West and East

Chapter 21

Fog shrouded the airstrip in northeastern France. Nobody was going anywhere this morning. Chances were, nobody was going anywhere all day. The idled Luftwaffe flyers did what idled flyers had been doing since the first biplanes took off with pilots carrying pistols and hand grenades: they sat around and shot the shit and passed flasks of applejack and cognac.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel was happy enough to join the bull session. When one of the flasks came to him, he passed it on without drinking. "Danke schon," said the pilot to his left. "More for the rest of us."

"Nobody got out any milk for him," another flyer said.

Everybody in the battered farmhouse that did duty for an officers' club laughed. But the laughter sounded different from the way it would have not too long before. Then it would have been aimed at him, deadly as the bullets from a Hurricane's machine guns. Now he was an Oberleutnant with the Ritterkreuz at his throat. His comrades might not love him, but he'd earned their respect.

"Coffee will do," he said mildly, and got another laugh.

"Coffee's harder to come by than booze these days. Coffee worth drinking is, anyhow," said the pilot next to him. "The footwash they issue with our rations…" The other flyer made a horrible face.

"Frenchies don't have much of the good stuff left these days, either," another pilot complained. "Or if they do, they're hiding it better than they used to."

"I don't think they've got it," a third flyer said. "We've been in France since last year, and here it is, just about autumn come round again. You can only scrounge so much. After that, there's nothing left to scrounge."

"There'd be plenty if we'd got into Paris the way we thought we would," someone else said. Rudel couldn't see who it was; the farmhouse was twistier than a fighter pilot's mind. He wouldn't have been surprised if the French family who'd lived in it before fleeing in the early days of the war had unrolled balls of thread of different colors to guide them as they navigated from one room to another. What was left of the upstairs seemed even worse.

A long silence followed the flyer's remark. Anything that touched on politics was dangerous these days. Yes, the squadron was a band of brothers. But brothers could turn on one another, too-look what happened to Joseph. Some people feared that the Gestapo got word of any even possibly disloyal remarks. Others-Hans-Ulrich among them-hoped the security service did. He didn't want to inform on anyone else himself, but he also didn't want to fly alongside people whose hearts weren't in the fight.

"We'll get there yet," he said.

"Sure we will," said another voice he couldn't easily match with a face. "But when, and what will it cost? Will we get to Moscow first?"

Someone else whistled softly. Hans-Ulrich knew the two-front war wasn't popular with his comrades. Maybe it was even less popular than he'd thought. Again, no one seemed to care to take that particular bull by the horns. At last, the pilot sitting next to Rudel said, "I'd rather have the Poles on our side than against us."

"They aren't on our side." To Hans-Ulrich's dismay, that was Colonel Steinbrenner. The squadron commander went on, "Right this minute, Stalin scares them worse than the Fuhrer does. There's a difference. You'd better believe there is, my friends."

"Jawohl, Herr Oberst," Rudel said. "But it makes an army of a million men march against the Bolsheviks side by side with us. We ought to get the French and the English to do the same thing-a crusade to rid the world of something that never should have been born."

A different kind of silence descended on the farmhouse: one rather like the aftermath of a thousand-kilogram bomb. At last, the fellow next to Hans-Ulrich said, "You've always been an optimist, haven't you?"

"When it comes to Germany, of course I have," he answered proudly.

"We're all optimists about the Vaterland." Colonel Steinbrenner spoke as if challenging anyone there to argue with him. When nobody did, he continued, "But there is also a difference between optimism and blind optimism."

"Are you saying that's what I show, sir?" Rudel asked.

"No, no. You're a good German patriot," Steinbrenner replied. Rudel would have thought hard about reporting him had he said anything else. After all, he'd been brought in here to replace an officer in whom the fires of zeal didn't burn bright enough-or so the Gestapo had concluded, at any rate.

