The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  Willi was nursing a headache when they marched away. One of the other soldiers said, “I wonder if the froggies’ll be using that hall now that we’re clearing out.”

  “They’re welcome to it, as long as they come shoot Ivans with us,” Willi said. “I just wish I could hang around and watch one of ’em try to feel up that gal at the tavern.”

  “Silence in the ranks, Dernen!” Awful Arno shouted furiously. He hadn’t cared about anyone else talking in the ranks. And even the routine order didn’t satisfy him—he scowled at Willi and added, “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Yes, Corporal,” Willi said. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was exactly what they told you.

  Along with everybody else, he climbed aboard a train. As far as he knew, this was the same route he’d taken when he went home on leave. Sure as hell, the train rolled through Breslau. Most of the men came from these parts. Some of them waved out the windows, not that it was likely anyone who’d recognized them would see.

  This time, the train didn’t stop at his old stomping grounds. It kept going, up to the Polish border and beyond. At the border, one Polish soldier came aboard each car, as if to say This is our country. Poles were proud, touchy people. Willi’d seen that in Breslau; a lot of them lived there.

  It might be their country, but more and more it was Germany’s fight. What would come of that? A bunch of dead Germans, Willi thought, and hoped like hell he wouldn’t end up one of them.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL GOT a hero’s funeral. That didn’t make Alistair Walsh any happier about the politician’s demise. If anything, it only threw petrol on his suspicions.

  Assorted Conservative Party dignitaries walked behind the hearse and a riderless black horse with polished black boots reversed in the stirrups. At the politicians’ head strode Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister reminded Walsh of nothing so much as a gray heron with a black bowler and an umbrella. The day was sunny, but the umbrella seemed at least as much a part of him as, say, his small intestine.

  Walsh shook his head. Everybody knew the PM always had his umbrella. Whether he had guts wasn’t nearly so obvious.

  Why were the Tories laying on a memorial like this for a man most of them couldn’t stand? Come to that, how and why had Churchill walked in front of a speeding Bentley? Important people didn’t do such things … did they? Not very often—Walsh was bloody sure of that.

  Guilty consciences, he thought unhappily as the slow funeral procession passed him. That’s what it smells like to me.

  He wondered if there wasn’t also a touch of guilt in the way the authorities hemmed and hawed about returning him to duty. He wouldn’t have stayed in London to watch the funeral procession if they’d been sure what to do with him. Why the devil did I have to be the one who saw Rudolf Hess come down? Somebody had to, but why me?

  Quite a few men in Army khaki, Royal Navy deep blue, and RAF blue-gray lined the route of the procession. Like Walsh, many of them doffed their caps in silent tribute when the hearse rolled by. They weren’t so silent when Chamberlain followed. Several hisses floated through the warm, damp summer air. So did calls of “Shame!”

  Chamberlain might have been oblivious. His small head, set atop a long neck and tall, thin, angular frame, only made him seem the more birdlike. Had he suddenly thrust forward and straightened up again with a wriggling fish clenched in his jaws, Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised.

  But no. The Prime Minister passed close enough to let Walsh see a small muscle under his left eye twitch. Walsh wouldn’t have believed Chamberlain had been issued a conscience at birth, but he might have been wrong.

  Behind the PM walked Lord Halifax. If Chamberlain looked like a heron, Halifax resembled a walking thermometer. He was tall—even taller than the Prime Minister—and lean, with a big bald head that looked like a rugby ball standing on end. He smiled at something the man next to him said. Assuming he’d ever come equipped with a conscience, it wasn’t troubling him now.

  Not all the spectators were military men—not even close. There were many ordinary civilians: housewives and greengrocers and shop-girls and chemists and secretaries and clerks. Almost all of them wore somber black to pay their respects to the dead man. Some of the women dabbed at tears behind dark veils. Churchill had always been more popular among the people than the gray men who held the reins of power. Unlike them, he was a recognizable human being. Having met him, Walsh knew how very human he was.

