After a brief pause to look around, the response came quietly, "Not even if Hitler makes this his summer home."
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto glared disapprovingly at the younger officer who had directed the invasion of the Philippines. "You bring me news of this failure after such a great success in Pearl Harbor? You should be filled with shame. The enemy forces were so much greater in Hawaii than those that you faced, yet our victory there was beyond our greatest hopes. And you, facing resistance less than your own numbers, dare to tell me of your defeat?"
"We accomplished much to weaken them, my admiral. It was not a complete failure."
"And we lost even more!" screamed Yamamoto.
"We also learned a great deal from our attack."
"Oh? So what do you now suggest?"
"To take what we learned and use it effectively. I made a vow on the blood of my ancestors."
"A vow?" The admiral looked thoughtfully at his officer. "Tell me this vow."
As we left the island, I looked back and swore: "I shall return."
Shock and Awe
Harry Turtledove
The lowlands are soft. The hills are hard. The rule is as old as time. The lowlands yield. The hills resist. So it has ever been. The lowlands welcome. The hills shun. So it will always be.
And when the soft lowlands yield and welcome, the hard hills have to punish. For the hills and the lowlands are locked together in unbreakable embrace; they are two halves of one flesh, even if the lowlands have a wandering eye.
Down came the raiders to burn and to steal and to scourge out those who had been welcomed and to chastise the faithless ones who had welcomed them. The lowlands had cozied up to the latest conquerors. The hills raised up the latest rebel chieftain to try to push them into the sea.
When he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple. The garrison soldiers tried to take him then. They discovered, as others had before them and yet others would in centuries still to come, that the only thing worse than not trying is trying and failing. He rose against them, and his followers with him, and tried to drown the lowlands in blood.
Lowlanders knew what to do in times like those. It was not as if they had not seen them before. The rich and the accommodating fled their farms and took refuge in the cities, where the conquerors they had been accommodating would protect them from their unloving upcountry cousins. For the conquerors needed collaborators-almost-as much as collaborators needed the conquerors. This too is a rule oft seen in other lands and other times.
Some of the rich-fewer of the accommodating-did not run fast enough. Few crimes are worse than bad timing, and few more harshly punished. How the hillmen howled! "Generation of vipers!" they cried. "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come! Repent, you-for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!"
And they sent those they caught to heaven, or wherever they went, with the sword and the axe and the rope and such other tools as an aroused ingenuity might suggest. And their chieftain looked at what they had done, and he saw that it was good. "Follow me," he said, "and I will make you reapers of men."
They howled louder and harder after that. They reaped men and burned fields and vineyards and cut down olive groves. "Now also is the axe laid unto the root of the trees!" they cried. "Thus every tree which does not bring forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire."
Trees were not all that went into the fire. So did many of the rich, and their wives, and their mistresses, and their children-legitimate and otherwise. "Happy shall he be," sang the hillmen, "who takes and dashes your little ones against the stones." By that measure, many hillmen were happy indeed.
They came down on a city, there in the plain. It was closed against them, of course. Its walls rose up five or six times as tall as a man. Up at the top of them, the defenders pointed out at the ragtag and bobtail force that presumed to stand against them, the greatest power in the world. Some of the defenders laughed. And why would they not? Those walls were thick as well as tall. The hillmen had no siege train. A siege train was the mark of a civilized army, not hairy, unwashed, circumcised barbarians.
The rebel leader-the Son of God, some of his fanatics named him in their madness and arrogance-called up to them, "Judge not, lest you be judged." Hardly any of them understood him. He spoke only the guttural local language, not the civilized tongues, the tongues of the West. If he grunted and brayed like that, how could anything he had to say possibly matter? Even the handful who could follow his worthless jargon laughed at his presumption.
A few of his men, wild with rage, tried to storm the frowning walls. The defenders' weapons smashed them. They were brave. Indeed, they were wild to give up their lives for the greater glory of their leader's Father. But courage would take even the bravest men only so far. It would not take them to the top of that wall.
He called them back. "I came not with peace but with a sword," he told them, and he drew one, and he brandished it. "He that is not with me is against me. For we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. Take to yourselves the whole armor of God so that you may be able to withstand them in the evil day."
"How shall we go up?" they cried.
"Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first," he replied, and added, "Narrow is the way, and few there are that find it." And he met with his twelve chief followers, and they talked till after the sun went down.
Everything was quiet in the night. When day came again, the hillmen raged against the city-raged against it and were beaten back. Quiet returned on the second night. On the third day, the rebels once more surged like a restless sea. On the third night, quiet came again-and the defenders relaxed something of their vigilance. Quietly still, hillmen thrust stakes in between the stones of the wall, and used the ladders they thus made to mount to the very top.
Yes, on the third night they were risen, and they gained the wall, and they gained the city, and great was the slaughter therein. "This is the day the Lord has made!" they cried, and they killed the defenders, and they killed the collaborators, and they killed anyone else who happened to get in their way, and they put the place to the torch. And then, with a shout of, "He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the meat from their seats, and exalted those of low degree," they-and the Son of God-melted back into the hills.
The transport made its slow way into the harbor. Gulls wheeled overhead, skrawking for a handout. More transports followed the first. Warships flanked them, ready to pounce in case fanatics in small boats tried to hurl fire into them, killing at the cost of their own lives.
On the deck of the lead transport, Marcus looked ahead with interest. The green plains seemed reasonably familiar. The forbidding brown hills beyond them? No. Marcus had joined the army when he turned eighteen. It was that or spend the rest of his days staring at the north end of a southbound mule. He was still a good-natured, smiling kid… unless you happened to be the enemy, in which case you were in more trouble than you knew what to do with.
One of his buddies bumped up against him. "Watch where you're putting your big, smelly feet, Lucius," he said.
Lucius told him something that had to do with his mother. Lucius had got a girl in trouble, and gone into the army instead of facing her father. He was short and stocky, where Marcus had half a head on him and was on the lean side. Apart from their build, they both could have been stamped from the same tough mold. Lucius looked out toward the hills, too. "It's not much like Europe, is it?" he remarked.