The Tommies who huddled with Walsh weren't so sure how their side was doing. They'd all started out in different regiments, but here they were, thrown together by the fortunes or misfortunes of war. One of them-Walsh thought his name was Bill-said, "Where do we go if we have to fall back from here, Sergeant?"
"Beats me," Walsh answered, more cheerfully than he felt. "They want us to hold where we are, so we'll do that as long as we can."
He peered out through a hole that had been a window. The bomb that had mashed this house had leveled three on the far side of the street. As far as Walsh was concerned, that was all to the good: it let him see farther than he could have if they still stood. Some British infantrymen were setting up a Bren gun over there, using the rubble to conceal and strengthen their position. That wouldn't protect them from artillery the way a concrete emplacement would, but it was a damn sight better than nothing.
And Walsh liked having machine guns around. They stretched an ordinary rifleman's life expectancy. Not only did they chew up enemy foot soldiers, they also drew fire, which meant the Germans wouldn't be shooting anywhere else so much-say, at the precious and irreplaceable carcass of one Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh.
Artillery probably based somewhere inside of Paris thundered behind the British position. The shells came down a few hundred yards in front of Walsh. A short round burst much too close to the Bren gunners. One of them turned and shook his fist in the direction of his own gunners.
Walsh would have done the same thing. Artillerymen and foot soldiers often brawled when they came together in taverns behind the line. The artillerymen seemed to wonder why. Not the infantry. They knew, all right.
"Can't win, can you, Sergeant?" a different private said. His name was Nigel, and he talked like an educated man.
"Oh, I don't know. Look at it the right way and we're all winners so far," Walsh replied.
Nigel looked puzzled. "How's that? This isn't a holiday on the fucking Riviera." His wave encompassed the shattered house and the wreckage all around.
"Too bloody right it's not," Walsh agreed. "But you're still here to piss and moan about it, eh? They haven't thrown you in a hole in the ground with your rifle and tin hat for a headstone. They haven't taken your leg off with a strap to bite on 'cause they ran out of ether with the last poor bloke. If you're not a winner on account of that, chum, what would you call it?"
"Heh." Nigel chuckled sheepishly. "Put it like that and you've got something, all right. Taken all in all, though, I do believe I'd sooner win the Irish Sweepstakes." He lit a Navy Cut and passed around the packet. He might talk like a toff, but he didn't act like one.
With one of Nigel's fags in his mouth, Walsh didn't feel like arguing any more. Sure as hell, a cigarette was better than a soft answer for turning away wrath. Then the German artillery woke up, and he forgot about everything else.
He hoped the Fritzes were sending back counterbattery fire. If they wanted to drop some on his own gunners' heads, he didn't mind…too much. But no such luck. The first shells burst a little closer to his position than the German rounds had. Then they walked west.
"Christ, we're for it this time!" he shouted, and dove under the dining-room table. It was the best shelter around. The other Tommies knew what they were doing, too. They all ended up in a mad tangle under there. That table, a great, solid hunk of oak, had to date back to the last century. It would keep the rest of the roof and the ceiling from coming down on their heads if anything could.
If anything could. That table wouldn't stop a shell burst on the house or right outside of it from filling them with fragments. Walsh knew that painfully well-and, with somebody's boot in his eye, somebody else's elbow in his stomach, and somebody else altogether squashing him flat, painfully was le mot juste.
An explosion to the right. Another to the left. Two more behind the house. Bits and pieces of things came down. Something about the size of a football thumped on top of the table and banged away. Another chunk of the ceiling? Whatever it was, Walsh wouldn't have wanted it landing on him. But it didn't. That table might have let a tank run over him, not that he was anxious to find out by experiment.
The bombardment pressed on, deeper into the Allied position. It was almost like the walking barrages the British had used in the last go. That memory galvanized Walsh. "Up!" he shouted urgently, lifting his face from the small of-he thought-Nigel's back. "Get up! We'll be arse-deep in Boches any second now!"
Getting out from under the table was more complicated than getting in there had been. They'd packed themselves in too tightly. After mighty wrigglings and much bad language, they got loose. Bill had a gash on his left leg. It might have come from broken glass on the floor or a graze by a fragment. In civilian times, Walsh would have thought it was nasty. Neither he nor Bill got excited about it now.
Walsh ran up to the top floor. Sure as dammit, here came the Fritzes. Their storm troops had submachine guns and lots of grenades. They'd learned that stunt in 1918. They'd bring real machine guns along, too. The current models were more portable than Maxims had been back then. And they were Fritzes. That alone gave Walsh a healthy respect for their talents.
He took a quick look at the Bren-gun position across the street. It didn't seem to have taken a hit, but the gun stayed quiet. With luck, the crew was playing possum, luring the Boches forward to be mown down. Without luck, somebody else would have to get over there-if he could-and use the Bren.
An unwary German (yes, there were such things: just not enough of them) showed himself for rather too long. Walsh's Enfield jumped to his shoulder almost of its own accord. The stock slammed him when he pulled the trigger. The German went down. By the boneless way he fell, Walsh didn't think he'd get up again.
"Now they know we're here," Nigel called from downstairs. He didn't sound critical-he was reminding Walsh of something he needed to remember.
"We couldn't have kept it secret much longer," the veteran noncom answered. "As long as they haven't got any tanks, winkling us out'll take a bit of work." He hadn't seen any mechanical monsters right around here. They did less well in built-up places than out in the open. They grew vulnerable to grenades and flaming bottles of petrol and other dirty tricks.
A machine gun started barking from most of a mile away. Bullets slammed into the east-facing stone wall. It wasn't aimed fire, but it made the Englishmen keep their heads down. A rifle could hit at that range only by luck. The machine gun stayed dangerous not because it was more accurate but because it spat so many rounds.
German infantry advanced under cover of that machine-gun fire. Walsh had been sure the Boches would. They knew what was what. And then, like the cavalry riding to the rescue in an American Western, the Bren gun in the wreckage across the street opened up. Walsh heard the Fritzes shout in dismay as they dove for cover. This wouldn't be so easy as they'd thought.
The machine gun that had been firing at Walsh and his chums forgot about them and went after the more dangerous Bren gun. The Germans didn't use light machine guns in this war. They had a general-purpose weapon that filled both the light and heavy roles. It wasn't ideal for either. But, being belt-fed, it could go longer than a box-fed Bren.
Not that that did the advancing Landsers much good. The Bren-gun position was secure against small-arms fire. The Tommies manning it ignored the other machine gun and kept the foot soldiers in field-gray at a respectful distance.
And Walsh and his pals and the other riflemen in the half-wrecked suburb made the Germans pay whenever they stuck their heads up. The only thing he dreaded was that the German artillery would come back. It didn't. After half an hour or so, the attack petered out. The Fritzes had taken a good many casualties, and Walsh couldn't see that they'd gained an inch of ground.