Hitler's War (65 page)

“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 gunner something to draw a bead on. He knew better now.

“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?’”

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.