Harry Turtledove: West and East

Ahead, machine guns started hammering. Fujita shook his head as he dodged around trees. No, the bombers hadn’t cleared out everybody on the ground. They never did. By the nature of things, they couldn’t. That was up to the infantry.

Red Army khaki was a little darker, a little browner, than the color the Japanese used. Neither was very well suited to the deep greens and browns of these pine woods. Fujita scrambled behind a tree. He raised his rifle, made sure that the helmet had an unfamiliar outline, and pulled the trigger.

Down went the Russian. One less round-eyed barbarian to worry about, Fujita thought. Somebody ran past him, toward the higher ground ahead. A moment later, the Japanese soldier wailed in despair. He was hung up on barbed wire cleverly concealed among the ferns and bushes that grew under the trees. The way he jerked and struggled reminded Fujita of a bug trapped on flypaper.

A trapped bug might struggle for quite a while. One of the Russian machine guns soon found the Japanese soldier. He didn’t jerk any more after that, but hung limply, like a dead fly.

Fujita shivered. That could have been him, as easily as not. If that private hadn’t rushed forward, he might have done it himself. Rushing forward was what the Japanese Army taught its soldiers. Aggressiveness won battles. If it also got people killed, that was just part of the cost of doing business.

“Urra!” The Russian shout rang through the woods. A submachine gun stuttered, somewhere off to Fujita’s left. The Japanese preferred rifles because of their longer range. The Russians liked weapons that could fire rapidly at close quarters. A lot of the fighting in these woods was at very close quarters, because half the time you didn’t see the other guy till you fell over him-or he fell over you.

“Advance toward the rear!” an officer shouted. The Japanese had no command for retreat. That one did the job, though. Hill 391 wouldn’t fall today. Neither would the railroad line-not here, anyhow.

Shanghai had seen better days. Pete McGill snorted when that piece of brilliance crossed his mind. It was a good thing he was a Marine corporal. He made a fine leatherneck. If he’d gone into the detective racket instead, his deductions wouldn’t have put Sherlock Holmes out of business any time soon.

Of course Shanghai had seen better days. He couldn’t think of one spot in China that hadn’t seen better days, better years, probably better centuries. Peking, where he’d been stationed till just a little while before, sure as hell wasn’t the same since the Japs occupied it.

Japan occupied Shanghai, too. The Japanese had dominated the area since the early 1930s, and threw the Chinese out in November ’37, a year and a half ago now. The battle, not far outside of town, was supposed to have cost 300,000 Chinese casualties and 40,000 Japanese. The ratio said a lot about the quality of the two armies involved. That the Chinese stayed in the fight after taking such losses again and again said how much they hated the Japs.

The USA had pulled most of its Marines out of Peking to help protect Americans in Shanghai, who were far more numerous than in the former capital. That was what the United States loudly proclaimed, anyhow. If you read between the lines, you saw that Marines in Peking were trapped. If trouble with Japan flared up, the garrison at the U.S. Legation would have to be written off. Shanghai was a port. Troops here had some kind of chance of getting on a ship and heading for Hong Kong or Manila or… somewhere.

McGill didn’t worry about it. Worrying about foreign policy wasn’t in a corporal’s job description. He worried about making sergeant one of these days. He worried about the twenty bucks U.S. he’d lost in a poker game on the train down from Peking. He worried about finding a good, cheap whorehouse; he hadn’t much cared for the couple of places he’d visited here. Till he found some suckers and won back what he’d lost-how often did you run into four sixes, for crying out loud?-cheap came first.

He didn’t like worrying about the Japs anyway, so he did as little of it as he could. Like any Marine, he was convinced he was part of the best fighting outfit in the world. Back when Peking still belonged to China, he’d brawled with Japanese soldiers. He’d cheered the American baseball team against the Japanese nine.

But things weren’t the same any more. Now that the Japs were at war with China, they didn’t go in for friendly brawling. They’d mob you if you messed with them. It was an article of faith that one Marine was tougher than one Jap. One Marine sure as hell wasn’t tougher than six or eight or ten slant-eyed little yellow monkeys, and that was how things worked out nowadays.

American, British, and French warships lay alongside Japanese naval vessels in the harbor. Their guns were supposed to give the Western powers bargaining strength against the Chinese and the Japs. They’d done the job against the Chinese… till the Chinese didn’t hold Shanghai any more. Against Japan? Japan had far more firepower here than all the Western powers put together.

And Japan had fighters and bombers galore, which the Western powers here didn’t. The crew of the American gunboat Panay could have preached a sermon about that. Japanese airplanes had sent her to the bottom of the Yangtze. Oh, the Japanese government apologized and paid an indemnity afterwards, but that didn’t do the dead sailors a hell of a lot of good.

So Americans, and Westerners generally, had to watch themselves in Shanghai these days. But you could still have yourself a hell of a good time if you did watch yourself. Things cost more here than they did in Peking. With only a corporal’s pay, Pete noticed the difference. Still, compared to Honolulu or even Manila, Shanghai remained a pretty good deal.

It had compensations Peking lacked, too. Most of the dance-hall hostesses at the clubs here were White Russians, refugees first from the Red takeover and then from the Japanese domination of what was now called Manchukuo. McGill couldn’t remember the last time he’d danced with a white woman in Peking. He wasn’t sure he ever had. Here, he could do it as much as he wanted, for anything from ten cents to a dollar Mex a dance, depending on how fancy the joint was. And some of the White Russian gals were real stunners, too.

Stunners or not, a lot of them were vampires who could put Bela Lugosi to shame. Their main goal was separating soldiers and sailors and businessmen from cash. Between dances, they wanted to drink. You ordered them champagne or wine or whiskey. They got ginger ale or apple or grape juice or weak tea. It went on the chit as booze, though. You paid-through the nose. Some of Pete’s naive buddies wondered how the girls could drink so much and never show it.

He knew better than that, anyhow. If the girl he was dancing with was pretty enough, he didn’t care… too much. And Vera, tonight, was all that and then some. Her hair was the color of Jean Harlow’s. If a peroxide bottle helped it along (as it was supposed to have done for Harlow), Pete didn’t feel like fussing. She had big blue eyes, a button nose, and a mouth as red and sweet-looking as a strawberry. Moving south, she came equipped with everything else a girl needed, too.

And she could really dance. She danced well enough to make Pete, a man born with two left feet, feel like a good dancer himself. She also clung to him tighter than a coat of paint. If that wasn’t inspiration, he didn’t know what would be. She must have felt his hard-on bumping against her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She let him kiss her, too. Her mouth turned out to be even sweeter than it looked.

They went on clinging to each other after the music stopped. A slinky Chinese gal in a dress slit up to there brought fresh drinks to the sweating Chinamen in black tie who played some pretty good hot jazz.