The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  He pictured a map in his mind. Would the Emperor take Vladivostok for Japan, or would he say it was territory redeemed for Manchukuo? It didn’t really matter one way or the other. Japanese influence would predominate no matter which flag flew there.

  Then Russian artillery opened up. The Reds hadn’t gone away, even if Fujita wished they would have. He cocked his head to one side, gauging the flight of the shells by the way they snarled through the air. He relaxed. Nothing aimed at him—not this time.

  He lit an Aeroplane. Smoke helped when you couldn’t take a drink. Everything around you seemed a little less important while you had a cigarette going. It was as if … as if you were laying down a smoke screen against the outside world.

  He liked that well enough to say it out loud. Shinjiro Hayashi grinned and dipped his head. “Oh, very good, Sergeant-san!” he said.

  If Hayashi, with his education, appreciated the joke, that meant it was a good one … didn’t it? Fujita wished he wouldn’t have had the afterthought. He remembered the days when he was a private himself. Any stupid joke the sergeant cracked was funny, for no other reason than that he was a sergeant. If you didn’t laugh, he’d thump you like a drum. Of course sergeants slapped privates around; that was what privates were for. If you didn’t keep your sergeant greased, the army would get even more miserable than it already was for a private.

  Now Fujita had a thin gold stripe and two stars on his red collar tabs. Now he was the one who expected the sorry bastards under him to laugh at whatever came out of his mouth. And they did. Oh, they did. They knew where their rice came from, all right. But that meant he couldn’t trust them. They would laugh even if he said something stupid—no, especially if he said something stupid. He remembered doing that. What was sweeter than laughing at a puffed-up sergeant who was playing the fool and didn’t even know it?

  Nothing, for a private. All the more reason for a sergeant to watch himself. Privates were unreliable, officers thought they were little tin gods … You had to take care of yourself. Nobody would do it for you.

  That also applied when the Russians came. Some of the people you led wouldn’t be sorry to see you dead. If they got the chance to arrange that in a way that wouldn’t land them in trouble, they were liable to do it.

  Those were thoughts Fujita wished he hadn’t had when Lieutenant Hanafusa came up to him and said, “You’ve done well since you got here, Sergeant. I wondered about you, because you didn’t have much experience fighting in forests. But nobody can say you haven’t picked it up in a hurry.”

  “Thank you very much, sir.” Fujita wondered what Hanafusa had in mind. He also wondered if he would have done better to stay on Manchukuo’s Mongolian frontier, where only sandstorms kept you from seeing for kilometers every which way and where any tree was a prodigy.

  And so he heard the platoon commander’s next words with a mournful lack of surprise: “We need some prisoners for interrogation. Take your squad forward and get me a couple. Try not to make too much of a fuss while you’re doing it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fujita said—the only thing he could say. He did ask, “Right now, sir, or may we wait till after dark?”

  Lieutenant Hanafusa looked surprised, as if the possibility had never crossed his mind. It probably hadn’t. He’d got the order from above, and hadn’t thought twice about it. After a few seconds, he said, “I suppose it will keep that long.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fujita repeated. He couldn’t say Thank you again; he would have meant it this time. Scooting forward at night, he and his men had at least a chance of coming back in one piece.

  It started raining before the squad set out. Fujita didn’t know whether to take that for good luck or bad. It would make finding Russians harder. But it would also make it harder for the Reds to hear his men coming. Nothing he could do about it either way. He just had to hope for the best.

  “Stick close together,” he told the Japanese. “We’ll grab the first couple of men we catch and head on back.” He made it sound easy. Whether it would be …

  He had a compass that glowed in the dark. Without it, he probably would have blundered around in circles. Even by daylight, you couldn’t see very far in these woods. At night, in the rain … He wondered what Lieutenant Hanafusa would say if he came back and told him the squad couldn’t find any Russians. Nothing good. He was sure of that.

  He walked right into a tree. “Zakennayo!” he snarled. It would have been worse if he weren’t wearing his helmet. He would have mashed his nose instead of scratching his cheek. Muffled—and sometimes not so muffled—curses from his men said they were having their troubles, too.

  How were you supposed to walk straight when you couldn’t see where you were putting your feet? Only luck nobody sprained an ankle, or maybe broke one. And the lieutenant was back somewhere warm and dry. Of course he was. He was an officer.

