Luc didn't want to command a squad, much less a platoon. All he wanted to do was hunker down tight, live through the war, and get on with his life. Not that anyone from Sergeant Demange on up cared what he wanted, of course.

"See? I told you France was in trouble," the veteran underofficer said. "And you will be, too, if you don't get cracking."

"Right." Luc knew better than to argue. Somewhere in his pack he had a little housewife with needle and thread. He dug it out and sewed on the hash mark. He would never put a seamstress out of business. He'd sewn up a couple of rips in his uniform. His stitches were large and dark and ugly, like the ones that held together the pieces of the Frankenstein monster in the American film.

French 75s threw shells at the Germans on the other side of the Aisne. Luc's company was dug in a couple of kilometers west of Soissons. The town had taken a beating in the Franco-Prussian War and again in the Great War. Now it was catching hell one more time. Luc had come through it on the way to this position. Bombs and shells had wrecked the cathedral; bits of thirteenth-century stained glass lay shattered in the streets. A priest stood by the ruins with tears running down his face. Luc had no tears left for people, let alone things.

Machine guns started stuttering up by the river. French or German? Luc wondered, cocking his head to one side to hear better. Both, he thought. That wasn't so good.

Sergeant Demange must have decided the same thing. "Are those shitheads trying to force a crossing?" he growled. "They'd better not get over, that's all I've got to say."

"Let's move!" Luc grabbed his rifle. He liked the idea of Germans on the south bank of the Aisne no better than Demange.

As they hurried up toward the riverbank, they gathered as many other soldiers as they could. Damned if that hash mark on Luc's sleeve didn't make ordinary privates follow him without arguing or asking a lot of questions. I could get used to this, he thought.

There was smoke on the river: not the ordinary war smoke of burning houses and vehicles, but a thick chemical haze the Germans used to mask what they were doing on the other side. Out of the smoke came black rubber boats paddled by field-gray soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets. Sure as the devil, the Boches were trying to get over.

French machine guns stammered out death again. A German dropped his paddle and slumped down in his raft. Then another one got hit, and another. The raft slewed sideways. It was probably leaking, too. German machine guns across the Aisne shot back, trying to silence the French fire. They put out more rounds per minute than the ones the French used, but they couldn't knock them out of action.

Luc flopped down behind some bushes and started shooting at the Germans in their rafts. It wasn't fair-they couldn't shoot back. That bothered him till a couple of machine-gun bullets cracked past maybe half a meter above his head. They cured any chivalrous notions he might have had.

Two or three rubber rafts actually made it to the south bank of the Aisne. The unhurt Germans in them jumped up and tried to set up some kind of bridgehead. With all that French firepower concentrated on them, they never had a chance. Inside of a few minutes, they were all dead or wounded.

"Assholes'll have to do better than that," Sergeant Demange said, a fresh cigarette in his mouth and a fresh clip on his rifle.

"What else have they got behind that smoke?" Luc asked.

"We'll know in a few minutes," Demange answered, sending up smoke signals of his own. "Looks like it's blowing away." He and Luc and the rest of the French defenders waited. Then he said one thing more: "Fuck me."

The Germans had lined up a couple of dozen tanks-Panzer IIs and captured Czech machines-on the north bank of the Aisne. Their cannon all pointed toward the French positions across the river from them. To Luc's frightened eyes, it seemed as if every single one of those cannon pointed straight at him.

Every single one of them seemed to open up at the same time, too, pouring shells and more machine-gun bullets down on the French defenders. Luc hugged the ground. His rifle was useless against those steel monsters. The machine gunners fired back at the German armor. He watched tracers fly across the Aisne and ricochets harmlessly spark off the tanks' armored carapaces.

One by one, the French machine guns fell silent. Luc didn't think the gunners were lying low, waiting to massacre the next wave of German rubber boats. He thought they were dead. Those cannon weren't all pointing at him after all. They were pointing at the guns that could do the German assault troops the most harm.

That second wave of boats splashed into the river even while the cannonading went on. The Boches hadn't silenced everything on the south bank: here and there, riflemen and even a machine gun or two opened up on the soldiers who paddled like men possessed.

But now the French didn't have enough firepower to keep the rubber boats from beaching on the near bank. Luc raised up a little to shoot at the men leaping out of the boats. As soon as he did, a machine gun from one of the tanks on the far bank started banging away at him. He had to flatten out again if he wanted to stay alive.

Some of the German assault troops carried submachine guns with big drum magazines. French doctrine scorned submachine guns. They fired pistol ammunition, and they were worthless out past a couple of hundred meters. Inside that range, though, they were uncommonly murderous. They threw around a hell of a lot of lead. Even if they didn't get you, they made you stay down so you couldn't shoot back.

And the damned Boches had brought along real machine guns, too. Hearing that malevolent crackle at such close range made Luc's asshole pucker. He had to bear down tight on his bladder to keep from wetting himself.

"Back!" Sergeant Demange's raspy voice penetrated the din. "We've got to get out of here, form a line somewhere else!"

"How?" Luc asked, which seemed to him the very best of good questions.

Even through the rattle of the German machine guns, he heard the underofficer laugh. "Carefully, sonny, carefully, unless you aim to get your dick shot off."

Even thinking of that made Luc want to clutch at himself. He crawled away from the riverbank, doing his best to keep the bushes between himself and the Boches. Only a few random bullets came his way. The Germans didn't seem to know he was there: news good enough to make an atheist thank God.

He flopped down again behind the crest of a small swell of ground that shielded him from the enemy. Sergeant Demange lay a few meters away, still puffing on a cigarette butt. "What do we do?" Luc said. "How do we throw them back into the river?"

"If we can bring a lot of tanks forward in a hurry, that might turn the trick." Demange stubbed out the cigarette in the dirt. "But what are the odds, eh?"

Luc mournfully considered them. "Not good," he said. "The Germans always have plenty of tanks where they need them the most. How come we can't do the same thing?"

"Because their High Command doesn't fight with its head up its ass," Demange answered. He rose up to shoot at somebody heading up-slope toward them. A wild scream said he'd hit what he aimed at, too. Chambering a new round, he went on, "They know it's the twentieth century, damn them. How come we don't have any dive-bombers plastering the shit out of them right now?"

Having cowered under more Stukas than he cared to remember, Luc said, "I don't know, and I wish I did. How come we don't?"

"If we were fighting the Kaiser's army, we'd wallop the snot out of it," Demange replied. "It's the curse of winning-you get ready to do the same damn thing over again. The Germans lost, so they figured they'd better try something new. Now we're on the receiving end."