Hitler's War (39 page)

Machine guns started stuttering up by the river.
French or German?
Luc wondered, cocking his head to one side to hear better.
Both
, he thought. That wasn’t so good.

Sergeant Demange must have decided the same thing. “Are those shitheads trying to force a crossing?” he growled. “They’d better not get over, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Let’s move!” Luc grabbed his rifle. He liked the idea of Germans on the south bank of the Aisne no better than Demange.

As they hurried up toward the riverbank, they gathered as many other soldiers as they could. Damned if that hash mark on Luc’s sleeve didn’t make ordinary privates follow him without arguing or asking a lot of questions.
I could get used to this
, he thought.

There was smoke on the river: not the ordinary war smoke of burning houses and vehicles, but a thick chemical haze the Germans used to mask what they were doing on the other side. Out of the smoke came black rubber boats paddled by field-gray soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets. Sure as the devil, the
Boches
were trying to get over.

French machine guns stammered out death again. A German dropped his paddle and slumped down in his raft. Then another one got hit, and another. The raft slewed sideways. It was probably leaking, too. German machine guns across the Aisne shot back, trying to silence the French fire. They put out more rounds per minute than the ones the French used, but they couldn’t knock them out of action.

Luc flopped down behind some bushes and started shooting at the Germans in their rafts. It wasn’t fair—they couldn’t shoot back. That bothered him till a couple of machine-gun bullets cracked past maybe half a meter above his head. They cured any chivalrous notions he might have had.

Two or three rubber rafts actually made it to the south bank of the Aisne. The unhurt Germans in them jumped up and tried to set up some kind of bridgehead. With all that French firepower concentrated on them, they never had a chance. Inside of a few minutes, they were all dead or wounded.

“Assholes’ll have to do better than
that,”
Sergeant Demange said, a fresh cigarette in his mouth and a fresh clip on his rifle.

“What else have they got behind that smoke?” Luc asked.

“We’ll know in a few minutes,” Demange answered, sending up
smoke signals of his own. “Looks like it’s blowing away.” He and Luc and the rest of the French defenders waited. Then he said one thing more: “Fuck me.”

The Germans had lined up a couple of dozen tanks—Panzer IIs and captured Czech machines—on the north bank of the Aisne. Their cannon all pointed toward the French positions across the river from them. To Luc’s frightened eyes, it seemed as if every single one of those cannon pointed straight at him.

Every single one of them seemed to open up at the same time, too, pouring shells and more machine-gun bullets down on the French defenders. Luc hugged the ground. His rifle was useless against those steel monsters. The machine gunners fired back at the German armor. He watched tracers fly across the Aisne and ricochets harmlessly spark off the tanks’ armored carapaces.

One by one, the French machine guns fell silent. Luc didn’t think the gunners were lying low, waiting to massacre the next wave of German rubber boats. He thought they were dead. Those cannon weren’t all pointing at him after all. They were pointing at the guns that could do the German assault troops the most harm.

That second wave of boats splashed into the river even while the cannonading went on. The
Boches
hadn’t silenced everything on the south bank: here and there, riflemen and even a machine gun or two opened up on the soldiers who paddled like men possessed.

But now the French didn’t have enough firepower to keep the rubber boats from beaching on the near bank. Luc raised up a little to shoot at the men leaping out of the boats. As soon as he did, a machine gun from one of the tanks on the far bank started banging away at him. He had to flatten out again if he wanted to stay alive.

Some of the German assault troops carried submachine guns with big drum magazines. French doctrine scorned submachine guns. They fired pistol ammunition, and they were worthless out past a couple of
hundred meters. Inside that range, though, they were uncommonly murderous. They threw around a hell of a lot of lead. Even if they didn’t get you, they made you stay down so you couldn’t shoot back.

And the damned
Boches
had brought along real machine guns, too. Hearing that malevolent crackle at such close range made Luc’s asshole pucker. He had to bear down tight on his bladder to keep from wetting himself.

“Back!” Sergeant Demange’s raspy voice penetrated the din. “We’ve got to get out of here, form a line somewhere else!”

“How?” Luc asked, which seemed to him the very best of good questions.

