The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  When Fujita wasn’t talking about his precious plant, he would talk about that. “Russians are funny people,” he said wisely, puffing a cigarette. “As long as a Russian has a rifle or a bayonet or an entrenching tool in his hands, he’s as dangerous as one of us would be. Maybe more so, because he’s sneakier.”

  “Hai,” breathed the soldiers gathered around him. After all, he was speaking plain truth. Besides, he outranked them. They weren’t going to argue. There were less painful ways to commit seppuku, if a man was so inclined.

  He warmed to his theme: “But when a Russian’s had enough, he just throws down his rifle and throws up his hands and smiles at you like a dog. He expects you to pet him and feed him and take care of his messes from then on out.”

  “Hai,” the soldiers chorused again—they’d all been in the trenches long enough to see the same thing for themselves.

  “Disgraceful,” somebody added. The men nodded. By Japanese standards, surrender was disgraceful. Facing the choice between surrender and death, a Japanese soldier was trained to choose death every time. He had no honor left if he decided to live. Even worse, he smeared his whole family with his shame. If he gave up, gave in, none of his relatives would be able to hold up their heads ever again.

  And, because a man base enough to surrender had no honor left, you could do whatever you pleased with him after he fell into your hands. Russians and other Westerners were said to treat prisoners of war kindly. To Fujita and his comrades, that was incomprehensible softness, even madness.

  To most of them, anyhow. Educated Senior Private Hayashi said, “My father fought against the Russians at Port Arthur.” He waited for his own nods, and got them. Not many men in those muddy trenches didn’t have older relatives who’d gone through the Russo-Japanese War. He continued, “He told me orders then were to go easy on prisoners, to treat enemy wounded the same way we treated our own, and not even to be too hard on soldiers who gave up when they weren’t wounded.”

  Fujita started to tell him he was full of crap. Before he could, though, another soldier said, “Yeah, I remember hearing the same thing from my old man. Pretty crazy stuff, ain’t it?”

  Maybe it really was true, then. No one other than Fujita seemed inclined to contradict Hayashi. Instead of sticking out his own neck, he said, “Well, we aren’t dumb enough to keep on with that kind of nonsense nowadays.”

  “Oh, no, Sergeant,” Hayashi said quickly. Fujita hid a smile behind the rituals of lighting another smoke. Hayashi’s education had made him smart enough to know where his next bowl of rice was coming from, anyhow. Fujita might not know so many kanji or be able to read and write Chinese, but he had the rank. A subordinate who annoyed him would pay and pay. His power might be petty, but for those in its grasp it was real as rain.

  Behind the lines, Japanese guns thundered. Before long, Russian artillery answered. Wherever Fujita had faced the Red Army, he’d seen that it had cannon falling out of its asshole. More guns, guns with longer range … It was enough, more than enough, to make the poor sorry bastards who had to face those guns jealous.

  Something a few kilometers behind Fujita’s position blew up with a rending crash. All the soldiers shook their heads in sorrow. “Eee!” Fujita said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “There’s some ammunition we won’t get to use against the round-eyed barbarians.”

  He wanted to turn around and stand up in the trench to take a look at the cloud of smoke rising from that blast. He wanted to, but he didn’t. That would be asking for a bullet in the back of the head from a Russian sniper. Peering through telescopic sights, waiting for a Japanese soldier to make a mistake and show himself, those round, pale eyes would be pitiless.

  Despite that hit, the Russian guns fell silent again sooner than he’d expected. When he said as much, Senior Private Hayashi answered, “They’ve been doing that the past few days, haven’t they?”

  He made it a question so he wouldn’t seem to contradict Fujita. And, making it a question, he made Fujita think back on it. Slowly, the sergeant nodded. “You know, maybe they have. I wonder what it means.”

  “Maybe they’re running low on shells,” a soldier said hopefully.

  “If they are, we’ve got them,” another man said.

  “Not till they run out of machine-gun bullets, too,” the first soldier retorted. Fujita nodded again. He’d heard stories about the Russo-Japanese War, too. Machine guns were the slate-wipers even back then. They melted regiments into companies and companies into squads. From everything he could see, the Red Army used more of them now than it had in the old days.

