The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (16 page)

ife went on in spite of everything. Weeds began to grow in the Japanese trenches outside of Vladivostok. Sergeant Hideki Fujita admired the little bits of green amidst dun and dirty white. And, when one of the weeds sprouted little red flowers, he was as happy as if he’d raised it himself.

That meant the men in his section admired the flowers with him. If they were otherwise inclined, the certain knowledge that he would give scoffers a clout in the head kept them from showing it.

“Now I hope the Russians don’t shell the poor thing,” he said, and while he spoke he really was worried about it.

“Don’t fret, Sergeant-
san
,” Senior Private Hayashi said. “A week from now, a million of these things will pop up all over everywhere. We’ll get so sick of them, we’ll start to hate them.”

“I am not going to hate my plant,” Fujita declared. Hayashi, wise in the ways of noncoms, nodded and shut his mouth.

Except for the plant with the little red flowers, not much seemed to change around the besieged Russian city. Fifty meters here, a hundred meters there, the Japanese lines tightened. Maybe the Red Army men
defending the place were scrawnier than they had been when Fujita got there. They still fought as hard as ever, though.

When Fujita wasn’t talking about his precious plant, he would talk about that. “Russians are funny people,” he said wisely, puffing a cigarette. “As long as a Russian has a rifle or a bayonet or an entrenching tool in his hands, he’s as dangerous as one of us would be. Maybe more so, because he’s sneakier.”

“
Hai
,” breathed the soldiers gathered around him. After all, he was speaking plain truth. Besides, he outranked them. They weren’t going to argue. There were less painful ways to commit
seppuku
, if a man was so inclined.

He warmed to his theme: “But when a Russian’s had enough, he just throws down his rifle and throws up his hands and smiles at you like a dog. He expects you to pet him and feed him and take care of his messes from then on out.”

“Hai,”
the soldiers chorused again—they’d all been in the trenches long enough to see the same thing for themselves.

“Disgraceful,” somebody added. The men nodded. By Japanese standards, surrender was disgraceful. Facing the choice between surrender and death, a Japanese soldier was trained to choose death every time. He had no honor left if he decided to live. Even worse, he smeared his whole family with his shame. If he gave up, gave in, none of his relatives would be able to hold up their heads ever again.

And, because a man base enough to surrender had no honor left, you could do whatever you pleased with him after he fell into your hands. Russians and other Westerners were said to treat prisoners of war kindly. To Fujita and his comrades, that was incomprehensible softness, even madness.

To most of them, anyhow. Educated Senior Private Hayashi said, “My father fought against the Russians at Port Arthur.” He waited for his own nods, and got them. Not many men in those muddy trenches didn’t have older relatives who’d gone through the Russo-Japanese War. He continued, “He told me orders then were to go easy on prisoners, to treat enemy wounded the same way we treated our own, and not even to be too hard on soldiers who gave up when they weren’t wounded.”

Fujita started to tell him he was full of crap. Before he could, though,
another soldier said, “Yeah, I remember hearing the same thing from my old man. Pretty crazy stuff, ain’t it?”

Maybe it really was true, then. No one other than Fujita seemed inclined to contradict Hayashi. Instead of sticking out his own neck, he said, “Well, we aren’t dumb enough to keep on with that kind of nonsense nowadays.”

“Oh, no, Sergeant,” Hayashi said quickly. Fujita hid a smile behind the rituals of lighting another smoke. Hayashi’s education had made him smart enough to know where his next bowl of rice was coming from, anyhow. Fujita might not know so many
kanji
or be able to read and write Chinese, but he had the rank. A subordinate who annoyed him would pay and pay. His power might be petty, but for those in its grasp it was real as rain.

Behind the lines, Japanese guns thundered. Before long, Russian artillery answered. Wherever Fujita had faced the Red Army, he’d seen that it had cannon falling out of its asshole. More guns, guns with longer range … It was enough, more than enough, to make the poor sorry bastards who had to face those guns jealous.

Something a few kilometers behind Fujita’s position blew up with a rending crash. All the soldiers shook their heads in sorrow. “Eee!” Fujita said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “There’s some ammunition we won’t get to use against the round-eyed barbarians.”

He wanted to turn around and stand up in the trench to take a look at the cloud of smoke rising from that blast. He wanted to, but he didn’t. That would be asking for a bullet in the back of the head from a Russian sniper. Peering through telescopic sights, waiting for a Japanese soldier to make a mistake and show himself, those round, pale eyes would be pitiless.

Despite that hit, the Russian guns fell silent again sooner than he’d expected. When he said as much, Senior Private Hayashi answered, “They’ve been doing that the past few days, haven’t they?”

He made it a question so he wouldn’t seem to contradict Fujita. And, making it a question, he made Fujita think back on it. Slowly, the sergeant nodded. “You know, maybe they have. I wonder what it means.”

“Maybe they’re running low on shells,” a soldier said hopefully.

“If they are, we’ve got them,” another man said.

“Not till they run out of machine-gun bullets, too,” the first soldier retorted. Fujita nodded again. He’d heard stories about the Russo-Japanese War, too. Machine guns were the slate-wipers even back then. They melted regiments into companies and companies into squads. From everything he could see, the Red Army used more of them now than it had in the old days.

“Sooner or later, we’ll beat them down,” Hayashi said. “Whether it’s soon enough to do us any good …”

He didn’t go on, or have to. Foot soldiers were expendable. Everybody knew it, including them. If Fujita’s regimental commander needed to take a height in front of him, he’d keep throwing men at it till he did. Why not? He could get reinforcements. Where would the Red Army find them?