More high-octane liquor made the rounds. Several separate conversations started in place of the general one. That was safer: nobody could hear everything at once. Lickerish laughter said some of the flyers were talking about women-a topic more dangerous than politics, but in different ways. Hans-Ulrich might be a teetotaler, but he didn't stay away from the French girls. His father wouldn't have approved, but he didn't worry about that. When he was with a girl, he didn't worry about anything. More precious than rubies, the Bible said, and, as usual, it knew what it was talking about. The Biblical context might be different from the one Hans-Ulrich had in mind, but he didn't worry about that, either.

"If we didn't fuck up this stupid goddamn war-"

Rudel heard the words through all the other chatter, as one might hear a radio station through waves of static and competing signals. His ears pricked up. Treason would do that. You could say some things in some ways, but there were limits. This shot right past them.

He thought so, anyhow. He wondered how Sergeant Dieselhorst would feel about it. Dieselhorst was an older man and a veteran noncom. Both factors generated a broader view of mankind's foibles than a young officer who was also a minister's son was likely to have. Rudel suspected as much, but only in a vague way. He would not have been himself were he mentally equipped to grasp the full difference between how he thought and how Albert Dieselhorst did.

He didn't enjoy being the only sober man in the middle of a drunken bash. Who in his right mind would? But this was nothing he hadn't been through before. They'd think him a wet blanket if he stayed. They'd think him an even worse wet blanket if he got up and walked out. They'd think he thought he was better than they were. He did, too, but he'd learned that showing it only made things worse.

Somebody not far away was going on about the vastness of Russia, and about how a war against a country like that could have no sure ending. Sober or not, Hans-Ulrich got angry. "Once we smash the Reds, we'll run the country for ourselves," he said. "Russia is our Lebensraum. England and France have colonies all over the world. We'll get ours the way the Americans did, by grabbing the lands right next door."

"Yes, but the Americans only had to worry about Red Indians. We've got Red Ivans, and they're tougher beasts." The other flyer chuckled in not quite sober amusement at his wordplay.

Ignoring it, Hans-Ulrich said, "We can beat them. We will beat them. Or do you think the Fuhrer's wrong?"

The other fellow's mouth twisted. He couldn't say yes to a blunt question like that, and he plainly didn't want to say no. What he did say was, "We all hope the Fuhrer's not wrong."

That was probably safe. Rudel would have had to push to make something out of it. He didn't want to push. He wanted his comrades to like him. The easiest way to do that would have been to act like them. He couldn't bring himself to do it. Showing he was brave and skillful in combat was the next best thing. The others didn't despise him any more, anyhow.

Progress. He could throw it away in a flash if he got too strident about politics or about the way he thought the war ought to be going. He said, "Wherever we run into the enemy, we'll whip him, that's all."

"That's what the Kaiser's General Staff told him, too," the other flyer remarked.

"We beat the enemy," Hans-Ulrich said. "It was the traitors inside Germany who made us lose." He'd been two years old when the last war ended. He was parroting Mein Kampf, not speaking from experience.

The other flyer was probably younger than he was. "That's not what my old man says," he replied. "He was a lieutenant on the Western Front the last year and a half of the war. They had swarms of panzers by the end of 1918, and most of ours were retreads we captured from the Tommies. He says we got whupped."

"What's he doing now?" Rudel asked.

"He's a lieutenant colonel in Poland. Why?"

"Never mind." If the complainer was fighting, Rudel couldn't call him a defeatist. Not out loud, he couldn't. What he thought… he kept to himself. Little by little, he was learning. CHAIM WEINBERG'S SPANISH was still lousy. It would never be great. But it was a hell of a lot better than it had been, especially when he talked about the class struggle or dialectical materialism.

He hadn't liked the political agitators who indoctrinated the Internationals so they would fight more ferociously. If they needed that kind of indoctrination, they wouldn't have come to Spain to begin with. Or it looked that way to him. The leaders of the International Brigades, and the Soviet officers and apparatchiks who stood beside them, held a different opinion. Theirs was the one that counted.

Indoctrinating prisoners with the ideals of the Republic-and of the USSR-was different. Chaim told himself it was, at any rate. The hapless campesinos the Nationalists had dragooned into their army needed to understand that everything they'd believed in before they were taken prisoner was a big, steaming pile of mierda.

