the fount of Marxism-Leninism.
Luc was no Communist. He didn’t want to fight alongside the Germans, either. They’d come too close to killing him too many times. They’d killed friends, and wounded others. He respected their skill; he didn’t think you could go up against Germans without quickly coming to respect it. All the same, as far as he was concerned, they made better enemies than allies.
Of course, a devil of a lot of generals felt that way about Russians. Sergeant Demange was right-they’d sooner go after the USSR than Germany. That, to Luc’s mind, was carrying things too far.
The wind wailed down off the North Sea. Snow swirled in it. It had been snowing in a halfhearted way all morning long. Now anything more than a few meters away vanished behind that thick white cloak. Luc shivered in his greatcoat. The wind didn’t seem to know it was there.
“Merde alors!” he shouted over that wailing. “How are we supposed to fight a war in such filthy weather? The Boches could bring up an armored division, but we’d never know it till the tanks started killing us.”
“It’s a cunt of a winter, all right,” Sergeant Demange shouted back. “To hell with me if I remember a worse one, and I go back a fuck of a lot further’n you do. But you know what else?”
“What?” Luc asked.
“Goddamn Nazis’re just as screwed up as we are. Two, three, five kilometers from here, some poor cocksucking Boche is sitting there shivering and scared to death our tanks are right outside his trench, getting ready to squash him into a blancmange. And he hates his generals and his politicians every fucking bit as much as we hate ours.”
“Oh, yeah?” Luc said, deeply skeptical. “Why would he? His generals halfway know what they’re doing. More than you can say about ours.”
“Why? I’ll tell you why.” And Demange proceeded to: “Because his generals tried to get Hitler but screwed it up, that’s why. Now nobody on the other side trusts anybody else. And when Nazis start not trusting each other, people end up dead.” He twisted his skinny, ratlike face into an exaggerated look of regret. “Breaks my heart, y’know?”
“I’ll bet,” Luc answered, which squeezed a wry chuckle out of the sergeant.
Demange lit another Gitane. He could have been in a hurricane, with winds of 250 kilometers an hour and rain coming down like Noah’s flood, and he still would have got his cigarette going. Cigarettes, after all, were important. “I’ve wasted enough time on you,” he said. “Now I’ll go waste it with some other sorry son of a bitch.”
“Love you, too, Sergeant,” Luc said. Laughing-and, of course, smoking-Demange ambled away. If the cold bothered him, he gave no sign.
“What was he going on about?” Joinville asked in his nasal accent after the sergeant was gone. He distrusted sergeants on general principles, as most privates did. Being a Gascon, he perhaps distrusted them more than most. He also hated the weather more than most. Before Luc could answer, the swarthy southerner added, “Whole German army’s liable to be waiting out there.”
Luc repeated what Demange had said about the Boches’ fearing the French army the same way.
“He said that?” Joinville asked. Luc nodded. Joinville grunted. “Well, he’s a prick, but I guess he’s not such a dumb prick.” By the way he eyed Luc, the same applied to him. Joinville might think Luc made a good commander for the machine gun, but he didn’t like authority of any sort. He made funny noises for Tiny, translating the talk into what passed for Breton. Villehardouin nodded to show he got it. They all crouched and waited for whatever happened next. Luc wished to God winter would finally give it up. Neither God nor winter seemed to be listening.
Corporal Arno Baatz had his knickers in a twist. Awful Arno often got his knickers in a twist, but for once he wasn’t pissing and moaning about Willi Dernen. Willi approved of that. He could handle the poilus who were trying to punch his ticket for him. But, as somebody famous must have said at one time or another, God deliver him from his so-called friends.
Awful Arno pointed southwest, toward the closest French foxholes. “For heaven’s sake, men, be careful as long as this damned blizzard lasts,” he said. “The frog-eaters could sneak a whole army corps past our pickets in weather like this.”
He went on like that every time a blizzard tried to bury the German positions in northeastern France under untold meters of snow. In this truly godawful winter, he said it and said it and said it some more. Willi was sick and tired of listening to him. (Of course, Willi had been sick and tired of listening to Awful Arno long before this winter rolled around, but that was another story.)
A soldier named Klaus Metzger said, “Hey, Corporal, don’t you figure the Frenchies are as worried about us as we are about them?” Exactly the same thought had gone through Willi’s mind, but he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t feel like drawing Baatz’s fire today-life was too short. Metzger was a new replacement, and still naive about the ways of noncoms. Well, he’d find out.
And he did. Awful Arno swelled up like a puff adder about to strike. Willi didn’t think puff adders turned that unhealthy shade of purplish red, though. “Don’t you tell me what to figure! I tell you what to figure!” Baatz yelled. “Have you got that?”
“Sure, sure,” Metzger said with a placating little wave.
It failed to placate. Awful Arno went plum-colored: not a hue a human being was meant to have. He screamed the question again, right in Metzger’s face: “Have you got that?”
Memories of apoplectic drill sergeants in basic training must have come back to the luckless private. He stiffened to a rigor mortis-like attention. The heels of his boots crashed together. “Jawohl, Herr Unteroffizier!” he said. “Zu befehl, Herr Unteroffizier!”
Baatz went right on screaming at him. Baatz screamed at people for the fun of it. Willi didn’t think screaming at people was much fun, but he’d known plenty of noncoms who did. Awful Arno had the disease worse than most.
And he had the rank that gave him the right to be a pain in the ass. After he finally made Klaus Metzger eat enough crow to keep himself happy, he stomped off to inflict himself on soldiers farther down the trench.
Metzger stared after him. “Wow! That was fun,” the new fish said. “Is he always so bad?”
Willi shook his head. “Nah. Sometimes he’s worse.”
Awful Arno whirled. Willi’d forgotten he had rabbit ears. “What was that, Dernen?” he shouted.
“Nothing, Corporal.” Willi was ready to lie to save his own skin, or just to save himself grief.
“ Ja, ja. Tell me another one.” But Baatz must have picked up tone rather than words, because he left it there. Willi celebrated by lighting a Gitane from a pack he’d taken off a captured Frenchman.
“Can I have one of those?” Metzger asked.
“Sure. Steady your nerves now that he’s done fucking you over.” Willi gave him the smoke, and a light.
Metzger’s cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. Then he coughed. He eyed the Gitane with sudden wary respect. “What the hell do the Frenchies put in there? Tastes like I’m smoking barbed wire.”
“That’s real tobacco, kiddo, is what that is,” Willi answered. “We mix ours with God knows what to stretch it further. You taste the straight goods again, you’re not used to it any more. You forget how strong it can be.”
“Strong? I hope to shit! One of these things could win the Olympic weightlifting medal if they ever hold the Games again,” Metzger said.
“Not this year,” Willi said. “We’re playing a different game now.”
The other Landser nodded. “Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?”
A mortar round came down a few meters in front of the trench. Willi hated mortars as much as anything in this different game. You could hear ordinary artillery coming, often soon enough to have a good chance to duck. If the shell didn’t land right on top of you, you were probably fine. But only a faint whistle betrayed a mortar bomb before it burst. And ducking after it burst was what the Tommies called tough shit.
Metzger stared when Willi threw himself flat. He didn’t know what to listen for yet. Come to that, Willi wasn’t consciously aware of why he hit the dirt. He only knew he needed to. The bang and the snarl and screech of fragments slicing by overhead filled in the wherefores.
A moment later, Klaus Metzger stretched out beside him. “You all right?” Willi asked. Metzger wasn’t screaming, but wounds didn’t always hurt right away.
“Ja,” the other soldier answered. “Took me by surprise. How’d you know it was coming?”
