End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  For this I went to Annapolis? he thought bitterly as he shoveled glop into his face as fast as he could. He’d been a Navy lieutenant on the Enterprise, coming back to Pearl Harbor after delivering fighter planes to Wake Island. He’d roared off the carrier’s deck to do what he could against the Japanese—and promptly got shot down. He’d thought his Wildcat was pretty hot stuff till he ran into his first Zero. It was also the last one he’d faced in the air. One was plenty. One had sure been plenty for him.

  He managed to bail out, and came down on a golf course near Ewa, the Marines’ airfield west of Pearl Harbor. He’d done his damnedest to get back in the air. His damnedest turned out to be no damn good. Lots of pilots—Marines, Army and Navy men—were in line ahead of him. All they needed were planes. The Japs did a hell of a job blowing those to smithereens on the ground. Japanese mastery of the air in the invasion was absolute.

  Since Peterson couldn’t fight the Japs in the air, he’d fought them on the ground as a common soldier. He’d even been promoted to corporal before the collapse; he still had the stripes on the sleeve of his ragged shirt. Nobody would use him as an officer on the ground, which was only fair, because he hadn’t been trained for that. He would have got people killed trying to command a company.

  Nobody in his shooting squad knew he’d been an officer. No sooner had he thought of the squad than he thought of Walter London. Up came his head, like a bird dog’s. Where was London? There, sitting on a boulder, eating rice like everybody else. Peterson relaxed—fractionally. London was the weak link in the squad, the guy most likely to disappear if he saw half a chance—and if the other guys didn’t stop him.

  That was what shooting squads were all about. The Jap who’d come up with the idea must have got a bonus from the Devil. If one man escaped, all the others got it in the neck. That violated all the rules of war, of course, but the Japs didn’t care. Anybody who’d seen them in action had no doubts that they would get rid of nine because the tenth vamoosed.

  The sun sank behind the Waianae Range, Oahu’s western mountains. The labor gang was widening the road that led to Kolekole Pass from Schofield Barracks. Why the road needed widening, Peterson couldn’t see. He’d been stationed in the Kolekole Pass for a while during the fighting. Not many people wanted to get there, and he couldn’t imagine that many people ever would.

  But it gave the POWs something to do. It gave the Japs an excuse to work them—to work them to death, very often. Peterson laughed, not that it was funny. Working the prisoners to death was probably no small part of what the Japanese had in mind.

  He finished the last grain of rice in the mess kit. He always did. Everybody always did. He remembered when he’d left food on his plate in the Enterprise’s wardroom. No more. No more. He got to his feet. He topped six feet by a couple of inches, and had been a fine, rangy figure of a man. Now he was starting to look more like a collection of pipe cleaners in rags. He’d lost somewhere close to fifty pounds, and more weight came off him every day. He didn’t see how, but it did.

  Peterson made a point of walking right past Walter London and scowling at him. Most POWs were scrawny wretches. London was skinny, but he wasn’t scrawny. He was a wheeler-dealer, a man who could come up with cigarettes or soap or aspirin—for a price, always for a price. The price was commonly food.

  A stream ran down from the mountains, close by the side of the road. POWs rinsed their mess tins and spoons in it, getting them as clean as they could. Dysentery wasn’t bad here, but some men suffered from it—and more, weakened by hard labor, exhaustion, and starvation, came down with it all the time. You did what you could to stay clean and to keep your stuff clean. What you could do often wasn’t enough.

  There were no huts. There were no beds. There weren’t even any blankets. In Hawaii, that mattered much less than it would have a lot of other places. Peterson found some grass and lay down. Other men were already lying close by. If they felt cold in the middle of the night, they would roll together and use one another to keep warm.

  He woke in the morning twilight with a Japanese guard’s boot in his xylophone ribs. The Jap wasn’t kicking him, just stirring him to get him up and moving. If he kept lying there, though, he would get kicked. He scrambled to his feet and bowed to the guard. Satisfied, the Jap went on to prod the next closest American awake.

