And so the long war came.

'China is indestructible, there are too many of us. Fire, flood, famine, war – they're like pruning a tree. Branches cut to stimulate new life. The tree keeps growing.'

Major Kuo was feeling expansive. It was dawn, the Chinese hour. Early light illuminated the Muslim outposts and put the sun in their eyes, so that they were wary of snipers, and bad at it themselves. Sunset was their hour. Call to prayer, sniper fire, sometimes a rain of artillery shells. Best stay in the trenches at sunset, or in the caves below them.

But now they had the sun on their side. Sky frost blue, standing around rubbing gloved hands together, tea and cigarettes, the low whump of cannon to the north. Rumbling for two weeks now. Preparation for another big assault, possibly, perhaps even the breakout spoken of for so many years – so many that it had become a catchword for something that would never happen – 'when the breakout comes' as 'when pigs fly' or the like. So perhaps not.

Nothing they could see would tell them one way or another. Out in the middle of the Gansu Corridor, the vast mountains to the south and the endless deserts to the north were not visible. It looked like the steppes, or it had, before the war. Now the whole width of the corridor, from mountains to desert, and the whole length, from Ningxia to jiayuguan, was torn to mud. The trenches had moved back and forth, li by li, for over sixty years. In that time every blade of grass and clod of dirt had been blasted into the sky more than once. What remained was a kind of disordered black ocean, ringed and ridged and cratered. As if someone had tried to replicate in mud the surface of the moon. Every spring weeds made brave efforts to return, and failed. The town of Ganzhou had once been near this very spot, paralleling the jo River; now there was no sign of either. Land pulverized to bedrock. Ganzhou had been home to a thriving Sino-Muslim culture, so this wasteland they observed, stark in dawn light, was a perfect ideograph of the long war.

The sound of the big guns began behind them. The shells from the latest guns were cast into space, and fell two hundred li away. The sun rose higher. They retreated into the subterranean realm of black mud and wet planks which was their home. Trenches, tunnels, caves. Many caves held Buddhas, usually in his adamant posture, hand out like a traffic policeman. Water at the bottom of the lowest trenches, after the night's heavy rain.

Down in the communications cave the wiregraph operator had received orders. General attack to commence in two days. Assault all the way across the corridor. An attempt to end the stalemate, or so Iwa speculated. Cork bunged out of its hole. Onto the steppes and westward ho! Of course the lead point of the breakout was the worst place to be, Iwa noted, but with only his usual academic interest. Once at the front it could not really get any worse. It would be parsing degrees of the absolute, for they were already in hell and dead men, as Major Kuo reminded them with every toast of their rakshi: 'We are dead men! A toast to Lord Death by-gradations!'

So now Bai and Kuo merely nodded: worst place, yes, that was where they were always sent, where they had spent the last five years, or, seen in a larger temporal perspective, their whole lives. Finishing his tea, Iwa said, 'It is bound to be very interesting.'

He liked to read the wiregrams and newspapers and try to work out what was going on. 'Look at this,' he would say, scanning papers as they lay in their bunks. 'The Muslims have been kicked off Yingzhou. Twenty year campaign.' Or: 'Big battle at sea, two hundred ships sunk! Only twenty of them ours, but ours are bigger, admittedly. North Dahai, water zero degrees, ouch that's cold, glad I'm not a sailor!' He kept notes and drew maps; he was a scholar of the war. The appearance of the wireless had pleased him greatly, he had spent hours in the comm cave talking with other enthusiasts around the globe, 'Big bounce in the qisphere tonight, I heard from a guy in South Africa! Bad news though,' marking up his maps, 'he said the Muslims have retaken all the Sahel and have conscripted everyone in west Africa as slave soldiers.' He considered the voices wafting out of the darklight to be unreliable informants, but no more so than the official communiques from headquarters, which were mostly propaganda, or lies designed to deceive enemy spies. 'Look at this,' he would scoff as he lay reading in his bunk. 'It says they're rounding up all the Jews and Zotts and Christians and Armenians and killing them. Subjected to medical experimentation… blood replaced by mules' blood to see how long they will live… who thinks up these things?'

'Maybe it's true,' Kuo suggested. 'Kill off the undesirables, the ones that might betray them on the home front…'

Iwa turned the page. 'Unlikely. Why waste all that labour?'

Now he was on the wireless trying to find out more about the upcoming assault. But you did not have to be a scholar of the war to know about breakouts. They had all been part of past attempts, and this knowledge tended to put a damper on the rest of their day. The front had moved ten li in three years, and eastwards at that. Three consecutive Ramadan campaigns, at tremendous cost to the Muslims, a million men per campaign, Iwa calculated, so that they now fought with boys and battalions of women: as did the Chinese. So many had died that those who had survived the past three years were like the Eight Immortals, walking under a description, surviving day after day at a great distance from a world that they only heard about, only saw the wrong way through the telescope. Tea in cup was all to them now. Another general assault, masses of men moving west into mud, barbed wire, machine guns, artillery shells coming down from space: so be it. They drank their tea. But it had a bitter taste.

Bai was ready to get it over with. He had lost his heart for this life. Kuo was irritated at the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent, for ordering the assault during the brief rainy season. 'Of course what can you expect of any body named "The Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent"!' This wasn't entirely fair, as Kuo's usual analysis of them made plain: the First Assemblage had been old men trying to fight the previous war; the Second Assemblage, over ambitious arrivistes ready to use men like bullets; the Third Assemblage a bad mix of cautious corporals and desperate fuckwits; and the Fourth had come only after the coup that had overthrown the Qing dynasty and replaced it with a military government, so that in principle it was possible that the Fourth Assemblage was an improvement and the one that might finally get things right. Results so far, however, had not supported the notion.

Iwa felt they had discussed this matter too many times already, and confined his remarks to the quality of the day's rice. When it was ready and they had eaten it, they went out to tell their men to get prepared. Bai's squads were mostly conscripts from Sichuan, including three women's squads who kept trenches four through six, considered the lucky ones. When Bai was young and the only women he knew were those from the brothels of Lanzhou, he had felt uncomfortable in their presence, as if dealing with members of another species, worn creatures who regarded him as from across a gaping abyss, looking, as far as he could determine, guardedly appalled and accusatory, as if thinking to themselves, You idiots have destroyed the whole world. But now that they were in the trenches they were just soldiers like any others, different only in that they gave Bai an occasional sense of how bad things had got: there was no one in the world left now to reproach them.

That evening the three officers gathered again for a brief visit from the general of their part of the line, a new luminary of the Fourth Assemblage, a man they had never seen before. They stood at loose attention while he spoke briefly, emphasizing the importance of their attack on the morrow.