His frankness made majors and lieutenant colonels and other such Important Personages wince. His own superior, a young captain named Marcel Gagne, was used to him by now-and stuck with him, too. “We’re trying to shove it up the Boches’ ass,” he said mildly.
“If we’re gonna shove, we oughta shove,” Demange insisted. “You don’t give it to your girlfriend halfway, do you?”
Eyeing the officers, he figured some of them gave it to their boyfriends instead. If he came out with that, though, they would find something worse than demotion to do to him. All too often, the exact truth was the worst thing you could use.
Instead, he found a different question to ask: “Will we have any armor support?” If the answer turned out to be no, he hoped he wouldn’t get too badly damaged before the stretcher-bearers carried him to an aid station.
But the Most Important Personage-a brigadier general, no less-nodded. “We will,” he said, beaming as much as a big shot was ever likely to. “Some American chars we have purchased, and some of our own as well.”
“How about that?” Demange said in glad surprise. New French tanks had a gunner instead of making the commander fire the main armament. They all carried radios, too. The designers had swiped both notions from the Germans, but so what? They were good ones. The American tanks, though they carried radios, too, were like some of the older French models. They mounted a small gun in the turret and a bigger one in a hull sponson. But they were faster than the old French machines, and the Americans manufactured stuff in quantities other countries could only dream about.
Demange was actually optimistic when French guns hammered the Nazis’ front lines. The sensation felt so strange, he had trouble recognizing it. Even the gloomy, drizzly weather didn’t dampen his spirits. The last time he’d felt this way was in the autumn of 1918, when the Kaiser’s boys realized they couldn’t hold out any more. And they couldn’t-but they’d gone and shot him before they folded up for good.
Whistles shrilled, up and down the French trenches. “Come on, you bastards!” Demange yelled to the men he led. “We’ll get ’em!” For a few minutes, he even believed what he told them.
Then the German guns came back to life. No, the French barrage hadn’t silenced them-that would have been too much to hope for. Shells started falling amidst the advancing men in khaki. One came down right on some poor cochon. When the smoke and flame cleared, nothing was left of him but one boot. Machine guns spat death and mutilation. Concrete firing positions weren’t easy for artillery to take out. Tanks could do it, though.
The tanks did take out some of the machine-gun nests. And German 88s posted a bit farther back took out some of the tanks. Neither the American chars nor the French ones could stand up against those massive AP rounds. As far as Demange knew, no tanks could, not even the monsters the Russians built.
Here and there, Germans surrendered when French troops overran their positions. “Kamerad!” they would shout, or, if they spoke some French, “Ami!” And sometimes they got the chance to go back into a POW camp, and sometimes they didn’t: Monte Carlo, only played with human lives.
Those tanks that survived smashed lanes through the iron bramble fields of wire. French soldiers who had to dive when gunfire opened up nearby often clambered to their feet swearing and bleeding. Demange did himself. Much of the wire was old and rusty. He tried to remember the last time he’d got tetanus antitoxin.
He couldn’t. He didn’t waste time worrying about it. Of all the things he expected to die from, lockjaw came low on the list.
One of the American-built tanks hit a mine not far in front of him. The beast stopped short with a thrown track. The tank crew bailed out and hotfooted it to the rear, using their machine’s carcass to help cover them from enemy fire. No more than half a minute after they escaped, an 88 hit the char and set it ablaze. A tank that wouldn’t go was a tank waiting to die. Most of the time, it didn’t have long to wait, either.
Here came Marcel and Jean. The tall Red and the short one looked as filthy and as scared as any other soldiers where things got hot. “Here’s your Riviera, dearies!” Demange called to them. “See, there’s Stalin over on the next beach towel. Why don’t you wave?”
They gave him identical horrible looks. Sometimes what you’d asked for was the worst thing you could get.
Little by little, the French attack bogged down. Demange hadn’t looked for anything else, not after those rose-colored first few minutes. In fact, they’d pushed farther than he’d thought they could. Some of them settled down in German trenches. The Boches built finer field fortifications than anybody. He’d seen that in the last war. It remained true this time. The Russians used better camouflage, but they cared nothing for their soldiers’ comfort. The Germans did.
They also cared about pushing the French back to the border. Their artillery banged away all through the long night. Of course they had the range to their own former front line. A burst not far from Demange killed two of his men and sent three more off to the butchers in masks. One of the poilus was in bad shape. If they slapped an ether cone over his face and let him die, they might be doing him a favor.
But the advance went on the next morning. That surprised Demange-astonished him, in fact. Maybe the fat old fools in Paris meant it after all. Who would have thought so? Demange still wasn’t sure he did.
This wasn’t the first time Alistair Walsh had found himself in Calais. It wasn’t the second time, either. That had been back in late 1938, when the British Expeditionary Force crossed to the Continent in alleged support of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia went down the drain several hundred miles away. The BEF fired not a shot till long after Prague was occupied and Slovakia had detached itself from the Czecho part and declared its Nazi-sponsored independence.
If you had to be somewhere not fighting, there were worse places than Calais. It wasn’t England, but you could-literally-see Blighty from there. Most of the shopkeepers and waiters and barmaids spoke English. The bars weren’t pubs, but they came close. The beer and cider were both good, and Calvados … There was a hell of a lot to be said for Calvados.
To his regret, Walsh didn’t get to linger in Calais this time, not the way he had four years earlier. He got off the ferry that hauled him across the Channel, walked down the dock, and climbed into the back of an enormous lorry from out of Detroit. Almost before he knew it, he was bouncing down a narrow, badly paved road heading east.
The lorry-truck was the Yankee word, but he had no truck with it-had a canvas canopy of brownish green. That kept him from peering anxiously up at the sky. If Stukas screamed down on this column of lorries … He’d been through that when the Fritzes made their big push into France. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.
He knew too well the Germans didn’t care about what he cared to do. He couldn’t hear much over the bang and rattle of tires on potholed asphalt, the engine’s steady grunting, and the chatter of the other soldiers who filled the big passenger compartment.
Most of them were young enough to be his children. They shared fags and pipe tobacco. A couple had flasks full of one kind of distilled lightning or another. None of it was as good as Calvados, but Walsh didn’t fuss. A knock of anything strong made him worry a bit less about whatever might be flying overhead.
“If they’re Stukas, you’ll hear the Jericho Trumpets-the sirens they’ve got fixed to their landing gear,” he said. “Whoever thought those up, I’d like to wring his neck like a pullet, bugger me blind if I wouldn’t. The Fritzes want to scare you so much that you piss yourself, and the bastards know how to get what they want, too.”