Commercials followed the news, and then an interview show at a war plant. It was so stupid and saccharine, it soon made Peggy spin the dial. She felt embarrassed she’d listened to it for even a few minutes. Plenty of people must, she supposed, or they wouldn’t leave it on the air. But if that was popular, the country had to be going to the dogs … didn’t it?
She washed some clothes. She hung them out on the line behind the house. It wasn’t warm any more. The wind blowing out of the north made the wet laundry flap. The clothes would dry fast, unless the wind brought rain with it.
When she went back in, she did some ironing, too. She thanked heaven for an iron you plugged into the wall, an iron that by God stayed hot. She’d learned to fight wrinkles with irons you had to heat on the stove, irons that cooled off to worthlessness by the time you carried them from the stove to the ironing board.
After the ironing, sweeping and dusting. Now that she had no one but herself for whom to keep the house neat, she did a better job of housekeeping than she had when Herb also lived here. She pictured him living in squalor in his apartment. She couldn’t make herself believe the picture, though. Even living alone, Herb wouldn’t be a slob. Any man who’d gone through the Army knew the basics of taking care of himself.
By the time she finished getting the place shipshape, it was almost noon. She stared at the clock on her nightstand as if it had done her wrong. And she felt it had. Didn’t she just finish breakfast? It seemed that way, but she was hungry for lunch.
She’d had ham for dinner the night before. Wax paper–wrapped leftovers sat in the icebox. She sliced some ham thin, put it on bread, added sweet pickles and mustard, and ate the sandwich. Another cup of coffee washed it down. That was heated up from the pot she’d made for breakfast, and on the bitter side. Next to what they called coffee in Europe, it was the nectar of the gods.
After lunch, she started an Agatha Christie mystery. It was pretty good, but the Englishwoman’s casual anti-Semitism grated in ways it wouldn’t have before Peggy saw how Hitler treated Jews in the countries he’d overrun—and in his own. She sighed and put the book down. She’d changed, all right.
Her life had turned inside out because she’d been stranded on the wrong side of the Atlantic when Europe went up in flames. Well, sure, so did millions of other lives. But it wasn’t even as if she’d got hurt. She’d just got stuck.
And, because she’d got stuck, she wasn’t married to Herb any more. Her politics and her whole outlook on the world had changed. Why? Because she hadn’t packed up and headed for home a week earlier.
How many other lives took turns just as big from causes just as trivial? It made you wonder. It really did. In some world where she had taken a train back to France and sailed for America, was another Peggy, one who still wore a wedding ring, rattling around this house right now? Was that Peggy wondering what things would have been like if she’d stayed in Czechoslovakia till the war broke out?
This Peggy’s mouth twisted. “Trust me, kiddo—you wouldn’t’ve had a whole lot of fun,” she told the imaginary one, and tried to dismiss her from her own mind.
But, once summoned, that still-married Peggy didn’t want to be dismissed. Neither did the idea that had spawned her, even if it seemed to belong to the lurid pulp magazines with the gaudy covers and the wildly titled stories. Because the real Peggy was sure she couldn’t be the only one who conjured imaginary selves from the vasty deep. Everybody had places in his life where he could have done one thing but had done the other. Had he chosen differently, he would have had a different life story from then on out. How could you help wondering about the way that other movie would have run?
Peggy lit a cigarette to help herself think. It wasn’t only people, was it? It was countries, too. What would Germany be like right now if Hitler had got killed in the last war? He could have, easily. He’d been a runner—from what Herb said, about as dangerous a duty as you could find. But he’d come through, and the Reich was what it was because he had. If you dug enough, history had to be full of crazy things like that. Peggy decided she didn’t want to dig after all. She fixed herself a bourbon on the rocks. It helped, but not enough.
Louis Mirouze didn’t look quite so miserable as a kitten you tossed into a puddle. But that was only because the young lieutenant’s helmet kept his hair from going every which way like a soaked kitten’s.
