The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (39 page)

“Why the fuck aren’t th
ose tanks dead?” someone sneered behind Ilya’s back.

The men were all pressing themselves tightly against the cold, snowy trench while three monkey tanks were ri
ght at the bottom of the long slope reading up to the ridge, machineguns firing and forcing the men to keep their heads down or risk being practically decapitated like a couple of unfortunate bastards had been. The rice-combines were much too far away for a satchel charge or some other failsafe means for common men to destroy them. And the fucking dimwitted artillerymen were taking their goddamn time to fire back. A mortar shell had fallen just a few yards in front of the trench, and from the look of things there was no end to the monkeys coming up the distant road.

Some of the men were throwing hand grenades in the hope to do something to the enemy tanks, and Ilya had no idea what the hell they could do to put an end to those tanks down there that kept everyone from firing at the enemy soldiers.

The rice-combines were big, and ordinary infantry just didn’t have the weapons to knock them out. Even many infantry guns didn’t do very well against their armor. He had to give it to the little yellow rats; they could build vehicles that took a bit of work to dismantle.

Fucking ass…
He could do little but whine and keep his head down and hope for the best, but things didn’t look very good.

“Brothers! Comrades,” an NCO yelled, “for God’s sake take what you can and fall back!”

Ilya glanced over at one of the other soldiers, not vocalizing his question. Was that an order?

“We can’t pr
otect Russia if we’re dead,” Ilya’s lieutenant called, running hunched down along the line, sweeping down like an angel from heaven to answer Ilya’s unasked question. “Take everything you can carry and run!”

Ilya looked around
himself as if the lieutenant had cast a spell that filled him with enthusiasm, although he was still hunkering down to keep from getting offed by the machinegun, rifle, and mortar fire from the enemy. The battalion-strength force was clearly heavily outnumbered, and when Ilya dared to look up for a split moment over the trench and over at the highway he could see halftracks and trucks along with hunching little shapes scouring about like little rats. Was it the whole damn monkey army coming up that road?

“Take the ammuniti
on,” a soldier snapped at him, and Ilya took a full moment before he turned his head.

When Ilya looked at the man he had blood stained over his helmet and part of his face, and between the two were several slumped down men
who had been alive just a couple of minutes ago. He hadn’t seen that before he had heard the NCO and then the lieutenant call for them to fall back. Some of his comrades had already grabbed boxes, bags, and haversacks with grenades and ammunitions and were running towards the artillery tractors parked just a hundred yards from where Ilya was lying.

“Help me carry the ammunitio
n,” the unfamiliar soldier said, glaring at Ilya.

He nervously nodded, still keeping his head down
as he slung his rifle over his back and reached over to grab the two boxes that were still full while the gunner lifted the unmounted machinegun.

“Hurry
and—”

It looked like he was gently pushed down
into the snow-covered sandbags when he dropped the heavy gun, and collapsed with his head stopping against the trench wall. However, despite the circumstances, Ilya just calmly made sure that the lids were secure and quickly ran away in the same direction that the other men were running, leaving the gun and the soldier behind without bothering to make sure that he was really dead. He had more pressing things to do—he had no intention to stay when the monkeys were coming for him.
Rest in peace, brother
.

Makoto was sitting
on top of the turret, his buttocks feeling ice cold, but he didn’t really react to that. He had no idea how they had survived when he could see just how close they had been to the enemy can openers. When he could see with his own eyes how short the distance was between the tank and the Russian cannons, he was quite amazed that they had made it through—was this divine protection? His mother and sister had given him a magical belt to keep him safe, and he hoped that it would work. He wasn’t sure though, but there was no harm in just hoping. Sergeant Unegi’s tank hadn’t made it, and it was still smoldering just ten yards away. The wreckage seemed to be glaring at him, the turret skewed to the side from a hit that had killed everyone apart from the driver who had crawled out fine before the tank had blown up after it had caught fire. It was chilling to see what an exploded tank looked like, everybody inside blown to powder instantly apart from the quick-footed little driver.

That could have been us
.
Dead and rotting on a battlefield like real soldiers.

