Franz Fischbach summed up what that meant: “We don’t want to get shot down behind the Russian lines, you’re saying.”
“Not unless you’ve got a big insurance policy and you need your next of kin to cash it in right now,” Steinbrenner agreed dryly. By all the signs, the Russians cared little for the Geneva Convention. They hadn’t signed it. That meant the Germans didn’t need to follow its rules when dealing with Red prisoners. But it also meant the Russians did as they pleased with Germans they captured. You heard stories about foot soldiers ingeniously mutilated, maybe after they were dead, but maybe not, too. Some pilots made sure they always kept a round in their pistol, to keep the Russians from having fun with them if their luck soured. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t worried about such things before. Flying against Borisov… I’d better see to it, he thought.
After the meeting broke up, Sergeant Dieselhorst asked him about what was going on. Hans-Ulrich explained the mission. Dieselhorst nodded impatiently. “Ja, ja,” he said. “But what about the Western powers? Are they going to come to their senses, or will they go on fighting us instead?”
“Peter asked Colonel Steinbrenner the same thing.”
“And…?”
“And the colonel said he should talk to the fellows in striped trousers, ’cause they might know and he didn’t.”
Dieselhorst snorted. “Those fairies don’t know their ass from their elbow. Sure would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to worry about the Western front.”
“You’re right. It would. But the colonel can’t do anything about that, and neither can we. All we can do is bomb the snot out of the Ivans, so we will.”
“Sounds good by me.” The sergeant sent him a crooked grin. “And then you can try and get back to Bialystok and see your half-Jewish girlfriend.”
Rudel’s ears heated. “Sofia’s not my girlfriend.” That was true, although not from lack of effort on his part. “I don’t know what kind of Mischling she is.” That was also true. She was maddeningly vague about herself. She might have been almost a full-blooded Jew. Or she might just have been an uncommonly swarthy Pole. In these parts, half the time nobody was sure what anybody else was.
Flying the mission seemed easier than facing Sofia, anyhow. The Russians could only kill him in the air or torture him and then kill him if they caught him on the ground. They couldn’t humiliate him, make him feel he was twelve years old again, and at the same time make him feel more electrically alive, more sparky and sparkly, than he’d ever felt before.
As soon as his Stuka crossed over into territory the Reds still held, they started shooting at him. They opened up with everything they had: not only antiaircraft guns but also machine guns and rifles. That small-arms fire would fall far short of the plane. All they were doing with it was putting themselves in danger. A bullet falling from a couple of thousand meters could kill you if it landed on your unprotected head. The Germans wasted much less ammo like that: not none, but much less.
He droned along behind and to the left of Peter Tannenbaum’s plane, the flight leader. If Peter didn’t know the way to Borisov, they were all shafted. Hans-Ulrich kept an eye peeled for Soviet fighters. Messerschmitt pilots scorned the biplanes and flat-nosed monoplanes the Red Air Force threw against them. But a fighter all but helpless against a 109 could hack a Stuka out of the sky with the greatest of ease.
“See anything, Albert?” Rudel asked through the speaking tube.
“Only the rest of our boys,” Dieselhorst answered. “I wish they’d given me two heavy machine guns back here instead of one ordinary piece. Then I’d really stand a chance against whatever came after us.”
Roughened by static, Tannenbaum’s voice came through Hans-Ulrich’s earphones: “I see the target ahead at one o’clock. Everybody have it?”
That ribbon of water through the flat landscape had to be the Dnieper. And those steel curves marked the bridge. It looked as graceful as most in Germany. Given Russian slovenliness, that surprised Rudel. It was so all the same. “Got it,” he said, his confirmation intermingled with the others.
One by one, the Stukas flipped a wing in the air and dove on the target. The Ivans knew how important the bridge was. Their flak sent up puffs of black smoke all around the bombers. Most of the shells burst behind them. Gunners often underestimated how fast a diving Stuka could go. But Franz Fischbach shouted in pain and despair and fear. His Ju-87 plunged faster than any of the others, and didn’t pull up. An enormous explosion and a pillar of black smoke marked where it slammed into the ground.
Hans-Ulrich released his bombs and hauled back on the stick for all he was worth. The climb was the real danger point, not the dive. The Stuka wasn’t very high, and it moved slower and slower as it shed the momentum it had.
“Somebody got the bridge,” the backwards-facing Sergeant Dieselhorst reported.
“Good,” Rudel answered. “I hate it when our men go down.” Another flyer would have talked of friends going down. Hans-Ulrich had precious few friends in the Luftwaffe. The other pilots had come to respect his skill and courage. Like him? That seemed to be asking too much. But he had more urgent things to worry about, starting with staying alive.
And, with the bridge down, maybe he could ask Colonel Steinbrenner for a short furlough in Bialystok. He wasn’t sure Sofia liked him, either. Whether she did or not felt at least as important as whether he kept on breathing. Why not? If Sofia liked him, he’d have something to go on breathing for.
German and French lines ran close together in front of Luc Harcourt’s position. When a Fritz came out in front of his side’s trenches, Luc could have potted him easy as you please. But the soldier in field-gray carried a couple of items that made him think twice. One was a large white flag of truce. The other, even more curious, was a megaphone.
Luc wondered where the hell he’d found it. Did the Germans issue them, say, one to a battalion? That took thoroughness to what struck him as an insane degree, but you never could tell with the Boches. Or had this fellow liberated it from the little French town whose ruins lay right behind the line?
