The War That Came Early: West and East (58 page)

SOMETIMES THE WORST THING
you could do was imagine something. Sergeant Hideki Fujita discovered that painful truth for himself, as so many had before him. The idea of getting transferred to attack Vladivostok hadn’t so much as crossed his mind till he and that other sergeant sat around chewing the fat and wasting time.

Once it got into his head, though, it wouldn’t go away. It stayed there and stayed there, like an eyelash you couldn’t rub out of your eye. Other units had been called away from the blocking position. It could happen to his regiment, too. When you were a soldier, anything that could happen could happen to you. It could, and sooner or later it probably would.

You didn’t want to have thoughts like that. They meant that, if you kept at this trade long enough, you
would
stop a bullet, you
would
get ripped up by a shell fragment, you
would
get blasted into chunks of raw meat. How could you keep on soldiering if you kept worrying about such things?

How? Your own side would deal with you if you tried
not
to soldier, that was how. And if you found yourself in the middle of the trackless Siberian woods (well, not quite trackless—there was the railroad line that had sent the Japanese army blundering among the firs and spruces to begin with), your best chance—maybe your only chance—was to do your job like everybody else.

This was bad. Nobody in his right mind would have called it anything else. But soldiering had taught Fujita one thing, anyway: the difference between bad and worse was much bigger than the difference between good and better.

“My father fought at Port Arthur,” Superior Private Hayashi said one afternoon. The squad huddled around a small, almost smokeless fire in the bottom of their trench. It wasn’t snowing now, but it had been, and it looked as if it would start up again pretty soon, too. They had thick greatcoats and fur-lined gloves and Russian-style felt boots (although the ones they took from dead Red Army men were even better), but that didn’t mean the cold didn’t seep into a man’s bones. Fire and hot tea or soup were the best weapons against it.

Yet even fire and tea were powerless against the chill that seeped into a man’s head. “Two of my uncles did,” Fujita said. “They never liked to talk about it afterwards. I didn’t understand that till I went into the army myself. You can’t tell somebody what combat’s like till he’s done it himself—and after that he doesn’t need to hear it from you.”

“Hai
, Sergeant-
san
.” Shinjiro Hayashi nodded. Well, of course a superior private would agree with his sergeant. A sergeant would knock your block off if you were crazy enough to do anything else. But then Hayashi added, “That’s very well put.”

Fujita smiled before he realized he’d done it. When a smart kid said you’d said something well, of course you were tickled. Yes, he might be flattering you—he knew where his bowl of rice came from, all right. He’d found a good way to go about it, though. Fujita’s voice lacked some of the growl he usually put into it speaking to inferiors when he said, “So what did your father tell you about Port Arthur?”

“He never talked about it much, either, not till just before I had to go in for basic training,” Hayashi said. “Then he said he hoped I never ended up in a spot like that. He said the Russian artillery was bad—”

“That sure hasn’t changed!” somebody else exclaimed. All the soldiers nodded. No matter what other mistakes the Russians made, their artillery was always trouble.

“And he said that our machine guns fired right over the heads of our men when they were attacking the Russian forts,” Hayashi went on.
“Right
over their heads. Sometimes our gunners would shoot our men in the back.”

“It happens,” Fujita said.
“Shigata ga nai.”
Life was hard to begin with. Soldiering was a hard part of life. If the generals decided killing some of the troops on their own side would help the rest take an objective, they’d do it without thinking twice. It was just part of the cost of doing business. He could understand that. A sergeant sometimes had to make those choices, too, if on a smaller scale.

“Hai
. It does happen.” Hayashi had seen enough to leave him no doubts on that score. “But, please excuse me, Sergeant-
san
—I don’t want it to happen to me.”

“Well, who does?” Fujita said. “Me, I aim to die at the age of a hundred and three, shot by an outraged husband.”

The soldiers all laughed. Fujita couldn’t remember where he’d heard that line before. Somewhere. It didn’t matter. It was funny. When you heard something funny, of course you used it yourself and passed it along.

“Eee
, I like that,” a private said. “An outraged husband with a pretty young wife,
neh?”

“Oh, yes,” Fujita said. “What’s the point to getting shot for screwing some ugly old woman, eh?”

