West and East

Chapter 1

Theo Hossbach lay on a cot in a military hospital in Cambrai. All of him was fine except for the last two joints on the ring finger of his left hand. He wouldn't see those again until and unless what the Resurrection of the Flesh preachers liked to talk about turned out to be the straight goods. Theo doubted it-Theo doubted almost everything people in authority said-but you never could tell.

One thing Theo didn't doubt was that he was lucky to be there, or anywhere. Along with the commander and driver, he'd bailed out of a burning Panzer II. They'd all run for some bushes a couple of hundred meters away. He'd made it. Ludwig and Fritz hadn't. It was about that simple.

The bullet that amputated those last two joints came later. He didn't know whether it was aimed at him in particular or just one of the random bullets always flying around a battlefield. The one by Beauvais seemed to have had more of them than most. Theo might have been prejudiced; he'd never had to bail out of a panzer before.

Or he might not have been. The French and English had stopped the Wehrmacht's drive at Beauvais, and it hadn't got started again. This made two wars in a row where the Schlieffen Plan didn't quite work. Hitler's generals came closer to pulling it off than the Kaiser's had, but what was that worth?

A nurse came by. She took his temperature. "Normal. Very good," she said as she wrote it down. "Do you need another pain pill?"

"Yes, please," he answered. Those two missing joints seemed to hurt worse than the stub he had left. Phantom pain, the doctor who cleaned up the wound called it. He could afford to dismiss it like that; it wasn't his hand.

"Here." The nurse gave Theo the pill, watched while he swallowed it, and wrote that down, too. He figured it was codeine; it made him a little woozy, and it constipated him. It also left him less interested in the nurse, who wasn't bad looking, than he would have been if he weren't taking them every four to six hours. But it pushed away the pain, both real and phantom.

Most of the soldiers in the ward with him had nastier wounds. Most, but not all: the fellow two beds down wore a cast on his ankle because he'd tripped over his own feet and broken it. "I wasn't even drunk," he complained to anyone who'd listen. "Just fucking clumsy."

Woozy turned to drowsy. Theo was dozing when hearing his own name brought him back to himself. The nurse was leading a captain over to his cot. The pink Waffenfarbe on the man's Totenkopf collar patches and edging his shoulder straps said he was a panzer man, too. "You are, uh, Theodor Hossbach?" he said.

"Theodosios Hossbach, sir," Theo said resignedly. How was he supposed to explain that his father had been slogging through a translation of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at just the wrong time?

He got the panzer captain's attention, anyhow. "Theodosios? Well, well. No wonder you go by Theo."

"No wonder at all, sir," Theo agreed.

"You are a radio operator. You are familiar with the operation of the Fu5 radio set?"

"Yes, sir." Theo knew he still sounded resigned. Every panzer in the Wehrmacht used the Fu5 except commanders' vehicles, which carried the longer-range Fu10. If he was a panzer radioman, he'd damn well better know how to use the standard set. A pfennig's worth of thought… was evidently too much to hope for.

Then the captain got to the point: "Can you return to duty? A radio operator in a Panzer II is not required to do much with his left hand."

That was true, and then again it wasn't. A radioman didn't need to do much with his left hand to operate the radio. When it came to things like engine repairs or remounting a thrown track, though… Theo knew he could have said no. His hand was swathed in enough bandages to wrap a Christmas present, or maybe a mummy. He hesitated no more than a heartbeat. "As long as they give me a jar of those little white pills, sir, I'm good to go."

"They will," the captain said, with a glance toward the nurse that warned someone's head would roll if they didn't. "You'll have it by the time I come back for you, in half an hour or so. A couple of other fellows here I want to scoop up if I can."

A doctor gave Theo the codeine and a reproachful look. "You should stay longer. You're nowhere near healed."

"I'll manage," Theo said. "I'm sick of laying around."

"Lying," the doctor said automatically.

"No, sir. I'm telling the truth."

"Right." The doctor looked more reproachful yet. Theo hadn't thought he could. "Maybe we're lucky to get rid of you."

"Maybe you are. Most of me doesn't need the bed-only my hand."

When the panzer captain came back for Theo, he had one other fellow (who walked with a limp) in tow and a discontented expression on his face. "The last guy I want is shirking," he growled. "I'd bet my last mark on it even if I can't prove it. Well, I just have to make do with you two. Let's go."

They'd laundered Theo's black coveralls. Putting them on again did feel good. The other panzer crewman, whose name was Paul, seemed to feel the same way. Once he had the black on, he stood taller and straighter and seemed to move more fluidly.

