The Year of Rice and Salt

Bai nodded uneasily; he did not like to talk of such things. He tried to hear only the roaring. He tried to forget all he had seen the last three days.

'How can we have possibly survived for so long?' Kuo asked recklessly. 'Everyone else we began with is dead. In fact the three of us have outlasted five or six generations of officers. How long has it been? Five years? How can it be?'

'I am Peng zu,' Iwa said. 'I am the Unfortunate Immortal, I can never be killed. I could dive right into the gas and it still wouldn't work.' He looked up from his rice mournfully.

Even Kuo was spooked by this. 'Well, you'll get more chances, don't worry. Don't think it's going to end any time soon. The Japanese could take the north because no one cares about it. When they try to come off the taiga onto the steppes, that's when it'll get interesting. I don't think they'll be able to turn the hinge very far. It would mean a lot more if the breakout was in the south. We need to connect up with the Indians.'

Iwa shook his head. 'That won't happen.' This kind of analysis was more like him, and the other two asked him to explain. For the Chinese the southern front consisted of the great wall of the Himalaya and Pamirs, and the jungles of Annam and Burma and Bengal and Assam. There were only a few passes over the mountains that were even thinkable, and the defences of these were impregnable. As for the jungles, the rivers offered the only passage through them, and they were too exposed. The fortifications of their south front were therefore geographical and immovable, but the same could be said for the Muslims on the other side of them. Meanwhile the Indians were trapped below the Deccan. The steppes were the only way; but the armies of both sides were concentrated there. Thus the deadlock.

'It has to end some day,' Bai pointed out. 'Otherwise it will never end.'

Kuo spat out a mouthful of rakshi in a burst of laughter. 'Very deep logic, friend Bai! But this is not a logical war. This is the end that will never end. We will live our lives in this war, and so will the next gener ation, and the next, until everyone is dead and we can start the world all over, or not, as the case may be.'

'No,' Iwa disagreed mildly. 'It can't go on that long. The end will come somewhere else, that's all. The war at sea, or in Africa or Yingzhou. The break will come somewhere else, and then this region will just be a, a what, a feature of the long war, an anomaly or whatnot. The front that could not be moved. The frozen aspect of the long war at its most frozen. They will tell our story for ever, because there will never be anything like it again.'

'You're such a comfort,' Kuo said. 'To think we're in the worst fix any soldiers have ever been in!'

'We might as well be something,' Iwa said.

'Exactly! It's a distinction! An honour, if you think about it.'

Bai preferred not to. An explosion above shook dirt out of their ceiling onto them. They bustled about covering cups and plates.

A few days later and they were back in the usual routine. If there was still a Japanese breakout to the north there was no way to tell it here, where the daily barrage and sniping from the Muslims was the same as always, as if the Sixth Great Error, with its loss of perhaps fifty thousand men and women, had never happened.

Soon after that the Muslims too started using poison gas, spreading over the death zone on the wind just as the Chinese had done, but also sending it over contained in explosive shells that came down with a loud whistle, scattering the usual shrapnel (including anything that would cut, as they too were running low on metal, so that they found sticks, cat bones, hooves, a set of false teeth) and now with the shrapnel a thick yellow geyser of the gas, apparently not just mustard gas but a variety of poisons and caustics, which forced the Chinese to keep both gas mask and hood and gloves always by them. Dressed or not, when one of these shells came down it was hard not to get burned around the wrists and ankles and neck.

The other new inconvenience was a shell so huge, cast so high by such big cannons, that when it came down out of the sky it was falling faster than its sound, so there was no warning. These shells were bigger around than a man, and taller, designed to penetrate the mud some distance and then go off, in stupendous explosions that often would bury many more men in trenches and tunnels and caves than were killed by the blasts themselves. Duds of these shells were dug out and removed, very cautiously, each one occupying an entire train car. The explosive used in them was a new one that looked like fish paste, and smelled like jasmine.

One evening after dusk they were standing around drinking rakshi and discussing news that Iwa had got from the comm cave. The southern army was being punished for some failure on that front, and each squad commander had to send back one per cent of his command, to be executed as encouragement to those that remained.