The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  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 matériel 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. “Ça 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 Français. 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 g
oing 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.