The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  He mostly huddled in a dugout scraped from the forward wall of a trench. Digging was anything but easy. The ground was frozen hard as stone. It wouldn’t collapse under shellfire, which was something. Not enough, not as far as Fujita was concerned.

  Japanese and Russian cannon dueled with one another. Machine guns made sticking your head up over the parapet tantamount to committing seppuku. Runners who brought rice and other food up from the field kitchens risked their life with every trip. Even when they made it through, meals were commonly cold by the time they reached the frontline soldiers.

  Rumors flew thick and fast as bullets. Some people said the Russian commander was about to surrender, the way the nobleman in charge of Port Arthur had in 1905. Fujita didn’t believe that one. He’d spent too long fighting the Russians to doubt they were in earnest. They might bungle things—they weren’t always skillful soldiers. But, no matter what they’d been like in 1905, no one who fought them now could think they’d quit so easily.

  Other rumors claimed the Japanese would soon charge the works in front of them again. Fujita had to hope those weren’t true. Too many frozen corpses still sprawled suspended in the wire ahead. Along with solidifying the ground, the cold meant dead bodies didn’t stink. Having said those two things, you exhausted its virtues.

  Fujita wanted the generals to come up with something brilliant, or at least clever. If they tried something like that, he was less likely to get killed or maimed than if they just pounded away. They didn’t seem to worry about that. As far as generals were concerned, soldiers were only munitions of war, expendable as machine-gun bullets or 105mm shells.

  Far off in the distance, Vladivostok itself burned. Black columns of smoke rose into the sky all day long. Japanese bombers pounded the city night and day. When, as occasionally happened, the wind blew from the south instead of the north, the half-spicy, half-choking smell of smoke filled Fujita’s nostrils.

  Russian fighters rarely came up to challenge the Japanese planes. The Reds hadn’t had many fighters when Fujita got here, and they had fewer now. Fighters were short-range planes; the Soviet Union couldn’t bring in more very easily.

  Russian bombers, by contrast, flew over fairly often, for the most part at night. Fujita had no idea where they came from. Some landing strip up in Siberia? The northern, Soviet half of the island Japan called Karafuto and the Russians Sakhalin? No doubt it mattered to his superiors, who had to decide what to do about the air raids. To Fujita, they were only one more annoyance. Machine-gun bullets and the deadly artillery were worse.

  And worse still was knowing his regiment was only an officer’s whim from being thrown into the fire of a frontal attack. Many went forward. Few came back—even fewer unmaimed.

  Shinjiro Hayashi, a superior private in Fujita’s section, had been a student when conscription nabbed him. He still had a calculating turn of mind. “If we use up a regiment to take a stretch of ground two hundred meters wide and fifty meters deep, how many will we use to advance twenty kilometers on a front at least fifty kilometers around?” he asked.

  When Fujita was in school, he’d hated problems like that. He tried to work this one, but didn’t like the answer he got. “I don’t know if there are that many regiments in Japan,” he said.

  “I don’t, either, Sergeant-san,” Hayashi answered somberly.

  And what was Fujita supposed to do with that? A sergeant punished defeatism wherever he found it. And a sergeant had the right—the duty—to beat the snot out of his underlings when they didn’t live up to his expectations, or sometimes whenever he felt like it. But the only thing the senior private had done was ask a simple question. They went back to Mongolia together, too.

  Instead of belting Hayashi, then, Fujita said, “If you open your big yap any wider, you’ll fall right in.”

  Hayashi got the message. “I’ll be careful, Sergeant-san,” he promised.

  “You’d better,” Fujita growled, but he didn’t sound angry enough to frighten a nine-year-old, let alone a combat veteran.

  Then they got something to be frightened about: an order to attack the Red Army positions in front of them. Fujita was a combat veteran, all right, and he was scared green. He spent half an hour sharpening his bayonet. He didn’t think that would keep him alive, but it gave him something to do so he wouldn’t have to worry—too much—about what lay ahead.

  No artillery preparation. That, the officers said, would warn the Russians. And so it would, but it would also kill a lot of them, and flatten some of the wire in front of their trenches. What could you do? Live—if they’d let you.

