Manchuria-Western
"Hans, what did the branch manager say?"
"What do you think? He flipped his lid. Asked if I wanted to rot here another year instead of going home to Germany."
Hans came back looking thoroughly fed up, dropped into his chair with a thud, stuck a cigarette between his lips, and started gnawing on the end of it.
"That damn bank manager. How was I supposed to know that chinky bastard had money?"
"Well, fair point."
"Exactly! Goddamn it! What's he any different from those yellow monkeys crawling all over Kiautschou?"
It wasn't just the traditional garb the chinkies always paraded around in — the suit that fellow had been wearing was every bit as shabby.
If the branch manager had been sitting at my desk, he wouldn't have groveled politely at all — he'd have screamed at a penny-ante merchant to get the hell out. So why does he have to be so harsh with me alone?
"Because he walked in with eighty thousand yen in crisp cash. That's what, forty thousand dollars?"
"...Damn it all. How does a stinking chinky get his hands on more money than I'd make in my entire career?"
"You idiot. You think that's his money? Did you not hear him talk or see his military ID? He's attached to the Northern Army's field command."
"So Germany, China, either way it's always those Junker noblemen eating everything up."
Hans muttered under his breath and started rummaging through the paperwork their mysterious customer had left behind.
The whole Deutsche Bank branch had been in an uproar just yesterday, so by now the fellow was surely on a boat — or a carriage, or whatever — headed back home.
"Hey, hey. Look at this with me."
"What for? Tend to your own customers. Don't touch mine."
"Oh, come on. If we look at it together, do the numbers shrink, or does your future commission evaporate? ...Huh?"
The coworker glanced over Hans's shoulder and frowned in confusion.
"This isn't a savings deposit? And why this asset breakdown? Thirty thousand dollars in bonds, ten thousand in stocks?"
"Beats me. He refused savings. But who am I? I grabbed him and talked him around! I said, why not invest in the German Empire, holder of the finest technology in the world! German engineering is second to none!"
Lies. All lies.
The truth was that the chinky, for reasons beyond comprehension, had decided to invest in Germany entirely of his own accord.
'That will be eighty thousand yen. The yen-to-dollar rate is two to one at the moment, correct? Exchange it into forty thousand dollars, place thirty thousand into Imperial German government bonds, and put the remaining ten thousand into Krupp, Siemens, Benz, and Bayer. Weight Krupp most heavily at five thousand dollars, and split the rest evenly.'
'Ah, yes, of course...'
'And for the German bonds, please make them mature in January 1914.'
'Pardon? Then that's not a ten-year term but a nine-year one. Wouldn't a clean ten-year note maturing in 1915 serve you better?'
'I have a feeling the economy will start turning sour around then.'
'I... see. If you insist.'
Regardless — I was the one who closed the sale. Regardless.
And then, a few days later.
"...What the hell."
With a wet blorgh, the sausage Hans had been chewing slid out of his mouth and back onto his breakfast plate.
"This is insane. What — what is even happening."
Every time he exhaled, his breath stretched in a long pale line and vanished on the sea wind.
"Goddamn bastards."
The very same would-be war criminals who twenty years down the line would consecrate their fatherland with the blood of five million Jews — from the moment he set foot in Qingdao until the day he returned to Manchuria, they'd thrown every brand of racism at him in the book.
Fine. Up to a point, he'd let it roll off his back. But was it really necessary for the schweinshaxe he'd paid a fortune for to come out smelling off?
They took his money readily enough, didn't they?
He wanted nothing more than to pull the pistol hidden against his belly and unload a whirlwind of lead into the room. But if he did, the German troops — the very same ones who'd been hunting Beijing's treasure hunters hand in hand with the British until recently — would happily put a well-aimed Gewehr round through his skull, and his body would bob up in the Yellow Sea as a floater. That much was a given.
Truly, the age of the Yellow Monkey was hard and wearying beyond measure.
But next time he visited Qingdao, they would not dare treat him like this.
He turned past the illustrations of warships flying the Russian flag diving to the deep sea floor in search of pineapples.
Muahaha. That's the one.
The Russo-Japanese War was over.
