“Sense!” General Yamada muttered to himself at the table, seated among the regimental commanders and the chiefs of staff. The others looked at him with concern or suspicion, and he lowered his eyes to a tiny black dot on the table. It was an ant, on its eternal mission to hurriedly get and store food; he kept his eyes fixed on it until the meeting ended.
Over the next few days, the regiments whiled away their time mending their gear and writing letters, to be dispatched whenever they would mobilize once more and pass through a town. It was predicted that the Russians would wait until fall to advance their armies, to replenish the troops worn out from the war in Europe. But on August 9, Yamada’s camp received a message from Japan—that another atomic bomb razed Nagasaki to the ground—and another one from their western front—that Russia had declared war on Japan in the twenty-third hour of August 8. The tanks started rolling at midnight, precisely three months after the German surrender.
Yamada’s army was set to march to the northwest in order to join the Fourth Army. The soldiers, who had been naively cheerful while they were camped, assumed a solemn air as the morning warmed to a honeyed afternoon. An eerie silence gripped them. It was the kind of quiet that reminds one of childhood summers, of birdsongs, mothers when they were still young and beautiful, and leaves swaying and shimmering in the wind. In the midst of this somnolence, the faintest tremor on the black earth was felt by Yamada. The soldiers exchanged looks as the sound grew, but kept up their march.
Yamada ordered a halt. They were facing northwest, and to their right were the smooth, dark ankles of the Khingan mountains, sloping gently upward to meet the clouds. From their left, the tremor intensified and became a rumble. Over the soft, green grass of the horizon, they could now make out the tanks and the artillery of the Russian army.
They were trapped between the Russians and the hills. There was no choice but to meet them headlong. The commanders and officers rushed to get their troops in formation. Yamada looked around at the soldiers, carrying their worn-out rifles, trying not to show their fear. Many of them, he was sure, were thinking of the letters near their hearts that would never reach their families. It was up to him to rouse their courage, however he could.
“Brave sons of the Empire, now is the time to show what you’re made of. For honor, for the motherland, for the Emperor!” He shouted whatever words he thought were appropriate, and the soldiers erupted into a deafening cry, raising their fists over their heads. But it didn’t matter what words he chose—it was simply the fact that he said them to encourage them, and they knew and accepted that intention.
The Russians responded with their own battle cry, reaching them faintly at first, then becoming a tidal wave of sound. Soon they were within shooting range of one another, which both sides seemed to realize at the same time. At once, the ground beside Yamada exploded from the first artillery fire. The Russians were also swept in smoke, but they were still advancing.
“Hold the line! Hold!” Yamada shouted, and the regimental commanders and officers repeated after him. Some of the troops and even some officers fell to the ground. Those in the immediate vicinity suppressed the urge to tend to their wounded and held their positions stoically. Both sides traded rifle shots and lobbed grenades at one another. More explosions, more men engulfed in flames.
The tide turned more quickly than even a seasoned general like Yamada could have predicted. The Russians had far superior weapons; Yamada’s army didn’t have a single tank or a machine gun. Even in the tangle of a battlefield it was soon clear to Yamada that his army was being massacred. The grass that had been so soft and feathery was quickly being covered in bodies and smoke. Everywhere around Yamada, the dead and the dying lay in piles of flesh and blood. The gunshots were slowing down, spaced farther in between; and some distance away he could see some of his troops and officers on their knees, hands raised over their heads. He was alone, shrouded in gun smoke for the time being, but it was only a matter of time before the Russians would either capture or kill him. In such a situation, the only option left for a general of the Imperial Japanese Army was to end his own life. Instead, Yamada surprised himself by turning around and running with all his strength toward the wooded hills. A minute later, a sudden gust of wind carried away the smoke that had settled on the field. Without turning around, Yamada heard the shouting in Russian. He sprinted until his lungs felt like bursting, and the shouts turned to gunshots.
Bang! Bang! The sound sailed straight across the field, and he could almost feel the bullets piercing his back. He knew they’d missed only because his legs kept running. The thicket at the edge of the woods was just fifty or so yards away, then forty, then thirty . . .
BANG! BANG! BANG! He heard the last three shots, louder than before, certain that at least one bullet had hit him just before reaching the woods. He thought, So this is how it feels to die . . .
*
IT WAS CLEAR, from the heavy whiteness of the sky and the dampness of the wind, that there would be snow.
Yamada was crouching in his cove, a little triangular shelf made by a flat rock below two rocks leaning into each other. It was just high enough for him to sit inside with a straight back, and long enough so he could lie down fully stretched. He sat facing the bare-branched trees and the forest floor blanketed in yellow and red-brown leaves. Soon, that softening layer would disappear; there had already been light flurries in the past few weeks. So far, the snow was melting within a day of falling. But if it started to stick around for longer, Yamada wouldn’t be able to forage for berries and mushrooms.