The hold filled and filled and filled. The mats on the racks were very close together. If a man rolled over, he was liable to bump into the fellow next to him. “Packing us in like sardines,” Corporal Shimizu said.

Most of his men just nodded. They sprawled on the mats. Three or four of them had started a card game. But a young soldier named Hideo Furuta said, “It could be worse, Corporal.”

“How?” Shimizu demanded-he thought it was already pretty bad.

Furuta realized he’d blundered. Anger at his own stupidity filled his broad, acne-scarred face. But he had to answer: “If it were hot, the deck right above us would be like an oven.”

He was right. That would have been worse. Being right did you little good, though, when you were only a first-year conscript. Shimizu said, “Why don’t you bring us a pot of tea?” He’d seen a big kettle in the improvised kitchen up on deck.

“Yes, Corporal!” Thankful Shimizu hadn’t hit him, Furuta got down from his mat and hurried up the narrow aisle toward the ladder that led to the deck. He had to go belly-to-belly with newly arriving soldiers coming the other way.

“Hard work!” somebody called after him. That could mean several things: that the work really was hard, or that the man calling sympathized with the one stuck with the job, or simply that the luckless one was stuck with it. Tone of voice and context counted for more than the words themselves.

After what seemed a very long time, Furuta came back with a pot of tea. Shimizu thought about bawling him out for dawdling, but decided not to bother. Given the crowd, the kid had done the best he could. By the way the men in the squad praised the tea, they thought the same thing.

Before long, all the soldiers packed into the hold made it hot and stuffy in there even without the summer sun beating down on the metal deck above. There were no portholes-who would have bothered adding them on a freighter? The only fresh air came down the hatch by which the men had entered.