The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  “I’ve got no idea,” he said, and he might have been proud of having no idea. As a matter of fact, he was. Like any well-trained hunting dog, he went where he was told and did what he was told. He didn’t need to worry about that kind of thing for himself, and so he didn’t. The question did provoke a little more response in him, though: “How come?”

  “Because the Japanese can run over you any time they please. Because I do not want anything bad to happen to you,” Vera said.

  Pete grunted. Ever since the Japs overran Peking, he’d known that was true. More often than not, a Marine’s pride kept him from admitting it, even to himself. “They mess with us, they’ve got a war on their hands. A war with the USA. They got to know we’d kick their behinds around the block so darn fast, it’d make their heads swim.” That he censored the automatic Marine curses showed she wasn’t just a joy girl for him—he really cared.

  “They bombed the Panay. There was no war,” Vera said.

  “They apologized afterwards. That’s why,” Pete answered uneasily. “ ’Sides, they’re busy fighting a war with the Russians. They wouldn’t want to tangle with two big countries at once. Japs are crazy, sure, but they aren’t that kind of crazy.”

  “They have what they want from Russia. They have Vladivostok.” Vera’s English was a lot better, yeah, but the way she pronounced the town’s named showed what her native language was. “Now Russia has a hard time fighting them.” She spoke with as much assurance as a general.

  Pete was good and sure he would never want to suck on a general’s bare tits, though. “What can I do about it?” he said. “I’m nothing but a two-striper. Nobody’s gonna pay attention to me.”

  “Talk to your officers. Let them know your concern.” Let them know my concern, Vera meant. Pete vaguely sensed that, but only vaguely. She went on, “Some of what you tell them will go into what they tell the people over them, the people back in America.”

  How could she be so sure of that? How much experience of the way the military mind worked did she have? When the question came to him like that, Pete shied away from it. It was almost as if his Corps buddies were razzing him about her. Hell, he didn’t need them. He was doing it to himself, right there inside his own head.

  What was going through his mind must have shown on his face. Vera suddenly looked impish. “When you turned on the light, I thought it was because you wanted to watch,” she said. “Here. I give you something to watch.”

  And she did. Did she ever! She couldn’t have been more distracting if she’d caught fire. She needed experience with men to know how to do what she was doing, too, but Pete didn’t care. While she was doing it, he didn’t care about anything.

  After she got done doing it, he wanted to roll over and sleep for a week. Instead, he smoked another cigarette. Then he did something along those lines for her, too. That went a long way toward proving his love. He never would have done anything like it for anyone he didn’t really want to please. If it also proved Vera washed more often and more carefully than other women he’d known—well, he didn’t consciously notice.

  He did notice she gave every sign of being pleased when he did it: one more encouragement for him to do it again. “How am I supposed to go dance tomorrow?” she said. “My legs are all unstringed.”

  He thought that was supposed to be unstrung, but he wasn’t sure enough to tell her so. Correcting a girl who’d just paid you a compliment like that wasn’t the smartest thing you could do, either. Pete might not have been the highest card in the deck, but he could see that. Squeezing the breath out of her seemed a better idea. It was more fun, too.

  He wished she didn’t have to go on working as a taxi dancer. He gave her what he could, but he didn’t have enough to put her up the way she’d want to be put up if she quit. A Marine corporal was rich by Shanghai standards, but not rich enough to support a mistress. You needed an officer’s pay for that.

  Besides, he didn’t want a mistress. He wanted a wife. That thrilled his superiors, too. It was one more reason they wouldn’t listen to him if he came to them with stories of what the Japs were liable to do. Since he didn’t see how he could explain that to Vera, he didn’t try.

  As they were walking back to the dance hall above which she lived, she waved at the European-style buildings all around. “All this? Pretty soon—poof!” She snapped her fingers. “What do you say? Rented time?”

  “Borrowed.” Pete only shrugged. “Nothing I can do about it, babe. I don’t know if anybody can do anything about it.”

  “The Japs can,” Vera said. “That is the point.”

