They were by now the most rugged race left on the planet, jolted on horseback from the day they were born, occupying the great crystal clear high Plateau of Crisulan at the source of the Hor, an area by turns parched as the Sahara, barren as the Gobi, and cold as the Arctic, where the tallest plant to be found is the wild onion, and more impractical to the explorer than either of the poles. They believed in neither God nor the Devil, nor in the sacraments any more than the resurrection of the dead. Christians, Pagans, and Musselman alike had termed Cannonia the “country of the unbelievers.” Yet the Astingi apparently always had everything they needed. “Even their dog leashes were made of sausages,” as Herodotus noted. They thought the Cossacks wimps, the gypsies too sedentary, the Jews passive-aggressive, the gentry unmannered, the peasants too rich by half, the aristocracy too democratic, and the Bolsheviks and Nazis too pluralistic. When cornered, they would put their women and children in the front ranks, and fire machine guns through their wives’ petticoats. And in times of peace they were renowned for their impromptu traveling performances of Shakespeare and Chekhov. The only belief they shared with Americans was that the entire world was constituted of rings of peoples set up to protect them.
Their women, nimble, handsome, and accommodating, were celebrated for their extraordinary carriage and complexions varying between pink and bronze. The infidelity of wives was punished by a mild beating, while that of men by a fine of cattle. The men were famous for their outspokenness, friendliness, and nonstop humor. They seemed to be everything I admired — handsome, intelligent, and reckless, with a healthy relation to life and oblivious to death.
To be honest, I didn’t see we had much to offer them. Indeed, I had noticed in London that our intelligence briefings had become more complex and arcane as our forces approached the border. I took little interest in the internecine struggles our specialists described, backing one bandit one day then changing their allegiances the next. It was clear only that Cannonian politics were as gnarled, fecund, and impenetrable as their landscape, as useless to themselves as to others, and that a military mind could not even begin to plot their intricacy. So it was not surprising that our analyst’s lectures petered away self-consciously as glazed stares from the ranks became the norm.
But arriving at the front, I heard quite a different story. Among the guys, Cannonia was simply referred to as Terra XX, where it was rumored there was a secret redoubt at the exact geographical center of the continent, filled with art masterpieces, one hundred tons of gold, and heavy water, guarded by a battalion of yellow-eyed dogs and seven-foot mountain men in scarlet tunics — a cache in its scope and preciousness which made Cannonia at that time the most cultured nation on earth, as they had been regarded in the fourteenth century when their treasury and library exceeded that of France. We had been told to stand fast, coil up our formations, and clean up our flanks, but you could sense the renewed “fighting spirit” among the ranks.
This was not a novel notion. We knew that Hitler (“That handsome boy who never rode a horse,” as Iulus’s father called him) was constructing a vast redoubt in the Bavarian mountains from which to conduct a last stand, as well as house his art collection. As in the First World War, the only strategic reason for our bloody forcedmarch upon Cannonia was to cut off a potential German retreat. Our information was based on intercepts of cables from the Cannonian foreign minister, Count Zich, to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Oshima, offering shelter in Cannonia for the imperial family portraits, consistent with the traditional Cannonian foreign policy of keeping a foot in every camp, and further suggesting that the location of the true inner redoubt was in salt mines in the Unnamed Mountains of Cannonia, which already housed Hitler’s own Vermeer, The Artist in his Studio; the Ghent Altarpiece; the first page of the “Song of Hildebrand”; and a world-class collection of toy soldiers. Not for nothing did the advancing Soviet army carry with them carloads of art experts. Terra XX was to be defended to the death by a half-million, hand-picked men and women, the Wolverines, who were already infiltrating and toughening the SS, whose mission it was not only to prolong the war indefinitely, but to launch terroristic attacks throughout the continent from the most inaccessible part of Europe. Of course we know today that this was not precisely true. But I also know that the top-secret documents relating to it in the archives have been retrospectively falsified.
In any event, our advance column breached the Hron and, leaving Dede-Agach and her wasp-waisted women, slowly negotiated the trackless wastes of the Marchlands on a southeasternly salient, without a single act of resistance, indeed without a single incident of any kind. Through our binoculars we scanned the villages where no flag flew, a village darkness like no other darkness. (“A land so poor that even the crows fly upside down to avoid seeing it,” was how an eighteenth-century traveler had described it.) In not-so-short order, outrunning our gasoline supplies, our armored column finally spread out over some seventy miles. Directed by scurrying jeeps and swooping Piper Cubs, we finally reached a perfectly unknown double-oxbow of the Mze.
Breached for the first time since Napoleon, the Mze had proven a disappointment in every way. Planes had photographed it, engineers had studied it for months, generals had dreamed of nothing else. But when we got there it wasn’t as big as the Mississippi, or as beautiful as the Hudson, or as rough as the Colorado — just graygreen, cold, and unimpressive. “Never halt on the near side of a river, even if you do not intend to exploit the crossing.” Had that ancient injunction not been pounded into us in War College, we would have never have forged the Mze. As it was, the engineer in charge of the pontoon bridge was in despair when he was told it had taken him twelve hours longer than it had taken Julius Caesar. But soon our first column of tanks crossed the bridge, draped now with drying wash, captured flags, and laughing naked spitting boys. And an hour later, on the firmer ground of a glacier scour, our half-tracks crested the bluffs of yet another bend of the Mze. Downriver, a dozen locomotives were parked on a siding, alongside barges packed with knocked-down submarines. The trains had been blasted to smithereens, one locomotive pointing straight up, like a dog begging on its hind legs. The current was so stolid that it gave no reflection whatsoever. There was not even the trace of an eddy, a fleck of foam. It made not the slightest sound. “Let’s go down and piss in it,” my sergeant driver said, and so we did.