The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (17 page)

The platform was crowded
with men in greatcoats and with scarves wrapped around their heads who were slowly getting into the train cars under the disordered supervision of non-commissioned officers and junior officers equipped with lists of which units would go in which car. However, the heavy snow was still being shoveled from the platform by station workers while the men tried to squeeze through to their cars, and curious locals were staring from outside the fences. It was rather a spectacle, and it was a miracle that the whole endeavor hadn’t broken down and that in fact there was slow progress and the train was being filled. In the crowd of cheering onlookers a large banner was held up by a couple of young girls in school uniforms, the shortened phrase
“expel the barbarians”
clearly readable on the banner from the platform.

Kokatoku w
as a large industrial city and the most populous city of Great Mongolia, an enormous province far north of the soldiers’ homes in Annam. For most of January and all of February they had been living in a large camp outside the city together with the thousands of soldiers who were also making their first real acquaintance with the steel behemoths assembled in the enormous works in the city. Kokatoku was home to the Great Mongolia Imperial Arsenal of Kokatoku which had subsumed the nearby tractor and truck plants to become the single largest supplier of the tracked machines that so amazed the public and was supposed to make old military tactics obsolete. The Kokatoku Arsenal rolled out 25 or so assembled tanks every single day, and they had to be sent by train all the way up to the frontline depots in Shinkyou, northern Mongolia, and depots established on occupied “Russian” territory. The pictures from the parade in the ruins of Altay City with columns of tanks flying rising sun flags on their turrets after they had pushed the Russians away had been reprinted even in Annam and all across the nation and hardly anybody could have missed the newsreels or the reprinted photographs in newspapers, magazines, and on posters proclaiming their great success. It was the armored arm that would be the shock cavalry that would sweep the enemy troops away and finish this war.

Outside Kaipo Township in northern Annam,
Makoto and the others from his regiment had been schooled in the basic maneuvering and the theoretical study of armored warfare. For six weeks they had been learning the basics of military life in the large barracks of the armor depot that was part of a large military training field that had been expanded to train drivers, tankers, mobile artillerymen, as well as motorized infantry and ordinary riflemen. However, outside Kokatoku the theoretical schooling, drill, and garrison training had been replaced by practical training.

Just outside Kokatoku—a couple of miles from the Gr
eat Mongolia Imperial Arsenal of Kokatoku—dozens of tanks of standard and variant configurations had provided field training for both tankers and infantry units at the huge military city that had sprung up around the training fields and hosted thousands and thousands of soldiers going through the Kokatoku Mechanized Warfare School. Not only did they get to know the tanks that were being put on trains and sent out west to the waiting divisions assembling near the borderland, but they also got a taste of the horrible freezing climate.

Makoto had grown up in
rural northeastern Annam, and he had never left his home county before he was called up to the barracks of the 1493rd Infantry Regiment. After just two weeks there he had been reassigned to the local armored regiment and had been sent to the armor depot located outside Kaipo before he had made the long journey across southern and central Japan from his native Annam Province to southern Mongolia. Great Mongolia was the second largest province of Japan—slightly bigger than Nanshuu but rather small compared to Alaska Province across the sea—and Kokatoku was a spectacular city which he had only had time to see briefly during the cold winter weeks spent loading and reloading a real tank as it was moving in mock battles.

It was different from the dummy tanks and training hulls in Kaipo
that had provided the limited practical instruction at the depot, and a tank just like the one he had been training with on the Ordnance Field outside Kokatoku was exactly like the tank he was supposed to learn to know in Shinkyou. Makoto could hardly wait to get into
his
tank.

“
Banzai
to you too,” Kai yelled, raising his arms over his head back at the schoolchildren gathered outside the fence to cheer patriotically at the soldiers.

Kai was the
driver, and if he would drive just as bumpily as he had on the training field, Makoto could only pray that Mou would manage to hit anything at all with the main gun.