"They exploited you," he told the tough, skinny, ragged men who came to the edge of the barbed wire to listen to him. He didn't fool himself into thinking he was all that fascinating. Time hung heavy for the POWs. Anything out of the ordinary seemed uncommonly interesting. "They were shameless, the way they exploited you." Sinverguenza-he loved the Spanish word for shameless.

One of the captured Nationalists raised a hand. Chaim pointed to him. "Excuse me, Senor," the fellow said apologetically, "but what does this word 'exploited' mean?"

Chaim blinked. He'd known these peasants were ignorant, but this took the cake. They literally had to learn a whole new language before they could understand what he was talking about. Before he answered the prisoner, he asked a question of his own: "How many others don't know what 'exploited' means?"

Two or three other grimy hands went up. After some hesitation, a couple of more followed them. How many other Nationalists were holding back? Some, unless he missed his guess.

"Bueno," he said. "If you don't know, ask. How can you understand if you don't ask? When the priests and the landlords exploit you, they take advantage of you. You do the hard work. They have the money and the fancy houses and the fine clothes and the pretty girls who like those things. They take your crops, and they make most of the money from them.?Es verdad, o no?"

The POWs slowly nodded. That was how things worked in Spain-how they had worked before the Republic, and how they still worked where Marshal Sanjurjo and his lackeys governed. Joaquin Delgadillo raised his hand. Chaim nodded to him. He had a proprietary interest in Joaquin.

"What you say is true, Senor." Delgadillo had learned to slow down a little to give Chaim a better chance to stay with him. "But how can things be different? How can anyone do anything about it?"

"Land reform," Chaim answered at once. "There are no landlords in the Republic." There were no live landlords in the Republic, not any more. "Peasants own their lands. Sometimes they form collectives, but no one makes them do that." Plenty of Republican enthusiasts wanted to impose collective farms, as Stalin had in the USSR. Oddly, Soviet officials discouraged it. They didn't want to scare the middle classes in the cities and towns.

"But what about the holy padres?" another prisoner asked. "Haven't terrible things happened to them?"

"They sided with the reactionaries, or most of them did. They wanted to go on living well without working," Chaim said. "Progressive priests follow the Republic." There were some. There weren't very many. He didn't go into detail. His job here was to persuade, after all.

"The priests say God is on Marshal Sanjurjo's side. They say the Republic is the Devil's spawn," the prisoner said.

"?Y asi?" Chaim asked. And so? "What do you think they will say? No one says God fights for his enemies, but Satan is with him. No one would be that stupid. But do you believe everything the padres tell you?"

"They're holy men," the Spaniard said doubtfully. He wasn't used to questioning assumptions. He probably hadn't imagined assumptions could be questioned till he started listening to Chaim. Exploited, indoctrinated… Was it any wonder that, when the people of Spain found out they could overthrow the system that had been giving it to them in the neck for so long, they often threw out the baby with the bath water?

"How do you know they're so holy?" Chaim asked. "Are they poor? Do they share what they have with people who are even poorer? Or do they suck up to the landlords and piss on the poor?"

"Some of them are good men," the captured Nationalist answered. "Perfection is for the Lord." He crossed himself.

As long as their grandfathers had put up with it before them, a lot of Spaniards would put up with anything. They would be proud of putting up with it, in fact, because their grandfathers had before them. Well, Eastern European Jews had put up with pogroms for generation after generation, too. Chaim's grandfather had-and, no doubt, his grandfather before him. But Chaim's father had got the hell out of there and hightailed it for the States. And here stood Chaim in a bomb-scarred park in Madrid, not screwing around with the Talmud but preaching the doctrine of Marx and Lenin and Stalin.

"Some are good, eh?" he said.

"Si, Senor," the prisoner replied with dignity. People here had immense dignity-often more than they knew what to do with.

"Okay," Chaim said, and then, remembering which language he was supposed to be speaking, "Bueno." He tried a different approach: "Isn't it true that most of the priests you call good favor the Republic?"