Aristide Demange was sure he looked every bit as soggy himself. He doubted he looked miserable, though. His guess was that he looked pissed off. It wasn’t a wild guess. He usually looked pissed off, because he usually was pissed off. If you couldn’t find something to get pissed off about while you were in the Army, you weren’t half trying.
“Stupid cons,” he muttered. Just then, a raindrop came down right on the coal of his Gitane. The cigarette quit drawing. He spat it out in disgust and fired up another one.
“Sir?” Mirouze said.
“Stupid cons,” Demange repeated. “The cretins and syphilitic imbeciles who left us stuck in the mud here.”
“Oh,” Mirouze said. That would have been heresy to him not long before. Now he just shrugged. “Fuck ’em all.”
“Alors!” Demange said in surprise. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. You’re learning, kid.”
What showed in Mirouze’s eyes was something on the order of Fuck you, too. He didn’t come out with it. Demange might have laughed if he had. Or he might have coldcocked him, not because he outranked Mirouze but because only his friends could talk to him like that, and he counted his friends on the toes of both hands.
A German MG-42 spat a few short bursts over the French line, just to remind the poilus to keep their heads down. The Germans lived better in their trenches than the French did. The French seemed to think being miserable reminded you you were at war. The Boches made the best of things. In the last war, Demange had seen a deep German bunker with electric lights and with wallpaper over the timbers that shored it up. Except for being a good many meters underground, it could have been taken from an expensive flat.
“Here,” Demange said. “You’re a smart cochon, so I’ve got an arithmetic problem for you. If we advance ten meters every day, how long till we get to Berlin?”
“Long enough so I’m not holding my breath,” Mirouze answered, which was close enough to the right answer to make Demange nod. The second lieutenant went on, “If we can push the Fritzes back to their old border, I’ll be happy enough. As long as they don’t shoot me, I will.”
“Beats the crap out of ‘On les aura!,’ doesn’t it?” Demange agreed. “And it’s about as much as we can hope for on this side. Over in the East, the Boches have a little more on their plates.”
“They’ve got the Poles over there to keep the Russians off them,” Mirouze said. “Till the Poles turn their coats, anyhow.”
“Heh! You mean the way we did?” Demange said. “I was over there when that happened, remember. And I’m goddamn lucky I’m back here now.”
Off in the distance, German 105s woke up. Demange listened to the shells scream through the air. If that scream built and built till it sounded as if it were coming down right on top of you … then the chances were much too good that it was. That was when you wanted a deep bunker, like the German one Demange remembered. A direct hit from a 105 wouldn’t bother that bunker one bit. You’d need something like a 240 to make it sit up and take notice, and those babies didn’t grow on trees.
Mirouze was listening intently, too. His face cleared no more than a split second after Demange’s. “They’ll go wide of us.”
“That’s right,” Demange said. “Some other sorry salauds will suffer, but not us. And you know what? The Germans shot me in the last war. If they don’t get me this time, I won’t mind. Let the next hero take his turn instead. Fine with me, by God!”
“If everybody thought like you, we couldn’t have a war,” Mirouze said.
“Everybody does think like me. You fucking want to get your family jewels blown off?” Dem
ange said. “But when they tell you, ‘We will kill you if you don’t go, and the Boches may miss if you do,’ what happens then? You damn well go, that’s what.”
Back behind them, French artillery started roaring. Demange carefully noted the flight of those shells, too. It was counterbattery fire, going after the Germans’ guns. He relaxed, as much as he ever let himself relax. If his own side had started raking the enemy’s forward trenches, the Boches might have felt obliged to return the favor. Some courtesies, Demange could do without.
Lieutenant Mirouze asked a new question: “What do you think of the antitank rocket the Americans have made, the bazooka?” He pronounced the name slowly and carefully, stressing how strange and foreign it was.
