The Red Army was always ass-deep in guns. Russian artillerymen had harried the Japanese on the frontier between Manchukuo and Mongolia. They’d fused their shells to burst as soon as they touched the treetops in the woods, showering Japanese forces astride the Trans-Siberian Railway with deadly fragments. And, here in front of their Far Eastern port, they tried to murder anything that 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 it through, 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.