The War That Came Early: West and East (7 page)

They hadn’t got into Laon. Along with French, African, and English troops, most of a regiment’s worth of Czech refugees helped keep them out. Vaclav had fought the Germans inside Czechoslovakia. He’d got interned in Poland, figuring that was a better bet than surrendering to the victorious
Wehrmacht
. And he’d gone to Romania and crossed the Mediterranean on the most rickety freighter ever built, just to get another chance to let the Germans kill him.

They hadn’t managed that, either. He’d done some more damage to them, especially after he got his hands on an antitank rifle a Frenchman didn’t need any more. The damned thing was almost as tall as he was. It weighed a tonne. But the rounds it fired, each as thick as a man’s finger, really could pierce armor. Not all the time, but often enough. And what those rounds did to mere flesh and blood … Its bullets flew fast and flat, and they were accurate out past a kilometer and a half. Just the shock of impact could kill, even if the hit wasn’t in a spot that would have been mortal to an ordinary rifle round.

The Germans hadn’t got into Laon, but they’d knocked it about a good deal. Stukas had bombed the medieval cathedral to hell and gone. No
using those towers as observation points, not any more. The Nazis had blasted the bejesus out of the ancient houses and winding streets up on the high ground, too. The lower, more modern, part of the city was in better shape—not that better meant good. Loaf under his arm, Vaclav trudged past a Citroën’s burnt-out carcass.

He wore new French trousers, of a khaki not quite so dark as Czech uniforms used. His boots were also French, and better than the Czech clodhoppers he’d worn out. But his tunic, with its corporal’s pips on his shoulder straps, remained Czech. And he liked his domed Czech helmet much better than the crested ones French troops wore: the steel seemed twice as thick.

He had the helmet strapped to his belt now. He didn’t want that weight on his head unless he was up at the front. He smiled at a pretty girl coming past with a load of washing slung over her back in a bedsheet. She nodded with a small smile of her own, but only a small one. Vaclav was a tall, solid, fair man. When the French saw him, half the time they feared he was a German even if he did wear khaki. That he couldn’t speak their language didn’t help.

From behind Vaclav, someone did speak in French to the girl with the laundry. She sniffed, stuck her nose in the air, and stalked away. “Oh, well,” the man said, this time in Czech, “they can’t shoot me for trying. She was cute.”

“She sure was, Sergeant,” Jezek agreed.

Sergeant Benjamin Halévy was a Frenchman with parents from Czechoslovakia. Fluent in both languages, he served as liaison between the French and their allies. Parents from Czechoslovakia didn’t exactly make him a Czech, though. His curly red hair and proud nose shouted his Jewishness to the world. Jew or not, he was a good soldier. Vaclav didn’t love Jews, but he couldn’t quarrel about that. And Halévy had even stronger reasons to hate the Nazis than he did himself.

Those German guns in the distance thundered again. Halévy frowned. “Wonder what the fuckers are up to,” he said.

“They aren’t shooting at me right now,” Vaclav said. “As long as they aren’t, they can do anything else they want.”

“There you go. You’re an old soldier, sure as shit,” the sergeant said.
Other guns started barking: French 75s. Halévy listened to them with a curious twisted smile. “I wish we had more heavy guns around Laon. We could hit the Nazis hard. They’ve got this long southern flank just waiting for us to take a bite out of it.”

“That would be good,” Vaclav said. Hitting the Nazis hard always sounded good to him. If only he were doing it in Czechoslovakia.

“Of course, by the time the brass sees the obvious and moves part of what we need into place for a half-assed attack, the Germans will have seen the light, too, and they’ll hand us our heads,” Halévy said.

Vaclav wondered if the Jew had been that cynical before he became a noncom. Whether Halévy had or not, what he came out with sounded all too likely to the Czech. “Maybe we ought to move up without waiting for the brass,” Jezek said.

Halévy laid a hand on his forehead. “Are you feverish? No real, proper old soldier
ever
wants to move up. The bastards in
Feldgrau
have guns, you know.” The way he pronounced the German word said he could
sprechen Deutsch
, as Vaclav could.

“Best way I can see to throw the Germans out of Czechoslovakia is to start by throwing ’em out of France,” Vaclav said.

