Hitler's War (30 page)

Hitler came over to the Panzer II. Automatically, Ludwig saluted. The other crewmen echoed the gesture a beat later. The
Führer
returned the salutes. “Is everything all right here?” he asked. Up close, his voice was even more resonant, even larger than life, than it was over a microphone in a stadium or on the radio.

“Y-Yes, sir,” Ludwig managed. “Just routine repairs. We’ll be at ‘em again soon.” He felt dizzy, half drunk. Talking to Adolf Hitler! He would
remember this day for the rest of his life, even if he lived to 112. (Having seen what happened to front-line fighters here and in Czechoslovakia, he knew how unlikely that was. He knew, but he didn’t dwell on it. He tried not to, anyhow.)

“Your fuel pump giving you trouble?” the
Führer
asked.

Theo’s eyes bugged out all over again. Ludwig Rothe’s did the same thing this time. “How the devil did you know
that
, sir?” he blurted.

One of the big SS men guarding Hitler growled like an angry Rottweiler. But the
Führer
only chuckled. “I get reports. I read them. I remember them,” he answered. “That’s the most common failing on the Panzer II. I have had a few things to say to the Maybach people about it. An improved model is now in production.”

“Good. Very good.” Ludwig wondered what had happened to the people responsible for the current piece of junk. Maybe he was better off not knowing.

“We will use it to go on to victory,” Hitler continued. A lock of hair flopped down over his forehead. He brushed it back with a gesture so automatic, he must have used it thousands of times. “We will!” he insisted. “Victory may be coming a little more slowly than some of the poison dwarfs back in Berlin believe, but it is no less sure on account of that.”

Several of the LAH bodyguards growled this time.
Wehrmacht
men called the
Waffen-SS
asphalt soldiers, but Ludwig wouldn’t have wanted to mess with any of these guys. “I’m sure of it,
mein Führer,”
he said, not because that was the thing to say but because he really believed it.

Maybe Hitler sensed as much. Or maybe, once the
Führer
got rolling, he was no easier to stop than a river. “Victory
is
sure!” he thundered, as he might have on the radio. “And the mad mongrels and traitors who tried to stop the
Reich
from gaining it have got what they deserved. Oh, yes! That they have!” His eyes blazed.

The only trouble was, Ludwig didn’t know what he was talking about. “Sir?” the sergeant said.

One of the
Leibstandarte
men murmured warningly The fellow
wore what would have been a major’s shoulder straps if he were in the
Wehrmacht
, but the SS had its own weird set of ranks. Major or whatever the hell he was, the
Führer
ignored him. “Some of those pigdogs—fancy aristocrats and even a few military men, I’m sorry to say—thought they could run the country better than I am doing it. Well, the ones who are left alive are seeing how they like the arrangements at Dachau.”

“Mein Führer—”
the SS officer said urgently.

“
Ja
, Jens,
ja
.” Hitler sounded—indulgent? He turned back to the panzer crew. “Do not gossip about this,
bitte
. We have not said anything in the papers or on the radio. We do not want the enemy to know there is even so much as a mustard seed’s worth of dissension in the
Reich
. You are good fellows—I can see that. I’m sure you won’t blab.”

“Of course not,
mein Führer,”
Ludwig said quickly. Fritz and Theo also stammered out reassurances. Rothe had never imagined he would end up knowing a state secret. By the way that officer was looking at him, the
Waffen-SS
man thought he would be better off dead.

“That’s what I thought,” Hitler said. He caught the officer’s eye again. “Don’t give them any trouble—you hear me? They said they’d keep quiet, and I expect they meant it. Unless you’re sure—and I mean sure—they didn’t, leave them alone.”

“Jawohl, mein Führer,”
the LAH man said. The look he gave Rothe and the other panzer men shouted that he still wanted to dispose of them. But he didn’t look as if he had the nerve to go against Hitler’s direct order. Who in his right mind would?

