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 losing his men's respect forever held him in place. "Hit the dirt!" he yelled, and suited action to word.