Cautiously, Chaim straightened up till he could peer over the lip of the trench. He wanted to make sure Sanjurjo's bastards weren't swarming forward. As soon as he did, he ducked down again. He wouldn't come up again in the same spot. He knew better than that. Why give the snipers a free shot at you? Guys who did that ended up with a new hole in the head.

He took a swig from his water bottle. It wasn't water, but sour white wine-horse piss, really. But it was less likely to give you the galloping shits than Ebro water was. He'd had dysentery once, and was glad he'd got over it. He sure as hell didn't want it again.

When he looked again, ten or fifteen yards down the trench from the place where he'd last popped up, he spied two or three Nationalists looking out of their trenches a couple of hundred yards away and toward him. As he ducked, he saw them ducking at the same time.

They're scared of me, he thought, not without pride. They even looked like Fascist assholes. Like most of Sanjurjo's better troops, they wore German-style helmets. But they were scared of a dumb Jew from New York City. If that wasn't a kick in the nuts, he didn't know what would be.

If you had a rifle in your hands, you were dangerous. It was as simple as that. The thing you had to remember, though, was that the other son of a bitch was dangerous as long as he had a rifle, too. VACLAV JEZEK STUMBLED OVER THE border. Behind him, Slovakia was going to hell in a handbasket. The Germans were breaking in from the west. The Hungarians, not about to miss a chance to seize again what they'd ruled for centuries, were breaking in from the south. The Slovaks were up in arms-German-supplied arms-against what was left of Czechoslovakian authority. Ingrate bastards, Jezek thought, not that anybody gave a damn about his opinion.

He didn't know what the Poles would do with him-to him-either. Poland was also more or less at war with Czechoslovakia. By now, Tesin would be Cieszun, or however the hell the Poles spelled it. He doubted whether his own country tried very hard to defend the mining town. When a lion jumped you, you didn't worry about the jackals.

The country was rough and broken. Most of the leaves were off the trees, though, which made people easier to spot. And, being off the trees, the leaves lay underfoot. Every time Vaclav took a step, they crunched underfoot. They might as well have shouted Here I am!

But so what? He didn't want to sit around in a Nazi POW camp till the war ended. Whatever the Poles did to him had to be better than that…didn't it? Behind him, he could still hear bombs and shells bursting and machine guns going off. More Czech soldiers-the ones who could-were stumbling north, out of the fighting. They'd made the same calculation he had. Now…were the lot of them right?

Somebody up ahead shouted something. Vaclav almost understood it. Polish and Czech were closely related-not so closely as Czech and Slovak, but still…A word here and there came through, even if each of them seemed to carry an extra syllable or two.

Vaclav stood still. He thought that was what the Pole was telling him to do. "I give up!" he shouted back. "You can intern me!"

The Pole came out from behind a tree. He wore a greenish uniform, not brown like Vaclav's (not filthy and tattered like Vaclav's, either) or German field-gray. The bayoneted rifle he carried looked extremely businesslike. Moving slowly and carefully, Vaclav unslung his own piece and laid it on the ground in front of his feet.

With a nod, the Pole advanced on him. They tried to talk. It was an exercise in near misses and frustration. Then the Pole-a big blond fellow-raised an ironic eyebrow and asked, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

"Ja," Jezek said miserably. Two Slavs, having to go back and forth in German!

"Gut," the Pole said. "Jetzt konnen wir wirklich einander verstehen." And they could really understand each other now, no matter how much Vaclav loathed the idea. Still in German, the Pole went on, "Give me your name and rank and unit."

Dully, Vaclav did. "What will you do with me?" he asked.

"We have a camp a few kilometers to the north," the Polish soldier answered. "Did you say you wanted to be interned before?"

"Ja," Vaclav said again.

"I thought so, but I wasn't sure," the Pole said. "Well, you will be. You are not a prisoner of war, not here. Poland and Czechoslovakia are not formally at war."

"No. You just grabbed," Jezek said bitterly.

With a shrug, the big man in the green uniform answered, "So did you Czechs, after the last war. Otherwise, the coal mines down there would have been ours all along. And then you act like your shit doesn't stink."

"Oh, mine does. I know that," Vaclav said. "But if you are friends with Hitler, he will make you sorry."

"Better him than Stalin and the damned Reds," the Pole retorted.

"You find friends where you can. At least the Russians did something for us. More than France and England did," Vaclav said.

"What did you expect? They're full of Jews," the Pole said. No wonder he liked Hitler better than Stalin. He stooped, picked up Vaclav's rifle, and slung it over his own shoulder. Then he pointed north. "The camp is that way. Get moving, Corporal Jezek."

Shoulders slumped in despair, Vaclav got moving.

The night was cool and damp. Most nights were, as October moved toward November. Willi Dernen peered at the Frenchmen who'd nipped off a few square kilometers of German soil.

They were warmer than he was. They'd started a fire and sat around it. From 300 meters, he could have potted them easily. Orders were not to piss them off, no matter what. If they wanted to sit on their asses as if they hadn't crossed the border, they were welcome to.

If they'd really come loaded for bear…

Willi's shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He was a blond, stolid watchmaker's son from Breslau, all the way over on the other side of the Reich. He could hardly follow the German they spoke here, and the locals had trouble with his accent, too. But he'd been on the Westwall since France and England declared war. He knew what would have happened had the French put some muscle into a push instead of tiptoeing over the border.

They would have smashed the Westwall as if they were made of cardboard. Not a Landser here thought any differently. The Westwall was Goebbels' joke on the democracies. On paper, and on the radio, it was as formidable as the Maginot Line. For real, construction gangs were still frantically building forts and obstructions. And the Westwall didn't have nearly enough troops to man what was already built.

Most of the Wehrmacht had gone off to kick Czechoslovakia's ass. What was left…the French outnumbered somewhere between three and five to one. That was the bad news. The good news was, they didn't seem to know it.

One of the Frenchmen pulled out a concertina and began to play. The thin, plaintive notes made Willi shake his head. How could the guys on the other side listen to crap like that? Horns, drums, fiddles-that was music.

Beside Dernen, Wolfgang Storch whispered, "We ought to plug him just so he'll shut up, you know?"

Trust Wolfgang to come up with something like that, Willi thought. He whispered back: "Damn you, you almost made me laugh out loud. That wouldn't be so good."

"Why not?" Storch said. "Probably make the Frenchmen piss themselves."

Willi did snort then, not because Wolfgang was wrong but because he was right. Willi had come that close to pissing himself when he was part of a firefight right after the French came over the border. The guy next to him took one right in the belly. The noises Klaus made…You didn't want to remember things like that, but you couldn't very well forget them. When Willi went to sleep, he heard Klaus shrieking in his nightmares. He smelled the other man's blood, like hot iron-and his shit, too.