“I’d do better using them on wounded men than on those who diseased themselves,” Murdoch broke in.

“Sir, he’s wounded in war, too, in a manner of speaking. He never would have met that woman if we hadn’t been posted to Norway,” Walsh said.

“No, he would have got his dose from some French twist instead.” Murdoch sent him an unfriendly look. “And I suppose you’ll find ways to make my life miserable if I don’t play along.”

“How can I do that, sir? I’m only a staff sergeant.” Walsh might have been innocence personified.

He might have been, but the doctor knew he wasn’t. “People like you have their ways,” he said sourly. “Half the time, I think officers run the army on the sufferance of sergeants.”

Walsh thought the same thing, but more often than half the time. All the same, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Yes, likely tell.” Murdoch made a disgusted gesture. “All right. Have your way, dammit. He’ll get the bloody sulfanilamide, and I’ll write it up as a skin infection.”

“Much obliged to you, sir.” Walsh knew he might have to pay the sawbones back one day, but he’d worry about that when the time came. He had got his way, and Jock wasn’t in a jam on account of it. Except for the Norwegian winter and the advancing Nazis, everything was fine.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel had thought he’d flown his Ju-87 under primitive conditions in France. And so he had: with its heavy, fixed undercarriage, the Stuka was made for taking off and landing on dirt airstrips. All the same, he’d been flying in France, and France was a civilized country. Poland, now…

The pilot came from Silesia. He knew about Poles: knew what Germans in that part of the Reich knew about them, anyhow. They were lazy, shiftless, drunken, sneaky, not to be trusted behind your back. Nothing he saw in this village east of Warsaw made him want to change his mind. If anything, the Poles here were even worse because they hadn’t been leavened by Germans the way they had in Silesia. They were well on their way to being Russians, and how could you say anything worse about a folk?