That made the prisoner stop and think. It made all the prisoners listening to him stop and think, in fact. They argued among themselves in low voices. One man threw his hands in the air and walked away in disgust when the argument didn't seem to be going the way he wanted. The rest patiently went on hashing it out. They had plenty of time, and they weren't going anywhere.

Chaim squatted on his heels and smoked a cigarette. He wasn't going anywhere, either, not right away. He owned more patience than he'd had before coming to Spain, too. If army life, and army life in the land of manana at that, wouldn't help you acquire some, nothing would.

He'd given the little cigarette butt to Joaquin and lit another smoke-and got almost all the way through that one-before the POWs came to some sort of consensus. The fellow who'd called priests holy men came up to the edge of the wire. "It could be, Senor, that you have reason," he said gravely. "Many of these men, the ones who did most for the poor, did favor the Republic. Some got into trouble for it. Some ran away to keep from getting into trouble."

"And what does this mean, do you think?" Chaim inquired.

Instead of yielding as he'd hoped, the Nationalist prisoner only shrugged a slow shrug. "?Quien sabe, Senor?" he said. "Who can be sure what anything means? Very often, life is not so simple."

In spite of himself, Chaim started to laugh. Only in Spain would a prisoner answer a political question with philosophy. "Muy bien," the American from the International Brigades said. "What does this mean, then? Italy and Germany can't help Marshal Sanjurjo any more. England and France can help the Republic. Who is likely to do better now?"

"?Quien sabe?" the Nationalist repeated. "We were winning before. You are doing better at this moment. But who can say anything about manana?" Several long, strongly carved faces showed somber agreement.

The response only made Chaim laugh harder. The prisoners gave him fishy stares, wondering if he was mocking them. He wasn't, or not for that. "This is Spain, the land of manana. I was just thinking about that. If you can't talk about it here, where can you, Senor?"

They had to talk that over, too, before they decided how to feel about it. It was almost as if they had their own little soviet here. Chaim didn't tell them that; it would have scandalized them. Slowly, one at a time, they started to smile. "We did not think men from the Republic could joke," one of them said.

"Who says I was joking?" Chaim answered, deadpan. The POWs thought he was joking again, and their smiles got broader. He knew damn well he wasn't. He grinned back at them all the same. THE BROWN BEAR in the cage stared out at Sarah Goldman and Isidor Bruck through the bars. He looked plump and happy. People in Germany might have to shell out ration coupons for everything they ate, but the zoo animals remained well fed. Germans were uncommonly kind to animals. Everyone said so.

When Sarah remarked on that, Isidor looked around. No Aryans stood close enough to overhear him if he kept his voice down, so he did: "They think Jews are animals, so why don't they treat us better?"

Sarah stared at him in something not far from amazement. She would have expected a crack like that from her father, not from somebody her own age. But she didn't need long to figure out why the baker's son would come out with it. If being a Jew in National Socialist Germany didn't bring out gallows humor in people, what the devil would?

Isidor took a chunk of war bread out of his jacket pocket. He tossed it into the bear's cage. The animal ambled over to it. Sarah wondered if he'd turn up his nose at it-he probably got better himself. Animals were harder to fool than people. But he ate the treat and ran his blood-pink tongue across his nose.

A guard bustled up. He wore an impressive, military-looking uniform. "Do not feed the animals! It is forbidden!" he said importantly. Then he saw the yellow stars on their clothes. He rolled his eyes (Aryan gray, not brown and therefore of questionable breed). "You should be in cages yourselves! Obey, or things will go even worse for you!" Sarah was afraid he would grab the billy club on his belt, but he turned on his heel and stomped off.

"If we were in cages, do you suppose anyone would feed us?" she asked bitterly.

"Some people would-if they came by when nobody could see them do it, and if they were sure the guard was somewhere else," Isidor said.

"Yes, that sounds about right." Sarah remembered the Germans who'd sympathized with her after she had to start wearing the star. She also remembered that no one had told the Nazis they shouldn't make Jews wear stars to begin with. "They wouldn't keep us out of cages, though. Not a chance."

