The coffee, by contrast was pretty good. That was because it wasn't Wehrmacht issue. Like the cigarettes the Landsers smoked, it was the good stuff, foraged from French farms and villages-and, no doubt, corpses. Wolfgang Storch already had a tin cup's worth. "You know you're beat to shit when even this stuff won't make your heart turn over," he said sadly.

"Tell me about it," Willi agreed. He gulped the coffee anyway. He certainly didn't move slower with it inside him. If he moved any slower, he'd be dead. The stink that fouled what should have been a fine spring morning reminded him how easy dying was these days. The Wehrmacht was still pushing forward, so what he smelled were mostly dead Frenchmen. Dead Germans were no sweeter to the nose, though.

Lieutenant Krantz took advantage of having most of his men gathered together. "We have to get through," the platoon commander said earnestly. "We aren't as far along as we ought to be. The more we fall behind schedule, the better the chance we give the enemy. If he stops us here, he can reinforce his positions north of Paris. That wouldn't be good-not a bit."

A few of the soldiers eating breakfast and smoking managed weary nods. Willi didn't have the energy. He knew too damned well why they hadn't come farther or gone faster. Anybody with a gram of sense did. The terrain in the Ardennes sucked, and they didn't have enough panzers along to punch through the Frenchmen and their friends blocking the way west. Most of the goodies-and most of the air support-went to the right wing, the one punching ahead somewhere to the northwest. The plan had almost worked in the last war. The High Command had decided it just needed to make the fist a little bigger this time around.

And maybe the High Command knew what it was doing, and maybe it had its head up it ass. One reason you fought wars was to find out things like that.

Willi washed out his mess tin and stowed it on his belt. He put on his helmet and picked up his Mauser. The rifle was just over four kilos; it only seemed to weigh a tonne. He couldn't even sling it. He had to carry it instead-the French were too damned close.

As if to remind him of that, a Hotchkiss machine gun stuttered awake. The malign rattle made his asshole pucker. Somewhere up ahead lay Laon, which the Germans had been bombing and shelling for days. How many French soldiers still crouched in the ruins with rifles and machine guns and grenades-waiting?

"Come on," Lieutenant Krantz said. "We've got to move up, and that damned gun is in the way."

Well, I'm awake now, Willi thought as he heaved himself to his feet. Raw terror burned away exhaustion. And anybody who had to stalk a well-sited machine gun-and this one would be, because the Frenchies knew how to play the game, too-made an intimate acquaintance with terror.

Farms in these parts were small. Stone fences separated one from another. Poilus lurked behind the fences. Every so often, one of them would pop up and shoot. Or a mortar team would lob a couple of bombs from God knew where. Willi hated mortars. You couldn't hear the rounds coming till they got right on top of you, which was just exactly too late.

"There!" Wolfgang pointed. The machine gun was firing from a stone farmhouse's window narrowed to a slit with more building stones. Willi swore under his breath. This one would be a bitch and a half to get rid of. The position was shielded against anything this side of an antitank gun.

Or maybe it wasn't. Lieutenant Krantz spoke into the radio set a lance-corporal got to lug. Fifteen minutes later, a fellow with a couple of tanks on his back and a sinister-looking nozzle in his hand came forward. Everyone shied away from him. He didn't seem to care, or maybe he was used to the response by now.

"Keep them busy, all right?" he said. The German soldiers nodded. You wanted a flamethrower man on your side to succeed, but you felt faintly guilty when he did. Nobody mourned a flamethrower man who got roasted by his own hellish device, either. And Willi had never heard of anyone who managed to surrender with that apparatus on his back.

But that wasn't his worry, except at one remove. He raised up from behind a boulder and took a shot at the machine gun's firing slit. He ducked back down as soon as he'd pulled the trigger-and a good thing, too, because the Hotchkiss promptly spat lead his way. The froggies in the farmhouse were mighty alert. Willi hoped the miserable bastard with the flamethrower had his life insurance paid up.

One of his buddies groaned. Somebody else yelled for a medic. If you poked a bear in its den, you were liable to get clawed. The last thing Willi wanted was to rise up again and shoot at the slit. He did it anyway, which proved what a strong thing Wehrmacht training was-and, even more, how powerful was his fear of looking bad in front of his squadmates. Without that fundamental fear, nobody could have fought a war.

When he rose up one more time, the muzzle of the Hotchkiss was pointing straight at him. Before the Frenchies could shoot him, though, the flamethrower man used his toy. Foomp! Even across several hundred meters, Willi heard the man-made dragon's noise. Fire engulfed the machine gun and the firing slit-and whoever had the bad luck to be right behind them.

German soldiers whooped. Even so, nobody seemed especially eager to show himself. Maybe more Frenchmen had dragged their charred friends away from the trigger and were waiting to give optimists or fools-assuming there was a difference-a nasty surprise.

The flamethrower man solved that problem. He crawled right up to the farmhouse, stuck his nozzle into the firing slit, and…Foomp! He cocked his head to one side, as if listening. Then he waved. No more trouble here, the gesture said.

Willi still wasn't enthusiastic about standing up, but he did. The soldiers trotted forward as smoke rose from the farmhouse. The breeze came out of the west, as it commonly did. Willi's nose wrinkled. Along with woodsmoke, he caught the reek of burnt meat. The flamethrower had done its job, all right.

Even so, nobody wanted much to do with the fellow who carried it. He stood there, a little more smoke trailing from the snout of his infernal machine. Again, he didn't seem particularly surprised or disappointed. Well, why would he? How many times had he seen this same response by now?

Lieutenant Krantz pointed toward Laon. His officer's whistle squealed. "Come on!" he yelled. "Not far now! Follow me!"

An officer who said that made his troops want to do it. All the same, the infantrymen hesitated. That rattling clatter out of the east, getting louder now…"Panzers!" Willi said in delight. "Our panzers!" He hadn't seen many of them.

These two little Panzer Is were no more than mobile machine-gun nests. Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot, though. Both panzer commanders stood up in their turrets. They waved to the foot soldiers, who returned the compliment. "Come with us," one of the men in black coveralls shouted over engine noise. "Keep the French pigdogs away."

"And you keep them away from us," Lieutenant Krantz said. The panzer commander who'd spoken before nodded. Everybody needed help now and then.

Willi loped along to the left of the panzers. A French machine gun fired at them, which was stupid. Its bullets couldn't hurt them. One of the panzers crushed the sandbagged position, turning back and forth and round and round on top of it to make sure nothing in there survived.

Then a rifle of a sort Willi hadn't heard before went off-a big boom that would have set anyone's teeth on edge. What followed wasn't the ping of a ricochet, either. That round punched clear on through the baby panzer's thin frontal armor. The machine kept going in a straight line till it rammed a big oak and stopped. Driver's hit, Willi realized. German had antitank rifles, too, but you didn't expect to run up against one right after you'd finally picked up some armor.