Joaquin ground his teeth. Something in his lower jaw twinged. One of these days-if he lived, if he ever got out of the line-he'd have to visit the dentist. He feared that worse than he feared facing the International Brigades. He'd seen a lot of war. He knew what it could do. He'd never been to the dentist. What you didn't know was always scary.
He did know that, if Sergeant Carrasquel ordered no retreat, somebody behind the line would be waiting to shoot him if he tried. Both sides gave troops that duty, to make sure people kept their minds on what they were supposed to be doing. The only trouble was that, while you could call the men in the International Brigades every filthy name in the book, anybody who'd ever bumped up against them-and Joaquin had, along the Ebro-knew they were damn good fighting men.
Between the Devil and a hard place. A rock and the deep blue sea. As Joaquin chambered a round in his old Mauser, he hardly noticed the phrases were all mixed up in his head. He didn't want to look out over the brick pile that had sheltered him from the enemy machine gun. If some rotten Red with a scope-sighted rifle was up on some high ground, waiting to blow his brains out…
A grenade burst, maybe fifty meters in front of him. Something clanged off his brick pile, flipped up in the air, and fell down a few centimeters from his face. It was a bent tenpenny nail. Along with grenades from every country in Europe, both sides used homemade models. A quarter-kilo of explosives, some nails or other metal junk, a tobacco tin if you had one, a blasting cap, a fuse… You could blow yourself up, too, of course, but you could also do that with a factory-made bomb.
Where grenades went off, men wouldn't be far behind. Grenades weren't like machine-gun bullets; they didn't fly very far. Joaquin popped up for a look-and a shot, if he had one. He hated to show himself. Yes, he wore a helmet: a Spanish one, almost identical to the German style. But it wouldn't keep out a rifle bullet. He'd seen much too much gruesome proof of that.
Sure as hell, there was an International, scrambling from one bit of maybe-cover to the next. The fellow had red hair and foxy features. Wherever he came from, he was no Spaniard. Catching sight of Joaquin, he started to bring his rifle to his shoulder.
Too late. Joaquin fired first. The foxy-faced man from God knew where clutched at himself and started to crumple. Joaquin didn't wait to find out whether he was dead or only wounded. Down he went again. Some other hard case from the middle of Europe or across the sea might be drawing a bead on him right now.
Most Spaniards on both sides were lousy shots. Without false modesty, Joaquin knew he wasn't. He had been, but Sergeant Carrasquel cured him of it. Carrasquel was a veteran of the fighting in Spanish Morocco. He knew how to make a rifle do what it was supposed to do: hit what you aimed at. All the survivors in his squad shot well.
And so did the Internationals. Some of them had learned soldiering a generation earlier, in a harsher, less forgiving school than even Spanish Morocco. The younger Reds had picked up their trade from the veterans-and anyone who lived through a few weeks of fighting made an infinitely better soldier than a raw recruit.
Joaquin wriggled like a lizard to find a fresh place from which to shoot. No one before had been watching the rubble pile from which he'd fired. Somebody would be now. He was grimly certain of that. You didn't want to give them two chances at you. For that matter, you didn't want to give them one chance at you. All too often, though, you had no choice.
He raised himself up high enough to see over his new pile of bricks. Once upon a time, this miserable wreckage had housed the department of agriculture. He'd seen a shattered sign that said so. The ruins had changed hands a lot of times since then, though.
Joaquin gasped. There squatted an International, not three meters away. The Red looked just as surprised-and just as horrified-as Joaquin felt. Neither man had had the faintest idea the other was around. They both fired at the same instant. They were both veterans, both experienced fighting men, both presumably good riflemen.
They both missed.
"Fuck!" Joaquin said fervently. He grabbed a broken brick and flung it at the International. The brick didn't miss. It thudded against the other man's ribs and kept him from working the bolt on his French rifle. The fellow said something hot and guttural. Then he jumped down behind Joaquin's rubble pile and tried to stick him with his bayonet.
With a desperate parry, Joaquin drove aside the long knife on the end of the other rifle. He'd learned bayonet fighting. Sergeant Carrasquel made sure you learned everything that had anything to do with soldiering. He'd learned it, but he'd never had to use it before. He knocked the International's feet out from under him with the barrel of his own rifle.
Then they were clawing and grappling and kneeing and gouging, there in the dirt. They were a couple of wild animals, snapping for each other's throats. One of them would get up again, the other wouldn't. It was as simple and mindless as that. In the end, what else did war come down to?
A rifle cracked. It wasn't Joaquin's. When he heard it, he figured it had to be the International's. And if it was, he had to be dead, and hearing the reverberations from the next world. He prayed he would rise to heaven, not sink down to hell.
But the foreigner was the one who groaned and went limp. Hardly believing he could, Joaquin shoved the man's suddenly limp body away from him. He bloodied his hands doing it-a human being held a shocking amount of gore.
There on the ground a couple of meters off to one side sprawled Sergeant Carrasquel, rifle in hand. "You had a little trouble there," he remarked.
"Only a little," Joaquin said, as coolly as he could with his heart threatening to bang its way out of his chest. After a moment, he managed to add, "Gracias."
"De nada," Carrasquel said. "If you would've shot the asshole in the first place, you wouldn't've had to dance with him."
"Dance? Some dance!" Joaquin laughed like a crazy man. Relief could do that to you. Then he lit a cigarette and waited for whatever horror came next. LUC HARCOURT SEWED a second dark khaki hash mark onto the left sleeve of his tunic. He sewed much better now than he had before he got conscripted. Work with needle and thread wasn't something the French army taught you. It was something you needed to learn, though, unless you wanted your uniform to fall apart. You had to make repairs as best you could; the French quartermaster corps was unlikely to minister to your needs.
Sergeant Demange came by. Things were quiet in front of Beauvais, the way they had been on the border before the Germans made their big winter push. Luc wished that comparison hadn't occurred to him. He was proud that the poilus and Tommies had stopped the Nazis at Beauvais and not let them get around behind Paris the way they planned. He was even proud he'd made corporal, which surprised him: he sure hadn't cared a fart's worth about rank when the government gave him a khaki suit and a helmet.
The Gitane that always hung from the corner of Demange's mouth twitched when he saw what Luc was doing. "Sweet suffering Jesus!" he said. "They'll promote anything these days, won't they?"
"It must be so," Luc answered innocently. "You're a sergeant, after all."
You had to pick your spots when you razzed a superior. After he'd just razzed you was a good one. Demange wasn't just a superior, either. He was a professional, old enough to be Luc's father-old enough to have got wounded in 1918. He was a skinny little guy without a gram of extra fat. No matter how old he was, Luc, six or eight centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier, wouldn't have wanted to tangle with him. Demange had never heard of the rule book, and knew all kinds of evil tricks outside of it.
He grunted laughter now, even if it didn't light his eyes. "Funny man! You know what that two-centime piece of cloth is, don't you? It's all the thanks you're gonna get for not stopping a bullet yet."