“Blimey, don’t they ’arf!” said a younger man, a lance-corporal. “I went and did it first time they screamed down and bombed me, and I’m not ashamed to say so.” He wore the ribbon for the Military Medal; no one was likely to call him yellow.
“Anybody who’s seen combat and says he hasn’t had to change his drawers once or twice-well, maybe he’s telling the truth, but he’s got himself one tight arsehole if he is,” Walsh said.
None of the others commented on that. More than one, though, looked up at the canvas stretched over steel hoops as if thinking rather loudly. Walsh had been through enough to let him come out with things others knew but would sooner not have said.
In due course, the unstrafed string of lorries stopped. The soldiers piled out. Walsh already had a round chambered in his Sten gun. That involved a certain amount of risk: the safety on the nasty little submachine gun was no more reliable than any other piece of the botched-together weapon. If the Sten wasn’t the ugliest piece of armament in the world, Walsh had no idea what would be. But it did the job-if the job was something like house-to-house fighting. For longer ranges, a rifle beat it all hollow. But it fired much faster than a rifle could.
They were closer to the sea than Walsh had been in 1938. Gulls wheeled and screeched overhead. They were worse scroungers than soldiers, if such a thing was possible. The breeze came off the water, and smelled of salt and sand. Pretty soon, if the guns pounding up ahead were any indication, the breeze would start stinking of blood and shit and death. Walsh savored the clean smell while he could.
Before he went forward and won the chance to pick up one more wound (or worse, but no one ever wanted to think about worse) for King and country, regimental HQ had to find a slot for him. A bespectacled subaltern in a tent diplomatically distant from the gun pits-as safe a slot as a man in a front-line regiment could find-clicked his tongue between his teeth.
The fellow was about to post him somewhere when a runner came in and set a scrap of paper on the folding table he was using for a desk. The young second lieutenant glanced at the paper and said, “Bloody hell!” He looked up to Walsh. “Can you handle a company for a few days, Staff Sergeant? I realize it’s a deal to ask, but Lieutenant Ormesby just copped one. He was a friend of mine: a year ahead of me at Sandhurst.” He touched the bit of paper. “Doesn’t sound good.”
“Sorry to hear it, sir,” Walsh said. “Always hard when a mate gets hurt.” He knew that too well himself. “I’ll have a go at the company if you want me to, but aren’t there any other officers besides Lieutenant, uh, Ormesby?”
“Not in that company,” the subaltern said. “If you can handle personnel matters, I’ll take that Sten off your hands and go forward myself.”
Walsh liked him better after that. He wasn’t back here only because he didn’t want to get any closer to the action, then. Truthfully, the sergeant answered, “I’d do more good up there. You wouldn’t care to see the balls-up I’d make of your work.”
“Right. Well, off you go, then.” The junior officer explained to Walsh how to find his new post, adding, “Mind how you move up from the apple orchard. The Fritzes throw mortar bombs at you if they see you.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.” Walsh ducked out of the tent and waved to the men serving the 105s. Even in this chilly weather, they worked stripped to the waist. Up he went. Teams of aid men with Red Cross armbands brought back a steady stream of wounded. One of them might have been the unfortunate Lieutenant Ormesby, but Walsh didn’t pause to inquire.
The subaltern’s apple orchard had been pretty well torn up. Walsh might not have recognized it if he hadn’t been looking for it. He stuck some twigs into the strip of inner tube he’d put on his tin hat just above the brim. That might help break up his outline. Or nothing might help. The craters in the field ahead argued that the Germans were much too alert.
Well, all he could do was his best. He dashed forward, dodging like a rugby half who smelled a try. He’d got almost all the way to the battered village past the field before the boys in Feldgrau lobbed a couple of mortar rounds his way. Both fell a good hundred yards behind him.
“ ’Oo the ’ell are you?” asked a grimy, unshaven Tommy in a uniform he hadn’t changed for a long time. The way he curled his lip made Walsh ashamed of his smooth chin and clean clothes.
He gave his name and rank regardless, finishing, “They sent me up to take charge of things till they can find an officer for the company.”
“ ‘Appy bleedin’ dye.” The Tommy curbed his enthusiasm very well. Suspiciously, he asked, “You ever smell smokeless powder before?”
“You weren’t even a gleam in your pa’s eye the first time I got shot,” Walsh answered. “The last time was this past summer. I’m just back to duty after the wound healed.”
“Hrm.” A grunt. The soldier rubbed his bristly chin. “Well, you may do, then.” He still sounded anything but sure.
“You can tell me where to head in later, if you still want to,” Walsh said. “In the meanwhile, don’t you think we’d better dig these holes deeper?” He grabbed his own entrenching tool so the other man could see that we was no figure of speech.
“Bugger me blind! You do know what you’re about.” Now the Tommy spoke in tones of deep and genuine astonishment. In minutes, dirt was flying from shovels all over what was left of the village.
As Hans-Ulrich Rudel scrambled out of his Stuka and the groundcrew men covered the revetment with camouflage netting, he breathed out a long, weary sigh. His breath smoked. Sergeant Dieselhorst lit a cigarette. “Another one down,” Dieselhorst said, his cheeks hollowing.
“That’s about the size of it,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. He hurried out of the revetment. He usually relished the smells of gasoline and motor oil and hot metal that clung to his Ju-87. Not today, for some reason. He needed fresh air-and Dieselhorst’s nasty cigarette sure didn’t help.
It was cool and cloudy, but it wasn’t raining and it wasn’t freezing. Not all the fields around the airstrip had gone yellow and lifeless, the way they would have in Russia with winter nearly here. Some still showed green. Half a kilometer away, past the barbed wire, a Belgian farmer in overalls puttered around in one of them.
Sergeant Dieselhorst came up beside Rudel. The pilot smelled the cigarette smoke even before he noticed the other man’s footfalls. Nodding out toward the Belgian, Hans-Ulrich remarked, “I wonder what that clown’s doing-know what I mean?”
“You mean you wonder if he’s keeping an eye on us,” Dieselhorst said.
Hans-Ulrich nodded. “Right the first time.”
The sergeant chuckled harshly. “Well, in Russia you wouldn’t’ve needed to wonder. He damn well would have been.” Another chuckle, even dryer than the first. “Of course, in Russia we would’ve shot any Ivan who got that close to one of our bases.”
“Belgium’s a more crowded place,” Hans-Ulrich said, which was putting it mildly. After a moment, he added a wistful coda: “And some of the Belgians like us, too.”
“There is that.” Sergeant Dieselhorst softened the concurrence with a coda of his own: “Some of the Russians liked us, too. Of course, their other choice was Stalin. He could make damn near anybody look good by comparison.”
“Naughty.” Hans-Ulrich wagged a finger at him. “Are you trying to get me to report you to the Sicherheitsdienst?”
“Nah.” Dieselhorst shook his head as he ground out the cigarette under his boot. “If you were gonna do it, you would’ve done it by now.”
One more thing the veteran was right about. Some of what Dieselhorst said about National Socialism and about what it did to the Reich’s foreign policy went far beyond what was safe. But how many times had the rear gunner and radioman saved Hans-Ulrich’s one and only neck? More than he cared to remember. He hoped he understood what gratitude was. The sergeant might not care for the people who ran Germany. He’d served the country well for a long time, though. Didn’t that matter more?