guns that gave back counterbattery fire. Luc hoped like anything that they murdered some Ivans. He didn’t want anybody’s artillery coming down on his head.
The Red Army signaled early one frigid morning (there was no other kind in Russia at this season of the year), just as night was giving way to daybreak. One second, the predawn stillness held. The next, it might have been a Bastille Day fireworks show, except that all the stars and rockets and flares flying up in the east were green.
“Let’s go!” Luc called. “There’ll be ways through the wire. The flank guards will hold off the Boches while we move.” While France and Germany played at friendship, you weren’t supposed to call the Feldgrau boys Boches. It was an order widely ignored-he ignored it himself-but an order even so. The flank guards still weren’t supposed to fire until fired upon, which would probably get some of the poor bastards killed.
Luc carried his rifle at high port as he hurried across the snow-covered fields toward the gaps in the barbed wire that had better be there. No firing came from in front of him. That was encouraging. But, all at once, he heard MG-34s and Mausers open up off to the left. Swearing under his smoking breath, he hunched over and tried to hurry faster.
“Green flares,” Oberleutnant Wolfgang Gruber told Willi Dernen and the other men commanding squads in his company. “That’s what you’ve got to look for from the Russian lines. That’s the signal for the froggies to try and fuck us over.”
“What do we do then, sir?” Willi asked. To his surprise, he found he liked leading a squad. Because Awful Arno had done it for so long, he’d assumed he would hate the job. But no-and he didn’t think he was doing it badly. He added, “I mean, I won’t be sorry to get the Frenchies off our flank-I was always scared the Ivans would push through them to flank us out. Still…”
“When they turn their coats, we’ve got to make them pay,” Gruber answered. “Till then, we have to make nice. I guess there’s still some chance the guys in the striped pants and the cutaways can straighten things out again. I mean, I don’t want them on our flank any more than you do, Dernen, but I don’t want a hole in the line four divisions wide, either.”
Willi grunted and nodded. The Wehrmacht had managed to patch things up and keep going when the English turned traitor. Maybe the General Staff could figure out how to do it again, especially since they seemed to have some warning. But that wasn’t a game you wanted to play once, much less twice.
Gruber looked from one corporal and Obergefreiter to the next. “Any other questions?” he asked. Nobody said anything. Willi had asked the only one that mattered. The company CO nodded. “All right, then. Let your men know what’s going on.”
Adam Pfaff nodded cynically when Willi passed along the news. “No big surprise, is there?” he said. “Anybody who ever counted on a lousy Frenchman was just asking to get his pocket picked.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Willi said. “We got as much as we could out of the no-good pigdogs. Best thing we can do when they fly the coop is remind ’em why screwing around with the Reich is a bad idea.”
Pfaff nodded again. Most of the other guys in the squad bobbed their heads up and down, too. At the time, Willi thought he’d been plain enough. Later, though, he was faintly appalled at what had come out of his mouth.
Sharing a cigarette with the Obergefreiter with the gray Mauser, he explained why: “I sounded just like that cocksucking Baatz! Just like him, you hear me?”
“Take an even strain, man,” Pfaff said. “If you’re a noncom or making like a noncom, you’ve got to come out with that bullshit every now and then. You couldn’t do your job if you didn’t.”
“I don’t want to sound like Awful Arno,” Willi said. “Why couldn’t I sound like a good corporal instead?”
“Because you’ve had the dumb turd blabbing in your ear since the war started, that’s why,” his buddy answered. “Some of it’s bound to stick, the way shit sticks to the hair around your asshole.”
“There you go!” Willi liked the comparison. “Thanks. Now you made me feel better.”
“What are friends for?” Pfaff said modestly.
One thing friends were for, as far as Willi was concerned, was staying with you through thick and thin. The French flunked that test. The Germans started unobtrusively patrolling their right flank, where their positions adjoined those of their alleged allies. Willi noticed the froggies doing some unobtrusive patrolling of their own, keeping an eye on what the Landsers were up to. When Germans and Frenchmen couldn’t avoid noticing one another, they still waved and swapped smokes and rations, but it wasn’t the same as it had been.