Demange thought the handle sounded idiotic, too, but that wasn’t what the kid was talking about. “I’ve only seen a couple of them,” he answered. “I’ve heard it can get through the armor on most German tanks—the Tiger still gives it trouble. If it can, I’m all for it. I’m for anything that gives the infantry a chance against chars. But what do you want to bet the Fritzes will start making their own as soon as they can get their hands on one? Then our tanks will start cooking, too.”
“It could be.” By Mirouze’s expression, he hadn’t thought of that. Also by his expression, he didn’t much like the possibility now that Demange had pointed it out. What a shame! Whether he liked it or not wouldn’t slow the Germans down a bit. Demange had no doubts there.
After a while, the shelling petered out. Only the rain and the chill and the machine guns to worry about then. Wasn’t life grand? It was so grand, Demange took the water bottle off his hip and swigged from it. He had cognac in there, not water. It didn’t do much about machine guns, but it sure made the rain and chill seem less annoying.
He offered Mirouze the aluminum bottle. “Thanks,” the younger officer said, surprise in his voice: Demange wasn’t usually so friendly. Mirouze started to cough when he found the bottle didn’t hold water or even pinard. But he didn’t choke and he didn’t spew the stuff out his nose like someone who didn’t know how to drink. He respectfully handed the bottle back. “Thanks is right.”
“Any time. All part of the service.” Demange stuck the bottle back into the cloth canteen cover.
“That’ll put hair on my chest,” Mirouze said. “Probably make me grow hair all over like King Kong.”
“Just don’t start pounding your chest and climbing the tallest building you can find. It wouldn’t be beauty killed the beast—it’d be the fucking Fritzes and their damn buzz saws.” As if to underscore Demange’s words, an MG-42 sprayed more death at the French lines.
“I guess I won’t.” Mirouze sighed. “I’d make a crappy gorilla anyhow, wouldn’t I?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Demange said. The junior lieutenant was skinny and sallow, with a long, mournful face, not quite enough chin, and a sad little mustache that looked as if someone had put burnt cork on his upper lip and he’d washed off some of it but not enough.
“You know what else is funny?” Mirouze said. “Those biplane fighters that got the ape were as good as anybody’s ten years ago. They wouldn’t last ten minutes now. Well, they would against King Kong, but not against real airplanes.”
“You’re right.” Demange sounded surprised, mostly because he was. That a punk like Lieutenant Mirouze could come up with something worth hearing, something Demange hadn’t thought of himself, had to come as a surprise. “What we had ten years ago was junk next to what we’ve got now.”
“And who knows what we’ll have in ten years more?” Mirouze said.
“Whatever it is, it’ll probably kill you before you even get born.” In his own twisted way, Demange had faith in mankind.
Every time Hideki Fujita woke up in the morning after a U.S. bombing raid, he thanked all the kami that he didn’t wake up dead. He’d seen bombing raids from the Russians, but those were only an annoyance next to the pounding Midway was taking.
The island, bigger than any this side of the main Hawaiian group, took up several square kilometers. The only thing that let the Japanese garrison remain a going concern was that that was simply too much ground for a string of bombers to knock flat even with the worst will in the world.
Had they dropped incendiaries … Fujita imagined the devastation that kind of bombing could cause in Japan’s lightly built cities, with so many walls of wood or paper. Yes, those would all go up in flames, and no one could guess how many people with them.
But the Americans were at the end of their reach here on Midway. The Home Islands lay thousands of kilometers to the west. No Yankee bombers could reach them. No Yankee bombers would ever reach them. Fujita was sure of it.
He walked over to the edge of the lagoon as soon as it began to get light. Bombs had fallen in the water there. The bursts killed the little silvery fish that took refuge in the shallows from bigger, meaner fish out in the Pacific. Some of them had washed ashore. They hadn’t started to go bad.
A bayonet was rarely useful these days as a weapon of war. You fought the enemy at longer range than you could thrust with your bayoneted rifle. But a knife on your belt was still a handy thing to have. It was good for all kinds of things. Gutting little fish lying on the sand, for instance.
