Hitler's War (62 page)

He spotted what he thought was the cathedral steeple a moment before Major Bleyle’s voice dinned in his earphones: “Abort! Break off! We’re losing too many planes!”

“Devil take me if I will,” Hans-Ulrich muttered to himself. To Sergeant Dieselhorst, he added, “I have the target. I’m going into my dive.”

“What about Bleyle’s orders?”

“What about ‘em?” Rudel shoved the control column forward. The Stuka’s nose went down. Acceleration slammed him back against the armored seat. Damned if that wasn’t a truck column on the road. Even if this wasn’t Gisors after all—plenty of little French towns had cathedrals—he’d do some damage. He yanked at the bomb-release lever, then pulled up for all he was worth.

In the rear seat, Sergeant Dieselhorst whooped. “What a fireworks show! They must have been hauling ammo!”

“Gut. Sehr gut,”
Hans-Ulrich said. “Officially, of course, I never heard the major’s order to withdraw.”

“What order was that, sir?” Dieselhorst said innocently. Rudel laughed, then grimaced. Ignoring orders, disobeying orders…Once such things started, where did they stop? With trying to overthrow the
Führer
?

But I helped the
Reich
more than I would have by obeying
, he thought. Maybe the conspirators had felt the same way. He shrugged. He was loyal. He knew it. His superiors did, too.

Pretty soon, they’d refill the Stuka’s gas tank and bomb her up again, and he and Dieselhorst would go off and try this again. And, if they came back from that run, they’d do it one more time, and one more after that, till the war was won and they didn’t have to worry about it any more. As long as you looked at things the right way, they were pretty simple.

SOMEBODY KICKED WILLI DERNEN IN
the ribs. He grunted and folded up on himself and tried to go back to sleep. After a few seconds, the German marching boot thudded into him again. He grunted once more, louder this time. Reluctantly, his eyes opened.

“There you go,” Corporal Baatz said. “Time to get moving again.”

“Your mother, Arno,” Dernen said. With great determination, he screwed his eyes shut again.

Arno Baatz kicked him yet again, this time with real malice. He knew just where to put a boot to make it hurt most. Willi wondered how he knew. Had he learned in noncom school along with other bastardry, or maybe from an SS interrogator? Or was it just natural talent? It worked the same any which way. Willi sat up, clutching at the injured part. As with Macbeth, Baatz had murdered sleep. “Get it in gear,” he snapped. “Nobody put you on leave.”

Willi staggered to the bushes to take a leak. He was still yawning when he came back. No one who hadn’t been through a campaign had the faintest notion of how exhausting war was. Some men could get kicked almost to death without waking up, let alone marching. The mechanism simply wore down. Willi wasn’t there yet, but he wasn’t far from that dreadful place.

Maybe breakfast would help. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. He took out his mess tin and advanced on the field kitchen. The cooks spooned the tin full of slop. They called it porridge, but that gave it too
much credit. They took everything remotely edible they could find and boiled it all together in a giant kettle. It ended up tasting the way library paste smelled.

The coffee, by contrast was pretty good. That was because it wasn’t
Wehrmacht
issue. Like the cigarettes the
Landsers
smoked, it was the good stuff, foraged from French farms and villages—and, no doubt, corpses. Wolfgang Storch already had a tin cup’s worth. “You know you’re beat to shit when even this stuff won’t make your heart turn over,” he said sadly.

“Tell me about it,” Willi agreed. He gulped the coffee anyway. He certainly didn’t move slower with it inside him. If he moved any slower, he’d be dead. The stink that fouled what should have been a fine spring morning reminded him how easy dying was these days. The
Wehrmacht
was still pushing forward, so what he smelled were mostly dead Frenchmen. Dead Germans were no sweeter to the nose, though.

Lieutenant Krantz took advantage of having most of his men gathered together. “We have to get through,” the platoon commander said earnestly. “We aren’t as far along as we ought to be. The more we fall behind schedule, the better the chance we give the enemy. If he stops us here, he can reinforce his positions north of Paris. That wouldn’t be good—not a bit.”