The captain bundled them both into a Citroen he'd got somewhere or other and headed west. They drove past and through the wreckage of a nearly successful campaign. Dead panzers-German, French, and British-littered the landscape, along with burnt-out trucks and shot-up autos. Here and there, German technicians salvaged what they could from the metal carcasses.

Just outside of Mondidier, the captain stopped. "You boys get out here," he said. "We're regrouping for a fresh go at the pigdogs. They'll fit you into new crews."

"What'll you do, sir?" Theo asked.

"Head for another hospital and see how many men I can pry loose there," the officer answered. "The more, the better. We can use experienced people, God knows."

Theo felt shy about joining a new crew. He'd spent his whole military career-he'd spent the whole war-with Ludwig and Fritz. They'd understood him as well as anybody did. They'd put up with him. If another driver and commander had lost their radioman… He made a sour face. He'd feel like a woman marrying a widower and trying to live up to the standard his first wife had set.

To his relief, he didn't have to do that. The personnel sergeant assigned him to what would be a brand-new crew. The commander was a sergeant called Heinz Naumann. He had bandages on his neck and his left hand-and maybe in between, too. "Burns. Getting better," he said laconically. On his coveralls he wore the Iron Cross First Class and a wound badge. Sooner or later, Theo knew, a wound badge would also catch up with him.

By contrast, the driver was just out of training. His coveralls weren't faded and shapeless; you could cut yourself on their creases. He was a big fellow with dark hair who moved like an athlete. His name was Adalbert Stoss.

Theo was from Breslau, way off in the east. Naumann came from Vienna. Stoss hailed from Greven, a small town outside of Munster. "It's a wonder we can understand each other," he said with a grin.

Grin or not, he wasn't kidding. As far as Theo was concerned, Stoss and Naumann had different strange accents. They probably thought he talked funny, too. "We'll manage," Heinz said.

"Oh, sure." Adalbert went on grinning. He seemed happy as could be to have escaped basic and come out to join the grown-ups at-or at least near-the front. Theo had seen that reaction before. Most of the time, it wore off as soon as the rookie saw his first body with the head blown off. Training was hard work, to say nothing of dull, but you hardly ever got killed there. In real war, on the other hand…

"I was hoping they'd give me a Panzer III," Naumann said. "But no-it's another II." He eyed Theo's bandaged finger. "You aren't complaining, though, are you?"

"Not right now," Theo allowed. In a Panzer III, the radioman sat up front, next to the driver. He also served a hull-mounted machine gun. That wouldn't be much fun with a bad hand. Then again… "A Panzer III, now, that's a real fighting machine."

"I know, I know. That's why I wanted one," the sergeant said. Along with two machine guns, a Panzer III mounted a 37mm cannon. Unlike the Panzer II's 20mm gun, which fired only armor-piercing ammo, the bigger weapon had high-explosive shells, too. That made it a lot more useful against infantry out in the open.

A Panzer III also carried thicker armor, and boasted a more powerful engine. A Panzer III was a real panzer. A Panzer II was a training vehicle. Oh, you could fight with it. The Wehrmacht had been fighting with it, and with the even smaller, lighter Panzer I, ever since the Fuhrer gave the order to march into Czechoslovakia, more than six months ago now. But it would be nice to have a fighting vehicle that matched the ones the enemy used.

Would have been nice. Panzer IIIs were still scarce, while there were lots of IIs and, even these days, quite a few little obsolete Is. (There were also Panzer IVs, which carried a short-barreled 75mm gun and were designed to support infantry, not to attack enemy armor. There were supposed to be Panzer IVs, anyhow. Theo didn't think he'd ever seen one.)

"I know what I'm doing in a II," Stoss said. "They never let us drive a III in training. Most of the practice we got was in those turretless Panzer I chassis-you guys know the ones I mean."

Theo nodded. So did Heinz Naumann. What you used in training was as cheap as the Wehrmacht could get away with and still do the job. Theo doubted whether any Panzer IIIs were within a hundred kilometers of a training base. You didn't practice with those babies-you got them into the fight.

Eager as a puppy, Adalbert asked, "You know where they're going to throw us in, Sergeant?"

"Nope," Naumann answered. "Far as the generals are concerned, we're just a bullet. Point us at the enemy, and we knock him over."