Down in the open field between the sloping ridge and
the highway infantrymen were still recovering some of the dead which they had left when they first had run out to get the wounded men back to the battalion’s medical group. It looked almost comical when the men waded through the deep, powdery snow towards one of the still bodies. They had to carry them in large groups, if for no other reason than to simply keep them on the stretcher for the whole walk back to where a couple of doctors and orderlies had set up shop beside the road. Another company had taken point, and Makoto assumed that he would not reach the big Russian city first like they had been supposed to. Damn bad luck. Or good luck, depending on what the defenses ahead were like. No, bad luck. It was evil to hope for other men to risk their lives—a good man should be aching to be the first to head into danger rather than shamelessly put the burden on someone else’s shoulders.

When
he looked up at the slope, Kai was coming down back towards the tank, strolling like he was out on adventure. Together with Mou and Akino he had been examining the Russian position while Makoto and the sergeant had remained by the tank. Under each arm Kai carried what looked like ammunition boxes for machineguns, and he looked very pleased with himself.

“Did you take Russian amm
unition?” Makoto asked when Kai put the two boxes on top of the tank before he started to climb up on top of the tank.

Although Makoto was no great expert, he had learned that bullets weren’t interchangeable, and he had been taught the different sorts of ammunition that he should know about from the instructors. Even if the ammunition could seemingly fit, it could be dangerous to try to load a gun with the wrong kind of bullets. It might just blow the barrel or something.

“What? No, that wouldn’t be very useful, would it?” Kai said with a smile.

He pulled open the lid on one of the boxes and pulled out a pipe.

“Pretty neat, huh?” he said, putting it between his grinning lips. “I thought I might have some use for it later,” he said as he put the pipe back into the box. “I got a little something for you too,” he said as he rummaged around one of the boxes. “Ah, here it is!”

His hand came up with a small packet and h
e crawled over and held it up. It was some kind of small paper package fitting in the palm of his hand.

“It’s Russian chocolate,
” he explained.

“Thank you,” Makoto said as he accepted the small chocolate bar.

He had had chocolate in Mongolia, although he didn’t actually like it. Maybe it was a Northern thing? People said Northerners had a different palate, although Kai apparently liked the hard, murky food. Makoto preferred sweet beans. That was his kind of candy, not bitter brown… chocolate. It looked like poo pressed into squares.

“You never know what you find when y
ou take a good look,” Kai said.

Indeed, an officer had had quite the nice watch, and he didn’t really use it anymore.
Kai Dokushu wasn’t used to wearing a watch, but maybe his wife or his father-in-law would like it. They might have use for being able to tell the time at any moment. When Kai was doing his deliveries he didn’t actually look at the time, he just drove the truck to where he was going, and that was it. He arrived whenever he arrived, and he didn’t need a watch to do that. Still, the watch was obviously a good piece of craftsmanship, and it was a damned waste to leave it behind. If his wife didn’t like it she could always sell it. It had to fetch at least a good five yen. It wasn’t damaged, and there was no blood on it or anything. Nobody would have to know that it had belonged to a dead man. That would just be needlessly grotesque information—maybe he should have a priest clean it so it wouldn’t curse anybody.

Terushige was exhausted from the long walk through the snow
and was practically panting when he finally came within reach of the summit. The sight of the temporary medical station and the lined up bodies down by the road told him that some of the poor bastards in one of the division’s mechanized infantry battalions had been unlucky. The snow was so soft and deep that it swallowed the feet rather than serve as a hard ground surface like snow should. No doubt this kind of snow would be a big killer if the soldiers would have to wade through it like this. He stopped where the slope up to the ridge began and where a few tanks had ended their assault on the enemy before the enemy positions had been cleared by infantry. It was embarrassing for a grown man who was as young as Terushige to find himself so tired from nothing but walking, but he never pretended to be a virile young man capable of any physical exertion.

Part of the division was speeding ahead up the road towards the prize, but Terushige had been put in charge of making sure
that the troops that had engaged the enemy would get back on the road to rejoin the rest of the division soon. Junior Colonel Aobara thought that he had lost not more than a hundred of his infantry, and added to the infantry losses were only six tanks and two halftracks that had been put out of service, and only three of the tanks had been blown to scrap. To Terushige’s mind, that sounded relatively acceptable under the circumstances, but he was still keen on seeing the battlefield with his own eyes so that he could write up a brief report. The exact ratio of losses between the two sides was not something Terushige liked to think about, but from what he had heard a two-to-one would not be too bad according to the plans of the General Staff—one of the colonels had suggested that Combined Command mostly just wanted to see dead Russians and the casualty ratio wasn’t really a concern at all. However, Terushige had a certain responsibility for the men not only in the division, but in the rest of the whole army, and he did not like to hear about divisions that had been sent back to be restructured with fresh manpower and equipment to supplant their casualties. He looked at one of the tanks nearby with three men sitting on top of it, two men on the turret and a third squatting opposite them next to the gun barrel.

