Sergeant Fujita looked at his watch. If it hadn't frozen and quit moving, he still had more than an hour out here before his relief came. "Zakennayo!" he muttered. That felt like forever.
At last, though, a superior private named Suzuki found him out in the middle of the blowing snow. Suzuki wore as much winter gear as Fujita, and a white camouflage smock on top of it all. He looked miserably cold just the same. But, cold or not, he said the magic words: "I relieve you, Sergeant."
"Good," Fujita said. The howling wind grabbed the world and tried to swirl it away. "What's going on back at the camp?"
"Somebody from regimental headquarters is there," Suzuki said.
"Oh, yeah?" Automatic suspicion filled Fujita's voice. Like any veteran noncom, he distrusted any break with routine. He had his reasons, too. "What does the guy want? Are we going to have to try and attack the Mongols and the Russians again? They've got more tanks and better artillery than we do. And they hold the high ground."
None of that would matter a sen's worth if the powers that be in Mukden or in Tokyo decided to send the guys at the pointy end of the bayonet into action once more. Fujita knew it only too well. And Superior Private Suzuki only shrugged. "I can't tell you anything about that, Sergeant," he answered. "The guy got there just when I was starting out here."
"I'd better go find out, then," Fujita said. "Try to stay warm. If you want to build up a wall of snow to keep the wind from blowing straight through you, nobody will say boo."
"Maybe I will," Suzuki said. "It's pretty bad."
"Is it ever!" Fujita headed back toward the tents that housed his company. Halfway there, he tried to get a cigarette going. He soon gave it up as a bad job. He had plenty of practice lighting up in a strong wind, but this one defeated him.
Getting under canvas did let him light a match. He gratefully sucked in smoke. Then he said, "Suzuki was going on that somebody from regimental HQ showed up here."
"That's right, Sergeant-san," one of the privates in the tent said. "People say we're pulling out of here."
"What, the company?" Fujita asked. "I won't be sorry-I'll say that. We've been bumping noses with the Mongols and the Russians too damn long."
"Not just the company-the whole regiment. Maybe everybody on this whole front," the private answered. "That's what people are saying, anyhow." The disclaimer let him off the hook in case the rumors he dished out proved nothing but a bunch of moonshine.
"The regiment? The whole front?" That was so much more than Sergeant Fujita had expected, he needed a minute to take it all in. "If we leave, where do we go next? Back to Japan?" If you're going to wish, wish for the moon, he thought.
"I'm very sorry, Sergeant-san, but I don't know." The private-Nakayama, his name was-sounded not only sorry but apprehensive. Privates got knocked around when sergeants wanted to know things and they didn't have the answers handy.
Had Fujita been in a bad mood, he might have hit Nakayama a couple of times to make himself feel better. But the sheer scope of what was going on left him more awed than angry. And walloping a private because of rumors wasn't exactly fair-which wouldn't have stopped Fujita if he really felt like doing it.
"I'm sure the captain will tell me in the morning," he said.
"Yes, Sergeant-san. Of course he will," Nakayama said quickly. He and the other privates in the tent let out almost identical sighs of relief. Sergeant Fujita affected not to notice them. He'd been a private himself once upon a time. He remembered what looking up at a sergeant-ogre was like. Discipline would suffer if this bunch of conscripts realized that, though. In the gloom, none of them could see him smile.
Sure enough, Captain Hasegawa summoned Fujita and the company's other senior noncoms first thing in the morning. Without preamble, the company commander said, "We are leaving the Mongolian frontier region and redeploying to eastern Manchukuo."
"Where will the redeployment take us, sir?" Sergeant Fujita asked. If it was to Mukden-the capital-or Harbin or some other big city, that wasn't so bad. It was a lot better than staying stuck on the edge of Mongolia. And what isn't? Fujita thought. Unfortunately, that had an answer. If the regiment got shipped up to the Amur frontier with Russia, it just traded one miserable spot for another.
"I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that," the company commander said. "No one has told me, not yet. Even if I did know, I wouldn't tell you till we were well away from the border. The same reason applies in both cases: security. We don't want to take the chance that the Mongols or the Russians would seize you and squeeze you. No matter how honorable you wanted to be, you might not manage to kill yourself in time."
"I understand, sir. Please excuse my stupidity." Fujita bowed his head in embarrassment not far from shame.
Captain Hasegawa didn't come down on him as hard as he expected. "It's all right, Sergeant," the officer said. "The courier who brought me the news also had to explain the facts of life to me, you might say. Make sure you have your men ready to move out when I give the word, that's all."
"Yes, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir." Fujita bowed again, this time gratefully. The company commander hadn't made him lose face-had, in fact, gone out of his way to let Fujita keep it. You had to repay that kind of consideration with loyalty.
The order to abandon the position they'd defended for so long came that afternoon. Retreat often meant a loss of face, too. Not for Fujita, not this time: he was only obeying the orders he got from his superiors. But wouldn't Japan itself be embarrassed if it abandoned land to which it had asserted a claim?
"They'll probably say it was Manchukuo's claim, not ours," Superior Private Hayashi predicted as the company marched through the drifted snow toward regimental headquarters. "That way, we aren't responsible for it."
"Makes sense," Fujita said. Having an educated man in the squad came in handy now and then. Of course, without Japan there would have been no such country as Manchukuo. But that didn't have much to do with anything. Blaming the hapless Chinese and Manchus was much easier than blaming the mother country. And if the Emperor of Manchukuo didn't like it, too bad.
Trucks waited at the headquarters. Seeing them made Sergeant Fujita realize how serious Japan was about getting its men away from this stretch of the border. Japan wasn't a motorized country like Germany or the United States. It had to save its vehicles for really important things. If getting out of western Manchuria was this important…
Away rumbled the trucks, north and a little east. "Hailar," Fujita said even before his own machine set out. "We've got to be going to Hailar." That miserable Mongolian town was one of the two railheads closest to the disputed areas. The other, Arshaan, lay to the southeast.
Maps showed roads across this endless steppe. They were at best dirt tracks. At this time of year, with snow deep on the ground, whether you were on the road was often a matter of opinion. The truck carrying Fujita and his squad rumbled past another one that had overturned. Maybe the driver had tried to corner too fast. Maybe he'd run into a ditch. He would end up in trouble any which way.
Much the biggest and most modern building in Hailar was the railway depot. A few natives in sheepskin coats stared at the trucks that could go almost anywhere far faster than any horse ever foaled. What did they think, watching the modern world roll through their ancient town? Actually, what they thought hardly mattered. The modern world was here whether they liked it or not.
A train that would go east stopped at the depot-stopped a little past it, in fact, because snow and ice on the rails meant the brakes didn't grab as well as they would have most of the time. Some soldiers were already aboard, and had come this far west before starting east again. Fujita's unit left the cars packed as tight as tinned fish-the only way the Army seemed to know how to travel.