The Year of Rice and Salt

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.

'We're a diversion,' Kuo declared when General Shen had boarded his personal train and headed back towards the interior. 'There are spies among us, and he wanted to fool them. If this was the real point of attack there would be a million more soldiers stacking up behind us, and you can hear the trains, they're on their usual schedule.'

In fact there had been extra trains, Iwa said. Thousands of conscripts brought in, and no shelter for them. They wouldn't be able to stay here long.

That night it rained. Fleets of Muslim flyers buzzed overhead, dropping bombs that damaged the railroad tracks. Repair began as soon as the raid was over. Arc lamps turned the night brilliant silver streaked by white, like a ruined photo negative, and in that chemical glare men scurried about with picks and shovels and hammers and wheelbarrows, as after any other disaster, but speeded up, as film sometimes was. No more trains arrived, and when dawn came there were not very many reinforcements after all. Extra ammunition for the attack was missing as well.

'They won't care,' Kuo predicted.

The plan was to release poison gas first, to precede them downslope on the daily morning east wind. At the first watch a wiregram came from the general: attack.

Today, however, there was no morning breeze. Kuo wiregraphed this news to the Fourth Assemblage command post thirty li down the corridor, asking for further orders. Soon he got them: proceed with the attack. Gas as ordered.

'We'll all be killed,' Kuo promised.

They put on their masks, turned the valves on the steel tanks that released the gas. It shot out and spread, heavy, almost viscous, in colour virulent yellow, seeping forwards and down a slight slope, where it lay in the death zone, obscuring their way. Fine in that regard, although its effect on those with defective gas masks would be disastrous. No doubt it was an awful sight for the Muslims, to see yellow fog flowing heavily towards them, and then, emerging out of it, wave after wave of insectfaced monsters firing guns and launchers. Nevertheless they stuck to their machine guns and mowed them down.

Bai was quickly absorbed in the task of moving from crater to crater, using mounds of earth or dead bodies as a shield, and urging groups of soldiers who had taken refuge in holes to keep going. 'Safer if you get out of holes now, the gas settles. We need to overrun their lines and stop the machine guns,' and so on, in the deafening clatter which meant none of them could hear him. A gust of the usual steady morning breeze moved the gas cloud over the devastation onto the Muslim lines, and less machine gun fire struck at them. Their attack picked up speed, cutters busy everywhere at the barbed wire, men filing through. Then they were in the Muslim trenches, and they turned the big Iranian machine guns on the retreating enemy, until their ammunition was drained.

After that, if there had been any reinforcements available, it might have become interesting. But with the trains stuck fifty li behind the lines, and the breeze now pushing the gas back to the east, and the Muslim big guns now beginning to pulverize their own front lines, the breakout's position became untenable. Bai directed his troops down into the Muslim tunnels for protection. The day passed in a confusion of shouts and mobile wiregraph and wireless miscommunication. It was Kuo who shouted down to him that the order had finally come to retreat, and they rounded up their survivors and made their way back across the poisoned, shattered, body strewn mud that had been the day's gain. An hour after nightfall they were back in their own trenches, less than half as numerous as they had been in the morning.