"He's careful, the way he puts things. I know him, so I can read between the lines," Witt said. "The blockheads the army has reading mail, they don't know crap from cabbage."
"They may seem dumb a lot of the time, but they're smarter than you make them out to be," Stoss said.
"How do you know?" Witt retorted. "Next letter you get will be the first."
Adi shrugged. "My folks died in a train crash when I was little. My grandfather raised me, but he died a few years ago, too. The Stosses never were a big family. Now there's me."
"No girlfriend?" Witt asked slyly.
Another shrug. "I had one. She didn't feel like giving me what I wanted before I headed off to training, and I told her what I thought about that. Haven't heard from her since, the lousy bitch."
The panzer commander set a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. "Some of 'em are like that, and damn all you can do about it. If they didn't have pussies, there'd be a bounty on 'em. Ought to be a bounty on some of 'em any which way."
"Well, you can sing that in church," Adi said. Witt asked no more questions. He just looked at Lieutenant Colonel Koch's grave one more time, shook his head, and walked off.
Theo asked no questions, either. Questions of that kind weren't his style. He'd served with Adi a lot longer than the new commander had, and had also noticed that the driver never got any mail. Stoss didn't seem to miss it; it was as if he knew he wouldn't.
If he had no family, if he'd told his girlfriend to piss up a rope… Well, hell, didn't he have any friends? He was a good guy. Theo thought so, anyway. Didn't anyone else in the whole wide world? Didn't anyone else like him well enough to send him a note saying I hope you're still in one piece?
Evidently not.
But why not?
Several possibilities had occurred to Theo. He'd long since decided which one he thought most likely, and it had nothing to do with singing in church. If the blackshirts ever came to ask him about it, he'd also decided he would deny everything as hard and as long as he could. Of course he would. You didn't tell the blackshirts anything about your buddies, not if you could help it. But Theo would have kept his mouth shut absent that ironclad injunction. He had a keen sense of the absurd, even if he didn't let other people see it very often. A working sense of the absurd often came in handy in the Third Reich. And if his conclusion didn't fit in well with the general preposterousness of life, he was damned if he could imagine one that would! SOMETIMES THE WORST THING you could do was imagine something. Sergeant Hideki Fujita discovered that painful truth for himself, as so many had before him. The idea of getting transferred to attack Vladivostok hadn't so much as crossed his mind till he and that other sergeant sat around chewing the fat and wasting time.
Once it got into his head, though, it wouldn't go away. It stayed there and stayed there, like an eyelash you couldn't rub out of your eye. Other units had been called away from the blocking position. It could happen to his regiment, too. When you were a soldier, anything that could happen could happen to you. It could, and sooner or later it probably would.
You didn't want to have thoughts like that. They meant that, if you kept at this trade long enough, you would stop a bullet, you would get ripped up by a shell fragment, you would get blasted into chunks of raw meat. How could you keep on soldiering if you kept worrying about such things?
How? Your own side would deal with you if you tried not to soldier, that was how. And if you found yourself in the middle of the trackless Siberian woods (well, not quite trackless-there was the railroad line that had sent the Japanese army blundering among the firs and spruces to begin with), your best chance-maybe your only chance-was to do your job like everybody else.
This was bad. Nobody in his right mind would have called it anything else. But soldiering had taught Fujita one thing, anyway: the difference between bad and worse was much bigger than the difference between good and better.
"My father fought at Port Arthur," Superior Private Hayashi said one afternoon. The squad huddled around a small, almost smokeless fire in the bottom of their trench. It wasn't snowing now, but it had been, and it looked as if it would start up again pretty soon, too. They had thick greatcoats and fur-lined gloves and Russian-style felt boots (although the ones they took from dead Red Army men were even better), but that didn't mean the cold didn't seep into a man's bones. Fire and hot tea or soup were the best weapons against it.
Yet even fire and tea were powerless against the chill that seeped into a man's head. "Two of my uncles did," Fujita said. "They never liked to talk about it afterwards. I didn't understand that till I went into the army myself. You can't tell somebody what combat's like till he's done it himself-and after that he doesn't need to hear it from you."
"Hai, Sergeant-san." Shinjiro Hayashi nodded. Well, of course a superior private would agree with his sergeant. A sergeant would knock your block off if you were crazy enough to do anything else. But then Hayashi added, "That's very well put."
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.