Hitler's War (32 page)

He was freezing his ass off just the same. You had to go out on patrol, freezing or not. If you didn’t, the Russians or the Mongols would make you sorry. The Russians were used to cold weather—like what Hokkaido got, this stuff blew down from Siberia. The Mongols were used to it, too. And the Mongols were as sneaky, and as dangerous, as so many poisonous snakes. They could slither through openings where you didn’t think there were any.

Sergeant Fujita looked at his watch. If it hadn’t frozen and quit moving, he still had more than an hour out here before his relief came.
“Zakennayo!”
he muttered. That felt like forever.

At last, though, a superior private named Suzuki found him out in the middle of the blowing snow. Suzuki wore as much winter gear as Fujita, and a white camouflage smock on top of it all. He looked miserably
cold just the same. But, cold or not, he said the magic words: “I relieve you, Sergeant.”

“Good,” Fujita said. The howling wind grabbed the world and tried to swirl it away. “What’s going on back at the camp?”

“Somebody from regimental headquarters is there,” Suzuki said.

“Oh, yeah?” Automatic suspicion filled Fujita’s voice. Like any veteran noncom, he distrusted any break with routine. He had his reasons, too. “What does the guy want? Are we going to have to try and attack the Mongols and the Russians again? They’ve got more tanks and better artillery than we do.
And
they hold the high ground.”

None of that would matter a sen’s worth if the powers that be in Mukden or in Tokyo decided to send the guys at the pointy end of the bayonet into action once more. Fujita knew it only too well. And Superior Private Suzuki only shrugged. “I can’t tell you anything about that, Sergeant,” he answered. “The guy got there just when I was starting out here.”

“I’d better go find out, then,” Fujita said. “Try to stay warm. If you want to build up a wall of snow to keep the wind from blowing straight through you, nobody will say boo.”

“Maybe I will,” Suzuki said. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Is it ever!” Fujita headed back toward the tents that housed his company. Halfway there, he tried to get a cigarette going. He soon gave it up as a bad job. He had plenty of practice lighting up in a strong wind, but this one defeated him.

Getting under canvas did let him light a match. He gratefully sucked in smoke. Then he said, “Suzuki was going on that somebody from regimental HQ showed up here.”

“That’s right, Sergeant-
san
,” one of the privates in the tent said. “People say we’re pulling out of here.”

“What, the company?” Fujita asked. “I won’t be sorry—I’ll say that. We’ve been bumping noses with the Mongols and the Russians too damn long.”

“Not just the company—the whole regiment. Maybe everybody on this whole front,” the private answered. “That’s what people are saying, anyhow.” The disclaimer let him off the hook in case the rumors he dished out proved nothing but a bunch of moonshine.

“The regiment? The whole front?” That was so much more than Sergeant Fujita had expected, he needed a minute to take it all in. “If we leave, where do we go next? Back to Japan?”
If you’re going to wish, wish for the moon
, he thought.

“I’m very sorry, Sergeant-
san
, but I don’t know.” The private—Nakayama, his name was—sounded not only sorry but apprehensive. Privates got knocked around when sergeants wanted to know things and they didn’t have the answers handy.

Had Fujita been in a bad mood, he might have hit Nakayama a couple of times to make himself feel better. But the sheer scope of what was going on left him more awed than angry. And walloping a private because of rumors wasn’t exactly fair—which wouldn’t have stopped Fujita if he really felt like doing it.

“I’m sure the captain will tell me in the morning,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant-
san
. Of course he will,” Nakayama said quickly. He and the other privates in the tent let out almost identical sighs of relief. Sergeant Fujita affected not to notice them. He’d been a private himself once upon a time. He remembered what looking up at a sergeant-ogre was like. Discipline would suffer if this bunch of conscripts realized that, though. In the gloom, none of them could see him smile.

