“He runs it with power to the proletariat, too,” Marcel said. “If we would only do that-”
He got no further. Demange cut him off. “My ass,” the veteran growled. “I was there, kid. I saw the Russian proletariat. Hell, I shot some of the Russian proletariat. A bunch of those guys, when they found out we were Frenchmen instead of Germans, they went over to us faster than those machine-gun bullets are going over us now. Some of them went over to the Nazis, too, but most of ’em figured Hitler was an even bigger salaud than Stalin. That’s the figuring you’ve got to do-which one of ’em makes the worst con.”
“Hitler does,” Marcel said confidently.
“Well, for now the big shots back in Paris think you’re right,” Demange said. “But that doesn’t turn Stalin into a bargain. The only thing that could ever turn Stalin into a bargain is, mm, Hitler.”
He was lighting another fresh Gitane when the Germans started lobbing mortar bombs at the poilus in the trenches. If you had a good, thick parapet in front of you and you kept your head down, machine-gun bullets were just an annoyance. As long as you stayed in your hole, you had to be mighty unlucky to get hurt.
Mortars whispered up and whined down. If one landed beside you, it would slice you into dogmeat even if you stayed behind your parapet. Demange despised mortars. So did every foot soldier who’d ever been on the receiving end of an attack. You couldn’t hide from them, and the bastards on your own side wouldn’t let you run away from them, either.
Screams rose from the next job over in the trench. Somebody over there had caught it, all right-caught it pretty bad, by the horrible noises he was making. Rolled into a ball in the bottom of the trench, Demange wished the bearers would cart off the luckless bugger. His shrieks were plenty to demoralize a whole regiment.
At last, they fell silent. Maybe he’d passed out. Maybe he’d died. Whatever had happened, he couldn’t feel his tormented body any more. That was a mercy, and not such a small one. People could be so dreadfully wounded, they begged you to kill them and thanked you if you had the nerve to do it.
War movies didn’t show stuff like that. A wound in a war movie meant a clean, white bandage-where were the blood and the mud? — and a nurse with big tits to bat her eyelashes at you while you recovered. If only life worked out so neatly … especially for that sorry fool over there.
The next interesting question was whether the Germans were going to follow up all this ironmongery with an attack of their own. They hadn’t been doing that very often in Belgium. They were content to let the Tommies and poilus come at them, and to slaughter the Allies when they tried.
You never could be sure, though. Whenever you thought you knew what the Boches were up to, they’d let you figure you were right for a little while and then, when you were good and set up, they’d shove it right up your ass.
Regretfully, Demange unfolded from the fetal position. Even more regretfully, he got up on the firing step and peered over the top of the parapet. That brought the machine-gun bullets terrifyingly close to the top of the crest on his helmet. Why that stupid crest was there he’d never known, in the last war or this one. To give style? It didn’t seem reason enough. The Tommies and the Ivans got along fine without crests. So did the Germans, whose helmets were hands down the best in both wars.
“Up! Up, you shitheads!” Demange yelled. “They’re moving!” He unslung his rifle-no pissy officer’s automatic for him-and started banging away at the oncoming Boches.
He felt better when French machine guns began gnawing at the enemy. The German attack soon ran out of steam. The Fritzes didn’t have any tanks supporting their foot soldiers. The infantrymen sensibly decided there was no point to getting killed when they hadn’t a prayer of making any real advance. They trotted back to their start line or at most hung on in shell holes between the lines.
After a while, a German officer stood up waving a white flag: a bed-sheet nailed to a pole. Firing on both sides slowly died away. The officer strode forward, still carrying the flag of truce.
As soon as the German got within shouting distance, Demange yelled, “Far enough, pal!”
The Boche obediently stopped. “An hour’s cease-fire?” he shouted back in guttural French. “So we can pick up our wounded?”
“Send your guys hiding in the craters back to your start line and you can have it,” Demange answered.
“D’accord,” the German agreed after a short pause for thought. “We gain little advantage from them anyhow.”
Demange saw it the same way-for now. But the Germans might try to reinforce them under cover of darkness. Then they could make more trouble here tomorrow or further down the line. “An hour’s cease-fire, starting-now!” he called to his own men. “Don’t shoot at their stretcher-bearers, and let their troops go back out of no-man’s-land.” The German officer turned and bellowed auf Deutsch.
Out came the Boches with Red Cross vests and with Red Crosses painted inside white circles on their helmets. The effect, to Demange, was that of a wolf dyed pink. It still looked dangerous, but now it looked peculiar, too. The bearers hauled wounded men back toward German aid stations. Unwounded Germans scuttled away to their entrenchments. Demange guessed not all of them would abandon the ground they’d so painfully won, no matter what their officer promised. Nobody ever kept promises all the way. Demange wouldn’t have, in the German’s shoes. A night patrol would root out the ones who’d stayed behind, and then this stretch of front could get back to normal.
No more Flying Fortresses had raided Munster, for which Sarah Bruck thanked the God in Whom she had ever more trouble believing. Maybe the daylight raid cost the RAF more than it wanted to pay. Other English bombers still hit the town by night, though.
Samuel Goldman seemed absurdly cheerful about it. “Well, I don’t lack for work, anyhow,” he said one evening over supper. “For a while there, when England and France were at peace with the government, I was afraid they’d want me as much as a laborer as they did when I was a professor.”
“Supper’s good,” Hanna Goldman said, which both wasn’t and was an answer. The Nazis hadn’t let Sarah’s father go on teaching at the university. Expelling him from the faculty had been a disaster. If they threw him out of the labor gang, that would be a catastrophe.
He nodded to Mother now. “Not too bad, if I say so myself.” He preened just a little. The spaetzle and the tinned fish that went with them had come from his inspired scrounging.
It wasn’t impossible for Jews to survive in the wartime Reich without such help, not quite. Life might be lived, yes, but it wasn’t worth living. Barely enough food, and almost all of it dreadful … They wanted you to know what they thought of you, all right.
When Father couldn’t steal better edibles than German Jews were legally entitled to, he stole clothes. Sarah had no idea how he’d managed to stuff a cashmere sweater into one of his inside jacket pockets, but he had. Even the yellow Stars of David she’d sewn onto it, front and back, didn’t seem to deface it too badly.
She supposed that was her vanity talking. After so long in the altered old clothes she’d got from the rabbi, anything nice seemed extra wonderful. With the wretched clothing ration Jews got, she might have been able to buy a sweater like that around the turn of the twenty-first century-provided she didn’t need anything else in the meantime.
The only reason she had that sweater was that some Aryan woman had got blown to gory smithereens. Father and the other laborers in his gang, Jews and petty criminals alike, robbed the dead whenever they saw the chance. The people the RAF killed didn’t need their things any more. The laborers who cleaned up the mess the bombers left behind did, desperately.