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Airplanes swooped low over the battlefield, machine guns yammering. Luc had started to move, but froze again, not that that would do him any good if those probing bullets found him.
They didn't. The fighters weren't Messerschmitts. They were English Hurricanes, the roundels on their broad wings looking inside out to Luc because the red was in the center instead of the blue. And they were shooting up the Germans.
"See how you like it, cochons, salauds!" he whooped joyously. He'd been on the other end of strafing too many times. Here as so many other places in war, it was better to give than to receive. Now…Did the English have anything like the Stuka, so they could really give the Germans what-for?
They didn't seem to, but maybe what they did have was enough. The Boches enjoyed air attack no more than anybody else. Only a few of them ran-they were good troops. But it took the starch out of them just the same. And, a moment after the Hurricanes roared away, a French tank knocked out what had to be the enemy's command vehicle. From then on, the few German tanks still moving didn't work together so smoothly any more.
"Come on!" Sergeant Demange said again, more urgently this time. "It was like this in the summer of '18, too. If we hit 'em a good lick, we'll get 'em." We'll get 'em-on les aura. The slogan from the last war should have seemed as dated as ground-scraping skirts. Somehow, it didn't.
Luc scrambled out of the shell hole and trotted forward. Sure as hell, the Germans were pulling back. Yes, they were pros. They had rear guards with machine guns to make sure nobody chased them hard. But they were pulling back. They weren't breaking through. They wouldn't break through. And if they wouldn't, they wouldn't win the war in a hurry. What would happen once they saw that, too? Luc lit a Gauloise. That was their worry, not his. He kept on advancing.