Sure enough, Captain Hasegawa summoned Fujita and the company’s other senior noncoms first thing in the morning. Without preamble, the company commander said, “We are leaving the Mongolian frontier region and redeploying to eastern Manchukuo.”

“Where will the redeployment take us, sir?” Sergeant Fujita asked. If it was to Mukden—the capital—or Harbin or some other big city, that wasn’t so bad. It was a lot better than staying stuck on the edge of Mongolia.
And what isn’t?
Fujita thought. Unfortunately, that had an answer.
If the regiment got shipped up to the Amur frontier with Russia, it just traded one miserable spot for another.

“I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that,” the company commander said. “No one has told me, not yet. Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you till we were well away from the border. The same reason applies in both cases: security. We don’t want to take the chance that the Mongols or the Russians would seize you and squeeze you. No matter how honorable you wanted to be, you might not manage to kill yourself in time.”

“I understand, sir. Please excuse my stupidity.” Fujita bowed his head in embarrassment not far from shame.

Captain Hasegawa didn’t come down on him as hard as he expected. “It’s all right, Sergeant,” the officer said. “The courier who brought me the news also had to explain the facts of life to me, you might say. Make sure you have your men ready to move out when I give the word, that’s all.”

“Yes, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir.” Fujita bowed again, this time gratefully. The company commander hadn’t made him lose face—had, in fact, gone out of his way to let Fujita keep it. You had to repay that kind of consideration with loyalty.

The order to abandon the position they’d defended for so long came that afternoon. Retreat often meant a loss of face, too. Not for Fujita, not this time: he was only obeying the orders he got from his superiors. But wouldn’t Japan itself be embarrassed if it abandoned land to which it had asserted a claim?

“They’ll probably say it was Manchukuo’s claim, not ours,” Superior Private Hayashi predicted as the company marched through the drifted snow toward regimental headquarters. “That way, we aren’t responsible for it.”

“Makes sense,” Fujita said. Having an educated man in the squad came in handy now and then. Of course, without Japan there would have been no such country as Manchukuo. But that didn’t have much to
do with anything. Blaming the hapless Chinese and Manchus was much easier than blaming the mother country. And if the Emperor of Manchukuo didn’t like it, too bad.

Trucks waited at the headquarters. Seeing them made Sergeant Fujita realize how serious Japan was about getting its men away from this stretch of the border. Japan wasn’t a motorized country like Germany or the United States. It had to save its vehicles for really important things. If getting out of western Manchuria was this important…

Away rumbled the trucks, north and a little east. “Hailar,” Fujita said even before his own machine set out. “We’ve got to be going to Hailar.” That miserable Mongolian town was one of the two railheads closest to the disputed areas. The other, Arshaan, lay to the southeast.

Maps showed roads across this endless steppe. They were at best dirt tracks. At this time of year, with snow deep on the ground, whether you were on the road was often a matter of opinion. The truck carrying Fujita and his squad rumbled past another one that had overturned. Maybe the driver had tried to corner too fast. Maybe he’d run into a ditch. He would end up in trouble any which way.

Much the biggest and most modern building in Hailar was the railway depot. A few natives in sheepskin coats stared at the trucks that could go almost anywhere far faster than any horse ever foaled. What did they think, watching the modern world roll through their ancient town? Actually, what they thought hardly mattered. The modern world was here whether they liked it or not.

A train that would go east stopped at the depot—stopped a little past it, in fact, because snow and ice on the rails meant the brakes didn’t grab as well as they would have most of the time. Some soldiers were already aboard, and had come this far west before starting east again. Fujita’s unit left the cars packed as tight as tinned fish—the only way the Army seemed to know how to travel.

Well
, the sergeant thought,
we won’t be cold any more
. Each car
had its own stove. And so many men stuffed the cars, the stoves might prove afterthoughts. Body heat would be plenty to keep everybody warm.

Slowly, the train started to roll again. Fujita still didn’t know where he was going. He shrugged—being a sergeant, he had room to do that. What difference did it make. He’d get there whether he knew or not. Then he’d do…whatever needed doing.

