The War That Came Early: West and East (10 page)

Sergeant Demange came by. Things were quiet in front of Beauvais, the way they had been on the border before the Germans made their big winter push. Luc wished that comparison hadn’t occurred to him. He was proud that the
poilus
and Tommies had stopped the Nazis at Beauvais and not let them get around behind Paris the way they planned. He was even proud he’d made corporal, which surprised him: he sure hadn’t cared a fart’s worth about rank when the government gave him a khaki suit and a helmet.

The Gitane that always hung from the corner of Demange’s mouth twitched when he saw what Luc was doing. “Sweet suffering Jesus!” he said. “They’ll promote anything these days, won’t they?”

“It must be so,” Luc answered innocently. “You’re a sergeant, after all.”

You had to pick your spots when you razzed a superior. After he’d just razzed you was a good one. Demange wasn’t just a superior, either. He was a professional, old enough to be Luc’s father—old enough to have got wounded in 1918. He was a skinny little guy without a gram of extra fat. No matter how old he was, Luc, six or eight centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier, wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with him. Demange had never heard of the rule book, and knew all kinds of evil tricks outside of it.

He grunted laughter now, even if it didn’t light his eyes. “Funny man! You know what that two-centime piece of cloth is, don’t you? It’s all the thanks you’re gonna get for not stopping a bullet yet.”

“If they keep promoting me for that, I hope I’m a marshal of France by the time the war’s over.” Luc poked himself with the needle.
“Nom d’un nom!”

He made Demange laugh again, this time in real amusement. “The war may go on a long time, sonny, but it ain’t gonna last
that
long.”

“Well, maybe not.” Luc chuckled, too. It wasn’t a bad line, and a sergeant’s jokes automatically seemed funny to the men he led.

German 105s started going off in the distance. Luc looked at his watch. Yes, it was half past two. Those shells would land on a road junction a kilometer and a half to the south. When the
Boches
weren’t trying to pull the wool over your eyes, they could be as predictable as clockwork.

“Dumb
cons,”
Sergeant Demange said with a contemptuous wiggle of his Gitane. “Like we’re going to run anything through there at this time of day! What kind of jerks do they think we are?”

“The same kind they are, probably,” Luc answered.

“Then they really are dumb,” Demange said. “Maybe Englishmen wouldn’t notice what they’re up to, but we’re French, by God! We’ve got two brain cells to rub together, eh?”

“Most of us do. I’m not so sure about our officers,” Harcourt said.

That was safe enough. Any sergeant worth his miserable joke of a salary looked down his nose at the men set over him (privates looked at sergeants the same way, something sergeants tended to forget). And Demange
had been a noncom a very long time. “Oh, officers!” he said. “You’re right—officers can’t find their ass with both hands half the time. But they’ll have sergeants to keep ’em from making donkeys of themselves.”

“Sure, Sergeant,” Luc said, and left it right there. Yes, lieutenants and captains did need sergeants at their elbow. But that said more about their shortcomings than about any great virtues inherent in sergeants. So it seemed to a new-minted corporal, anyhow.

Demange stamped out his cigarette just before the coal singed his lips. Then he lit another one and strode off to inflict himself on somebody else in the platoon.

Luc lit a Gitane of his own. It wasn’t as good as Gitanes had been before the war. Everything had gone down the crapper since then. Captured Germans loved French cigarettes, though. Luc knew why, too: their own were even worse.
Poor sorry bastards
, he thought, puffing away. And what they used for coffee! A dog would turn up its nose at that horrible stuff.

Almost as big as a light plane, a vulture glided down out of the sky and started pecking at something in the middle of the kilometer or so that separated the French and German lines right here. Maybe it was a dead cow or sheep. More likely, it was a dead man. If it was, Luc hoped it was a dead
Boche
. The Germans had been falling back in these parts, so the odds were decent it was.

Closer to him, blackbirds hopped across the torn-up, cratered dirt with their heads cocked to one side. Plenty of worms out there—and plenty of new worm food, too, even after the vultures ate their fill. The vultures and the blackbirds—and, no doubt, the worms—liked the war just fine.