  Peterson took his place for morning lineup. Till the men were counted, they got no breakfast. They formed up in rows of ten, which made it easy for the guards to count them. Or that should have made it easy; some of the Japs seemed to have trouble with numbers as big as ten. Maybe Peterson was just being rude in thinking so, but it looked that way to him. A lot of the camp guards seemed to be peasants from the Japanese back of beyond. They were ignorant and mean, and reveled in their petty authority over the Americans.

  About one morning in three, something went wrong with the count. This was one of those mornings. Americans muttered to themselves when no guards were looking their way. “Fuck up a wet dream,” somebody behind Peterson said. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a wet dream. When you were slowly starving to death, dreams of pussy went right out the window.

  The Japanese sergeant in charge of the labor gang wasn’t a bad guy. At least, he could have been worse. He plainly had orders about how much he was supposed to feed the POWs and how much work he was supposed to get out of them. Like just about every Jap Peterson had seen, he conscientiously obeyed his orders. Past what he had to do, he wasn’t cruel for the sake of being cruel. He didn’t beat people or behead them just because he felt like it, and he didn’t let his men do anything like that, either.

  Now, though, he looked about ready to explode. “Shooting squads!” he yelled: one of the handful of English phrases he knew.

  Ice ran up Peterson’s back. It always did when the prisoners got that command. As usual, the first thing he did was look around to see where Walter London was. He didn’t spot him right away. Telling himself that didn’t mean anything, he joined his comrades in misery. Along with them, he silently counted off: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . . nine. No ten. Wherever London was, he wasn’t here.

  “Oh, fuck,” somebody said very softly. It seemed more a prayer than a curse.

  “How did he get loose?” Peterson’s voice was also soft, but very grim. They’d kept a watch on London through the night, taking turns gapped out of their exhausted sleep. The man they worried about, of course, hadn’t had to watch himself. He’d slept like a baby. Till last night, he’d slept like a baby.

  “I had the last watch,” a guy from Oregon named Terry said. Naked fear widened his eyes until you could see white all around the iris. “I guess maybe I fell asleep again, on account of the Jap kinda poked me awake this morning. I didn’t think anything about it till—”

  “Yeah. Till,” somebody broke in. “You just put all our necks in the noose, God damn you.”

  “Too late to do anything about it. The asshole’s gone.” Peterson sounded even wearier than he felt—no mean trick. Under the laws of war, a sentry who fell asleep at his post could go up in front of a firing squad. He didn’t take his buddies to perdition with him, though.

  Here came the Japs. No chance to sneak in somebody from another group that had already been counted. The Japs might have trouble getting to eleven without taking off their shoes, but they knew nine, and they knew nine wasn’t ten. They started pointing and yelling and jabbering in their own language.

  The gang-boss sergeant tramped up. He had no trouble getting to nine and not to ten, either. The POWs stood at ramrod-stiff attention. The sergeant might not have been a bad guy, but he lost his temper now. Peterson even felt a moment’s sympathy for him; he’d probably get in Dutch because of the escape, too.

  “Zakennayo!” he yelled—a handy-dandy all-purpose Japanese obscenity. “Baka yaro!” he tacked on for good measure. Idiots! That also didn’t fit the situation too badly. But cussing wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He walked up to the clos
est POW in the shooting squad and slapped him in the face, hard.

  He might not normally have beaten people, but things weren’t normal now. Japanese noncoms belted their own privates when they got mad. The privates took it without blinking and went on about their business. The prisoners had to do the same, or else they would get shot on the spot.

  Wham! Wham! Wham! The sergeant wasn’t real tall, but he had a bull’s shoulders. He didn’t hit like somebody’s girlfriend when she got mad. He was trying to knock you ass over teakettle. Peterson had just time to brace himself before he got it. His head whipped to one side. He refused to give the Jap the satisfaction of staggering, though he tasted blood in his mouth.

  The damn Jap came back along the row, smacking everybody again. He screamed at the Americans. It was all in Japanese, but he illustrated with gestures. He did excellent impressions of being hanged, being shot, and having his throat cut—the last complete with gruesomely authentic sound effects. Then he pointed at the POWs. This is going to happen to you.