  And, because he was a recognizable human being, he roused dislike as well as admiration. A furlong or so down the street from Walsh stood a knot of Silver Shirts, supporters of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They were in uniform, something Walsh hadn’t seen since war was declared. He thought there was a law against it, but he wasn’t sure. If there was, the authorities were looking the other way.

  The Silver Shirts bawled organized abuse as Churchill’s body rolled past them. The man standing to Walsh’s right nodded. “That’s telling the daft old bugger,” he declared.

  “Think so, do you?” Walsh asked in conversational tones.

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do.” The man was younger and larger than Walsh. “What about it, sport?”

  Walsh slugged him in the jaw. He was a veteran of the front and of years of bar fights. Nothing in his expression or the direction in which he looked warned that he was about to do anything at all. The chap who liked the Silver Shirts better than Churchill never knew what hit him. He toppled as if all his bones had turned to gravy.

  A bobby rushed up. “ ‘Ere, what did you go and do that for, Staff Sergeant?” He was about Walsh’s age. No doubt he’d done a tour in the trenches the last time around, to recognize the noncom’s rank emblem so readily.

  “He spoke ill of the dead,” Walsh answered quietly.

  “That’s right—he did,” a woman behind Walsh said.

  “Like that, was it? Spoke ill of Winnie, did ’e, with ’im on ’is way to the grave?” The bobby clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I’ll let you off with a caution, then, but take yourself somewhere else before ’e comes to, like.”

  “Obliged, Officer.” Take himself elsewhere Walsh duly did. He steered clear of the band of Silver Shirts. He would only have got into another fight, and against so many he wouldn’t have come off well.

  Another man of about his own age, this one wearing the uniform of a chief petty officer, came after him. “Will you let me buy you a pint, friend?” the Royal Navy man said. “Or a shot, or whatever your pleasure may be? If you hadn’t coldcocked that bastard, I’d’ve landed on him with you.”

  He looked like a good man to have on your side in a fight. He was strong and stocky and plainly knew his way around. Walsh gave his name and stuck out his hand.

  The CPO took it. He had a grip like a vise. “Douglas Green, at your service. The cheek of those Mosley maniacs, to heckle Churchill when he’s not even in the ground! I’d like to break all their heads, I would.”

  “Save a few for me, by God,” Walsh answered. “If we are where I think we are, there ought to be a pub around this corner and half a block down.”

  They were. There was. The two veterans went in together. Walsh ordered a pint of bitter, Green a whiskey. They raised their glasses together. “To Winston!” they chorused, and they both drank.

  “Amen,” the bartender said. “He was a right good one, he was, not like the cabbageheads running things nowadays.” He had to be over sixty; his bushy mustache was white as fine flour. “You blokes mind if I turn up the wireless a bit? They’ve got the ceremony on, and I don’t hear so good when other folks are talking at the same time as what I’m listening to.”

  “Go ahead,” Walsh said. “I know what you mean.” Age hadn’t dulled his hearing, not yet. Countless bullets going off near his ear had, though.

  In hushed tones, a BBC broadcaster said, “The cortege now approaches St. Paul’s. Inside, after the customary prayers and a sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prime Minister wi
ll say a few words.”

  “Oh, Winston’d love that, he would,” the barman said.

  “If he wasn’t already dead, it’d kill him,” Walsh agreed.

  “Bore him to death,” Douglas Green put in. The man behind the bar liked that so much, he gave them the next round on the house. Walsh drank up, though none too happily. The last funeral the BBC had broadcast was George V’s, four and a half years earlier. Like the rest of the obsequies, this worried Walsh instead of comforting him. Churchill hadn’t been in power. Why were the present rulers making such a show of these rites, if not to make the public look away from them? See how sorry we are he’s dead? they might have been saying. They might have been, but Walsh didn’t think they were.

  Prayers and sermon were almost invincibly conventional. William Cosmo Gordon Lang, senior prelate of the Church of England, couldn’t have been duller if he were Neville Chamberlain. Or so Walsh thought, till Chamberlain took the microphone.