And as far as he knew, Russia — beaten black and blue by a nation of yellow-skinned Asians — would assign the cause to a single verdict: Ah, German weapons are terrifying. If not for those, we would have won. Then they'd slap Krupp with an enormous order.
Unlike ten years from now, Germany and Russia were not yet hostile to one another. If anything, they were like cousins who hadn't seen each other in ages — cordial, if a touch awkward.
You know the type. As kids you went to the playground and the arcade together, but grown up, you meet and the whole conversation amounts to, So... what are you up to these days? Ah — oh, I see. That's... impressive, really...
Out of the forty thousand dollars, carefully plucked from the taxes of the honorable, chivalrous Japanese army and the honest Japanese public, his own cut was ten thousand.
And with it he'd bought into Krupp, Siemens, Bayer, and Benz.
Four companies, plain and simple.
Krupp and Siemens needed no introduction — the finest munitions and heavy industry concerns on Earth. Bayer was the world's premier chemical firm, the very ones who'd developed poison gas. They also, oddly enough, made aspirin.
And Benz — well, need he say more?
Right now only Krupp was riding a runaway bull market, but all of them would soar sky-high once the war ended.
And then there were the thirty thousand dollars of Imperial German bonds, placed under Zhang Zuolin's name.
The German Empire would go mad and set the world on fire in July 1914. So he'd sell every last bond in January of that year, cash out, and laugh all the way to the bank. How much would that be worth, eh?
Why were Zhang Zuolin's funds in bonds, you ask? Because if the future knowledge he carried ever proved wrong — if he'd simply misremembered — the obvious consequence was sashimi blades driven into his gut and his carcass tossed onto the Manchurian plains as eagle feed. You don't gamble with another man's money on those odds.
That money had cost a lifetime of hardship to get this far, and he could not stomach risking it on top of everything else.
Besides, it had taken a solid forty-five hours to explain bonds, stocks, and inflation — things even half of twenty-first-century adults couldn't parse — to a twentieth-century man with zero financial literacy.
'And if you run off with the money?'
'A battalion commander such as yourself, sir, could surely afford the assassins required to collect my neck.'
'Good. Let's do this, then.'
Unlike that man, he had no time to hesitate.
The capital had to be deployed like lightning over Mount Baekdu — strike, strike, strike, like thunder over Jeilbong Peak.
And with this, the seed money was secured.
"So. Enjoy your trip to Shandong?"
"It wasn't a trip, sir. I went there to work."
Why is this old man acting like a deadbeat again?
He fished a few bottles out of his bag and set them on Zhang Zuolin's desk. The weather had turned cold enough that when the bottles came out into the heated room, they immediately began to steam.
"What's this, then?"
"Kheheh. A Kiautschou specialty, sir. A brew the Germans make from barley—"
"A bribe?"
"A bribe, sir? Please regard it as my loyalty, rendered into physical form."
Because it was Korean culture, damn it — you went sightseeing somewhere and came back bearing armloads of gifts to scatter around. Only those who'd never received a Jeju tangerine-chocolate bar from a friend on the first day back from summer break were entitled to object.
Zhang Zuolin drew a short dagger from his belt and flicked the cap off the bottle — pop!
"...Mm. Not bad. This'd be perfect with some roasted meat."
Granted, it wasn't a green twenty-first-century bottle, and the logo was different — but the palate of a man who loved shouting lamb skewers and a cold Tsingtao! hadn't changed a bit.
And yet — where on any ordinary day he'd have barked, What are you looking at? Go out and roast me a lamb, Zhang Zuolin merely slumped deeper into his chair.
No, wait. What on earth has happened that he's melting like this even after I handed him a cold bottle of beer?
"Has something happened, sir?"
"Hoo. Goddamn it all. The good times are gone. The battlefield's moved up north now, so there's not a single refugee left to fleece."
So that's why they've been throwing up new barracks all over the place lately.
It made sense, really. An administrative collapse like this was the perfect season for men like Zhang Zuolin to fatten themselves.
"So how many did you 'voluntarily enlist' this time, exactly?"
"...Around three hundred?"
"What a world."
And who, pray tell, is going to find the money to feed and clothe all of them?
"......"
"......"