Or he knocks us over. Theo remembered the antitank round slamming into his old Panzer II's engine compartment. He remembered opening his escape hatch and seeing nothing but flames. He'd followed his panzer commander out the turret hatch instead. Ludwig hadn't made it much farther. Theo had-which didn't stop that bullet from finding him a little later on.

The new Panzer II looked like the one that had burned. Theo's station was behind the turret, just in front of the bulkhead that separated the fighting compartment from the one housing the engine. He couldn't see out. The smells were familiar: oil, gasoline, cordite, leather, metal, sweat. He didn't smell much lingering fear, which argued that this panzer hadn't seen a lot of action.

He started fiddling with the radio. No matter what the manufacturer claimed, every set was different. Heinz Naumann said something. Theo ignored it. Indeed, he hardly heard it: like the radio, he was good at tuning out anything that didn't directly concern him.

Sometimes, he tuned out things that did concern him. Naumann spoke again: "I said, is it up to snuff?"

"Uh, it seems to be." Theo came back to the world.

"Good. Pay some attention next time, all right?"

"Whatever you say, Sergeant," Theo answered. Ludwig had tried to keep him connected, too. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. When Theo got interested in a radio, or in whatever was going on inside his own head, everything else could go hang.

They motored west, toward the front, the next morning. Naumann rode along standing up with his head and shoulders out of the turret. That was how a panzer commander was supposed to do things when not in combat. A lot of commanders looked out even when their machine was in action. The vision ports in the turret just didn't let you see enough. There was talk of building a Panzer II with a proper cupola for the commander. The Panzer III had one. So did a lot of foreign panzers. Not the II, not yet.

Theo had another reason for liking the way Heinz did things. With the hatch open, some of the mild spring air got down to him. Then a bullet cracked past Naumann. The commander dove back inside the turret faster than you could fart. "Panzer halt!" he shouted.

"Halting," Adalbert Stoss said, and hit the brakes. Instead of using the traversing gear, Heinz manhandled the turret into position with the two handgrips on the inside. The machine gun snarled several short bursts at… something, at… somebody. Theo couldn't see out, so except for the gunshot he had no idea what was going on. Not counting his earphones, the radioman on a Panzer II was always the last to know.

"Maybe I got him. Maybe not," Sergeant Naumann muttered. Then he spoke into the tube that carried his voice to Adalbert's seat: "Forward!"

"Forward, ja," Stoss agreed. As the panzer got moving again, the driver asked, "A soldier behind our lines, or a franc-tireur?"

"Don't know. I never saw enough of him to tell whether he had a uniform," Heinz said. After a pause for thought, he added, "Sounded like a military rifle, though-not a little varmint gun."

"Are the Frenchies trying to infiltrate us? That wouldn't be so good," Adalbert said.

"No. It wouldn't." Heinz thought some more. Then he said, "Hossbach! Report this back to regimental HQ. If it's not just one guy with a gun, the higher-ups need to know about it. We're in map square K-4, just west of Avrigny. Got that?"

"K-4. West of Avrigny," Theo repeated. He sighed as he made the connection and delivered the message. Ludwig had always been on him because he was happier with his own thoughts that with the rest of the world. Now Naumann had figured out the same thing in about a minute and a half.

Theo would have liked to do something about that. But doing something about it would have involved changing, and he didn't care to change. His panzer commanders would just have to cope with it… and so would he.

FROM GREASY TO MESSY. Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh nodded in weary approval. The Anglo-French counterattack, pushing east from the outskirts of Paris, was still making progress. Greasy was actually the hamlet of Gressy, a few miles west of where Walsh was now. Where Walsh was now was in Messy, which looked exactly the way its name made you think it would.

Messy had good reason for looking that way. Only a few weeks earlier, the Germans had bombed and shelled the place to chase the Allied defenders back toward Paris. And then, after the German attack ran out of steam both here and up near Beauvais, English and French guns pounded Messy to push back the Boches. A few buildings were still standing and didn't seem too badly damaged, but that wasn't from lack of effort on either side.

Hardly anyone lived in the ruins. People who could get out had done so before the Germans arrived. They hadn't come back to reclaim whatever might be left of their homes and property. A lingering sick-sweet stench said not everybody'd got away. Or Walsh might have been getting a whiff of dead Germans. After three days, everybody-and every body-smelled the same.

As much to blunt the reek as for any other reason, Walsh lit a Navy Cut. Beside him, Second Lieutenant Herman Cavendish looked around and said, "So this is victory."

