The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (18 page)

Demange pointed east, toward the woods. “Goddamn leaves
would
have to start sprouting just when they could hide some Fritzes.” His scorn was so seamlessly perfect, it covered all of mankind and had room for Mother Nature as well. When Luc said as much, Demange spat. “That clapped-out old whore? All she’s ever given me are lice.”

“Like you’re the only one.” Just thinking about them made Luc want to scratch. He nodded toward the trees himself. “You going to order us in? Joinville and Villehardouin are ready to lug the Hotchkiss.”

“Don’t blame it on me,” Demange said. “When the generals decide it’s time to go, we’ll go. Till then, I’ll sit on my ass as long as I can.”

He spat out the last Gitane’s tiny butt and lit up the next. “How about one for me?” Luc asked.

Demange looked shocked. “What? You think officers waste tobacco on enlisted men? Fuck off,
cochon
!”

“Fuck off yourself … sir,” Luc said. The new lieutenant gave him a cigarette. They smoked together, eyeing the woods they’d have to clear out sooner or later. Like Demange, Luc hoped it would be later. Luc pointed toward the new grass sprouting in the cratered field in front of the trees. “You’ve got to know the Fritzes have had time to lay mines there.”

“As sure as your sister’s got crabs,” Demange agreed. “All part of the overhead.”

“Oh, boy.” Luc took his canteen off his belt. It was full of
pinard
. He drank some, then passed the rough red wine to Demange. The veteran’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he took a good swallow. Just for the moment, with nobody shooting at them and no order to advance, life didn’t seem so bad.

The order to advance came the next day. Luc would have been more upset had he been more surprised. “Well, if we’ve got to catch the shaft, there are worse places to do it—I suppose,” Joinville said. Villehardouin came out with something in Breton that Luc didn’t understand at all. As Luc had told Demange, they were ready. So was the gun: he checked it himself. By now, he could do everything with a Hotchkiss gun but build one.

And so were the Germans. Whether a deserter warned them or they figured it out for themselves, they shelled the French positions on and off through the night. Luc huddled in a shallow foxhole, trying to doze. He didn’t get much sleep, but the hole was deeper toward dawn than it had been at sundown.

“Come on, you sorry, silly
cons
,” Lieutenant Demange called when the eastern sky began to go gray. “Time to earn our
sous.
” He made more as a lieutenant than he had as a sergeant, but you didn’t make a career of the Army to get rich.

“You heard the man,” Luc told his machine-gun crew. They stumbled forward. There still wasn’t enough light to see much. You’d never spot the mine that waited for you. You’d never spot wire, either, though Luc looked for some almost hopefully. A broken ankle didn’t seem half bad.

Then, all of a sudden, he could see just fine. German parachute flares lit up the field brighter than noontime. French soldiers cried out in horror. “Down!” Demange screamed. “Get down. They’re gonna give it to us.”

Give it to them the
Boches
did. Their artillery opened up one more time. Now it was deadly accurate, thanks no doubt to forward observers watching the
poilus
scramble and dive for cover. For good measure, German machine guns at the edge of the woods raked the field. Traces might have been lines of blood drawn in the air.

When people started shooting at you, you flattened out. Demange had that right. Luc did his best to imitate a frog squashed by a tank. But he couldn’t just lie there and pile dirt in front of himself with his entrenching tool. Commanding a machine gun meant he had to shoot back. If the Hotchkiss could knock out the German machine gunners, he and his buddies would have a much better chance of seeing the sun go down this afternoon.

Joinville and Villehardouin had hit the dirt, too. They were already putting the machine gun on its tripod. Luc crawled over to them, not getting a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to. “Fuck the fuckers!” Villehardouin said: the clearest thing Luc had heard from him in days.

He got down behind the Hotchkiss and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared through a strip of ammo. He probably wouldn’t have any hearing left by the time he got out of the Army, but he didn’t care.

Joinville fed fresh strips into the machine gun. One of the ammunition carriers was down, wounded or dead. Villehardouin crawled back to recover the crate. Luc fired, first at one MG-34, then at another. How many of the monsters did those Nazi
cochons
have? The other thing was, they all seemed to be shooting at him, and with better and better accuracy as sunrise neared.

“What I wouldn’t give for a couple-three tanks right now,” Joinville said. Luc nodded, not that that did either one of them any good. The brass didn’t seem to have laid on any armor for this little dance. The Fritzes didn’t have any in the neighborhood, so why should
la belle France
waste hers?

Why? To keep us from getting murdered
, Luc thought. But that wasn’t
the biggest worry in the brass’s minds, now or ever. The old men with all the gold braid and leaves on their kepis measured things out on their maps and went from there. Casualties? Just part of the overhead, as Demange said.

What Demange said now was, “Back! Get back! We can’t break in there in a million years! Machine gun, give us covering fire!”

“Thanks a bunch,
Lieutenant
,” Luc said under his breath. But it was the right order, even if it might make him a casualty. He tapped the gun with the heel of his hand, again and again, traversing it so it sprayed the whole front of the woods with fire and made lots of
Boches
keep their heads down. The more Germans who ducked, the more of his own buddies who’d get back to their holes. How he and the rest of the Hotchkiss crew would get back was an … interesting question.

