose untimely demises he’d mourned not a bit. But if the kid wanted to think he had, he didn’t mind.
They got the order to go forward again a week later. This time, they had a couple of Somua S-42s with them. The latest French char was almost as good as a long-gunned Panzer IV. It had thicker, better-sloped armor than the German machine, but its cannon wasn’t as powerful. Still, it did stand a decent chance against most of Fritz’s panzers, and it was hell on infantry.
“On les aura!” Mirouze shouted as he trotted up with the poilus. We’ll get ’em! It had been Pétain’s slogan at Verdun. You saw it on posters in the last war. Demange wondered how the puppy had heard of it.
The S-42s sprayed machine-gun fire at the German positions ahead. One thing that made them pretty fair chars was that they’d stolen a leaf from the German book. They’d stopped asking the commander to make like a one-armed paperhanger with hives. Now the turret held a gunner and a loader, too, so the commander didn’t have to try to do everything at once.
Then, quite suddenly, there was a noise like a bad accident in a steel mill. One of the S-42s stopped running and started burning. None of the crew got out. As Demange loped past, he saw a hole in the glacis plate you could throw a dog through. A Panzer IV could kill an S-42. He hadn’t thought a Panzer IV could murder an S-42 like that.
A moment later, somebody yelled “Tiger!” and pointed behind what was left of a barn. At a distance, you could mistake a Tiger for a Panzer IV. More often, it worked the other way round-poilus thought the medium was the heavy, and panicked because they did. There was a family resemblance. But the big brother was a much rougher customer than his smaller sibling.
And this was a Tiger. The surviving S-42 fired at it. The 75mm AP round hit, too. Demange could see sparks fly where hardened steel slammed into hardened steel. But the French char’s shot didn’t penetrate the Tiger’s thick armor. The German machine’s long, fearsome gun swung to bear on its new target. It didn’t traverse very fast-that turret was heavy indeed-but the Tiger’s 88 spoke before the S-42 could fire again.
One shot was all it took. With a Tiger, one shot was commonly all it took. Flame blasted out of every hatch in the French char. An enormous smoke ring blew from the commander’s cupola, as if the Devil were in there smoking a fat Havana. Ammunition started cooking off inside the steel carapace, with roars from the cannon shells and cheerful popping noises from the machine-gun cartridges. Again, no one came out. The most Demange could hope for was that the poor cons in there died before they hurt too much. He feared even that was a forlorn hope.
Then the Tiger started lobbing HE at the French foot soldiers. An 88mm shell was big enough to have a good-sized bursting charge and to throw plenty of knife-edged fragments.