Willi wondered what would happen if he asked some French noncom about green flares. He figured it was even money whether the guy had kittens or tried to murder him on the spot. Probably just as well he didn’t know enough French even to frame the question. Of course, he might run into a Frenchman who could verstehen some Deutsch…?
He never did so much as find the chance to ask. Patrolling got more dangerous: Russian artillery fire picked up. He noticed that the Ivans were also hitting the French positions off to the right of where the German part of the line ended. He hoped they were killing bunches of the men who were plotting to go over to them. It would serve the French right, by God!
All he really wanted to do was get out of Russia-eventually, get out of the war-in one piece himself. If doing that involved massacring every Ivan from here to Omsk, he would. If it involved sitting on his ass instead, he’d do that. He wasn’t fussy. He didn’t know anyone who’d been at the front for a while and didn’t feel the same way.
So he didn’t complain when the Russian artillery fire eased off again. If the Reds were hauling their guns twenty kilometers north to hit the Germans there, that was all right with him. His boys had been taking it in the neck for a while. Now it was some other poor bastards’ turn.
And then, one clear, cold morning, a new fish named Erich Something-or-other shook him awake. “Sorry to bother you, Herr Obergefreiter,” the kid said: to an ordinary rifleman, even Willi’s picayune rank mattered. Erich went on, “They’re shooting off green flares. Bunches of them, in fact.”
“Ah, fuck!” Willi said, wriggling out of his blanket like a bad-tempered butterfly emerging from its pupa. He looked eastward. Sure as hell, green fire was everywhere. He sighed and swore and lit the day’s first smoke. “All right. We’re on with the French again, then. Are the rest of the guys awake?”
“Most of them,” Erich answered. “We didn’t want to bother everybody, in case this wasn’t what you warned us about.”
“Give the sleepyheads a good, swift kick in the ass, in that case. This sure won’t be anything else.” Willi grabbed for his scope-sighted rifle. The longer the range at which he could pick off treacherous froggies, the better.
Oberleutnant Gruber spoke to most of the company: “The French figure they can get away with yanking the Fuhrer ’s mustache. We’re going to make them sorry, you hear me? The more poilus we kill here, the more we kill right now, the fewer we’ll have to worry about on the Western Front later on. So let’s go get ’em!”
The Landsers raised a cheer. Willi joined it, but he had the feeling he’d heard something most of them had missed. If France was back in the war, there would be a Western Front again, wouldn’t there? The Wehrmacht had come so close, so goddamn teasingly close, to Paris. Well, close only counted if you were chucking hand grenades. He had a couple of potato-mashers on his belt. He’d use them if he couldn’t get rid of the enemy from farther away.
He trudged south and east through the snow, toward the boundary between the German and French sectors. Shooting had already broken out. As he remembered from the fighting in France, it was easy to tell whose machine guns were going off. MG-34s fired a lot faster than the crap the froggies used. French rifles didn’t sound the same as Mausers, either. He hadn’t had to worry about them for a while, but all that stuff came back in a hurry.
There was a Frenchman, scurrying east to the vodka and borscht the Reds would give him for turning his coat. Willi dropped to one knee, to steady his aim and to make himself a smaller target. Exhale… Don’t squeeze the trigger. Touch it gently, like a tit… The Mauser pushed back against his shoulder. In his scope, the Frenchman staggered, stumbled, and fell.
He worked the sniping rifle’s downbent bolt and slogged forward again. He knocked over a couple of more poilus, both of them from a range where an ordinary Mauser without a scope probably would have missed. He felt sorry for them. How could he not, when it was a risk he took himself? But he knew they would have shot him without a qualm. Do unto others before they could do unto you. If that wasn’t war’s Golden Rule, it should have been.
