End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  Les nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and, “Jesus.” That amounted to about the same thing. If he’d spoken first, he would have said what the younger man had.

  He looked around. These torn-up trenches weren’t worth a thing by themselves, any more than one German trench had been worth anything in particular during the War to End All Wars. How many men had died defending them? How many had died or been maimed taking them? He knew the answer to the last question, knew it out to the tenth decimal place: too goddamn many. He threw down the cigarette butt and lit a new one.

  A runner came over from the right. “What are you guys sitting around with your thumbs up your asses for? Pick up your feet—get moving. Back where I came from, they’re going forward like Billy-be-damned.”

  A burst of weary profanity answered him. Les said, “Cut us some slack, okay? We almost got our heads handed to us here. Those fucking Hawaiians wouldn’t give up for shit.”

  “Goldbricks. I knew you guys were goldbricks,” the runner said.

  “Goldbricks, my ass,” Les said. Even after a fight like the one he’d just been through, sometimes your own side was a worse enemy than the bastards who’d been trying to kill you. “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

  “Hawaiians,” the runner sneered. “You can’t bullshit me about Hawaiians—I damn well know better. We had Hawaiians in front of us, too, all decked out like the Army was when the shit hit the fan. They fired two, three shots and then threw down their pieces and threw up their hands. We musta took a company’s worth o’ POWs.”

  The man meant it. Les could see that. He and the other Marines who’d just gone through hell stared dully at the irate runner. “Fuck,” he mouthed, as the youngster had a few minutes earlier. He gathered his men by eye. “Come on,” he said. “We gotta get back in the goddamn war.”

  THINKING BACK ON THINGS, Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa couldn’t account for being alive. Most of the men from his regiment had died at or near Oahu’s northern beaches. They’d done everything they could to throw the Americans into the sea. They’d done everything they could—and it hadn’t been enough.

  Furusawa stayed alive after the first day’s fighting—one of the few who did. Naval bombardment didn’t kill him. Neither did U.S. air strikes. Nor did enemy artillery and small-arms fire. By the second morning, nobody survived to give him orders.

  He’d retreated several times since then. For one thing, he had no one left to tell him not to. For another, he wasn’t a typical soldier. Most of the men in his regiment—even most of his noncoms—had come into the Army straight off a farm. A lot of them had had to learn how to make up a bed that stood on a frame instead of just on the floor. They sucked up the indoctrination about the duty to die for their country along with the rest of their training till it became as automatic as slapping a new clip into an Arisaka.

  It wasn’t that Furusawa was unwilling to die for Japan. Like any soldier with a gram of sense, he knew that was always possible, often likely, sometimes necessary. But he was less inclined to die if it wasn’t necessary than most of his comrades. Because he was a druggist’s son, he’d got more education than the average conscript. And his father had taught him to think for himself in a way most Japanese didn’t.

  “You always have to worry. Is this the right medicine? Is this the right dosage? Will it be good for this patient? Never assume anything. Always check, always question—always.” Furusawa didn’t know how many times he’d heard his father say that. And the old man, being a typical Japanese father in a lot of ways, would usually follow the advice with a clout in the ear to make sure it sank in. The method was brutally simple. The Army used it, too. Like a lot of brutally simple things, it worked.

  In his innocence, the younger Furusawa had gone on asking questions after he was conscripted. The Army, far more brutal than his father ever dreamt of being, soon cured him of that—at least of asking them out loud. But the habit of thought persisted. He would sometimes smile to himself when he ran into things that made no logical sense. Even smiling could be dangerous. He was convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps because he didn’t act like a patriotic machine. Of course, he didn’t know a single soldier who wasn’t convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps, so who could say for sure?

  After the Americans landed, he’d fought hard. But he’d watched other soldiers rush across open ground to try to come to close quarters with the enemy. And he’d watched rifles and machine guns and mortars and artillery shells tear them to bloody shreds before they accomplished a thing. If a sergeant or a lieutenant had shouted at him in particular—“You! Furusawa! Forward!”—he supposed he would have charged, too. No superior had. That left him to use his own judgment. And he was still alive and fighting, while flies buzzed around the bloated, stinking corpses of most of his regiment.