"You bet!" Isidor looked around. "I wish we could do something to the people who're putting the screws to us. All I ever wanted to be was a German, and look what I've got." He brushed his hand across the yellow star.

Samuel Goldman could also have said that. Could? Her father had, many times. Sarah didn't find it surprising: she'd said the same kind of thing herself, too. She almost told Isidor about her brother. But no. What he didn't know, he couldn't blurt out. Saul's life rode on secrecy.

And Saul's fate rode on the tracks of a panzer. He was bound to have Aryan crewmates. He was also bound to be fighting as hard as he could to help the Nazis win their war. How perverse was that? As perverse as anything Sarah had ever imagined.

Perverse enough to let Isidor notice the look on her face. "What is it?" he said. "Are you all right?"

"It's everything," Sarah answered at once. "I'm a Jew in Munster. How can I be all right?"

"Well, it all depends on the company," Isidor said, and then he turned a flaming red, as if he were standing in front of one of his father's back ovens with the door wide open and the heat blasting into his face.

He was sweeter on Sarah than she was on him. He was earnest and nice-no two ways about that. It wasn't even that she felt no spark when he took her hand. But she thought she ought to feel a bigger one if something serious was going to happen.

Or maybe she was crazy. What kind of prospects did a Jewish girl in Munster-or anywhere in the Reich-have these days? If somebody not too bad liked you, shouldn't you grab as hard as you could?

Before he went into the Wehrmacht, a young professor who'd studied under her father and done what little he could for him had been interested in her. But he hadn't been interested enough to risk courting her. She couldn't even blame him. If she were an Aryan, she wouldn't risk courting a Jew, either. Life gave you plenty of tsuris at the best of times; you didn't need to look for more.

She and Isidor walked on. A lion slept in the corner of his cage. His head was twisted to one side, as if he were an enormous tabby cat. He seemed to sleep most of the time. At least, Sarah hadn't seen him awake in several visits to the zoo lately. Well, what else did he have to do, shut away behind bars?

As if picking that thought from her mind, Isidor said, "I know just how the lion feels."

"Me, too," she exclaimed, liking him better for that.

A giraffe stripped leaves from branches set on a bracket high up in its tall enclosure. Its jaws worked from side to side as it chewed. A camel stared at the humans with ugly disdain, then spat in their direction. "See?" Isidor said. "Even the camel knows we're Jews."

"Nah." Sarah shook her head. "It would have got us for sure if it did." They both laughed. Sometimes you couldn't help it.

People walked by carrying steins. A fat man (his saggy skin suggested he once might have been fatter yet) with a big white mustache sold beer from a handcart he pushed along in front of him. "Want one?" Isidor asked.

"I've love one," Sarah said. "But-" She didn't go on… or need to.

"He doesn't have 'I don't serve Jews!' plastered all over everything like a lot of the pigdogs," Isidor said. "Let's try it. What's the worst he can do? Tell us no, right?" He hurried over to the beer-seller. Sarah followed briskly. As if Isidor weren't wearing a yellow star, he told the man, "Two, please."

"Sorry, kid," the fellow said. "I'd like to. Honest to God, I would. My mother's father, he was one of your people. Sometimes the clowns at city hall, they give me a hard time about it-but only sometimes, on account of I just got the one grandfather. But if they was to think I wanted to be one myself…" He turned a thumb toward the ground, as if he were shouting for blood in a Roman amphitheater. (So Sarah thought about it, but her father taught, or had taught, ancient history. Isidor might have seen things differently, but he also couldn't miss the beer-seller's meaning.)

The baker's son sighed. "They'll come for you anyway, you know. They may come later, but they'll come."

"Oh, sure." The old man whuffled air out through his mustache. "But when you've got as many kilometers on you as I do, I figure it's about even money I crap out on my own before the bastards get around to it." He dipped his head to Sarah. "Sorry for the way I talk, miss."

"It's all right." She set her hand on Isidor's arm. It might have been-she thought it was-the first time she'd reached out to touch him, even innocently like that, instead of the other way around. "See? I said he wouldn't."

