Hitler's War (64 page)

Nigel came up and took the other German weapon. Walsh shared ammunition with him. “This is going better than I expected,” the youngster remarked.

“I was thinking the same thing.” In lieu of knocking wood, Walsh rapped his knuckles on his own tin hat. Nigel managed a haggard grin. Walsh gave him a Gitane—what he had—lit one of his own, and tramped ahead again.

He found one German fast asleep on what had been some French
merchant’s bed. The artillery hadn’t wakened him; neither had the Allied infantry assault. Walsh knew just how the poor bugger felt: he’d felt that way himself. He carried away the German’s Mauser and dropped it in the mud. He left the man alone. Without a weapon, the fellow was no threat to anybody. And this would be Allied ground by the time he woke up.

“Damned if it won’t,” Walsh said in tones of wonder. Maybe the generals and even that snot-nosed subaltern knew what they were up to after all. And if they did, wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? Schmeisser at the ready, Walsh pressed on.

GERHARD ELSNER STRODE OVER TO
Ludwig Rothe, who was adding oil to his panzer’s crankcase. “Still running all right?” the company CO asked anxiously—there’d been a lot of wear and tear in the drive across the Low Countries and France.

But Rothe answered, “You bet, Captain.”

“Good. That’s what I want to hear,” Elsner said. “Tomorrow morning we smash them. We go through south of Beauvais—between there and a village called Alonne. Three or four kilometers of open ground. We won’t have to fight in built-up places. That’s what they tell me, anyhow.”

“Here’s hoping they’re right—whoever
they
are. That gets expensive fast,” Rothe said. He turned to his driver and radioman. “But we’ll be ready, right?”

Fritz Bittenfeld and Theo Hossbach both nodded. Then Theo yawned. Everybody was beat. Ludwig was running on looted French coffee and on pills he’d got from a medic. The pills were supposed to keep a dead man going for a day and a half. Ludwig still wanted to hole up somewhere and go to sleep, so he figured he was about two steps worse off than dead.

“This is the breakthrough—
the
breakthrough,” Captain Elsner said.
He ignored the yawn. He was running on nerves and maybe drugs, too, same as everyone else. “We crack the line, we pour through, we wheel around behind Paris, and we make every old fart who remembers 1914 sick-jealous of us. We can do it. We can, and we will.
Heil
Hitler!” His right arm shot up and out.

“Heil
Hitler!” Ludwig echoed. He imitated the Party salute. So did Fritz and Theo. If Theo was a beat late—and he was—Captain Elsner pretended not to see that, too. He was a good officer. He cut some slack for any man who was good in the field, and Theo was. As far as Ludwig was concerned, all the
Heil-ing
was a bunch of
Quatsch
. But you’d get your head handed to you if you said that out loud. The failed coup against the
Führer
left everybody jumpy.

Then Theo stopped being dreamy and asked a sharp question: “When we go in, will we have infantry support?”

“As much of it as there is,” Captain Elsner answered. Panzegrenadiers in half-tracks and trucks could keep up with armor. Ordinary ground-pounders couldn’t. The panzers were supposed to pierce the enemy lines and let the foot-bound infantry pour through after them. Panzers helped infantry enormously. What they’d found out in Czechoslovakia and here in the west, though, was that infantry support also helped panzers. Foot soldiers moving up along with the armor stopped plenty of unpleasant surprises.

The attack was scheduled for 0530. Morning gave attackers the most daylight in which to do what they could. And morning also let the Germans come out of the rising sun, which made them tougher targets. Ludwig approved of that. He knew better than most people how vulnerable his steel chariot was.

As in the attack on Czechoslovakia and the one that launched this campaign, white tapes guided the panzers to their start line in the dark. But this operation wouldn’t be anywhere near so strong. Establishment strength for a panzer company was thirty-two machines. They’d been pretty much up to snuff before. After this grinding campaign across the
Low Countries and France, Captain Elsner’s company had thirteen runners, and it was in better shape than a lot of others.

Well, the enemy’s taken his licks, too
, Ludwig thought. All through the advance, he’d driven past Dutch and Belgian and French and British wreckage. He’d breathed air thick with the smells of death and burnt rubber and scorched paint and hot iron. That stench was in his coveralls now. Not even washing—not that he’d had much chance to wash—got rid of it.