C
haim Weinberg shivered in a trench. The war on the Ebro seemed to have frozen solid. The whole Spanish Civil War seemed to have frozen solid. The Soviet Union wasn’t sending aid to the Republic any more—Stalin was using the planes and tanks and guns himself. After the broader war broke out, a surge of aid had come from France and England, who’d ignored the Republican cause before. Now, with the Low Countries conquered and France herself invaded, they were ignoring it again.

The only good news was, Hitler and Mussolini were also ignoring General Sanjurjo’s Spanish Fascists. With the Royal Navy and the French actually paying attention to the Mediterranean, the reactionaries would have had a devil of a time getting anything through anyway.

And so both sides were running on momentum, using—and using up—what they’d had before the great powers forgot about them. Before long, one side or the other would run out. The side that still had something would win—unless seeing their proxies in trouble prodded rich sponsors into action again.

Meanwhile…Meanwhile, Weinberg lit a cigarette. It was a Gitane, part of the bounty that had flowed in from France. It was a damn sight better than native Spanish smokes, which tasted of straw and lots of other things besides tobacco. Chaim still longed for an American cigarette. With a Lucky or a Chesterfield, you didn’t feel as if you’d swallowed a welder’s torch every time you inhaled.

He smoked the Gitane down to a tiny butt, then stuck that in a leather pouch he wore on his belt next to his wound dressing. He’d got used to saving dog-ends when tobacco was even scarcer than it was now. Wrap half a dozen of them and you had yourself another cigarette. He would never have stooped so low in the States, but things were different here.

Nobody’d been trying to kill him in the States, for instance. He’d made a crude periscope: two hand-sized chunks from a broken mirror mounted on opposite ends of a stick. (Seven years of bad luck? Getting shot was bad luck. He hadn’t broken this mirror himself, but he would have without even blinking if he’d needed to.) He stuck it up over the lip of the trench to see what the enemy was up to.

Smoke rose here and there from the Fascists’ trenches. Nobody was shelling them; the artillery on both sides stayed quiet. But cold struck impartially. There were fires in the International Brigades’ position, too.

A khaki-clad Fascist soldier came head and shoulders out of his hole for a moment. He wasn’t a sniper—he was dumping a honey bucket. One good thing about the cold: no flies right now. The Spaniard ducked down again before a Republican sharpshooter could fire at him.

Chaim didn’t think it was sporting to shoot a man who was easing himself or getting rid of slops. But bastards on both sides had rifles with telescopic sights. They thought they weren’t earning their pay if they didn’t use them. And so, every now and then, men got shot at their most defenseless.

Not far away, Mike Carroll was cleaning his rifle. The French had
used Lebels by the million in the last war. They’d been old-fashioned then, and they were obsolete now…which didn’t mean you still couldn’t kill people with them. How many different kinds of rifles, how many different kinds of ammunition, did the Republicans use? Too goddamn many—Chaim knew that.

Carroll paused. “Spot anything interesting?” he asked.

“Sure,” Weinberg answered. “Naked blond broad taking a sun-bath out in front of the Fascist line. Big tits, pretty face—what more could you want? Natural blonde, too. Either that or she peroxides her bush.”

The other American started to put down the rifle and grab for the periscope. Just too late, he caught himself. “Fuck you, you lying asshole,” he said. “You had me going.”

“Yeah, well, she’s a hell of a lot better than what’s really there.” Weinberg told him about the guy with the bucket.

“Whole war’s full of shit,” Carroll said. “Sanjurjo’s guys, you…Everything. And nobody gives a shit about us.”

“You just notice?” Chaim lit another Gitane. Mike Carroll looked like a puppy hoping for table scraps. Chaim handed him the pack. He took one with a nod of thanks and lit it with a Zippo. He fueled the lighter with kerosene—regular lighter fluid was impossible to come by on either side of the line here.