No one saw any. As soldiers will, the men started talking about young women, pretty women, women they’d known, women they claimed they’d known, women they wished they’d known. Fujita told a little truth and more than a few lies. He figured the other soldiers were doing the same thing. Well, so what? Talk like that made the time go by. In their foxholes and trenches farther north, the Russians were probably telling the same stories.

As if to remind the Japanese that they hadn’t gone away, Red Army gunners greeted the next day’s dawn with an artillery barrage. Bombers flying above the ugly gray clouds dropped tonnes of explosives through them. They were bombing blind, and none of their presents fell anywhere close to the front. For all kinds of reasons, that didn’t break Fujita’s heart. He was in no danger himself. And the soft-living men who called themselves soldiers but never saw the trenches—the clerks and the cooks
and the staff officers—got a taste of what war was like. He hoped they enjoyed it.

A couple of days after that, the regiment got pulled out of the line. The first place they went was to a delousing station. Like any Japanese, Fujita was glad to soak in almost unbearably hot water. He was even gladder the Russian bombers had missed the bathhouse. If the soap smelled powerfully of medicine, so what? Getting his clothes baked to kill lice and nits was less delightful, but he could put up with it.

Some of the soldiers thought they were going home. Some people could smell pig shit and think of pork cutlets. Fujita was willing—even eager—to be surprised, which didn’t mean he expected it.

The men marched off to the west, toward the Ussuri River and the border with Manchukuo. The officers said nothing about where they were headed, or why. Maybe they didn’t know, either. More likely, they didn’t want the troops to find out till they couldn’t do anything about it but complain.

A small flotilla of river steamers waited by the riverbank. They’d all seen better decades. Some of them looked as if they’d seen a better century. Sergeant Fujita’s company and another filed aboard one of the river-boats. They filled it to overflowing. It waddled out into the stream and headed south. Fujita feared he knew what that meant … which, in the grand scheme of things, mattered not at all.

Spatters of snow chased the steamers. The clouds overhead remained thick and dark. For that, the sergeant thanked whatever weather
kami
ruled in these parts. Clear skies would have let Russian airplanes spot the steamers and shoot them up at their leisure. Each boat mounted a machine gun at the bow and another at the stern. From everything Fujita had seen, they wouldn’t do a sen’s worth of good in case of a real attack.

He said as much to Hayashi. The conscripted student looked back at him. “What difference does it make? If the Russians don’t shoot us from the air now, they’ll shoot us on the ground pretty soon.”

“Maybe they won’t,” Fujita answered. You had to look on the bright side of things. That was about as far on the bright side as he could make himself look, though.

“Hai. Honto
. Maybe they won’t. Maybe our own machine gunners will
do it for them, the way they did in my father’s day.” Hayashi had his share of cynicism, or maybe more than his share.

“Your father made it. So did my uncles,” Fujita said. Again, just surviving seemed like optimism. The steamers lumbered south through the snow flurries.

PERONNE WAS A NORTHERN TOWN
that had kept some of its brick-and-stone walls. German bombs and French artillery—or maybe it was the other way around—had done horrible things to them. Big chunks were bitten out of the church of St. Jean. Despite the chill of crisp fall days, the stench of death fouled the air.

In the French drive to the east, Luc Harcourt had seen—and smelled—a lot of towns and villages like this one. He smelled bad himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. Joinville and Villehardouin were just as grimy and unshaven and odorous as he was. So were all the other
poilus
pushing the Fritzes back.

Joinville pointed to a parade of sorts going through the streets of Peronne. “By Jesus, there’s something you don’t see every day!”

“Too bad,” Tiny Villehardouin added in his bad Breton-flavored French.

Luc Harcourt thought it was too bad, too. The locals were forcing a dozen or so young women to march along bare to the waist, their breasts bouncing at every step. Some had had their heads shaved. Others, more humiliatingly still, wore scalps half bare. One was very visibly pregnant.

People yelled at them as they went: “Whores!” “Cunts!” “Scumbags of the
Boches
!” Rotten vegetables flew through the air. No one seemed ready to cast the first stone, though.

“I bet this happened after we chased the Germans out the last time, too,” Joinville said. The Gascon had his eye on one of the girls in particular. His chances were probably pretty good, too. If she’d sleep with a German, or a bunch of Germans, why wouldn’t she sleep with a Frenchman?