Behind them, the sky lightened. Gray and then blue spread west. Rothe checked his watch. He’d synchronized it with the captain’s before they moved up. Any second now…
Now!
The eastern horizon blazed with light: not the sun, but muzzle flashes from the artillery pounding the
poilus
and Tommies up ahead.

“Get a move on, Fritz!” Ludwig shouted into the speaking tube.

“Right you are, boss!” Bittenfeld put the panzer in gear. Tracks rattling and clanking, it growled forward. Because of the crew’s experience, they took point for their platoon. Ludwig could have done without the honor. The point man commonly discovered trouble by smashing his face against it.

French 75s and occasional 105s answered the German barrage. Ludwig didn’t want to duck down into the turret so soon—he couldn’t see out nearly so well. But, with fragments sparking off the panzer’s side armor, he didn’t want to get sliced up, either. You acquired experience by
not
getting killed.

“They’re alert today,” Fritz remarked.

“They would be,” Ludwig agreed gloomily.

“I’m going to miss the waitress at that
estaminet
in Fouquerolles.” The driver cheerfully mangled the French word and the name of the village where they’d stayed not long before. “Limber as an eel, she was.”

“Can’t you think of anything but pussy?” Ludwig asked, knowing the answer was no.

Machine-gun bullets clattered off the right side of the turret.
“Guten Morgen!”
Theo said from his seat in the back of the fighting compartment.

“I’ll give
them
a good morning, by God!” Rothe said, and then, to Bittenfeld, “Panzer halt!”

“Halting,” Fritz responded, and the Panzer II shuddered to a stop. Ludwig traversed the turret. There was the gun, still spitting bullets. Machine gunners never learned. You could fire at a panzer till everything turned blue, and you still wouldn’t penetrate the armor. Of course, each crew that made the mistake lived to regret it—but rarely for long.

Ludwig fired several rounds from the 20mm cannon. Those would punch through whatever sandbags protected the machine gun. They’d punch through the soldiers serving the gun, too. Sure as hell, it shut up. Maybe the crew was lying low. More likely, those men wouldn’t fire that piece again, not at a panzer and not at horribly vulnerable infantrymen, either.

But Ludwig also saw a burning Panzer II a few hundred meters away. A machine gun couldn’t do for one, but anything bigger damn well could. And if an antitank-gun crew was drawing a bead on this stopped panzer…“Get moving!” Ludwig yipped into the speaking tube.

A 135-horsepower engine wasn’t supposed to be able to throw 8,900 kilos of steel around like a Bugatti at Le Mans. All the same, when Fritz hit the gas the panzer jumped like one of the many barmaids he’d goosed. Ludwig almost got thrown out of his seat.

He spied armored shapes up ahead. Their lines were rounder than those of Germany’s slab-sided panzers. “Get on the horn, Theo,” he said. “Tell the captain the enemy’s got armor in the neighborhood.”

“I’m doing it,” Hossbach said, “but I bet he already knows.”

Elsner hadn’t known when he briefed the company. Maybe one of those French machines had taken out the other Panzer II. They had
more armor and bigger guns than most German panzers—they were easily a match for the Czechs’ tanks.

Well, we beat those
, Rothe thought. The next interesting question was what French armor was doing right at the
Schwerpunkt
here. Was it dumb luck, or had the enemy guessed much too right? If the breakthrough was going to happen, it would have to be a breakthrough indeed. “Panzer halt!” Rothe commanded again.

He fired at the closest enemy panzer. Yes, he was outgunned, but the 20mm could break a French
char’s
armored carapace. The enemy machine caught fire. The crew bailed out. He gunned them down with the coaxial machine gun as they ran for cover. An ordinary machine gun was plenty to kill ordinary soldiers.

“Step on it, Fritz!” he said—not a command in the manual, but also not one easy to mistake. Again, the driver did his best to pretend he was at the Grand Prix.

That might have been why the antitank round slammed into the engine and not the fighting compartment. All three crewmen screamed
“Scheisse!”
at the same time. The panzer stopped. It wouldn’t go anywhere again.

“Get out!” Ludwig yelled. The French or British gunners were bound to be reloading. When they did…He didn’t want to be there.