Wherever he’d got it, he raised it to his lips and bellowed through it in gutturally accented French: “We would like a cease-fire! We won’t shoot if you don’t! We should all fight the Russian Jew Bolsheviks instead!” After repeating himself several times, he waved to the poilus on the far side of the barbed wire, gravely lowered the megaphone, and withdrew back to some place where things were apt to be safer.
“Give ’em a burst, Harcourt,” Lieutenant Demange rasped. “They came out with that same horseshit while they were squashing Czechoslovakia, remember? Then it was our turn, so they kicked us in the nuts instead.”
Luc did remember the eerie, almost unnatural quiet on the Western front till the German onslaught a couple of weeks before Christmas 1938. With some surprise, he realized he and Demange were two of the very few left in this company who could recall that quiet at firsthand. So many new fish in, so many veterans dead or wounded or down with one frontline sickness or another…
He squeezed the triggers on the Hotchkiss gun. Yes, for the moment it was still his baby, even if he wore a gold sergeant’s stripe. Half a strip’s worth of ammo roared toward the Germans’ line. Demange hadn’t told him to try to kill anybody, so he fired high. In war’s rough language, he was saying no without being rude.
Even if he was polite, he expected the Boches to shoot back. But they didn’t. The silence from their side of the line might have been a pointed comment about his burst.
“Be damned,” Joinville muttered. “Maybe they mean it this time.”
“Fuck ’em. Fuck their mothers. Fuck their grannies.” Villehardouin spoke only a little French, almost all of it filthy. He went on in Breton. Luc understood Breton no more than he understood Bulgarian, but it sounded vile. Joinville had picked up scraps of Tiny’s native tongue. He whistled and clapped his hands. Whatever Villehardouin said, it must have been juicy.
After sundown, German planes rumbled overhead. Searchlights and antiaircraft guns hunted for them, without much luck. But no bombs whistled down from the planes. They dropped leaflets instead. The leaflets carried the same message the Landser had shouted out. They also showed a cartoon: a wolf with a Jewish face and a Soviet officer’s red-starred cap attacking a pretty blonde labeled CIVILIZATION. A knight called WESTERN EUROPE was coming to her rescue with a sword.
The paper was cheap, brownish pulp. All the same… “Not the worst asswipe I’ve found lately,” Luc said. “And it’s a better present than most of the ones the Boches try to give us.”
“Boy, you’ve got that right,” Demange agreed. “I wonder if Hitler bit off more than he could chew over there on the other front.”
“Could be,” Luc said. “Germans never tried to make that kind of deal in the last war, did they?”
“I hope to shit, they didn’t,” the middle-aged veteran answered. “They knew we would’ve told ’em to stuff it. You’ve got to figure the fucking Nazis aren’t serious this time around, either.”
“How come? They sure are putting a lot of effort into it. I bet they’ve got guys yelling and planes dropping leaflets up and down the whole front.”
“Oh, sure. But so what?” Demange said. “The way it looks, they just want us to throw in with them on account of they’re so fucking cute, y’know? They aren’t saying they’ll pull out of France or the Low Countries. They aren’t saying they’ll turn loose of Denmark and Norway. They want to rape us, and they want us to come while they’re doing it. Shitheads should live so long.”
Luc grunted. Demange had a way with words-not always a pleasant way, but a way. Being nasty didn’t make him wrong. Luc hadn’t heard anything that made him think the Nazis were willing to pull back from what they’d grabbed. Thoughtfully, he said, “I wonder if any of that’s occurred to our diplomats, or to the English.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Demange advised. “Our boys are a bunch of hyenas in top hats and cutaways. And as for the English… Merde alors, the English fucking boil bacon. Anybody who does that can’t be long on brains.”
Luc hadn’t thought of it like that, which again didn’t mean the foul-mouth reluctant lieutenant didn’t have a point. “Any which way, I’ll be happy as long as this cease-fire holds.”
“Well, so will I,” Demange answered, lighting a fresh Gitane from the stub of his old one. Luc looked wistful, so Demange, muttering, handed him a cigarette, too. Then he continued, “We’d better not go to sleep like we did after old Czecho got it. Boches ‘re liable to be piling up tanks behind their line, ready to give us another clop in the teeth as soon as we squat over the slit trench with our pants at half mast.”
“You’d think our recon would notice something like that,” Luc said.
Demange laughed raucously. “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you? And you’d think those cons might’ve noticed something the last time, too. Did they? Not fucking likely! So how far can you trust ’em now?”
“I’ve learned not to trust the Boches, either-except to trust them to be sure to cause trouble,” Luc replied with dignity.
“Good job! Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look. Maybe.” Demange’s seamless scorn for all mankind had plenty of room to include Luc.
Come the next morning, the Germans still didn’t fire. They did show themselves, as if confident the poilus wouldn’t shoot at them without provocation. As Luc had seen many times before, German discipline was a formidable thing. He wondered if any of the Landsers walking around within easy rifle shot had given their officers a nasty look when they were ordered to come out from their nice, safe trenches. He knew damn well he would have.
He waited for Lieutenant Demange to tell him to open up on the Boches. If Demange gave the order, he would obey. He didn’t want to face French military justice, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. But he also didn’t want to start the fighting up again without orders.
And the orders did not come. Neither hard-bitten Demange nor any of his superiors seemed eager to provoke the enemy. Their attitude looked to be that they could fight if they had to, but that they weren’t going to start anything. Luc felt the same way.