One of the poilus had a concertina. When he started playing it, several other Frenchmen sang with more enthusiasm than tune. Walsh knew just enough of the language to recognize a dirty word or two every line. The barmaids pretended to be shocked. Their acting might have been even worse than the soldiers' singing.
Half a dozen military policemen stormed into the joint. The concertina squalled to a stop. The French MPs started hauling poilus out into the street. Then they grabbed one of the maybe-Czechs. He was in French uniform. He said something to them. It didn't help-they dragged him toward the door. Then he hit one of them in the face. The Frenchman went down with a groan. His buddy, unperturbed, hauled out a blackjack and coshed the Slav, who also crumpled. He might not have wanted to go wherever they were taking people, but he would.
Walsh's hand tightened on his mug of piss-sour, piss-thin beer. They wouldn't haul him off without a fight.
They didn't haul him off. One of them nodded his way, shrugged Gallically, and said, "Eh bien, Monsieur le Anglais?" He pointed to the flattened MP and soldier, as if to say, Well, what can you do?
"Just leave me alone, that's all." Walsh didn't loosen his grip on the mug. He didn't want to provoke the military police, but he also didn't want them taking him anywhere.
By the time they got through, they'd more than half emptied the dive. "Wot'll it be, mate?" the barman asked Walsh in English he might have picked up from an Australian in the last war.
"Another mug of the same." For what Walsh felt like spending, the wine would be urine, too, and the whiskey or brandy loaded with enough fusel oil in them to make him wish he were dead come morning.
"Right y'are." The barman was opening a bottle when Walsh heard the scream of a big shell in the air. Two wars' worth of reflexes threw him flat on the floor a split second before the shell burst in the street outside.
Plywood covered the plate-glass windows. But how much did that help when a 150-maybe even a 170-blew up far too close? Blast shoved in the plywood-and brought down part of the roof. Fist-sized chunks of jagged metal slammed through wood and glass. Not so many knifelike glass splinters spun through the air as would have without the plywood, but one as long as a pencil buried itself in the side of the bar about three inches in front of Walsh's nose.
More shells screamed in. He rolled himself into a ball, not that that would do him any good if his luck was out. Maybe it wasn't. None of the others hit close enough to do the tavern any more harm. After an eternity of ten or fifteen minutes, the bombardment stopped.
Walsh had to make himself unroll. He felt like a sowbug that had just escaped an elephant. As he dazedly picked himself up, he realized not everybody in the little bar had been so lucky. If he wanted that beer, he would have to get it himself. The barman's blood splashed broken bottles behind the bar. The stink of the spilled potables almost drowned the butcher-shop odor of blood.
Other soldiers were down, too. Walsh did what he could for them, which mostly consisted of pulling tables and chairs off them and using their wound dressings. He hoped he helped a little.
The door had been blasted open. The door, not to put too fine a point on it, had been blasted off its hinges, and lay in the middle of the floor. He stepped over it and out into the street, which now had a crater big enough to hold a horse. It was filling up with water from a broken main.
Staggering away, Walsh realized one thing was absolutely true-and absolutely terrifying. The front was Paris. • • • THE FRONT WAS THE USSURI RIVER. Northeastern Manchukuo was about as different from the Mongolian border region as anything Sergeant Hideki Fujita could imagine. Gone were waterless wastes with camels and wild asses running through them. Great forests of pine towered toward the sky here. Rain-and sometimes snow-poured down out of the sky. Japanese soldiers who'd been here longer than Fujita said tigers prowled these woods. He didn't know about that. He'd seen no sign of them himself. But he wouldn't have been surprised.
He did know there were Russians on the far side of the Ussuri. That was the same here as it had been 800 kilometers to the west.
Not far east of the Ussuri, the Russians' Trans-Siberian Railroad ran south toward Vladivostok. If Japan could get astride the railroad, the USSR's eastern port would fall into Japanese hands like a ripe fruit.
Fujita crouched in a log-roofed dugout artistically camouflaged with dirt and pine boughs and, now, the latest snowfall. He peered across the Ussuri toward the Red Army positions on the far bank. He couldn't see as much as he would have liked. The other side of the border was as thickly wooded as this one-and the Russians, damn them, were at least as good as his own people at hiding what they were up to.
"What do you see, Sergeant?" Lieutenant Kenji Hanafusa asked.
"Trees, sir. Snow," Fujita answered. "Not much else. No tigers. No Russians, either."
"They're there," the lieutenant said.
"Oh, yes, sir," Fujita agreed. "They're everywhere. The Mongols would have fallen over years ago if the Russians weren't propping them up."
"No, the Russians are really everywhere," Hanafusa said. "A quarter of the way around the world, they're fighting the Poles and the Germans. And that's why we're here. When things get cooking on this front, they'll be too busy in the west to do anything about it."
"Yes, sir," Fujita said resignedly. Japanese officers always figured enlisted men were hayseeds. The sergeant had figured out why his unit was transferring from the Mongolian border to the northeast as soon as it got the order. He knew what a map looked like. And if he'd never slept in a bed with a frame and legs till he got conscripted…Lieutenant Hanafusa didn't need to know that.
"As soon as the weather warms up and the snow melts, I think we'll move," Hanafusa said.
"Sounds good to me, sir," Fujita said. You needed as many clothes here in the winter as you did in Mongolia, and that was saying something.
Something buzzed by high overhead: an airplane. "Is that one of ours or one of theirs?" Hanafusa asked.
"Let me see, sir." Fujita raised the field glasses. The plane was too far off to let him make out whether it bore the Rising Sun or the Soviet red star. But he recognized the outline, and spoke confidently: "It's one of ours, sir."
"Well, good," Hanafusa said. Both sides sent up reconnaissance planes: each wanted to see what the other was up to. Every so often, one side would send up fighters to chase off the spies or shoot them down. Sometimes the other side would send up fighters of its own. Then the men on the ground could watch dogfights and cheer on the planes they thought were theirs.
Sergeant Fujita hoped the Russians would open up with their antiaircraft guns. He didn't want them hitting the Japanese plane-that was the last thing he had in mind. But if they started shooting at it, his side could see where they'd positioned their guns. That would be worth knowing when the big fight started.
He wasn't much surprised when the guns stayed silent. The Russians were better at hiding their artillery till they really needed it than he'd imagined anyone could be. If you didn't think they had any guns nearby, half a dozen batteries were zeroed in on you. If you thought you knew about those half a dozen batteries, four wouldn't be where you expected them to be and you'd missed another half a dozen. You wouldn't find out about them, either, not till the Russians needed to show them to you.
He said as much to Lieutenant Hanafusa. Not all of the Kwantung Army had as much experience with the Russians as the men who'd fought them in Mongolia did. These fellows who'd been on the Ussuri or over by the Amur…well, what did they know? Not much, not so far as Fujita could see.
But Hanafusa nodded. "Thank you, Sergeant," he said. "We've seen that ourselves. There have been skirmishes along this frontier, too, you know. Even the Korean Army got into the act-but they had to ask us for help when the Russians turned out to have more than they expected."