Those German guns in the distance thundered again. Halevy frowned. "Wonder what the fuckers are up to," he said.
"They aren't shooting at me right now," Vaclav said. "As long as they aren't, they can do anything else they want."
"There you go. You're an old soldier, sure as shit," the sergeant said. Other guns started barking: French 75s. Halevy listened to them with a curious twisted smile. "I wish we had more heavy guns around Laon. We could hit the Nazis hard. They've got this long southern flank just waiting for us to take a bite out of it."
"That would be good," Vaclav said. Hitting the Nazis hard always sounded good to him. If only he were doing it in Czechoslovakia.
"Of course, by the time the brass sees the obvious and moves part of what we need into place for a half-assed attack, the Germans will have seen the light, too, and they'll hand us our heads," Halevy said.
Vaclav wondered if the Jew had been that cynical before he became a noncom. Whether Halevy had or not, what he came out with sounded all too likely to the Czech. "Maybe we ought to move up without waiting for the brass," Jezek said.
Halevy laid a hand on his forehead. "Are you feverish? No real, proper old soldier ever wants to move up. The bastards in Feldgrau have guns, you know." The way he pronounced the German word said he could sprechen Deutsch, as Vaclav could.
"Best way I can see to throw the Germans out of Czechoslovakia is to start by throwing 'em out of France," Vaclav said.
"Well, when you put it like that…" Sergeant Halevy rubbed the side of his jaw. "Tell you what. Talk to your Czechs-see what they think. I'll go chin with a couple of French captains I know, find out if they'll go with it."
Jezek found his countrymen had as many opinions as soldiers. That didn't faze him; as far as he was concerned, Germans were the ones who marched and thought in lockstep. But most of the Czechs were ready to give the enemy one in the slats as long as the odds seemed decent. "I don't want to stick my arm in the meat grinder, that's all," one of them said.
"Ano, ano. Sure," Vaclav said. "If there's a chance, though… Let's see what the Jew tells me."
Halevy came over to the Czechs' tents a couple of hours later. "The French officers say they want to wait two days," he reported.
"How come?" Vaclav asked. "We're ready now, dammit."
"They say they really are bringing stuff up to Laon," the sergeant replied.
"Yeah. And then you wake up," Vaclav said.
Halevy spread his hands. "Do you want to attack without any French support?"
"Well… no," Vaclav admitted. No artillery, no flank cover-sure as hell, that was sticking your arm in the grinder.
"There you are, then," Halevy said.
"Uh-huh. Here I am. Here we are: stuck," Vaclav said. "I'll believe your captains when I see the stuff."
"Between you, me, and the wall, that's what I told 'em, too," the Jew said.
But trains rolled into Laon after the sun went down. Rattles and rumbles and clanks declared that tanks were coming off of them. When morning rolled round again, some of the metal monsters sat under trees, while camouflage nets hid-Vaclav hoped-the rest from prying German eyes.
He asked, "Now that they're here, why don't we attack today instead of waiting till tomorrow?"
Benjamin Halevy shrugged a very French shrug. "If I knew, I would tell you. Even going tomorrow is better than retreating."
"I suppose so," Vaclav said darkly. "But if we attack today, maybe we'll still be advancing tomorrow. If we don't go till tomorrow, we've got a better chance of retreating the day after."
"I'm a sergeant," Halevy said. "What do you want me to do about it?"
Vaclav had no answer for that. A corporal himself, he knew how much depended on officers' caprices. "Tomorrow, then." If he didn't sound enthusiastic, it was only because he wasn't.
The French dignitaries with the power to bind and loose set the attack for 0430: sunup, more or less. The Germans would be silhouetted against a bright sky for a while. That would help-not much, but a little.
At 0400, big guns in back of Laon started bellowing: more big guns than Vaclav had thought the French had in the neighborhood. Maybe they'd moved those up the day before, too. If they had, maybe they'd had good reason to delay the attack till now. Maybe, maybe, maybe… Big, clumsy antitank rifle slung on his back, Vaclav marched north and east, into the rising sun.
WILLI DERNEN WAS SLEEPING the sleep of the just-or at least the sleep of the bloody tired-when the French barrage started. He'd dug a little cave (a bombproof, a veteran of the last war would have called it) into the forward wall of his foxhole. Now he scrambled into the shelter like a pair of ragged claws.
Shells kept raining down: 75s, 105s, 155s. He hadn't known the damned Frenchmen had moved so much heavy stuff into Laon. Life was full of surprises. The big blond private from Breslau could have done without this one.
Somebody not far away started screaming. The other Landser didn't sound hurt, just scared shitless. Willi wouldn't have blamed the other poor bastard if he was. He'd had to chuck his own drawers a couple of times. And he hated artillery fire worse than anything else war brought. While those packages kept coming in, you had no control over whether you lived or died. If one of them burst in your hole, you were strawberry jam, and it didn't matter one goddamn bit if you were the best soldier in your regiment. If you came up against a poilu with a rifle or even a bunch of poilus with rifles, well, hey, you had a rifle, too, and a chance. What kind of chance did you have against some arselick throwing hot brass at you from ten kilometers away? Damn all, that was what.
Poilus were coming. Willi was mournfully sure of that. The froggies wouldn't lay on a bombardment like this without following it up. They might not have been eager when this war started. Eager or not, they were fighting hard now. The Germans had done their damnedest to take France out in a hurry. Their damnedest hadn't been quite good enough. Now it looked like the Frenchies' turn.
Another voice shouted purposefully through the din: "Stand by to repel boarders!"
That had to be Corporal Arno Baatz's idea of a joke. Talk about arselicks… Awful Arno didn't just qualify. He had to be in the running for the gold medal. Every soldier in Willi's section hated Baatz's guts. If the French were going to blow somebody sky-high, why couldn't it be him?
The barrage kept up for what seemed like a hundred years. In fact, it was half an hour. That crazy kike scientist who'd fled the Reich one jump ahead of National Socialist justice had a point of sorts. Everything was relative.
As soon as the artillery let up, Dernen popped out of his hole in the ground like a jack-in-the-box. Awful Arno might be-was-an arselick, but he was bound to be right. The French would be coming.
Willi wouldn't have been surprised if the drastically revised landscape in front of Laon slowed them down. He didn't fancy crossing terrain full of shell holes, some as small as a washtub, others large enough to swallow a truck. You had to pick your way through and past the obstacles. That gave the fellows who'd lived through the barrage a better chance to punch your ticket for you.
"Panzers!" The cry rang out all up and down the German line. Willi's mouth went dry just looking at the armored murder machines. He couldn't remember so many French panzers in the same place at the same time. Sure as the devil, the French high command had finally learned something from the way the Germans handled their armor.