“Well, when you put it like that …” Sergeant Halévy rubbed the side of his jaw. “Tell you what. Talk to your Czechs—see what they think. I’ll go chin with a couple of French captains I know, find out if they’ll go with it.”

Jezek found his countrymen had as many opinions as soldiers. That didn’t faze him; as far as he was concerned, Germans were the ones who marched and thought in lockstep. But most of the Czechs were ready to give the enemy one in the slats as long as the odds seemed decent. “I don’t want to stick my arm in the meat grinder, that’s all,” one of them said.

“Ano, ano
. Sure,” Vaclav said. “If there’s a chance, though … Let’s see what the Jew tells me.”

Halévy came over to the Czechs’ tents a couple of hours later. “The French officers say they want to wait two days,” he reported.

“How come?” Vaclav asked. “We’re ready now, dammit.”

“They say they really are bringing stuff up to Laon,” the sergeant replied.

“Yeah. And then you wake up,” Vaclav said.

Halévy spread his hands. “Do you want to attack without any French support?”

“Well … no,” Vaclav admitted. No artillery, no flank cover—sure as hell, that was sticking your arm in the grinder.

“There you are, then,” Halévy said.

“Uh-huh. Here I am. Here we are: stuck,” Vaclav said. “I’ll believe your captains when I see the stuff.”

“Between you, me, and the wall, that’s what I told ’em, too,” the Jew said.

But trains rolled into Laon after the sun went down. Rattles and rumbles and clanks declared that tanks were coming off of them. When morning rolled round again, some of the metal monsters sat under trees, while camouflage nets hid—Vaclav hoped—the rest from prying German eyes.

He asked, “Now that they’re here, why don’t we attack today instead of waiting till tomorrow?”

Benjamin Halévy shrugged a very French shrug. “If I knew, I would tell you. Even going tomorrow is better than retreating.”

“I suppose so,” Vaclav said darkly. “But if we attack today, maybe we’ll still be advancing tomorrow. If we don’t go till tomorrow, we’ve got a better chance of retreating the day after.”

“I’m a sergeant,” Halévy said. “What do you want me to do about it?”

Vaclav had no answer for that. A corporal himself, he knew how much depended on officers’ caprices. “Tomorrow, then.” If he didn’t sound enthusiastic, it was only because he wasn’t.

The French dignitaries with the power to bind and loose set the attack for 0430: sunup, more or less. The Germans would be silhouetted against a bright sky for a while. That would help—not much, but a little.

At 0400, big guns in back of Laon started bellowing: more big guns than Vaclav had thought the French had in the neighborhood. Maybe they’d moved those up the day before, too. If they had, maybe they’d had good reason to delay the attack till now. Maybe, maybe, maybe … Big, clumsy antitank rifle slung on his back, Vaclav marched north and east, into the rising sun.

*   *   *

WILLI DERNEN WAS SLEEPING
the sleep of the just—or at least the sleep of the bloody tired—when the French barrage started. He’d dug a little cave (a bombproof, a veteran of the last war would have called it) into the forward wall of his foxhole. Now he scrambled into the shelter like a pair of ragged claws.

Shells kept raining down: 75s, 105s, 155s. He hadn’t known the damned Frenchmen had moved so much heavy stuff into Laon. Life was full of surprises. The big blond private from Breslau could have done without this one.

Somebody not far away started screaming. The other
Landser
didn’t sound hurt, just scared shitless. Willi wouldn’t have blamed the other poor bastard if he was. He’d had to chuck his own drawers a couple of times. And he hated artillery fire worse than anything else war brought. While those packages kept coming in, you had no control over whether you lived or died. If one of them burst in your hole, you were strawberry jam, and it didn’t matter one goddamn bit if you were the best soldier in your regiment. If you came up against a
poilu
with a rifle or even a bunch of
poilus
with rifles, well, hey, you had a rifle, too, and a chance. What kind of chance did you have against some arselick throwing hot brass at you from ten kilometers away? Damn all, that was what.

Poilus
were coming. Willi was mournfully sure of that. The froggies wouldn’t lay on a bombardment like this without following it up. They might not have been eager when this war started. Eager or not, they were fighting hard now. The Germans had done their damnedest to take France out in a hurry. Their damnedest hadn’t been quite good enough. Now it looked like the Frenchies’ turn.