  Peterson had figured it would happen right there. It didn’t. The sergeant told off three guards and had them march the nine remaining members of the shooting squad back to Opana, the northernmost point on Oahu, to the POW camp where they’d been held since not long after the fighting stopped. The men got no food and no water. Whenever one of them stopped for any reason, the Japs set on him with their rifle butts.

  After a day of that, Peterson decided he would take off when they stopped for the night. If they shot him trying to escape, he didn’t figure he’d lost much. And they were going to do in his buddies anyway, so he couldn’t get them into any worse trouble. Disappearing—if he could—looked like his best hope.

  He never got the chance. The Japs herded the shooting squad into Waimea, on the north coast, just as the sun was going down. The men spent the night in one cell of the town jail—all of them crammed into one cell. The cell, naturally, had not been made with nine men in mind. They filled it to overflowing and piled onto one another when they lay down.

  Nobody fed them. But, because the cell had been built by Americans and not by Japanese, it boasted a cold-water sink and a toilet. Jim Peterson drank till he thought water would start coming out of his ears. He washed his face and hands, too. Everybody else did the same thing. And none of them had heard a toilet flush for a hell of a long time.

  When morning came, the Japs herded them out. They’d already used the sink again, expecting that they wouldn’t get any water the rest of the day. They turned out to be right about that. And, because they didn’t seem demoralized enough to suit their captors, the Japs quickmarched them north and east along the highway towards Opana. Now even slowing down meant a goose with a bayonet or a kick or a rifle butt in the kidneys or the ribs or the head.

  Of course, quickmarching the prisoners meant the guards had to quickmarch, too. But they were well fed, and they hadn’t been killing themselves with hard physical labor. They might have been tired by the time they got up to Opana. Peterson felt ready for the boneyard.

  And the Japs were ready to give it to him, too. Everybody from the shooting squad went into punishment cells. They weren’t big enough for anybody to stand up or lie down in them. The prisoners spent ten days in them, with only a little rice and a little water on which to stay alive.

  When Peterson finally did emerge from his cell, he could barely stand. Everybody else in the squad was just as bad off. An officer strode up to them with an interpreter—a local Jap—in tow. That worried Peterson all by itself. If the Japs had something to say that they wanted the POWs to understand, it wasn’t going to be good news.

  Hand on the hilt of his sword, the officer snarled in Japanese. “You have failed in your obligation,” the interpreter said. “Because you have failed, you will be punished. No longer will you be allowed the light duty you have enjoyed up till now.”

  Peterson didn’t laugh in the man’s face. If he had, the officer might have used that sword to cut off his head. He still wanted to live, though right at that minute he couldn’t have said why.

  Another furious-sounding spate of Japanese. “You will be sent to road building in the Kalihi Valley,” the local Jap said. “This is your unbreakable sentence.” He might have been sending them off to Devil’s Island.

  The officer growled one more time. The interpreter left it untranslated, which might have been just as well. The officer drew himself up straight, which would have been more impressive if he’d been taller than five-six. Like the rest of the men in the shooting squad, Peterson bowed. They knew what the Jap wanted.

  As the officer swaggered away with the interpreter in his wake, Peterson dared breathe a sigh of relief. As far as he could see, they’d got off easy. Road building was road building. How could what they wanted him to do be any worse than what he’d been doing already?

  And where the devil was the Kalihi Valley, anyway?

  CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU GATHERED HIS SQUAD by eye. “You boys ready to go back to Honolulu?” he asked.

  “Yes, Corporal!” chorused the men under him. Of course they called out, “Hai!” at the top of their lungs. He was a noncom and they were only privates. If they annoyed him, he could slap them or punch them or kick them, and no one above him would say a word. No, that wasn’t quite true. Lieutenant Horino, the platoon commander, would say, Well done! Keep your men disciplined! Certainly, though, no one above him would complain.