  He couldn’t even tell his men the Red Army soldiers would have loot worth taking. In Mongolia, Russian gear and rations seemed luxurious to the Japanese. Not here. The Russians around Vladivostok had been under siege for months. Even by Japanese standards, they didn’t have much.

  The only covering fire the attackers got came from machine guns. Ever since the fight at Port Arthur, the Japanese had handled those aggressively. If the gunners shot a few of their own men in the back … Well, to everyone but the luckless victims, that was only a cost of doing business.

  Mouth dry, Fujita ran forward, hunched over as low as he could go. The Russian Maxim guns needed only a few seconds to snarl to life. Bullets coming toward him, bullets snapping past him from behind … He’d been places he liked more. Less? Maybe not.

  He tripped over something and fell full length in the snow. Two bullets, one coming and the other going, slammed together about where he’d just been. They fell beside him, sending up a small plume of steam. He hardly noticed, and had no idea how lucky he was.

  He got up again and stumbled on. Not all the Japanese soldiers who’d gone down would get up again. If you lost a regiment taking a stretch of ground not very wide and even less deep … He called down elaborate curses on Shinjiro Hayashi’s learned head.

  Some soldiers had wire cutters. Some of them stayed unwounded long enough to get up to the vicious stuff and cut it. More Japanese soldiers, Fujita among them, pushed through the gaps and rushed the Russian trenches. A Red Army man popped up like a marmot. He aimed his rifle at the sergeant. Fujita fired first. He missed, but he made the Russian duck. With a cry of “Banzai!” Fujita leaped into the trench after him.

  The Russian shot at him from almost point-blank range. He missed anyhow. Fujita lunged with the bayonet while the Russian was working the bolt. The point went home. The white man screamed and dropped the rifle. Fujita stuck him again and again, till he finally fell over. Even then, he kept thrashing on the cold hard ground until the sergeant shot him in the head. People could be awfully hard to kill.

  Little by little, paying a price, the Japanese cleared the Russians from three or four rows of trenches. No, not much left in the dead men’s pockets, though Fujita did get some Russian cigarettes—a little tobacco at the end of a long paper holder. He lit one. The smoke was harsh as sandpaper, but he didn’t care.

  Senior Private Hayashi sidled up to him and spoke in a low voice: “If clearing a space two hundred meters by fifty meters costs most of a regiment …”

  “Oh, shut up,” Fujita exclaimed. He tried to blow a smoke ring.

  SPAIN WAS MISERABLY hot in summer and miserably cold in winter. Coming as he did from New York City, Chaim Weinberg had reckoned himself a connoisseur of both extremes. He had to admit, though, that Spain went further in both directions than his home town.

  Spain seemed to go all-out in everything. American politics matched one side of the center against the other, and endlessly played the game of compromise solution. Communists like Chaim couldn’t get a serious hearing there. And so he’d come to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to do what he could for the left-wing Republic against Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists, who held more than half of it.

  He’d sweltered. He’d frozen, the way he was freezing now. He’d argued in English, in Yiddish that often did duty for German, and in bad Spanish. The Republic ran on argument no less than on gasolin
e and high explosives. He’d learned to drink wine from a leather sack and to roll his own smokes. He’d killed. He’d been wounded. He’d got laid. If you were an excitable young man who hadn’t done most of those things before (sweltering, freezing, and arguing came naturally), Spain could look a lot like paradise.

  But if this was paradise, it needed rebuilding. Sanjurjo’s men, and the Italian and German mercenaries who fought on their side, had done their best to knock Madrid flat. Their best was good, but not good enough. Buildings had chunks bitten out of them. Hardly any windows were glazed. Craters in streets and sidewalks made getting anywhere in town an adventure.

  Chaim didn’t care. The Madrileños carried on as if the war were a million miles away: as well as they could when going hungry or huddling in a cellar while bombs rained down didn’t distract them. If the wine reminded him of vinegar or piss, if the cigarettes tasted of hay or horseshit or other street scrapings, well, so what? You could still get drunk. Whatever else went into the cigarettes, they had enough tobacco so you didn’t think you’d quit.