"Yeah, you did." Isidor touched the brim of his ratty cap in a mournful salute to the beer-seller. "Good luck."

"You, too." With a grunt, the fellow lifted the handcart's handles. The iron tires rattled on the slates as he shoved it down the path between the cages.

"Did you notice something?" Sarah said after he got out of earshot.

"I noticed he was a jerk," Isidor said, probably in lieu of something stronger. "What else was there to notice?"

"He wouldn't say 'Jew,'" Sarah answered. "His grandfather was 'one of you people.' He had 'just the one grandfather.' He didn't want to be 'one.' He knew what he didn't want to be, but he wouldn't say it."

"Ever since Hitler took over, I bet he's been going, 'Oh, no, not me. I ain't one of them,'" Isidor said. "By now, he may even believe it. Whether he does or not, he sure wants to." He scowled after the man. "And he's right, dammit. He may not last till they decide to land on him with both feet. We aren't so lucky."

"They've only landed on us with one foot so far," Sarah said. And maybe that was the worst thing of all: she knew, or imagined she knew, how much worse things could get. WIND WHISTLED through the pines. It came out of the northwest, and it carried the chill of the ice with it. When winds brought blizzards to Japan in the winter, people said they came straight from Siberia. It wasn't winter yet-it was barely fall-but you could already feel how much worse things were going to get here. Sergeant Hideki Fujita was in Siberia. As he had in Mongolia farther west, he discovered that the winds just used this place to take a running start before they roared over the ocean and slammed into the Home Islands. They were already frigid by the time they got here.

"When will the snow start?" he asked another noncom, a fellow who'd served in northeastern Manchukuo for a long time.

"Tomorrow… The day after… Next week… Maybe next month, but that's pushing things," the other sergeant said. "Don't worry about it. When the snow does start, you'll know, all right."

"Hai, hai, hai," Fujita said impatiently. He looked north. "Miserable Russians'll cause even more trouble than they did when the weather was good-or as good as it gets around here, I mean."

"They're animals," the other sergeant replied with conviction. "Where they come from, they live with winters like this all the time. It's no wonder they're so hairy. Their beards help keep their faces from freezing off."

"I believe it," Fujita said. "I wanted to let my own whiskers grow when we were in Mongolia to try and keep my chin warm, but the company CO wouldn't let us do it. He said we had to stay neat and clean and represent the real Japan."

"Officers are like that," the other fellow agreed. "Shigata ga nai, neh? We grew beards along the Ussuri, I'll tell you. We tried, anyhow. Most of us couldn't raise good ones. It just looked like fungus on our faces. But this one guy-he had a pelt! We called him the Ainu because he was so hairy."

"Did he come from Hokkaido?" Fujita asked with interest. The natives the Japanese had largely supplanted lived on the northern island, though they'd once inhabited northern Honshu as well.

"No. That was the funny thing about it. Sakata came from Kyushu, way down in the south." The other noncom lit a cigarette, then offered Fujita the pack.

"Arigato." Fujita took one and leaned close for a light. Once he had the smoke going, he continued, "Maybe he had a gaijin in the woodpile, then. Isn't Nagasaki where the Portuguese and the Dutch used to come to trade?"

"I think so. He didn't look it, though. He wasn't pale like a fish belly, the way white men are, and he didn't have a big nose or anything. He was just hairier than anybody else I've seen-anybody Japanese, I mean."

"I understood you," Fujita said. Foreigners were big-nosed and hairy and pale-or even black!-which marked them off from the finer sort of people who lived in Japan. Oh, there were foreigners who didn't look too funny: Koreans and Chinese, for instance. But their habits set them apart from the Japanese. Koreans slathered garlic on anything that didn't move. Chinese were opium-smoking degenerates who were too stubborn to see that they needed Japanese rulers to bring sense and order to their immense, ramshackle country.

The wind blew harder. A few crows scudded south on its stream. High above them, a raven sported. Crows were businesslike birds, flying from here to there straight as airplanes. Ravens performed, gliding and diving and looping. Fujita liked crows better. But they were leaving, getting out while the getting was good. He wished he could do the same. If some kami touched him and gave him wings, he'd fly straight home. Unless a kindly kami touched him, he was stuck here.

