More rockets rained down on the crumbling German position east of the river. The enemy must have lined up a whole battery of launcher trucks axle to axle, Sack thought with the small part of his mind not terrified altogether out of rationality. To either side of him, wounded men’s screams sounded tiny and lost amidst the shrieks and explosions of the incoming rockets.
Just when he was certain his company’s hellish fix could not grow worse, shells began landing along with the rockets. Mud and dying grass fountained up into the weeping sky, then splashed down on men and on pieces of what had been men.
Then German artillery west of the Trubezh—the last defensive positions in front of the Dnieper and Kiev—opened up in counterbattery fire. The eastbound shells sounded different from incoming ordnance; instead of growing louder and shriller, their track across the sky deepened and got fainter as they dopplered away. But any response to the barrage under which he suffered was lovely music to Jürgen Sack.
The enemy fire slackened: maybe the counterbattery work had smashed the rocket launcher trucks. Sack didn’t care about wherefores; the only thing that mattered to him was that, for the moment, the heavens were raining only water, not steel and brass and high explosive.
“Up!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet. “Up and get moving!”
At the same time, Wachtmeister Pfeil was shouting, “Come on, you lice! Head for the river! We have a chance to hold them there.”
Between them, the two noncoms bullied almost all the huddled, terrified Germans into motion. A few did not move because they’d never move again. One or two more, still alive and unhurt, refused to get up even when Sack kicked them with his muddy boots. They’d taken all they could; even capture by the enemy, with its prospects of Siberia at the best, horrid death at the worst, could not stir them from their fatal apathy. Sack hurried on. Delaying to force the laggards up would only have meant dying with them.
A ragged German rear guard—men in flooded foxholes, three or four mechanized infantry combat vehicles, a couple of panzers—held a line on a low rise a couple of hundred meters this side of the Trubezh. A grimy lieutenant, his helmet knocked askew on his head, squelched toward Sack. The lance-corporal gulped, fearing he was about to be ordered to help hold that unholdable line. But the lieutenant just waved him toward the river. “Go on, go on. Get as many across as you can, while we keep the verdammte Asiatics off your backs.”
Sack nodded and stumbled on. But when he started to come down from the rise toward the Trubezh, his feet for a moment refused to carry him forward. The ground-attack plane had caught German rafts in the water. Wreckage drifted downstream. So did dead men, and their fragments. Sack had read of battles where streams flowed red with blood. Till that moment, he’d thought it a novelist’s conceit. No more.
Living soldiers still struggle in the Trubezh, too; a couple of rafts and barges that hadn’t been hit wallowed up onto the western bank. Men in camouflage cloth and field-gray mottled and filthy enough to serve as camouflage cloth scrambled off, glad to put any water barrier, however small and flimsy, between themselves and the uncountable Asiatic horde swarming out of the east.
The boats started back toward the eastern bank of the Trubezh. Sack dispassionately admired their crews, just as he admired the worn lieutenant in charge of that doomed rear-guard line. He admitted to himself that he lacked the courage required to stick his head deliberately into the tiger’s mouth and leave it there while the fanged jaws closed.
Boots splashing at the marge of the river, Wachtmeister Pfeil positioned himself where one of the barges looked likeliest to ground. Sack stood at his left shoulder, as if he were a feudal retainer. But chivalry in the east was dead, dead. This war had room only for ugliness.
An old soldier, Pfeil knew all the tricks. As soon as the barge got close, he splashed out into the Trubezh and helped drag it to shore. As if by magic, that entitled him to a place on board. His big, rough hands pulled Sack in after him.
Germans swarmed on until the rough water of the Trubezh was bare centimeters from the gunwale. Even as the sergeant at the engine threw it into reverse and backed the clumsy vessel away from the riverbank, more men reached out beseechingly, though they had to know they’d swamp it if they managed to get aboard.
