died hard.
“C’mere, I said, dammit.” The cigarette in the corner of Demange’s mouth twitched as he talked. Luc wondered if he kept that Gitane there even when he got laid. It wouldn’t have surprised the younger man one bit. Demange gestured peremptorily. “Walk with me.”
“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” Luc said. Demange didn’t rise to the bait. He just stomped away from the French encampment. Luc’s legs were longer, but he had to hustle to keep up. The air smelled of dust. No human habitations lay anywhere near. Luc had never dreamt how vast Russia was. The last Frenchmen who’d got this deep into the country marched with Napoleon. He hoped he’d come out better than they did.
He still carried his rifle. Demange had one, too, along with an officer’s sidearm. You didn’t want to let the Ivans catch you, no matter how enticing their safe-conducts seemed to jerks. The front was supposed to lie a few kilometers off to the northeast, but one thing you could always count on was Russian infiltrators.
“What’s up?” Luc asked after a little while.
“Keep walking,” Demange answered. “I don’t want any of those cons to hear this.” He spat out the latest Gitane’s mortal remains, ground them under his bootheel, and lit a fresh one.
“Am I in trouble?”
“No more than any of the rest of us.” Lieutenant Demange paused to blow out a stream of smoke, then hurried on. “Some crazy shit is going on, that’s all, and I want to talk to somebody about it. You’ve got your head on pretty straight, and you don’t run your mouth when you aren’t supposed to.”
“Gee, thanks.” Luc’s sardonic tone couldn’t hide how pleased he was. He would rather have got that kind of praise from Demange than to have won a medal and brushed cheeks with General Weygand. To Weygand, he would be just another poilu. Demange knew him well enough for his judgment to mean something.
“Any time, kid.” Demange paused and looked back. No, none of the other French soldiers would overhear them now.
Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. German guns, Luc thought, recognizing the reports. He was glad those 105s would come down on the Ivans’ heads, not on his. Of course, the Red Army had plenty of artillery of its own, but getting shelled by the Boches still struck him as the definitive experience.
“So what’s the crazy shit?” He tried to keep his voice as casual as he could.
“It’s political, that’s what.” Demange couldn’t have sounded more disgusted if he were talking about syphilis. “You’re not one of those crazy Reds, or I wouldn’t say boo to you. But you don’t wish you were wearing a German helmet, either.”
“I should hope not! Those fuckers are heavy.” Luc had handled them plenty of times, dealing with dead or captured Fritzes. He preferred the lighter Adrian helmet he had on right this minute. But that was beside the point. “What do you mean, political?”
“If you had your druthers, who would you rather fight, Hitler or Stalin?”
“If I had my druthers?” Luc echoed. Demange nodded. Luc spoke without the least hesitation: “If I had my druthers, sir, I’d take off this uniform and burn it. Then I’d go home and try and forget everything that’s happened to me the past going on three years.”
“ Salaud! You don’t get that many druthers. The Nazi or the Communist? Who’s in your sights first?”
He was serious. Seeing him serious made Luc think it over harder than he’d expected to. At last, he said, “The Germans live right next door. That makes them trouble no matter who’s in charge in Berlin. When it’s a cochon like Hitler… I mean, Stalin’s no bargain, either, but he’s way the hell over here. The Boches are the ones who can really do us in.”
“There you go! I knew you weren’t as dumb as you look,” Lieutenant Demange said-praising with faint damn, certainly, but praising even so. “That’s how it looks to me, too.”
“But so what, Lieutenant? Here we are in the middle of Russia. If we don’t go after the Ivans, they’ll sure kill us.”
Demange got rid of another dead Gitane. This time, he gave Luc one after lighting up himself-another sign he was pleased. “Suppose a little bird told you they’re quietly working on stretching the Maginot Line from the Belgian border all the way to the Channel?”
“Where’d you hear that?” Luc asked. If Demange met a little bird, he’d clean it and pluck it and roast it, preferably stuffed with mushrooms.
“Never mind where. What you don’t know, nobody can squeeze out of you.” Demange might have been talking about interrogation by the enemy, not by his own side. He went on, “What you do need to know is, this isn’t somebody who talks out his asshole. Or I don’t think so, anyway.”
“Huh,” Luc said, and then, “What do the Germans say about that?” One of the big reasons the Nazis had invaded France by way of the Low Countries was that they hadn’t wanted to bang their heads against the works of the Maginot Line. France had figured Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg would make shield enough. Now that France knew better…
“If the Germans know what we’re up to, they haven’t said anything about it,” the veteran replied. “That’s what I hear.”
“Huh,” Luc said again, more thoughtfully this time. “Why aren’t they screaming their fool heads off? Quiet Nazis? It sounds unnatural.”
Demange rewarded him with a twisted grin. “It does, doesn’t it? Here’s the best answer I can give you: I don’t know why. If I was Hitler, me, I’d be having kittens.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Luc agreed. If somebody who showed he’d gone over to your side by sending several divisions to help you fight your other enemies suddenly started strengthening his border against you, you had to have something wrong with you if you didn’t wonder why. Didn’t you?
Luc looked around. Yes, he was glad none of the other soldiers could overhear them. “So what happens now? Do we cross over to the Russians’ side of the line the way the Tommies did? Or do we wait till somebody counts three and then turn our guns on the Boches? I mean, I wouldn’t mind, but…”
“What happens now? We keep on doing what we’ve been doing till somebody with clout tells us to do something else. Then we fucking well do that instead.” Demange paused, considering. “And you never heard word one about this crap from me, understand? Try and say anything different and you won’t live to enjoy it.”
“I’m no rat,” Luc said, genuinely affronted.
“Yeah, yeah. I know that. I wouldn’t’ve said anything at all if I thought you were,” Lieutenant Demange replied. “But this is dynamite. You’ve got to remember it’s dynamite. Otherwise you’ll get your hands blown off, and you’ll be standing there bleeding and wondering what the hell happened to you.”
A Russian machine gun opened up, not close enough to worry about. A few seconds later, a French machine gun answered. Maybe the diplomats were doing mysterious things behind the scenes. The men who fought and died were still fighting and dying.
Demange listened to the dueling murder mills with his head cocked to one side and that wry grin still on his face. “It’s all merde, you know,” he said. “Every goddamn bit of it.”
“Uh-huh.” Luc nodded. All he wanted was to keep from getting ground between the gears. He’d managed so far. Another Russian machine gun started firing. Pretty soon, the artillery would join in. How long could he stay lucky?
Be careful what you ask for. You may get it. Hideki Fujita must have heard that before he requested a transfer away from Pingfan. Sadly, though, it hadn’t stuck. And Captain Ikejiri had wasted no time in ridding the bacteriological-warfare unit of someone who’d screwed up.
When Fujita heard he was being transferred to Yunnan province, he’d assumed he would travel down through China to wherever the devil Yunnan was. As things turned out, the province lay in the far, far south, on the border with Burma. He couldn’t simply hop on a train and go there, because Japanese control in China stopped well north of the area.
No, things weren’t that simple. The train took him from Harbin to Shanghai. From there, he took a ship to Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, newly seized from the British, he had to wait two days for a plane to Hanoi, newly taken from the French. After another flight, he landed at the airport in Mandalay: Burma, too, had belonged to England till the war got rolling. Then he took the train up to Myitkyina, near the Chinese border.
The train trip was an adventure all by itself. Even before the fighting started, the line must have been an afterthought of empire. During combat, English soldiers had sabotaged it here and there. And the Japanese broom