  “England has lost a patriot,” the PM said, “and we shall go on to accomplish his desires.” That almost made Walsh choke on his beer. How was Chamberlain going to justify such an enormous lie? He did his best: “Early on, Winston Churchill recognized the dangers and evils of Bolshevism. After the last war, Britain attempted to nip the canker in the bud. Sadly, we failed then, despite Churchill’s best efforts. This time, with God’s help, we shall succeed.”

  His claque in St. Paul’s applauded. “God’s help? What about Hitler’s?” Green said.

  “Churchill knew Germany was dangerous before anybody ever heard of Bolsheviks,” Walsh added. “Will Chamberlain say anything about that?”

  Neville Chamberlain said not a word.

  “HEY, YOU! SERGEANT! Yes, you! Whatever your name is.”

  “Fujita, sir!” Hideki Fujita sprang to attention and saluted. “At your service, sir!” He hoped he wasn’t in trouble.

  Evidently not. The captain had been at Japan’s research center at Pingfan longer than Fujita had—how much longer, the sergeant had no idea. But the man, who seemed to be a doctor or scientist as well as an officer, wasn’t especially harsh. Now that he had Fujita’s attention, he said only, “Fetch me two maruta, right away.”

  “Two logs! Yes, sir!” Fujita saluted again. Then he asked, “Do you need a particular kind of log, sir, or will any of them do?”

  “Good question.” The captain actually smiled at a noncom, which had to prove he didn’t come out of the Regular Army. “Let me have a couple from the ones you just brought here.”

  “Right away, sir!” With one more salute, Fujita hurried off.

  The size, the scale, of the Pingfan complex astonished him. It was six kilometers square. Before he got here, people were calling it a village. There had been a Chinese village named Pingfan here. Japanese authorities had driven off the natives, except for the ones whom they’d put to work building what they needed.

  This wasn’t a village any more. It was a city, with its own railroad spur. It had a swimming pool and even a geisha house (not for the likes of him: for the officers). And it had the tightest security he’d ever seen anywhere.

  The outer fence was electrified with killing voltage. So were the compounds that housed the maruta. Each compound—and the outer perimeter—also boasted plenty of barbed wire, and machine guns atop towers that could sweep wide areas with fire. The relatively weak gates—by the nature of things, they couldn’t be electrified—had large guard contingents at all times.

  And all that was just the outer reaches of Pingfan! The citadel where the scholarly captain worked had a solid wall five meters high, so no one on the outside could see what went on within. More barbed wire and electrified wire topped the wall. Nobody inside could come out without permission from those in authority. It also worked the other way around.

  Fujita didn’t know what went on inside that citadel. Asking questions was strongly discouraged—which understated things. As Fujita had seen elsewhere, there were things about which it was better not to get too curious.

  He approached the lieutenant in charge of one of the gate garrisons. Saluting, he said, “Sir, Captain—I think his name is Sugiyama: please excuse me, but I’m new here—well, anyway, he needs two Russian logs right away.”

  “Captain Sugiyama.” The lieutenant slowly nodded. “Yes, I know him. All right, Sergeant. Wait here. I’ll get them for you.”

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  After a brief colloquy with the lieutenant, one of the men from the garrison shouted into the POW compound in Russian. A couple of the prisoners Fujita had helped escort from Vladivostok shambled up to the gateway. They were scrawny, filthy, and shaggy—hardly human beings at all, to the sergeant’s eyes. No wonder the Japanese called the prisoners here logs.

  At that, the POWs who’d made it to Pingfan were the lucky ones. Ravens and vultures and foxes and flies feasted on the flesh of the thousands of Russians who’d died along the way. The Japanese had marched them hard and fed them little. Why take pains for men who’d surrendered?

  Two squads of soldiers aimed their rifles into the compound as the pair of volunteers came forth. No one who wasn’t authorized would come out … and the prisoners wouldn’t try a mass escape.

  As soon as the two maruta emerged, the Japanese soldiers closed the gate again and snapped all the locks shut. The posts to which the locks were affixed were steel, and were mounted in concrete. Nobody without a bulldozer, or more likely a tank, could knock them down.

  One of the Russians gave Fujita a doglike grin. Pointing to the inner citadel, he spoke in broken Japanese: “Good food in, hai?”