A few of the soldiers eating breakfast and smoking managed weary nods. Willi didn’t have the energy. He knew too damned well why they hadn’t come farther or gone faster. Anybody with a gram of sense did. The terrain in the Ardennes sucked, and they didn’t have enough panzers along to punch through the Frenchmen and their friends blocking the way west. Most of the goodies—and most of the air support—went to the right wing, the one punching ahead somewhere to the northwest. The plan had almost worked in the last war. The High Command had decided it just needed to make the fist a little bigger this time around.

And maybe the High Command knew what it was doing, and maybe it had its head up it ass. One reason you fought wars was to find out things like that.

Willi washed out his mess tin and stowed it on his belt. He put on his helmet and picked up his Mauser. The rifle was just over four kilos; it only seemed to weigh a tonne. He couldn’t even sling it. He had to carry it instead—the French were too damned close.

As if to remind him of that, a Hotchkiss machine gun stuttered awake. The malign rattle made his asshole pucker. Somewhere up ahead lay Laon, which the Germans had been bombing and shelling for days. How many French soldiers still crouched in the ruins with rifles and machine guns and grenades—waiting?

“Come on,” Lieutenant Krantz said. “We’ve got to move up, and that damned gun is in the way.”

Well, I’m awake now
, Willi thought as he heaved himself to his feet. Raw terror burned away exhaustion. And anybody who had to stalk a well-sited machine gun—and this one would be, because the Frenchies knew how to play the game, too—made an intimate acquaintance with terror.

Farms in these parts were small. Stone fences separated one from another.
Poilus
lurked behind the fences. Every so often, one of them would pop up and shoot. Or a mortar team would lob a couple of bombs from God knew where. Willi hated mortars. You couldn’t hear the rounds coming till they got right on top of you, which was just exactly too late.

“There!” Wolfgang pointed. The machine gun was firing from a stone farmhouse’s window narrowed to a slit with more building stones. Willi swore under his breath. This one would be a bitch and a half to get rid of. The position was shielded against anything this side of an antitank gun.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Lieutenant Krantz spoke into the radio set a lance-corporal got to lug. Fifteen minutes later, a fellow with a couple of
tanks on his back and a sinister-looking nozzle in his hand came forward. Everyone shied away from him. He didn’t seem to care, or maybe he was used to the response by now.

“Keep them busy, all right?” he said. The German soldiers nodded. You wanted a flamethrower man on your side to succeed, but you felt faintly guilty when he did. Nobody mourned a flamethrower man who got roasted by his own hellish device, either. And Willi had never heard of anyone who managed to surrender with that apparatus on his back.

But that wasn’t his worry, except at one remove. He raised up from behind a boulder and took a shot at the machine gun’s firing slit. He ducked back down as soon as he’d pulled the trigger—and a good thing, too, because the Hotchkiss promptly spat lead his way. The froggies in the farmhouse were mighty alert. Willi hoped the miserable bastard with the flamethrower had his life insurance paid up.

One of his buddies groaned. Somebody else yelled for a medic. If you poked a bear in its den, you were liable to get clawed. The last thing Willi wanted was to rise up again and shoot at the slit. He did it anyway, which proved what a strong thing
Wehrmacht
training was—and, even more, how powerful was his fear of looking bad in front of his squadmates. Without that fundamental fear, nobody could have fought a war.

When he rose up one more time, the muzzle of the Hotchkiss was pointing straight at him. Before the Frenchies could shoot him, though, the flamethrower man used his toy.
Foomp!
Even across several hundred meters, Willi heard the man-made dragon’s noise. Fire engulfed the machine gun and the firing slit—and whoever had the bad luck to be right behind them.

German soldiers whooped. Even so, nobody seemed especially eager to show himself. Maybe more Frenchmen had dragged their charred friends away from the trigger and were waiting to give optimists or fools—assuming there was a difference—a nasty surprise.

