Hitler's War (11 page)

They would have smashed the Westwall as if they were made of cardboard. Not a
Landser
here thought any differently. The Westwall was Goebbels’ joke on the democracies. On paper, and on the radio, it was as formidable as the Maginot Line. For real, construction gangs were still frantically building forts and obstructions. And the Westwall didn’t have nearly enough troops to man what was already built.

Most of the
Wehrmacht
had gone off to kick Czechoslovakia’s ass. What was left…the French outnumbered somewhere between three and five to one. That was the bad news. The good news was, they didn’t seem to know it.

One of the Frenchmen pulled out a concertina and began to play. The thin, plaintive notes made Willi shake his head. How could the guys on the other side listen to crap like that? Horns, drums, fiddles—
that
was music.

Beside Dernen, Wolfgang Storch whispered, “We ought to plug him just so he’ll shut up, you know?”

Trust Wolfgang to come up with something like that
, Willi thought. He whispered back: “Damn you, you almost made me laugh out loud. That wouldn’t be so good.”

“Why not?” Storch said. “Probably make the Frenchmen piss themselves.”

Willi did snort then, not because Wolfgang was wrong but because he was right. Willi had come
that
close to pissing
himself
when he was part of a firefight right after the French came over the border. The guy next to him took one right in the belly. The noises Klaus made…You didn’t want to remember things like that, but you couldn’t very well forget them. When Willi went to sleep, he heard Klaus shrieking in his nightmares. He smelled the other man’s blood, like hot iron—and his shit, too.

One of the Frenchmen looked up. The guy with the concertina stopped playing. All of the men in khaki looked around. Willi pretended he wasn’t there as hard as he could. It must have worked, because
none of the enemy soldiers got to his feet or anything. Tiny in the distance, one of them shrugged a comically French shrug. The concertina player started up again.

“Let’s head back and report in,” Wolfgang said.

“Now you’re talking. You and your stupid jokes.” It was hard to stay really mad when you were whispering in a tiny voice, but Willi gave it his best shot. “We wouldn’t’ve got in a jam if you weren’t such a damn smartass.”

“Your mother,” Wolfgang answered sweetly.

Both Germans drew back as softly as they could. The French soldier with the concertina went on playing. Willi took that as a good sign. Maybe the Frenchmen were using the noise as cover. That would be a smart thing to do. It would also be an aggressive thing to do. The French might be smart. They’d shown no sign of aggressiveness.

All the same, Willi wanted no part of a nasty surprise. All it would take was a sergeant who’d been through the mill the last time around. Willi’s father was a guy like that. When he and his buddies got together and drank some beer, they’d start telling stories. Like any kid, Willi listened. There probably weren’t a lot of guys his age who hadn’t heard stories like that. Some veterans, though, didn’t care to talk. Willi hadn’t understood that, not till Klaus got it. He did now.

They’d gone about half a kilometer when a no-doubt-about-it German voice challenged them: “Halt! Who goes there?”

“Two German soldiers: Dernen and Storch,” Willi answered. He and Wolfgang were out in the middle of a field. The
Landser
who owned that voice might have been…anywhere.

“Give the password,” the man said.

“Sonnenschein,”
Willi and Wolfgang chorused. A Frenchman poking around could have picked it up from them, but the French didn’t do much of that kind of poking.

“Pass on,” the sentry said.

They did. The Germans were ready for anything. The French didn’t
seem to be. They didn’t have to be, either—they had numbers, and the
Wehrmacht
didn’t. But they acted as if that would go on forever. And it wouldn’t.

Willi got a glimpse of just how true that was when he and Wolfgang finished making their report. They ducked out of Colonel Bauer’s tent and found themselves in the middle of chaos. Soldiers were jumping down from trucks whose headlights were cut down to slits by masking tape. Some of the belching, farting monsters there weren’t trucks at all. They were panzers.

Both Willi and Wolfgang gaped at them. Willi hadn’t seen a panzer up till now in all the time he’d spent on the Western Front. He supposed there were a few, in case the French decided they were serious about attacking here. But he sure hadn’t seen any.

“It must be all over in Czechoslovakia,” he said.

“Ja.”
Wolfgang nodded. “Took longer than it should have, too.”

