The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  Fujita smiled before he realized he’d done it. When a smart kid said you’d said something well, of course you were tickled. Yes, he might be flattering you—he knew where his bowl of rice came from, all right. He’d found a good way to go about it, though. Fujita’s voice lacked some of the growl he usually put into it speaking to inferiors when he said, “So what did your father tell you about Port Arthur?”

  “He never talked about it much, either, not till just before I had to go in for basic training,” Hayashi said. “Then he said he hoped I never ended up in a spot like that. He said the Russian artillery was bad—”

  “That sure hasn’t changed!” somebody else exclaimed. All the soldiers nodded. No matter what other mistakes the Russians made, their artillery was always trouble.

  “And he said that our machine guns fired right over the heads of our men when they were attacking the Russian forts,” Hayashi went on. “Right over their heads. Sometimes our gunners would shoot our men in the back.”

  “It happens,” Fujita said. “Shigata ga nai.” Life was hard to begin with. Soldiering was a hard part of life. If the generals decided killing some of the troops on their own side would help the rest take an objective, they’d do it without thinking twice. It was just part of the cost of doing business. He could understand that. A sergeant sometimes had to make those choices, too, if on a smaller scale.

  “Hai. It does happen.” Hayashi had seen enough to leave him no doubts on that score. “But, please excuse me, Sergeant-san—I don’t want it to happen to me.”

  “Well, who does?” Fujita said. “Me, I aim to die at the age of a hundred and three, shot by an outraged husband.”

  The soldiers all laughed. Fujita couldn’t remember where he’d heard that line before. Somewhere. It didn’t matter. It was funny. When you heard something funny, of course you used it yourself and passed it along.

  “Eee, I like that,” a private said. “An outraged husband with a pretty young wife, neh?”

  “Oh, yes,” Fujita said. “What’s the point to getting shot for screwing some ugly old woman, eh?”

  No one saw any. As soldiers will, the men started talking about young women, pretty women, women they’d known, women they claimed they’d known, women they wished they’d known. Fujita told a little truth and more than a few lies. He figured the other soldiers were doing the same thing. Well, so what? Talk like that made the time go by. In their foxholes and trenches farther north, the Russians were probably telling the same stories.

  As if to remind the Japanese that they hadn’t gone away, Red Army gunners greeted the next day’s dawn with an artillery barrage. Bombers flying above the ugly gray clouds dropped tonnes of explosives through them. They were bombing blind, and none of their presents fell anywhere close to the front. For all kinds of reasons, that didn’t break Fujita’s heart. He was in no danger himself. And the soft-living men who called themselves soldiers but never saw the trenches—the clerks and the cooks and the staff officers—got a taste of what war was like. He hoped they enjoyed it.

  A couple of days after that, the regiment got pulled out of the line. The first place they went was to a delousing station. Like any Japanese, Fujita was glad to soak in almost unbearably hot water. He was even gladder the Russian bombers had missed the bathhouse. If the soap smelled powerfully of medicine, so what? Getting his clothes baked to kill lice and nits was less delightful, but he could put up with it.

  Some of the soldiers thought they were going home. Some people could smell pig shit and think of pork cutlets. Fujita was willing—even eager—to be surprised, which didn’t mean he expected it.

  The men marched off to the west, toward the Ussuri River and the border with Manchukuo. The officers said nothing about where they were headed, or why. Maybe they didn’t know, either. More likely, they didn’t want the troops to find out till they couldn’t do anything about it but complain.

  A small flotilla of river steamers waited by the riverbank. They’d all seen better decades. Some of them looked as if they’d seen a better century. Sergeant Fujita’s company and another filed aboard one of the river-boats. They filled it to overflowing. It waddled out into the stream and headed south. Fujita feared he knew what that meant … which, in the grand scheme of things, mattered not at all.

  Spatters of snow chased the steamers. The clouds overhead remained thick and dark. For that, the sergeant thanked whatever weather kami ruled in these parts. Clear skies would have let Russian airplanes spot the steamers and shoot them up at their leisure. Each boat mounted a machine gun at the bow and another at the stern. From everything Fujita had seen, they wouldn’t do a sen’s worth of good in case of a real attack.

