It might work. Stranger things had happened … hadn’t they? The generals seemed confident. Of course, from everything Walsh had heard, they’d seemed confident at the Somme, too. Even if this did work, would England and France have to repeat it ten miles farther east, and then another ten miles later after that? If they did, would any Belgians not in exile be left alive to reclaim their country? Would any country be left for them to reclaim?
Fascinating questions, all of them, but not questions even the most senior NCO was in any position to answer. Walsh mainly worried about what would happen once the shelling stopped and the officers’ whistles ordered the advance. Most of the Tigers, he assumed, would survive. A few would take direct hits on the turret or engine decking and go up, but most would remain.
What about the ordinary Landsers in their holes? Whether the guns could do for them would determine whether this was a replay of the Somme or something with a happier ending from the English point of view.
At the Somme, even English troops in sectors where the Fritzes got smashed had trouble going forward because the ground was so torn up. When they did advance, the ground complicated resupply or made it impossible. Now there were tanks and Bren-gun carriers and other tracked vehicles that could cope with the worst terrain. That would help.
Not all the shells here flew from west to east. The Germans shot back whenever they saw the chance-and, no doubt, whenever they managed to get shells to their big guns. Some of it was counterbattery fire. That didn’t bother Walsh. When the buggers in Feldgrau took their whacks at the English front line, though …
All he could do was hunker down and hope nothing landed close enough to murder him. He’d picked up a Blighty wound in each fight so far. If he got hit again, he couldn’t count on being so lucky three times in a row.
RAF bombers pounded the Germans, too, the usual planes by night and a few squadrons of American Fortresses by day. Spitfires escorted the day bombers, but the Luftwaffe savaged them anyhow. Watching one fall out of the sky in a flat spin with two engines on fire made Walsh think there might be more rugged ways to make a living than the one he’d found for himself.
Little by little, the English bombardment lifted. It didn’t die out altogether, but went after more distant targets. Ever so cautiously, Walsh looked out over the forward lip of the hole in which he crouched. If people ever sent a rocket to the Moon, whoever peered out from the cabin might see a landscape that looked a lot like this one. Oh, he wouldn’t spot shattered tree stumps on the Moon-or Walsh didn’t think so, anyhow. And all those battered coils of barbed wire also struck him as unlikely … unless the Lunarians were fighting a particularly vicious war amongst themselves. And if there were Lunarians, they might be.
Tanks rumbled and clanked forward. Infantrymen trotted along with them to protect them from determined Fritzes with grenades and Molotov cocktails or other handheld unpleasantnesses. Walsh wasn’t sorry his company hadn’t been told off for that little job. They’d done it before. Whenever you took the lead, you wanted to make sure you had all your policies paid up.
Blam! … Clang! … Boom! Walsh didn’t see the enemy tank or antitank gun that opened up on the English armor. He recognized the flat, harsh bark of an 88, but wasn’t sure whether the dreaded German beast was mounted on a Tiger or in an emplacement all that gunnery hadn’t taken out. Either way, the clang! was a round penetrating a tank’s vitals, while the boom! was all the ammo inside the iron coffin going up at once. The turret flew off the stricken tank. It came down fifteen or twenty feet away, and squashed a luckless Tommy. The poor beggar was doubtless dead before he knew it, not that that would be much consolation for him and his mates.
Blam! … Clang! … Boom! Another English tank turned into a burning hulk. The surviving tanks started shooting, but at what? Walsh still couldn’t see the cannon that was murdering them. Then German MG-34s and the newer, still more vicious MG-42s opened up on the foot soldiers stumbling across the broken ground.
Walsh had hated MG-34s since he first made their acquaintance in the war’s early days. They were as portable as Bren guns-you could even pick one up and fire it like a rifle if you had to-but put three or four times as much lead in the air. MG-42s were even worse. They fired so fast, you couldn’t really hear the separate rounds. An MG-42 sounded like a buzz saw, and cut men down like a buzz saw, too.
Officers’ whistles shrilled. “Follow me, men!” a captain shouted. “Our armor will lead us into the Germans’ rear!” He clambered up out of his hole and dogtrotted after the tanks and the men who’d advanced with them.
Follow me! almost always produced the desired effect. So did a calculated show of bravery like the one the captain gave. “Come on, lads!” Walsh called to the Tommies within earshot. “No help for it-let’s be at ’em!” He got out of his own lovely foxhole and went after that captain.
He’d already seen more than enough to make him sure the attack wouldn’t do what the generals hoped it would. The bombardment hadn’t smashed the Nazis’ tanks or wiped out their machine-gun nests. Which meant neither foot soldiers nor armor would be seeing the Germans’ rear any time soon.
To show that to the brass hats, though, the Army had to pay the butcher’s bill. Walsh slipped in some mud and sprawled on his belly. A couple of rounds from a German machine gun cracked through the air where he probably would have been if he hadn’t taken a header.
Another man was down not far away, wailing and clutching at his thigh. Walsh crawled over to him. He did what he could to dress the wound. He gave the Tommy morphine. He stayed with the poor fellow as long as he could, or a little longer. It let him do something useful that didn’t put him in too much danger of getting killed. At last, reluctantly, he had to return to the attack. He could already see it wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually, the blokes who gave the orders would realize the same thing. His job now was to stay alive till they did. If their orders in the meantime would let him.
A soft bed. Clean sheets. A shower ever day. Regular meals with enough food in them. Except for a scalp laceration and a mangled hand, Chaim Weinberg would have said he hadn’t had it so good since he got to Spain.
Once the scalp wound got cleaned up and stitched, it healed on its own. X-rays showed that that mortar fragment might have dented his hard head, but hadn’t cracked it.
His hand was a more complicated, more painful business. Dr. Alvarez kept doing things to it, waiting till it got halfway better, then doing more things. When Chaim complained about operations every couple of weeks, Alvarez said, “I will stop if you like. You will have a claw with a usable thumb. Is that what you desire?”
“What I want is for the goddamn mortar bomb to’ve come down somewhere else,” Chaim answered. “I’d still be in one piece, and they wouldn’t’ve had to plant poor Mike.” Carroll had died on the way back to the aid station. Word took a while getting to Chaim in Madrid, but he knew now.
“I cannot do anything about that now, nor can you,” Dr. Alvarez said patiently. “I can do something about your hand-if you wish me to proceed, of course.”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Chaim said. “I’m sick of getting carved on, but go ahead. You give me something I can use well enough to help me handle a rifle, that’s what I want.”
More ether. More pain. More morphine. He wondered if he’d end up a junkie by the time this was all over with. That was one more thing he’d just have to worry about later.
He was pretty doped up after the latest surgery, his hand elevated and wrapped in enough bandages to make a suit of clothes with two pairs of pants, when La Martellita walked into his room. “Wow,” he said. “Hola, beautiful! I hope like hell you’re real, not something I’m imagining on account of the drugs.”