  Then somebody bumped into him. Before he could call his own man a clumsy idiot, the other fellow growled, “Metyeryebyets!”

  Fujita didn’t quite know what the endearment meant. He did know it wasn’t in Japanese. “Grab him, boys!” he said happily.

  The Red Army man didn’t want to get grabbed. Fujita hit him in the side of the head with his entrenching tool. The Russian was wearing a helmet, but it rang his bell anyhow. If he hadn’t had the helmet, Fujita might have smashed in his skull. That would have been a waste of some good luck.

  Hanafusa wanted a couple of prisoners. If they didn’t nab somebody else … Maybe I can blame it on the rain, Fujita thought. Or maybe not. Officers looked for results. If you didn’t give them what they told you to get, whom would they blame? Themselves, for giving idiotic orders? Fat chance!

  And than Senior Private Hayashi whooped, “I’ve got another one!” By the shouts and scuffle that followed, who had whom wasn’t obvious. The Russians must have sent out their own patrol, and it had blundered straight into Fujita’s. Sometimes luck counted more than skill. The Japanese snagged the second Red Army man.

  A Russian opened up with a submachine gun, but none of the bullets came anywhere close to the the Japanese. The Red was firing blind. “Let’s get out of here!” Fujita said. He’d never had an order obeyed with such alacrity.

  Japanese sentries almost fired on the patrol before Fujita convinced them he was on their side. He hadn’t come in where he thought, and had to make his way back to Lieutenant Hanafusa. “All right—you got them,” Hanafusa said, eyeing the battered, unshaven, miserable-looking Russian captives. “Not so bad, neh?”

  If Fujita used the entrenching tool on Hanafusa’s skull, they’d kill him a millimeter at a time. He knew that, but his hand twitched all the same. He made it hold still. “No, sir,” he said expressionlessly.

  Chapter 12

  Photographs and posters made Marshal Sanjurjo look tall and stern and heroic. He always wore splendid uniforms. Joaquin Delgadillo liked that. If you were somebody, you should look as if you were.

  In the flesh, Sanjurjo was less imposing. He had a lot of flesh—were those three chins or four? He was shorter and wider than the posters made him out to be. He was also at least fifteen years older. He looked like a village druggist just on the point of retiring.

  He still wore a fancy uniform. And, whether he was a hero or not, he had cojones enough to come up to the front on the northwestern outskirts of Madrid. If some traitor—and there were always traitors—had let the Republicans know he was coming, they could smash up these trenches with mortar bombs and cut off the Nationalist state’s head. Or a lucky sniper could take care of it. The enemy’s trenches lay almost a kilometer off, but even so.…

  Sanjurjo eyed Sergeant Carrasquel, who stood at stiff attention. A slow smile spread across the marshal’s face. He set a hand on Carrasquel’s shoulder. He knew what kind of creature he had before him. “So tell me, Sergeant, how are things here? Tell me the truth,” he said. Dígame la verdad. He made the last three words a caressing invitation.

  “It’s fucked up, sir. But it�
��s always fucked up, so what can you do?” the sergeant answered. “The Republicans are as stubborn as we are, and the Internationals over yonder, they’re damn good troops. We need more of everything if we’re gonna shift ’em.”

  “You get what we have,” Sanjurjo said, no anger in his voice.

  “Yes, sir. But we don’t have enough,” the sergeant said. “Just so you know, the rations suck, too.” The look in his eye said he’d noticed Sanjurjo wasn’t missing any meals. Not even Carrasquel seemed ready to come out with that, though.

  “You said it—things are fucked up.” The crude phrase sounded much more elegant in Marshal Sanjurjo’s mouth. The marshal turned to Delgadillo. “Is this a good man, Sergeant?”

  “I’ve got plenty worse, sir,” Carrasquel replied.

  That was the kindest thing he’d ever said about Joaquin. Sanjurjo’s pouchy eyes were clever, also like a village druggist’s. “How is it with you, soldier?” he asked. “Speak freely. I didn’t come here to listen to polite bullshit.” He used the English word with a certain sour relish. Delgadillo had heard it from the Republicans often enough to know what it meant.

