"If they keep promoting me for that, I hope I'm a marshal of France by the time the war's over." Luc poked himself with the needle. "Nom d'un nom!"
He made Demange laugh again, this time in real amusement. "The war may go on a long time, sonny, but it ain't gonna last that long."
"Well, maybe not." Luc chuckled, too. It wasn't a bad line, and a sergeant's jokes automatically seemed funny to the men he led.
German 105s started going off in the distance. Luc looked at his watch. Yes, it was half past two. Those shells would land on a road junction a kilometer and a half to the south. When the Boches weren't trying to pull the wool over your eyes, they could be as predictable as clockwork.
"Dumb cons," Sergeant Demange said with a contemptuous wiggle of his Gitane. "Like we're going to run anything through there at this time of day! What kind of jerks do they think we are?"
"The same kind they are, probably," Luc answered.
"Then they really are dumb," Demange said. "Maybe Englishmen wouldn't notice what they're up to, but we're French, by God! We've got two brain cells to rub together, eh?"
"Most of us do. I'm not so sure about our officers," Harcourt said.
That was safe enough. Any sergeant worth his miserable joke of a salary looked down his nose at the men set over him (privates looked at sergeants the same way, something sergeants tended to forget). And Demange had been a noncom a very long time. "Oh, officers!" he said. "You're right-officers can't find their ass with both hands half the time. But they'll have sergeants to keep 'em from making donkeys of themselves."
"Sure, Sergeant," Luc said, and left it right there. Yes, lieutenants and captains did need sergeants at their elbow. But that said more about their shortcomings than about any great virtues inherent in sergeants. So it seemed to a new-minted corporal, anyhow.
Demange stamped out his cigarette just before the coal singed his lips. Then he lit another one and strode off to inflict himself on somebody else in the platoon.
Luc lit a Gitane of his own. It wasn't as good as Gitanes had been before the war. Everything had gone down the crapper since then. Captured Germans loved French cigarettes, though. Luc knew why, too: their own were even worse. Poor sorry bastards, he thought, puffing away. And what they used for coffee! A dog would turn up its nose at that horrible stuff.
Almost as big as a light plane, a vulture glided down out of the sky and started pecking at something in the middle of the kilometer or so that separated the French and German lines right here. Maybe it was a dead cow or sheep. More likely, it was a dead man. If it was, Luc hoped it was a dead Boche. The Germans had been falling back in these parts, so the odds were decent it was.
Closer to him, blackbirds hopped across the torn-up, cratered dirt with their heads cocked to one side. Plenty of worms out there-and plenty of new worm food, too, even after the vultures ate their fill. The vultures and the blackbirds-and, no doubt, the worms-liked the war just fine.
You could walk around out in the open. Sergeant Demange was doing it. Odds were the Germans wouldn't open up on you. Luc didn't want to play the odds. It would be just his luck to have some eager German sniper itching to test his new telescopic sight right when he decided to take a stroll.
Peeking out of his foxhole, he could see Germans moving around in the distance. That had happened last fall, too. The Boches had stayed very quiet in the west while they were flattening Czechoslovakia. The French had advanced a few kilometers into Germany, skirmished lightly with the Wehrmacht, and then turned around, declared victory, and marched back across to their own side of the border.
When the Wehrmacht marched into France, it didn't dick around. If Luc never saw another Stuka-better yet, if no Stuka pilot ever spotted him again-he wouldn't shed a tear. And, if the war ever ended, he would happily buy drinks for all the Stuka pilots who hadn't spotted him.
Demange came back just before sunset. "Got a job for you, Corporal Harcourt." The stress he gave the rank convinced Luc it would be a dirty job. And it was: "When it gets good and dark, take a squad to the German lines, nab a couple of prisoners, and bring 'em back for questioning. The boys with the fancy kepis want to know what the damned Boches are up to."
"Thanks a bunch, Sergeant!" Luc exclaimed.
"Somebody's gotta do it. I figure you have a better chance to come back than most." After a moment, Demange added, "If it makes you feel any better, I'm coming along. I played these games in the trenches last time around."
Actually, it did make Luc feel better. The sergeant was a handy man to have around in a tight spot. Luc was damned if he'd admit it, though. He rounded up the men he'd been leading since he made PFC: a couple of veterans and the new fish just finding out what the water was like. The news thrilled them as much as it had him.
"Why us?" one of them whined.
"Because you'll get your miserable ass court-martialed if you try and wiggle out, that's why," Luc explained. "Maybe the Germans won't do for you. Your own side? You know damn well they will. Be ready an hour before midnight."
Nobody bugged out before the appointed hour. The French soldiers must have feared their own gendarmerie worse than the Nazis. Sergeant Demange said, "We'll get 'em at the latrine trenches. Easiest way I can think of to nab the sons of bitches. C'mon."
He made it sound easy. Of course, sounding easy didn't mean it was. Luc had already had that lesson pounded into him. They had to make it across no-man's-land without any German sentries spotting them. The night was dark, but even so… Then they had to get past the enemy's forward positions. Luc was sweating enough to let him smell his own fear.
Sergeant Demange, by contrast, took everything in stride. "This is too fucking simple," he whispered as the Frenchmen crawled past the German foxholes. "No ten-meter belts of wire, no continuous trench line… Nothing to it." He sounded affronted, as if he'd expected the Germans to do a better job and wanted to ream them out for being sloppy. Luc wasn't so choosy.
Finding the latrine trenches proved easy enough. Something in the air gave them away. The Germans used lime chloride to keep the stench down, but even that couldn't kill it. Clutching their rifles, the Frenchmen waited in the bushes nearby.
They didn't have to wait long. A yawning Boche ambled over and squatted above a trench. Demange hissed at him in bad German. Luc thought he said he'd blow the Nazi a new asshole if he didn't get over here right now. That made the enemy soldier finish what he was doing a lot faster than he'd expected to. He didn't even try to clean himself. He just yanked up his trousers and followed orders.
"Amis! Amis!" he whispered in equally bad, very frightened French.
"We're no friends of yours. Shut up if you want to keep breathing." After a moment, Luc added, "You stink." Abstractly, he sympathized. He'd stunk worse than this a time or two.
He was just glad the prisoner didn't want to be a hero. That would have shortened everybody's life expectancy. A few minutes later, another German stood at the latrine trench and unbuttoned his fly. Sergeant Demange asked him if he felt like getting circumcised with a bullet. The Boche pissed all over his own boots. After that, he was amazingly cooperative.
"We need more than two?" Luc asked.
"Nah. They asked for a couple, and that's what we'll give 'em," Demange answered. "Now let's get the fuck out of here."
Luc had never heard an order he liked better. The German captives were at least as good at sneaking across broken ground as the poilus herding them along. They didn't let out a peep till they were inside the French lines. They seemed pathetically grateful still to be alive.