torches while they did it? They probably were. Who was going to tell Chekists they couldn’t do something? You could wind up in a camp yourself if you tried.
I did it. I got away with it, too, Stas thought, not without pride. He was still cold-colder now, in fact, with all the icy air his visitors had let into the tent. He huddled under the blankets. Sleep was hopeless. He’d be pouring down tea tomorrow to keep his eyes open, or coffee if they had any.
Or maybe not. He’d need a replacement copilot if he was going to fly. Could they deliver somebody soon enough to do him any good? He’d have to see.
Out at the edge of the encampment, somebody yelled. A moment later, someone fired a long burst from a machine pistol. A moment after that, somebody let out a horrible scream. Was that Kulkaanen? Or were the NKVD brutes mowing one another down? Stas knew where his hopes lay.
As a Karelian, Kulkaanen probably knew even more about snow than the Russians coming after him did. Maybe he could get away. It still didn’t seem likely, but it was possible.
It was possible, but it didn’t happen. They brought him in near daybreak. They’d beaten the snot out of him for making them work so hard. Odds were he had worse coming. If they didn’t execute him, they’d give him twenty-five years in the gulag. They wouldn’t bother hanging a mere tenner on him, not after he’d gone and pissed them off.
And the war would grind on, whether run well or badly. Why couldn’t he have seen that? Any which way, no matter what he told his cousin, the goddamn war would grind on.
Chapter 25
Lieutenant Demange sidled up to Luc Harcourt and murmured into his dirty and none too shell-like ear: “Be ready.”
“Be ready for what?” Luc asked irritably. “I’d sure be ready for a holiday on the beach at Nice or somewhere like that, I’ll tell you.” The flat Russian landscape he saw at the moment wouldn’t have reminded him of the Riviera even if it weren’t draped in snow.
“Funny. Funny like the crabs,” Demange growled, the usual Gitane in the corner of his mouth jerking as he spoke.
“I don’t know if I’ve got crabs or not. I don’t give a good goddamn, either,” Luc said. “I’ve got regular lice, though, and fleas, and bedbugs. So who cares about the papillons d’amour?”
“It’s war. What d’you expect?” Demange’s narrow, bloodshot eyes flicked now this way now that. Luc tried to look every which way at once, too. The Ivans off to the east were supposed to be pretty quiet right this minute. But you’d never live to get old by counting on what the bastards on the other side were supposed to be doing. Demange went on, “Yeah, it’s war, but the political wheels are spinning again. That’s what you’ve got to be ready for.”
“Oh, God! Are we going through another round of that merde?” Luc looked around again, this time off toward the left. His regiment was stationed at the French expeditionary force’s left flank. Next to them in the line were the Boches. If he suddenly didn’t have to worry about the Russians any more, he would have to worry about the Fritzes instead.
“Could be,” Lieutenant Demange answered. “What I hear is, Daladier’s been talking with the English. If he decides they look like a better bet than Hitler, things here get sticky in a hurry.”
“No kidding!” Luc exclaimed. After a moment, he added, “You know, some of the guys in my section really do hate the Russians. You stay here for a while and they keep trying to kill you, that’ll happen.”
“Sure it will. So what?” Demange said. “We came here on account of some French jackass with a white mustache and fancy embroidery on his kepi told us to. If that same jerk, or another con just like him, says Stalin’s the hottest lay since Josephine Baker and we should make nice with him from now on, we fucking well will. That’s how the game is rigged, and you know it as well as I do.”
Luc’s sigh brought out fog almost as thick as the lieutenant’s cigarette smoke. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said unhappily. “You want I should warn the men something may be cooking, then?”
“Hold off a while longer. Like you say, some of the dumb shitheads like the Nazis better than the Reds. Wouldn’t do if one of ’em spilled the beans and brought the Germans down on our heads before we were ready to go over to the Russians.”
“You’re right.” Luc sounded more unhappy yet-and he was. “So you don’t think I’d do that, huh?”
“If you even thought about it, I’d blow your fucking head off before you got the chance to try,” Demange replied.
“Love you, too, Lieutenant.” Luc teased a few syllables’ worth of sour laughter out of Demange.
If the Red Army knew the French were thinking about changing sides, it didn’t let on. The Russians always had-sometimes quite literally-more artillery than they knew what to do with. They also had their horrible new barrage rockets that could lay a square kilometer waste in nothing flat. Winter weather troubled such toys much less than it interfered with infantry actions. The Russians pounded the French positions again and again.
Luc wondered if they were trying to tell the French generals that they could hurt the troops those generals commanded worse than the Nazis could. If they were trying to do that, he didn’t think it would work. Yes, the Russians could punish the expeditionary force. But the Germans could invade France-could invade, and had invaded, and might invade once more if France did switch back to England’s side.
None of which made him cower any less in the shallow scrapes he hacked out of the frozen ground when the Red Army pounded his countrymen’s positions. Shell fragments whined maliciously not far enough over his head. Blast from the rockets picked him up and slammed him down till he felt as if he’d lost a fifteen-rounder to Joe Louis.
The shelling did send one of the most pro-Nazi soldiers in his section away with a nasty thigh wound. Seeing the mess, Luc guessed the poor groaning bastard would lose the leg. He didn’t wish that kind of anguish on anybody-and Marcel had been a brave fellow even if he was a Fascist.
Two days after Marcel got hit, Lieutenant Demange quietly told Luc, “Now you can let your guys in on it. They need to know.”
“Oh, they do, do they?” Luc said tonelessly. He wasn’t at all sure he needed news like that himself. He glanced off to the left again. The closest German detachments were only a few hundred meters away. No barbed wire separated them from the French, as it did from the Russians. They were allies, after all… for the time being, anyhow.
Demange’s eyes slid in the same direction. He nodded glumly, as if at a question Luc hadn’t asked. “Yeah, it’s liable to get a little hairy,” he said. “We may end up playing flank guards. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“Fun. Right,” Luc said, still with no expression in his voice. Demange chuckled, thumped him on the back, and went off to brief some more noncoms.
Luc spread the word through his section. He quietly told off a few reliable poilus to keep an eye on the handful of others who might give them away to the Wehrmacht. “It’s politics, my dears,” he said over and over again. “Nothing we can do about it but roll with the punches.” He wished he had a better line. That one reminded him too much of the way the Russian rockets knocked him around.
“We’re crossing into the Reds’ lines, right?” one of his men asked. “How do we know when we’re supposed to do that? If we go too soon, the salauds ’re liable to machine-gun us instead of letting us through.”
“They’ll give us the signal to move on.” Luc hoped like nobody’s business he wasn’t lying.
And, as a matter of fact, he turned out not to be. “When it’s time for us to go, the Russians’ll fill the sky with green flares,” Lieutenant Demange said. “Just like fucking traffic lights, Harcourt. Even the dumb-shits in your section ought to be able to remember that.”
“Here’s hoping. Some of those dimbulbs wouldn’t remember their heads if they didn’t have ’em stapled on,” Luc said. Demange grunted something that might have been laughter. How many times had he talked about ordinary soldiers the same scornful way? Sure as hell, Luc had got most of what he thought he knew about being a sergeant straight from the horse’s mouth.
The Russians shelled the stretch of German line that abutted the French positions. Perhaps for the sake of verisimilitude, perhaps just to remind the French that they weren’t buddies yet, they also shelled Luc’s regiment. A couple of luckless men got killed; a few more picked up wounds. French 75s and 105s indignantly joined the German
