A French noncom up ahead was trying to rally his section. It was another long shot, but Willi didn’t hesitate. Down went the noncom. His men scattered like partridges. Willi slapped a new clip into the rifle.
As he did, a bullet cracked past his head. Not all the froggies were running, dammit. He flattened out in the snow. Where was that French son of a bitch? Willi couldn’t spot him. That was scary. You always hated it when the guy who was trying to kill you was good at what he did.
Aristide Demange peered balefully across the snowy fields. That damned Boche had disappeared. With a white snowsuit and a whitewashed helmet, he was almost impossible to spot as long as he kept his head and his hands out of sight.
In front of Demange, Luc Harcourt’s blood steamed in the snow. The Germans were still well over half a kilometer away. It had taken one hell of a shot to punch Harcourt’s ticket for him. Well, punched it was; that one had torn his throat out. He’d lie here till the wolves found him.
Which didn’t mean Demange wanted to lie here with him. The veteran glanced back over his shoulder, working out what he needed to do next. The stupidest thing you could do was move before you decided where you were going and how you intended to get there.
He crawled backward, trying his best to keep Harcourt’s body between him and the German sniper. Acting as cover was the last favor the kid could do him or anybody else. When Demange had gone about as far as he could go that way, he scrambled to his feet and sprinted for the cover of some snow-covered bushes.
A Mauser bullet snapped past him, viciously close. He dove behind the bushes, his breath harsh in his throat. I’m getting too old for this crap, he thought. All those chain-smoked Gitanes… He spat out the butt he had in his mouth now. The last thing he wanted was for that fucking Nazi to spot cigarette smoke yelling Here I am!
Can I take him out? he wondered. He had a lot of practice with a rifle, but he was only a good marksman, not a great one. And his piece wasn’t all that accurate out past three or four hundred meters. If the guy who’d potted poor damned Harcourt wasn’t carrying one of their man-hunting fancy Mausers, Demange would have been astonished. All of which meant that, in any kind of long-range duel, the odds were on the other fucker’s side.
Then a Hotchkiss machine gun opened up. Puffs of rising snow traced its stream of bullets across the ground. Demange loved machine guns… when they were shooting at the other clowns. He wasn’t nearly so fond of them when they tried to put his lights out.
Now the sniper would have to keep his head down, though, unless he craved a round in one ear and out the other. And if he couldn’t fire, or would be rushed when he did, now looked like a terrific time to put some more distance between him and the lieutenant’s precious, irreplaceable self.
He used the bushes to screen his movements from the Boche. The asshole might be willing to pop up for a shot if he got a good target. Best not to give him one, then. All the same, the spot between Demange’s shoulder blades, that stretch of skin right above his spine, itched madly as he hustled toward the Red Army lines.
№ 7.92mm round ripped through that spot, or any other. Demange thanked the God in Whom he’d long since quit believing. He hadn’t stopped anything big in this war, not yet. He sure as hell did in 1918. The more you know about getting shot, the less you wanted to do it again.
A horrible clanking monster rumbled straight at him: a whitewashed T-34. It looked as if it could make canapes out of every French tank ever manufactured. The reason it looked that way was simple: it could. The commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the hatch. Recognizing Demange as a Frenchman, the Ivan waved a mittened hand as the T-34 clattered past.
“Watch out for a sniper up ahead!” Demange yelled. He doubted the Russian heard, or understood if he did hear. He’d tried, though. What else could you do?
He soon discovered he should have warned the driver to watch out for one of the Germans’ fearsome 88mm multipurpose guns, but he’d had no idea the damn thing was in the neighborhood. The Boches hadn’t wasted it on anything so trivial as foot soldiers. A T-34, now, that they took seriously. A big armor-piercing round slamming into steel plate sounded like an accident in a steel mill. The T-34 slewed sideways and started burning. A diesel engine didn’t go to blazes the way a gasoline-powered one did, but there were limits to everything.
