"Here you go." Walsh handed him the packet, then leaned close to let him have a light. "It's not, I tell you."

"I said the same fing myself." Collins blew out smoke, then whistled respectfully. "Bastard's strong as the devil. Turkish blend?"

"That's right. If you aren't going to taste it, why smoke it?" Walsh said.

"Knocks the socks off Navy Cut Gold, it does," Collins said.

"I should hope so." Alistair took a pull at his pint. Some places on the Continent, they sold beer by the half-liter, which wasn't enough. None of that nonsense at the Green Duck, though. Walsh repeated, "If you aren't going to taste it, why smoke it? And if you aren't going to fight, why send the bloody Expeditionary Force over here?"

"Politics." Joe Collins turned it into the filthiest word in the world. "The froggies, they'd break out in arseholes if we wasn't here, so we bleedin' well are."

"Sounds right to me," Alistair agreed. "But say what you please about the frogs, last time around they wanted to have a go at the Boche. So did we. Everybody was dead keen to get in there and mix it up. Not now."

"No, not now. Sufferin' Jesus!" The other senior sergeant drained his pint and waved for another one. "The way those sorry sods are tippytoeing into 'Unland…and they 'aven't moved us up towards the front at all."

"Don't I know it!" Alistair said. "We just sit around soaking up beer and pinching the barmaids' bums…"

"You try it, dearie, and you'll draw back a bloody stump," said the broad-shouldered blonde who brought Collins his refill. The words carried a bit of a French accent. The sentiment could have come from any British barmaid from Londonderry to Dover.

"Don't pay him no mind, sweet'eart," Joe Collins said. "If I get my mitts on you, now, you'll love every minute of it."

"And then you wake up," she retorted. Away she went, with a little extra roll to her hips to show the soldiers what they were missing.

Collins chuckled. "She'd be a 'andful and a 'alf, she would."

"You might say so." But Alistair wanted to talk about the war, not women. They could always come back to women, and they probably would. For now, though…"Only ones who fight like they mean it are the Czechs-and the Germans in Czecho, too."

"Fat lot of good it does the bloody Czechs," Collins said. "They'd be better off if they lay down for old Adolf."

"Tell that to the next Czech you see," Walsh said. "Go on-I dare you. But make sure I'm there, mind, on account of I want to watch him wallop the snot out of you. And he will, too. You're a tough bugger, Joe, but these blokes from the middle of Europe, they bloody well mean it. Tell me I'm wrong."

"Oh, I could lick a Czech or a Pole," Collins said. "But if I turned me back 'arf a mo', 'e'd bloody well pull a knife out of 'is boot top and give me one right in the kidney. They don't fight fair in those parts."

Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just that Central Europeans were dreadfully in earnest. The one who'd plugged Henlein and touched off this mess-he must have known he wouldn't get away. He did it anyhow. A generation earlier, Gavrilo Princip and his Balkan buddies hadn't counted the cost, either.

"I wish they'd move us forward," Walsh said. "I don't give a shit about hanging out my washing on the Siegfried Line, but I'd like to see the goddamn thing."

"Careful what you wish for-you may get it," Collins said.

"Not here, by God." Alistair Walsh shook his head. "The Frenchies say they did their duty by Czecho when they stuck half of one toe into Germany. And we did ours by the Frenchies when we crossed over. Fight? Oh, no, dear!" His voice rose to a shrill, effeminate falsetto.

Joe Collins laughed. So did the Englishman behind the bar. The tap-man could afford to. He'd done his bit the last time around, and paid enough so that nobody wanted anything else from him now. Walsh soaked up the beer. This was soft duty. He knew he shouldn't complain. Drinking pints in a Calais pub when he should have been in a trench brewing tea with hot water from the cooling jacket of his machine gun didn't feel right, though. Somebody in charge knew damn all about what was going on.

Or maybe that somebody knew entirely too well. There was a notion more frightening still. PRAGUE DEAD AHEAD. LUDWIG ROTHE'S Panzer II approached the capital of Czechoslovakia from the east. Prague was surrounded, utterly cut off from any hope of relief. If the Czechs had any brains, they would surrender. If they had any brains, they would have surrendered a long time ago.

Luftwaffe planes dropped leaflets on the capital along with bombs. Winds swept some of the leaflets far from the target. Ludwig had seen a couple of them. They showed Prague in flames while Jewish-looking men labeled FRANCE and ENGLAND played the violin. The German caption beneath them read Your allies fiddle while Prague burns; Ludwig presumed the Czech forest of consonants meant the same thing.

Burn Prague did. The sour smell of smoke and damp clogged the panzer commander's nostrils. There was just enough drizzle to cut down visibility-not enough to do much against fires. Prague had been catching it since the war started. Not much of the place could still be standing. How many civilians and soldiers had died in the rain of high explosives? Ludwig could smell corpses, too.

But the Czechs fought on in the ruins, perhaps fueled by the courage of despair. If you want us, come and get us. Come pay the butcher's bill for us, they seemed to say. And they were making it as expensive as they could.

Fritz Bittenfeld drove the panzer past the burnt-out hulk of a Czech T-35, and then past a dead Panzer I that had had the turret blown clean off the chassis. Ludwig winced when he saw that. Nobody'd really intended the Panzer I for anything more than a training vehicle. It didn't have the firepower or the armor to fight other tanks.

If an emergency came along before your bigger machines were ready, though…If that happened, you used what you had and hoped for the best. And sometimes you got it, and sometimes you bought the farm like the two sorry sons of bitches inside that baby panzer.

Ludwig knew too well his own Panzer II was only a small step up. Its main armament was a good deal better than the Panzer I's pair of rifle-caliber machine guns. It carried thicker armor, too. But the armor wasn't that much thicker. The cannon on Czech tanks had no trouble piercing it.

He looked this way, that way, the other way. While he was at it, he wished for eyes in the back of his head. Smashed buildings came closer and closer together as the Wehrmacht pushed into Prague's suburbs. Tanks and antitank guns and Czech soldiers with Molotov cocktails had all kinds of places to hide.

Landsers were supposed to root out such dangers. Panzers and foot soldiers worked best together. Each helped protect the other. Armor was great for disposing of machine-gun nests that could hang infantry up for days. Ground pounders returned the favor by spotting lurking soldiers or guns.

Broad-winged Heinkel 111s and slim Dornier bombers-Flying Pencils, people called them-gave Prague one more dose of modern war. Antiaircraft shells burst all around them. Not many Avias rose to challenge the bombers. The little biplanes sure looked as if they came out of the last war, but they'd given Germany's fancy new 109s all they wanted and then some. The Messerschmitts hadn't knocked them out of the sky. Bombers had finally plastered so many Czech airstrips that few Avias could get off the ground.

A Czech machine gun up ahead barked. Ludwig got ready to dive back into the turret. Anybody who talked about how the Slavs were a bunch of Untermenschen had never run into Czech engineering-or Czech infantry, for that matter. The guys in the brown uniforms knew what they were doing. They meant business, too.

Then, all of a sudden, the machine gun fell silent. So did all the guns on the Czech side. Little by little, German firing also wound down. Fritz's voice floated out of the speaking tube: "What's going on?"