And there were Frenchmen in the Bois des Hazelles. Willi and his pals had to be coming to the end of it-the sky was starting to go from black to charcoal gray in the southeast-when someone called out, "Qui va?"

"Un ami," Lieutenant Gross said. Ami meant friend; Willi had picked that up from surrendering Frenchmen. Now-would it do the trick?

It didn't. The poilu gave forth with a fresh challenge, one Willi didn't get. Maybe he wanted a password. Whatever he wanted, Gross didn't have it. The shooting started a moment later.

The froggies, damn them, had a machine gun right there. It spat fire in the darkness. Tracers stabbed out at the oncoming Germans. They were scary as hell. Willi flopped down on his belly and crawled forward like a slug. He didn't want to get a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to.

As he crawled, he realized that those tracers weren't doing the guys at the Hotchkiss gun any favors. Every time the machine gunners opened up, they guided their enemies toward them. And it wasn't really light enough for them to see what they were aiming at. So…

Willi yanked the fuse cord on a potato-masher grenade. He flung it toward the machine gunners, who had no idea he was there. But the grenade hit a branch or something, because it didn't burst where he wanted it to. The Frenchmen serving the gun yelled, but they didn't scream. He froze. If they spotted him, he was sausage meat-and it was getting lighter.

Something off to one side distracted them. They turned the Hotchkiss in that direction and started banging away. They nailed somebody, too. That shriek sounded bad. But, while they were busy over there, Willi slithered behind a-hazel?-tree.

He pulled another grenade off his belt. He threw this one sidearm: not the way they taught you in basic, but he wanted to keep it low so it didn't bounce off anything. Then he flattened out again. If this one didn't do the job, though, he had the bad feeling flattening out wouldn't be enough to save his young ass.

Bang! He got screams this time. Then it was forward, as fast as he could scramble. He had no idea how badly hurt the Frenchmen were. He had to finish them before they or their buddies got that machine gun going again.

They were down. They were thrashing, not worried about the Hotchkiss at all. He shot them to make sure they didn't worry about anything else again. He was putting a fresh clip on his Mauser when a shape loomed up out of the morning twilight. He started to give it the bayonet, but checked himself when he recognized the familiar shape of a Stahlhelm.

With a dry chuckle, Corporal Baatz said, "I would've plugged you before you could drive that home."

"Let's go after the Frenchmen," Willi answered, and left it right there. He didn't think Baatz could have got him if he'd followed through, and he was half sorry he hadn't. Maybe more than half sorry.

More machine guns-and poilus with rifles, grenades, mortars, and all the other usual nastiness-crowded the Hazelwood. Methodically, the Germans cleaned them out and pressed on toward Charleville-Mezieres. Panzers drew tracks across the snow on the flat, open country south and east of the woods. Pillars of smoke rising to the cloudy sky marked the pyres of a couple that would go no farther. But the runners were the ones that mattered. The French tried to make a stand in front of the town. Cannon and machine-gun fire from the German army sent them tumbling back in retreat.

Willi looked around. There was Wolfgang. His bayonet had blood on it-not Arno Baatz's, but somebody's, all right. "Where's the lieutenant?" Willi asked him.

"Down. I bet he loses his arm," Wolfgang answered. "The fucking Hotchkiss got him just before somebody did for it."

"That was me," Willi said.

"Yeah? Well, it needed doing." Storch paused to light up. Then he said, "Sergeant Pieck caught one right through the foot, too. That means Awful Arno's got a section-maybe the platoon, till they give us a new officer."

"Jesus Christ! I knew I should have stuck him!" Willi explained how he'd almost bayoneted Baatz by the French machine gun. His buddy was good for even more reasons why he should have than he'd thought of for himself. Willi pulled a pack of Gauloises out of his pocket, but the familiar winged helmet shielded no more cigarettes. "Let me bum a butt off you."

"What a useless creature you are! First you didn't scrag the corporal, and now you steal my smokes." Wolfgang gave him his own pack. Willi did have a match. He got the cigarette going. The two Landsers tramped on. THE POLES HAD A GOOD medium bomber. The PZL P-37 could carry more than twice the bomb load of a Tupolev SB-2. Fortunately for the Red Army and Air Force, the Poles didn't have a hell of a lot of them. Whenever the enemy found a chance, he did his best to strike at the airstrips the Red Air Force used.

Sergei Yaroslavsky took those raids for granted. The Poles made them at high altitude, and they got out of Soviet airspace in a hurry. An occasional bomb gave the groundcrew some work to do repairing a runway. More often than not, the bombs missed by hundreds of meters or even by kilometers. Nothing to get excited about.

Then things changed. Sergei was barely awake when antiaircraft guns around the airstrip started banging away at sunrise. He tumbled out of his cot, wondering if the gunners had the galloping jimjams.

They didn't. Bombs crashed down on the runways and on the bombers near them. Not all the bombers were in revetments, the way they should have been. It hadn't seemed worth the trouble.

"Those aren't Elks!" somebody yelled-that was the P-37's nickname. "Those are motherfucking Stukas!"

"Bozhemoi!" Yaroslavsky shouted. A bombardier said something electric about the way the Devil's grandmother had buggered up the antiaircraft guns. Satan and his relatives might be as out of fashion as God, but people hadn't forgotten about them, either.

Sergei threw himself flat in the snow. That was all he could do now. One after another, the Fascist dive-bombers stooped on the airstrip like falcons after pigeons.

Pigeons could at least try to get away. To mix the metaphor, the bombers on the ground were sitting ducks. And, while the pilots of those Ju-87s might be goddamn Nazi bastards, they were also more than competent professionals. One after another, they released their bombs, fired a burst from their forward machine guns, pulled out of their dives, and zoomed off to the northwest. They might almost have performed an aerial ballet.

The Germans had a word for that kind of ballet (they would): a Totentanz, a dance of death. Here, they were dishing it out. The Soviets had no choice but to take it.

Machine-gun bullets thudded into the snowbank, much too close to Sergei. Little white powdery puffs shot up into the air at the impacts. If a round hit him, a little red fountain might join the white. He burrowed into the drift. Burrowing wouldn't do him a kopek's worth of good, but he did it anyway. Fear and instinct drove harder than reason.

Not all the explosions came from German bombs. The SB-2s had been gassed up and bombed up. Before long, they would have taken off and punished the semifascist Poles. Well, behind the semifascist Poles loomed the Fascist Germans. And, no matter how virtuous the Soviets might be, they were getting hammered this morning.

Ever so cautiously, Sergei stuck up his head. The Stukas were gone, which didn't make the airstrip a safe place. An SB-2 a couple of hundred meters away was burning like the inside of a blast furnace. Ammunition for the plane's guns cooked off with a cheerful popping noise, spraying bullets every which way. And then one of the bombs-or maybe all of the bombs-blew.

What had been a fire turned into a fireball. Stunned, half deafened, Sergei burrowed into the snow again. Something large and hot smashed down well behind him-the explosion had thrown it a long, long way. He could tell it was hot because even his afflicted ears made out the hiss of steam coming off it as the snow put it out.