  How long he could escape becoming a bloated, stinking corpse himself was anybody’s guess. He crouched in a shell hole not far in front of the ruins of Schofield Barracks. The U.S. Army’s former base had been smashed twice now, first by the Japanese when the Yankees held it and now by the Americans to keep Japan from getting any use out of it.

  Several of the men nearby were stragglers and orphans like himself. Others belonged to a company whose captain wasn’t shy about grabbing reinforcements wherever he could. A corporal spoke in bitter frustration: “Those stinking bastards!”

  “Who?” Furusawa asked. That could have meant either the enemy or the Japanese high command.

  “The Yankees,” the corporal answered. “When the wind blows from them to us, you can smell their cigarettes. When was the last time you had one?” Naked longing filled his voice.

  “Please excuse me, but I don’t smoke,” Furusawa said.

  “Ai!” The noncom’s disgusted grunt might have meant, Why do they saddle me with idiots like this? Furusawa’s cheeks heated. The corporal went on, “Well, even you’ll know they don’t send many smokes from Japan. I haven’t had one for weeks. American tobacco’s good, too—better than what we use ourselves. I’m tempted to sneak over there and cut somebody’s throat just so I can steal his cigarettes.”

  He sounded as serious as a funeral. “Are cigarettes worth risking your life for?” Furusawa asked.

  “Why not? I’m going to get killed pretty damn quick anyway,” the corporal said. “Cigarettes or hooch or pussy—might as well have fun while I can.”

  That made more sense to Furusawa than it might have to a lot of his countrymen. “You don’t think we can win?” he said.

  “Win, lose—who gives a shit? They’ll use us up either way.”

  And that made sense to Furusawa, too, however much he wished it didn’t. All the phrases the Japanese Army used to convince its men to fight to the end no matter what came bubbling up in his mind. He didn’t bring any of them out. But even thinking them at a time like this showed he’d been more thoroughly indoctrinated than he thought. What were such words worth on a real battlefield, with the stench of death and its lesser cousin, the stench of shit, all around?

  Words were worth enough to send young Japanese men into the face of enemy guns by the hundreds, by the thousands. A lot of those young Japanese men were part of that battlefield stench now. How could anything be worth more than a man’s life? The words said the country was, the Emperor was. And the young men, or most of them, believed it.

  He knew what questioning it here and now would get him: a bullet in front of the ear or in the back of the neck, unless some officer who heard him decided to make him into an example for other doubters. In that case, he’d die a lot slower and hurt a lot more while he was doing it.

  He opened a ration can he’d taken from a dead American. A lot of the food the enemy ate was nasty, but he got lucky this time—it was chopped, salty meat. It wasn’t anything he would have got back home, but it was like something he might have got. He wolfed it down. As he did, he remembered the cans of the stuff called Spam he’d found for his squad when the Japanese were conqu
ering. He sighed nostalgically. Now that—that had been really good.

  Not five minutes after he’d finished, the Americans started shelling the Japanese line. Furusawa huddled in his hole, right next to the can he’d dropped. Had the kami decided to discard him the same way? Getting discarded hadn’t hurt the can. If his time was here, he hoped he would be as lucky.

  Huddled next to him, the corporal who wanted a smoke said, “Stinking Hawaiians. It’s their fault we’re in this mess.”

  He didn’t mean Japan. Japan’s problems weren’t the Hawaiians’ fault. But those of this particular knot of Japanese soldiers were. Furusawa said the most he could for the men of the Royal Hawaiian Army: “Some of them fought well.”

  “And some of them damn well didn’t,” the noncom snarled as a nearby shell burst sent splinters screeching overhead. “Some of them ran away. Zakennayo! Some of them surrendered, the worthless turds.” Furusawa had run away. He would have been dead if he hadn’t. The corporal had probably run away, too.