The cannon of one of the panzers posted on the eastern rise roared. A moment later, a couple of MG-3 machine guns opened up. With their rapid cyclic rate, they sounded like giants ripping enormous sheets of canvas. However many bullets they spat, though, there always seemed to be more short, stocky men who wore the red star on their fur caps.
Some of the Germans by the riverside turned and ran back toward the rearguard line to help buy their comrades time. Others threw down weapons, stripped off clothes and boots, and plunged naked into the chilly Trubezh: drowning looked to them a better risk than waiting for another boat where they were. They swam almost as fast as Sack’s overloaded barge made headway across the river.
The lance-corporal became aware of an unfamiliar feeling. “Great God, I’m almost warm!” he bawled into Pfeil’s ear.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” the senior noncom answered. “We’re packed together tight as steers in a cattle car.” Pfeil managed a worn grin. “I just hope we’re headed away from the slaughterhouse.”
Sack tried to laugh, but after what he’d been through the past few months—and especially the past few days—he couldn’t force himself to find it funny. Hardly more than a year before, German motorized patrols were operating east of the Volga and pushing toward Astrakhan over a steppe that seemed empty of foes. Now the Volga line was long forgotten. If the army couldn’t hold the Reds along the Dnieper … if they couldn’t do that, where would they stop them?
Deciding such questions was not a lance-corporal’s concern. Sack watched the western bank of the Trubezh ever so slowly draw nearer. How long could crossing a couple of hundred meters of water take?
Too long—the barge was still wallowing toward the far shore when he heard another fighter-bomber screaming in on an attack run. Cannon shells whipped the river to creamy foam; underwing rockets lanced down on tongues of flame. Sack’s scream was lost in those of his comrades.
One instant he was huddled in the barge, the next flying through the air, and the one after that floundering in the cold, muddy Trubezh. He must have swallowed a liter of it before he clawed his way to the surface and sucked in a lungful of desperately needed air. Then his boots touched bottom. He realized he was just a few meters from shore.
He splashed up onto the western bank and threw himself down at full length, more dead than alive. Or so he thought, till a roar in the sky warned that the enemy plane was coming back for another pass. He scrambled on hands and knees toward a shell hole that might offer some small protection.
He rolled in on top of another man who’d beaten him to it. “I might have known it would be you, Wachtmeister.”
Pfeil grunted. “You can get hurt around here if you’re not careful.”
Both men buried their heads in the wet dirt, waiting for another dose of guns and rockets. But it didn’t come. The Red fighter-bomber sheered off and streaked away eastward, two Luftwaffe fighters hot on its trail. Moments later, a blast louder than shellfire said one enemy aircraft, at any rate, would never harass German ground troops again.
Sack and Pfeil both shouted like men possessed. They pounded each other on the shoulders, clasped hands. “The air force is good for something!” the lance-corporal yelled, in the tone of an atheist suddenly coming to Jesus.
“Every once in a while,” Pfeil allowed. “Haven’t seen much of those bastards the past few weeks, though.” Sack nodded. Too many hundreds of kilometers of front, too few planes spread too thin.
The two battered soldiers used the momentary respite to get away from the riverbank. Sack spotted an abandoned farmhouse, half its roof caved in, that looked like an ideal spot to curl up and rest for a wh
ile before getting back to the war. When he pointed it out to Pfeil, the staff sergeant grinned. He hurried past his junior to take the lead in exploring the retreat.
He and Sack both entered with rifles at the ready, in case partisans were lurking inside. And indeed, the farmhouse was occupied—but by German soldiers in too-clean uniforms with the metal gorgets of the military police round their necks. “What unit, gentlemen?” one of them asked with a nasty smile.
“First platoon, third company, second regiment, Forty-First Panzergrenadiers,” Sack and Pfeil answered in the same breath.
“Where’s the rest of it?” the military policeman demanded.
“Back in the hospital, dead on the field, drowned in the f— in the Trubezh,” Pfeil said. “Oh, I expect some of our comrades are still alive, but we got separated. It happens in battle.” His tone implied, as strongly as he dared, that his questioner had never seen real combat.
