Hitler's war

Chapter 10

Luc Harcourt was alive. That was all he knew, all he cared about. He’d seen more war than he ever wanted to meet. He’d smelled blood and pus and death and his own shit in his pants. Nobody’d ever ragged him about that. He knew damn well he wasn’t the only one.

This ruined barn was a good place to grab a cigarette. What was left of the walls kept a German sniper from drawing a bead on him and punching his ticket. He sucked in harsh smoke, held it as long as he could, and finally let it out again.

“Man,” he said, and paused for another drag. “I never wanted a smoke this much when I was a civilian.”

“Not even after a fuck?” Sergeant Demange had a cigarette between his lips, too, but then he always did.

“Not even then,” Luc said. “Then I like it. Yeah, sure-but of course. But there’s a difference between liking a smoke and really needing one, you know what I mean? When the bastards are trying to kill you, a cigarette’s all you’ve got.”

“Well, not quite,” Demange shook his canteen so it sloshed. “What do you have in here?”

“Pinard,” Luc answered. The cheap, nasty red wine was nonregulation, but it was also less likely than water from God knew where to give you the runs. You couldn’t very well get lit on a liter of pinard, either. “How about you, Sergeant? What do you have?”

“Calvados,” Demange said proudly. “That’ll put hair on your balls, by God.”

“Boy, will it ever,” Luc said. The apple brandy of northern France was liquid dynamite. He hoped the sergeant would offer to share, but Demange didn’t. Demange was for Demange, first, last, and always. Luc didn’t resent it the way he might have from someone more hypocritical about it.

Paul Renouvin said, “Calvados? C’est rien.” He didn’t look like a college man any more. He was as scrawny and filthy and ragged and unshaven as any of the other soldiers in the barn.

But he still knew how to get under Demange’s skin. The sergeant jerked as if all of his lice had bitten him at once. “Nothing, is it, asshole? Well, what the devil have you got that’s better? Whatever it is, it better be good, or I’ll whale the living shit out of you.” Renouvin was ten centimeters taller and a good bit heavier. Luc would have bet on Demange every time.

Paul caressed his canteen as if it were a beautiful woman’s bare tit. “Me? I’ve got scotch,” he murmured.

“Why, you lying prick!” Demange said. “Scotch, my left one! Where would a no-account cocksucker like you get scotch?”

“Off a dead Tommy officer,” Renouvin answered calmly. “Good stuff, too.”

“Tell me another one. You think I was born yesterday? You think I fell off the turnip truck?” The sergeant pointed to the canteen. “Give me a taste of that. Right now, too. If it isn’t scotch, I’ll tear your ears off and shove ‘em down your throat.”

“But what if it is?” Renouvin asked.

Rage made Demange reckless. “If it is-fat chance!-you can have all my applejack.”

“You heard him, boys,” Paul said. Luc and the other poilus nodded. Why not? This was the best sport they’d had in a while. Luc forgot about the cold and the dirt and the fear. He forgot about the battery of 75s banging away not far from the barn, even if they were liable to bring German artillery down on everybody’s head before too long. He watched Renouvin open the canteen and pour a little of the contents into the screw-on cap. With elaborate ceremony, Renouvin passed the cap to Demange. “Here you go, Sergeant. Salut.”

“If you’re trying to get me to drink piss, you’ll fucking die-I promise you that,” Demange said suspiciously. He sniffed at the cap before he drank from it. Luc watched his face, but those ratlike features gave nothing away. Like a man moving in a dream, the sergeant sipped.

He didn’t say anything for more than a minute. He just sat there motionless, even the perpetual cigarette in the corner of his mouth forgotten. Then, without any particular rancor, he said, “You son of a bitch.” He flipped the cap to Renouvin, who put it back on the canteen. And Demange handed him his own canteen. “Here. Choke on it.”

“We’ll all choke on it-and then on the scotch. How’s that?” Paul said. He swigged from the Calvados, then passed it along.