  He said as much to Hayashi. The conscripted student looked back at him. “What difference does it make? If the Russians don’t shoot us from the air now, they’ll shoot us on the ground pretty soon.”

  “Maybe they won’t,” Fujita answered. You had to look on the bright side of things. That was about as far on the bright side as he could make himself look, though.

  “Hai. Honto. Maybe they won’t. Maybe our own machine gunners will do it for them, the way they did in my father’s day.” Hayashi had his share of cynicism, or maybe more than his share.

  “Your father made it. So did my uncles,” Fujita said. Again, just surviving seemed like optimism. The steamers lumbered south through the snow flurries.

  PERONNE WAS A NORTHERN TOWN that had kept some of its brick-and-stone walls. German bombs and French artillery—or maybe it was the other way around—had done horrible things to them. Big chunks were bitten out of the church of St. Jean. Despite the chill of crisp fall days, the stench of death fouled the air.

  In the French drive to the east, Luc Harcourt had seen—and smelled—a lot of towns and villages like this one. He smelled bad himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. Joinville and Villehardouin were just as grimy and unshaven and odorous as he was. So were all the other poilus pushing the Fritzes back.

  Joinville pointed to a parade of sorts going through the streets of Peronne. “By Jesus, there’s something you don’t see every day!”

  “Too bad,” Tiny Villehardouin added in his bad Breton-flavored French.

  Luc Harcourt thought it was too bad, too. The locals were forcing a dozen or so young women to march along bare to the waist, their breasts bouncing at every step. Some had had their heads shaved. Others, more humiliatingly still, wore scalps half bare. One was very visibly pregnant.

  People yelled at them as they went: “Whores!” “Cunts!” “Scumbags of the Boches!” Rotten vegetables flew through the air. No one seemed ready to cast the first stone, though.

  “I bet this happened after we chased the Germans out the last time, too,” Joinville said. The Gascon had his eye on one of the girls in particular. His chances were probably pretty good, too. If she’d sleep with a German, or a bunch of Germans, why wouldn’t she sleep with a Frenchman?

  “Not with the same broads, I bet,” Luc said. Joinville laughed so hard, the Hotchkiss gun on his back almost fell off. Villehardouin, who was burdened with the tripod, fixed his crewmate’s straps.

  The rumble of aircraft engines swelling out of the east made Luc’s head rise like that of a dog scenting danger. If those were Stukas, he wanted to find somewhere else to be, and in a hurry. Another country, by choice.

  But this flight wasn’t full of vulture-winged dive bombers. In fact, the flying machines looked like something left over from his father’s war. They were biplanes with open cockpits. Antiaircraft guns opened up on them. Black puffs of smoke marked shell bursts. Some came quite close to the planes, but the old-fashioned, ungainly machines buzzed on.

  Luc had trouble taking them seriously even when they swooped down on Peronne. But then, all of a sudden, it sounded as if God were firing giant machine guns up in the sky. The townsfolk suddenly lost interest in tormenting their wayward women. They ran, screaming. Luc wanted to do the same thing. Only the fear of losi
ng his men’s respect forever held him in place. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled, and suited action to word.

  Both machine gun and tripod clanked as Joinville and Villehardouin followed suit. That fearsome ratatat-tat grew louder yet as the German biplanes neared. They’re doing it with their engines, Luc realized. It was the same kind of trick as the sirens in a Stuka’s landing gear. It was designed to make people afraid. And, as with most things German, it did what it was designed for. Did it ever!

  The biplanes carried real machine guns: Luc saw them spitting fire. And bombs fell from under their wings: not the monsters Stukas could haul, the ones that pierced reinforced concrete and wrecked fortresses, but even so.… Luc rolled himself into a ball like a hedgehog. He only wished he had real spines.

  Bullets sparked off brickwork and cobblestones. Bombs bounced him as if he were a basketball. A round clanged off metal somewhere much too close. And then the biplanes were gone—he hoped.