If the military policeman noticed the sarcasm, he didn’t show it. One of his companions might have, for he said, “At least they have all their gear, Horst. Some of those fellows have been coming back without a stitch on them.”
“As if the quartermasters didn’t have enough problems,” Horst snorted. Sack wanted to pump him full of bullets—here he was in his dog collar, with a safe post back of the line, making the lives of fighting men miserable. But Horst went on, “You’re right, Willi, we have worse things to worry about. You two—there’s a road, of sorts, about a hundred meters west of here. A kilometer and a half, maybe two, down that road are more panzergrenadiers. Attach yourself to their Kampfgruppe for the time being.”
“Yes sir,” Sack and Pfeil said, again together. They got out of the farmhouse in a hurry; the military police had almost certainly taken possession of it knowing it would attract tired soldiers.
The road, like too many Russian roads, was nothing more than a muddy track. Pfeil swore at the military police as he tramped along. Sack echoed him for a while—like any real soldier, he had only scorn for the dog-collar boys—but then fell silent. He didn’t like what he’d heard back at the farmhouse. A Kampfgruppe was like papier-mâché: bits and pieces of defunct units squashed together in the hope they’d hold. Also like papier-mâché, battle groups fell apart when handled roughly.
Somebody in a foxhole shouted, “Halt!”
Sack and Pfeil obediently halted. “We’re friends,” Sack called. He stood still to let the sentry see his uniform.
“Stay,” the sentry said. They stayed—he had the drop on them.
He didn’t get out of the hole to check them himself, but called to someone else. The other soldier approached from the side, careful not to get between the foxhole and the two Germans. He too kept his assault rifle at the ready as he carefully examined Sack and Pfeil. But when he spoke to them, what came out of his mouth was gibberish, not German.
Now the two noncoms exchanged glances. “Should he worry about us being the enemy, or should we worry about him?” Pfeil muttered.
Then sack saw the rampant lion on the fellow’s collar patch. “Norway?” he asked, pointing to it.
“Ja!” the other soldier exclaimed, and then more in his own language. Sack eyed him with increasing respect. Several western European nations had sent contingents to hold back the Red Asiatic flood, and those outfits had solid fighting reputations. Sack just wished their soldiers had picked up more German.
The Norwegian was a big blond fellow who might have posed for a recruiting poster if he’d been cleaner. He and Sack soon discovered they’d both taken English in school. Neither of them was fluent, but they managed to understand each other. The Norwegian said, “There is a—how do you say it?—a canteen? a kitchen?—down the road not far.” He pointed to show the direction.
That cut conversation off at the knees, or rather at the belly. The German supply system had worked well for a while, with everyone having plenty of food and field kitchens keeping pace with the advancing armies. The armies were no longer advancing. Enemy aircraft had taken their toll on truck columns and supply trains. The long and short of it was that Sack hadn’t eaten for more than a day.
The big bubbling pot smelled wonderful. Most of the soldiers gathered around it were Scandinavians of one sort or another: Norwegians, Danes who wore a white cross on a red shield, or Swedes with blue and gold emblems that were almost the same shades as those of the Ukraine’s national colors. Some spoke German; more knew English. They all had the worn look of men who’d been through a good deal.
But the stew in the pot was thick and rich, full of cabbage, potatoes, and meat. Sack wolfed down a big bowl. “It’s horsemeat,” a Dane said apologetically in English. The corporal didn’t quite take that in, so someone else translated: “Pferdfleisch.” In civilian life, the idea would have revolted him. Now he just held out his bowl for more. The Scandinavians laughed and fed him.
He’d hardly begun his second helping when firing to the east picked up. Gustav Pfeil looked grim. “Eat while you can. I think the Reds are trying to force the river.”
As if on cue, a German artillery battery not far away fired a salvo. Then Sack heard the heavy diesels of the self-propelled guns roar into life to move them into a new position before Red artillery could reply.
