Two Fronts Read Free

tell, since both wore khaki when not in winter white. They spilled out as he climbed for the new attack. By the time he dove again, muzzle flashes warned that they were shooting back.
    Well, they could try if they wanted to. A Stuka was a tough target for a rifleman. Even if a bullet or two did hit, the Ju-87’s cockpit and engine were armored against small-arms fire. Infantrymen, poor fools, weren’t. Rudel’s thumb came down on the firing button. His forward-facing machine guns chattered. The enemy soldiers ran every which way through the snow.
    Sergeant Dieselhorst gave them a parting burst as the dive-bomber climbed away from the stricken train. “They’re froggies, I think, Herr Oberleutnant ,” he said. “I’m pretty sure some of them were wearing the helmets with the crest.”
    “Good,” Hans-Ulrich said savagely. “They need to know they can’t play those games without paying the price.”
    “Damn straight, sir.” But then Dieselhorst went on, “What kind of price will we have to pay when the war in the west starts cooking again?” Since Hans-Ulrich had no good answer for that, he pretended not to hear, but droned on back toward the airstrip west of Smolensk.

    LIEUTENANT ARISTIDE DEMANGE had traveled in cattle cars before. In the last war, the French Army used them all the goddamn time: often enough to make stencils for painting the legend 8 HORSES OR 36 MEN on their sides. In the last war, the French Army’d used anything and everything it could find. Things hadn’t changed much in the generation since, either. If it was there, you grabbed it. Legalities and other details would wait till later.
    But the Red Army made Demange’s countrymen look like a bunch of pikers. Fighting against the Russians, he’d seen they were in grim earnest. Now the French expeditionary force was in Soviet hands. The Ivans wanted them the hell out of their country. What they wanted, they got. And they didn’t worry about legalities even a little bit. Legalities were whatever the commissars said they were. Anybody who didn’t like it headed for Siberia or got a bullet in the back of the neck.
    When Demange was a sergeant, he’d always tried to make his men more afraid of him than they were of the enemy. He’d done a damn good job of it, too. But, from everything he could see, all of Red Russia worked that way.
    No doubt the generals and colonels who’d led this force in the biggest French invasion of Russia since Napoleon’s day were riding north in the same kind of luxury high Soviet officers enjoyed when they weren’t at the front, classless society or no classless society. No doubt. People who weren’t generals or colonels headed north however the commissars wanted them to. And if the commissars felt like getting some of their own back … They might be godless Communists, but they were also human beings.
    So Demange and too many men from his company were sardined into a cattle car the French Army would have been ashamed to use in the most desperate hours of funneling men forward into the Verdun charnel house. You could watch the sleepers go by through spaces between the floorboards as the train rattled up the tracks toward … wherever the hell it was going. Nobody’d bothered to tell Demange where that was.
    Nobody’d bothered to muck out the car, either. As far as Demange could tell, nobody’d bothered to muck out the car since Tsar Nicholas was running things, or maybe Tsar Alexander before him. The Frenchman would never again doubt what bullshit smelled like.
    Sanitary arrangements were a couple of honey buckets with covers. When somebody needed to crap, Demange told off a poilu to stand in front of his chosen bucket and hold up a greatcoat to give some rudimentary privacy. By what Demange had seen in the USSR, the covers on the buckets represented no small concession to French sensibilities from the Red Army.
    His men were hardened to Russian conditions. They bitched about the stinks in the cattle