"When do you think Vladivostok will fall?" the other sergeant asked, not quite out of the blue.

"It should be soon," Fujita answered. "All the news reports say the Russians can't hold out much longer. And we're sitting on their lifeline." If not for the Trans-Siberian Railway, this would have been the most worthless country anywhere.

"The news reports have been saying soon for a long time now. When does soon stop being soon?"

"It'll work out," Fujita said confidently. "The last time we fought the Russians, Port Arthur took a long time to fall, but it finally did."

"Well, that's true," the other noncom admitted. "I'd rather be here than trying to break into Vladivostok, too. They're fighting there like they fought in front of Port Arthur-with charges and trenches and machine guns everywhere."

"How do you know?" Fujita asked. It wasn't that he disbelieved it-it sounded only too probable. But he hadn't heard it before, and nothing like it had been in the news.

"I've got a cousin down there. I hope he's all right. Casualties are pretty high," the other man answered. "And I hope like anything they don't decide to ship us down there."

"Eee!" Fujita made an unhappy noise. They were liable to do that if they ran low on men-or if they decided they didn't need so many here to keep the Russians from opening the railroad line again. Russian snipers firing from high in the trees were bad. Fujita thought about Russian machine guns sweeping the ground in front of Vladivostok. He thought about rushing from a Japanese trench to a Russian one and running into a stream of Russian machine-gun bullets halfway across the broken landscape. "Makes my asshole pucker and my balls crawl into my belly."

The other sergeant laughed-unhappily. "I wouldn't have come out with it like that, but it does the same thing to me. You stay in this game for a while, you get a feel for what's bad… and what's even worse."

"That's right," Fujita said. "You do if you're a noncom, anyway. I'm not so sure officers can tell." He never would have said that where an officer could hear him, of course, but he was confident a fellow sergeant wouldn't betray him.

And the other man nodded. "You're lucky if your officers know enough to grab it with both hands." Now each had something slanderous on the other. They both grinned.

Not long before, Fujita had been thinking about Russian snipers in the trees. A Mosin-Nagant rifle cracked, a couple of hundred meters off to the left. The report was deeper and louder than the ones that came from Japanese Arisakas. Yells and commotion from the Japanese lines said the sharpshooter had hit somebody.

A moment later, another shot rang out. That raised a bigger uproar. "Zakennayo!" Fujita exclaimed. "What do you want to bet they showed themselves getting the wounded man to cover, so the sniper hit somebody else?"

"You're bound to be right," the other sergeant answered. "The Russians like to play those games. You have to be stupid to fall for them, stupid or careless, but sometimes people are."

"We wouldn't be people if we weren't," Fujita said. "Or weren't you sweet on some girl or other before you got sucked into the army?"

"Oh, sure. But when you're talking about girls, at least you get to have fun being stupid."

"There is that," Fujita allowed. Just for a moment, loneliness knifed him in the heart. Fun… He'd almost forgotten about fun. The most fun you could have in war was not getting shot. That negative made for cold comfort. Of course, with this wind there was no warm comfort for heaven only knew how many kilometers.

Vladivostok… Of their own accord, Fujita's eyes slid south. He didn't want to stay where he was, but he sure didn't want to go down there, either. As far as he was concerned, they could starve the stinking Russians into submission. If it took a while, so what? It wasn't as if Japan needed to use Vladivostok right away. All she needed was to keep the Russians from using it, and she was already doing that.

The people who ran things would see it differently. Fujita had no doubts on that score. He wished he did, but he didn't. They would worry about things like prestige. The sooner Japan took the Russian city, the better she'd look. They wouldn't care about how many soldiers turned into ravens' meat in the doing.

Fujita did. He didn't want to be one of those soldiers. The only trouble was, he could do exactly nothing about it. If they ordered his regiment to storm the works in front of Vladivostok, it would damn well storm them-or die trying. That was what worried him.