Two Fronts Read Free Page A

car, but if you put a bunch of poilus fresh from the front in heaven they’d bellyache about that. Demange discounted it. Besides, some of the soldiers had vodka in their canteens instead of pinard or—God forbid!—water. They were the ones who pissed and moaned the loudest, and who fell asleep first. Hearing them snore, Demange wouldn’t have minded a good slug of liquid lightning himself. He knew how to hold his booze. He wouldn’t go out like a flashlight with a used-up battery.
    Two French soldiers played piquet. Four more made what would have been a bridge table if only they’d had a table. One fellow leaned against the filthy boards of the cattle-car wall with a pocket New Testament a few centimeters in front of his nose. How anybody could go through more than five minutes of combat and still believe in God was beyond Demange, but Maxime was a long way from the worst man in his company. As long as that stayed true, the lieutenant didn’t care how stupid he was every other way.
    Demange stubbed out the tiny butt of one Gitane and lit another. While he was awake, he smoked. His cigarettes dangled from the corner of his thin-lipped mouth. Alert poilus gauged his mood by the angle of the dangle. Of course, the gamut of those moods ran from bad to worse. He wasn’t about to waste his rare happiness on his men, the cons . He inhaled deeply. Gitanes were good and strong. The smoke helped him ignore the other foul odors in the cattle car.
    He’d just blown out a long stream of gray when he cocked his head to one side. He was trying to hear better—which, in its own way, was pretty goddamn funny, considering how often he’d fired a rifle right next to his ear. If by some accident he lived through the war, he’d be deaf as a horseshoe five years later. And this train, clunking along over a railroad that needed way more maintenance than it ever got, didn’t exactly make the ideal listening platform.
    All the same, this new background noise didn’t sound like anything that belonged with the train. It was getting louder, too, as if coming up from behind. It sounded like … “Fuck!” he said softly when he realized what it sounded like. He didn’t get the chance to yell before machine-gun bullets tore through the cattle car’s back wall and roof.
    Something stung his cheek. Automatically, his hand went up to it. His fingers came away bloody. For a bad second or two, he wondered if he’d got half his face shot away and just didn’t feel it yet. His hand rose again. No: he was still pretty much in one piece. Either a round had just grazed him or he’d got nicked by a flying splinter or something.
    Not all of his men were so lucky. The iron tang of blood suddenly warred with the rest of the stinks. One of the bridge players was down. With most of the left side of his head blown off, he wouldn’t get up again, either. The poilu beyond him clutched at his leg and howled like a wolf. The same bullet might have got them both.
    Other wounded men added their shrieks to the din. At least one other poor bastard looked to be dead, too. And, to add insult to injury, a bullet had holed one of the honey buckets below the waterline. Only the goddamn thing didn’t hold water.
    The train slowed, then stopped. At first, Demange swore at the engineer. Why wasn’t he going flat out, damn him? But that was a question with an obvious answer. If the German Stuka—Demange thought it was a Stuka, anyhow—had shot up the locomotive along with the cars behind it, the train wasn’t going anywhere because it couldn’t.
    And if it couldn’t … Demange knew what he would do if he were flying that ugly, ungainly bastard. “We’ve got to get out of here, dammit!” he yelled. “That cocksucker’ll come around again for another pass now that he’s got a target he can’t miss.” That he hated Germans didn’t keep him from giving them the professional respect they were due.
    There was a seal on the door. The Ivans didn’t want