The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  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 Münster. 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 Münster—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 t
he 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.

  Chapter 22

  Luc Harcourt looked around. More and more poilus kept coming into the line. More and more tanks and other armored contraptions sheltered in groves or under camouflage netting not far behind it. “I think they really mean it this time.”

  The other members of his machine-gun crew shrugged in a unison that looked staged, all the more so as Pierre Joinville was small and swarthy while fair Tiny Villehardouin was anything but. Tiny said something incomprehensible, presumably in Breton. Joinville said something perfectly comprehensible, in southern-accented French: “The cons have meant it before. That doesn’t matter for shit. What matters is whether they can do it right for a change.”

  Tiny nodded, so either that was what he meant or it was something else he might have said. You never could tell with him. But he was strong as an ox and he’d go forward when he got the order, so who cared? You didn’t know what he was talking about? Big deal. As often as not, you didn’t want to know what a private was saying. That was one of Luc’s discoveries since becoming a corporal.

  “We’ve got a chance this time, I think,” he said. “Damn Boches don’t have their peckers up the way they did before they started fighting in Poland, too.”

  “It could be,” Joinville said: as much as a private was likely to give a corporal. Luc remembered that from his days with no rank at all. Oh, yes. The Gascon went on, “Other question is, do we have our peckers up now?”

  That was the question, all right. Its answer would also go a long way towards answering the other question, the one from the English play. To be or not to be? Luc glanced down at his hands. They were battered and scarred and filthy, the nails short and ragged. But they opened and closed at his command. They could yank the cork from a bottle of cognac or cup a girl’s soft, warm breast or knock down half a dozen Germans at five hundred meters with the Hotchkiss gun. They were marvelous things, marvelous.

  Hanging around in the trenches was pretty safe. Oh, you might be unlucky, but your odds were decent. But if the French advanced … There he’d be, out in the open, just waiting for a shell fragment or a machine-gun bullet to do something dreadful. And how much would his clever hands help then?

  They could slap on a wound bandage. They could give him a shot of morphine so he didn’t hurt so much. It seemed … inadequate.

  He hunted up Sergeant Demange. If anybody was likely to know what was going on, Demange was the man. He greeted Luc with his customary warmth: “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Love you, too, Sarge,” Luc said. Demange grunted and waited. He wouldn’t wait long. He’d start snarling—or worse. Luc hurried ahead: “Are we really going to give the Feldgraus one in the teeth?”

  “Sure as hell looks that way,” Demange answered. “Any other questions? No? Then piss off, why don’t yo
u?”

  Instead of pissing off, Luc asked, “How bad will it be?”

  “All things considered, I’d sooner get a blowjob,” the sergeant said, and lit a fresh Gitane.

  “Merci beaucoup.” Luc left. Behind him, Demange didn’t even bother laughing. And yet he’d found out what he needed to know. The attack was coming, and the sergeant wasn’t looking forward to it. Demange had done his attacking in 1918. The dose he’d got then cured him of eagerness forever after.

  Luc gauged the temper of the new fish instead. When the war first broke out—good God! was it really a year ago now?—he and his buddies had tiptoed into Germany, then tiptoed right back out again. They’d been waiting to get kicked in the teeth. As soon as the Boches were ready, they’d got what they were waiting for, too.

  The new guys weren’t intimidated by the Germans, or by the idea of advancing against them, the way Luc and his buddies had been. Or maybe their officers weren’t intimidated the way the fellows with the fancy kepis had been a year earlier. They thought they could go forward and win. That was half the battle right there. If you weren’t licked before you even set out, you had a chance.

  4 October 1939. 0530. The day. The hour. Luc had his machine-gun team ready. Villehardouin and Joinville were pretty much self-winding. They tolerated Luc not least because he didn’t try to pretend they couldn’t do it without him. They knew damn well they could. So did he.

  It was chilly and drizzly in the wee small hours, but nowhere near enough rain came down to bog the tanks that had rattled forward under cover of darkness. At 0435, right on schedule, the French artillery roared to life. “See how you like that, cocksuckers!” Luc yelled through high-explosive thunder.

  German artillery started shooting back inside of five minutes. Some of the Boches’ shells went after the French batteries. Others pounded the front line. The Germans knew their onions. A big barrage meant the French were going to follow it up. The worse the Germans could hurt them, the better … if you were a German.