Walsh hadn't liked the subaltern ever since Cavendish brought the first order to counterattack. The Anglo-French strike had worked, which didn't make the veteran noncom like the very young officer any better. "Sir, when you set this against 1918, it looks like a rest cure," Walsh said.

Maybe Cavendish had been born in 1918, maybe not. If he had, he was still making messes in his nappies. He hadn't seen-or, for that matter, smelled-the Western Front. He hadn't got shot there, either. Walsh had done all of those things, however much he wished he hadn't.

For a wonder, Cavendish heard the reproach in his voice. The youngster blushed like a schoolgirl. "I know you've been through a good deal, Sergeant," he said stiffly, "but I do believe I am gaining on you when it comes to experience."

That he could come out with such claptrap straight-faced only proved how much experience he didn't have yet. Telling him so would have been pointless precisely because he lacked the experience that would have let him understand what an idiot he was being.

Walsh didn't even try. "Whatever you say, sir," he answered. One of the things staff sergeants did was ride herd on subalterns till their nominal superiors were fit to go around a battlefield by themselves without getting too many of the soldiers under their command killed for no reason.

Cavendish might have been doing his best to prove he hadn't reached that point yet. Pointing east, he said, "Well, we've given the Boches a proper what-for this time, eh?"

His posh accent only made that sound even stupider than it would have otherwise. Walsh wouldn't have thought such a thing possible, but Cavendish proved him wrong. "Sir, the Germans came from their own border all the way to Paris. We've come from Paris all the way to Messy," Walsh said. "If you want to call that a proper what-for, well, go ahead."

"There are times when I doubt you have the proper attitude, Sergeant," Cavendish said. "Would you sooner be fighting behind Paris?"

"No, sir. Not a bit of it." Walsh's own accent was buzzing Welsh, and lower-class Welsh at that. What else to expect from a miner's son? He went on, "I'd sooner be fighting in bloody Germany, is what I'd sooner be doing. But that doesn't look like it's in the cards, does it?"

"In-Germany?" By the way the subaltern said it, the possibility had never crossed his mind. "Don't you think that's asking a bit much?"

"Evidently, sir." Walsh left it right there. If the French generals-to say nothing of the British generals (which was about what they deserved to have said of them)-were worth the paper they were printed on, the German High Command wouldn't have been able to impose its will on them with such effortless ease. That had happened the last time around, too. The Boches ran out of men and materiel then, while the Yanks gave the Allies all they needed.

No Yanks in the picture now, worse luck. Just the German generals against their British and French counterparts. Christ help us, Walsh thought.

As if to remind people who'd forgotten (Second Lieutenant Herman Cavendish, for instance) that they hadn't gone away, German gunners began lobbing shells into Messy. When they started landing too close for comfort, Walsh jumped into the nearest hole in the ground. It wasn't as if he didn't have plenty of choices.

He thought Cavendish would stay upright and make a brave little speech about command responsibility-till a flying fragment did something dreadful to him. But no: the subaltern dove for cover, too. He'd learned something, anyhow. Walsh wouldn't have bet more than tuppence ha'penny on it.

After ten minutes or so, the bombardment eased off. Walsh cradled the Schmeisser he'd taken off a dead Boche-for throwing a lot of lead around at close quarters, nothing beat a submachine gun. If the Germans decided they wanted Messy back, he was ready to argue with them.

But no hunched-over figures wearing field-gray and coal-scuttle helmets loped forward. This was just harassing fire: hate, they would have called it in the last war. Somebody off in the distance was yelling for a medic, so the bastards serving a 105 had earned their salary this morning.

Lieutenant Cavendish went off to inflict his leadership on someone else. Walsh lit a fresh Navy Cut. He climbed out of the hole to see what the shelling had done to the hamlet.

A skinny little stubble-cheeked French sergeant puffing on a pipe emerged from cover about the same time he did. The Frenchman waved. "Ca va, Tommy?" he called.

"Va bien. Et tu?" Walsh ran through a good part of his clean French with that. He waved toward the east, then spat.

The French noncom nodded. "Fucking Boche," he said. His English was probably as filthy as most of Walsh's Francais. A couple of his men came out. He started yelling at them. He was a sergeant, all right.

Walsh checked on the soldiers in his own section. The fellow who'd bought part of a plot came from a different company. That was something, anyhow. After nodding rather smugly, Walsh wondered why it should be. The British army was no better off because the wounded man wasn't from his outfit. And that other company was weakened instead of his. In the larger scheme of things, so what?

