Hitler’s War

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 outgu

"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 gu

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 ca

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 Cha

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.

"It sure is," Luc answered. "Do you want to join the party?" Were he a new fish, he would have waved-and given a German sniper or machine gu

"Do I look that fucking stupid?" Demange said. Luc wanted to tell him yes, but didn't have the nerve. Sure as the devil, a sergeant who scared you more than the Boches did wasn't the worst thing to have around. Then the veteran didn't just surprise Luc: he flabbergasted him. He scrambled from his foxhole and scurried toward a crater a bursting 105 had dug. As soon as he got there, he called, "Somebody's got to do it, right?"

No doubt somebody did. Luc wondered whether one of the somebodies had to be him. Regretfully, he decided he couldn't hang back when even a cold-blooded pragmatist like Demange was advancing.

Coming up out of a hole felt like a snail shedding its shell and turning into a slug. Luc grimaced and shook his head as he ran for a crater of his own. No, he didn't want to think about slugs, not when the lead variety were snarling all over the place.

His dive into the shell hole would have won no worse than a bronze at the last Olympics. Luc shook his head again. Those were Hitler's games, and to hell with him.

Time for another look around. German and French tanks burned nearby. The thick black smoke that rose from them hid the field as well as any barrage of smoke shells German artillery laid down.

Luc fired at another Boche. Again, he had no idea whether he hit him. In a way, that wasn't so bad. One less fellow on his conscience. He wished that particular organ had a switch he could flick or a plug he could pull. He didn't like to think about all the things he'd done, but sometimes they bubbled up whether he wanted them to or not.

"Come on!" Sergeant Demange rasped. "What did that American Marine say in the last war? 'Do you want to live forever?'"