  He needed a moment to take stock of himself. Both arms work? Check. Both legs? Check again. No holes? No blood? No pain? No and no and no. “Fuck me,” he said. “I’m all right.”

  Then he looked around to see how his buddies were doing. Villehardouin seemed to be going through a checklist like the one he’d just used himself. The big Breton nodded and gave a thumbs-up. Joinville had taken off the Hotchkiss gun and was looking it over. “Look!” he said, pointing to a dent and a lead splash on one of the iron cooling fins at the base of the barrel. “It hit here and ricocheted. If it hadn’t ricocheted, it would have gone into my back.”

  “Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” Luc took his water bottle off his belt. “Here. Have some of this.”

  “Pinard?” Joinville asked, taking the flask.

  “Better—applejack,” Luc said.

  “Ah. Merci, mon ami.” The Gascon’s throat worked. After a couple of swallows, he handed Villehardouin the bottle. The big man also took a knock. Then he gave the water bottle back to Luc. Luc drank, too, before he stowed it on his belt. He needed a little distilled courage, or at least an anesthetic.

  Luc looked around again, this time for the soldiers who’d been hauling the Hotchkiss gun’s ammunition. None of the bullets from the biplanes had hit the aluminum strips of cartridges, which was also lucky. They might have started going off like ammo inside a burning tank, which wouldn’t have been healthy for anyone within a few hundred meters.

  But one of the troopers was methodically bandaging his calf. Red soaked through the white cotton gauze. “How bad is it, Émile?” Luc asked.

  “Hurts like a motherfucker, but I don’t think it’ll kill me,” Émile answered. “Hell, if you get me a stick I bet I can walk on it.”

  “Chances are they’ll send you home, then,” Luc said.

  “Not fucking likely—I grew up in Verdun,” Émile said. The eastern town had held in the last war, but fallen in this one.

  “Oh.” Luc had forgotten that, if he ever knew it. “Well, they’ll take you out of the line for a while, anyway.”

  “It’ll do,” Émile said. “I only wish to Christ they’d done it sooner.”

  Loud shouts came from around the corner. That was Sergeant Demange’s voice. Of course he’d live through a strafing and a dive bombing. Luc didn’t think anything could kill him. He’d probably never been born, but manufactured in some armaments plant during the last war. Maybe he had a serial number tattooed on his ass—or stamped into it.

  Now he was trying to pull order out of chaos. He bawled for medics, for stretcher-bearers, for Peronne’s firemen, for water, for anything else blasted houses and wounded people were likely to need. He might have restored something resembling calm, too, if the church of St. Jean hadn’t chosen that moment to fall in on itself with a crash.

  Shrieks from inside announced that people had sheltered there against the German biplanes. Sergeant Demange effortlessly shifted gears. “Come on!” he yelled to whoever might be listening. “Let get the sorry sons of bitches out!”

  “Let’s go,” Luc told his men—or all of them except Joinville, who’d somehow disappeared after his slug of apple brandy. “We’ll do what we can.”

  They followed him. He was proud of that. Till he’d got a corporal’s stripes, no one had ever wanted to follow him. Maybe the rank helped make the man. He didn’t feel like complaining any which way.

  The church wasn’t burning: a small thing on the scale of miracles, but Luc would take it. He flung aside stones and chunks of brickwork and tugged at beams. His hands were hard, but he tore them up anyhow. And the first woman he uncovered didn’t need help: falling masonry had made sure she never would. He turned her over so he wouldn’t have to look at what was left of her face.

  He and the other soldiers—and some townsfolk—did pull several people out alive. That made him feel a little better. Joinville showed up about twenty minutes after he started heaving wreckage. “Where the hell were you?” Luc growled.

  “I found that broad,” the Gascon said with a lazy smile. “Never did it with nobody with no hair up top before. Didn’t matter—she had plenty down below.” He set to work as if he’d been there all along.

  “Merde! I ought to kick your sorry ass!” Luc didn’t know whether to laugh or to pound the soldiers’s thick head with a brick.

