They did not know then — neither he nor Daisuke — that in a few years they would find themselves on the same ship, sailing west. In the same platoon, in an alien, frozen land, where their only food would be cold rice balls, and their only beauty — the gleam of a bayonet in the moonlight. They did not know that the friendship born in a school latrine would pass through fire and blood, through the mud of trenches and the bitter cold of foreign soil
