“They seem to have withdrawn,” Pritwitz said. “Well, if that is the worst they can do, I do not see why you are bothering to go into the swamp after them, Colonel.” Alexander frowned into the darkness. He had never regarded the Russians with the contempt felt by so many of his fellow officers, and to him it was incredible that the partisans should have issued from their marsh, with all the attendant risk —not least that of confirming they were there at all — simply to engage in a long-range gun battle, which had damaged absolutely nothing, and then melted away into the darkness again. “I think we shall all go home to bed,” Pritwitz said, and turned. “My God!” he said.
Alexander turned too, and saw the enormous glow on the south-west horizon. “That is Brest-Litovsk,” Pritwitz gasped.
“Major, bring your men back,” Alexander snapped. “As fast as you can.” He ran to his car. “Drive, goddammit!”
He stared at the flames as they bumped over the uneven track back to town, while a hundred thoughts tumbled through his brain. The principal one was that he had been outwitted. So, of course, had Blasewitz, but he wasn’t interested in Blasewitz now. He had been sent here to destroy a nest of partisans, and the partisans had all but destroyed him! But there remained revenge. He had never been so angry in his life.
The streets of the town were packed with people, Russian civilians and German soldiers, scurrying to and fro, attempting to put out the flames, which had spread from the generating plant to the neighbouring houses. Other quarters were on fire, and dead bodies still littered the ground. Alexander directed his driver to Headquarters, but progress was slow because of the clogged streets as people, recognising the command car, clustered round it shouting and screaming. Then he saw the burned-out building. Here too flames had spread to either side, and the street was a mass of glowing rubble.
“Alexander!”
Alexander leapt out of the car at the scream, and Anna staggered towards him, half-naked and bloodied. Alexander held her close, deducing from both her bedraggled appearance and her smell that she must have been lying in a gutter. “What happened?”
“It was terrible! Grenades! Then they came into the house, and shot the General in cold blood. I was just leaving to go home. Oh, Alexander...”
“Take Frau von Holzbach home,” Alexander snapped to his driver. She was not doing any good for the morale of the soldiers who were accumulating. “Tell Constantina to put her to bed with a sedative.”
“But Alexander...”
“I will be with you in a little while,” Alexander assured her. The car drove off, while he contemplated the burned-out wreckage of the Headquarters building. But there was obviously nothing to be retrieved from there, and if Blasewitz was dead, he was in command. For the time being all their main communications had been wiped out, but there remained radio contact with Pinsk. This had to be by means of batteries as electric power were gone, but he managed to get through and explain what had happened, putting the entire blame on Blasewitz’s decision to over-react to the attack on the railway bridge. But assuring General Hassler, Blasewitz’s second-in-command, that he was in control of events and would take care of the situation.
“But I need some assistance,” he said. “Do you not have a parachute regiment training in your area? Yes, Herr General, I know it would be better to wait until the weather improves, but we must make an example of these people, now! Thank you. No, no tanks. Tanks are useless in that swamp. Tomorrow at dawn? Not before then? That is more than twenty-four hours! I see. Yes, that will be capital; twenty miles in. But it would be of great assistance if there could be an air strike as soon as possible. This morning. Yes, Herr General; I intend to have them all.”
By now Pritwitz and his men had returned, and Alexander set them to restoring order. “Get your engineers working on repairing the electrics,” he said. “That is top priority.”
“Surely avenging this mess is top priority,” Pritwitz objected.
“It will be avenged. But communications come first. While that is being done, assemble all the Russian residents of the town in the square. I will be back in an hour.”
He called for a car and drove out of the town, but did not have to go very far. The villa that had been his home for the past few months was a burned out wreck. “Where is my wife?” he demanded of his chauffeur.
The chauffeur licked his lips, nervously. “Here, Herr Colonel.”