  She wouldn’t let it alone. If Pete hadn’t been head over heels, that would have bothered him. It bothered him a little anyhow, but he overlooked being bothered. Yes, he was in love, all right.

  THEY’D DONE SOMETHING unspeakable to Sergeant Demange. Luc Harcourt laughed and laughed. “A lieutenant? At your age? When you’ve been cussing out officers since before you had to shave? What is the world coming to?”

  “Ah, fuck off,” Demange said. His eternal cigarette quivered in fury. “I didn’t ask ’em to do it. God knows I didn’t want ’em to do it. But you can’t tell the assholes no—they don’t listen to you.”

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant, sir,” Luc said, and gave Demange the fanciest salute he’d torn off since training-ground days.

  “It won’t change anything,” Demange insisted. “I’ve been running this fucking platoon full of cocksuckers anyway.”

  “Hey, but now that you’re a lieutenant they’ll figure you can run a company, or maybe a battalion,” Luc answered. “Everybody knows how screwed up our high command is. They just went and proved it, that’s all.”

  Demange said something about his mother that violated at least eight of the Ten Commandments. Then he added, “The real proof that those shitheads have lost it will be when they make you a sergeant.”

  “Now that you can’t do it, somebody’s got to disgrace the rank,” Luc said reasonably. Demange’s reply took care of the last two Commandments.

  Luc wasn’t eager to become a sergeant. If he kept avoiding bullets, though, he would before too long. Slots opened up as people’s luck ran out. You didn’t always need to meet a bullet. Somebody in another company in the regiment had tripped over a length of barbed wire he hadn’t seen and broken an ankle. He’d be out of action for weeks, the lucky salaud.

  Woods rose up ahead. Beyond them lay the village of Serzy-et-Prin. Beyond that, a good way beyond it, lay Reims, which was a real city. The Boches held Reims. They held Serzy-et-Prin, too. And there were bound to be bastards in coal-scuttle helmets in among the trees.

  Demange pointed east, toward the woods. “Goddamn leaves would have to start sprouting just when they could hide some Fritzes.” His scorn was so seamlessly perfect, it covered all of mankind and had room for Mother Nature as well. When Luc said as much, Demange spat. “That clapped-out old whore? All she’s ever given me are lice.”

  “Like you’re the only one.” Just thinking about them made Luc want to scratch. He nodded toward the trees himself. “You going to order us in? Joinville and Villehardouin are ready to lug the Hotchkiss.”

  “Don’t blame it on me,” Demange said. “When the generals decide it’s time to go, we’ll go. Till then, I’ll sit on my ass as long as I can.”

  He spat out the last Gitane’s tiny butt and lit up the next. “How about one for me?” Luc asked.

  Demange looked shocked. “What? You think officers waste tobacco on enlisted men? Fuck off, cochon!”

  “Fuck off yourself … sir,” Luc said. The new lieutenant gave him a cigarette. They smoked together, eyeing the woods they’d have to clear out sooner or later. Like Demange, Luc hoped it would be later. Luc pointed toward the new grass sprouting in the cratered field in front of the trees. “You’ve got to know the Fritzes have had time to lay mines there.”

  “As sure as your sister’s got crabs,” Demange agreed. “All part of the overhead.”

  “
Oh, boy.” Luc took his canteen off his belt. It was full of pinard. He drank some, then passed the rough red wine to Demange. The veteran’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he took a good swallow. Just for the moment, with nobody shooting at them and no order to advance, life didn’t seem so bad.

  The order to advance came the next day. Luc would have been more upset had he been more surprised. “Well, if we’ve got to catch the shaft, there are worse places to do it—I suppose,” Joinville said. Villehardouin came out with something in Breton that Luc didn’t understand at all. As Luc had told Demange, they were ready. So was the gun: he checked it himself. By now, he could do everything with a Hotchkiss gun but build one.

  And so were the Germans. Whether a deserter warned them or they figured it out for themselves, they shelled the French positions on and off through the night. Luc huddled in a shallow foxhole, trying to doze. He didn’t get much sleep, but the hole was deeper toward dawn than it had been at sundown.