Oh, come on. God, damn it. Don't look at me like that, you queue-balded bastard.
"Why is it always me, sir? Couldn't you assign Deputy Battalion Commander Zhang Jinghui?"
"Why, you ask? That friend of ours can't read."
"...Ah."
These are the white man's burden?
Aaah, forget it. Not doing it.
"Look at that jaw hanging open. Stop standing there like a fool and bring over a glass. I'll pour you one — it'll warm your gut."
"I'm not of age yet, sir."
"Men marry and father children at sixteen out here. Spare me the fainting spell."
No. It's this insane era that's brutal to its budding seedlings.
"Do you think the chance to learn the Way of the Drink from me, Zhang Zuolin himself, grows on trees?
Now, take it. When an elder offers you a cup, you tap the table three times before you accept."
Before he knew it, the glass in front of him was brimming to the rim with golden beer, froth bubbling up cheerfully.
Well, well. The man's pouring beer like he's done it all his life. Look at that head of foam. Born for it, apparently.
"Cheers."
"Kkhh. That's... good, sir."
"Hard work always makes the drink taste sweeter. Good job out there."
"'Good job,' he says, and then hands me more work."
"Couldn't be helped. You'll understand once you see this."
"...What is this?"
He unfolded the bundle of papers Zhang Zuolin had passed over.
"Be it ordered: the notorious bandit Tian Yuben shall be shot dead. By Zhao Erxun, General of Shengjing. ...This is a suppression order, sir."
"It is."
Zhang Zuolin set down the beer bottle and took up his long pipe.
"They say two district magistrates on the west bank of the Liao River have already been killed, and the common folk he's wronged are beyond counting."
"Wronged the common folk? Surely you don't mean he's killing them?"
Zhang Zuolin nodded.
Something doesn't add up.
A bandit band's primary income was plundering the wealth common folk had squirreled away. Waylaying travelers was more of a side hustle.
So normally they took the goods and left the bodies breathing. You needed living, working commoners to accumulate the wealth worth robbing later, after all.
"They say he's got a thousand mouths to feed."
"...I'm beginning to get the picture."
Clothing, feeding, and housing a thousand men in a Manchuria ravaged by war took more than ordinary banditry. He'd have gone bloodshot-eyed scraping together coin by any means necessary — and the poor townsfolk caught in the middle would have come down with a very nasty case of measles indeed.
"A thousand enemies. So that's why you've been rushing to expand the troops?"
"If things go wrong, this becomes an all-out war, so we need the numbers to match."
Zhang Zuolin clamped the pipe between his teeth again, looking cramped and restless.
Alright. I admit it. For the means available to him, that's the best call.
And in any case, he and Zhang Zuolin were all but bound at the hip — partners in fate until the day Japan started openly drooling over the continent.
He cleared away the beer glass and pulled his chair up to the desk.
"Please spread out the map, sir."
"Go ahead."
The map shoved to one side of the table slid open again with a rustle.
"You said the bandits are active in western Liaoning."
"That's right."
"Do we know their base of operations?"
"No. It's a mystery. Even the Shengjing General seems to be in the dark."
"Feeding and provisioning a force of a thousand through a war like this is no small feat. And given that they've stayed out of the sight of us holding Fengtian and Liaodong, they must be moving in and out via Heilongjiang."
He pressed a finger to the map and drew a long line from top to bottom.
"But with the Russian army expelled, Heilongjiang itself has become a battlefield — so they would have marched south toward the Jehol region without fail. Inside this line, crops still grow reasonably well, so villages remain here and there."
"So they're hiding out there?"
"Where else could they be, sir?"
"Well — the Heilongjiang General and the Shengjing General have already sent patrols that way. And the patrols reported 'no suspicious signs.'"
"Do you truly believe, sir, that those so-called patrols actually patrolled anything in the middle of this war?"
Zhang Zuolin thought for a moment, then broke into a slow grin.
"No. I'd best start gathering troops right away."
"Safe travels then, sir. I'll handle the administrative work here in Fengtian—"
"No. This time, you're coming with me."
"...Pardon? I'm not even of age yet, sir."
"This from the brat who drinks my beer and plans to pop out children the moment he's married?"
Shit. I'm screwed.