Hitler’s War

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.

Vaclav 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 Halevy 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.

"You'd better dig in," Halevy said. "If the tanks couldn't do for us, they'll see how the artillery works."

Without raising his head, Vaclav pulled the entrenching tool off his belt and started scraping out a foxhole of his own. Halevy knew how the Germans operated, all right. Even now, some junior officer with a radio or a field telephone was probably talking to his regimental HQ, telling the gu

And he'd get that artillery fire, too. The Germans were mighty damn slick about such things. Vaclav had seen as much in Czechoslovakia and here in France. They wouldn't have been half so dangerous if they weren't so blasted good at what they did.

He wondered how good the defenders were. Czechs, Frenchmen, Belgians driven back from their own country, Englishmen, Negro troops from some colony or other…Whatever the French marshals didn't urgently need somewhere else seemed to be jammed into a military sausage around Laon. Now if the casing didn't split and spill soldiers all over everywhere…

Sure as hell, here came the guns. Huddling in his scrape, Vaclav wished it were twice as deep, or even four times. He hated artillery more than anything else. German infantry made a fair fight. You could even face panzers. His monster rifle helped even the odds. But what could you do with artillerymen? Hope your own side's guns slaughtered them-that was all. It didn't seem enough.

Most of the shells were long-not very long, but Jezek took whatever he could get. If the troops a little farther back had hell coming down on their heads, he didn't. He could think of plenty of times when the Nazis' artillery had been right on target.

As soon as the shelling stopped, he came up out of his trench ready to fight. The Germans counted on stu

"We can do it!" Sergeant Halevy shouted in Czech. Then he said what was probably the same thing in French. In Czech, he went on, "They've got to be at the end of their tether. If we stop them, they're really stopped."

How could he know that? Nobody in the middle of a battle knew a damn thing. It sure sounded good, though.

The Germans came forward. Vaclav had known they would. They were bastards, but they were brave bastards. And they exposed themselves as little as they could, which made them smart bastards.

No new panzers rolled up, for which he thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing. He wasn't thrilled about using the antitank rifle as an oversized sniper's piece-the fight with the French quartermaster sergeant lingered painfully in his memory-but he wasn't thrilled about getting killed in his hole, either.

He could, literally, have killed elephants with this rifle. Knocking over a few Nazis while they were still a long way off would make the rest go to ground and not move forward so fast. It would also make him wish some quartermaster sergeant could issue him a new shoulder, but that was one more thing he'd worry about later.

It worked out just the way he'd hoped. That stood out, because it happened so rarely in this war. He hit two Germans with four shots, which slowed the rest of them down to an amazing degree. Then, of course, the antitank rifle's loud roar and big blast of fire from every round drew the enemy's concentrated attention. Ordinary Mausers weren't especially accurate out close to a kilometer off, but they made him keep down. And he could have done without the machine gun probing for him.

He really could have done without the mortar bombs that started raining down on the Allied front. They did their best to make up for the artillery's poor performance. If one of them landed in your hole, you were dead, because you couldn't do anything about it.

But then, for a wonder, Allied-probably French-mortars closer to Laon opened up on the Germans. So did a couple of batteries of 75s that had stayed quiet and hidden up till now. Those 75s were weapons from the last war, and outclassed these days-which didn't mean they couldn't kill you if they got the chance.

The German mortars quit firing, quite suddenly. Thus encouraged, Vaclav stuck his head up-and plugged a soldier in field-gray who'd made the mistake of coming out from behind the dead cow he'd been using for cover. Jezek ducked down again right away. A good thing, too, because nothing had taken out that German machine gun. It sent a long, angry burst after him.

"Fuck me!" Sergeant Halevy called from his nearby hole. "Maybe we really will stop these assholes." He hadn't believed it before, then. Well, who could blame him? Vaclav hadn't believed it, either. He still wasn't sure he did.

More French troops came up to join the ragtag and bobtail on the front line. They wore khaki instead of the last war's horizon blue, but their uniforms still looked old-fashioned next to those the enemy wore. Still and all, Jezek wasn't inclined to fuss. Old-fashioned or not, they were here and they were shooting at the Germans. What more could you want?

And the Germans themselves weren't what they had been when the war broke out. They remained consummate professionals, and he'd remembered a moment before how brave they were. But they were also flesh and blood. They were every bit as worn out and ragged as the Allied troops they faced. It was like the later rounds of a championship prize fight. Both sides were bloodied, both half out on their feet, but they kept slugging away. The prize here was even sweeter than money. This fight was for power.