Even through the rattle of the German machine guns, he heard the underofficer laugh. “Carefully, sonny, carefully, unless you aim to get your dick shot off.”

Even thinking of that made Luc want to clutch at himself. He crawled away from the riverbank, doing his best to keep the bushes between himself and the
Boches
. Only a few random bullets came his way. The Germans didn’t seem to know he was there: news good enough to make an atheist thank God.

He flopped down again behind the crest of a small swell of ground that shielded him from the enemy. Sergeant Demange lay a few meters away, still puffing on a cigarette butt. “What do we do?” Luc said. “How do we throw them back into the river?”

“If we can bring a lot of tanks forward in a hurry, that might turn the trick.” Demange stubbed out the cigarette in the dirt. “But what are the odds, eh?”

Luc mournfully considered them. “Not good,” he said. “The Germans always have plenty of tanks where they need them the most. How come we can’t do the same thing?”

“Because their High Command doesn’t fight with its head up its ass,” Demange answered. He rose up to shoot at somebody heading up-slope toward them. A wild scream said he’d hit what he aimed at, too.
Chambering a new round, he went on, “They know it’s the twentieth century, damn them. How come we don’t have any dive-bombers plastering the shit out of them right now?”

Having cowered under more Stukas than he cared to remember, Luc said, “I don’t know, and I wish I did. How come we don’t?”

“If we were fighting the Kaiser’s army, we’d wallop the snot out of it,” Demange replied. “It’s the curse of winning—you get ready to do the same damn thing over again. The Germans lost, so they figured they’d better try something new. Now we’re on the receiving end.”

“Lucky us,” Luc said in hollow tones. Ever so cautiously, he too peered back the way he’d come. The lines on that dark helmet moving through dead grass were unmistakable. He fired. The
Boche
scrambled for cover. Luc fired again. The German went down with a howl. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t dangerous any more, either. That would do.

“Good job,” Demange said. “But we won’t stop them all by ourselves. I wonder if anybody will, this side of Paris.”

PEKING IN SUMMER WAS HOT
and dusty. During the winter, it was colder than a witch’s tit. How cold was that? Marines who’d been in Chicago said it was that cold. Pete McGill could compare it to his native New York City. He’d known some cold weather there, but Peking bottomed out worse.

And Peking would have felt cold even if it were in the nineties. As long as the Marines stayed close to the American legation, they were okay. But if they strayed very far into the city, Japanese soldiers were much too likely to whale the crap out of them.

Like any other Marine, McGill was convinced he was a better fighting man than some little, scrawny, buck-toothed, bowlegged Jap. He was convinced he could take two or three Japs, come to that. But when the odds got steeper still, even John Henry the Steel-Driving Man would have found himself in deep water.

The odds did get steeper, too. Peking was crawling with Japs these days. Some of them kept order in the city. The Japanese way to keep order was to shoot first and not ask questions later. Since Nationalist and Communist guerrillas and freelance bandits all afflicted Peking and the surrounding area, that Wild Wild East style had its points.

But even more Japanese soldiers were getting leave in Peking and then climbing onto trains and heading out of town. Pete would have liked it if the bastards never came back, but that was bound to be too much to hope for. They weren’t going back to Japan—at least, they weren’t heading southeast toward Tangku or Tsingtao, the ports from which they sailed for home.

No, most of them were going northeast on some of the new lines their people had built: up into Manchukuo. That made McGill gloat. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said one day in the NCOs’ club, “but the sorry sons of bitches are heading somewhere colder’n this.”

“Serves ‘em right, sure as hell,” another corporal agreed.

Pete emptied his glass. “Hey, Danny!” he called. “Bring me another beer, chop-chop!”

“Right, boss,” the Chinese bartender said. The beer came from Tsingtao. It was pretty damn good. The Germans had run the place before the Great War, and they’d built a brewery there. Hitler was a bastard, yeah, but the squareheads knew what was what with beer. The brewery was under new management these days, of course, but some of the old magic remained.

When the beer came, Pete tipped Danny a nickel. To a Chinaman, a nickel was a big deal. Danny bowed almost double. He folded one palm over the other fist, which was what the Chinese did instead of saluting.