To his surprise, it got an answer. The French artillery, which should have shelled the woods before the infantry moved out, chose that moment to wake up. Under cover of the badly timed barrage, the machine gunners made it back to what passed for safety in these parts. Luc drained his
pinard
to celebrate. He figured he’d earned it.

ergeant Hideki Fujita had been talking about prisoners of war not long before. Now here they were, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, crowded into barbed-wire corrals with Japanese machine-gun positions outside the wire to make sure they didn’t get any bright ideas about breaking out.

The Russians looked … well, they would have had to perk up to look miserable. They’d been disarmed and hastily plundered after they surrendered, but they weren’t plucked clean yet. Who could guess what goodies they hid under their dun-colored greatcoats? Those coats, and the hair—black, brown, yellow, once in a while startling red—sprouting in clumps on their faces, robbed them of their human outlines.

“Monkeys,” Fujita said as he strolled around the camp. “That’s what they look like. A bunch of monkeys.” He mimed scratching himself under the armpits.

Senior Private Hayashi smiled and nodded. If a sergeant made a joke, a senior private thought it was funny. “Have you seen the ones that go in the hot springs in the middle of winter? The Russians are so hairy,
that’s just what they remind me of.” He made his own joke: “And they’re in hot water, too.”

“
Hai
. They sure are,” Fujita said. No matter what had happened during the last war between Russia and Japan, he couldn’t see his own countrymen wasting much food or care on prisoners of war, especially when there were so many of them.

He was soon proved right—even righter than he’d expected. The regimental commander, Colonel Watanabe, gathered his men together so he could harangue them: “Soldiers of Japan, we have got to deal with this Russian pestilence!”

Along with plenty of other men, Fujita nodded. Hearing the colonel like this was safe enough. Usually, if his eye fell on you, it was because you’d screwed up. He’d make you sorry, which was one of the things colonels were for.

“Our regiment has been chosen for a high honor!” Watanabe went on. Fujita had a good idea what that meant. It meant that, whatever came out of the colonel’s mouth next, they were stuck with it. Sure enough, Watanabe went on, “We have the privilege of removing many of the Russians from proximity to Vladivostok. That way, they can no longer endanger the city, which has become an integral part of the Japanese Empire.”

A murmur of “Hai” ran through the men. Again, Sergeant Fujita joined it, though he wasn’t quite sure what Watanabe was talking about. And then, suddenly, he was. They were going to guard the Russians while the prisoners went wherever Japanese officials had decided they should go.

Colonel Watanabe looked out at his men. “You must be severe. These prisoners have no honor left. Since they’ve surrendered, how could they? Some of them will realize this. Others will not care, and will act like the wild beasts they are. If they try to get away, you will dispose of them the way you would get rid of any other vermin. Do you understand me?”

“Hai,”
the Japanese soldiers chorused once more. This time, Sergeant Fujita spoke firmly. He heard no hesitation from any of his comrades, either. It wasn’t as if Watanabe had told them anything they didn’t already know.

The colonel nodded to the regiment. “Good,” he said. “I knew you would hear me in the spirit of
bushido
. Do you have questions?” He pointed to a captain from another company. “Yes?”

“Please excuse me, Colonel-
san
, but what arrangements will be made for getting the prisoners food and water on the march?”

“They are
prisoners
,” Watanabe said, as if to an idiot. “They will get what
bushido
says they deserve. Is that clear enough?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the captain said quickly. It was clear to Fujita, too.
Bushido
—the way of the warrior—said letting yourself get captured was the ultimate disgrace. A prisoner deserved nothing. Better he should have died.

As if reading his mind, Colonel Watanabe raised a hand in warning. “I have been told it is important that some of the captives reach the destination to which we are ordered to take them. They must not all fall along the way. So there will be food. There will be water.” He shrugged. “Not what everyone would want, perhaps, but it can’t be helped.”

After the colonel dismissed the regiment, Fujita went to watch the prisoners some more. He nodded to himself. Monkeys. That was just what they looked like, all right.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant-
san
, but you must not go too close to the wire.” The private who spoke to Fujita sounded nervous, and no wonder. Fujita outranked him. Persuading a superior to do what another superior had told you needed doing was liable to get you in trouble.

Not this time, though. “I’ll be careful,” the sergeant said. “I’ve never seen so many Westerners close up, that’s all.”

“Oh, no! Neither have I!” The private showed his teeth in a broad, relieved grin. “I never knew they were so ugly. Did you?”

“No. They look like they were taken out of the oven too soon. And all that hair! They might as well be Ainu,
neh
?”

“I don’t know, Sergeant-
san
. I’ve never seen an Ainu—I’m from Shikoku myself.” The private named the southernmost of the four main islands; the Ainu lived on Hokkaido, the most northerly. “All I know is what people say.”

What people said was also all Fujita knew about the Ainu. He wasn’t about to admit that to a no-account guard. He looked at the Russians. They stared back at him. Just as some of them had yellow or red hair instead
of black, some had eyes of blue or green instead of brown. Were they really human?

They were humanly miserable. They stretched out their hands to him, palms up, like begging monkeys. Some of them knew a few Japanese words: “Food, please?” “Rice?” “Meat?” “Bread, sir?” “You have cigarettes?”

“You can ignore them,” the private said. “Just about everybody does.”

“Just about?” Even the qualification surprised Fujita.