“Come on, get a move on,” Sergeant Shibui mumbled
, waving for Kai to stop playing around with the children fondly cheering from outside the closed off train station.

Kai
and some of the other soldiers on the platform had been cheering-off with the excited children outside the fence while the junior officers and NCOs did their best to get the troops on the train, and nobody wanted this process to be interfered with by childish soldiers who were playing around with the kids. Makoto could see why the sergeant didn’t want Kai to cause any trouble that would reflect poorly on them since the lieutenants, captains, and even majors who hovered around them might dress them down if they were being obstructive. The local gendarmes who were standing around smoking would probably not be very impressed by lack of discipline among the men either.

On top of one of the train cars—a refurbished freight car that was being filled with soldiers—a makeshift sandbag anti
-aircraft emplacement was manned with men looking like they were natives to the Arctic north. They had actually been issued with fur caps and had the ear flaps tied snugly down the sides of their heads as well as scarves around their necks and bulky fur mittens on their hands that only came off when they lit cigarettes and waved their flags at the cheering crowd outside the station. They apparently had nothing better to do than to mess around.

“Long live His Majesty,” yelled one of the soldiers
loudly, and Makoto could almost see the life drain from the annoyed junior officers’ faces when the loading was interrupted by the raucous responses from many on the platform in addition to the civilians outside.

Were they drunk? So many of the men were acting like over-excited little boys. The kids—boys and girls alike—were ecstatically responding back, jumping and cheering as if they were all comrades. In some way they probably were; if the boys had been just a little older they might have been sent off by the girls to fight for them. Now, they could just assemble and express their patriotic unity with the men who would represent the nation in the noblest way there was.

Amid the cheering, Makoto saw one of the junior officers raise his arms without enthusiasm and with an expression on his face that made it look like he wanted to strangle the man up on the train car for disturbing the order with his cheer. However, most people would have an instinct particularly strong in this confusing time in history to want to express the common cause which a simple cheer for His Majesty expressed. One of the soldiers on top of the nearest train car had pulled out his flag and waved it, the writing on the flag clearly visible but illegible as he waved it at the outside crowd. Makoto had a flag like that too with wishes and greetings from friends and family covering the white field surrounding the sun disc. It was a nice reminder of all the family and neighbors who waited for him to get back home safe and sound.

The long line of men was slowly getting onboard the train with their backpacks and bags with their uniforms and personal items. Most of the gear would be handed out at
the depot on the other end, and for now, he was mostly just carrying his personal belongings, his uniform, and the basic kit, but no weapons or things like that. He hadn’t actually used firearms up here; his firearms training had all been taken care of down in Annam before they were sent up north.

“Stay close, alright?” the sergeant said, keeping track of his men like they were his children, Kai, Akino, Mou, and Makoto following their “big brother” like a respected elder as they squeezed inside the train car.

The wooden seats might as well have been unpadded, and they sat down tightly packed together as the car was filling up with far too many men. Makoto and most of the other men of the 3rd Company, 2nd Battalion of the 243rd Armored Regiment attached to the 71st Mechanized Division were seated in a single long car, and there weren’t enough seats for them all, so some men had to sit on the floor in the aisles—only about one platoon was pressed into the car behind them together with men from the 2nd Company. The officers, NCOs, and enlisted men were practically sitting on top of one another like pickles in a jar when men finally stopped pushing inside and were settling down. Before they had marched to the train station they had all been issued with a packet of factory-rolled cigarettes and matchboxes each, and quickly many of them started to light up.