Luc thought that was mighty smart-not university-smart, maybe, but soldier-smart for sure. A man who had both scotch and applejack was a man who made his buddies jealous. A man who shared them made friends for life-or at least till one of the other guys got his hands on something nice.

Two big knocks of good, strong booze. Shelter from the winter weather. A soldier’s life could be simple sometimes. A few tiny pleasures, and everything seemed wonderful.

The next morning, replacements came up to the front. Luc eyed them with mingled suspicion and contempt. They were too pale, too neat, too plump. They carried too much equipment. Their uniforms weren’t dirty and torn. Their noncoms hardly knew how to swear.

“Poor darlings!” someone jeered. “Someone forgot to lock the nursery, and look where they ended up.”

A shell burst half a kilometer away. Some of the new fish flinched. That made Luc want to start laughing. “They have to come closer than that to hurt you,” he said. “Don’t worry-they will.”

A lieutenant as young and unweathered as his troops pointed an angry finger at him. “Where is your superior, soldier?” he snapped.

“I guess I’m him…sir,” Sergeant Demange said, the usual Gitane bobbing in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “What do you need?”

He was grimy and unshaven. He looked as if he’d killed better men than that baby lieutenant-and he had. The officer had the rank, but Demange had the presence. Luc watched the lieutenant’s bravado leak out through the soles of his boots. “Tell that man to be more respectful,” he managed, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Sure,” Demange said, and then, to Luc, “Be more respectful, you hear?”

“Sorry, Sergeant.” Luc went along with the charade.

“There you go, sir,” Demange said to the lieutenant. “You happy now?”

Plainly, the lieutenant wasn’t. Just as plainly, being unhappy wouldn’t do him one goddamn bit of good. Demange’s attitude and graying stubble said he’d fought in the first war, while the lieutenant hadn’t done much fighting in this one yet. His tongue slid across the hairline mustache that darkened the skin just above his upper lip, but he didn’t say anything more. He just kept on walking.

More German shells came in. Maybe the Boches were probing for that battery of 75s. Whatever they were doing, those rising screams in the air said this salvo was trouble. “Hit the dirt!” Luc yelled. He was already flat by the time the words came out. Several other veterans shouted the same thing-also from their bellies.

Bam! He felt as if a squad of Paris flics were beating on him with their nightsticks. Blast picked him up and slammed him back down again. “Oof!” he said-he came down on a rock that would bruise his belly and just missed knocking the wind out of him. Jagged fragments whined overhead. Several of them spanged off the barn’s stone wall. One drew a bloody line across the back of Luc’s hand. What he said then was worse than Oof!

More shells landed a couple of hundred meters away, and then more farther off still. Luc opened and closed his hands a couple of times. All his fingers worked-no tendons cut. Only a scratch, as these things went. It still hurt like blazes, though.

Cautiously, he raised his head. When he did, he forgot about his own little wound. One or two of the German shells had come down right by-maybe even among-the raw troops. They didn’t know anything about flattening out. You could scream at them, but they needed a few seconds to get what you were saying and a few more to figure out what they should do.

All of which added up to a few fatal seconds too long.

Some of the soldiers were still standing. More were on the ground now-men and pieces of men. The air was thick with the stink of blood, as it might have been after explosions in a slaughterhouse. This wasn’t quite that. This was explosions that produced a slaughterhouse.

A soldier stared stupidly at the spouting stump of his arm. Not three meters from him, the kid lieutenant stood there with his face white and twisted into a rictus of horror. “Merde,” Luc muttered. He scrambled to his feet and ran over to the maimed kid. A leather bootlace did duty for a tourniquet. The spout became a tiny trickle.

And the soldier came out of shock and started to shriek. Luc dug the morphine syrette out of the fellow’s wound kit and jabbed him with it. The drug hit hard and fast. The soldier’s eyes closed and he passed out. Luc thought he would live if he hadn’t bled too much. Unlike most battlefield wounds, the amputation was almost as neat as if a surgeon had done it.