The Norwegian who’d led him to the field kitchen handed him a mug full of hot instant coffee. He gratefully held it under his nose. Even the rich aroma was invigorating. And the aroma was all he got, too, for a whistling in the air said the Germans hadn’t knocked out all the enemy guns. Soldiers shrieked “Incoming!” in a medley of languages. Some, who’d been around here for a little while, knew where the slit trenches were and dove for them. Sack threw his coffee away and flattened out on the ground. The burst were thunderous, and less than a hundred meters from where he lay. Splinters flew by with deadly hisses; mud splattered down on top of his helmet.
Still on his belly, he pulled out his entrenching tool, unfolded it, and started digging himself in. The Red shells kept falling; it might as well have been a World War I bombardment. If it was going to be like that, Sack wanted himself a nice World War I trench in which to endure it.
Then Gustav Pfeil screamed.
Sack rolled out of his half-dug hole, crawled snakelike over to where the Wachtmeister lay writhing on the ground. Pfeil had both hands clenched to his thigh. His trouser leg was already reddish-black, his face gray.
“Medical officer!” Sack shouted. Then, more softly, he said to Pfeil, “Here, let me see it.” His hands shook as he moved the staff sergeant’s away from the injury. Pfeil had never been scratched, not in more than two years of hard fighting. How could he be wounded now? And if he was, how could anyone hope to come through this war intact?
The wound sliced cleanly into the meat of the thigh. Pfeil’s flesh looked like something that ought to be hanging in a butcher’s shop, not like part of a man at all. “I don’t think the femoral artery’s cut,” Sack said inanely.
“Of course not,” Pfeil replied with the eerie calm of a man in shock. “If it were, I’d already have bled out.”
Sack dusted the wound with sulfa and antibiotics from his aid kit, wrapped a pressure bandage around it. One of the Danes came up to help a moment later. Along with his white cross on red, he wore a red cross on a white armband. He looked under the pressure bandage to see what Sack had done, nodded, and then rolled up Pfeil’s left sleeve. He gave the Wachtmeister a painkiller shot, then said in good German, “Make a fist.” When Pfeil obeyed, the Dane stuck the needle from a plasma unit into the bend of his elbow.
The medical officer turned to Sack. “I wish we could airlift him out, but—” A fresh barrage of incoming artillery punctuated the but. The Dane stood up anyhow, shouted, “Stretcher party!” first in German, then in English.
“I’m one,” Sack said.
The Norwegian who’d guided the two Germans back to the kitchen came out of his hole. “I’m t
he other,” he said in English. “I know the way back to the field hospital.”
The medical officer pulled telescoping aluminum stretcher poles from his pack, extended them, and strung them with mesh. He fixed an upright metal arm to one of them to hold the plasma bag. Together, he and Sack got Pfeil onto the stretcher. “He should do well enough,” the medical officer said, “unless, of course, we’re all overrun.”
Sack, for one, could have done without the parenthetical comment. He and the Norwegian stooped, lifted the stretcher, and started for the field hospital. Though they headed away from the fighting, no one could question their courage, not with artillery shells still falling all around. They would have been safer staying in their foxholes than walking about in the open.
Wachtmeister Pfeil was not a big man; he weighed perhaps seventy-five kilos. By the time Sack had hauled him through mud for more than a kilometer, it might as well have been seventy-five tonnes. He marveled that his arms didn’t drag the ground like an orangutan’s by the time he reached the aid station.
All the tents there were clean and white, with red crosses prominently displayed on the cloth. They wouldn’t necessarily keep away artillery fire, but Sack did notice no bigger bombs had hit in the immediate vicinity of the tents. That raised some small measure of relief in him; too often, the godless Reds respected nothing.
An orderly took charge of Pfeil. Sack stood near the hospital tents for a couple of minutes. He windmilled his arms, trying to work the soreness out of them. The Norwegian did the same; they traded weary grins. The lance-corporal wondered what the devil to do next. He supposed he ought to go back to the panzergrenadiers; if any officer asked what he was doing there, he could say the military police had sent him.
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