"So what do we do now? Wait for the Americans, the way we did in 1918?" Luc inquired with a certain amount of malice aforethought.
"Screw the Americans!" Yes, that was steam coming out of the sergeant's ears. "Cocksuckers were way late the last time. I don't think they're coming at all now."
"Here's hoping you're wrong," Luc said.
"Sure-here's hoping," Demange answered. "But don't hold your breath. Oh, and one more thing… Suppose we do send the tanks through the Boches' wire. How far do you think they'll get? How many mines have the fucking Feldgraus planted under there?"
That was another good question. As many as they could was the answer that occurred to Luc. Doubting the Germans' competence didn't pay. Luc knew he made a decent soldier now not least because the enemy was such a good teacher. If you lived, you learned.
Supper turned out to be something the cooks might have learned from the enemy: a stew of potatoes and cabbage and sausage that tasted like a mixture of stale bread and horsemeat. The only thing that suggested it hadn't come from a German field kitchen was a heavy dose of onions and garlic. Before the shooting started, Luc would have sneered at it. These days, he knew better. Anything that left him with a full belly and didn't give him the runs afterwards was not to be despised.
After supper, a private named Denis Boucher said, "Talk to you, Corporal, please?" He was a little round-faced fellow, maybe a year younger than Luc: a new conscript, just out of training, and in the line for the first time.
"What's up?" Luc asked.
Boucher looked at him the way he'd looked at Sergeant Demange when he was still a new fish. Luc still sometimes looked at Demange that way. To have somebody turn that kind of gaze on him… To the rookie, all noncoms were deities: some grander and more thunderous than others, no doubt, but all deities just the same.
"Well, Corporal… Can we talk someplace where nobody can hear us?" The kid fidgeted in what looked like acute embarrassment.
"Come on. Out with it. If we go off somewhere, people will wonder. If you talk to me right here, they'll think you're asking about cleaning your rifle or something," Luc said.
"You're so smart!" Boucher blurted. Luc didn't think he was trying to butter him up. That kind of thing hadn't occurred to him before. I could get used to being the guy who knows stuff, Luc thought. Then the little fellow in the unfaded khaki uniform went on, "It's about my girl. I'm afraid she's fooling around on me while I'm away. What can I do?"
Not even the guy who knew stuff had an automatic good answer for that one. Cautiously, Luc asked, "Why do you think she's messing around?" Some guys worried themselves sick over nothing.
And some guys didn't. "Marie's always been a flirt," Boucher said. "And we kind of had a fight before I had to go into the army."
That didn't sound so good. Luc spread his hands. "Don't know what to tell you except this: if she is messing around on you, she wasn't worth having to begin with."
"Easy for you to say! I love her!" Denis Boucher seemed as hot and bothered as a little round-faced guy could get.
"Well, if she's there for you when you get home, everything's great. And if she's not, you've got the rest of your life to pick up the pieces and find somebody else," Luc said. Sergeant Demange would have told the kid to shut the fuck up and soldier, which was also good advice. Luc wasn't so hardened. He also didn't point out that Denis was liable not to get home, or to come back so torn up that neither Marie nor anyone else in skirts was likely to want anything to do with him. No matter how true that was, it wasn't helpful.
True it was. The Germans might not have any tanks in the neighborhood of Beauvais any more, but they'd left behind plenty of artillery. It started working over the French lines in the middle of the night. It had them ranged to the centimeter, or so it seemed to Luc as he cowered in his hole. Nothing you could do about artillery fire but pray it didn't chop you up.
The barrage stopped as abruptly as it started. Wounded poilus shrieked. You could follow them by their screams as aid men took them to the rear. Luc grasped his rifle and stared wildly into the night, waiting for the fuckers with the coal-scuttle helmets to sweep down on the French trenches. Machine guns spat strip after strip of ammunition at the German lines to make the Boches think twice.
Maybe they'd already thought twice. They didn't come out of their foxholes and trenches. After a while, swearing and yawning, Luc curled up like a tired old dog and tried to sleep. No sooner had he closed his eyes, or so it seemed, than the artillery started up again.
It went on like that for the next several days: random shelling at all hours of the night and day. It wasn't anything like the usual methodical pattern of German fire. Maybe the regular German artillery commander had gone off with the tanks and left his halfwitted nephew in charge. If so, Junior was a damn pest.
And Denis Boucher went missing one morning. Luc glumly reported that to Sergeant Demange. "Maybe a German 105 blew him to kingdom come," he said. "But maybe he scooted off to see what was going on with his precious Marie."
"Well, if he did, he's not our worry any more," Demange said. "Let the military police get all hot and bothered about him. And if he does make it back to the mangy bitch, I hope she gives him the clap." The milk of human kindness ran thin and curdled in Demange's veins.
In Luc's, too, at the moment. He yawned till his jaw cracked like a knuckle. "I hope the Boches' artillery lets up during the day. I've got to grab some sleep."
"You get tired enough, you can sleep through a barrage. I did it myself, back in '18," Demange said.
"I believe you. I aim to try," Luc said. Maybe the generals should have sent armor surging forward to drive the invader from la belle France. Luc couldn't get excited about that, not right now. He went back to his hole and snuggled down in it. By now he was so used to sleeping on the ground, he'd decided mattresses were overrated. Exhaustion clouted him over the head with a padded blackjack. An hour and a half later, the German artillery started up again. Luc never knew it. AS HE ALWAYS DID while he was atop the U-30's conning tower, Julius Lemp scanned. The sun was going down, far in the northwest. At this latitude and this season, it would rise again in the northeast in a very few hours. It wouldn't stay dark long, and it wouldn't get very dark; the sun wouldn't sink far enough below the horizon for that.
This stretch of North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway should have been deadly dangerous for a surfaced U-boat, then. And it would have been, had any Royal Navy ships been close enough to spot the U-30. The submarine lay almost two hundred kilometers north of the Faeroe Islands. The English had to figure no one in his right mind would care to visit this lonely stretch of sea.
Lemp thought the English had a point. You could die of boredom before you saw a freighter plowing across these waters. Even if you did, it would be flying a Danish or Swedish or Norwegian flag: a neutral, and so not a legitimate target. Lemp had already sunk one neutral. What Admiral Donitz would do to him if he sank another did not bear thinking about.
Resolutely, then, Lemp didn't think about it. Or he tried not to. The thought kept making him notice it, like a chunk of gristle wedged between two back teeth. He longed for transcendental floss to make it go away.
The ratings up there with him were also peering through binoculars. As a wave crest pushed the U-30 up a meter or two, one of them stiffened and pointed. "Smoke, Skipper!" he exclaimed.
"Where away?" Lemp asked, but he was already looking north, following the man's index finger. He needed to wait for another wave to lift the U-boat before he spied the plume himself. It was in the right quarter, but… He frowned. Diesels were supposed to make less smoke than turbines. That he'd seen this ship's exhaust before the masts came up over the horizon wasn't a good sign.