Another voice shouted purposefully through the din: “Stand by to repel boarders!”

That had to be Corporal Arno Baatz’s idea of a joke. Talk about arselicks … Awful Arno didn’t just qualify. He had to be in the running for the gold medal. Every soldier in Willi’s section hated Baatz’s guts. If the French were going to blow somebody sky-high, why couldn’t it be him?

The barrage kept up for what seemed like a hundred years. In fact, it
was half an hour. That crazy kike scientist who’d fled the
Reich
one jump ahead of National Socialist justice had a point of sorts. Everything
was
relative.

As soon as the artillery let up, Dernen popped out of his hole in the ground like a jack-in-the-box. Awful Arno might be—was—an arselick, but he was bound to be right. The French would be coming.

Willi wouldn’t have been surprised if the drastically revised landscape in front of Laon slowed them down. He didn’t fancy crossing terrain full of shell holes, some as small as a washtub, others large enough to swallow a truck. You had to pick your way through and past the obstacles. That gave the fellows who’d lived through the barrage a better chance to punch your ticket for you.

“Panzers!” The cry rang out all up and down the German line. Willi’s mouth went dry just looking at the armored murder machines. He couldn’t remember so many French panzers in the same place at the same time. Sure as the devil, the French high command had finally learned something from the way the Germans handled their armor.

Being on the receiving end of the lesson was an honor Willi could have done without. He nervously looked back over his shoulder. Where were the German panzers to stop this onslaught? They’d always been thin on the ground in this part of the front. The generals had concentrated them on the other wing. It almost worked, too … but
almost
was a word that got a lot of soldiers killed.

One of the French panzers started spraying machine-gun fire toward the German line. Idiotically, a couple of German MG-34s fired back. Their bullets spanged harmlessly from the panzers’ thick iron hide. And, as soon as they showed themselves, other enemy panzers gave them cannon fire till they fell silent. It didn’t take long.

Then flame spurted from the first French machine. It stopped short. Hatches flew open. The driver, radioman, and commander bailed out. One of them, his coveralls on fire, dove into a shell hole. The other two got shot before they could find cover. Willi didn’t know for sure whether one of his bullets found the panzer crewmen. If not, though, it wasn’t for lack of effort.

The German antitank gun knocked out another enemy machine a moment
later. Then the surviving French panzers shelled it into silence. On they came,
poilus
loping along among and behind them. After snapping off a couple of more shots, Willi ducked for cover. He knew what was coming. And it came: a burst of machine-gun bullets cracked past less than a meter above his head.

Then he heard one of the sweetest noises ever. There were German panzers around here after all. One of them fired at the French machines.
Clang!
That was a hit. Willi thought it came from a 37mm gun, too. He
really
hadn’t known there were any Panzer IIIs in the neighborhood.

Fire from the French panzers paused. They had to traverse their turrets to bear on the new threat. And their commander was also the loader and gunner. They couldn’t shoot fast no matter how much they wanted to. The German Panzer I and II suffered from the same problem. Not the III. Commander, loader, and gunner all fit within its angular turret.

Because of that edge, the Panzer III knocked out two more French vehicles in quick succession. Its hull machine gun sprayed death at the advancing foot soldiers and made them sprawl for cover. But then the froggies started shooting back, damn them. Some of their panzers mounted 47mm cannon. The III was armored better than the I and II, but Willi didn’t know of a panzer in the world that could stop 47mm AP rounds. The German machine showed smoke, and then flame. Willi hoped some of the crewmen got out.

A few Panzer Is and IIs still tried conclusions with the French armor. Willi could see how that would play out, even if it took a while. He didn’t like the ending on the movie that ran in his mind. He didn’t like retreating, either, but … He just hoped he could do it without getting shot in the back.

Then Corporal Baatz yelled, “Fall back through Etrepois!” That was the tiny village behind the stretch of line the section was holding. Willi had heard the Frenchies who lived there pronounce the name. Awful Arno made a horrible hash of it.

German artillery came to life then, pounding the ground in front of the line. That would make the
poilus
take cover if anything did. Trying not to think about short rounds, Willi scrambled out of his hole. He ran hunched-over and zigzagged. Maybe it did a little good, maybe not.