  “Sooner or later, we’ll beat them down,” Hayashi said. “Whether it’s soon enough to do us any good …”

  He didn’t go on, or have to. Foot soldiers were expendable. Everybody knew it, including them. If Fujita’s regimental commander needed to take a height in front of him, he’d keep throwing men at it till he did. Why not? He could get reinforcements. Where would the Red Army find them?

  The next day, the Russians raided off to the left of Fujita’s position. They were after ground or prisoners to interrogate. They also made off with the Japanese unit’s rice rations, which were about to be served. The Japanese troops got more a couple of hours later. The Russians got full bellies for a change.

  More raids like that followed. Some of them succeeded in grabbing the booty. Others only cost the Red Army casualties. The Japanese began using field kitchens to bait traps. It worked as well with the Russians as it would have with any other wild beasts.

  Because of such things, Fujita wasn’t astonished when white flags started flying in the Russian trenches. He got a glimpse of grim-faced Soviet officers coming through the Japanese lines to confer with his superiors.

  It wasn’t peace, not yet. But it wasn’t war. You could stand up and show yourself, and the Russians wouldn’t shoot at you. Some of them came into the Japanese lines to beg. They weren’t starving yet, but they were skinny. A lot of them had very fine boots. Fujita acquired a buttery-soft pair for a couple of mess kits of rice.

  A Red Army man who spoke a few words of Japanese said. “Nobody come help we. Why go on fight?”

  Because giving up makes you a thing, not a person, Fujita thought. But he wanted the Russian’s belt, so he didn’t say what was in his mind. He went on dickering with the fellow, for all the world as if he’d personally grown the rice he was offering. He got the price he wanted. The Russian couldn’t say no, not if he aimed to get any food at all. Hunger was a terrible thing.

  So was defeat. After three days of talks, the Red Army officers surrendered Vladivostok and the surrounding territory. They’d reached the same conclusion as the soldier with the belt: no one was coming to help them. Fujita wondered how many Russians were giving up and what the Japanese authorities would do with them all. He shrugged. It wasn’t his worry.

  ONE OF THE BRIGHT lads in Willi Dernen’s company had managed to hook a radio to a car battery and make noise come out of it. The noise, at the moment, was a German newsman. “Radio Tokyo announced today that Vladivostok has at last passed under Japanese control, ending the second long siege in twentieth-century conflicts between the two countries. Having lost to Japan in the east, Russia will now surely also lose to the Reich in the west.”

  “How do they figure that?” a soldier said. “Now Stalin’s only got us to worry about. He isn’t in a big two-front war any more, ’cause he’s already lost just about all of what he can lose way the hell over there.”

  A considerable silence followed. No one seemed sure what to say about the comment. The Landser had a point, which only made matters worse. At last, Willi took a shot at it: “Why don’t you open your mouth a little wider, Anton? Then I can stick a land mine in there, and you’ll blow your own head off next time you talk.” If you haven’t done it already, he added, but only to himself.

  “Huh? What do you mean?” Maybe Anton was God’s innocent, because he sounded as if he had not a clue.

  Willi wasn’t a
bout to spell it out for him. Then again, he didn’t have to. Corporal Arno Baatz took care of things with his usual style: “He means you sound disloyal, that’s what. And you goddamn well do. If they say we’ll whip the lousy Russians, we’ll whip ’em, and that’s flat.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Anton wasn’t in Awful Arno’s section, and had more leeway sassing him than Willi would have. “Has anybody told the lousy Russians about that?”

  The Germans huddled in what had been some middle-class Frenchman’s parlor. The power was out; otherwise, the bright boy wouldn’t have needed his magic trick with the battery. Willi could watch Corporal Baatz turn red anyhow. “The Führer knows what’s what!” he shouted. “We’ll tell the Russians when we march through Moscow!”

  “Moscow? Have you got any idea how far from Poland that is?” Anton said.

  “I’ve got an idea that someone doesn’t care a pfennig for Germany’s leadership,” Awful Arno said in a deadly voice. “And I’ve got a good idea of what happens to people like that, too.”