The flamethrower man solved that problem. He crawled right up to the farmhouse, stuck his nozzle into the firing slit, and…
Foomp!
He cocked his head to one side, as if listening. Then he waved.
No more trouble here
, the gesture said.

Willi still wasn’t enthusiastic about standing up, but he did. The soldiers trotted forward as smoke rose from the farmhouse. The breeze came out of the west, as it commonly did. Willi’s nose wrinkled. Along with woodsmoke, he caught the reek of burnt meat. The flamethrower had done its job, all right.

Even so, nobody wanted much to do with the fellow who carried it. He stood there, a little more smoke trailing from the snout of his infernal machine. Again, he didn’t seem particularly surprised or disappointed. Well, why would he? How many times had he seen this same response by now?

Lieutenant Krantz pointed toward Laon. His officer’s whistle squealed. “Come on!” he yelled. “Not far now! Follow me!”

An officer who said that made his troops want to do it. All the same, the infantrymen hesitated. That rattling clatter out of the east, getting louder now…“Panzers!” Willi said in delight.
“Our
panzers!” He hadn’t seen many of them.

These two little Panzer Is were no more than mobile machine-gun nests. Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot, though. Both panzer commanders stood up in their turrets. They waved to the foot soldiers, who returned the compliment. “Come with us,” one of the men in black coveralls shouted over engine noise. “Keep the French pigdogs away.”

“And you keep them away from us,” Lieutenant Krantz said. The panzer commander who’d spoken before nodded. Everybody needed help now and then.

Willi loped along to the left of the panzers. A French machine gun fired at them, which was stupid. Its bullets couldn’t hurt them. One of the panzers crushed the sandbagged position, turning back and forth
and round and round on top of it to make sure nothing in there survived.

Then a rifle of a sort Willi hadn’t heard before went off—a big boom that would have set anyone’s teeth on edge. What followed wasn’t the ping of a ricochet, either. That round punched clear on through the baby panzer’s thin frontal armor. The machine kept going in a straight line till it rammed a big oak and stopped.
Driver’s hit
, Willi realized. German had antitank rifles, too, but you didn’t expect to run up against one right after you’d finally picked up some armor.

War wasn’t what you expected. It was what you got. What the surviving panzer got was out of there. Its crew knew that antitank rifle could do for them, too. And it did. Two rounds into the engine compartment turned the panzer into an immobile machine-gun nest. “We go on regardless,” Lieutenant Krantz declared. Willi was still willing to advance. Able? He’d just have to see.

V
aclav Jezek sprawled behind a chunk of chimney that a shell hit had detached from a nearby house. He chambered another round in his antitank rifle and waited. The crew of that disabled Panzer I wouldn’t stay inside long. A hit from any kind of artillery would mangle them and torch them at the same time. A couple of more hits from the antitank rifle might set the tank on fire.

Sure enough, the commander clambered out of the turret. The Czech was ready. Despite a muzzle brake and a padded stock, the antitank rifle slammed his shoulder when he pulled the trigger. He’d already seen that, although these 13mm armor-piercing rounds weren’t designed to kill mere human beings, they did one hell of a job. The German in black coveralls never knew what hit him. He tumbled off the tank and lay still.

The driver was sneakier, or maybe smarter. He scuttled out and kept the tank’s carcass between him and Jezek till he bolted for some trees. Jezek shot at him, too, but missed. “Shit!” he said in disgust.

Sergeant Halévy had dug himself a foxhole a few meters away, and
fronted it with bricks and stones from the ruined house. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar,” he said. “You did what you were supposed to do. Neither one of those tanks’ll bother us any more.”

“Fuck it,” Vaclav said. “I should have finished the other cocksucker, too.”

“You can’t kill all of them by yourself,” the Jew said. “Remember, you’ve got to leave some for me.”

“Heh,” Jezek said. Before the shooting started, he’d had doubts about how well Jews would fight. Yeah, Hitler was giving them a hard time, but they were still Jews, weren’t they? Once they had rifles in their hands, they seemed to do just fine.