Harry Turtledove: Hitler_s war

A French tank stopped not far from his hole. The commander popped out of the cupola like a jack-in-the-box. He pointed at the Germans. “Advance!” he yelled. “If we stop them here, we can break them!” He disappeared again. The tank fired its cannon at, well, something. Luc didn’t pop up himself to see what. The noise all around was worse than loud. It made his brain want to explode out through his ears.

The tank fired again. The machine gun in its bow also banged away-again, Luc couldn’t see what it was shooting at. Then the tank rumbled forward. The commander hadn’t urged him to do anything the man wasn’t willing to try himself. Of course, he had twenty or thirty millimeters of hardened steel shielding him from the unpleasant outside world. But, to be fair, he also had worse things aimed at him than foot soldiers were likely to face.

Still…Advance? It almost seemed a word in a foreign language. The French Army and the BEF had got booted out of Belgium and beaten back across northern France. They’d given up more ground than their fathers (or, more often, their mourned uncles who hadn’t lived to sire children) did in 1914. The Channel ports were lost, which meant the Tommies would have a harder time getting into the fight. Advance? After all that?

If they kept retreating, the Boches would win. Luc hated that thought. The Germans were good at what they did. On the whole, they fought clean-or no dirtier than the French. But so what? They were still Boches.

He popped up and fired at some Germans. They dove for cover. That was all he’d wanted-they were too far off for him to have much chance of hitting them. But if they were hiding behind trees or digging new scrapes for themselves, they weren’t advancing against the defenders here.

Defenders? That wasn’t one tank commanded by a homicidal-or suicidal-maniac. More French armor was going forward against the troops in field-gray A crew of artillerymen manhandled a 37mm antitank gun into a position a couple of hundred meters farther east than it had held before. Even khaki-clad infantrymen-no great swarm of them, but some-were climbing out of their holes and trenches and moving toward the Boches.

Maybe twenty meters away, Sergeant Demange was watching the show from his foxhole. He looked as astonished as Luc felt. He looked almost astonished enough to let the Gitane fall out of his mouth: almost, but not quite. He caught Luc’s eye. “This is something you don’t see every day,” he shouted. He had to say it two or three times before Luc understood.

“It sure is,” Luc answered. “Do you want to join the party?” Were he a new fish, he would have waved-and given a German sniper or machine gunner something to draw a bead on. He knew better now.

“Do I look that fucking stupid?” Demange said. Luc wanted to tell him yes, but didn’t have the nerve. Sure as the devil, a sergeant who scared you more than the Boches did wasn’t the worst thing to have around. Then the veteran didn’t just surprise Luc: he flabbergasted him. He scrambled from his foxhole and scurried toward a crater a bursting 105 had dug. As soon as he got there, he called, “Somebody’s got to do it, right?”

No doubt somebody did. Luc wondered whether one of the somebodies had to be him. Regretfully, he decided he couldn’t hang back when even a cold-blooded pragmatist like Demange was advancing.

Coming up out of a hole felt like a snail shedding its shell and turning into a slug. Luc grimaced and shook his head as he ran for a crater of his own. No, he didn’t want to think about slugs, not when the lead variety were snarling all over the place.

His dive into the shell hole would have won no worse than a bronze at the last Olympics. Luc shook his head again. Those were Hitler’s games, and to hell with him.

Time for another look around. German and French tanks burned nearby. The thick black smoke that rose from them hid the field as well as any barrage of smoke shells German artillery laid down.

Luc fired at another Boche. Again, he had no idea whether he hit him. In a way, that wasn’t so bad. One less fellow on his conscience. He wished that particular organ had a switch he could flick or a plug he could pull. He didn’t like to think about all the things he’d done, but sometimes they bubbled up whether he wanted them to or not.

“Come on!” Sergeant Demange rasped. “What did that American Marine say in the last war? ‘Do you want to live forever?’”

Airplanes swooped low over the battlefield, machine guns yammering. Luc had started to move, but froze again, not that that would do him any good if those probing bullets found him.

They didn’t. The fighters weren’t Messerschmitts. They were English Hurricanes, the roundels on their broad wings looking inside out to Luc because the red was in the center instead of the blue. And they were shooting up the Germans.

“See how you like it, cochons, salauds!” he whooped joyously. He’d been on the other end of strafing too many times. Here as so many other places in war, it was better to give than to receive. Now…Did the English have anything like the Stuka, so they could really give the Germans what-for?

They didn’t seem to, but maybe what they did have was enough. The Boches enjoyed air attack no more than anybody else. Only a few of them ran-they were good troops. But it took the starch out of them just the same. And, a moment after the Hurricanes roared away, a French tank knocked out what had to be the enemy’s command vehicle. From then on, the few German tanks still moving didn’t work together so smoothly any more.

“Come on!” Sergeant Demange said again, more urgently this time. “It was like this in the summer of ‘18, too. If we hit ‘em a good lick, we’ll get ‘em.” We’ll get ‘em-on les aura. The slogan from the last war should have seemed as dated as ground-scraping skirts. Somehow, it didn’t.

Luc scrambled out of the shell hole and trotted forward. Sure as hell, the Germans were pulling back. Yes, they were pros. They had rear guards with machine guns to make sure nobody chased them hard. But they were pulling back. They weren’t breaking through. They wouldn’t break through. And if they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t win the war in a hurry. What would happen once they saw that, too? Luc lit a Gauloise. That was their worry, not his. He kept on advancing.