"Nein," Claude said with dignity.

Baatz jumped to his feet. "I'll show you, then, you stinking pigdog! Come fight like a man!"

Claude turned around and took one step back toward him: giving himself room to maneuver. Baatz rushed him. Willi wanted to avert his eyes. He couldn't stand the Unteroffizier, but no denying he was a rough man in a rough trade. He gave Claude one that should have dented a Panzer II. The barman blinked his good eye. Then he swung. His fist caught Arno Baatz right on the button with a noise like a cleaver smacking into a frozen side of beef. Baatz went straight over backwards. The back of his head smacked the stone floor. He didn't move. He didn't even twitch.

"Holy Jesus!" Willi said. "Did you kill him?"

Claude took the question seriously. He felt for the noncom's pulse. "He lives," he said laconically, and dropped Baatz's wrist. It fell back limply. Baatz might be alive, but he sure wasn't connected to the real world. The tapman looked to the other Germans at the corporal's table. "He hit me first. Please take him away. He is no more welcome here."

They didn't argue with him. Nobody in his right mind would have argued with Claude then-not without a Schmeisser in his hands, anyhow. Arno Baatz was as boneless as an octopus as they dragged him out of the tavern.

One of the Frenchmen drinking there sent up smoke signals from his pipe. He said something in his own language. Claude shrugged a massive shrug, as if to say, Well, what can you do? Willi guessed the customer had warned him he would get in trouble.

"We'll say he started it," Willi volunteered.

"It's the truth," Wolfgang agreed.

"Danke," Claude said. "For official business, this is good. For not official business…" He spread his hands and let his voice trail away.

Willi understood that. If Arno Baatz and his friends-assuming he had any, which struck the biased Willi as improbable-decided to come back with weapons, what would the officers set over them do about it? Anything? Even if they did, how much would that help Claude after the fact?

"Maybe we'll go forward again soon. Blizzards can't last forever-I don't think," Wolfgang said. "Then Awful Arno will be out of your hair."

"Ja. Maybe," Claude said. It was the first time Willi had heard him even slightly enthusiastic about the prospect of a German advance. He was a Frenchmen. The Germans had maimed him in the last war. You couldn't blame him for not wishing them well. But you also couldn't blame him for wanting Corporal Baatz the hell out of Watigny, even if that meant the Wehrmacht went forward.

The tapman ducked into the back room for a little while, then came out again. A couple of minutes later, so did Michelle. She brought Willi a beer and Wolfgang a brandy they hadn't ordered. When they tried to pay for them, she wouldn't take their money.

"Merci. Merci," Willi said. It didn't seem enough, but it was the best he could do.

They finished the free drinks and left. After they got outside and closed the door behind them again, Wolfgang said, "If she really wanted to thank us, she could have taken us into that back room while Papa looked the other way."

"She's not that kind of girl," Willi said.

"Yeah. Ain't it a shame?" Wolfgang's breath smoked even though he didn't have a cigarette in his mouth. After a couple of steps, he brightened. "Could be worse, you know? Old Arno sure got his."

"Boy, did he ever!" Willi agreed enthusiastically. They walked on through the snow, toward the house where they were quartered. FRENCH VILLAGERS STARED FEARFULLY AT Vaclav Jezek and the rest of the Czechs in his outfit. Vaclav knew why, too. Their uniforms weren't quite the right color, their helmets were the wrong shape, and they spoke some funny foreign language. To people who didn't know any better, that was plenty to turn them into Germans.

And, just to make things worse, they were coming from the east. If they were Germans, they would have smashed all the defenders ahead of them, but you couldn't expect civilians to think of things like that.

One of the locals came out with something. Vaclav had picked up a handful of French words, but not nearly enough to let him follow. "What did he say?" he asked the guy along as an interpreter.

Benjamin Halevy looked even less happy than he had before he heard the Frenchman's news. The Jewish sergeant pointed north and west. "Old geezer claims the Germans are already over there."

"Shit," Vaclav said. If that was true, they were in danger of getting cut off and surrounded. If…"Does he know his ass from a hole in the ground?"

He eyed the Frenchman. The guy was around fifty, and had some ugly scars on his jaw and left cheek. Maybe those weren't war wounds, but they sure looked like them. If this fellow had gone through the mill before, he wouldn't see a cow and imagine it was a German armored division.

Halevy went back and forth with him. After a last "Merci," the sergeant returned to Czech: "Sure sounds like he does. They pushed through the woods over there. This guy says he saw a couple of armored cars, but no tanks."

"Bad enough," Vaclav muttered. Several of his countrymen nodded. He went on, "Where are our tanks? Where are our armored cars?" Nobody answered him. The Germans always seemed to have armor when they broke through. They used their armor to break through. The French scattered it up and down the line, which meant they never had enough where they needed it most. That was one reason they were falling back and the Nazis moving up.

Halevy gave Vaclav a crooked grin. "Hey, pal, that's why you've got your antitank rifle, right?"

Vaclav told him where he could put the antitank rifle. Halevy would have walked very straight if he'd tried. You could get your behind in a sling for telling off a noncom, but Vaclav's behind was already in a sling because he was up at the front, so what did he care?

He would have expected a Jew to get stuffy about that kind of thing, maybe to threaten him with official regulations. But Sergeant Halevy just laughed and said something about his mother and troopships. From another guy, or under different circumstances, Vaclav would have tried to rearrange his face. He laughed now, too. They'd been through it together. They'd earned the right to zing each other.

"Seriously, we ought to head up that way," Halevy said. "If your rifle can take out those cars, it'll do us some good."

Vaclav was no more enthusiastic about putting his dick on the chopping block than any other soldier in his right mind would have been. But he could see the need. "I'll try it," he said.

"Attaboy," Halevy told him. He clapped another Czech soldier on the back. "Dominik, take point."

"Right, Sergeant." Dominik didn't sound thrilled, but he never did. He was little and skinny and nervous as a cat in a room full of Rottweilers-all of which made him a goddamn good point man. He carried a captured German submachine gun. If he ran into trouble, he could spray a lot of lead at it.

"Let's go," the sergeant said. He moved right behind Dominik. He didn't believe in staying away from trouble. None of the people who said Jews were a bunch of cowards had seen him in action. David had stayed right up there with everybody else, too, till he stopped one. And they both hated Nazis even more than Vaclav did, which he wouldn't have believed if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes.

"Bonne chance," called the Frenchman who'd warned them about Germans. Luck, that meant, or something like it. Vaclav waved to the guy without looking back.

Trees and bushes and rocks. The western part of the Ardennes was as wild and rugged as anything in Czechoslovakia. Vaclav would have bet the Germans couldn't get any armor through here, but he would have lost if he had. He'd already escaped from tanks in these parts: Panzer Is and IIs, and also some captured Czech T-35s. Those infuriated him. Yes, everybody grabbed whatever he could get his hands on-his own antitank rifle and Dominik's machine pistol showed as much. But seeing Czech tanks fight against Czech soldiers made him want to cry.