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moved.
    They came much too close to succeeding. Kilometer upon kilometer of barbed wire and entrenchments ringed Vladivostok. The Soviet Union had always known it might have to fight for the place one day. If Japan was going to take it, her soldiers would have to winkle out the Red Army men one foxhole at a time.
    More than a generation earlier, the fight for Port Arthur had gone the same way. Some of the men commanding at Vladivostok would have been junior officers in the earlier fight. Fujita hoped they’d learned something in the intervening years. By everything he could see, it didn’t seem likely.
    He mostly huddled in a dugout scraped from the forward wall of a trench. Digging was anything but easy. The ground was frozen hard as stone. It wouldn’t collapse under shellfire, which was something. Not enough, not as far as Fujita was concerned.
    Japanese and Russian cannon dueled with one another. Machine guns made sticking your head up over the parapet tantamount to committing
seppuku
. Runners who brought rice and other food up from the field kitchens risked their life with every trip. Even when they made itthrough, meals were commonly cold by the time they reached the frontline soldiers.
    Rumors flew thick and fast as bullets. Some people said the Russian commander was about to surrender, the way the nobleman in charge of Port Arthur had in 1905. Fujita didn’t believe that one. He’d spent too long fighting the Russians to doubt they were in earnest. They might bungle things—they weren’t always skillful soldiers. But, no matter what they’d been like in 1905, no one who fought them now could think they’d quit so easily.
    Other rumors claimed the Japanese would soon charge the works in front of them again. Fujita had to hope those weren’t true. Too many frozen corpses still sprawled suspended in the wire ahead. Along with solidifying the ground, the cold meant dead bodies didn’t stink. Having said those two things, you exhausted its virtues.
    Fujita wanted the generals to come up with something brilliant, or at least clever. If they tried something like that, he was less likely to get killed or maimed than if they just pounded away. They didn’t seem to worry about that. As far as generals were concerned, soldiers were only munitions of war, expendable as machine-gun bullets or 105mm shells.
    Far off in the distance, Vladivostok itself burned. Black columns of smoke rose into the sky all day long. Japanese bombers pounded the city night and day. When, as occasionally happened, the wind blew from the south instead of the north, the half-spicy, half-choking smell of smoke filled Fujita’s nostrils.
    Russian fighters rarely came up to challenge the Japanese planes. The Reds hadn’t had many fighters when Fujita got here, and they had fewer now. Fighters were short-range planes; the Soviet Union couldn’t bring in more very easily.
    Russian bombers, by contrast, flew over fairly often, for the most part at night. Fujita had no idea where they came from. Some landing strip up in Siberia? The northern, Soviet half of the island Japan called Karafuto and the Russians Sakhalin? No doubt it mattered to his superiors, who had to decide what to do about the air raids. To Fujita, they were only one more annoyance. Machine-gun bullets and the deadly artillery were worse.
    And worse still was knowing his regiment was only an officer’swhim from being thrown into the fire of a frontal attack. Many went forward. Few came back—even fewer unmaimed.
    Shinjiro Hayashi, a superior private in Fujita’s section, had been a student when conscription nabbed him. He still had a calculating turn of mind. “If we use up a regiment to take a stretch of ground two hundred meters wide and fifty meters deep, how many will we use to advance twenty kilometers on a front at least fifty kilometers around?” he asked.
    When Fujita was in school, he’d hated problems like that. He tried to work this one, but didn’t like the