  Surrender . . . That was scarier than the artillery barrage. You didn’t just disgrace yourself if you gave up. You disgraced your family, too. Who could say what the authorities would do to them if word that you were a prisoner got back to Japan? And it wouldn’t be only the authorities. Who would go to a druggist whose son had thrown down his rifle? Who wouldn’t turn away when a man like that, a man who had raised such a worthless son, walked by? Who wouldn’t talk about him behind his back?—not that he wouldn’t know what all his neighbors, all his former friends, were saying.

  Mortar bombs hissed down along with the shells. Furusawa really dreaded mortars. You could hardly hear them coming, and they dropped straight down into foxholes. You couldn’t hide from them, the way you could from ordinary artillery. If one of them decided to rip you up, there you were—sashimi—and you couldn’t do a thing about it.

  Then, as suddenly as a Hawaiian rain shower, the bombardment stopped. Furusawa and the corporal looked at each other, each one making sure the other was still breathing and hadn’t been blown to red rags without even a chance to scream.

  Shouts in harsh English came from the north. So did bursts of machine-gun fire to make the Japanese keep their heads down. And so did clanking rattles that sent fresh ice walking down Furusawa’s spine. Tanks! He’d seen the new U.S. tanks before—always from some little distance, or he wouldn’t be here worrying about them now. They were bigger and tougher-looking than their Japanese counterparts, not that any Japanese tanks were close by. Their cannon would wreck machine-gun nests, their machine guns would chew up infantrymen, and what could a poor damned foot soldier do about them? Not bloody much.

  Furusawa popped out of his hole a couple of times to fire at the oncoming Marines. Bullets cracked past him whenever he did. He took his life in his hands even to try to shoot. But he knew the Yankees would run up and kill him if he didn’t fight back. The risk of death against its certainty . . . You braced yourself, you took the risk, and you hoped for the best. If no bullet found you, you did it again.

  A burst of machine-gun fire from one of the U.S. tanks almost tore his head off. He crouched in the hole, shuddering. Then the machine gun swung elsewhere, to torment other luckless Japanese soldiers.

  As soon as it did, the corporal with whom Furusawa had been talking sprang up and ran toward the tank, which was horribly close. He scrambled onto the metal monster before the bow gunner could swing his weapon back to bear on him. Through the din of battle, Furusawa heard the noncom tap two grenades on his helmet, or possibly on the side of the tank, to start their fuses. He opened a hatch and chucked them in. Then he jumped down and tried to get away.

  One of the American tankers cut him down with half a dozen rounds from the submachine gun he carried as a personal weapon. The grenades went off: two muffled thumps inside the big steel box. An instant later, much bigger booms followed—the grenades must have touched off the tank’s ammunition. The big machine ground to a halt. A thick column of greasy black smoke rose from it.

  Five men and a traveling fortress slain. The corporal’s spirit would have a lot to be proud of as it took its place with so many others in Yasukuni Shrine. Furusawa admired the man’s bravery, and admitted to himself he couldn’t match it.

  Seeing the tank go up in flames made the Yankees hesitate. It filled the Japanese with new spirit, at least for a little while. Another soldier used a bottle full of burning gasoline to disable a second tank, though Furusawa thought some of that crew got away. He hoped the new loss would make the Americans draw back. It didn’t. They might have lacked the stubborn stoicism of Japanese troops, but they were brave, tough men.

  “Give up!” someone shouted in Japanese. “You won’t be harmed after surrender! You’ll be fed and treated well.”

  Only a long burst of machine-gun fire answered that call. The Americans must have found a local Japanese to do their talking—to do their lying—for them. They’d done that when the American Army was advancing, too. You listened to those wills-o’-the-wisp at your peril. Furusawa had seen men do what they said and then get shot down.

  Another call came from behind him: “Back here! We’ve got another line set up!” That was a Tokyo man talking. He didn’t have the Hiroshima accent of the men from Furusawa’s regiment—and of most Japanese settlers in Hawaii. That made Furusawa believe him. It also gave the senior private an excuse to retreat with his honor more or less intact.