A sergeant named Larry Koenig came and sat down with Pete. He ordered a beer, too. Danny brought it over to him. Koenig lit a cigarette and offered Pete the pack—he was a good guy. “Thanks,” McGill said. He took one and leaned close for a light.

Raising his mug, Koenig said, “Mud in your eye.”

“Same to you.” Pete answered the salute with one of his own. They both drank. After sucking foam off his upper lip, Pete lifted his mug again and said, “Here’s to all the Japs getting the hell out of Peking.”

“Hey, I’ll drink to that, but you’ll be bluer’n your dress uniform if you hold your breath and wait for it to happen,” Koenig said.

“Yeah, I know. It’d be nice, though, wouldn’t it?” Pete said. “They sure are moving a lot of guys through here—moving a lot of guys out of here.”

“They’ll keep Peking garrisoned, though, you bet. Hell, I would in their shoes.” Koenig looked at his mug in mild surprise, as if wondering how it had emptied without his noticing. He waved to Danny for a refill. As he waited, he went on, “They hang on here, what are the Chinese gonna do about it? Not much, not so I can see.”

“Yeah, man, yeah. Looks the same way to me,” Pete said. With Peking in their hands, the Japanese could spill south and west all over the place. They’d done that for a while after overrunning the place. Now the flow was going in the other direction. “What do they need so many troops up in Manchukuo for?”

“Beats me.” Koenig paused while Danny set the beer on the table in front of him. A lot of Marines didn’t like to talk with Chinamen hovering around them. Pete didn’t know whether Danny was a spy or not. He didn’t much care, either. He didn’t know enough himself to make what he said worth anything to anybody. But if the sergeant wanted to be tight-assed about it, he could. After Danny hustled back behind the bar to build somebody a highball, Koenig resumed: “Gotta be the Russians. I’ve figured it every different way I could, and that’s what it comes out to every goddamn time.”

“You really think so?” Pete said. “That’d be one hell of a scrap.”

“Damn Russians have shit closer to home than Siberia to worry about,” Koenig said. “If it was me, I wouldn’t have started fucking with the Polacks when they knew that was liable to bring Hitler down on their necks.”

“Yeah, old Adolf’s bad news, all right,” Pete agreed. “Me, I wonder how much the Russians really do know these days. They’ve been killing off generals like it’s going out of style.”

“Maybe we ought to try that. I don’t know about the Corps, but it’d sure as hell work wonders for the Army and the Navy,” Koenig said.

Pete snorted. Then he giggled. Then he guffawed. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but he was damn sure it was funny. “I can see the FBI guys coming up to their desks. ‘You—come with us!’ And out they’d go, and—
bang!”

“Plenty of ‘em nobody’d miss,” Koenig said.

“Ain’t it the truth!” Pete nodded. “And you know what else? I bet there hasn’t been an army since Julius Caesar’s day where the noncoms didn’t think it’d go better if some officers got it in the neck.”

“Most of the time we’d be right, too.” Like any sergeant worth his salt, Koenig was sure he knew better than the guys set over him. Since Pete McGill felt the same way, he didn’t argue. Koenig waved for a fresh beer before continuing, “So if the Japs and the Reds bang heads, which way do you bet? My money’s on the white men.”

“Yeah, everybody said the same thing about the time you were born, too, and look how that turned out,” McGill said. Anybody who came to Peking got his nose rubbed in that lesson. You couldn’t come here without paying attention to what had happened in the Russo-Japanese War.

Sergeant Koenig turned red. He waited till Danny gave him his new seidel, then said, “You think the little yellow bastards can take ‘em?” He paid no more attention to the barman than Pete would have.

“I dunno. They’ve sure got more combat experience than the Russians do. Hell, they’ve got more combat experience than just about anybody,” McGill answered. “And it’s way past the back of beyond for the Russians,
and
they’re fighting somewhere else,
and
their army’s fucked up. So yeah, I guess maybe I figure the Japs’ll win.”

“I got a sawbuck says you’re full of it,” Koenig declared.

As far as Pete was concerned, the problems with the Marine Corps started with sergeants, not officers. That attitude would probably change the day he got his own third stripe, but he had it now. Taking a sergeant down a peg would be a pleasure—and so would winning ten bucks. “You’re on,” he said.