“All right.” Hitler nodded to Ludwig, then to his driver and radioman. “I hope you stay safe, my friends. I know it’s warm work, but it needs doing. Fight hard!” He nodded again, then stumped away, his retinue all around him.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
Fritz whispered.

“Somebody pinch me. I think I’m dreaming,” Theo said, also in a low voice. That amounted to about the same thing.

“He’s…something.” Ludwig heard the awe in his own voice. He tried to imagine why anyone would move against the
Führer
. True, the war wasn’t won yet, but Germany was still moving forward, and a lot faster than she had the last time around. What was wrong with that?

Plainly, the traitors had paid for their folly. Dachau…Rothe’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. If half what he’d heard was true, the plotters who’d got killed outright might have been the lucky ones.

L
uc Harcourt was alive. That was all he knew, all he cared about. He’d seen more war than he ever wanted to meet. He’d smelled blood and pus and death and his own shit in his pants. Nobody’d ever ragged him about that. He knew damn well he wasn’t the only one.

This ruined barn was a good place to grab a cigarette. What was left of the walls kept a German sniper from drawing a bead on him and punching his ticket. He sucked in harsh smoke, held it as long as he could, and finally let it out again.

“Man,” he said, and paused for another drag. “I never wanted a smoke this much when I was a civilian.”

“Not even after a fuck?” Sergeant Demange had a cigarette between his lips, too, but then he always did.

“Not even then,” Luc said. “Then I like it. Yeah, sure—but of course. But there’s a difference between liking a smoke and really needing one, you know what I mean? When the bastards are trying to kill you, a cigarette’s all you’ve got.”

“Well, not quite,” Demange shook his canteen so it sloshed. “What do you have in here?”

“Pinard,”
Luc answered. The cheap, nasty red wine was nonregulation, but it was also less likely than water from God knew where to give you the runs. You couldn’t very well get lit on a liter of
pinard
, either. “How about you, Sergeant? What do you have?”

“Calvados,” Demange said proudly. “That’ll put hair on your balls, by God.”

“Boy, will it ever,” Luc said. The apple brandy of northern France was liquid dynamite. He hoped the sergeant would offer to share, but Demange didn’t. Demange was for Demange, first, last, and always. Luc didn’t resent it the way he might have from someone more hypocritical about it.

Paul Renouvin said, “Calvados?
C’est rien.”
He didn’t look like a college man any more. He was as scrawny and filthy and ragged and unshaven as any of the other soldiers in the barn.

But he still knew how to get under Demange’s skin. The sergeant jerked as if all of his lice had bitten him at once. “Nothing, is it, asshole? Well, what the devil have you got that’s better? Whatever it is, it better be good, or I’ll whale the living shit out of you.” Renouvin was ten centimeters taller and a good bit heavier. Luc would have bet on Demange every time.

Paul caressed his canteen as if it were a beautiful woman’s bare tit. “Me? I’ve got scotch,” he murmured.

“Why, you lying prick!” Demange said. “Scotch, my left one! Where would a no-account cocksucker like you get scotch?”

“Off a dead Tommy officer,” Renouvin answered calmly. “Good stuff, too.”

“Tell me another one. You think I was born yesterday? You think I fell off the turnip truck?” The sergeant pointed to the canteen. “Give me a taste of that. Right now, too. If it isn’t scotch, I’ll tear your ears off and shove ‘em down your throat.”

“But what if it is?” Renouvin asked.

Rage made Demange reckless. “If it is—fat chance!—you can have all my applejack.”

“You heard him, boys,” Paul said. Luc and the other
poilus
nodded. Why not? This was the best sport they’d had in a while. Luc forgot about the cold and the dirt and the fear. He forgot about the battery of 75s banging away not far from the barn, even if they were liable to bring German artillery down on everybody’s head before too long. He watched Renouvin open the canteen and pour a little of the contents into the screw-on cap. With elaborate ceremony, Renouvin passed the cap to Demange. “Here you go, Sergeant.
Salut.”