The three tankers sitting on the armored vehicle
pushed themselves to their feet and duly saluted the officer, presumably noticing the stiff cap that was the telltale sign of an officer. All the infantrymen either wore unlined caps or helmets, and it was an officer exclusive tradition to wear the lined peaked cap even in the field while ordinary soldiers were not even issued them except for parades under the Year 94 Standard Army Regulations that had been introduced just months before war had been declared. Officers on the other hand often didn’t bother to get unlined crusher cap but instead stuck with just having the rigid peaked cap or possibly a steel helmet on their heads. Terushige only had his one cap to wear, and he hadn’t worn a steel helmet since field exercises when he was still in training.

“Good afternoon, soldiers,” Terushige said after he saluted them back.

He awkwardly climbed up on top of the tank, not quite familiar with how to best get up on top of it. Perhaps he was a little tired from wading through the snow, but he managed to get up on it without help.

“Congratulations on your
victory,” he said after he straightened himself opposite the soldiers.

“Thank you sir,” the sergeant dutifully replied.

“Those guns,” Terushige mumbled, looking up towards where the Russians had apparently been dug in just a stone’s throw from where he was, “they are 76mm guns, right?”

“Yes sir,
” the sergeant answered, his voice a bit tense.

“Well, it seems you did well. I spoke with you battalion commander, an
d he has heaped much praise on this section’s courage and resolve.”

Terushige was no stranger to giving compliments, and these heroes apparently had performed very well and had helped to overtake the devils successfully. People had different attitudes about how to address ordinary men and Terushige had been accustomed to be overly generous rather than critical of soldiers. He had picked it up from experience and learning for himself the pleasurable feeling of being praised once in a while.

“Thank you, sir.”

The shell that
had destroyed Sergeant Unegi’s tank had pretty much the final one the Russians had fired before the 76s stopped shooting altogether. It might have been comical that the Russians hit them good at the very end, had not Unegi, the radioman, the loader, and the gunner all died. In a slapstick motion picture the long duel might have been hilarious, but in this one the bad guys had done a bit too well for it to be funny.

“May I offer the colonel a cigarette?” asked one of the tankers
, holding out a paper packet of cigarettes.

“Yes, thank you
, soldier.”

He accepted the cigarette and leaned forward as the private
prepared to light it for him with a nice metal lighter. These peasants could surprise you once in a while. Terushige only really came across peasants in the army—where he had lived that sort of people had rarely come closer to him than seeing them through a car window when he was going somewhere.

“You must be proud to have fought them so bravely,” Terushige said
after taking a drag on the cigarette, thinking that the soldiers deserved praise for driving up towards the enemy guns that were evidently more than powerful enough to easily knock out a battle tank.

As endurable as the battle tanks were, the enemy possessed anti-tank guns that penetrated their front armor at long ranges. It was horrifyingly easy sometimes to destroy such a great piece of machinery.

“Yes sir,” the sergeant dutifully answered on the whole crew’s behalf.

“The people will be grateful fo
r your courage, just as I am,” Terushige said, a little unsure of what he should say.

Makoto could see from the insignia that the colonel was a colonel, and he had never been this close to an officer of that stature before. Most of the officers he had seen up close had been lieutenants—senior or junior ones—not colonels like this nice-looking man. He was happy to let the sergeant talk to the officer since Makoto wasn’t sure how to deal with senior officers, even though the man seemed nice enough.

“Thank you sir,” Shibui said on behalf of his crew.

“Thank
you
, sergeant.”