Theo opened the hatch behind the turret. Then he slammed it shut again. “Fire!” he said.

“Follow me out, then,” Rothe told him. He jumped out the turret hatch on the side away from that deadly round.

Theo and Fritz both made it out after him. Bullets cracking past them said
out
wasn’t the best place to be, not when it was in the middle of a horribly bare field. Ludwig pointed to some bushes a couple of hundred meters away. Crouching low, zigzagging, the panzer crewmen ran for them. Not much of a hope, but some.

Ludwig didn’t understand why he crashed to the ground. Then he did, because it started to hurt. He shrieked and clutched at himself. It
was a bad one. He knew that right away. Then he groaned again, because Fritz went down, too. Damned if Theo didn’t make it to the bushes. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.

“Medic!” Ludwig cried. “Med—” Another bullet caught him, and he didn’t hurt at all after that.

LUC HARCOURT CROUCHED IN A FOXHOLE. ALL
around him, French and German tanks blazed away at one another—and at any poor damned infantrymen their crews happened to spot. He felt like a tiny ratlike ancient mammal stuck in the middle of a horde of battling dinosaurs. They might kill him without even realizing he was there.

Well, he’d had at least some small share of revenge. When a Panzer II started burning, the crew tried to make it out. They escaped the tank, but he shot one of them before the bastard could find a hole and pull it in after himself.

“How many of us did you get, you fucker?” he muttered as he slapped a fresh clip onto his rifle. “You won’t get any more.”

He wanted to huddle there, not moving, not looking up, rolled into a ball like a pillbug so he made as small a target as he could. He wanted to, but he didn’t. If the
Boches
got this far, they’d kill him as easily as if they were squashing a pillbug. What they said in training turned out to be true: your best chance of living was acting like a soldier. He’d thought it was a bunch of patriotic crap when he heard it the first time, but no.

Speaking of crap, his drawers were clean—well, not dirty on account of that, even if he couldn’t remember the last time he changed them. He knew the modest pride of going through fear and coming out the other side. He’d fouled himself before, yes, but not now. Like Sergeant Demange, he was past that…till the next time things got even worse than this, anyhow.

A French tank stopped not far from his hole. The commander
popped out of the cupola like a jack-in-the-box. He pointed at the Germans. “Advance!” he yelled. “If we stop them here, we can break them!” He disappeared again. The tank fired its cannon at, well, something. Luc didn’t pop up himself to see what. The noise all around was worse than loud. It made his brain want to explode out through his ears.

The tank fired again. The machine gun in its bow also banged away—again, Luc couldn’t see what it was shooting at. Then the tank rumbled forward. The commander hadn’t urged him to do anything the man wasn’t willing to try himself. Of course, he had twenty or thirty millimeters of hardened steel shielding him from the unpleasant outside world. But, to be fair, he also had worse things aimed at him than foot soldiers were likely to face.

Still…Advance? It almost seemed a word in a foreign language. The French Army and the BEF had got booted out of Belgium and beaten back across northern France. They’d given up more ground than their fathers (or, more often, their mourned uncles who hadn’t lived to sire children) did in 1914. The Channel ports were lost, which meant the Tommies would have a harder time getting into the fight. Advance? After all that?

If they kept retreating, the
Boches
would win. Luc hated that thought. The Germans were good at what they did. On the whole, they fought clean—or no dirtier than the French. But so what? They were still
Boches
.

He popped up and fired at some Germans. They dove for cover. That was all he’d wanted—they were too far off for him to have much chance of hitting them. But if they were hiding behind trees or digging new scrapes for themselves, they weren’t advancing against the defenders here.

Defenders? That wasn’t one tank commanded by a homicidal—or suicidal—maniac. More French armor was going forward against the troops in field-gray A crew of artillerymen manhandled a 37mm antitank gun into a position a couple of hundred meters farther east than it
had held before. Even khaki-clad infantrymen—no great swarm of them, but some—were climbing out of their holes and trenches and moving toward the
Boches
.

Maybe twenty meters away, Sergeant Demange was watching the show from his foxhole. He looked as astonished as Luc felt. He looked almost astonished enough to let the Gitane fall out of his mouth: almost, but not quite. He caught Luc’s eye. “This is something you don’t see every day,” he shouted. He had to say it two or three times before Luc understood.