Last Orders (The War That Came Early, Book Six) by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345524737
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Off in the distance, a German stuck up his head to see what the French in front of him were up to. Aristide Demange took a shot at the Boche. He didn’t think he hit the con. He did make him disappear in a hurry, which was what he’d wanted to do.

He also hopped down off the firing step from which he’d fired. A few seconds later, the Fritzes turned loose a burst from a machine gun. Maybe all those rounds would have missed him. It was nothing he cared to find out by experiment.

A poilu coming into the trench from the smashed Belgian village behind it grinned sympathetically. “You were lucky, Lieutenant, getting down when you did,” the fellow said, his southern accent nasal and grating in Demange’s ears.

“Lucky, my left one,” Demange said, focusing his usual scorn for all humanity on one human in particular. “Listen, Marcel, I don’t care how stupid you are. Even a Provençal clodhopper like you should be able to see that, when you try and kill somebody, he’s gonna try to kill you, too. So maybe you shouldn’t give him the chance, eh?”

Marcel pondered that. Demange could see, or imagined he could see, the gears going round in the soldier’s head—going round … very … very … slowly. “D’accord,” Marcel said at last.

Demange suppressed the urge to clap a hand to his forehead in theatrical despair. The only thing that could have made Marcel act any dumber than he did now would have been for him to chew gum like a cow or an American. The worst of it was, Demange couldn’t ride him as hard as he would have liked. When it came to smarts, Marcel wasn’t the highest card in the deck, no. But he was easygoing and he fought all right. You didn’t expect or even want brains in all the privates.

The ruined village in back of them was the one that had been in front of them a few weeks before. They didn’t need to measure their advance in centimeters per day, but they didn’t need to measure it in kilometers per day, either. At this rate, they’d cross the Low Countries and push on into Germany about when Demange died of old age.

Of course, if he stayed at the front, old age was the least of his worries. He didn’t take idiotic chances, the way fools fresh from basic training and hotheads did. He remembered that the sons of bitches on the other side carried rifles and other tools of mayhem. The less they got to use them on him, the better he liked it.

Some chances, though, you couldn’t help. If some fat general’s secretary told him she wouldn’t suck him off one morning, he was liable to order his brigade to attack the Germans out of sheer spite. That kind of shit never got into the history books. It happened all the time, though.

He stuck up his head to see if some frustrated German general whose secretary

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.