Nobody was supposed to go between the lines. They called the battered ground out there no-man’s-land for a reason. But a Belgian farmer in a worn felt hat, baggy corduroy trousers, and stout Wellingtons ambled along as if he had not a care in the world. Little smoke signals rose from the pipe clenched between his teeth.
Demange had seen such types before, in the last war and in this one. They came out of their holes whenever things quieted down. Sometimes they were harmless. They’d arrange to trade your tobacco for the other fellow’s schnapps, or to take a letter from a granny on one side of the wire to her granddaughter on the other.
Sometimes they were anything but harmless. They’d spy for one side or the other or sometimes for both. While they were going through the motions of trading, they’d scout out the other side’s positions and report back to whoever was paying them. Or the sweet letter from grandmother to little girl would be chock-full of coded messages. You never could tell.
And Demange distrusted Belgians on general principles. Half the Flemings wished they were Germans. The Walloons-even the ones who weren’t Rexist bastards-spoke French with a funny accent, even worse than what a Provençal like Marcel used.
“Hey, you!” Demange yelled at this Belgian. The man slowly looked back toward him, as if uncertain he was being addressed. Demange had seen it done better. Hell, he’d done it better himself. “Yeah, you, shit-for-brains! Get your ugly ass back here so I can talk with you!”
The farmer did his best to pretend he was deaf. His best didn’t impress Demange. Up came the rifle. He wasn’t particularly trying to hit the Belgian, but he wasn’t particularly trying to miss, either.
If a rifle bullet cracking past a meter or two in front of your snoot didn’t draw your attention, chances were you’d already bought a plot. The Belgian decided he might do better to come back to the French lines after all. A good thing for him, too. Demange would have aimed the next round with care.
A lot of people would have had trouble getting through the drifts of barbed wire in front of the French lines. The farmer knew the secret ways at least as well as Demange did. Have to change our routes, Demange thought irritably.
Down into the trench slid the Belgian. He wore a bushy gray mustache. He might have fought in the trenches the last time around. Now he’d gone into business for himself.
“What d’you want?” he asked in his peculiar French.
“What were you doing out there?” Demange returned. “And don’t fuck with me, either. You give me crap, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. Well, he did. It would turn a boring day halfway interesting.
The anticipation in his voice and on his narrow, nasty face got through to the Belgian. Some people, you did better not to mess with. “I was going to sell the Boches some applejack,” the farmer said slowly.
He did not visibly have any. “Where is it?” Demange snapped. “And if you say you were gonna bring it later, you’re in more trouble than you know what to do with.”
“I’ll show you.” The farmer unbelted his pants and let them drop. He wore long johns under them-it was cold out here. He also wore rubber bands around the ankles of the long underwear. He reached into the long johns and pulled out two fat rubber hot-water bottles. He handed Demange one. Demange unscrewed the stopper and sniffed. That was applejack, all right. Demange held out his hand for the other one. Sourly, the farmer passed it to him. He checked. Applejack in both of them, all right.
“Well, it is what you say it is,” Demange allowed. “And since it is, I’ll give you a whole franc for it.”
“A franc!” The Belgian’s mustache quivered with fury. He must have known he’d get screwed, but he hadn’t expected to get screwed that royally.
Because Demange was feeling generous, he said, “Oh, all right-a franc for each bottle.” He tossed the Belgian not one but two coins of yellow aluminum-bronze. “Out of my own pocket, you see.”
“No wonder some of us think the Germans are a better deal,” the farmer said. “You … You …!” Words failed him, which was his good luck.
“Get lost, cochon,” Demange said coldly. “I ever see you again, we’ll talk about it with the undertaker.”
Away the Belgian went. If looks could have killed … But you needed a rifle for that.
“Gather round, boys!” Demange told the soldiers he led. “We’d better destroy the evidence, in case he complains to a brass hat or something.” Destroy the evidence they did, and they had a hell of a time doing it, too.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel understood that Stukas had had their day-literally-as dive-bombers. Without fighter cover, they wouldn’t, and didn’t, last ten minutes. And giving them the cover they needed tied up Bf-109s and FW-190s that could have been doing more useful things.
Logically, the Luftwaffe should have scrapped them all and given their pilots hotter planes to fly, planes that could fight or flee well enough on their own to get by without escorts. But the higher-ups didn’t want to junk any weapons of war that still had use to them. And so some egghead decided to turn the Ju-87s into night raiders.
It made a certain amount of sense. Even Hans-Ulrich had to admit that much. Planes aloft in the dark were hard to spot and hard to shoot down once spotted. That French bombers built before the war, bombers even more spavined than Stukas, kept coming back from night attacks over the Vaterland proved as much.
Finding targets in the dark was also an adventure, of course. But the Ju-87s were no more inaccurate than any other German bombers. You couldn’t dive-bomb when you couldn’t judge when to pull up. You could fly on the level and drop all those hundreds of kilos of explosives where you hoped they’d do your side the most good.
You could, and the Stuka pilots were doing it. They’d struck at ammunition dumps and railroad yards close to the front. They’d also ventured deeper into France. Hans-Ulrich had hit Caen twice and Paris once. He’d bombed them, anyhow. He hoped he’d hit them.
Here he was again, droning along toward Paris. To guide his plane, he had a compass, an airspeed indicator, and a wristwatch with luminous hands. Fortunately, Paris was a big place. Some of the bombers that had been built with this kind of mission in mind-He-111s and Ju-88s, for instance-could be guided toward their target by radio beams. The Stuka carried no such receivers. Maybe groundcrew men would install them one of these days. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t holding his breath.
Before long, he stopped having any doubts about where Paris lay. Flak guns on the ground threw cascades of shells at the Luftwaffe planes above them. Muzzle flashes marked thicker concentrations of guns-and, Rudel supposed, thicker concentrations of targets worth hitting.
Tracers climbed up to and past the Ju-87. Their glowing trails and the shell bursts all around put Hans-Ulrich in mind of fireworks displays. Fireworks displays didn’t fill the sky with sharp fragments, though.
From the rear-facing seat, Sergeant Dieselhorst used the speaking tube: “I think they may have an idea we’re here.”
“Do you?” Hans-Ulrich said. “Well, you could be right. Just in case, I’ll give them something to remember me by.” He yanked on the bomb-release lever. The large bomb under the fuselage and the smaller ones under the wings fell away. Big flashes of light down below said other German bombs were already bursting on the capital of France.
He didn’t stick around to watch them. He hauled the Stuka’s nose around and headed back toward Belgium. The plane was friskier without its load. No Ju-87 would ever be either fast or maneuverable, but it came closer than it had.