  And the people … Everybody called everyone else tu. The formal Usted hadn’t been banned in the Republic, but anyone who used it might get sent off for reeducation. Women acted like men, in the shops, in the streets, and in bed. Yes, Chaim had got laid. If you couldn’t get laid in the Spanish Republic, you weren’t half trying.

  Prisoners from the other side who were brought into Madrid had to think they’d landed on Mars. Where the Republic jumped on class and sex distinctions with both feet, under the Fascist regime they got enforced more strongly than ever. Enforcing the ruling class’s dominance was what Fascism was all about.

  Almost by accident, Chaim had got the job of reindoctrinating those prisoners. His Spanish still wasn’t the best, but it did the job—and if he was fluent in any part of the language, it was Marxist-Leninist jargon. Besides, Spaniards were absurdly respectful of foreigners. The Fascists even respected Italians, for crying out loud! Prisoners assumed an American had to be a political sophisticate. Chaim knew better, but didn’t let on that he did.

  The POW camp was in a park near the center of Madrid. When enemy planes came over at night, they dropped their bombs more or less at random. They bombed their own people, too. Sometimes they blasted the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter. That led to escapes: POWs on the loose in Madrid weren’t much shabbier than anybody else, and looked, acted, and sounded like any other Spaniards. It also led to casualties.

  Chaim still wasn’t sure whether Joaquin Delgadillo, a man he’d captured himself, was the one or the other. Delgadillo wasn’t in the camp any more. Chaim knew that. But whether the Spaniard had got away after a bombing run or been blasted into unrecognizable scraps of meat, the guards had no idea. They only shrugged. “One or the other,” they chorused.

  “But which?” Chaim demanded. “Differences are important.”

  “One or the other,” the guards said again. They didn’t get it. Maybe they needed to listen to his harangues, too.

  Someone on this side of the wire listened intently to what he told the captured Fascists. The authorities wanted to make sure he preached only good, pure, true Communist doctrine. Heaven—the heaven he didn’t believe in—help him if he showed himself out of step with what Moscow decreed to be so … or, worse, if he showed he’d fallen into the Trotskyist heresy. There were times when the old Inquisition had nothing on the Republic, though Chaim didn’t think of it like that.

  He didn’t not least because his minder was one of the best-looking women he’d ever set eyes on. La Martellita—her nom de guerre meant the little hammer—filled out overalls in a way their designer never intended. Midnight hair. Snapping eyes, coral lips, a piquant nose … He was in love, or at least in lust.

  La Martellita looked at him as if she’d just found half of him in her apple. If she didn’t like what he said, she might be able to have him shot. He didn’t care. If anything, the aura of danger that fit her as tightly as those overalls only made him hotter.

  He didn’t even know her real name. She wouldn’t tell him, and he hadn’t found anybody else who knew. One of these days, he would. And then, casually, in just the right spot, he’d call her by it. And then what? Chances were she’d tell him to fuck off. Even rejection, coming from her, seemed sweet.

  Which was a good thing, because rejection and criticism were all he got from her. He did try to be more careful with the doctrine he preached to the prisoners. He didn’t want to die at the hands of his own side. He didn’t want to die at all. He aspired to be shot at the age of 103 by an outraged husband. He’d come to Spain to fight the enemies of Marxism-Leninism, not its friends.

  When he said as much to La Martellita, she curled her kissable upper lip. “Then you shouldn’t deviate from the Party line,” she said, as if she were a bishop complaining about a priest’s sermon.

  Chaim was no priest. He didn’t have to stay celibate. He didn’t want to, either. La Martellita was also free. Unlike a lot of her Spanish sisters, she wasn’t easy, though, not with him.

  “Why don’t you go play with yourself?” she said when she couldn’t be in any doubt of his interest. Spanish women could also be very blunt.

  “You’d be more fun,” he answered honestly.

  “Not with you, I wouldn’t,” she said. “You’d make any woman wish she were with somebody else.” She stalked away. Maybe she didn’t realize how her hips swung. More likely, she was doing it with malice aforethought.

  Oh, yeah? he wanted to shout back, like a stupid kid. Says you! Every once in a while, he’d learned, keeping his big mouth shut came in handy. This looked like one of those times.

