Hitler's War by Harry Turtledove Page A

to his feet or anything. Tiny in the distance, one of them shrugged a comically French shrug. The concertina player started up again.
    “Let’s head back and report in,” Wolfgang said.
    “Now you’re talking. You and your stupid jokes.” It was hard to stay really mad when you were whispering in a tiny voice, but Willi gave it his best shot. “We wouldn’t’ve got in a jam if you weren’t such a damn smartass.”
    “Your mother,” Wolfgang answered sweetly.
    Both Germans drew back as softly as they could. The French soldier with the concertina went on playing. Willi took that as a good sign. Maybe the Frenchmen were using the noise as cover. That would be a smart thing to do. It would also be an aggressive thing to do. The French might be smart. They’d shown no sign of aggressiveness.
    All the same, Willi wanted no part of a nasty surprise. All it would take was a sergeant who’d been through the mill the last time around. Willi’s father was a guy like that. When he and his buddies got together and drank some beer, they’d start telling stories. Like any kid, Willi listened. There probably weren’t a lot of guys his age who hadn’t heard stories like that. Some veterans, though, didn’t care to talk. Willi hadn’t understood that, not till Klaus got it. He did now.
    They’d gone about half a kilometer when a no-doubt-about-it German voice challenged them: “Halt! Who goes there?”
    “Two German soldiers: Dernen and Storch,” Willi answered. He and Wolfgang were out in the middle of a field. The
Landser
who owned that voice might have been…anywhere.
    “Give the password,” the man said.
    “Sonnenschein,”
Willi and Wolfgang chorused. A Frenchman poking around could have picked it up from them, but the French didn’t do much of that kind of poking.
    “Pass on,” the sentry said.
    They did. The Germans were ready for anything. The French didn’tseem to be. They didn’t have to be, either—they had numbers, and the
Wehrmacht
didn’t. But they acted as if that would go on forever. And it wouldn’t.
    Willi got a glimpse of just how true that was when he and Wolfgang finished making their report. They ducked out of Colonel Bauer’s tent and found themselves in the middle of chaos. Soldiers were jumping down from trucks whose headlights were cut down to slits by masking tape. Some of the belching, farting monsters there weren’t trucks at all. They were panzers.
    Both Willi and Wolfgang gaped at them. Willi hadn’t seen a panzer up till now in all the time he’d spent on the Western Front. He supposed there were a few, in case the French decided they were serious about attacking here. But he sure hadn’t seen any.
    “It must be all over in Czechoslovakia,” he said.
    “Ja.”
Wolfgang nodded. “Took longer than it should have, too.”
    “Everything takes longer than it’s supposed to,” Willi said. “No matter how smart the generals are, the bastards on the other side have generals, too.”
    Wolfgang laughed at him. “Generals? Smart? What have you been drinking? Whatever it is, I want some, too.”
    “Oh, come on. You know what I mean. If the guys with the red stripes on their trousers”—Willi meant the General Staff—“don’t end up smarter than the generals on the other side, we’re in trouble.”
    “But everybody knows the generals on the other side are a bunch of jerks,” Wolfgang said. “So how smart do our fellows need to be?”
    Before Willi could answer, more panzers rumbled up. Shouting sergeants ordered them under such trees as there were. Not all of them would fit there. Soldiers spread camouflage netting over the ones that had to stay out in the open. Not many French reconnaissance planes came over, but the
Wehrmacht
didn’t believe in taking chances when it didn’t have to.
    Wolfgang Storch pointed back toward the French soldiers they’dbeen watching. “Hope those assholes don’t hear the racket and start wondering what’s up.”
    “Don’t worry