"Well, in that case, we get our nuts crunched. What else?" Demange said. "It happened often enough the last time around. A breakthrough? Of course the next offensive would give us one. Of fucking course. They haven't got a whole hell of a lot smarter since, have they?"

"What can we do, then?" Louis asked-a damn good question.

"When they tell us to go, we go. That's what we can do," Demange answered flatly. "Do anything else and your own side will scrag you. Matter of fact, for you I'll take care of it personally." He paused, his ferret face even fiercer than usual. "Any other stupid questions?"

No one said anything. Louis'd asked the one thing that really needed asking. Only as the knot of soldiers broke up did Luc say, "How hard are we gonna get fucked, Sergeant?"

Demange looked at him. "They won't kiss us-I'll tell you that. If they really have shipped out their tanks… Well, shit, what if they have? They'll know which way we're coming, and they'll have an antitank gun with every one of our tanks' names on it. But what can you do?"

Once you put on a uniform-once they drafted you and put a uniform on you-you couldn't do a goddamn thing except what they told you. You figured that out in a hurry. If you had trouble, if you were slow or stubborn, they rubbed your nose in it. Luc understood what was what, all right. "Ah, shit," he said.

"See? You're not so fucking dumb." Demange reached up and thumped him on the shoulder. Luc had to hold himself tight to keep from jumping. Even such rough affection from Demange was far, far out of the ordinary.

French tanks clanked up under cover of darkness. The people with fancy kepis were serious about this, anyway. How much that meant… The only way to find out was to see how many poilus turned into cat's-meat and how much ground they took doing it.

Dawn came early these days. Summer would be here soon. Luc hoped he would be here, too, so he could see it when it came. He waited for the balloon to go up, his mouth papery dry. He knew about all the barbed wire ahead. You could get hung up on the stuff, stuck like a fly on flypaper, waiting for machine-gun bullets to chew you up and leave you limp. How many French soldiers had died that way in the last war? How many more were about to? Am I one of them? That was the question you never wanted to ask yourself.

Behind him, the French artillery woke up early. 75s, 105s, 155s… They pounded away for all they were worth. The ground shook under his feet. He glanced back over his shoulder. All those muzzle flashes made it look as if the sun were rising in the west.

The Germans were good, damn them. It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes after hell started coming down on their positions when their artillery started hitting the French forward trenches. Luc huddled there, trying to make himself as small as he could. Before long, he'd have to come out of the trench. He'd feel like an escargot without its shell. And the Boches had such sharp escargot forks!

An officer's whistle shrilled. The sound seemed small and lost in the middle of the thunderous artillery duel. Sergeant Demange let out a yell that cut through the explosions like a sharp knife through soft cheese: "Come on, you old cons! This is what you punched your time cards for!"

Luc would never have volunteered for this-which mattered not a sou's worth. He scrambled up the dirt steps that led out of the trench. His pack weighed him down, even stripped to the minimum as it was. It seemed heavy as an escargot's shell. But it didn't give him even that much protection.

As he went forward at a lumbering trot, he called fancy curses down on Denis Boucher's head. Maybe the little bastard was screwing his half-faithful Marie right now. Maybe the military police had caught him. Even that would be better than this. Anything would be better than this.

Clang-whang! That factory noise was an antitank round bouncing off a tank's armored carapace. If somebody inside the machine wasn't working his rosary beads, he was wasting a hell of a chance. Yes, the Germans were alert. When weren't they, damn them?

Clang! Blam! That factory noise was an antitank round penetrating a tank's steel hide and all the ammo inside going off at once. The turret blew three meters into the air and squashed a foot soldier when it came down. He didn't have time to scream. He probably didn't even have time to be surprised.

Machine guns rattled like malignant jackdaws. "Come on! Keep going!" Sergeant Demange shouted. "They aren't aimed at you!"

One of the things Luc had found out was that they didn't have to be aimed at you. They put out so many bullets, they could kill you any which way. But he couldn't flop down and start digging himself a foxhole, not when he had to mind a squad. He yelled "Keep going!" too. Once they smashed through the German line, things would-well, might-get easier.

Tanks really did mash down barbed wire, no matter how thickly the Germans laid it. And, if you went in right behind them, they shielded you from the fire directly ahead. Watching ricochets spark off the tank in front of him made Luc wonder how many of them would have nailed him if the tank weren't there. So what if its exhaust made him want to put on his gas mask? He might have been a Roman legionary advancing behind a big, fat shield.

This shield had weapons of its own. It stopped. So did Luc. Its cannon roared-once, twice. One of the machine guns that had been filling the air with death suddenly shut up. Even some of the new conscripts huddled behind the tank with Luc shouted happily. They knew every machine-gun nest that got ruined made them likelier to live.

The tank lurched forward-for about another fifteen meters. Then it hit a mine. That blew off its left track. It stopped. Hatches popped open. The crew jumped out. A tank that couldn't move was a tank an antitank gun would murder any minute now. The tank men carried only pistols. That made them useless in an infantry fight. Luc didn't know what they'd do now.

He didn't have time to worry about it, either. They were coming up on the Germans' foxholes and trenches. A Boche popped up with his hands high. "Kamerad!" he shouted hopefully.

Luc gestured with his rifle. The German climbed out of his hole, babbling thanks for not getting killed on the spot. Luc gestured again. The Boche stumbled back toward Beauvais. If he was lucky, no Frenchman would plug him before he got there. If he wasn't… Well, too bad, old man.

"Fuck me if I don't think we can do this after all!" Sergeant Demange yelled. Luc was starting to think the same thing. He hadn't seen any German tanks yet, and his own side still had plenty running. He tramped on toward the east. "LET'S HAVE ONE MORE RADIO CHECK, Theo," Heinz Naumann said.

"Right, Sergeant," Theo Hossbach answered resignedly. The radio set had worked perfectly half an hour earlier. They hadn't moved since. What could have gone wrong? But Naumann had the prejump jitters. Nothing to do but humor him. Theo hooked in with the company, regimental, and divisional networks. The set still worked fine. "Alles gut," he reported.

"Danke," Naumann said. "Won't be long now."

Theo didn't answer. The radioman's position in a Panzer II left him in a zone of no time and no place. He sat behind the turret and in front of the engine compartment. He couldn't see out unless he opened the hatch in the rear decking and stuck his head through it to look around. You didn't want to do that unless all your other choices were worse: cooking like a pork roast inside a burning panzer, for instance. No time and no place would do.

In an odd way, they even suited Theo. Some people who knew him called him self-sufficient. Rather more called him dreamy. All he knew was, most of the time the world within his head was more interesting than anything that went on outside. Being stuck in the bowels of all this complicated ironmongery bothered him much less than it would have troubled most other people.