  He ended up laughing. Life is too short for anything else. Joinville’s presence probably wouldn’t have meant life for anyone who’d died. That being so, why resent him for tearing off a piece when he saw the chance? Because I didn’t get to, goddammit. Yes, that one answered itself, didn’t it? Luc bent to the task once more.

  * * *

  HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WATCHED the Hs-123s land one after another. The biplanes were as near obsolete as made no difference. But they could still carry the fight to the enemy, even if Stukas could do more and do it better.

  Those Henschels could take it, too. One of them had a hole in the aluminum skin of the fuselage big enough to throw a cat through. It flew, and landed, as if it had just come off the assembly line. Rudel didn’t like to think what that kind of hit would have done to his Ju-87. Nothing good—he was sure of that.

  Groundcrew men pushed the biplanes toward revetments after they shut down their engines. Before long, the Henschels would fill all of them. Hans-Ulrich’s squadron, and the Stukas the pilots flew, were heading east to teach the Red Russians a thing or two.

  Sergeant Dieselhorst ambled up. “I was talking to one of the guys in the radio shack,” he said. “Sounds like they gave that Peronne place a good pounding.”

  “All right by me,” Rudel said. “But they can’t carry cannon under their wings, you know—not a chance in the world.”

  “Ja, ja.” Dieselhorst nodded. “But the scuttlebutt is, the Ivans have more panzers than England and France put together.”

  “Well, if they do, we’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t last.” Hans-Ulrich spoke with the confidence—with the arrogance—of youth. Dieselhorst, an older man, smiled and nodded and said not another word.

  The Stukas flew off to the east two days later. The sun was rising in Hans-Ulrich’s face when he rose from the airstrip in France and setting behind him when he put down on the smooth, grassy runway at Tempel-hof, just outside of Berlin. He and Dieselhorst both eagerly hopped out of their Stuka; long flights were tough on the bladder.

  Rudel was happier once he’d eased himself, but only for a little while. Then he noticed the armored cars crewed by Waffen-SS men near the edge of the airport. Their turrets were aimed at the just-arrived bombers. “What’s that all about?” he asked.

  “What do you think?” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. “They don’t want us to bomb up and go after the Chancellery.”

  “That’s crazy!” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed. “We wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “They’re kind of jumpy right now,” Dieselhorst said dryly.

  “You can’t blame them, after … whatever happened here,” Hans-Ulrich said. He didn’t know the details of th
e plot against Hitler: only that it had failed. He was glad it had. Treason had brought down the Reich at the end of the last war, and now it was raising its ugly head again? If it was, it needed to be slapped down, and slapped down hard.

  “We aren’t going to do anything like that. They’ve already been through us once to make sure we don’t.” Dieselhorst looked around and lowered his voice before going on, “And they didn’t need to do that.”

  “They thought they did. You can see why. If the Führer couldn’t trust the generals right under his eye, how can the Reich trust anybody without checking him out real well?” Rudel said.

  “Sir …” Dieselhorst hesitated again, much longer this time. He finally shook his head and started to turn away. “Oh, never mind.”

  “Spit it out,” Hans-Ulrich told him.

  “You’ll spit in my eye if I do.”

  “By God, I won’t.” Rudel raised his right hand with index and middle fingers extended and slightly crooked, as if taking an oath in court. “We watch each other’s backs. Always.”

  “Always? Well, I hope so.” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s jaw worked, as if he were chewing on that. After another hesitation, he picked his words with obvious care: “You know, sir, there’s a difference between not fancying the Führer and being a traitor to the Reich.”

  “No there isn’t!” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed.

  Dieselhorst’s chuckle held no mirth whatever. “I knew you’d say that. But a devil of a lot of people think there is. That’s the biggest part of what this ruckus was all about.”

  “If you try to overthrow the Führer of the German Reich in wartime, what are you but a backstabber?” Rudel demanded, as stern and certain as his father was about the tenets of their faith. If he hadn’t promised Dieselhorst … But he had, and his word was good.

  “Some people would say, a German patriot,” the sergeant replied. “I don’t know that that’s true. But I don’t know that it isn’t, either. What I do know is, there’s usually more than one way to look at things.”