"We use planes and tanks to help infantry," Walsh said. "We do when we've got 'em, any road."
"That's different," Jock insisted. "It's not sneaky-like, the way a submarine is." Soobmahreen-the broad Yorkshire vowels turned the word into something that might have been found in a barn. (People who talked as if they were doing their best to sound like BBC newsreaders thought Walsh's Welsh vowels sounded pretty funny, too. Over the years, he'd had to punch a couple of them in the nose. If they didn't twit him too hard, though, he just ignored them.)
"I expect we'll sink the surface raider sooner or later, and we dealt with the U-boats in the last war. We can do it again," Walsh said.
"Aye-but the cost! All them drowned sailors!" Jock said. "Hundreds of men on a cruiser, and not many left alive after three went down."
"It's a bastard," Walsh agreed. It wasn't as big a bastard as Jock thought it was, though. England had taken 50,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 dead… for a few square miles of cratered, poisoned mud that weren't worth having to begin with. Walsh hadn't been in the army yet in 1916. If he had, he probably would have been there. And if he'd been there, he probably wouldn't be here now.
"We've got to do something about them buggers, we do," Jock said, as if Walsh would know exactly what that something was. Maybe Jock thought he did. Common soldiers often seemed to think staff sergeants knew everything.
Staff sergeants sometimes thought they knew everything, too. When it came to dealing with common soldiers, they did, or near enough. When it came to setting Hitler's mustache on fire… "I'm open to suggestions," Walsh said dryly.
Before Jock could give him any, a German machine gun stuttered to hateful life. Things had been quiet lately. That made the short, professional bursts even scarier than they would have been otherwise. Three French machine guns started spraying the German lines a few seconds later. One of the froggies was also a professionaclass="underline" three rounds, pause, three rounds, pause, four rounds, pause. The other Frenchmen plainly didn't care how many gun barrels they burned through.
Walsh didn't get excited about the machine guns. He and Jock weren't out in the open. Machine guns could have kept banging away till doomsday without endangering them in the least. Then somebody threw a French grenade. Maybe a poilu saw Germans coming. Maybe he just imagined he did.
Any which way, the bursting grenade seemed to give the Landsers a kick in the arse the French machine guns hadn't. Something came down out of the sky with a whispering whistle and blew up with a bang much bigger than a hand grenade.
"Oh, bugger!" Walsh said. "Down, Jock!" He dove for the dirt himself. When the damned Boches started throwing mortars around, things stopped being fun. You could hide from machine guns. Not a thing you could do about mortars except pray one didn't land in your hole.
"I am down," Jock answered. So he was-he was flat as a swatted fly. The smell and taste of mud filled Walsh's mouth and nose. Mud was one of the characteristic smells of war, along with cordite, shit, and rotting meat.
French and English mortars answered the stubby little German guns. The French 75s behind the lines started tearing up the German trenches. Naturally, the Fritzes responded in kind. Both sides pounded away with everything they had.
"Fucking idiots!" Jock said. Fooking idjits, it came out, which made it sound all the more idiotic.
Walsh nodded without raising his head. Some bored German lieutenant had probably told the Feldwebel heading a machine-gun crew to squeeze off a couple of belts and make the fellows in the far trenches keep their heads down. And the Feldwebel, no doubt as bored as the officer, would have answered, "Zu befehl, mein Herr!" and told the Gefreiter who actually did the work to start shooting. And the Gefreiter would have said, "Jawohl!" and done as he was told, too.
And then, till somebody got tired of it, both sides would try their best to create hell on earth.
Their best, these days, was much too good. Nobody'd used gas yet, not so far as Walsh knew. That was the only thing from the last war's menu still missing in this one. Walsh peered out from behind the rubble of what had been some middle-class French family's house till a few months-perhaps a few weeks-before. He must have looked like a helmeted, submachine-gun-carrying khaki marmot popping out of its hole to make sure no helmeted, rifle-carrying field-gray wildcats were trying to sneak up on it. He didn't see any Germans scrambling forward. That only further convinced him the Fritzes hadn't had anything special in mind when they opened up with the MG-34. Just because you weren't looking for trouble didn't mean you wouldn't find any, of course.
While he spotted no enemy soldiers, he did see a skinny gray-and-white cat daintily picking its way through the wreckage where it must have lived till war turned everything inside out. It paused, staring at him with eyes green as verdigris. It still wore a bell on a collar, which couldn't have made hunting any easier. "Mrrow?" it said, and yawned, showing off needle teeth.
How did you call a cat in French? Walsh had no idea. He did what he would have done back in Blighty: he snapped his fingers, showed the cat his open hand palm-up, and went "Puss, puss, puss!" as persuasively as he could.
"Mrrow?" the cat said again. It might have been more suspicious if it were less hungry. It trotted toward him, stopping just out of reach. Walsh left his hand where it was. The cat stepped forward, sniffed, considered, and then rubbed against him. It started to purr. He'd passed whatever test it set him.
"Puss, puss, puss!" Walsh said again. He ducked down-he didn't want to give some sniper in a coal-scuttle helmet time enough to punch his ticket for him. The cat jumped into the hole with him and Jock.
Walsh scratched it behind the ears and under the chin. Purring louder, it stropped itself against his boot. "What'll you do with the sorry bugger?" asked Jock, he might have suddenly discovered Walsh was addicted to opium, or perhaps to unnatural vice.
"I'll give it something to eat. It looks like it could use a bite," the sergeant answered. "After that? Well, who knows? If it wants to stick around for a while, I don't mind. Why? Have you got something against cats?"
"Don't much fancy 'em," Jock said. Then he shrugged. A superior's vagaries weren't for the likes of him to question. "However you please, though."
"Let's see what it thinks of bully beef." Walsh opened a tin with his bayonet and put it on the ground in front of the cat.
Jock made a face. "Bugger has to be fuckin' starving if it'll stuff itself on that damned monkey meat."
Walsh smiled. Monkey meat was a straight translation of singe: what the Frenchies called tinned beef. Walsh wondered whether Jock knew that. He would have bet against it; even English often seemed a foreign language to the Yorkshireman.
As for the cat, it didn't care what you called the meat. It advanced, sniffed, and fell to without the slightest trace of feline fussiness. As it ate, it purred much louder than it had while Walsh scratched it. The tin held four ounces. By the way the cat emptied it, the beast might have disposed of four pounds of monkey meat just as eagerly.
"It must be hungry," said Walsh, whose opinion of bully beef was no higher than Jock's-or anyone else's.
After it had emptied the tin and got the inside shiny clean, the cat licked its chops. It licked its left front paw and meticulously washed its face. Then it cocked a hind leg in the air and started licking its privates. That deep, contented purr rose once more.