Demange wasted maybe a second and a half feeling sorry for the unlucky cons inside the T-34. Then he trotted on toward the Russians’ lines. Whatever the tank wouldn’t do now that it had been intended to, it had got the Germans off his back for a while. From his point of view, what more could he want?
As promised, there were lanes through the barbed wire. The Ivans had even gone to the trouble of marking them with strips of red cloth. Never a trusting soul, Demange yelled “Friends! We’re friends!” as he came forward. He didn’t want his new comrades potting him by mistake.
A Russian appeared out of nowhere. One second, he wasn’t there. The next, he loomed up in front of Demange, a snowman with a submachine gun. Instead of mowing the lieutenant down, he pointed with the stubby barrel. “You go that way,” he said in bad, palatal French.
“I will go that way,” Demange agreed, speaking slowly and clearly. Afterward, he thought the Red Army man understood his obedience better than his reply.
He spotted a few more Russians as he tramped along. A couple of them gave him and the poilus who’d come in more brusque directions. He wondered how many more of the snowsuited cochons he wasn’t seeing. The Russians knew things about camouflage other people didn’t even suspect. Their strength was like an iceberg: nine- tenths of it hid below the surface.
Finally, he came to an officer-a captain, by his collar tabs-who wore khaki. He relaxed a bit himself then, deciding he was out of any possible sniper range. The captain carried a clipboard and a pencil. His French was pretty fair: “Give me your name, your rank, and your pay number,” he told Demange.
“Whatever you want.” Demange rattled them off. He assumed half a dozen Russians he couldn’t see crouched somewhere nearby, ready to gun down anybody stupid enough to argue or complain.
The captain wrote things down in a language and a script Demange couldn’t begin to follow. He also took the information from the enlisted men who trailed Demange. Then he gestured with the pencil, the same way the guy in the snowsuit had with his machine pistol. “Go that way, past the trees, another kilometer. Get into one of the trucks you find.”
Demange sketched a salute. “You got it.” He turned to his men. “Come on, you lugs. One more lousy kilometer, then we’re done marching for a while.”
“At least they aren’t taking away our rifles,” one of the French soldiers said.
He was right. Demange found that mildly encouraging, too-but only mildly. If the Russians wanted to slaughter them from ambush, how much would their rifles help?
The trucks gave Demange pause, much the same way as the sight of his first T-34 had some weeks earlier. They were big, sturdy, broad-shouldered machines that made every design engineer in France, Germany, and England look like an amateur, and a half-assed amateur at that. If the Russians made trucks like these and tanks like those, how come they were still such fuckups?
Then he saw letters of his own alphabet on the trucks’ grillwork. STUDEBAKER, they proclaimed. The Russians hadn’t made these trucks. They’d got them from the Americans. That was something of a relief. The Americans had a real talent for manufacturing things. He remembered that from the last war, that and their puppyish enthusiasm. They were new to the fight, and still eager for it. All the French soldiers left alive then had long since shed such stupidity.
Another moon-faced Ivan with a submachine gun waved him and some of his men into the back of one of the Studebakers. Three or four Frenchmen were already inside. Before long, the compartment was packed as tight as a tin of anchovy filets. “Anybody know where they’re going to take us?” asked one of the fellows who’d got there ahead of Demange.
“As long as it’s away from the front, who gives a damn?” the lieutenant returned.
He was as grimy and unshaven as any enlisted man. His greatcoat hid his rank badges. The men who didn’t know him treated him the same way they would have treated one of their own. That suited him fine; he’d never wanted to be an officer to begin with.
The truck’s engine rumbled to life. The driver put the big beast in gear. Wherever they were going, they were on their way.
In the summertime, the stinking Fritzes pressed forward and Soviet forces fell back. Ivan Kuchkov had seen that in all three summers of the war. During the winter, though, all bets were off. The Nazis weren’t such hotshots
