“Down!” Demange yelled. He was already doing it. So were the poilus who’d been in the front lines for a while. The new fish took longer, the way they always did. They didn’t realize they were in trouble till they got hurt. That, of course, was just exactly too late.
Demange hated mortars even more than he hated a lot of other things. You couldn’t hear the bombs leaving the tubes. You mostly couldn’t hear them till they whistled down. Then you had to hope-you had to pray, if you happened to be a praying man, which he wasn’t-they didn’t whistle down right on top of you.
The shrieks that rose from the French positions all seemed to come from at least a hundred meters away. Fragments snarled through the air over Demange’s head. Dirt and perhaps some of those fragments pattered off his helmet.
He glanced over toward Francois. “Still got that hard-on to charge the Boches?”
“Maybe not so much, Lieutenant,” the new kid allowed.
“Well, then, maybe-just maybe, and I wouldn’t bet more than a sou on it-you aren’t as stupid as you look,” Demange said. Francois had started to smile at him. The expression congealed on his face like cooling fat.
Sometimes, of course, the cons with the white mustaches and the gold and silver leaves on their kepis were stupider than even a guy fresh out of basic ever dreamt of being. Or rather, those cons had the chance to be stupid on a scale a raw private couldn’t begin to imagine. When Francois wanted to advance against the Germans, a word from Demange sufficed to quash him. When the fools with the fancy hats ordered an army corps to advance, nobody could quash them … except the bastards in Feldgrau, of course.
The Germans had some new toys that the cons in the expensive kepis didn’t seem to know about. By now, even jerks like Francois knew the Tiger tank by name and had acquired a healthy respect-make that fear-for it. The generals ordered French armor forward as if the Tiger were no more than a gleam in some Nazi engineer’s eye. French tank-men, however, like the frogs in the saying, died in earnest. When they came up against Tigers, they-and their machines-also died in large numbers.
And the Germans pulled a new machine gun out from under their coal-scuttle helmets. Demange didn’t know what French generals thought of the German MG-34. He hated it himself. It fired much faster than any French machine gun, spraying murder out for a thousand meters from wherever it happened to lurk. And it could lurk anywhere. It was aircooled and light, and could be fired from a tripod, a bipod, or even, in an emergency, from the hip.
Prisoners said the new Nazi machine gun was called the MG-42. Demange supposed that stood for the year in which it went into production, the year now vanished with all the others that had gone before. Whatever the name stood for, the gun stood for trouble.
It made the MG-34 seem retarded, which Demange wouldn’t have believed possible till he saw-and heard-it for himself. Once you heard an MG-42 in action, you’d never mistake it for anything else. It fired so fast, shots blurred together into a continuous sheet of noise.
Naturally, firing that fast heated the barrel red-hot in short order. The efficient Boches issued an asbestos mitt to their machine-gun crews. In a pinch, some cloth would also let you take off the hot barrel so you could replace it with a cool one. The whole business needed only a few seconds. Then you went right back to slaughtering whatever you could see.
With French tanks smashed like dropped eggs, with French infantry falling as if to a harvester of death, the corps’ attack didn’t get far. Demange ordered his company to entrench even before word came down from On High that the generals had decided that they weren’t going to sweep triumphantly into Berlin after all. He took a certain sour pride in suffering fewer casualties than the other companies in the regiment. Fewer, unfortunately, didn’t mean few; they’d got badly mauled. But they could-he hoped they could-fight back if the Fritzes decided to counterattack.
The Germans would be taking a chance if they did. Demange deliberately placed his new line at the western edge of one of their minefields. If they wanted to hoist themselves on their own petards trying to come to grips with his poilus, they were welcome to, as far as he was concerned.
His men would also have trouble advancing from their position, of course. He didn’t worry about that. If Corps HQ wanted him to go forward, they could damn well send some sappers to help clear the way. He didn’t think they’d do that any time soon. Their last rush of blood to the head-or, more likely, to the cock-had proved too expensive.
He couldn’t complain about the zeal with which his men dug in. Dirt flew from their entrenching tools as if their mothers’ sides of the family were all moles. They’d been out in the open a couple of times now, exposed to shellfire and to those horrifying machine guns. The farther away from that they got, the happier they were.
There was Francois, doing his best to burrow all the way to New Zealand. “So how do you like advancing now, kid?” Demange inquired.
Francois had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, much the way Demange did (even if it was a Gauloise). It twitched as he answered, “Fuck that shit … sir.”
Demange grunted laughter and thumped him on the back. “There you go. It sounds better than it is, just like everything else. Well, everything except fucking.” Francois laughed, too. He sounded jaded, like a veteran. Hell, he’d lived through two attacks. He was a veteran now.
Chapter 20
Spring rain turned the trenches northwest of Madrid into mudholes. It might not have been as bad as the Russian spring rasputitsa, when a winter’s worth of snow melted all at once and turned everything into a quagmire, but it wasn’t fun, either. Instead of warthogs and hippos, Nationalist and Republican soldiers clumped through these mudholes. Neither side’s officers were enthusiastic about ordering attacks in such weather; they would only bog down. The brass relied on machine guns, and on snipers like Vaclav Jezek, to remind their foes the war was still on.
After night fell, Vaclav crawled back to the line from the shell-pocked horror of no-man’s-land. He was filthy from head to foot. He’d wriggled through puddles and muck he couldn’t see to avoid. When he pissed and moaned about it, Benjamin Halevy said, “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. You aren’t a whole lot dirtier than anybody else.”
A shout rang out from the rear: “Chow’s coming!”
Halevy added, “And you’re just in time for supper. Could be worse.”
“I suppose,” Vaclav said dolefully.
Supper did only so much to lift his spirits. The stew was red with paprika and fiery with chilies. The cooks were Spaniards. They liked it that way. Vaclav didn’t. He ate it anyhow. The gravy held turnips and potatoes and God knew what all else. If he was lucky, the meat he spooned up was goat. If he wasn’t so lucky, it was donkey-or possibly Nationalist, though it didn’t seem tough or stringy enough for that.
Whether he liked the chow or not, he emptied his mess tin. Hunger made the best sauce. He was washing out the tin in a galvanized pail when another visitor from behind the lines arrived: “Mail call!”
Vaclav went right on washing the tin. The rest of the Czechs went on with whatever they were doing, too. Who was likely to write to them in the island of exile? The fellow with the waxed-canvas sack called out a few names. He made a hash of them: he was an International, but not a Czech. Then he said, “Jezek! Vaclav Jezek!” He pronounced the sniper’s first name Vaklav, not Vatslav, but foreigners did that more often than not.