The next day, the Russians raided off to the left of Fujita’s position. They were after ground or prisoners to interrogate. They also made off with the Japanese unit’s rice rations, which were about to be served. The Japanese troops got more a couple of hours later. The Russians got full bellies for a change.

More raids like that followed. Some of them succeeded in grabbing the booty. Others only cost the Red Army casualties. The Japanese began using field kitchens to bait traps. It worked as well with the Russians as it would have with any other wild beasts.

Because of such things, Fujita wasn’t astonished when white flags started flying in the Russian trenches. He got a glimpse of grim-faced Soviet officers coming through the Japanese lines to confer with his superiors.

It wasn’t peace, not yet. But it wasn’t war. You could stand up and show yourself, and the Russians wouldn’t shoot at you. Some of them came into the Japanese lines to beg. They weren’t starving yet, but they were skinny. A lot of them had very fine boots. Fujita acquired a buttery-soft pair for a couple of mess kits of rice.

A Red Army man who spoke a few words of Japanese said. “Nobody come help we. Why go on fight?”

Because giving up makes you a thing, not a person
, Fujita thought. But
he wanted the Russian’s belt, so he didn’t say what was in his mind. He went on dickering with the fellow, for all the world as if he’d personally grown the rice he was offering. He got the price he wanted. The Russian couldn’t say no, not if he aimed to get any food at all. Hunger was a terrible thing.

So was defeat. After three days of talks, the Red Army officers surrendered Vladivostok and the surrounding territory. They’d reached the same conclusion as the soldier with the belt: no one was coming to help them. Fujita wondered how many Russians were giving up and what the Japanese authorities would do with them all. He shrugged. It wasn’t his worry.

ONE OF THE BRIGHT
lads in Willi Dernen’s company had managed to hook a radio to a car battery and make noise come out of it. The noise, at the moment, was a German newsman. “Radio Tokyo announced today that Vladivostok has at last passed under Japanese control, ending the second long siege in twentieth-century conflicts between the two countries. Having lost to Japan in the east, Russia will now surely also lose to the
Reich
in the west.”

“How do they figure that?” a soldier said. “Now Stalin’s only got us to worry about.
He
isn’t in a big two-front war any more, ’cause he’s already lost just about all of what he can lose way the hell over there.”

A considerable silence followed. No one seemed sure what to say about the comment. The
Landser
had a point, which only made matters worse. At last, Willi took a shot at it: “Why don’t you open your mouth a little wider, Anton? Then I can stick a land mine in there, and you’ll blow your own head off next time you talk.”
If you haven’t done it already
, he added, but only to himself.

“Huh? What do you mean?” Maybe Anton was God’s innocent, because he sounded as if he had not a clue.

Willi wasn’t about to spell it out for him. Then again, he didn’t have to. Corporal Arno Baatz took care of things with his usual style: “He means you sound disloyal, that’s what. And you goddamn well do. If they say we’ll whip the lousy Russians, we’ll whip ’em, and that’s flat.”

“Oh, yeah?” Anton wasn’t in Awful Arno’s section, and had more leeway sassing him than Willi would have. “Has anybody told the lousy Russians about that?”

The Germans huddled in what had been some middle-class Frenchman’s parlor. The power was out; otherwise, the bright boy wouldn’t have needed his magic trick with the battery. Willi could watch Corporal Baatz turn red anyhow. “The
Führer
knows what’s what!” he shouted. “We’ll tell the Russians when we march through Moscow!”

“Moscow? Have you got any idea how far from Poland that is?” Anton said.

“I’ve got an idea that someone doesn’t care a pfennig for Germany’s leadership,” Awful Arno said in a deadly voice. “And I’ve got a good idea of what happens to people like that, too.”

“Only if some stoolie rats them out,” somebody behind Baatz said. It should have been Anton, but maybe he really didn’t know what happened to those people. If he didn’t, he
was
one of God’s innocents.

Awful Arno whirled as if his ass were on ball bearings. “Who said that?” he yelled. He wasn’t red now; he was purple. “I’ll smash your face in!”

No one told him a thing. That made him angrier than ever. Now that he’d twisted in a new direction, he gave other people the chance to talk behind his back. And someone was quick to take advantage of it: “Shut up and let us listen to the music, Baatz.”

It was good music. Barnabas von Géczy was supposed to be Hitler’s favorite band leader. Listening to
Komm mit nach Madeira
, Willi wished he were on a subtropical beach with a girl, not stuck in a lousy French village with a bunch of smelly soldiers.
A bunch of other smelly soldiers
, he amended—he was none too clean himself. If the almost-engineer would rig up some hot water, now … Too much to hope for.

Corporal Baatz heaved himself to his feet and stormed out of the battered house. “He’s going to blab to the officers,” someone predicted gloomily.

“As long as he doesn’t blab to the SS,” Willi said. He scowled at Anton. “You and your big yap.”

“Me? What did I do? I was only looking at the military possibilities,” the other soldier said.

“That’s what you thought,” Willi said. “Don’t ask questions, man. Keep your trap shut and do your job. After the war’s over, we’ll straighten out whatever’s gone wrong.”

Anton eyed him. “Aren’t you the guy who …?” He paused, not sure how to go on.

“The guy who what?” Willi growled, though he didn’t have to be a bright boy himself to know.