But it was a bloke Walsh didn't know, not one he did. You didn't want one of your mates to stop one. Maybe that was a reminder you were too bloody liable to stop one yourself. Of course, you had to be an idiot not to know as much already. Still, there was a difference-whether there should have been or not-between knowing something and getting your nose rubbed in it.

"Are we supposed to move up again, Sergeant?" asked a soldier named Nigel. Like Lieutenant Cavendish, he spoke like an educated man. He didn't sound toffee-nosed doing it, though.

"Nobody's told me if we are," Walsh answered. "You can bet your last quid the lieutenant would have, too."

He wasn't supposed to speak ill of officers. He was supposed to let the men in his charge form their unflattering opinions all by themselves. By the way Nigel and Bill and the others chuckled, they needed no help from him.

"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."

Walsh told him where the hell he could go, and where he could stuff the Nobel Prize. They all laughed. They smoked another cigarette or two. And then they were ready to get on with the war again. SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA HAD SPENT more time than he cared to remember in Manchukuo. He'd got used to all kinds of noises he never would have heard in Japan. Wolves could howl. Foxes could yip. If he was wrapped in a blanket out where the steppe gave way to the desert, he'd fall asleep regardless. And he'd stay asleep no matter what kind of racket the animals made. Out there, he lived like an animal himself.

He also lived like an animal here in the pine woods on the Russian side of the Ussuri, the river that formed the northeastern border between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union. He dug himself a hole, he jumped down into it, and he slept. Howling wolves? Yipping foxes? Hooting owls? They didn't bother him a bit.

Tigers? Tigers were a different story. When a tiger roared or screamed, even gunfire seemed to hesitate for a moment. Those noises always woke him up, too, though he'd sleep through gunshots or through artillery that didn't come too close. You had to learn to fear gunshots. Not tigers. If you heard that roar, you were afraid, and on the double.

Fujita quickly found out he wasn't the only one who felt the same way. One of the superior privates in his squad, a student called Shinjiro Hayashi, said, "Something deep down inside your head knows that whatever makes that noise wants to eat people."

"Hai!" Fujita exclaimed. "That's just it!" He came off a farm himself. He often had the feeling that Hayashi looked down his nose at him, though a Japanese private who let his sergeant know for sure that he looked down his nose at him was asking for all the trouble in the world and a little more besides. Hayashi wasn't dumb enough to do that. And there were times when having a guy who knew things came in handy: Hayashi spoke some Chinese, for instance.

"When we came here from the Mongolian border, they said there'd be tigers here," said Shigeru Nakayama, another private. "I thought it was more of the same old crap they always give new people, but they meant it."

A major in the regiment had had his men drag in an enormous tiger carcass. He hadn't killed it; Russian artillery had. But he took possession of the hide-and of the innards. A tiger's gall bladder was worth plenty to the people who cooked up Chinese and Japanese medicines. You could probably get something for the rest of the organs, too.

But Hayashi spoke another truth when he said, "The tiger will make noise to let you know it's there. You never hear the damn Russian who puts a bullet in your back."

As if on cue, Russian mortar bombs started landing on the Japanese position. Like any soldier with even a little experience in the field, Fujita hated mortars. You couldn't hear them coming till they were almost there. Then they sliced you up like a sashimi chef taking a knife to a fine chunk of toro. Unlike the tuna belly, you weren't dead before they started. You sure could be by the time they got done, though.

Fujita jumped into a hole. He had more uses for them than sleep alone. Fragments snarled by overhead. A couple of hundred meters away, a Japanese soldier started screaming as if a tiger had clamped its jaws on his leg. Several rifle shots rang out a few seconds later. Another soldier shrieked.

"Zakennayo!" Fujita muttered under his breath. The Russians sent elaborately camouflaged snipers high up into pines that overlooked Japanese positions. Soldiers must have come out to pick up the man the mortars wounded-whereupon the snipers did more damage.

In the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese had accepted surrenders and treated enemy prisoners as well as any of the soft Western powers did, even if yielding was a disgrace in Japanese eyes. Things hadn't worked like that on the Mongolian border. If you gave up there, you took your chances. And the Mongolians and Soviets weren't what anybody would call gentle, either.

The game was rough here, too. For that matter, Fujita didn't think any army in the world casually accepted surrenders from snipers, any more than most soldiers were willing to let machine gunners give up.

Japanese guns began to move. The Russians had the edge in artillery here, as they did on the edge of the Gobi. The Soviets might not believe in God, but they believed in firepower. And some of the dugouts they built would take a direct hit without collapsing. What they didn't know about field fortifications wasn't worth knowing. They got to show that off in this forest fighting, too.