“Everything takes longer than it’s supposed to,” Willi said. “No matter how smart the generals are, the bastards on the other side have generals, too.”

Wolfgang laughed at him. “Generals? Smart? What have you been drinking? Whatever it is, I want some, too.”

“Oh, come on. You know what I mean. If the guys with the red stripes on their trousers”—Willi meant the General Staff—“don’t end up smarter than the generals on the other side, we’re in trouble.”

“But everybody knows the generals on the other side are a bunch of jerks,” Wolfgang said. “So how smart do our fellows need to be?”

Before Willi could answer, more panzers rumbled up. Shouting sergeants ordered them under such trees as there were. Not all of them would fit there. Soldiers spread camouflage netting over the ones that had to stay out in the open. Not many French reconnaissance planes came over, but the
Wehrmacht
didn’t believe in taking chances when it didn’t have to.

Wolfgang Storch pointed back toward the French soldiers they’d
been watching. “Hope those assholes don’t hear the racket and start wondering what’s up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Willi told him. They laughed. Why not? Their side was doing things. The enemy was sitting around. If the French had no stomach for a fight but one came to them anyway…

“BURN EVERYTHING,” SERGEANT DEMANGE SAID.
“When we pull back into France, we want the Germans to remember we were here.” The cigarette in the corner of his mouth jerked up and down as he spoke.

One of the guys in Luc Harcourt’s squad splashed kerosene against the side of a barn. Luc grabbed a burning stick from the cookfire and touched it to a wet place. He had to jump back, or the flames might have got him. The barn sent a black plume of smoke into the leaden sky.

Other soldiers were torching the farmhouse near the barn. “Hey, Sergeant?” Luc called.

Demange eyed him as if he were a chancre on humanity’s scrotum. But then, Demange looked at everybody and everything that way. “What do you want, kid?” he said.
Make it good, or else
lurked menacingly under the words.

“If we’re doing everything we can to hurt the
Boches
, how come we’re pulling out, not going forward?” As far as Luc could see, the whole halfhearted invasion was nothing but a sad, unfunny joke. Now it was ending without even a punch line.

“Well, we went in to give the Czechs a hand,
oui?”
the sergeant said.

“Sure,” Harcourt answered. “So?”

“So now there’s no more Czechoslovakia, so what’s the point of hanging around any longer? That’s how I heard it from the lieutenant, so that’s what the brass is saying.” Demange looked around to make sure no officers were in earshot. Satisfied, he went on, “You ask me what the real story is, we’re scared green.”

Maybe Demange would end up in trouble for defeatism if somebody reported him to the lieutenant. More likely, he’d eat the platoon commander without salt. And what he said made an unpleasant amount of sense. “We haven’t fought enough to see how tough the Nazis really are,” Luc said.

“You know that. I know that. You think the old men in the fancy kepis know that?” Demange made as if to wipe his ass, presumably with the collected wisdom of the French General Staff. “Come on, get moving!” the underofficer added. “I think you just want to stand around and gab instead of working.”

Luc liked work no better than anyone else in his right mind. Even standing around with thirty-odd kilos on his back wasn’t his idea of fun. But the fire warmed the chilly morning. He sighed as he trudged away. Pretty soon, tramping along under all that weight would warm him up, too, but not so pleasantly.

Every once in a while, somebody off in the distance would fire a rifle or squeeze off a burst from a machine gun. For the most part, though, the Germans seemed content to let the French leave if they wanted to.

Here and there, the retreating French troops passed men warily waiting in foxholes and sandbagged machine-gun nests. The rear guard would give the
Boches
a hard time if they were inclined to get frisky. The soldiers Luc could see looked serious about their job. They probably thought they were saving the French army from destruction. And maybe they were right.

Maybe. But it didn’t look that way now.

Luc’s company marched out of Germany at almost exactly the place where they’d gone in a month earlier. Luc eyed the customs post, now wrecked, that marked the frontier. Men had suffered there. And for what? Maybe the important people, the people who ran things, understood. Luc had no idea.

“It’s the capitalists who are making us pull out,” Jacques Vallat said.
He’d been drafted out of an army factory in Lyon, and was as Red as Sergeant Demange’s eyes. “The fools are more afraid of Stalin than they are of Hitler.”