“Not with the same broads, I bet,” Luc said. Joinville laughed so hard, the Hotchkiss gun on his back almost fell off. Villehardouin, who was burdened with the tripod, fixed his crewmate’s straps.

The rumble of aircraft engines swelling out of the east made Luc’s head rise like that of a dog scenting danger. If those were Stukas, he wanted to find somewhere else to be, and in a hurry. Another country, by choice.

But this flight wasn’t full of vulture-winged dive bombers. In fact, the flying machines looked like something left over from his father’s war. They were biplanes with open cockpits. Antiaircraft guns opened up on them. Black puffs of smoke marked shell bursts. Some came quite close to the planes, but the old-fashioned, ungainly machines buzzed on.

Luc had trouble taking them seriously even when they swooped down on Peronne. But then, all of a sudden, it sounded as if God were firing giant machine guns up in the sky. The townsfolk suddenly lost interest in tormenting their wayward women. They ran, screaming. Luc wanted to do the same thing. Only the fear of losing his men’s respect forever held him in place. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled, and suited action to word.

Both machine gun and tripod clanked as Joinville and Villehardouin followed suit. That fearsome
ratatat-tat
grew louder yet as the German biplanes neared.
They’re doing it with their engines
, Luc realized. It was the same kind of trick as the sirens in a Stuka’s landing gear. It was designed to make people afraid. And, as with most things German, it did what it was designed for. Did it ever!

The biplanes carried real machine guns: Luc saw them spitting fire. And bombs fell from under their wings: not the monsters Stukas could haul, the ones that pierced reinforced concrete and wrecked fortresses, but even so.… Luc rolled himself into a ball like a hedgehog. He only wished he had real spines.

Bullets sparked off brickwork and cobblestones. Bombs bounced him as if he were a basketball. A round clanged off metal somewhere much too close. And then the biplanes were gone—he hoped.

He needed a moment to take stock of himself. Both arms work? Check. Both legs? Check again. No holes? No blood? No pain? No and no and no. “Fuck me,” he said. “I’m all right.”

Then he looked around to see how his buddies were doing. Villehardouin seemed to be going through a checklist like the one he’d just used himself. The big Breton nodded and gave a thumbs-up. Joinville had
taken off the Hotchkiss gun and was looking it over. “Look!” he said, pointing to a dent and a lead splash on one of the iron cooling fins at the base of the barrel. “It hit here and ricocheted. If it hadn’t ricocheted, it would have gone into my back.”

“Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” Luc took his water bottle off his belt. “Here. Have some of this.”

“Pinard?”
Joinville asked, taking the flask.

“Better—applejack,” Luc said.

“Ah.
Merci, mon ami.”
The Gascon’s throat worked. After a couple of swallows, he handed Villehardouin the bottle. The big man also took a knock. Then he gave the water bottle back to Luc. Luc drank, too, before he stowed it on his belt. He needed a little distilled courage, or at least an anesthetic.

Luc looked around again, this time for the soldiers who’d been hauling the Hotchkiss gun’s ammunition. None of the bullets from the biplanes had hit the aluminum strips of cartridges, which was also lucky. They might have started going off like ammo inside a burning tank, which wouldn’t have been healthy for anyone within a few hundred meters.

But one of the troopers was methodically bandaging his calf. Red soaked through the white cotton gauze. “How bad is it, Émile?” Luc asked.

“Hurts like a motherfucker, but I don’t think it’ll kill me,” Émile answered. “Hell, if you get me a stick I bet I can walk on it.”

“Chances are they’ll send you home, then,” Luc said.

“Not fucking likely—I grew up in Verdun,” Émile said. The eastern town had held in the last war, but fallen in this one.

“Oh.” Luc had forgotten that, if he ever knew it. “Well, they’ll take you out of the line for a while, anyway.”

“It’ll do,” Émile said. “I only wish to Christ they’d done it sooner.”

Loud shouts came from around the corner. That was Sergeant Demange’s voice. Of course he’d live through a strafing and a dive bombing. Luc didn’t think anything could kill him. He’d probably never been born, but manufactured in some armaments plant during the last war. Maybe he had a serial number tattooed on his ass—or stamped into it.