You could walk around out in the open. Sergeant Demange was doing it. Odds were the Germans wouldn’t open up on you. Luc didn’t want to play the odds. It would be just his luck to have some eager German sniper itching to test his new telescopic sight right when he decided to take a stroll.

Peeking out of his foxhole, he could see Germans moving around in the distance. That had happened last fall, too. The
Boches
had stayed very
quiet in the west while they were flattening Czechoslovakia. The French had advanced a few kilometers into Germany, skirmished lightly with the
Wehrmacht
, and then turned around, declared victory, and marched back across to their own side of the border.

When the
Wehrmacht
marched into France, it didn’t dick around. If Luc never saw another Stuka—better yet, if no Stuka pilot ever spotted him again—he wouldn’t shed a tear. And, if the war ever ended, he would happily buy drinks for all the Stuka pilots who hadn’t spotted him.

Demange came back just before sunset. “Got a job for you,
Corporal
Harcourt.” The stress he gave the rank convinced Luc it would be a dirty job. And it was: “When it gets good and dark, take a squad to the German lines, nab a couple of prisoners, and bring ’em back for questioning. The boys with the fancy kepis want to know what the damned
Boches
are up to.”

“Thanks a bunch, Sergeant!” Luc exclaimed.

“Somebody’s gotta do it. I figure you have a better chance to come back than most.” After a moment, Demange added, “If it makes you feel any better, I’m coming along. I played these games in the trenches last time around.”

Actually, it did make Luc feel better. The sergeant was a handy man to have around in a tight spot. Luc was damned if he’d admit it, though. He rounded up the men he’d been leading since he made PFC: a couple of veterans and the new fish just finding out what the water was like. The news thrilled them as much as it had him.

“Why us?” one of them whined.

“Because you’ll get your miserable ass court-martialed if you try and wiggle out, that’s why,” Luc explained. “Maybe the Germans won’t do for you. Your own side? You know damn well they will. Be ready an hour before midnight.”

Nobody bugged out before the appointed hour. The French soldiers must have feared their own
gendarmerie
worse than the Nazis. Sergeant Demange said, “We’ll get ’em at the latrine trenches. Easiest way I can think of to nab the sons of bitches. C’mon.”

He made it sound easy. Of course, sounding easy didn’t mean it was.
Luc had already had that lesson pounded into him. They had to make it across no-man’s-land without any German sentries spotting them. The night was dark, but even so.… Then they had to get past the enemy’s forward positions. Luc was sweating enough to let him smell his own fear.

Sergeant Demange, by contrast, took everything in stride. “This is too fucking simple,” he whispered as the Frenchmen crawled past the German foxholes. “No ten-meter belts of wire, no continuous trench line … Nothing to it.” He sounded affronted, as if he’d expected the Germans to do a better job and wanted to ream them out for being sloppy. Luc wasn’t so choosy.

Finding the latrine trenches proved easy enough. Something in the air gave them away. The Germans used lime chloride to keep the stench down, but even that couldn’t kill it. Clutching their rifles, the Frenchmen waited in the bushes nearby.

They didn’t have to wait long. A yawning
Boche
ambled over and squatted above a trench. Demange hissed at him in bad German. Luc thought he said he’d blow the Nazi a new asshole if he didn’t get over here
right now
. That made the enemy soldier finish what he was doing a lot faster than he’d expected to. He didn’t even try to clean himself. He just yanked up his trousers and followed orders.

“Amis! Amis!”
he whispered in equally bad, very frightened French.

“We’re no friends of yours. Shut up if you want to keep breathing.” After a moment, Luc added, “You stink.” Abstractly, he sympathized. He’d stunk worse than this a time or two.

He was just glad the prisoner didn’t want to be a hero. That would have shortened everybody’s life expectancy. A few minutes later, another German stood at the latrine trench and unbuttoned his fly. Sergeant Demange asked him if he felt like getting circumcised with a bullet. The
Boche
pissed all over his own boots. After that, he was amazingly cooperative.

“We need more than two?” Luc asked.

“Nah. They asked for a couple, and that’s what we’ll give ’em,” Demange answered. “Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Luc had never heard an order he liked better. The German captives
were at least as good at sneaking across broken ground as the
poilus
herding them along. They didn’t let out a peep till they were inside the French lines. They seemed pathetically grateful still to be alive.

