Two Fronts (34 page)

“Oh, I’d shoot back at them, all right, Captain-san,” Fujita replied. “Only I’d use a different kind of bullet,
neh?
” Security at bacteriological-warfare units ran deep. Fujita didn’t call a Chinese a Chinese, and, just as much without thinking, he didn’t call a germ a germ.

The way he did say things made Masanori Ikejiri smile for the first time. “So you would,” the captain agreed. “Since you put it that way, Sergeant, I think we can give you what you asked for. Sure enough, your attitude is commendable—I will say that much for you.”

“
Domo arigato
, Captain-san!” Fujita exclaimed, saluting yet again.

Ikejiri kept smiling, but in a less pleasant way. “Don’t thank me until after you’ve flown a few missions. You may not be so happy about it then.”

Fujita thought that was nonsense—till he went on his first mission. He’d wheeled plenty of porcelain biological-warfare bomb casings across the airstrip outside of Myitkyina and loaded them into the bomb bays of the Japanese Army planes that would fly them up to Yunnan Province and drop them on the heads of the obstreperous Chinese.

Now he sat in the bomb bay himself. He’d learned which levers to pull to open the bomb-bay doors and to release the bombs and what to do—besides cussing—if the levers didn’t work the way they were supposed to. No one expected Chinese fighters to come up, but you never could tell.

And—maybe most important—he’d been briefed on how and when to use the oxygen apparatus. “It may not kill you if you don’t,” the pilot had explained. “We don’t usually fly that high. But if you forget you may be kind of stupid when we land, and you may stay that way. So remember,
neh? Wakarimasu-ka?
”

“
Hai. Wakarimasu
,” Fujita had answered. Understand he did.

One thing he hadn’t really understood was how flimsy and makeshift a warplane could seem when you scrambled up inside it. From the outside, the Ki-21 looked like an aerial shark: all deadly purpose. When you got in there and saw the ribs and realized that the fuselage was covered with aluminum skin almost thin enough for you to stick your hand through … Well, it gave you a different feel for things. True, the interior walls of many Japanese houses were no more than translucent paper—but Japanese houses didn’t go where angry people were liable to shoot at them. The bomber did.

He also hadn’t understood how noisy it would be in there. The roar and vibration from the twin engines made him wonder if the fillings in his back teeth would shake loose. It wasn’t really an idle kind of wondering, either. He sat back there, shivering in spite of his fur-lined leather flying suit, sucking in oxygen that tasted of the rubber lines it came through, and hoping like anything he wouldn’t have to visit an Army dentist when he got back to Burma.

If he got back to Burma. Yes, he’d known the Chinese shot at Japanese planes, but he hadn’t really understood what that meant. He hadn’t felt the bomber buck like a spooked stallion when an antiaircraft shell burst nearby. He hadn’t watched a ragged-edged hole suddenly appear in the fuselage’s skin when a fragment ripped through it. He hadn’t thought about what would have happened had that fragment ripped through him instead of hitting thirty centimeters farther back.

“Dump the bombs!” the pilot shouted through the voice tube. “Dump ’em right now so we can get the demon out of here!”

“
Hai!
” Fujita shouted back. He worked the levers the way he’d been taught. The fragment hadn’t damaged their mechanisms, anyhow. Down fell the porcelain casings, one after another.

The bomber banked steeply as it turned. The engines roared louder. Fujita took a deep breath of oxygenated air. He’d got the action he’d asked for, all right. Oh, had he ever!

Across the border lay Belgium. Aristide Demange had only contempt for the Belgians. Demange had plenty of that for the whole human race, but his reasons for scorning the Belgians were different. Like some Swiss and Canadians, they had the gall to speak French without being part of France.

And they were weak sisters. The Germans had overrun them in short order twice now in this century. They’d overrun them, and then they’d occupied them, and the Belgians had rolled over with their bellies in the air and accepted occupation. So it seemed to him, anyhow. And, this time around, the Belgian Fascists helped the Nazis every way they could.

Walloons—the Belgians who spoke French—blamed the collaboration on the Flemings, the ones who spoke Dutch and could play as if they were Aryans. But there were Walloon would-be Nazis, too. A character named Léon Degrelle had formed a Walloon Legion that fought for Hitler in Russia. Degrelle had got wounded and won himself a Knight’s Cross. These days, the Walloon Legion was back here in the West, ready to fight against “the forces of Jewish plutocrat capitalism”—France and England, in other words.

That really disgusted Demange. If the Belgians didn’t want to be liberated, why spend money and men on the job? Because orders were orders, that was why. But he’d heard somewhere that Hitler had said that, if he’d had a son, he would have wanted him to be like Léon goddamn Degrelle. If that wouldn’t gag a maggot …

As far as Demange knew, only authentic
Boches
, not homemade copies, crouched in the muddy trenches on the far side of the mined and wired border. For the Germans he had solid professional respect. For their Belgian imitators? If you came up against those
cons
, how many prisoners would you bother to take?

More and more planes—English with their red-white-and-blue roundels red at the center and blue on the outside, French with the same colors reversed—flew from west to east night after night to drop their loads of hate on Belgium, Holland, and Germany. The
Luftwaffe
returned the compliment, though not so often.

French guns started shelling German positions inside Belgium. Young François got all hot and bothered—it looked as if the big attack was on at last. Then the
Boches
fired back. He didn’t like that so much. Who would have?

France had started the war with great swarms of quick-firing 75s left over from the go a generation earlier. Thanks to Versailles, the Germans had had to rebuild their artillery from scratch. Their 105s had outclassed the older French guns: bigger shells, longer range. Now France had enough 105s of her own to compete on even terms.
And it only took us four years. Isn’t that grand?
Demange thought cheerfully.