The poor lieutenant still hadn’t unfrozen. Some of his men were helping the veterans help their buddies, but he stood rooted to the spot. “You all right, sir?” Luc heard the rough sympathy in his own voice. This wasn’t the first freeze-up he’d seen. It was a bad one, though. He tried again, louder this time: “You all right?”

“I-” The officer shook himself like a dog coming out of cold water. Then, violently, he crossed himself. And then he bent over and was sick. Spitting and coughing, he choked out, “I regret to say I am not all right at all.”

“Well, this is pretty bad.” Luc held out his canteen. “Here. Rinse your mouth. Get rid of the taste.”

“Merci.” The lieutenant did. As he handed the canteen back to Luc, he suddenly looked horrified and took off for the closest bushes at a dead run.

“He just realize he shat himself?” Sergeant Demange asked dryly.

“That’s my guess,” Luc said.

“He’s not the first. He won’t be the last, either,” Demange said. “I’ve done it in both wars, Christ knows. You?”

“Oui.” If the sergeant hadn’t admitted it, Luc wouldn’t have, either. But since he had…Luc knew that was a big brotherhood, sure as hell. It probably included more than half the people who’d ever come under machine-gun or artillery fire. More than half the people who’d ever been up to the front, in other words. “War’s a bitch.”

“And a poxed bitch to boot,” Demange agreed. Luc found himself nodding.

* * *

Snow flew as near horizontally as made no difference. The wind howled out of the north. Anastas Mouradian looked out the window of the flimsy hut by the airstrip and shuddered. “I wish I were back in Armenia,” he said in his accented Russian. “We have civilized weather down there.”

Another officer swigged from a bottle of vodka and then set it down. They weren’t going to fly today-why not drink? “Shit, this isn’t so bad.”

That was too much for Sergei Yaroslavsky “The Devil’s grandmother, it’s not! Bozhemoi, man! Where d’you come from?”

“Strelka-Chunya,” the other man answered.

“Where the hell is that?”

“About a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk.”

“A thousand kilometers…north of Irkutsk?” Sergei echoed. Then he said, “Bozehmoi!” again. Irkutsk lay next to Lake Baikal, in the heart of Siberia. Go north from there and you’d just get colder. He hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible, which only went to show your imagination reached so far and no further. He made as if to doff his fur cap. “All right, pal. If you come from there, this isn’t so bad-for you.”

“But why would anybody want to go there in the first place?” Mouradian asked. That struck Sergei as a damn good question, too.

And the Siberian flyer-his name was Bogdan Koroteyev-had an answer for it: “My people are trappers. If you’re going to do that, you have to go where the animals live.”

Through the roaring wind, Sergei heard, or thought he heard, a low rumble in the distance. “Is that guns?” he asked.

“Or bombs going off.” The Siberian had put away enough vodka so he didn’t much care. “Damn Poles are stubborn bastards.” He shoved the bottle across the rickety table. “Want a slug?”

“Sure.” Sergei poured some liquid fire down his throat. “Damn Poles.”

Things in northeastern Poland weren’t going as well as they might have. The radio and the newspapers didn’t say that, but anyone with a gram of sense could read between the lines. The Red Army kept attacking the same places over and over again. Every attack sounded like a victory. If they were victories, though, why weren’t the glorious and peace-loving soldiers of the Soviet Union advancing instead of spinning their wheels?

Not that wheels wanted to spin in weather like this. Supplies moved forward on sledges-when they moved forward at all. Bombers and fighters had long since traded conventional landing gear for ski undercarriages. Men wore skis or snowshoes whenever they went outside.

One of the flyers wound up a phonograph and put on a record. It was Debussy. Sergei relaxed. Nobody listened to Chopin or Mozart or Beethoven any more. Nobody dared. Listening to music by a composer from a country at war with the USSR might be enough to make the NKVD question your loyalty. Who could say for sure why people disappeared? Who wanted to take a chance and find out? But Debussy, a Frenchman, was safe enough.

