Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 151: "Guderian knows where to cut now.”

At first, they thought it was thunder.

The low rumble rolled over the Aragonese hills at dawn, too steady to be artillery, too distant to be armor.

Renaud stepped out of the forward command tent, squinting against the rising light.

The sun hadn’t fully breached the horizon.

Then the sky cracked.

Black shapes dropped from above fast, angular.

Stuka dive bombers.

He didn’t even have time to shout before the first siren wailed.

"Airstrike! Get down!"

The bombs hit a moment later, one after another, not on frontlines or staging posts but on the French artillery convoy still going through the hills south of Barbastro.

Explosions tore into soft vehicles.

One 75mm cannon was lifted into the air like a toy.

Bodies flung against rock.

Screams burst through the dust.

Flames followed.

Moreau was already running, hand on his sidearm, shouting orders.

"Move them! Split columns into tree cover....no more than five per group!"

Shells cratered the ridgeline behind them.

Renaud helped drag a wounded corporal from the edge of a burning truck, his leg shredded and leaking into the dirt.

"Three minutes," Renaud gasped. "Three minutes and they bled us."

Moreau looked up.

The bombers were gone now.

"They’re not testing," he said flatly. "They’re hunting."

Later that day, in a half-collapsed barn turned command post.

Moreau listened as the field radioman repeated the message from Paris.

"High Command denies air response. France is not at war. No authorization for retaliation or escort."

The room went silent.

"Neutrality," Renaud said. "Even while they bury our men."

"Neutrality doesn’t bury the dead," Moreau muttered.

He glanced over the casualty sheets.

Twelve confirmed.

Eighteen wounded.

Two guns lost.

"They hit our movement, not our line. Guderian knows where to cut now."

"He’s reading us," Renaud said.

"Then we stop being readable."

He drew a line across the map, bisecting the known Republican and French columns.

"No more static convoys. No more straight supply lines. We go fluid hunt patterns, not positions."

"And air?"

"If Paris won’t send wings, we find someone who will."

The answer came by midmorning.

A Polikarpov I-15, markings obscured, landed hard on a gravel strip near the Republican lines.

The pilot stepped out without ceremony.

He was Spanish, thirty at most, flight suit half unzipped, a pair of cracked goggles around his neck.

"Name’s Joaquín Esteve. I flew for the Republic until yesterday," he said.

"Now I fly for whoever knows how to fight back."

Moreau stared at him for a beat, then nodded once.

"You’ve got air intelligence?"

Esteve gave a tight smile. "I’ve flown every corridor between Zaragoza and Huesca. I know the Luftwaffe’s holding altitude, their drop intervals, and the refuel fields they’re hiding south of Tudela."

"You’re hired."

Renaud leaned in, skeptical. "How do we know you’re not working both sides?"

Esteve shrugged. "You don’t. But I didn’t come here to survive."

By that evening, the French PAP scouts had adjusted their movement to nocturnal hours, breaking into dispersed units and using natural shadows to conceal vehicle signatures.

Armor was split across elevation shifts to avoid being bracketed from above.

But they weren’t fast enough.

The next wave came without warning.

Midday.

North of Monzón.

Two Heinkel He 111 bombers tore through the airspace above the Cinca River.

Flanked by two Messerschmitts.

Esteve’s voice crackled over the field radio.

"They’re not going for roads they’re tracking engine heat. You’ve got less than three minutes."

Moreau didn’t respond.

He was already signaling the teams

From concealed ravines, two twin-barrel Hotchkiss guns rose from beneath netting and opened fire.

The first Heinkel veered, struck in its undercarriage, spiraling to the left before slamming into a field of olive trees.

A column of smoke erupted.

The second bomber loosed its payload blindly and turned back, trailing fuel.

The Messerschmitts strafed on exit, cutting a few men down along a dry creekbed.

But the message had changed.

The French weren’t just running anymore.

They were striking back.

Far away.

Guderian read the aerial loss report and paced the stone floor of his temporary headquarters.

"Minimal damage. Minor casualties. But our reach was repelled."

One of his adjutants, an SS liaison, adjusted his gloves nervously.

"You warned about this, Herr General. This Frenchman Moreau he’s breaking tempo."

Guderian paused, exhaled slowly.

"We’ll pull back three kilometers. Let them push forward. Watch how they regroup. Then we hit them again hard."

On the Republican side, chaos grew within the higher echelons.

Colonel Moscardó sent a blunt telegram to Franco.

"French activity now confirmed. Mechanized units and air resistance. If this continues, the international narrative collapses."

Franco’s reply was just as clipped.

"Reinforce Zaragoza. Mobilize southern columns. Deny French contact in public statements. Eliminate evidence in captured zones."

At dusk, Moreau stood with Renaud.

"We’re not going to survive this war clean," Renaud said.

"We’re not here to be clean," Moreau replied.

"Then what?"

He didn’t answer.

That night, Moreau launched a ghost assault on Nationalist artillery positions along the Zaragoza supply chain.

No tanks.

No formal lines.

Just six PAP teams, flamethrower units, and sappers moving through harvested fields and broken irrigation tunnels.

They bypassed guards by using livestock pens and drainage grates.

The first explosion a fuel truck lit up the night like sunrise.

The second tore through an ammunition trailer parked beneath canvas.

Within minutes, two of the five Nationalist guns were inoperable.

Spanish and German officers ran into the chaos, shouting orders into fire and confusion.

From a hilltop two kilometers east, Esteve circled in the dark above, watching it all unfold.

"They’re scattering," he reported. "No aerial spotters. They didn’t expect this."

By the time the Nationalists could organize, the French teams were gone.

Moreau’s columns had moved again.

Every unit repositioned in under four hours.

No fixed command center.

No centralized depot.

Every vehicle preloaded for immediate withdrawal.

In a small office in Madrid, two Soviet observers Andreyev and Vlasenko typed a new cable to Moscow.

"Moreau’s doctrine reflects distributed cognition semi-automated response and low-latency feedback loops. This is not classic mechanization. This is behavioral warfighting. Doctrine becomes ghostlike. Impressive. Dangerous."

They did not share the full thought, but both were thinking it.

By noon on August 3rd, Blum relented.

Paris approved deployment of a single air squadron MB.200s, obsolete and slow, but armed.

They arrived late in the afternoon, marked as "civilian cargo aircraft" but crewed by military pilots.

Renaud looked them over with narrowed eyes.

"This is what they sent?"

Moreau nodded. "Enough to test ideas. Not to win."

"So what now?"

He pointed to the map toward Guderian’s fallback line just west of Zaragoza.

"We take his bait. Then we turn the trap inside out. This war’s no longer about land," he said.

Renaud asked quietly, "Then what is it about?"

Moreau’s eyes stayed fixed on the dark sky.

"Time. Whoever owns time owns the battlefield."