  “It’s war, sir,” he said. “How is it supposed to be?”

  “That’s a fair question, son,” Sanjurjo said. “It’s supposed to be a lot like this. Sometimes it’s worse, eh, Sergeant?”

  “It can always get worse.” Carrasquel spoke with deep conviction. “I was in Morocco, fighting against the Rifs. If it gets much worse than that, I don’t want to know about it, by God!”

  “That was bad,” Sanjurjo agreed. “Maybe the Western Front in the last war was worse. So much slaughter, and for nothing. But maybe it wasn’t worse, too. When you fought the Rifs, you knew they really meant it.”

  Sergeant Carrasquel nodded. “Oh, are you ever right there, sir!”

  All Delgadillo knew about the Rifs was that they were savages and the Spanish army had beaten them. He’d been a little kid when that fight ended. So Carrasquel had been in Morocco, then, had he? He didn’t look old enough. Maybe vipers aged slower than ordinary human beings.

  “I hoped our friends would go on supplying us after the European war started, but”—Sanjurjo spread his plump palms—“así es la vida. The Republicans have the same worries. We can still beat them. We will still beat them, eh?”

  “Absolutamente, your Excellency!” Delgadillo said quickly. Was he going to tell the marshal the Nationalists would lose? Not likely! Sergeant Carrasquel might be convinced he was a dope, but he wasn’t that big a dope.

  “Bueno,” Sanjurjo said, and stumped down the trench. A gaggle of aides in almost equally gaudy uniforms followed him. They ignored Joaquin but edged away from Sergeant Carrasquel. They knew a dangerous man when they saw one.

  “Well, kid, you can tell your grandchildren you talked with a big shot once upon a time,” Carrasquel said gruffly.

  “Yeah. How about that?” Joaquin said. “The Caudillo.” It wasn’t quite so strong a title as Führer or Duce, but it was plenty strong enough.

  Carrasquel glanced after Sanjurjo’s henchmen. When he decided they’d got out of earshot, he went on, “You know what else you can tell your grandkids?”

  “What, Sergeant?” Delgadillo asked, as he was obviously meant to do.

  “Tell ’em Sanjurjo’s shit stinks just like yours,” the older man growled.

  Joaquin blinked. He’d expected something different. He looked around, too, to make sure no one could overhear. Satisfied, he spoke in a low voice: “If you feel that way, how come your aren’t fighting for the Republic?”

  “Chinga the Republic.” Carrasquel spat. “Those assholes think workers’ shit doesn’t stink, just on account of they’re workers. Everybody’s shit stinks, God damn it to hell. Everybody’s. You get down to the bottom of it, it’s all shit.”

  If he’d been on the other side of the line when the fighting started, would he be cussing out the Nationalists now? Delgadillo couldn’t ask; he’d said too much already. But he wouldn’t have been surprised. Carrasquel needed to fight somebody. Who probably didn’t matter much.

  And, after some of the things Joaquin had seen, he had a devil of a time thinking the sergeant was wrong. Shit and rotten meat and maggots: things did end up like that, all right. What you did before then mattered, though … didn’t it? If it does, what am I doing here?

  What was Joaquin doing here? They’d drafted him. They’d made sure he couldn’t run away, and they’d beaten the stuffing out of a couple of luckless lugs who tried. They’d shoot him if he deserted at the front, and they wouldn’t even waste a cigarette on him before they did. In spite of everything, they’d made a soldier out of him. Turning into a soldier gave him the best chance to live.

  A Republic machine gun growled to malign life. One of Marshal Sanjurjo’s aides, a tall, gangly man whose head must have stuck up above the rim of the trench, let out a choking moan and crumpled, clutching at himself. Medics rushed over to him. Delgadillo wondered how long he would have had to lie there if he’d got hit. A hell of a lot longer than that, he was sourly sure. The medics carried the groaning officer past him on a stretcher.

  “How bad?” Carrasquel asked in tones of professional interest.

  “Scalp wound. He’s bleeding like a pig, but he ought to make it,” a medic answered. “A few centimeters lower, and …” He shook his head.

  “Madonna, it hurts!” the officer said.

  “I gave you morphine, Señor,” the medic told him. “It’ll make you easier soon.” He and his comrades lugged the man away.