Orders came for a probe into Belgium. The Germans had attacked with everything they had in the winter of 1938. Attacking with everything you had didn’t seem to belong in the French vocabulary.

At the officers’ assemblage where the orders were announced, Demange asked, “A probe? Isn’t that what the doctors shove up your ass when your piles get impacted or whatever the hell piles do?” He didn’t care what he said. What was the worst thing they could do to him? Bust him down to sergeant again? He’d kiss them on both cheeks. Bust him down to private? He wouldn’t mind too much, unless he had some real
salaud
of a sergeant (one, say, like him) telling him what to do. Ship him to the front? He was already here.

His frankness made majors and lieutenant colonels and other such Important Personages wince. His own superior, a young captain named Marcel Gagné, was used to him by now—and stuck with him, too. “We’re trying to shove it up the
Boches’
ass,” he said mildly.

“If we’re gonna shove, we oughta
shove
,” Demange insisted. “You don’t give it to your girlfriend halfway, do you?”

Eyeing the officers, he figured some of them gave it to their boyfriends instead. If he came out with that, though, they
would
find something worse than demotion to do to him. All too often, the exact truth was the worst thing you could use.

Instead, he found a different question to ask: “Will we have any armor support?” If the answer turned out to be no, he hoped he wouldn’t get too badly damaged before the stretcher-bearers carried him to an aid station.

But the Most Important Personage—a brigadier general, no less—nodded. “We will,” he said, beaming as much as a big shot was ever likely to. “Some American
chars
we have purchased, and some of our own as well.”

“How about that?” Demange said in glad surprise. New French tanks had a gunner instead of making the commander fire the main armament. They all carried radios, too. The designers had swiped both notions from the Germans, but so what? They were good ones. The American tanks, though they carried radios, too, were like some of the older French models. They mounted a small gun in the turret and a bigger one in a hull sponson. But they were faster than the old French machines, and the Americans manufactured stuff in quantities other countries could only dream about.

Demange was actually optimistic when French guns hammered the Nazis’ front lines. The sensation felt so strange, he had trouble recognizing it. Even the gloomy, drizzly weather didn’t dampen his spirits. The last time he’d felt this way was in the autumn of 1918, when the Kaiser’s boys realized they couldn’t hold out any more. And they couldn’t—but they’d gone and shot him before they folded up for good.

Whistles shrilled, up and down the French trenches. “Come on, you bastards!” Demange yelled to the men he led. “We’ll get ’em!” For a few minutes, he even believed what he told them.

Then the German guns came back to life. No, the French barrage hadn’t silenced them—that would have been too much to hope for. Shells started falling amidst the advancing men in khaki. One came down right on some poor
cochon
. When the smoke and flame cleared, nothing was left of him but one boot. Machine guns spat death and mutilation. Concrete firing positions weren’t easy for artillery to take out. Tanks could do it, though.

The tanks did take out some of the machine-gun nests. And German 88s posted a bit farther back took out some of the tanks. Neither the American
chars
nor the French ones could stand up against those massive AP rounds. As far as Demange knew, no tanks could, not even the monsters the Russians built.

Here and there, Germans surrendered when French troops overran their positions. “
Kamerad!
” they would shout, or, if they spoke some French, “
Ami!
” And sometimes they got the chance to go back into a POW camp, and sometimes they didn’t: Monte Carlo, only played with human lives.

Those tanks that survived smashed lanes through the iron bramble fields of wire. French soldiers who had to dive when gunfire opened up nearby often clambered to their feet swearing and bleeding. Demange did himself. Much of the wire was old and rusty. He tried to remember the last time he’d got tetanus antitoxin.

He couldn’t. He didn’t waste time worrying about it. Of all the things he expected to die from, lockjaw came low on the list.

One of the American-built tanks hit a mine not far in front of him. The beast stopped short with a thrown track. The tank crew bailed out and hotfooted it to the rear, using their machine’s carcass to help cover them from enemy fire. No more than half a minute after they escaped, an 88 hit the
char
and set it ablaze. A tank that wouldn’t go was a tank waiting to die. Most of the time, it didn’t have long to wait, either.

Here came Marcel and Jean. The tall Red and the short one looked as filthy and as scared as any other soldiers where things got hot. “Here’s your Riviera, dearies!” Demange called to them. “See, there’s Stalin over on the next beach towel. Why don’t you wave?”

They gave him identical horrible looks. Sometimes what you’d asked for was the worst thing you could get.

Little by little, the French attack bogged down. Demange hadn’t looked for anything else, not after those rose-colored first few minutes. In fact, they’d pushed farther than he’d thought they could. Some of them settled down in German trenches. The
Boches
built finer field fortifications than anybody. He’d seen that in the last war. It remained true this time. The Russians used better camouflage, but they cared nothing for their soldiers’ comfort. The Germans did.

They also cared about pushing the French back to the border. Their artillery banged away all through the long night. Of course they had the range to their own former front line. A burst not far from Demange killed two of his men and sent three more off to the butchers in masks. One of the
poilus
was in bad shape. If they slapped an ether cone over his face and let him die, they might be doing him a favor.

But the advance went on the next morning. That surprised Demange—astonished him, in fact. Maybe the fat old fools in Paris meant it after all. Who would have thought so? Demange still wasn’t sure he did.

THIS WASN’T THE
first time Alistair Walsh had found himself in Calais. It wasn’t the second time, either. That had been back in late 1938, when the British Expeditionary Force crossed to the Continent in alleged support of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia went down the drain several hundred miles away. The BEF fired not a shot till long after Prague was occupied and Slovakia had detached itself from the Czecho part and declared its Nazi-sponsored independence.