After smoking a cigarette with the soldiers, Terushige carefully crawled down from the tank and headed to examine the Russians up on the ridge. One of the anti-tank guns
had clearly been hit, and the crooked metal and pieces of human remains made it quite clear that it had been a clean hit with an explosive shell while the crew had been all around it—they still were, of course. Terushige looked down the trench where the dead Russians were lying, disfigured or rather intact depending on what had killed them and where—a head blown apart by machinegun bullet or someone just hit in the back with the exit wound concealed in the snow was quite the difference on the eye. The four 76mm anti-tank guns and two 57mm anti-tank guns had been surrounded by hits from mortars and the Japanese tanks, and the snow and underlying ground had been disturbed by dozens of explosive hits. It was a bit grisly to see the effects on some of the Russians, but many of them looked rather presentable even in their deathly state.

Terushige was familiar with the effects of explosives, and he was not all that surprised that the gun crews had presumably been decimated from
the shells that had landed on top of their positions. The trench was shallow and had not been as carefully built as some of the defenses they had faced down closer to the starting point of the offensive almost 400 miles away, and he figured that not much time had been invested in preparing the position. Perhaps these Russians had been retreating until recently?

Much closer to the initial front
near the prewar border the Russians had built intricate systems of emplacements with lumber, concrete, sandbags, and stone during the past year. But this far from the front it was clear that little preparation had been made before offensive operations had been launched and penetrated the first 100 miles or so inland. The farther they came from the initial frontline, the more it became apparent to Terushige that the Russians had actually been overwhelmed by the strength of the attack and the depth of the continuous battle that raged in these parts of the frontline.

The frontline had moved up several hundred miles
across the board in less than a month, and casualties on both sides had probably been bad. Terushige was mostly familiar with the corps and his division, but judging from what he had heard and seen he could easily imagine that just on this small section of the front the total casualties had to be counted in the tens of thousands. The three corps of the 11th Field Army had a combined strength of more than 210,000 men at the outset, and he assumed that perhaps as much as one in thirty had been wounded, killed, or was missing. As one of the mechanized armies leading the charge it was only natural that they would suffer heavily from the Russian resistance while the footslogging infantry would suffer much less.

The figures he had heard
from the man from Intelligence seemed to be that the Russians were not forcing the Imperial Army to keep an unacceptable casualty ratio. One of the lieutenants of the Annam regiment that had carried out the attack today had counted almost two-hundred Russians dead or captured, which was obviously a victory, coupled with the anti-tank guns he could see with his own eyes. By any calculation, this had been a great victory.

This
conflict was not like the Liberation War, however; the Russians had tanks, rifles, and machineguns that were in no way inferior to the muskets and cannons that had faced the antique weapons of the Qing armies. Russia was a far greater threat than the Qing Dynasty had ever been, and Terushige understood that defeat would mean much greater losses than the nation had sustained during the Liberation War, but he hoped that victory would not be nearly as bloody as the struggle to reunify the ancient nation. If the death toll in this war would be matched proportionally to the Liberation War it would require somewhere upwards of a hundred million lives. The losses so far were certainly far, far short of that, and unless the enemy would be allowed to march into Japan deaths in the tens of millions would be an impossibility.

“Colonel Tokugawa!”

Terushige turned around from the sound of his name, and he saw a familiar NCO come running down the trench, skipping over the dead Russians. There was something comical about seeing a grown man avoid stepping on the blood or tripping on the enemy leftovers with such grace. It was like a bizarre version of a slapstick picture. The man saluted when he came to a halt within a few feet of Terushige.

“The general
’s staff is on the radio and wishes to speak with you,” the NCO exclaimed, a bit out of breath from running all the way from where the commander of the armored regiment had stopped to reorganize and prepare for the continued march on Novonikolayevsk.

“All right, let’s go then,
” Terushige said, not bothering further with examining the conquered enemy.

“What does he want?” he asked as the two men walked towards the halftrack that had driven up halfway across the field between the ridge and the highway.

“I think he’s in a very foul mood,” the NCO said, just evasively enough to really raise Terushige’s interest.

“Why is that?”

“Oh, just something about Corps deciding that our division won’t be leading the charge to take the city.”

“We won’t?”

That would be disappointing. Terushige had looked forward to the division getting the honor of leading the charge to capture Novonikolayevsk.

“It looks like we won’t.”

Damn shame. Still, they had to obey orders, and if the corps commander had decided differently they couldn’t just ignore his orders. That would hardly be the appropriate way to make war.