Somewhere up ahead lay the Trans-Siberian Railroad and victory. Cut the railroad line, and Vladivostok would start to wither away. That would leave the USSR without its great Pacific port, which was exactly what Japan had in mind.

Unfortunately, the Russians could read maps, too. They were going to defend the railway line with everything they had. And if they didn't have more than the generals in the Kwantung Army thought before they started this war, Fujita would have been amazed.

Somewhere up ahead lay Hill 391, the latest strong point the Japanese needed to subdue before they pushed on toward the two parallel lengths of iron track that were the main reason for the attack. Main reason? Sergeant Fujita shook his head. Absent the railroad, this was terrain only tiger hunters would ever want to visit.

The Russians had more of their seemingly limitless cannon up at the top of Hill 391. Down toward the bottom, they had machine-gun nests, barbed wire to guide troops into the machine guns' lines of fire, and minefields to maim any soldiers the machine guns happened to miss. Fujita had already stormed one of the Red Army's fortified hills. He didn't want to do it again. Of course, his superiors cared not a sen's worth about what he or any other enlisted man wanted. Enlisted men were tools, to be used-or used up-as officers saw fit.

Airplane engines droned overhead. Fujita could see only bits of sky through the tall pines and firs and spruces and other trees he had trouble naming. He couldn't make out what was going on up there. Japanese planes had an engine note different from that of their Russian foes: a little higher, a little thinner. Everybody said so. Fujita believed it, but he had trouble hearing it himself.

When bombs started bursting on top of Hill 391 and on the west-facing slope, he felt like cheering. That would give the Russians something to think about! Airplanes full of bombs could counteract their superiority in cannon.

His excitement didn't last long. Once the planes got done pounding the Russian position, what would happen next? Infantry would go forward and try to clean it out-that was what. And then all the Red Army men the bombs hadn't killed would grab their rifles and wait at their machine guns and slaughter as many Japanese as they could.

Sure enough, Lieutenant Hanafusa's whistle squealed. "Come on!" the platoon leader shouted. "Time to dig them out! We can do it! May the Emperor live ten thousand years!" He trotted forward.

"Banzai!" Fujita echoed as he scrambled out of his hole. He didn't care about living 10,000 years himself, though he certainly hoped the Emperor would. He did hope he would last another thirty or forty. Going up against another one of these hills made that a lot less likely.

But he couldn't hang back. It wasn't just that his own superiors would do worse to him than anything the Russians could dream up. They would, yes, but that wasn't what got him moving. You couldn't seem a slacker in front of your men. You were brave because they watched you being brave. And they were brave because you had your eye on them-and because they didn't want to let their buddies down.

Ahead, machine guns started hammering. Fujita shook his head as he dodged around trees. No, the bombers hadn't cleared out everybody on the ground. They never did. By the nature of things, they couldn't. That was up to the infantry.

Red Army khaki was a little darker, a little browner, than the color the Japanese used. Neither was very well suited to the deep greens and browns of these pine woods. Fujita scrambled behind a tree. He raised his rifle, made sure that the helmet had an unfamiliar outline, and pulled the trigger.

Down went the Russian. One less round-eyed barbarian to worry about, Fujita thought. Somebody ran past him, toward the higher ground ahead. A moment later, the Japanese soldier wailed in despair. He was hung up on barbed wire cleverly concealed among the ferns and bushes that grew under the trees. The way he jerked and struggled reminded Fujita of a bug trapped on flypaper.

A trapped bug might struggle for quite a while. One of the Russian machine guns soon found the Japanese soldier. He didn't jerk any more after that, but hung limply, like a dead fly.

Fujita shivered. That could have been him, as easily as not. If that private hadn't rushed forward, he might have done it himself. Rushing forward was what the Japanese Army taught its soldiers. Aggressiveness won battles. If it also got people killed, that was just part of the cost of doing business.

"Urra!" The Russian shout rang through the woods. A submachine gun stuttered, somewhere off to Fujita's left. The Japanese preferred rifles because of their longer range. The Russians liked weapons that could fire rapidly at close quarters. A lot of the fighting in these woods was at very close quarters, because half the time you didn't see the other guy till you fell over him-or he fell over you.

"Advance toward the rear!" an officer shouted. The Japanese had no command for retreat. That one did the job, though. Hill 391 wouldn't fall today. Neither would the railroad line-not here, anyhow.