She wouldn’t let it alone. If Pete hadn’t been head over heels, that would have bothered him. It bothered him a little anyhow, but he overlooked being bothered. Yes, he was in love, all right.
They’d done something unspeakable to Sergeant Demange. Luc Harcourt laughed and laughed. “A lieutenant? At your age? When you’ve been cussing out officers since before you had to shave? What is the world coming to?”
“Ah, fuck off,” Demange said. His eternal cigarette quivered in fury. “I didn’t ask ’em to do it. God knows I didn’t want ’em to do it. But you can’t tell the assholes no-they don’t listen to you.”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant, sir,” Luc said, and gave Demange the fanciest salute he’d torn off since training-ground days.
“It won’t change anything,” Demange insisted. “I’ve been running this fucking platoon full of cocksuckers anyway.”
“Hey, but now that you’re a lieutenant they’ll figure you can run a company, or maybe a battalion,” Luc answered. “Everybody knows how screwed up our high command is. They just went and proved it, that’s all.”
Demange said something about his mother that violated at least eight of the Ten Commandments. Then he added, “The real proof that those shitheads have lost it will be when they make you a sergeant.”
“Now that you can’t do it, somebody’s got to disgrace the rank,” Luc said reasonably. Demange’s reply took care of the last two Commandments.
Luc wasn’t eager to become a sergeant. If he kept avoiding bullets, though, he would before too long. Slots opened up as people’s luck ran out. You didn’t always need to meet a bullet. Somebody in another company in the regiment had tripped over a length of barbed wire he hadn’t seen and broken an ankle. He’d be out of action for weeks, the lucky salaud.
Woods rose up ahead. Beyond them lay the village of Serzy-et-Prin. Beyond that, a good way beyond it, lay Reims, which was a real city. The Boches held Reims. They held Serzy-et-Prin, too. And there were bound to be bastards in coal-scuttle helmets in among the trees.
Demange pointed east, toward the woods. “Goddamn leaves would have to start sprouting just when they could hide some Fritzes.” His scorn was so seamlessly perfect, it covered all of mankind and had room for Mother Nature as well. When Luc said as much, Demange spat. “That clapped-out old whore? All she’s ever given me are lice.”
“Like you’re the only one.” Just thinking about them made Luc want to scratch. He nodded toward the trees himself. “You going to order us in? Joinville and Villehardouin are ready to lug the Hotchkiss.”
“Don’t blame it on me,” Demange said. “When the generals decide it’s time to go, we’ll go. Till then, I’ll sit on my ass as long as I can.”
He spat out the last Gitane’s tiny butt and lit up the next. “How about one for me?” Luc asked.
Demange looked shocked. “What? You think officers waste tobacco on enlisted men? Fuck off, cochon!”
“Fuck off yourself… sir,” Luc said. The new lieutenant gave him a cigarette. They smoked together, eyeing the woods they’d have to clear out sooner or later. Like Demange, Luc hoped it would be later. Luc pointed toward the new grass sprouting in the cratered field in front of the trees. “You’ve got to know the Fritzes have had time to lay mines there.”
“As sure as your sister’s got crabs,” Demange agreed. “All part of the overhead.”
“Oh, boy.” Luc took his canteen off his belt. It was full of pinard. He drank some, then passed the rough red wine to Demange. The veteran’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he took a good swallow. Just for the moment, with nobody shooting at them and no order to advance, life didn’t seem so bad.
The order to advance came the next day. Luc would have been more upset had he been more surprised. “Well, if we’ve got to catch the shaft, there are worse places to do it-I suppose,” Joinville said. Villehardouin came out with something in Breton that Luc didn’t understand at all. As Luc had told Demange, they were ready. So was the gun: he checked it himself. By now, he could do everything with a Hotchkiss gun but build one.
And so were the Germans. Whether a deserter warned them or they figured it out for themselves, they shelled the French positions on and off through the night. Luc huddled in a shallow foxhole, trying to doze. He didn’t get much sleep, but the hole was deeper toward dawn than it had been at sundown.