Alexander got down and walked across to the other car. Anna was huddled on the floor in the back. The chauffeur had thoughtfully wrapped her in a blanket, and she had hugged this around her. But she still shivered. “Anna,” Alexander said. “It is I, Alexander. you are safe now. There is no longer any need to be afraid.”
“Safe?” she whispered. “Safe! How can any of us be safe, in this country? I want to go home, Alexander!”
Alexander frowned at her. “It was your idea to come,” he pointed out.
“I want to go home!” Her voice rose an octave.
“Listen,” he said. “I am going to avenge what has happened. I am going to capture this cousin of yours, and crucify her while she is still alive. Don’t you want to see that?”
“It was her,” Anna muttered. “I recognised her. It was Tatiana Gosykinya. I think she recognised me, too, but she was in too much of a hurry to follow it up. It was her!” she suddenly shouted. “She threw the grenades. And she shot the general! Just like that. Boom boom! Just like that. She’s going to come again! I want to go home, before she comes again!”
Alexander raised his head to look at the two drivers. After all these years of maintaining and indeed increasing his dignity before his men, he was being betrayed by the terror of his wife. But he was also curious. “You say you recognised her? Tell me what she looks like. Is she tall and blonde, like you?”
“No,” Anna said. “Oh, she is tall. but her hair is black. Gosykin’s hair.”
“And her face?”
“Oh, she is beautiful! But it is a cold beauty.”
“And she looks like a Bolugayevska?”
“She looks like a devil,” Anna said. “She is going to kill me, Alexander. I know she is. I want to go home.”
Alexander considered pointing out that if Tatiana Gosykinya had intended to kill her, she would have done so. But suddenly all he wished to do was be rid of her, to clear the decks, as it were, before he had Tatiana stretched naked before him. “All right,” he said. “I am going to take you somewhere for the night, where you can be warm and change your clothing. Then tomorrow I’ll send you back to Berlin.”
“Change my clothing,” she muttered, and raised her head. “It’s all in there. All gone! Burned up, with Constantina.”
Constantina, he thought. Burned up. There was a shame.
“I’ll find you some clothes for tonight,” he promised her. “Then when you get back to Berlin, all your other clothes will be waiting for you, in the apartment. Come along, now.” He took her to the mayor’s house, gave instructions.
“Don’t leave me, Alexander,” she begged.
“I must. I have a lot to do.”
“But you’ll come with me back to Berlin, tomorrow.”
“No,” he told her. “Not until I have finished here.” He drove to the town square, where several hundred people had been assembled. Most had been up anyway, aroused by the raid, and were at least half-dressed. But they were still bewildered as well as, now, terrified. “Clausen, you will take out every tenth person from that crowd.”
“You mean, every tenth man, Herr Colonel?”
“I mean every tenth person, man, woman or child.” Clausen gulped. “Yes, Herr Colonel.”
“Major Pritwitz, I want the maximum number of men you consider available made ready to move out. You will leave an adequate garrison, but I do not anticipate any further aggressive action by the partisans at this time. Every man will carry a week’s rations, and a hundred rounds of ammunition. Every company will be accompanied by a machine-gun section.”
“You are going
after those people?” Pritwitz was aghast. “I am going to wipe them from the face of the earth.”
“But we have no tanks! At least let us wait for some tanks.”
“Tanks will be of absolutely no use in that marsh,” Alexander told him. “This is a job for infantrymen. If you are afraid, you may remain here in command. I will lead the assault. We move out at dawn.” Which was now only an hour away.
*
It was first light long before the partisans regained the Marshes; they had abandoned the commandeered cars as each one had got stuck in various mini-swamps that existed in the cornfields. The last of the vehicles was left on the edge of the trees. But there had been no pursuit. “They are shocked silly,” Gregory declared.
“Tatiana!” Feodor folded her in his arms for a hug and a kiss. “An absolute triumph.”
