"He's a bit gormless, ain't he?" Bill said. He came from the Yorkshire dales, and sounded like it. The word wasn't one Staff Sergeant Walsh would have chosen. It wasn't one he'd heard before he took the King's shilling more than half a lifetime ago. Well, he'd heard-and used-a lot of words he'd never imagined back in his civilian days. Gormless was one you could actually repeat in polite company.

"Oh, maybe a bit," Walsh said, and they chuckled again. He added, "Say what you want about him, though-he is brave."

"Well, yes, but so are the Germans," Nigel said. "Even some of the Frenchmen… I suppose."

"They are. We'd be a lot worse off if they weren't," Walsh said.

"Half of them are Bolshies, though. Can you imagine what would happen if the Nazis and Reds were on the same side?" Nigel plainly could. By the way he rolled his eyes, he didn't fancy the notion. "Some Communist official would say, 'The Germans are the workers' friends,' and all the fellow travelers would decide they didn't feel like fighting any more."

"It's not going to happen, chum," Walsh declared, not without relief. "They're slanging away at each other on the far edge of Poland. You ask me, anyone who wants Poland enough to fight over it has to be daft."

"Anyone who's not a Pole, you mean," Nigel said.

"Them, too," Walsh said with more than a little heat. "Look at that bloody Bosnian maniac Princip in 1914. He got millions and millions killed because he couldn't stand the damned Austrian Archduke. Suppose that was worth it, do you? Just as bloody fucking stupid to go to war over Poland."

"There you go." Bill grinned at him from under the dented brim of his tin hat. "Now you've solved all the world's problems, you have. Go tell the Boches to quit shooting at us-'twas all a misunderstanding, like. Then get on your airplane and fly off to wherever the hell you go to pick up your Nobel Prize."