  “It could have been the Caudillo,” Joaquin said.

  “Not unless he really was as big as his pictures make him out to be,” Carrasquel said, so Delgadillo wasn’t the only one who’d had that thought.

  The rest of Sanjurjo’s aides plainly thought they’d seen as much of the front as they wanted to, and more besides. Sanjurjo himself took the wounding, and the firing that went on afterwards, in stride. His attitude declared he’d known worse. He had nerve—that much of what they said about him to make him look good was true, anyhow.

  Major Uribe’s shrill voice rang out: “Come on, my dears! We have to let them know they can’t get away with being so rude!”

  Joaquin fired a few shots toward the Republican lines. He saw no good targets, but fired anyway. A bullet might do something. The one that creased the aide’s head sure had. Beside him, Sergeant Carrasquel was doing the same thing. So were Nationalist soldiers all along the line. One of their machine guns opened up, and then another. Another Republican murder mill responded. It was getting dangerous out, whichever side you were on.

  As Joaquin Delgadillo put a fresh clip on his rifle, he glanced toward Sanjurjo. What did the marshal make of his maricón battalion commander? By his smile, he already knew about Bernardo Uribe. If you were a good enough soldier, you could get away with almost anything that didn’t hurt the way you fought. Uribe was, and then some.

  How many times had Joaquin yelled “¡Maricón!” at the Republicans? And now he had a fairy giving him orders! War was a crazy business, all right. He shouldered the reloaded piece and squeezed off another shot at the enemy.

  “MOSCOW SPEAKING.” The newsreader’s familiar voice came out of the radio at the Byelorussian airstrip. Sergei Yaroslavsky drank from a glass of strong, sweet tea as he listened to the morning report. Another pilot walked over to the battered samovar bubbling in a corner of the tent and poured a glass for himself. He already had a papiros sticking up at a jaunty angle from the corner of his mouth, as if he were Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tobacco and tea—how could you run a war without them?

  On vodka, that’s how, Sergei thought. The Russians had run on vodka long before they’d ever heard of tea or cigarettes, and on beer and mead and wine before they knew about vodka. That was all very well for a foot soldier. He thought about flying his SB-2 smashed out of his skull. He grimaced. No, not a pretty picture.

  “Comrade Stalin reports heavy fighting on the frontier betw
een the peace-loving Soviet Union and the regime of Hitler’s jackal, Marshal Smigly-Ridz,” the newsreader said. That was code of sorts, if you knew how to read between the lines. Fierce fighting and stubborn fighting weren’t so bad. When they started talking about heavy fighting, the Devil’s grandmother had spilled the pisspot into the borscht.

  Well, that was nothing he didn’t already know. If things were going well, would he have had to get out of Poland while German shells cratered the runway from which he’d been flying?

  Across the table from him, Anastas Mouradian raised one dark eyebrow a few millimeters. The Armenian had no trouble understanding news reports, either. Sergei sometimes thought Armenians and Jews and people like that were born reading between the lines. He wondered why Russians weren’t. Some Russians didn’t even seem to know there were lines to read between.

  “Despite the Red Army’s displays of heroism, the campaign in the area illegally occupied by the Polish junta has not necessarily gone to the Soviet Union’s advantage in all respects, due to the Nazis’ treacherous intervention in a fight where they had no true interest.” The radio newsreader paused portentously. “Accordingly, Comrade Stalin finds that the situation has changed.”

  He paused again, making sure he had everyone’s attention. He did—all the officers waking up in the tent stared toward the radio. Curls of smoke rose from papirosi being smoked or held between index and middle fingers. Changed. In the middle of a war, there were few more ominous words. Changed how?

  The newsreader had the answer, straight from the General Secretary’s lips: “Up till this time, our dispute with the vile Polish clique has concerned only the border region they unjustly occupied. But, now that the jackals have invited the deadly German viper into their filthy burrow, they make it only too clear that they are a danger to all lovers of peace. This being so, we are no longer concerned with the border region alone. We shall punish the Smigly-Ridz regime as it deserves. Its very existence is a product of our unfortunate weakness during the civil wars following the glorious Soviet revolution. We shall make Poland—all of Poland—pay for its brazen effrontery.”