Luc knew exactly how they felt.

PARIS IS WORTH A SOMETHING
. One French king or another had said that, or something like that, a hell of a long time ago. So much Alistair Walsh knew—so much, and not a farthing’s worth more. The veteran underofficer had picked up bits and pieces of knowledge over the years, but too many of them remained just that: bits and pieces. They didn’t fit together to make any kind of recognizable picture.

Staff Sergeant Walsh did know what Paris was worth to the Nazis, even if not to that long-ago and forgotten (at least by him) French king. It was worth everything. And, since they couldn’t get their hands on it—no matter how bloody close they’d come—they were doing their goddamnedest to ruin it for everybody else.

He’d got leave at last—only a forty-eight-hour pass, but forty-eight hours were better than nothing. He could go back to the City of Light. He could drink himself blind. He could watch pretty girls dance and take off their clothes. He could visit a
maison de tolerance
, where a girl would take off her clothes just for him … if she happened to be wearing any when he walked into her upstairs room.

He could do all that—if he didn’t mind taking the chance of getting blown up while he did it, or the almost equally unpleasant chance of spending big chunks of his precious, irreplaceable leave huddling in a cellar somewhere and praying no bomb scored a direct hit on the building overhead.

The
Luftwaffe
visited almost every night now. Ever since it became clear the French capital wouldn’t fall into Germany’s hands like a ripe plum, Hitler seemed to have decided to knock it flat instead. With so much of northern France under German occupation, his bombers didn’t have to fly far to get there. They could carry full loads every night, drop them, and go back to bomb up again for a second trip before daybreak.

All of which made Paris the greatest show on earth. The circus just had
to find itself a new slogan. Paris was every pinball machine and every fireworks display multiplied by a million. Searchlights darted everywhere, trying to pin bombers in their brilliant beams so the antiaircraft guns could shoot them down. Tracers from the guns scribed lines of red and gold and green across the sky’s black velvet. Even the bursting bombs were beautiful—if you didn’t happen to be too close to one when it went off.

Paris had already taken a lot of punishment. The Arc de Triomphe had a chunk bitten out of it. The Eiffel Tower was fifty feet shorter than it had been—and a meteorologist who’d been up at the top was never buried, because they couldn’t find enough of him to put in a coffin. The Louvre had been hit. So had Notre Dame.

You needed to be determined, then, or maybe a little loopy, if you wanted to visit Paris. Some people said Hitler had vowed to wipe the capital of Germany’s great continental rival off the face of the earth. Others claimed he was trying to terrify the Parisians, and the French in general, into tossing in the sponge.

From what Walsh knew of the corporal who’d promoted himself field-marshal, and from what he knew of Germans, that last seemed likely to him.
Schrechlichkeit
, they called it—frightfulness. If you went into Paris with a forty-eight-hour pass, you had a respectable chance of not coming back. On the other hand, if you were anywhere near Paris with pass in hand and you didn’t go in … well, you might never see another chance.

And so Walsh jumped into the back of a British lorry along with the other lucky sods who’d wangled a bit of leave. The lorry bounced over potholes the size of baby washtubs. Just outside of town, it got a flat. The passengers piled out to give the driver a hand. Changing a tire in the rapidly deepening dark was always an adventure. Walsh learned some bad language he’d never heard before. For a man who’d been a soldier for more than half a lifetime, that was almost worth the trip into town by itself.

Hitler might hope to frighten the Parisians into surrendering, but he hadn’t had much luck yet. The city was blacked out, of course, but it seemed noisier than ever. Touts stood in front of every establishment, shouting out the delights that lay beyond the black curtains. Quite a few
of them used English; they knew a lot of Tommies would be here to blow off steam.

“Girls!” one of them yelled. “Beautiful girls! Wine! Whiskey!”

That all sounded good to Walsh. He pushed past the tout and into the dive. The glare of the electric lights inside almost blinded him. Loud jazz blared from a record. Before the war, there likely would have been a band. How many of the musicians were playing to amuse their buddies in the trenches right now?