  Odds were he wouldn’t smack them around. He had a ready smile and a readier laugh. He’d been a while making corporal; his superiors came right out and said they feared he was too easygoing for the job. But he’d fought, and fought well, in China before crossing the Pacific to land on a beach not far from where he was now. Once he had the rank, he kept his squad in line well enough even if he didn’t thump his men as often as some other corporals and sergeants did with theirs.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. His whole regiment had moved up from Honolulu to the beaches near Haleiwa on Oahu’s north shore to defend against an American reinvasion. It hadn’t come—the Japanese Navy had made sure it wouldn’t and couldn’t. Now the regiment was returning to its previous posting.

  “This is pretty country. It’s a shame to leave,” Shiro Wakuzawa said. He wasn’t wrong—it was the sort of country where ferns sprouted from the dirt thrown up in front of foxholes, where coconut palms (the ones that hadn’t been knocked over when the Japanese shelled and bombed the beaches) swayed in tropical breezes, where the ocean was several improbably beautiful shades of blue. But Wakuzawa, who’d been a new conscript when he came ashore here, was such a sunny fellow that he made even Shimizu seem like a grouch.

  An older private said, “I won’t be sorry to get back to Honolulu. No whorehouses up here.” With his meager pay, he couldn’t afford to go to a brothel even once a month. But several other soldiers who had no more money nodded. Shimizu didn’t try to argue with them. He also thought getting laid every once in a while was better than not getting laid at all. Getting laid regularly would have been better still. Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought.

  He led the squad over to where the platoon was assembling. Everyone was clean. Everyone had all his gear. Everyone could stand inspection—everyone already had stood Shimizu’s inspection. Shimizu nodded to Corporal Kiyoshi Aiso, whose squad was also part of the platoon. Aiso nodded back. He was thin and leathery and tough—all in all, a more typical noncom than Shimizu.

  Colonel Fujikawa, the regimental commander, condescended to speak to the assembled soldiers before they started marching down across Oahu. “Congratulations, men. You were ready for action,” he said. “I know you would have mown down the Americans if they had dared return to Oahu. We will stay ready in case they decide to try again. Banzai! for the Emperor.”

  “Banzai!” the soldiers shouted.

  The bugler blared out the order to advance. The soldiers started to march. “Be strong!” Shimizu called to his men. “You were soft as tofu on the march up here. I e
xpect better.” Garrison duty in Honolulu had left all of them soft. Shimizu had suffered on the march up to Haleiwa, too, but hadn’t shown it in front of his men. If he kept up a bold front, he had no trouble ordering them around.

  Everything seemed easy when he started out. He laughed at the mynah birds croaking and squawking in the rice paddies that had replaced most of the sugar cane and pineapple plantations past and through which he’d fought. Hawaii hadn’t come close to feeding itself before Japan conquered it. Now it nearly could.

  Little blue-faced zebra doves and ordinary pigeons pecked at the growing rice. There were far fewer of them than there had been when Shimizu came ashore. They were good to eat, and people had got hungry enough to eat them. And zebra doves in particular were very tame and very stupid and very easy to catch.

  Before long, Wakuzawa started to sing. He had a fine musical voice, and could stick to the tune even when the soldiers around him—who weren’t nearly so good—made a hash of it. Singing helped the kilometers go by. Shimizu had done a lot of it on endless dusty marches through China. The marches here weren’t endless, thank heaven, and they weren’t even dusty, for the roads were paved. But singing felt good all the same.

  He thought so, anyhow. After Wakuzawa had led the men in a couple of ballads popular in Tokyo before they sailed for Hawaii, Lieutenant Horino said, “We are soldiers. If we’re going to sing, we should sing Army songs.”

  Army songs had only one thing wrong with them: next to popular ballads, they were dull. Singing about the infantry’s branch-of-service color and about dying for the Emperor and living on inside his spirit wasn’t nearly so much fun as singing about women and getting drunk and looking for a chance to get rich and women again. Even the tunes were dull; they seemed more chants than proper songs. How could you care about singing something like that?

  After a while, then, the men fell silent once more. Lieutenant Horino looked pleased with himself. To his way of thinking, he’d stopped a minor nuisance. Corporal Shimizu swallowed a sigh. When he was singing, he could do that and not notice the highway and each step along it. Now—thump, thump, thump—each footfall was what it was.