  “Only if some stoolie rats them out,” somebody behind Baatz said. It should have been Anton, but maybe he really didn’t know what happened to those people. If he didn’t, he was one of God’s innocents.

  Awful Arno whirled as if his ass were on ball bearings. “Who said that?” he yelled. He wasn’t red now; he was purple. “I’ll smash your face in!”

  No one told him a thing. That made him angrier than ever. Now that he’d twisted in a new direction, he gave other people the chance to talk behind his back. And someone was quick to take advantage of it: “Shut up and let us listen to the music, Baatz.”

  It was good music. Barnabas von Géczy was supposed to be Hitler’s favorite band leader. Listening to Komm mit nach Madeira, Willi wished he were on a subtropical beach with a girl, not stuck in a lousy French village with a bunch of smelly soldiers. A bunch of other smelly soldiers, he amended—he was none too clean himself. If the almost-engineer would rig up some hot water, now … Too much to hope for.

  Corporal Baatz heaved himself to his feet and stormed out of the battered house. “He’s going to blab to the officers,” someone predicted gloomily.

  “As long as he doesn’t blab to the SS,” Willi said. He scowled at Anton. “You and your big yap.”

  “Me? What did I do? I was only looking at the military possibilities,” the other soldier said.

  “That’s what you thought,” Willi said. “Don’t ask questions, man. Keep your trap shut and do your job. After the war’s over, we’ll straighten out whatever’s gone wrong.”

  Anton eyed him. “Aren’t you the guy who …?” He paused, not sure how to go on.

  “The guy who what?” Willi growled, though he didn’t have to be a bright boy himself to know.

  “The guy whose buddy ran off,” Anton said.

  “I don’t know what happened to Wolfgang. I wish I did.” Willi wasn’t lying. He’d warned Wolfgang Storch to run off because the SS was about to grab him. And run Wolfgang had—toward the French lines. Willi hoped he was sitting in a POW camp somewhere in southwestern France. He would be … if the poilus hadn’t plugged him instead. No way to know, not for Willi. Guys who tried to give up did get plugged sometimes, no matter what the Geneva Convention ordained.

  “You clowns should put a cork in it, too,” another Landser said. “Or take it outside, anyway.”

  Willi wanted to listen to the music, so he shut up. Anton left in a huff. Some people didn’t even know when they were getting themselves in trouble.

  When the song ended, somebody sighed and said, “That’s not bad, but it isn’t jazz, either.”

  All the other German soldiers in the battered parlor edged away from the music critic. In his own way, the fellow—Willi thought his name was Rolf—was as naïve as poor dumb Anton. The way things worked in the Reich these days, your taste in records was a political choice. National Socialist doctrine branded jazz as degenerate music, nigger music. If you liked it, maybe you were a degenerate or a nigger-lover yourself. The Gestapo would be happy to find out.

  As a matter of fact, Willi was fond of jazz, too. But he liked his own skin even better. He wouldn’t tell anybody he didn’t trust about anything that might be dangerous. If you wanted to get along, you had to think about such things. Or, better, you had to tend to them so automatically, you didn’t need to think about them.

  He sat there, listening and smoking, for another hour. After a repeat of the news, an opera tenor started blasting out an aria. He got up and left then. The Führer loved Wagner. It put Willi in mind of cats being choked to an overwrought musical accompaniment.

  For the time being, the Germans had the village pretty much to themselves. Only a few French families had stayed behind when the Wehrmacht rolled through. The rest packed up whatever they could and ran. Now they were stuck somewhere on the wrong side of the line … if they hadn’t got bombed or machine-gunned from the air while they were on the road.

  Off to the west, French 75s barked: a very distinctive sound. The shells didn’t come down on the village, for which Willi thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing. It wasn’t as if plenty hadn’t already landed here. One of these days before too long, the Germans would fall back some more. Poilus in khaki would take the place of Landsers in field-gray. And German 105s would kill a few French soldiers, mutilate a few more, and knock down some houses that had stayed lucky so far.

