Hans-Ulrich dove again, not so steeply this time. His thumb rested on the firing button atop the stick. He had two forward-firing machine guns mounted in his wings. The Ju-87 seemed to stagger in the air as his bullets stitched through the convoy.

A bus ran into a truck. The bus caught fire. Another bus rolled off the road and into a ditch. Soldiers bailed out of their vehicles and ran like hell. It was almost like going after partridges with a shotgun.

Almost. Some of the Dutch soldiers didn't run very far. They un-slung their rifles and started shooting at the Stuka as it roared away. Infantrymen didn't have much of a chance against aircraft, but no denying the balls on these guys. And damned if a bullet from somewhere didn't clang through the Stuka's tail assembly. A few meters farther forward…

My armor would have stopped it, Hans-Ulrich thought. That's what it's there for. Reassuring to remember you had eight millimeters of steel at your back, five millimeters under you, and four millimeters to either side. It wouldn't keep everything out, but it beat the hell out of not having any.

Soldiers fired green flares. That was the German recognition signal. They didn't want their own Stukas shooting them up. Hans-Ulrich waggled his wings to show he'd seen.

He bounced in on a dirt strip a few kilometers inside the German border. Groundcrew men and armorers cared for the Stuka. Hans-Ulrich rolled back the canopy so he could stand up and stretch. "You've got a couple of bullet holes, sir," a groundcrew man reported.

"I know I got hit at least once," Rudel answered. "Anything leaking? All my gauges are good, and the controls answer."

"No leaks," the man assured him.

"Well, then, I'll worry about it later," he said. "Mach schnell, bitte. We've got a war to fight, and no time to waste."

Five minutes later, he was airborne again. ONE OF THE THINGS ALISTAIR WALSH had forgotten about war was what a bloody balls-up it made of traffic. Or maybe things had been different in 1918. By the time he got to the front then, all the civilians had run off. Either that or they'd got killed. Anyhow, they weren't around to get in the way.

Things were different now. The Dutch and the Belgians hadn't expected the Nazis to jump on them. Sergeant Walsh didn't know why they hadn't-his opinion was that they were a pack of goddamn fools-but they hadn't. Now that the shells were bursting and the bombs came whistling down, half of the locals decided they really wanted to go to some place where things like that didn't happen.

And so they did. Whatever small respect Walsh had acquired for the Belgian army during the last go-round dissolved like his stomach lining in the presence of cheap whiskey. He didn't particularly expect the Brussels Sprouts to fight. (He knew damn well the Germans would fight, and hoped the French would, too. About all other foreigners he remained deeply pessimistic.) But couldn't they at least act like traffic police?

On the evidence, no. Now that the balloon had gone up, the Belgians weren't threatening to shoot at anybody who crossed their sacred border. The British Expeditionary Force, the French Seventh Army to its left, and the French First Army to its right were moving into Belgium to take up positions to throw back the Germans. They should have done that sooner, but King Leopold kept saying no. So they were doing it now.

Or they were trying to.

When lorries and tanks and long columns of khaki-clad men on foot headed east, and when mad swarms of autos and horsecarts and donkey carts and handcarts and terrified men, women, and children on foot headed west, and when they all ran headlong into one another…

Nobody went anywhere. The lorries and tanks tried to push forward. Drivers screamed in English, which mostly didn't help. Not many Englishmen knew enough French to do them any good-if French would have done them any good, which wasn't obvious. If Belgian troops had channeled the refugees down a few roads and left the rest open for the soldiers who were trying to save their miserable country for the second time in a generation…

Too much to hope for, plainly.

"We're not going to make our stage line today, are we, sir?" Walsh asked before the first day was very old.

"Too bloody right we're not," his company commander agreed.

Planes flew off toward the east. That, at least, was reassuring. Till now, the RAF had left the Germans alone. The Luftwaffe had also left the BEF alone, but Walsh didn't think about what that meant. He got his first lesson a little past noon.

The day was chilly, but only partly cloudy. The sun had risen late and would set early. It hung low in the sky, a bit west of south. The English soldiers were trying to fight their way through yet another clot of refugees. These people were gabbling in Flemish, or possibly Dutch. Whichever it was, it sounded enough like German to raise Sergeant Walsh's hackles.

"Don't they know we've got to get up there so we can fight?" he demanded of nobody in particular, or possibly of God.

His soldiers weren't listening. They were too busy yelling and swearing at the frightened people in front of them. As for God…When Walsh heard the rumble in the sky, he thought at first it was more RAF planes going over. The poor damn refugees knew better. That sound scattered them faster than all the yelling and swearing the British troops had done.

That timbre wasn't quite the same as the one Walsh had heard before. And those shark-nosed planes with the kinked wings had never come out of British factories. They dove almost vertically, like hawks after rabbits. And as they dove, they also screamed. The sound alone was plenty to make the sergeant want to piss himself.

"Get down!" he screamed. "Hit the dirt! Get-!" He followed his own order, just in the nick of time.

Blast picked him up and flung him around. He did piss himself then, but realized it only later. A lorry caught by a bomb turned into a fireball. Men and pieces of men flew through the air. A marching boot thudded down six inches in front of Walsh's nose. It still had a foot in it. He stared, then retched. He'd seen such things twenty years earlier, but he'd done his damnedest to block them out of his mind ever since.

More bombs went off among the refugees and the marching troops. Shrieks rang out through and even over the stunning crump!s of explosives. Wounded soldiers screamed for medics and stretcher-bearers. Wounded civilians simply screamed.

The nasty dive-bombers roared away toward the east, the direction from which they'd come. Alistair Walsh was just getting to his feet when more planes flew in from that direction. At first, he thought they were RAF fighters returning from strikes against the Nazis-their lines weren't so aggressively unfamiliar as those of the previous attackers. But then fire spurted from their wings and from their propeller hubs. They were shooting at-shooting up-the British column and the poor damned hapless refugees.

"Down!" Walsh yelled again, and fit action to word.

When a bullet struck flesh, it made a wet, slapping noise. He remembered that from the last time around, however much he wished he didn't. German airplanes had strafed trenches in 1918. It hadn't seemed nearly so horrid or dangerous then. For one thing, he'd been a fool of a kid twenty years earlier. For another, the German air force, like the Kaiser's army, had been on the ropes. And, for one more, he wasn't in a trench now.

More screaming engines made him grab his entrenching tool to see what he could do about digging in. Then a few people started cheering as if they'd lost their minds. Suspecting they had, he warily looked up. British Hurricane fighters were mixing it up with the bastards with the hooked crosses on their tails. Walsh started cheering, too.

A Hurricane went into a flat spin and slammed into the ground, maybe half a mile away. A black, greasy column of smoke marked the pilot's pyre. Then, trailing smoke and flames, one of the German fighters crashed into a stand of trees even closer to where Walsh lay.