They had suffered only three casualties. Even Gerasimov wanted to hug and kiss her, while the two American doctors gazed at her with admiring eyes. Alex came forward with outstretched hand, to take hers, and Elaine followed his lead. The others who had remained behind stood around with their mouths open. “It has been a triumph for all of us,” Tatiana said. “Especially for Olga.” Olga gave an appreciative smile. “Now we must anticipate a counter-attack,” Tatiana said.
“If they come into these swamps, we will destroy them,” Gerasimov declared.
“That depends how resolute they are,” Tatiana said. “Now, quickly, Bebrikov, you and your people prepare a meal. Christina, you and your women collect up all the food and clothing and divide it into six equal parts. Secure each part for moving out. Gerasimov, have you any rockets left?”
“Half a dozen.”
“Take them to the edge of the wood, in case they have tanks. We saw none in Brest-Litovsk, but they may have been hidden away. I will join you in a minute. The rest of you, eat and rest. Sleep, if you can.”
“We are going to fight them, Tatiana?” Gregory asked.
“Yes. But how we fight them depends on circumstances. So, rest. I will follow Gerasimov. I will send back to inform you what we plan to do.”
“I will come with you,” Feodor said.
“And what of us?” Alex asked. “So far we haven’t had much work.”
“Arm yourselves,” Tatiana told him. “You are going to have to fight, whether you like it or not. And then you will have work.” She hurried back through the trees.
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life,” Elaine said.
“This is a sub-machine-gun,” Olga said, handing her the weapon. “It has a safety-catch, see? Leave the catch on until you intend to shoot. Then flip it off, level the gun and squeeze the trigger. It fires nine hundred bullets a minute but also one at a time. You do not have to be a markswoman for this.” Elaine took the gun, gingerly.
“What about you?” Olga asked Alex.
As a Prince of Bolugayen, he had been taught to shoot from an early age. “I’ll have one of those.”
She gave him the gun. “Now here,...” she held out two strings of grenades. “I suppose you have never used these, either?”
“It’s not actually a hobby in Boston.”
“Listen. When you need to use it, pull the pin. This thing here. Then count up to four, and then throw it.”
Elaine took the grenades even more gingerly than she had taken the sub-machine-gun. “Can’t I just throw it without counting to four?” She didn’t see herself calmly standing there with a live explosive in her hand.
“No, because if you throw it right away, the person you are throwing it at will pick it up and throw it back, and you will be the one killed. After the count of four he no longer has the time to do that.”
“Oh,” Elaine said, feeling vaguely sick.
Alex slung his grenades from his belt. “Where do you want us?”
“I think you had better stick close to me,” Olga said. “And I am going to join Tatiana.”
They made their way back through the trees to the fringe of the marsh, where Tatiana and her command were installed. It had not rained during the night, but now there was a steady drizzle, which limited visibility to little over a hundred yards. “Well,” Tatiana said. “We will have to use our ears instead.”
They listened, but for more than an hour heard nothing. It was nearly noon, and the rain mist had taken on a yellow hue to suggest there was a sun up there, somewhere.
“Planes,” Feodor said.
“They had to be expected,” Tatiana said. “Now, no one is to move. Lie down and lie still. You will be just as safe doing that as running about.” She hoped those back at the village, Christina and Bebrikov, would have the sense to do the same.
They could not see the aircraft, but they could tell they were flying quite low. Then there came the first crimps of the bombs slicing through the trees and hitting the earth. Elaine lay on her face with her hands over her head. She had never been under fire before, this close; the air raids in Moscow had always seemed somewhat remote, and besides, even when there had been an emergency going on and they had been unable to go down to the shelters, the mere fact of having stone walls around one gave an impression of protection. Out in the open she felt intensely vulnerable. The raid only lasted about half-an-hour. In that time a large number of bombs were dropped, but few of them on the fringe of the marsh, and there were no casualties among the advance guard. Then the noise of the planes dwindled, and they could hear other noises, engines, and people. “Talkative lot,” Feodor commented.
“Probably trying to keep up their spirits,” Gerasimov suggested.
“Those are Russian voices,” Tatiana said.