“Come on, you sorry, silly cons,” Lieutenant Demange called when the eastern sky began to go gray. “Time to earn our sous. ” He made more as a lieutenant than he had as a sergeant, but you didn’t make a career of the Army to get rich.
“You heard the man,” Luc told his machine-gun crew. They stumbled forward. There still wasn’t enough light to see much. You’d never spot the mine that waited for you. You’d never spot wire, either, though Luc looked for some almost hopefully. A broken ankle didn’t seem half bad.
Then, all of a sudden, he could see just fine. German parachute flares lit up the field brighter than noontime. French soldiers cried out in horror. “Down!” Demange screamed. “Get down. They’re gonna give it to us.”
Give it to them the Boches did. Their artillery opened up one more time. Now it was deadly accurate, thanks no doubt to forward observers watching the poilus scramble and dive for cover. For good measure, German machine guns at the edge of the woods raked the field. Traces might have been lines of blood drawn in the air.
When people started shooting at you, you flattened out. Demange had that right. Luc did his best to imitate a frog squashed by a tank. But he couldn’t just lie there and pile dirt in front of himself with his entrenching tool. Commanding a machine gun meant he had to shoot back. If the Hotchkiss could knock out the German machine gunners, he and his buddies would have a much better chance of seeing the sun go down this afternoon.
Joinville and Villehardouin had hit the dirt, too. They were already putting the machine gun on its tripod. Luc crawled over to them, not getting a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to. “Fuck the fuckers!” Villehardouin said: the clearest thing Luc had heard from him in days.
He got down behind the Hotchkiss and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared through a strip of ammo. He probably wouldn’t have any hearing left by the time he got out of the Army, but he didn’t care.
Joinville fed fresh strips into the machine gun. One of the ammunition carriers was down, wounded or dead. Villehardouin crawled back to recover the crate. Luc fired, first at one MG-34, then at another. How many of the monsters did those Nazi cochons have? The other thing was, they all seemed to be shooting at him, and with better and better accuracy as sunrise neared.
“What I wouldn’t give for a couple-three tanks right now,” Joinville said. Luc nodded, not that that did either one of them any good. The brass didn’t seem to have laid on any armor for this little dance. The Fritzes didn’t have any in the neighborhood, so why should la belle France waste hers?
Why? To keep us from getting murdered, Luc thought. But that wasn’t the biggest worry in the brass’s minds, now or ever. The old men with all the gold braid and leaves on their kepis measured things out on their maps and went from there. Casualties? Just part of the overhead, as Demange said.
What Demange said now was, “Back! Get back! We can’t break in there in a million years! Machine gun, give us covering fire!”
“Thanks a bunch, Lieutenant,” Luc said under his breath. But it was the right order, even if it might make him a casualty. He tapped the gun with the heel of his hand, again and again, traversing it so it sprayed the whole front of the woods with fire and made lots of Boches keep their heads down. The more Germans who ducked, the more of his own buddies who’d get back to their holes. How he and the rest of the Hotchkiss crew would get back was an… interesting question.
To his surprise, it got an answer. The French artillery, which should have shelled the woods before the infantry moved out, chose that moment to wake up. Under cover of the badly timed barrage, the machine gunners made it back to what passed for safety in these parts. Luc drained his pinard to celebrate. He figured he’d earned it. ergeant Hideki Fujita had been talking about prisoners of war not long before. Now here they were, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, crowded into barbed-wire corrals with Japanese machine-gun positions outside the wire to make sure they didn’t get any bright ideas about breaking out.
The Russians looked… well, they would have had to perk up to look miserable. They’d been disarmed and hastily plundered after they surrendered, but they weren’t plucked clean yet. Who could guess what goodies they hid under their dun-colored greatcoats? Those coats, and the hair-black, brown, yellow, once in a while startling red-sprouting in clumps on their faces, robbed them of their human outlines.
“Monkeys,” Fujita said as he strolled around the camp. “That’s what they look like. A bunch of monkeys.” He mimed scratching himself under the armpits.