An officer had said that it would take a little more than a day before the train would arrive at the depot outside
Altay City in Shinkyou where the division was assembling. It was unnerving to imagine spending more than a day in this pickle jar whose only convenience was that it had a toilet rather than a bucket at the end of the car, and Makoto was starting to feel like this would be the worst part of the service. What could be worse than men squeezed so tightly to each other that the slightest movement caressed someone else? He had never been this intimate with anybody other than when he had been practicing judo in school. As much as he understood that it was necessary to cram as many soldiers, as much supplies, and as many guns, tanks and weapons as the trains could carry, he would have preferred a bit more space. The train between Kaipo and Kokatoku had been full, but it had been more like a coach fare than a cattle fare. At least the captain and the lieutenants were all in this jar as well, so it wasn’t like it was just the little guys being treated to this painful intimacy. And at least it wasn’t a boxcar.

It was incredible to watch a lieutenant climb over men, bags, and backpacks as he counted them to make sure that the whole company was onboard and no one was still out on the platform.
He counted the men by seeking out each sergeant or corporal and requesting that he confirm that his men were present and accounted for, and then he moved on down the car to finish the process. Watching him make his way down the car was like something out of an absurd comedy film.

The whole regiment had been drawn from the same county, although most of them came from Shinuoga Township
or one of the other townships in the county, so it wasn’t like they were all friends and neighbors. Nevertheless, it did give a sort of homely feel to the whole endeavor that even the officers came from places not that far from Makoto’s home, although his initial very brief posting in the infantry had been far, far more local than this bunch taken from a much wider area. Still, one of the lieutenants in another company was a neighbor who had left his position as a clerk for the rural township council to join the army as a reservist called up on active duty, and there were other men who were cousins or friends of neighbors who had been placed in this regiment rather than the infantry. One of Makoto’s cousins was in the regiment too, but most of the people he knew in his village were infantrymen. In fact, he had been a bit worried about how clever all the men from Shinuoga seemed to be, many of them having gone to high school or working in the small factories in town rather than out in the fields like Makoto.

However, the time they had spent in Kaipo and Kokatoku had brought them closer together, especially since they spoke the same dialect and had sort of the same frames of reference. One of the men in another company had a grandmother who had been a sister of Makoto’s grandfather, and there were plenty of relations b
etween the men if they just started to chat among each other about friends and relatives. Makoto was one of the less related because of his rural upbringing, but many of the guys from Shinuoga had gone to the Shinuoga Public Academy and could talk about old teachers or the cute girls over at the girls’ school. The most annoying thing about being around city guys was that they could talk about people with the kind of special intimacy that Makoto couldn’t quite muster. If Hatano from Makoto’s section for instance mentioned a cute girl from this or that neighborhood or working here or there, then it would make sense to the others, even if they might not know much about the person he was talking about. Hardly anybody would know about a certain farming cooperative or a family, let alone a person, from Makoto’s home village where almost everybody was living in a cooperative.

At least a dozen men from the small village had been drafted, but none of them was in Makoto’s company. He was the sole representative of not only his family and cooperative, but of his whole village in this company. It would have been nice if someone else had been around, but most of those on his cooperative within the
17–21 age bracket happened to be females, so his brothers, cousins, and closest neighbors hadn’t been called up—not even his older brother in the People’s Militia had been drafted. As far as Makoto could tell, nobody he’d seen was from the People’s Militia comprised of former conscripts put in the local defense reserve. Anyway, how many tens of millions of men did the Imperial Army have to draw from? There had to be a hundred million men the right age, and one of the newsreels he had seen in the local theater in Kaipo Township said that the Imperial Army had conscripted ten million patriots, although he had no idea whether that ten million was supposed to be a vague sort of number or a concrete estimate. Regardless, there couldn’t possibly be enough room for a hundred million soldiers, could there? He would have liked to have a relative in his company though. It would have been more homely. One of his cousins had been deferred because he was the only son, despite being probably exactly the sort of person the Imperial Army would want. It wasn’t fair that Makoto had to go alone. Despite the unknown men from his home county, he enjoyed the kind of companionship they shared as neighbors—relatively speaking—and their familiarity with the same home region gave them a communal frame of reference. It would have been a lot nicer if he’d known them from home, but he was getting along fine with the short Mou in particular.