More explosions, these not so distant. The windows in the hut rattled. “Those are bombs,” Mouradian said. “The weather somewhere off to the west is good enough to let airplanes get up.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Koroteyev said. “They’re trying to rattle our cage, that’s all. They can’t find anything to hit, so they drop things anywhere and hope they’ll do some good. Fat chance!” He belched and lit a cigarette.

“Even when you can see it, hitting what you aim at isn’t easy,” Sergei said.

“Turn on the radio, somebody,” Mouradian said. “It’s just about time for the news.”

The flyer closest to the set clicked on the knob. The dial lit up. Half a minute later-once the tubes warmed up-music started blaring out of the speaker. It wasn’t quite the top of the hour. The march wasn’t to Sergei’s taste, but you could put up with anything for a couple of minutes.

“Here is the news,” the announcer said.

“Moo,” Koroteyev added irreverently. Chuckles ran through the hut. The announcer’s accent said he came from the middle reaches of the Volga: he turned a lot of a sounds into o ’s. It really did make him sound as if he ought to be out in a field chewing his cud.

But what he had to say grabbed everybody’s attention: “Spreading their vicious campaign of terror ever more widely, the reactionary Polish junta under the thuggish leadership of Marshal Smigly-Ridz bombed both Minsk and Zhitomir yesterday. Casualties are reported heavy, because neither city was prepared for such treachery and murder. Numbers of innocent schoolchildren are among the slain.”

One of the pilots swore violently. He spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent, so that some of his g ’ s turned into h ’s. Sergei wondered if he was from Zhitomir or had family there.

“General Secretary Stalin has vowed vengeance against the evil Polish regime,” the announcer went on. “Our bombers have targeted Warsaw for retaliation.”

Our bombers taking off from where? Sergei wondered. He would have bet piles of rubles that nobody could fly from anywhere near Minsk. Maybe things were better farther south, down toward the Ukraine. He supposed they must have been, or the Poles couldn’t have struck at it. In this blizzard, they must have been bombing by dead reckoning-and damned lucky to boot-to hit Minsk at all.

Then the man reading the news said, “Observers in Minsk report that some of the planes striking the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic were German Heinkels and Dorniers. And so we see that the Hitlerites are indeed supporting their semifascist stooges in Warsaw. They too shall suffer the righteous wrath of the workers and people of the Soviet Union.”

Several flyers sitting around the table nodded. Sergei started to do the same thing. Then he caught himself. How the devil could observers in Minsk identify the bombers overhead? Minsk wasn’t far from here. It had to be as socked in as this miserable airstrip was.

Sergei opened his mouth to say something about that. Before he could, Anastas Mouradian caught his eye. Ever so slightly-Sergei didn’t think any of the other flyers noticed it-his copilot shook his head.

The newsman continued, giving more reports of the Poles’ atrocities and then going on to talk about the war news from Western Europe. Sergei ended up keeping quiet. Mouradian was bound to be right. If the authorities told lies and you pointed it out, who would get in trouble? The authorities? Or you?

Asking the question was the same as answering it.

Did the rest of the flyers see that the newsman was full of crap when he talked about Minsk? Or didn’t they even notice? Were they so used to believing everything they heard on the radio that they couldn’t do anything else?

Then something else occurred to Sergei. He grabbed the vodka bottle and took a good swig from it. But not even vodka could drown the subversive thought. If that newsman was lying about the weather in Minsk, what else was he lying about? Had the Poles really bombed the city at all? Had the Germans joined them? How much of what he said about the war in the West was true?

Was anything he said true? Anything at all?

How could you know? How could you even begin to guess? Oh, some things were bound to be true, because what point would there be to lying about them? But others? Had the top ranks of the Soviet military really been as full of traitors and wreckers as the recent purges left people believing? If they hadn’t…

Even with the fresh slug of vodka coursing through him on top of everything else he’d drunk, Sergei recognized a dangerous thought when he tripped over one. You couldn’t say anything like that, not unless you wanted to find out exactly what kind of weather Siberia had.

