A forlorn hope, and he knew it. Some of them would be dead. Some would be maimed, or too shellshocked to know sausage from Saturday. But there were always some lucky, stubborn assholes who'd…He hadn't even finished the thought before a French machine gun started banging away.

A Landser toppled, clutching at his chest. Other German foot soldiers hit the dirt. Ludwig was back inside the turret a split second before several bullets rattled off the panzer's armor. Small-arms ammo couldn't get through. That never stopped machine gunners from trying.

"Scheisse," Fritz said. Like Ludwig, the driver must have hoped the Stukas would do all their work for them.

Ludwig swung the turret toward the closest French machine gun. He fired back, hot 20mm cartridge cases clattering down onto the fighting compartment's floor. The enemy Hotchkiss fell silent. The panzer pushed on.

Meaux was gone. Luc Harcourt could see the smoke in the east, much of which came from the lost town. Maybe the Boches were celebrating by burning everything they couldn't steal. Or maybe French engineers had planted charges under everything they didn't want the enemy to use. German prisoners who spoke French had nothing but admiration for the engineers.

As far as Luc was concerned, who torched or blew up what hardly mattered any more. No matter who did it, France caught hell. All he cared about was staying in one piece till the war ended.

No guarantee of that. Sergeant Demange was commanding the company. No replacement officer had come forward since Lieutenant Marquet stopped an antitank round with his stomach. It cut him in half. The top half lived, and screamed, much longer than Luc wished it would have.

Luc had a squad himself. A private first class wasn't much of a non-com, but he'd gone this far without getting hit. That put him several long steps ahead of the scared conscripts he led.

The sergeant came by, his red-tracked eyes missing nothing. The Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched as he snapped, "Don't let 'em lay there with their thumbs up their asses, Harcourt. Set the sorry sods to digging. They'll hate you now, but they'll thank you as soon as the Germans start shelling us again."

"Right, Sergeant," Luc said wearily. He knew Demange was right, too, but he wanted nothing more than to lie there himself, and who cared where his thumb went? With a sigh, he hauled himself to his feet. "Come on, you miserable lugs. You can rest once you've got foxholes to rest in."

They groaned. Some of them didn't even have hard hands yet; their palms blistered and bled when they used shovels or entrenching tools. But they'd seen dead men-both bloodied and astonished after meeting death unexpectedly and bloated and stinking from lying in the fields four or five days unburied. They didn't want anyone else seeing them like that: worse than getting caught naked. They weren't eager, but they dug.

So did Luc. He already had a scrape of sorts. He improved it as fast as he could. There seemed to be a lull now, but how long would it last? Another twenty minutes? Another twenty seconds? No time at all?

"Don't throw the dirt every which way!" he said in something not far from horror. "Sweet suffering Jesus, pile it in front of you! Don't they teach you anything in basic these days?"

"They teach us how to march and how to shoot," one of the new fish said. He had bloody hands and a pale, unweathered face. "From what they tell us, there isn't anything else-or if there is, we can pick it up at the front."

"They're sending you out to get slaughtered. They ought to see the Boches face-to-face themselves. That'd teach them something-the ones who come back from it," Luc said savagely.

Sure as hell, the shooting picked up before the soldiers finished their foxholes. They might be raw, but they weren't complete idiots. They knew enough to jump into the holes and keep on digging while inside them. Luc didn't think anybody got hit. He thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing.

He also thanked that God Who might or might not be there for sending nothing worse than small-arms fire his way. German machine guns fired faster than their French counterparts. Sergeant Demange said the same thing had been true the last time around, though both sides used different models now. Why couldn't the French have caught up with their longtime foes, especially since the Germans hadn't been allowed to mess with machine guns till they started laughing at the Treaty of Versailles?

Luc knew the answer to that. France hadn't wanted to believe another war would come. The Germans, by contrast, embraced battle the way a man embraced his girl…although fire from the flank could send them running, too. But they had the better tools with which to do their job.

"Is that a tank?" one of the rookies asked fearfully.

"No, my dear," Luc said after listening for a moment. "That's a truck-one of our trucks, by God. Maybe we've got reinforcements moving in. We could sure use some-I'll tell you that.

He almost shot one of the newcomers before he recognized the khaki greatcoat and the crested Adrian helmet. The French uniform had been modernized after 1918. It still looked old-fashioned next to what the Germans wore. The Boches seemed…streamlined, almost like oncoming diesel locomotives.

"Where are they?" shouted a corporal who sounded a hell of a lot like Sergeant Demange.

Demange himself gave an answer that was almost useful: "Look in the direction the bullets are coming from, mon vieux. You'll find the Germans, I promise."

"Funny," the corporal said. "You see? I laugh." And, having laughed a laugh that could have come straight off the cow on the label of a popular brand of cheese, he sent several shots toward the Boches.

A loop of the Marne-whose course was complicated in these parts-curled up toward the French position from the south. The enemy would have to cross the river twice to get in behind Luc and his comrades. As he'd seen to his sorrow, they were good at such things, but he could hope they would think two crossings were too much trouble here.

He popped up out of his hole to fire at an oncoming gray shape in a coal-scuttle helmet. The shape went down. Luc ducked before he could decide whether he'd hit it or not. Thinking of it as a shape, a target, meant not thinking of it as a human being he might just have killed. If he didn't think of it as a human being, he didn't have to think so much about what he was doing in this damned foxhole.

And ducking in a hurry meant that none of the other shapes in field-gray had the chance to draw a bead on a khaki shape and wonder whether he'd hit it. Luc didn't want some nice German young man to have him on his conscience.

The Nazis must also have decided that fording the Marne twice was more trouble than it was worth. But that didn't mean they stopped coming. If they couldn't go around the French here, they seemed determined to plow through them.

Sergeant Demange screamed for his men to hold fast till he realized they would all get killed or captured if they tried. One reason he made a good company commander was his aversion to dying. Luc shared the feeling. He wondered whether that would do him any good.

After fighting for a while in some woods, the French fell back into one of the riverside villages. Luc didn't know which one it was. There were lots of them, each Something-sur-Marne. The soldiers had fun with that, calling them things like Ammo-Dump-sur-Marne and Blowjob-sur-Marne. A blowjob on the Marne would have been a hell of a lot more fun than what Luc was going through.

Most of the locals had long since bugged out. Luc would have, were he still a civilian. Nobody was paying those poor slobs to get shot at, and they didn't have the weapons to shoot back.

But a few stubborn souls always stuck around. He wished one of them would have been a teenage girl with legs up to there, but no such luck. Most were grizzled men who'd done their bit the last time around and weren't about to let a little gunfire drive them away from their stone houses and shops and farms. They were plenty tough. Their wives were even scarier, at least to Luc.