  “Come on, you sorry, silly cons,” Lieutenant Demange called when the eastern sky began to go gray. “Time to earn our sous.” He made more as a lieutenant than he had as a sergeant, but you didn’t make a career of the Army to get rich.

  “You heard the man,” Luc told his machine-gun crew. They stumbled forward. There still wasn’t enough light to see much. You’d never spot the mine that waited for you. You’d never spot wire, either, though Luc looked for some almost hopefully. A broken ankle didn’t seem half bad.

  Then, all of a sudden, he could see just fine. German parachute flares lit up the field brighter than noontime. French soldiers cried out in horror. “Down!” Demange screamed. “Get down. They’re gonna give it to us.”

  Give it to them the Boches did. Their artillery opened up one more time. Now it was deadly accurate, thanks no doubt to forward observers watching the poilus scramble and dive for cover. For good measure, German machine guns at the edge of the woods raked the field. Traces might have been lines of blood drawn in the air.

  When people started shooting at you, you flattened out. Demange had that right. Luc did his best to imitate a frog squashed by a tank. But he couldn’t just lie there and pile dirt in front of himself with his entrenching tool. Commanding a machine gun meant he had to shoot back. If the Hotchkiss could knock out the German machine gunners, he and his buddies would have a much better chance of seeing the sun go down this afternoon.

  Joinville and Villehardouin had hit the dirt, too. They were already putting the machine gun on its tripod. Luc crawled over to them, not getting a centimeter higher off the ground than he had to. “Fuck the fuckers!” Villehardouin said: the clearest thing Luc had heard from him in days.

  He got down behind the Hotchkiss and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared through a strip of ammo. He probably wouldn’t have any hearing left by the time he got out of the Army, but he didn’t care.

  Joinville fed fresh strips into the machine gun. One of the ammunition carriers was down, wounded or dead. Villehardouin crawled back to recover the crate. Luc fired, first at one MG-34, then at another. How many of the monsters did those Nazi cochons have? The other thing was, they all seemed to be shooting at him, and with better and better accuracy as sunrise neared.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a couple-three tanks right now,” Joinville said. Luc nodded, not that that did either one of them any good. The brass didn’t seem to have laid on any armor for this little dance. The Fritzes didn’t have any in the neighborhood, so why should la belle France waste hers?

  Why? To keep us from getting murdered, Luc thought. But that wasn’t the biggest worry in the brass’s minds, now or ever. The old men with all the gold braid and leaves on their kepis measured things out on their maps and went from there. Casualties? Just part of the overhead, as Demange said.

  What Demange said now was, “Back! Get back! We can’t break in there in a million years! Machine gun, give us covering fire!”

  “Thanks a bunch, Lieutenant,” Luc said under his breath. But it was the right order, even if it might make him a casualty. He tapped the gun with the heel of his hand, again and again, traversing it so it sprayed the whole front of the woods with fire and made lots of Boches keep their heads down. The more Germans who ducked, the more of his own buddies who’d get back to their holes. How he and the rest of the Hotchkiss crew would get back was an … interesting question.

  To his surprise, it got an answer. The French artillery, which should have shelled the woods before the infantry moved out, chose that moment to wake up. Under cover of the badly timed barrage, the machine gunners made it back to what passed for safety in these parts. Luc drained his pinard to celebrate. He figured he’d earned it.

  ergeant Hideki Fujita had been talking about prisoners of war not long before. Now here they were, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, crowded into barbed-wire corrals with Japanese machine-gun positions outside the wire to make sure they didn’t get any bright ideas about breaking out.

  The Russians looked … well, they would have had to perk up to look miserable. They’d been disarmed and hastily plundered after they surrendered, but they weren’t plucked clean yet. Who could guess what goodies they hid under their dun-colored greatcoats? Those coats, and the hair—black, brown, yellow, once in a while startling red—sprouting in clumps on their faces, robbed them of their human outlines.

  “Monkeys,” Fujita said as he strolled around the camp. “That’s what they look like. A bunch of monkeys.” He mimed scratching himself under the armpits.

