"How do you know?" Fujita asked. It wasn't that he disbelieved it-it sounded only too probable. But he hadn't heard it before, and nothing like it had been in the news.

"I've got a cousin down there. I hope he's all right. Casualties are pretty high," the other man answered. "And I hope like anything they don't decide to ship us down there."

"Eee!" Fujita made an unhappy noise. They were liable to do that if they ran low on men-or if they decided they didn't need so many here to keep the Russians from opening the railroad line again. Russian snipers firing from high in the trees were bad. Fujita thought about Russian machine guns sweeping the ground in front of Vladivostok. He thought about rushing from a Japanese trench to a Russian one and running into a stream of Russian machine-gun bullets halfway across the broken landscape. "Makes my asshole pucker and my balls crawl into my belly."

The other sergeant laughed-unhappily. "I wouldn't have come out with it like that, but it does the same thing to me. You stay in this game for a while, you get a feel for what's bad… and what's even worse."

"That's right," Fujita said. "You do if you're a noncom, anyway. I'm not so sure officers can tell." He never would have said that where an officer could hear him, of course, but he was confident a fellow sergeant wouldn't betray him.

And the other man nodded. "You're lucky if your officers know enough to grab it with both hands." Now each had something slanderous on the other. They both grinned.

Not long before, Fujita had been thinking about Russian snipers in the trees. A Mosin-Nagant rifle cracked, a couple of hundred meters off to the left. The report was deeper and louder than the ones that came from Japanese Arisakas. Yells and commotion from the Japanese lines said the sharpshooter had hit somebody.

A moment later, another shot rang out. That raised a bigger uproar. "Zakennayo!" Fujita exclaimed. "What do you want to bet they showed themselves getting the wounded man to cover, so the sniper hit somebody else?"

"You're bound to be right," the other sergeant answered. "The Russians like to play those games. You have to be stupid to fall for them, stupid or careless, but sometimes people are."

"We wouldn't be people if we weren't," Fujita said. "Or weren't you sweet on some girl or other before you got sucked into the army?"

"Oh, sure. But when you're talking about girls, at least you get to have fun being stupid."

"There is that," Fujita allowed. Just for a moment, loneliness knifed him in the heart. Fun… He'd almost forgotten about fun. The most fun you could have in war was not getting shot. That negative made for cold comfort. Of course, with this wind there was no warm comfort for heaven only knew how many kilometers.

Vladivostok… Of their own accord, Fujita's eyes slid south. He didn't want to stay where he was, but he sure didn't want to go down there, either. As far as he was concerned, they could starve the stinking Russians into submission. If it took a while, so what? It wasn't as if Japan needed to use Vladivostok right away. All she needed was to keep the Russians from using it, and she was already doing that.

The people who ran things would see it differently. Fujita had no doubts on that score. He wished he did, but he didn't. They would worry about things like prestige. The sooner Japan took the Russian city, the better she'd look. They wouldn't care about how many soldiers turned into ravens' meat in the doing.

Fujita did. He didn't want to be one of those soldiers. The only trouble was, he could do exactly nothing about it. If they ordered his regiment to storm the works in front of Vladivostok, it would damn well storm them-or die trying. That was what worried him.

Chapter 22

Luc Harcourt looked around. More and more poilus kept coming into the line. More and more tanks and other armored contraptions sheltered in groves or under camouflage netting not far behind it. "I think they really mean it this time."

The other members of his machine-gun crew shrugged in a unison that looked staged, all the more so as Pierre Joinville was small and swarthy while fair Tiny Villehardouin was anything but. Tiny said something incomprehensible, presumably in Breton. Joinville said something perfectly comprehensible, in southern-accented French: "The cons have meant it before. That doesn't matter for shit. What matters is whether they can do it right for a change."

Tiny nodded, so either that was what he meant or it was something else he might have said. You never could tell with him. But he was strong as an ox and he'd go forward when he got the order, so who cared? You didn't know what he was talking about? Big deal. As often as not, you didn't want to know what a private was saying. That was one of Luc's discoveries since becoming a corporal.

"We've got a chance this time, I think," he said. "Damn Boches don't have their peckers up the way they did before they started fighting in Poland, too."

"It could be," Joinville said: as much as a private was likely to give a corporal. Luc remembered that from his days with no rank at all. Oh, yes. The Gascon went on, "Other question is, do we have our peckers up now?"

That was the question, all right. Its answer would also go a long way towards answering the other question, the one from the English play. To be or not to be? Luc glanced down at his hands. They were battered and scarred and filthy, the nails short and ragged. But they opened and closed at his command. They could yank the cork from a bottle of cognac or cup a girl's soft, warm breast or knock down half a dozen Germans at five hundred meters with the Hotchkiss gun. They were marvelous things, marvelous.

Hanging around in the trenches was pretty safe. Oh, you might be unlucky, but your odds were decent. But if the French advanced… There he'd be, out in the open, just waiting for a shell fragment or a machine-gun bullet to do something dreadful. And how much would his clever hands help then?

They could slap on a wound bandage. They could give him a shot of morphine so he didn't hurt so much. It seemed… inadequate.

He hunted up Sergeant Demange. If anybody was likely to know what was going on, Demange was the man. He greeted Luc with his customary warmth: "What the fuck do you want?"

"Love you, too, Sarge," Luc said. Demange grunted and waited. He wouldn't wait long. He'd start snarling-or worse. Luc hurried ahead: "Are we really going to give the Feldgraus one in the teeth?"

"Sure as hell looks that way," Demange answered. "Any other questions? No? Then piss off, why don't you?"

Instead of pissing off, Luc asked, "How bad will it be?"

"All things considered, I'd sooner get a blowjob," the sergeant said, and lit a fresh Gitane.

"Merci beaucoup." Luc left. Behind him, Demange didn't even bother laughing. And yet he'd found out what he needed to know. The attack was coming, and the sergeant wasn't looking forward to it. Demange had done his attacking in 1918. The dose he'd got then cured him of eagerness forever after.

Luc gauged the temper of the new fish instead. When the war first broke out-good God! was it really a year ago now?-he and his buddies had tiptoed into Germany, then tiptoed right back out again. They'd been waiting to get kicked in the teeth. As soon as the Boches were ready, they'd got what they were waiting for, too.

The new guys weren't intimidated by the Germans, or by the idea of advancing against them, the way Luc and his buddies had been. Or maybe their officers weren't intimidated the way the fellows with the fancy kepis had been a year earlier. They thought they could go forward and win. That was half the battle right there. If you weren't licked before you even set out, you had a chance.