Or would they just shoot you if they realized you realized they didn’t always tell the truth? He wouldn’t have been surprised. What could be more dangerous to the people who ran things?

Anastas watched him from across the table. Did the Armenian know what he was thinking? Did Mouradian think the same things, too? Then Sergei stopped worrying about himself, because the Russian newsman went on, “Since German planes were used in the terror bombings of peaceful Soviet cities, justice demands that we also retaliate against the Fascist Hitlerite swine. This being so, Red Air Force bombers have struck at the Prussian city of Konigsberg. Damage to the enemies of the people is reported to be extremely heavy. They richly deserve the devastation visited upon them!”

“Bozhemoi,” whispered somebody down the table from Sergei. It sounded too reverent to be conventional cursing. Nobody reprimanded the flyer, though-not after that news!

No matter what Sergei had been thinking, he didn’t doubt this for a moment. The USSR wouldn’t claim to have bombed Germany if it hadn’t really done it. And if the USSR bombed Germany…In that case, the war against Hitler had just gone from the back burner to the front.

Maybe those were Heinkels and Dorniers up there, inaccurately bombing the airstrip. Maybe Germans in field-gray would join Poles in greenish brown (although the Poles, like the Soviets, had the sense to wear white camouflage smocks in the wintertime). Maybe Hitler and Smigly-Ridz would show the world what the USSR already knew: they’d been in bed with each other all along.

A different announcer exhorted his listeners to buy war bonds. “Help make farmers and workers safe from the threat of Fascism!” he boomed. “Subscribe to the latest war bond program!”

Sergei already bought war bonds. So did everyone else in the Red Air Force and Army and Navy. Contributions came out of their pay before they ever set eyes on it. Losing the money didn’t hurt nearly so much that way as it would have if Sergei’d had to dig into his own pockets.

“As long as the Nazis stay busy in the West, we’ll do fine against them,” Koroteyev said.

Several men nodded. Sergei was one of them. Then Anastas Mouradian said, “Sure we will-just like we did in the last war.”

Silence slammed down around the table. Germany had been busy against France and England and Belgium in 1914-everybody knew that. And everybody also knew the Kaiser’s armies had smashed the Tsar’s again and again. If not for one disaster after another on the front, the Revolution might never have started, much less succeeded.

The Siberian looked at Anastas. “One of these days, you’ll open your mouth so wide, you’ll fall right in.”

“No doubt, Comrade,” Mouradian replied. “If it can happen to the whole country, why can’t it happen to me?”

That only brought more silence. People stared at the Armenian, then quickly looked away. They might have been gaping at a car wreck. “How much have you drunk?” Sergei asked. Sometimes you could get out of trouble by blaming it all on the vodka. He’d done that himself a time or three.

His copilot gave the question his usual serious-if not sober-consideration. “Either too much or not enough,” Mouradian said at last. “And it’s not too much, so…” He grabbed the vodka bottle, raised it, and tilted his head back.

Sergei reached out and grabbed it away from him. “To each according to his needs,” he said, and got rid of what was left. With the air of a man performing a conjuring trick, the Siberian produced another bottle. Loud applause greeted it. The drinking went on. With any luck at all, by this time tomorrow nobody would remember what one mouthy Armenian was going on about.

* * *

Some of the men in Hideki Fujita’s squad were from Hokkaido. The northern island was notorious for winter weather that blew straight down from Siberia. Fujita had been through some rotten winters himself before they shipped him off to the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia.

Or he thought he had, anyhow.

Now he had to admit that what he’d known about winter was about the same as what an eleven-year-old knew about love. The kid could imagine he understood what was what. And a jackass could suppose it was a nightingale, too. That didn’t make it sound like one when it opened its mouth, though.

Fujita wore a fur cap-the earflaps, at the moment, down. He wore a thick, heavily lined, fur-collared greatcoat. It was double-breasted, to make it harder for drafts to sneak in. He had stout gray felt mittens and knee-high felt boots with leather uppers. He had on two pairs of wool socks and two pairs of long woolen underwear.