  “Hai. Good food,” Fujita agreed. For all he knew, it was true. Plenty of supplies went in there. Maybe the maruta got their fair share of them. Who could say for sure? No one on the outside. And the hope helped keep the Russians docile. He gestured with his rifle. “You go now.”

  Go they did. The one who knew some Japanese translated for his companion. Even if he hadn’t, the gesture should have been unmistakable. Neither of the large, smelly men gave Fujita any trouble. That was all he cared about.

  An armored door to the citadel opened. The Russians went inside. The door closed in Fujita’s face. He couldn’t even see anything interesting beyond the wall. Khaki canvas screened whatever was in there away from prying eyes.

  Not all the prisoners in the outer area were Russians. There were also pens full of Chinese maruta. Some of them were soldiers who’d been taken in battle; the war between Japan and China dragged on and on, no end in sight. But others were prisoners from jails in Manchukuo and Japanese-occupied China. And there were pens full of women and children. Where they came from, Fujita didn’t know. He did know the men in the citadel sometimes called for female logs.

  And he knew how the Chinese arrived: in big black vans without any windows. Every so often, one or more of them would pass through the outer perimeter and disgorge the people it carried. Some of the Chinese were in bad shape when they came out. That didn’t bother Fujita. As far as he was concerned, the Chinese deserved everything they got.

  One day, a fancy black Mercedes convertible—not at all the kind of car anyone would expect to see on Manchukuo’s wretched roads—pulled into Pingfan. Out jumped a tall Japanese in colonel’s uniform. He wore an upswept mustache, as if he came from the Meiji era.

  Everyone fussed over him and all but kowtowed before him. So this is Colonel Ishii, Fujita thought, impressed in spite of himself. Unit 731 at Pingfan was Colonel Shiro Ishii’s creation. He was a bacteriologist, a water-purification expert, and a Regular Army officer. This was the first time Fujita had seen him; he was just back from a trip to Japan.

  “Let’s see how things are going!” he shouted, and took off on a whirlwind inspection tour. Junior officers hurried along in his wake.

  This was a doctor? Most of the physicians Fujita had seen—and Pingfan was crawling with them—were shy, self-effacing, quiet fellows. Not Ishii! He had a big, booming voice and an abrupt, aggressive m
anner. He went here, there, everywhere, always barking out questions. When he liked the answers he got, he grinned and patted a subordinate on the back. When he didn’t, he glowered and shouted and shook his fist in people’s faces. He acted a lot like a sergeant dealing with privates, in other words. Fujita wouldn’t have been surprised had he actually belted somebody, but he didn’t, or not where the real sergeant could see him.

  No real sergeant would have hurled around the technical terms Colonel Ishii used. He talked about infection rates and vectors and plague and cholera and typhoid and paratyphoid. He talked about rodent breeding and insect breeding. He talked about anthrax and glanders and horses and cattle and spores. Much of it flew straight over Fujita’s head, except that he recognized it as scientific.

  Ishii talked too much, as far as Fujita was concerned. But how could a sergeant say something like that to a senior officer? Simple—he couldn’t.

  “I may be going off again before too long, either back to Japan for another lecture or off to south China to see what happens when we put some of what we’ve learned into action,” Ishii told his men. “Even when I’m gone, though, I know you’ll carry on with the work. Isn’t that right?”

  “Hai!” they chorused.

  “We are protecting Japan. We are serving the Emperor. Isn’t that right?” Ishii shouted.

  “Hai!” the men repeated, louder this time.

  “Good. Very good.” The colonel who was also a bacteriologist nodded, apparently satisfied. “Any country foolish enough to make Japan angry will regret it for ten thousand years! And isn’t that right, too?”

  “Hai!” everyone yelled again.

  he next time Chaim Weinberg ran into La Martellita, it wasn’t because he was looking for her. It was because he got a pass to go back into Madrid and happened to walk into the bar where she was already drinking. Madrid had a lot—a devil of a lot—of bars. It was just dumb luck. After the way she’d sliced him to pieces outside Party headquarters, he was damned if he thought it was good luck.