Another soldier was using his bayonet for the same purpose. A petty officer had a shorter knife that also did the job. He caught Fujita’s eyes. “Well, the Americans went and got our breakfast ready for us, anyhow,” he said, and ate the fish he’d just cleaned.
“Hai.” Fujita nodded. “I didn’t have sashimi for breakfast very often before I came here, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” He ate a fish, too. “A lot better than no breakfast at all.” He knew more about that than he’d ever wanted to find out. Anyone who’d been in combat for a while discovered more than he’d ever wanted to learn about missing meals.
The other soldier tossed some guts into the water. He crouched down and scooped out a fish that came up to the bait. Inside of two minutes, that one was inside him. “You won’t get any fresher than that unless you eat dancing shrimp.”
“I haven’t done that since before I went into the Army.” Fujita let out a sigh full of longing. What could be more delicious than a live shrimp peeled from its shell and still wriggling?
A gull swooped down, grabbed a dead fish, and swallowed it while flying away. The gooney birds here didn’t care about people. The gulls knew enough to be wary of them. Some of the Japanese had eaten seagulls. The only reason they didn’t do it more often was that gulls tasted bad.
One of the reasons they tasted bad was that they didn’t care what they ate themselves. They were as bad as ravens. They would eat dead soldiers if you didn’t get the bodies under the sand. Did that make you a cannibal if you ate them? Fujita hadn’t, so he didn’t worry about it.
He had other things to worry about. He went to work with pick and shovel so the G4Ms could try to pay the Americans back for their visit. Japan kept flying a few bombers in by way of Wake Island. The Americans had more, though, and could bring in planes and men and munitions more easily than Fujita’s side. Their bases were closer to their homeland than this distant outpost of Empire was.
Rice. A little shoyu for flavor. Canned squid (the Americans had blown up a lot of food, but for some reason there was still plenty of canned squid). All things considered, sashimi from fish bombed in the lagoon was a step up from anything the cooks could do with what they had.
At the garrison’s pitiful supper, everyone held the same thought uppermost in his mind. Would the Yankees come over again tonight? The only way to find out was to try to sleep and see if you made it through till morning without needing to dash for a hole in the sand. When U.S. air raids started, the soldiers and sailors used to give the antiaircraft gunners grief about not shooting down more American planes. Now the men saw the gunners did the best they could. The bombers flew high. The gunners had no searchlights to show them their targets. They had to fire at the engines’ dr
one and hope for the best.
Fujita rolled himself in his blanket. After a day of hard labor on the runway—still nowhere near ready to take planes—he was ready to sleep hard for as long as anybody would let him. The Americans let him till a little past midnight. Then explosions woke him. He thought some of those booms would have woken the dead.
If he didn’t want to be one of those dead, he needed to take what little cover he could find. He grabbed his belt and his rifle—ingrained military habit—and ran for a shallow, sandy trench. Bombs kept whistling down out of the sky. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if one of them whistled down right here. But what else could he think about when the ground shook and the only light was the lurid flash of explosions?
Almost the only light. A couple of guns kept blasting away at the planes overhead. Their muzzle flashes and the ice-blue streaks from the tracers they fired also gave Fujita’s eyes something to work with.
If you put enough shells in the air, sooner or later you were bound to hit something. So the gunners claimed. Other troops stationed on Midway loudly and profanely doubted it. But the gunners turned out to know what they were talking about after all.
Through the whistles and explosions and the rapid-fire booming of the guns, Fujita heard his countrymen cheering in their holes. He looked up into the night. Kilometers high in the sky, an American bomber was on fire. Flames spread up the wing to the fuselage. The plane plummeted toward the sea. When it crashed into the Pacific, wreckage and gasoline floated on the water, burning.
Rifles started going off. Fujita looked up again. Lit as if by flash bulbs, parachutes were floating down on Midway. He chambered a round in his own Arisaka and blazed away whenever he could see one. American flyers deserved whatever happened to them, especially if they didn’t have the nerve to kill themselves instead of being taken prisoner.
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