“Shut your yap, Vallat,” the sergeant said without much heat. “Just keep picking ‘em up and laying ‘em down. When you get to be a general, then you can talk politics.”

“If I get to be a general, France has more trouble than she knows what to do with,” Vallat replied.

“You said it. I didn’t.” Demange might have come out of an auto factory in Lyon himself. He showed no weariness, or even strain. By the way he marched, he could have tramped across France with no more than some gasoline and an oil change or two.

Luc wished
he
had that endless, effortless endurance. He was a lot harder than he had been when he got drafted, but he knew he couldn’t match the sergeant. Demange was a professional, a mercenary in the service of his own country. With a white kepi on his head, he wouldn’t have been out of place in the Foreign Legion.

“Back in France,” Paul Renouvin said. “Funny—it doesn’t look any different. Doesn’t feel any different, either.”

“Oh, some, maybe,” Luc said. “When I camp tonight, I won’t have the feeling some bastard’s watching me from the bushes.”

“No, huh? You don’t think the Germans’ll sneak after us?” Paul said.

“Merde!”
Luc hadn’t thought of that. He’d figured that, once the French pulled back from Germany, the
Boches
would leave them alone. Why not? The Germans had pretty much left them alone while they were inside Germany.

“We’re going to pay for this,” Jacques Vallat predicted. “We had our chance, and we didn’t grab it. Now they’re done in Czechoslovakia. Where do they go next?”

“Didn’t I tell you once to shut up?” Sergeant Demange’s voice stayed flat, but now it held a certain edge. “You want to go pissing and moaning, go piss and moan to the captain.”

“He’d throw me in the stockade,” Vallat said with gloomy certainty.

“You’d deserve it, too,” Demange said. “Running your mouth when you don’t know shit…But if you’re in the stockade, you can’t do anything useful. Tonight, you fill up everybody’s canteen.”

Jacques’ sigh was martyred. Everyone took turns at the different fatigue duties. That one was more fatiguing than most. And the men had already been marching all day. Not that the day was very long. Darkness came early, and with it rain. Luc’s helmet kept the water off his head, and the greatcoat let him stay pretty dry, but marching through rain and deepening twilight wasn’t his cup of tea.

But tents and hot food and strong coffee waited for the soldiers who’d withdrawn from Germany. It wasn’t as good as ending up in bed with a pretty girl—but what was? Nobody was shooting at him. He had a full belly, and he was warm. When you were a soldier, that seemed better than good enough.

PEGGY DRUCE HAD HOT FOOD
, even if most of it was boiled potatoes and turnips. She had coffee. The Germans insisted it was the same stuff they drank. If it was, she pitied them. Nobody was shooting at her. She’d never thought she would have to worry about that…till the day she did.

She was a neutral, which meant the Germans treated her better than the English and French they’d also caught at Marianske Lazne. She got plenty of potatoes and turnips and godawful coffee. They had enough to keep body and soul together, but not much more. And if she were a Jew…

Till the war started, she’d looked down her snub nose at Jews. If you weren’t one, you did. She’d taken it for granted, the same way she’d taken for granted that nothing bad could ever happen to her. She was an American. She had money. She had looks.

Shells didn’t care. Neither did machine-gun bullets. She’d seen
things at Marianske Lazne she wouldn’t forget as long as she lived. (And she wouldn’t call the place Marienbad any more, even if that was easier to say. The Germans used the old name anew. If they did, she wouldn’t.)

Not all of what she wished she could forget came during the bombardment, or when she was bandaging wounded afterwards.

Quite a few Jews had been stuck in the resort with everybody else. The ones who were foreign nationals aimed their passports at the Nazis the way you’d aim a crucifix at a vampire. Peggy had no idea whether crucifixes worked; in that part of Europe, some people might. But the passports did. By their growls, the German soldiers and the SS men who followed them into Marianske Lazne might have been Dobermans brought up short by their chains. However much they growled, though, they treated Jews who weren’t from Czechoslovakia no worse than any other foreign nationals they’d nabbed.

Jews who
were
from Czechoslovakia…Peggy shuddered at the memories. Jews from Czechoslovakia were basically fair game. It wasn’t so much that the Blackshirts kicked some of them around for the fun of it. It wasn’t even that the soldiers set others to scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes.