"I was hoping they'd give me a Panzer III," Naumann said. "But no-it's another II." He eyed Theo's bandaged finger. "You aren't complaining, though, are you?"

"Not right now," Theo allowed. In a Panzer III, the radioman sat up front, next to the driver. He also served a hull-mounted machine gun. That wouldn't be much fun with a bad hand. Then again… "A Panzer III, now, that's a real fighting machine."

"I know, I know. That's why I wanted one," the sergeant said. Along with two machine guns, a Panzer III mounted a 37mm cannon. Unlike the Panzer II's 20mm gun, which fired only armor-piercing ammo, the bigger weapon had high-explosive shells, too. That made it a lot more useful against infantry out in the open.

A Panzer III also carried thicker armor, and boasted a more powerful engine. A Panzer III was a real panzer. A Panzer II was a training vehicle. Oh, you could fight with it. The Wehrmacht had been fighting with it, and with the even smaller, lighter Panzer I, ever since the Fuhrer gave the order to march into Czechoslovakia, more than six months ago now. But it would be nice to have a fighting vehicle that matched the ones the enemy used.

Would have been nice. Panzer IIIs were still scarce, while there were lots of IIs and, even these days, quite a few little obsolete Is. (There were also Panzer IVs, which carried a short-barreled 75mm gun and were designed to support infantry, not to attack enemy armor. There were supposed to be Panzer IVs, anyhow. Theo didn't think he'd ever seen one.)

"I know what I'm doing in a II," Stoss said. "They never let us drive a III in training. Most of the practice we got was in those turretless Panzer I chassis-you guys know the ones I mean."

Theo nodded. So did Heinz Naumann. What you used in training was as cheap as the Wehrmacht could get away with and still do the job. Theo doubted whether any Panzer IIIs were within a hundred kilometers of a training base. You didn't practice with those babies-you got them into the fight.

Eager as a puppy, Adalbert asked, "You know where they're going to throw us in, Sergeant?"

"Nope," Naumann answered. "Far as the generals are concerned, we're just a bullet. Point us at the enemy, and we knock him over."

Or he knocks us over. Theo remembered the antitank round slamming into his old Panzer II's engine compartment. He remembered opening his escape hatch and seeing nothing but flames. He'd followed his panzer commander out the turret hatch instead. Ludwig hadn't made it much farther. Theo had-which didn't stop that bullet from finding him a little later on.

The new Panzer II looked like the one that had burned. Theo's station was behind the turret, just in front of the bulkhead that separated the fighting compartment from the one housing the engine. He couldn't see out. The smells were familiar: oil, gasoline, cordite, leather, metal, sweat. He didn't smell much lingering fear, which argued that this panzer hadn't seen a lot of action.

He started fiddling with the radio. No matter what the manufacturer claimed, every set was different. Heinz Naumann said something. Theo ignored it. Indeed, he hardly heard it: like the radio, he was good at tuning out anything that didn't directly concern him.

Sometimes, he tuned out things that did concern him. Naumann spoke again: "I said, is it up to snuff?"

"Uh, it seems to be." Theo came back to the world.

"Good. Pay some attention next time, all right?"

"Whatever you say, Sergeant," Theo answered. Ludwig had tried to keep him connected, too. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. When Theo got interested in a radio, or in whatever was going on inside his own head, everything else could go hang.

They motored west, toward the front, the next morning. Naumann rode along standing up with his head and shoulders out of the turret. That was how a panzer commander was supposed to do things when not in combat. A lot of commanders looked out even when their machine was in action. The vision ports in the turret just didn't let you see enough. There was talk of building a Panzer II with a proper cupola for the commander. The Panzer III had one. So did a lot of foreign panzers. Not the II, not yet.

Theo had another reason for liking the way Heinz did things. With the hatch open, some of the mild spring air got down to him. Then a bullet cracked past Naumann. The commander dove back inside the turret faster than you could fart. "Panzer halt!" he shouted.

"Halting," Adalbert Stoss said, and hit the brakes. Instead of using the traversing gear, Heinz manhandled the turret into position with the two handgrips on the inside. The machine gun snarled several short bursts at… something, at… somebody. Theo couldn't see out, so except for the gunshot he had no idea what was going on. Not counting his earphones, the radioman on a Panzer II was always the last to know.

"Maybe I got him. Maybe not," Sergeant Naumann muttered. Then he spoke into the tube that carried his voice to Adalbert's seat: "Forward!"

"Forward, ja," Stoss agreed. As the panzer got moving again, the driver asked, "A soldier behind our lines, or a franc-tireur?"

"Don't know. I never saw enough of him to tell whether he had a uniform," Heinz said. After a pause for thought, he added, "Sounded like a military rifle, though-not a little varmint gun."

"Are the Frenchies trying to infiltrate us? That wouldn't be so good," Adalbert said.

"No. It wouldn't." Heinz thought some more. Then he said, "Hossbach! Report this back to regimental HQ. If it's not just one guy with a gun, the higher-ups need to know about it. We're in map square K-4, just west of Avrigny. Got that?"

"K-4. West of Avrigny," Theo repeated. He sighed as he made the connection and delivered the message. Ludwig had always been on him because he was happier with his own thoughts that with the rest of the world. Now Naumann had figured out the same thing in about a minute and a half.

Theo would have liked to do something about that. But doing something about it would have involved changing, and he didn't care to change. His panzer commanders would just have to cope with it… and so would he.

FROM GREASY TO MESSY. Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh nodded in weary approval. The Anglo-French counterattack, pushing east from the outskirts of Paris, was still making progress. Greasy was actually the hamlet of Gressy, a few miles west of where Walsh was now. Where Walsh was now was in Messy, which looked exactly the way its name made you think it would.

Messy had good reason for looking that way. Only a few weeks earlier, the Germans had bombed and shelled the place to chase the Allied defenders back toward Paris. And then, after the German attack ran out of steam both here and up near Beauvais, English and French guns pounded Messy to push back the Boches. A few buildings were still standing and didn't seem too badly damaged, but that wasn't from lack of effort on either side.

Hardly anyone lived in the ruins. People who could get out had done so before the Germans arrived. They hadn't come back to reclaim whatever might be left of their homes and property. A lingering sick-sweet stench said not everybody'd got away. Or Walsh might have been getting a whiff of dead Germans. After three days, everybody-and every body-smelled the same.

As much to blunt the reek as for any other reason, Walsh lit a Navy Cut. Beside him, Second Lieutenant Herman Cavendish looked around and said, "So this is victory."

Walsh hadn't liked the subaltern ever since Cavendish brought the first order to counterattack. The Anglo-French strike had worked, which didn't make the veteran noncom like the very young officer any better. "Sir, when you set this against 1918, it looks like a rest cure," Walsh said.