  And then, maybe, the people who’d run for their lives would come back to see what was left of the things around which they’d built their civilian existence. And they would cry and wail and swear at the Germans and shake their fists … and somebody would yank on a booby-trap left behind for the poilus and blow off her hand. Then the crying and wailing and cursing would start all over again, louder than ever.

  “War is shit,” Willi muttered, sincerely if with no great originality. He started to cross the main street, the only one in town you couldn’t piss across. Then he stopped. The main drag ran east and west, straight enough to let somebody out there look a long way down it. If the froggies had posted a sniper, he’d be looking this way through a rifle-mounted telescope. Willi had done a little sniping, enough to start to get the feel for it.

  He didn’t know the French had put a guy with a rifle out there. No far-off rifleman had punched Anton’s ticket for him. No sniper had got rid of Awful Arno, either. Too bad, Willi thought.

  Rolf came out, too, a minute or so behind Willi. No surprise: if you liked jazz, dark deeds on the Rhine wouldn’t be your cup of tea. Rolf crossed the street without hesitation. “You might want to watch—” Willi began.

  He couldn’t even finish the sentence before Rolf fell over, shot through the head. The distant report arrived after the bullet. Rolf didn’t even twitch. He just lay there, bleeding. He must have died before he hit the ground. Willi shuddered. It could have been him. Oh so easily, it could have been him.

  GOING WITH PETE MCGILL. had done wonders for Vera’s English. The White Russian girl hadn’t known much before they hooked up with each other. Now she was pretty fluent. Half the time, she even remembered not to roll her r’s. Pete was proud of her—it showed how smart she was. She was a good deal smarter than he was, but that hadn’t occurred to the Marine yet.

  If Vera was really smart, her being smarter than Pete never would occur to him. Worrying about whether the girl you love loves you back or is calculating the best way to use you to get what she wants is not likely to make an affair last.

  At the moment, Pete wasn’t worrying about anything. He’d just got what he wanted, and his heart was still beating like a drum. Shanghai had any number of places where a man and a woman could walk in together, sign the guest book as Mr. and Mrs., and be asked no questions. This was one of them. The room was small, but the mattress was fairly new and the sheets were clean. He wouldn’t have fussed if they weren’t, but Vera might have. Women are picky, he thought.

  He rolled half away from her and turned on the lamp on
the nightstand. With a little startled squeak, she made as if to cover herself. “Don’t do that, babe,” he said. “I love to look at you.”

  When he did, his manhood stirred again. Before long, they’d start another round. In the meantime, a different urge seized him. He rummaged in the trousers of his civilian slacks (till midnight tomorrow, he didn’t have to look like a leatherneck) till he found his Luckies.

  As he tapped one against the nightstand, he held out the pack to Vera. “Want one?”

  “Sure,” she said. The word came out just like that—perfect. She might have been born in the States. She took a cigarette, tapped it down on her nightstand, and waited for a light. Pete had to dig out his matches. If he’d been thinking, he would have grabbed them with the butts. If he’d been thinking, he would have been someone else altogether.

  He lit a match. His cheeks hollowed as he applied the flame to the tip of the cigarette. Smoke filled his mouth, then his lungs. He dropped the match in the glass ashtray next to the lamp.

  Vera leaned close for a light from the hot red coal at the end of his Lucky. As she too sucked in smoke, he cupped her breast with his free hand. She made a little noise that might have been a purr or a laugh. Once she had the cigarette going, she said, “You!”

  She didn’t say Men! That would have reminded Pete there’d been others—and how many others?—before him. She was more than smart enough to steer clear of that kind of tactical error.

  She did say, “I like your American tobacco.”

  The way she said it made Pete feel he’d grown the weed, harvested it, and cured it himself. “Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it?” he said. He’d smoked Chinese tobacco every now and then. It was like inhaling a blowtorch flame. Any smokes were better than none, but still.…

  After she’d leaned across him to grind out her cigarette (the room had only the one ashtray, and was lucky to have that), and after he’d taken more friendly liberties with her person while she did it, she asked, “How much longer will the Marines stay in Shanghai?”