They stared into the rain mist, hands tight around their weapons, and saw the people emerge into view, more than a hundred of them, Elaine estimated, some of them still wearing nightclothes, shivering in the damp, exhausted by their long march from the town; several had to be held up by their companions. “What are they?” she whispered.
“Hostages,” Olga replied, lying beside her.
Elaine licked her lips as she saw, appearing behind the people, the ranks of grey-clad soldiers, and the command cars. “No tanks,” Gerasimov said, with satisfaction.
But a lot of men, Tatiana thought; and if they did not have tanks, they had an awful lot of machine-guns, and even one or two small mortars. “Nobody move, nobody shoot,” she said.
The partisans waited, watching one of the command cars, which drove right up to immediately behind the Russian civilians, who were staring less at the forest than at the cross and the hanging skeleton of Valya Malevicha. “Listen to me, in there,” blared the loudspeaker on the command car. “I know some of you are still there. This is Colonel von Holzbach speaking. I am giving you a chance to surrender. Surrender now, and you will be treated as prisoners of war. Refuse to surrender, and I will shoot these people in front of you. These people are your own kith and kin. You will watch them die. And when they are dead, we will come into the marsh after you, and exterminate you like the rats you are. None of you will survive. You have thirty minutes to come out with your hands in the air. Thirty minutes.”
“Shithead!” Tatiana muttered.
“That man is the one I told you of, married to your cousin,” Feodor said, “I met them both in Berlin.”
“Then it was she last night,” Tatiana said. “My God, I held her hair in my hands.”
“And you did not kill her?”
“I saw that her face was vaguely familiar, but I had so much on my mind it didn’t really register.”
“That is a pity,” Feodor remarked. “Well, we may be able to get her husband, anyway.”
“You mean you’re not even going to consider surrender?” Elaine was appalled. “You’re just going to lie here and watch your own kith and kin shot?”
“There are none of our kith and kin in that lot,” Olga said.
“But they are still Russians!” Elaine begged. “And the German officer said we would be treated as prisoners of war.”
“You mean we would be
treated like dog-shit,” Shatrav growled.
“Anyway,” Olga said. “We have a job to do — staying alive. Those people are useless mouths.”
Elaine would have tried again, but Alex put his hand on her arm, and shook his head. Angrily she threw it away, but she realised there was nothing she could do. She had jumped, quite literally, with both feet into hell. Willingly!
Tatiana had been using her binoculars. “There are about a thousand of them,” she said. “We cannot possibly hope to fight such a number, face to face up. Thus it is better that we do not even try. Pass the word to fall back on the camp. There is to be no shooting. Under no circumstances must we reveal our whereabouts or our numbers. They will get tired of looking for us, soon enough.”
“How far back will we go, Comrade Commissar?” someone asked.
“Why, as far as we have to.”
“And the traitor?” Natasha asked. She wanted to have the executing of Constantina more than anyone.
“There will be time for the traitor,” Tatiana assured her.
They had not gone more than a few hundred yards when they heard the rattle of machine-gun fire and the shrieks of the people being mown down. Elaine stumbled to her knees, but Olga and Alex took an arm each to urge her on.
The people in the camp were waiting for them, anxious for a fight, and were bitterly disappointed when Tatiana told them there would be no resistance. “We are going to break up into groups of ten,” she said. “The food is already divided up, as are the blankets. Each group will have a radio, but these are not to be used except in emergency; the Germans will be listening on every possible frequency. Then we are going to fall back into the forest. As the Germans advance, we retreat. When they have had enough and retreat again, we will advance again.”
“They will destroy our camp,” someone said.
“Then we will merely build another camp when they have gone.” There were to be six groups. Tatiana appointed Shatrav to lead one, Bebrikov another, Gerasimov another and Olga a fourth. Reluctantly, but knowing it had to be done, she gave the fifth group to Feodor. She would lead the sixth group. “Natasha, you will go with Olga.”
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