Going straight at the village in broad daylight with the Boches watching and waiting would generate the slaughter the regimental CO had to expect. That would also be the kind of attack the unimaginative son of a bitch would make himself if someone ordered him to take the place.
So Demange gathered his men together and plotted a night attack instead. Then he asked, “Any of you dopes from Alsace or Lorraine?” As he’d hoped, a couple of soldiers were. He tried another question: “Can you talk enough German to get by?”
They both nodded. He’d hoped they would. Those provinces had been history’s football, kicked back and forth again and again between France and Germany. Most people knew some of both languages. He stuck the German-speakers up front with Stahlhelms on their heads and captured Nazi greatcoats on their backs. With luck, they’d fool the Fritzes’ sentries long enough. Without luck … Without luck, Monsieur le Colonel would get what he wanted no matter how cute Demange played it.
The men slithered forward an hour before midnight. It had warmed up enough to turn sleet into icy rain. You had to be crazy to try anything in weather like this. Demange hoped the Germans thought so, too, and that they were all busy screwing their Belgian whores.
Wire twanged as cutters snipped it. The plashing of the rain helped hide the noises. It also helped keep the sentries from spotting the approaching Frenchmen till they were almost on top of them. Then a German called, “Halt! Who comes?” Demange knew enough of the language to get that.
“Gott im Himmel! Is this the front?” His Lorrainer sounded convincingly surprised.
“You shithead!” the sentry said, and went on from there, telling the man what a jerk he was. He squawked when the Lorrainer’s bayonet went home, but not for long, and not loud enough to alert anyone else. The French soldier got his own helmet and greatcoat out of his pack and put them on in a hurry so his own side wouldn’t shoot him by mistake.
Somewhere not far off to one side or the other-no, to one side and the other-there’d be more sentries. Nobody raised the alarm, though. The other German-speaker must have done his job, too. Whispering in excitement, the French company sneaked into the village.
Most of the Boches seemed to be in the church. Guttural singing came from it. Christmas carols. Wasn’t that sweet? Demange whispered to the Lorrainer: “If we bust in there, can you tell ’em to give up? Tell ’em we’ll kill ’em all if they fuck around?”
“You bet, Lieutenant,” the soldier answered.
“All right. That’s what we’ll try, then. And if the assholes do fuck around, we damn well will kill ’em,” Demange said.
It wasn’t quite so simple, though. Nothing was ever as simple as you wished it would be. A German sentry paced the streets. He was caroling, too, along with the men in church. He wasn’t doing it very loud. He might not even have known he was doing it. But he warned the French troops he was there before he came around the corner. They slid into cover. With the rain, it didn’t have to be great.
That was the last mistake he ever made. Demange hid in a doorway, knife in his right hand. As soon as the German walked past, Demange silently slipped up behind him, clapped his left hand over the sentry’s mouth, and pulled his head back. He drew the knife across the Fritz’s throat. If you did it right, the guy you were killing hardly let out a peep. Demange had practice. He did it right. The German slumped to the cobbles with no more than a muffled grunt.
On to the church. Demange’s men surrounded it. In case of trouble, they could shoot through the windows and chuck in grenades once they broke the glass.
Demange and the Lorrainer and a couple of squads of his toughest men went up the stairs. The rain helped dull their footfalls. So did the racket the carolers were making. He tried the door and grinned nastily. It wasn’t even locked.
He threw it open. They rushed inside. The Lorrainer gave forth with his spiel in German. The Fritzes were staring in horror. The candlelight in there exaggerated shadows and made them look all the more appalled. “Hände hoch!” the Lorrainer finished. If any French soldier knew the tiniest bit of German, that would probably be it.
One by one, the Germans raised their hands. Demange and his men took charge of them. Their officer-a captain, by his shoulder boards-glared at Demange. “On such a night, this is not sporting,” he said in fair French.
Demange was inclined to agree with the Fritz, but so what? “We get orders, too,” he answered with a shrug. After a beat, he added, “Joyeux Noël.”
Poilus led the Germans out of the church and into captivity. A few Boches in the houses came out to see what was going on. They got scooped up, too; the French had to shoot only one of them. A pretty blond Belgian woman wept for him. Too bad, Demange thought. You’ll be blowing someone else soon enough.
He sent a message back to the coloneclass="underline" Village captured. No casualties on our side. With luck, the messenger would wake him up delivering it. An ordinary officer would win a medal for this. Demange hoped the colonel wouldn’t try to kill him again for a little while. Past that, he expected nothing.
Theo Hossbach had heard that the RAF wasn’t bombing Münster any more. German radio and newspapers claimed England was going easy on the place because it was full of traitors to the Reich.
The RAF hadn’t come over the first few nights after the panzer regiment camped outside of Münster. But then the bombers did show up. Maybe they were striking at Münster itself. Maybe they were going after the troops sent there to restore order instead. Bombs fell on both impartially.
Inside a panzer, or in a foxhole under one, you were safe from anything short of a direct hit. That didn’t mean the bombing was fun. The Panzer IV rocked on its tracks again and again. Twenty-plus tonnes of steel tried to rear up once. “Even more fun than Katyushas!” Adi said as bombs burst all around.
“And they said it couldn’t be done!” Theo was dismayed into a complete sentence. If this was the beating he took inside so much armor plate, what were things like for civilians and their homes? How did they go on through pounding after pounding like this? They were the ones who deserved the Knight’s Cross, not the men who’d actually been trained for war.
“I hope my family are all right,” Adi said tightly. Most of the regiment might come from Breslau and its Wehrkreis, but he’d grown up around here.
And, of course, he had more to worry about with his family than most people did. Theo didn’t know what to say about that. He didn’t know anything he could say that wouldn’t make Adi think his secret was under assault. So he did what he did best: he kept his mouth shut.
Next morning, the radio net crackled with reports of fresh unrest inside Münster. Some of the gray-haired sausage-makers and bookkeepers and mill hands still seemed to remember the stunts they’d learned when they went to war a generation earlier. Some of them had pistols and hunting rifles, too, toys they’d managed to keep hidden in spite of all the searches the security services had made.
They’d managed to pin down some foot soldiers. They fired from upper stories and rooftops, and slipped away before the troops could pay them back. One exasperated infantry captain complained, “The bastards might as well be Ivans, the way they disappear!”
Before long, the panzer regiment got orders to move out. “We have to put the fear of God in them,” the CO declared.
Theo relayed the command. “They make a desert and call it peace,” Adi said. Theo recognized the quotation, though he doubted anyone else in the panzer would have. The name people usually called him by was short for Theodosios; his father had been wild about Edward Gibbon. He knew more Roman history than he knew what to do with.