  Maybe the way to her heart lay in the straight Party line. But Chaim, while a good Communist, was also an American to the tips of his stubby fingers. He enjoyed tinkering with ideas the way a lot of his countrymen enjoyed tinkering with motors. He tore them down and rebuilt them and did his damnedest to get them working better than ever. If they weren’t always the same afterwards, so what? They were new and improved—two magic words in the States.

  Not in Spain. (Not in the USSR, either: something Chaim preferred to forget. He knew about the gulags—knew they existed, anyhow, and held dissidents. He also preferred to forget that.) Here, a parrot did better than a tinkerer. Chaim had never been a parrot, and didn’t want to start.

  But he did want to jump on La Martellita’s elegantly cushioned bones. “Weinberg wants a cracker!” he screeched in English. It wouldn’t have made sense to the guards even in their own language.

  he dreaded call didn’t always come with a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Lieutenant Anastas Mouradian was eating blintzes and drinking his breakfast tea when a hard-faced noncom carrying a submachine gun strode up to him in the officers’ mess and barked, “Comrade Lieutenant, Colonel Borisov requires your presence. Immediately!”

  Across the table from Mouradian, his pilot looked horrified. Sergei Yaroslavsky had warned him again and again that he was too sarcastic, too skeptical, for his own good. Maybe Sergei’d been right all along.

  Nothing showed on the Armenian’s swarthy face now. Never let them know you’re worried, Mouradian thought. And a whole fat lot of good that would do him if they’d already built a case with his name on it. If the powers that be wanted to give him a plot of earth two meters long, a meter wide, and two meters deep, they damn well would, and that was all there was to it.

  He got to his feet. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said in his throatily accented Russian, hoping it wasn’t for the last time.

  Russians from Siberia talked about the whisper of stars: weather so cold that, when you exhaled, the moisture in your breath audibly froze. They claimed it never got that cold on this side of the Urals. Mouradian couldn’t have said one way or the other. He’d never heard the so-called whisper of stars, but maybe the Siberians were lying about it.

  Even without it, the weather seemed plenty cold enough. He was glad for his flying suit of leather and
fur, and for the thick felt valenki that kept his feet from freezing. The Russians were good at fighting winter—and they needed to be. He often wondered why so many men from the south, where the weather was mostly decent, came up here to make their careers. When it got this cold, he wondered why he’d ever wanted to leave Armenia himself.

  But the answer was simple. Armenia and the rest of the Caucasus were only a little pond. If you wanted to see how good you were in the ocean, you came north and measured yourself against the swarms of Russians. It had worked out pretty well for Georgian-born Joseph Dzugashvili, who commonly went by the Russian handle of Stalin these days.

  Of course, things that worked out well for Stalin had a way of working not so well for other people. Mouradian glanced over at the sergeant with the machine pistol. The son of a bitch looked depressingly alert. Were a couple of NKVD men waiting for Mouradian along with Colonel Borisov? Would they ship him off to Kolyma or some other garden spot so he could find out about the whisper of stars for himself?

  He’d know soon. Here was the wing commander’s tent. The sergeant gestured with his weapon, telling Mouradian to go in. Sighing out fog but no stars, the copilot and bomb-aimer obeyed.

  No NKVD men. Only Colonel Borisov, sitting behind a card table that held some papers and a tumbler full of clear liquid. Despite a brazier next to the table, water would have frozen in a hurry. But, knowing Borisov’s habits, Mouradian would have been astonished had the glass held water.

  Saluting, the Armenian said, “Reporting as ordered, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Yes.” Borisov looked and sounded bleary. Had he started drinking this early in the morning? Or had he been at it all night, so it wasn’t early for him? He stared at Mouradian out of pale eyes narrowed by a Tatar fold at the inner corners. “Are you capable of piloting an SB-2?”

  “Da, Comrade Colonel,” Mouradian answered. A copilot needed to be able to fly his plane. If anything happened to the pilot—a 20mm cannon shell from a Messerschmitt, say—bringing the bomber home would be up to him. Colonel Borisov should have known that. Chances were he did … when he was sober.