He was freezing his ass off just the same. You had to go out on patrol, freezing or not. If you didn’t, the Russians or the Mongols would make you sorry. The Russians were used to cold weather-like what Hokkaido got, this stuff blew down from Siberia. The Mongols were used to it, too. And the Mongols were as sneaky, and as dangerous, as so many poisonous snakes. They could slither through openings where you didn’t think there were any.

Sergeant Fujita looked at his watch. If it hadn’t frozen and quit moving, he still had more than an hour out here before his relief came. “Zakennayo!” he muttered. That felt like forever.

At last, though, a superior private named Suzuki found him out in the middle of the blowing snow. Suzuki wore as much winter gear as Fujita, and a white camouflage smock on top of it all. He looked miserably cold just the same. But, cold or not, he said the magic words: “I relieve you, Sergeant.”

“Good,” Fujita said. The howling wind grabbed the world and tried to swirl it away. “What’s going on back at the camp?”

“Somebody from regimental headquarters is there,” Suzuki said.

“Oh, yeah?” Automatic suspicion filled Fujita’s voice. Like any veteran noncom, he distrusted any break with routine. He had his reasons, too. “What does the guy want? Are we going to have to try and attack the Mongols and the Russians again? They’ve got more tanks and better artillery than we do. And they hold the high ground.”

None of that would matter a sen’s worth if the powers that be in Mukden or in Tokyo decided to send the guys at the pointy end of the bayonet into action once more. Fujita knew it only too well. And Superior Private Suzuki only shrugged. “I can’t tell you anything about that, Sergeant,” he answered. “The guy got there just when I was starting out here.”

“I’d better go find out, then,” Fujita said. “Try to stay warm. If you want to build up a wall of snow to keep the wind from blowing straight through you, nobody will say boo.”

“Maybe I will,” Suzuki said. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Is it ever!” Fujita headed back toward the tents that housed his company. Halfway there, he tried to get a cigarette going. He soon gave it up as a bad job. He had plenty of practice lighting up in a strong wind, but this one defeated him.

Getting under canvas did let him light a match. He gratefully sucked in smoke. Then he said, “Suzuki was going on that somebody from regimental HQ showed up here.”

“That’s right, Sergeant- san,” one of the privates in the tent said. “People say we’re pulling out of here.”

“What, the company?” Fujita asked. “I won’t be sorry-I’ll say that. We’ve been bumping noses with the Mongols and the Russians too damn long.”

“Not just the company-the whole regiment. Maybe everybody on this whole front,” the private answered. “That’s what people are saying, anyhow.” The disclaimer let him off the hook in case the rumors he dished out proved nothing but a bunch of moonshine.

“The regiment? The whole front?” That was so much more than Sergeant Fujita had expected, he needed a minute to take it all in. “If we leave, where do we go next? Back to Japan?” If you’re going to wish, wish for the moon, he thought.

“I’m very sorry, Sergeant- san, but I don’t know.” The private-Nakayama, his name was-sounded not only sorry but apprehensive. Privates got knocked around when sergeants wanted to know things and they didn’t have the answers handy.

Had Fujita been in a bad mood, he might have hit Nakayama a couple of times to make himself feel better. But the sheer scope of what was going on left him more awed than angry. And walloping a private because of rumors wasn’t exactly fair-which wouldn’t have stopped Fujita if he really felt like doing it.

“I’m sure the captain will tell me in the morning,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant- san. Of course he will,” Nakayama said quickly. He and the other privates in the tent let out almost identical sighs of relief. Sergeant Fujita affected not to notice them. He’d been a private himself once upon a time. He remembered what looking up at a sergeant-ogre was like. Discipline would suffer if this bunch of conscripts realized that, though. In the gloom, none of them could see him smile.