  Senior Private Hayashi smiled and nodded. If a sergeant made a joke, a senior private thought it was funny. “Have you seen the ones that go in the hot springs in the middle of winter? The Russians are so hairy, that’s just what they remind me of.” He made his own joke: “And they’re in hot water, too.”

  “Hai. They sure are,” Fujita said. No matter what had happened during the last war between Russia and Japan, he couldn’t see his own countrymen wasting much food or care on prisoners of war, especially when there were so many of them.

  He was soon proved right—even righter than he’d expected. The regimental commander, Colonel Watanabe, gathered his men together so he could harangue them: “Soldiers of Japan, we have got to deal with this Russian pestilence!”

  Along with plenty of other men, Fujita nodded. Hearing the colonel like this was safe enough. Usually, if his eye fell on you, it was because you’d screwed up. He’d make you sorry, which was one of the things colonels were for.

  “Our regiment has been chosen for a high honor!” Watanabe went on. Fujita had a good idea what that meant. It meant that, whatever came out of the colonel’s mouth next, they were stuck with it. Sure enough, Watanabe went on, “We have the privilege of removing many of the Russians from proximity to Vladivostok. That way, they can no longer endanger the city, which has become an integral part of the Japanese Empire.”

  A murmur of “Hai” ran through the men. Again, Sergeant Fujita joined it, though he wasn’t quite sure what Watanabe was talking about. And then, suddenly, he was. They were going to guard the Russians while the prisoners went wherever Japanese officials had decided they should go.

  Colonel Watanabe looked out at his men. “You must be severe. These prisoners have no honor left. Since they’ve surrendered, how could they? Some of them will realize this. Others will not care, and will act like the wild beasts they are. If they try to get away, you will dispose of them the way you would get rid of any other vermin. Do you understand me?”

  “Hai,” the Japanese soldiers chorused once more. This time, Sergeant Fujita spoke firmly. He heard no hesitation from any of his comrades, either. It wasn’t as if Watanabe had told them anything they didn’t already know.

  The colonel nodded to the regiment. “Good,” he said. “I knew you would hear me in the spirit of bushido. Do you have questions?” He pointed to a captain from another company. “Yes?”

  “Please excuse me, Colonel-san, but what arrangements will be made for getting the priso
ners food and water on the march?”

  “They are prisoners,” Watanabe said, as if to an idiot. “They will get what bushido says they deserve. Is that clear enough?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” the captain said quickly. It was clear to Fujita, too. Bushido—the way of the warrior—said letting yourself get captured was the ultimate disgrace. A prisoner deserved nothing. Better he should have died.

  As if reading his mind, Colonel Watanabe raised a hand in warning. “I have been told it is important that some of the captives reach the destination to which we are ordered to take them. They must not all fall along the way. So there will be food. There will be water.” He shrugged. “Not what everyone would want, perhaps, but it can’t be helped.”

  After the colonel dismissed the regiment, Fujita went to watch the prisoners some more. He nodded to himself. Monkeys. That was just what they looked like, all right.

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant-san, but you must not go too close to the wire.” The private who spoke to Fujita sounded nervous, and no wonder. Fujita outranked him. Persuading a superior to do what another superior had told you needed doing was liable to get you in trouble.

  Not this time, though. “I’ll be careful,” the sergeant said. “I’ve never seen so many Westerners close up, that’s all.”

  “Oh, no! Neither have I!” The private showed his teeth in a broad, relieved grin. “I never knew they were so ugly. Did you?”

  “No. They look like they were taken out of the oven too soon. And all that hair! They might as well be Ainu, neh?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant-san. I’ve never seen an Ainu—I’m from Shikoku myself.” The private named the southernmost of the four main islands; the Ainu lived on Hokkaido, the most northerly. “All I know is what people say.”

  What people said was also all Fujita knew about the Ainu. He wasn’t about to admit that to a no-account guard. He looked at the Russians. They stared back at him. Just as some of them had yellow or red hair instead of black, some had eyes of blue or green instead of brown. Were they really human?