  He seized the chance, scrambling and scurrying and scuttling. Bullets whipped by him, but none bit. He flopped down into a hole deeper and much better made than the one in which he’d sheltered. This had to be a position American POWs had prepared in advance. He nodded to himself. Good. Now the Army would get some use out of all that digging.

  A U.S. FIGHTER PLANE ROARED LOW OVER THE VAST POW CAMP in Kapiolani Park. Fletcher Armitage stood in line for the evening meal—whatever rice and weeds the Japs cared to give their prisoners. The plane’s pilot waggled his wings as he zoomed away. When American fliers first started doing that, some of the prisoners had waved back. After the beatings the Japanese guards handed out, that stopped in a hurry.

  One of the guard towers sent a stream of bullets after the fighter, but it was long gone. The machine guns in the towers bore on the camp. When the towers went up, the Japs hadn’t figured those guns would need to shoot down U.S. planes. Too bad, you bastards, Fletch thought.

  A man in front of him said, “I wonder what the hell they call that aircraft. Sure as hell didn’t have anything like it when we got took.”

  He was right about that. It looked more businesslike than any plane Fletch had known in 1941, and its business was death.

  The line snaked forward. When Fletch got up to the cooks, one of them plopped a ladleful of overcooked, gluey rice and green stuff in his bowl. The ladle was small. For all he knew, the greens were lawn trimmings. He didn’t care. For one thing, he didn’t get enough to matter. For another, he would have eaten all he did get. If the Japs had cooked grubs in with the gruel, he would have eaten those, too.

  He savored what little he got. For a couple of hours, he wouldn’t feel like a man starving to death—which he was. He would just be very hungry. To a POW in Hawaii, very hungry seemed wonderful.

  Two emaciated prisoners carried an even more emaciated body to the disposal area near the perimeter. Several others lay there, some scrawnier yet. Men who should have been in the prime of life died here every day, and not a few of them. Fletch glanced warily toward the guard towers. If the Japs in them decided to open up, men inside the perimeter would die by the hundreds, by the thousands. And they were thinking about it. He could feel the tension in the air. If anything, those American fighters made it worse. The Japs were losing the fight for Oahu. The distant rumble of artillery fire and bombs going off wasn’t so distant any more. If the guards wanted to take a last revenge on the POWs in their hands and under their machine guns, they could.

  If they did, the Americans would avenge themselves in tur
n. That was obvious. It might have restrained Americans guarding Japanese prisoners. Fletch could tell the Japs didn’t give a shit. They intended to fight to the death any which way. If they could get rid of men who might recover and fight them again—or just men who’d fought them in the past—they would do it, and then die with smiles on their faces.

  I’ll give you something to smile about, you slant-eyed mothers. Fletch’s hands balled into fists. He’d had that fantasy so many times. And he couldn’t do one goddamn thing to make it real. Not one. The Japs were on the right side of the wire and he was on the wrong side. He didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting out, either. Hell, a Chinaman would have had a better chance than he did. A Chinaman might have been able to fool the guards into thinking he was another Jap. Tall, thin, freckled, and auburn-haired, Fletch made a most unconvincing Japanese.

  He did what most of the POWs did most of the time: he lay down and tried to rest. The laughable rations gave them next to no energy. The less they used, the better off they were. He shook his head when that occurred to him. The less energy he used, the longer he’d last. Whether that made him better off was a long way from obvious.

  But sleep had dangers of its own. When he slept, he dreamt of . . . food. He burned too low for sex to mean anything to him. But food—food was a different story. Those dreams never went away. If anything, they got worse as he got weaker. Steaks smothered in onions danced in his dreams. So did mashed potatoes and string beans. Bacon and eggs. Pancakes—mountains of pancakes smothered in melted butter and maple syrup. Cherry pie à la mode. Not slices—whole pies, with quarts of vanilla ice cream plopped on top. Coffee with cream and sugar. Beer. Brandy. Whiskey.

  And when he woke up, the dreams would seem so vivid, so real. He’d be just about to dig in, just about to make up for more than a year and a half of tormenting hunger—and then he’d have his food snatched away by cruel consciousness. When a man cried in Kapiolani Park, he most likely cried after a dream of food.