Sure enough, Captain Hasegawa summoned Fujita and the company’s other senior noncoms first thing in the morning. Without preamble, the company commander said, “We are leaving the Mongolian frontier region and redeploying to eastern Manchukuo.”

“Where will the redeployment take us, sir?” Sergeant Fujita asked. If it was to Mukden-the capital-or Harbin or some other big city, that wasn’t so bad. It was a lot better than staying stuck on the edge of Mongolia. And what isn’t? Fujita thought. Unfortunately, that had an answer. If the regiment got shipped up to the Amur frontier with Russia, it just traded one miserable spot for another.

“I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that,” the company commander said. “No one has told me, not yet. Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you till we were well away from the border. The same reason applies in both cases: security. We don’t want to take the chance that the Mongols or the Russians would seize you and squeeze you. No matter how honorable you wanted to be, you might not manage to kill yourself in time.”

“I understand, sir. Please excuse my stupidity.” Fujita bowed his head in embarrassment not far from shame.

Captain Hasegawa didn’t come down on him as hard as he expected. “It’s all right, Sergeant,” the officer said. “The courier who brought me the news also had to explain the facts of life to me, you might say. Make sure you have your men ready to move out when I give the word, that’s all.”

“Yes, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir.” Fujita bowed again, this time gratefully. The company commander hadn’t made him lose face-had, in fact, gone out of his way to let Fujita keep it. You had to repay that kind of consideration with loyalty.

The order to abandon the position they’d defended for so long came that afternoon. Retreat often meant a loss of face, too. Not for Fujita, not this time: he was only obeying the orders he got from his superiors. But wouldn’t Japan itself be embarrassed if it abandoned land to which it had asserted a claim?

“They’ll probably say it was Manchukuo’s claim, not ours,” Superior Private Hayashi predicted as the company marched through the drifted snow toward regimental headquarters. “That way, we aren’t responsible for it.”

“Makes sense,” Fujita said. Having an educated man in the squad came in handy now and then. Of course, without Japan there would have been no such country as Manchukuo. But that didn’t have much to do with anything. Blaming the hapless Chinese and Manchus was much easier than blaming the mother country. And if the Emperor of Manchukuo didn’t like it, too bad.

Trucks waited at the headquarters. Seeing them made Sergeant Fujita realize how serious Japan was about getting its men away from this stretch of the border. Japan wasn’t a motorized country like Germany or the United States. It had to save its vehicles for really important things. If getting out of western Manchuria was this important…

Away rumbled the trucks, north and a little east. “Hailar,” Fujita said even before his own machine set out. “We’ve got to be going to Hailar.” That miserable Mongolian town was one of the two railheads closest to the disputed areas. The other, Arshaan, lay to the southeast.

Maps showed roads across this endless steppe. They were at best dirt tracks. At this time of year, with snow deep on the ground, whether you were on the road was often a matter of opinion. The truck carrying Fujita and his squad rumbled past another one that had overturned. Maybe the driver had tried to corner too fast. Maybe he’d run into a ditch. He would end up in trouble any which way.

Much the biggest and most modern building in Hailar was the railway depot. A few natives in sheepskin coats stared at the trucks that could go almost anywhere far faster than any horse ever foaled. What did they think, watching the modern world roll through their ancient town? Actually, what they thought hardly mattered. The modern world was here whether they liked it or not.

A train that would go east stopped at the depot-stopped a little past it, in fact, because snow and ice on the rails meant the brakes didn’t grab as well as they would have most of the time. Some soldiers were already aboard, and had come this far west before starting east again. Fujita’s unit left the cars packed as tight as tinned fish-the only way the Army seemed to know how to travel.

Well, the sergeant thought, we won’t be cold any more. Each car had its own stove. And so many men stuffed the cars, the stoves might prove afterthoughts. Body heat would be plenty to keep everybody warm.

Slowly, the train started to roll again. Fujita still didn’t know where he was going. He shrugged-being a sergeant, he had room to do that. What difference did it make. He’d get there whether he knew or not. Then he’d do…whatever needed doing.