“If you’re trying to get me to drink piss, you’ll fucking die—I promise you that,” Demange said suspiciously. He sniffed at the cap before he drank from it. Luc watched his face, but those ratlike features gave nothing away. Like a man moving in a dream, the sergeant sipped.

He didn’t say anything for more than a minute. He just sat there motionless, even the perpetual cigarette in the corner of his mouth forgotten. Then, without any particular rancor, he said, “You
son
of a bitch.” He flipped the cap to Renouvin, who put it back on the canteen. And Demange handed him his own canteen. “Here. Choke on it.”

“We’ll all choke on it—and then on the scotch. How’s that?” Paul said. He swigged from the Calvados, then passed it along.

Luc thought that was mighty smart—not university-smart, maybe, but soldier-smart for sure. A man who had both scotch and applejack was a man who made his buddies jealous. A man who shared them made friends for life—or at least till one of the other guys got his hands on something nice.

Two big knocks of good, strong booze. Shelter from the winter weather. A soldier’s life could be simple sometimes. A few tiny pleasures, and everything seemed wonderful.

The next morning, replacements came up to the front. Luc eyed them with mingled suspicion and contempt. They were too pale, too neat, too plump. They carried too much equipment. Their uniforms weren’t dirty and torn. Their noncoms hardly knew how to swear.

“Poor darlings!” someone jeered. “Someone forgot to lock the nursery, and look where they ended up.”

A shell burst half a kilometer away. Some of the new fish flinched. That made Luc want to start laughing. “They have to come closer than that to hurt you,” he said. “Don’t worry—they will.”

A lieutenant as young and unweathered as his troops pointed an angry finger at him. “Where is your superior, soldier?” he snapped.

“I guess I’m him…sir,” Sergeant Demange said, the usual Gitane bobbing in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “What do you need?”

He was grimy and unshaven. He looked as if he’d killed better men than that baby lieutenant—and he had. The officer had the rank, but Demange had the presence. Luc watched the lieutenant’s bravado leak out through the soles of his boots. “Tell that man to be more respectful,” he managed, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Sure,” Demange said, and then, to Luc, “Be more respectful, you hear?”

“Sorry, Sergeant.” Luc went along with the charade.

“There you go, sir,” Demange said to the lieutenant. “You happy now?”

Plainly, the lieutenant wasn’t. Just as plainly, being unhappy wouldn’t do him one goddamn bit of good. Demange’s attitude and graying stubble said he’d fought in the first war, while the lieutenant hadn’t done much fighting in this one yet. His tongue slid across the hairline mustache that darkened the skin just above his upper lip, but he didn’t say anything more. He just kept on walking.

More German shells came in. Maybe the
Boches
were probing for that battery of 75s. Whatever they were doing, those rising screams in
the air said this salvo was trouble. “Hit the dirt!” Luc yelled. He was already flat by the time the words came out. Several other veterans shouted the same thing—also from their bellies.

Bam!
He felt as if a squad of Paris
flics
were beating on him with their nightsticks. Blast picked him up and slammed him back down again. “Oof!” he said—he came down on a rock that would bruise his belly and just missed knocking the wind out of him. Jagged fragments whined overhead. Several of them spanged off the barn’s stone wall. One drew a bloody line across the back of Luc’s hand. What he said then was worse than
Oof!

More shells landed a couple of hundred meters away, and then more farther off still. Luc opened and closed his hands a couple of times. All his fingers worked—no tendons cut. Only a scratch, as these things went. It still hurt like blazes, though.

Cautiously, he raised his head. When he did, he forgot about his own little wound. One or two of the German shells had come down right by—maybe even among—the raw troops. They didn’t know anything about flattening out. You could scream at them, but they needed a few seconds to get what you were saying and a few more to figure out what they should do.

All of which added up to a few fatal seconds too long.

Some of the soldiers were still standing. More were on the ground now—men and pieces of men. The air was thick with the stink of blood, as it might have been after explosions in a slaughterhouse. This wasn’t quite that. This was explosions that produced a slaughterhouse.