by Ralph Peters
He fought the need to go off into the smoldering woods, struggling to hold out until one of his staff officers or a subordinate commander made his way forward. It was forbidden, even for a brigade commander, to employ radio communications during the march. The commitment of the corps was to have been a sudden shock, its stealthy momentum propelling it deep into the enemy’s rear area. There was an intricate system of heliborne and road couriers, of predesignated rest, provisioning, and information points, structured to move the entire corps without resort to the electromagnetic spectrum. Yet how, Anton asked himself, could anyone have expected to hide such an enormous organization during a hasty daylight march on the exposed road network between the Letzlinger Heide and Hannover? There were too many obvious bottlenecks and water obstacles, and the border crossing sites were huge naked gashes on the countryside. It was well known that the enemy had sophisticated technical means of reconnaissance. The dialectic had shifted, perhaps decisively, and men refused to face up to the consequences. How could his own father have permitted such a thing to happen?
Even as he tentatively oriented the blame for his loss toward the enormous image he carried of his father, Anton realized that the old man had reached so grand a position of authority over his fellow man that the loss of this battalion was levels removed from his concern. No, this was not his father’s doing. This was the work of a chain of lackadaisical staff officers and of commanders intoxicated by the confusion and pace of the operation. It was, finally, his own work.
Still, it infuriated him that all of the rules had been so readily discarded. Of course, even darkness was no longer much of a shield against modern intelligence systems. Yet there was a margin of advantage. Or was it nothing more than the psychological security the darkness brought to the man with something to hide? Anton could not think the problem through now. He began to feel slightly faint. His bowels pressed outward, swelling in him, a body in mutiny.
He stopped attempting to analyze and relaxed back into his initial anger. The foolishness, the collective idiocy, that had created so perfect a target seemed beyond belief. On an open and obvious high-speed route, the last common sense and measure of security had been sacrificed for speed. Company-sized refueling stations had been clustered about an intersection with a network of feeder roads in such a manner as to allow an entire reinforced battalion to refuel simultaneously. Then the site had taken on a life of its own, obeying the secret law that a nucleus of military hardware inevitably attracts more hardware. It did not require sophisticated detective work to recognize the types of tactical sites in the burned-over wasteland. The burst sausages of the reserve fuel trucks had been parked in the disorder endemic to rear-services troops. And the stricken companies, his companies, unlucky in their timing, lay slaughtered where they had been calmly sucking at their fuel tits. Quite near the intersection itself, the commandant’s service had marked off its own little fief. And some technical-services officer, spotting an opportunity, had put in tracked- and wheeled-vehicle repair sites, running the two functions close together at a location where they could troubleshoot vehicles pulled over to refuel. Clever peacetime efficiency had turned deadly in war. Amid the blasted repair vans, stranded assemblies and major components lay strewn about in the chaos that Soviet soldiers achieved at the least opportunity. But perhaps worst of all, field hospital tentage had been set up against the treeline. The tents had blown down during the attack, burning their smothering occupants alive. All of the rules of dispersal had been ignored in the natural human tendency to crowd. And death had come in an instant, from a source that remained unknown.
Anton recalled reading articles that warned of Western assault breaker systems and reconnaissance strike complexes, the new bogeymen of the technological battlefield. And he had intellectually understood the implications. But words on a page could not prepare any man for this. Anton had been well over a kilometer away from the target area, working his way along the endless columns of his brigade, when, without warning, gigantic blossoms of flame had sprouted above leaves of midnight smoke, filling the horizon and dazzling his eyes so hard they ached. The blast waves seemed to lift his light vehicle off the roadway.
He had automatically ordered his driver to push forward, aware that this was his duty. But the continuing secondary explosions and the impenetrable heat had erected a barrier in the atmosphere, holding them back for long minutes. The inferno seemed to guarantee an end to all life within its radius.
Yet, as the densest smoke opened out into the blue sky, heading off in a trail that had to be dozens of kilometers long, a few living men had become evident, despite the impossibility of survival. And the man whose forearms had been torn away and whose face had been burned to an African grimness had wandered out of the dead landscape. His face reminded Anton of the pathetic look of the students from Patrice Lamumba University or the Third World military students at the Frunze Academy experiencing their first Russian winter.
Anton felt absolutely powerless. He knew he had to take actions to protect his remaining units and to reestablish the required march tempo. The plan demanded the corps’ commitment beyond the Weser in the Third Shock Army’s breakthrough sector during the coming hours of darkness. And they were already slipping behind schedule. The trained officer in him knew it was critical to maintain momentum. But his soul expected that somehow, after this, sensible men would agree to call it all off. How could such things be allowed to continue? It was madness.
A tracked command vehicle skirted noisily up along the blocked column, pluming exhaust. It was the brigade’s operations officer. As he dismounted to report to Anton he got his first good look at the devastation, and the routine formula of the military greeting broke apart in his throat.
Anton felt his lower belly quaking; the pressure of his sickness threatened to overpower him. He wanted to grasp his abdomen and bend over the pain. An unbearable cramp struck him, and he no longer had the control to await his subordinate’s report.
“Get them moving,” Anton shouted, his voice driven off balance. “Get them all moving. Move around this… this… Get the bastards moving. “
The operations officer did not reply, except to salute haltingly and quickly turn to his mission. Already moving, Anton looked about him for anything that might shield his impending nakedness from passing vehicles. He rushed dizzily toward the blackened no-man’s-land, clutching his map case, thrusting his hand inside to seek notepaper, anything with which he might cleanse himself. He felt as though he were exploding with filth.
Shilko found it unreasonably difficult to accept the lieutenant’s death. Intellectually, he understood that men died in war, and that the calamities of the battlefield did not discriminate between good men and bad, or between young and old. But he could not reconcile himself to the senselessness of this particular death. The thought of his lost gunners troubled him, as well. They were all his children. But the pathos, the stupidity, of the lieutenant’s end haunted him.
Following the delivery of hasty fires during the chaotic night battle, Shilko had rounded up his battalion to resume the march. Traffic controllers diverted all of the local movement down the same stretch of highway upon which Shilko’s guns had worked until they exhausted their on-board loads of ammunition. In the light of a clearing day, Shilko had gotten to see the results of his craftsmanship.
The forest road had been a well-chosen target, and, after some initial adjustment, his gunners had hit it dead on. Even after enough of the wreckage had been bullied aside to allow the great snake of Soviet vehicles to pass, the human and material devastation in evidence was such that Shilko could barely muster the hollowest feelings of professional pride. He felt no joy or moral satisfaction as the victor in this engagement. The Germans had been slaughtered; there was no other word in Shilko’s vocabulary that fit the scene. The enemy vehicles had been backed up in close order along the highway, unable to turn off into the thick stands of trees. Virtually every arm of the enemy’s service was represented in deat
h. Artillery pieces sat enshrouded in soot, and the buckled skeletons of high-bedded trucks had the feel of dead draft animals. Burn scars and lacings of junk marked the locations where fuelers or ammunition haulers had been stricken. Even medical carriers had been caught by the blind artillery rounds, and a series of red crosses on white fields had been discolored by waves of flame. The clearing party had piled the dead from the center of the roadway into disorderly mounds against the treelines, where the bodies looked like plague victims already partially burned.
If there were such a thing as a God… such a being, Shilko told himself… He might not be able to forgive this. But at the same time, Shilko knew that he would do it again, instantly. Perhaps that made him hopelessly damned. But he would do his duty.
They reached their next designated firing locations just behind the artillery reconnaissance group that was responsible for preparing the site.
The quartering party had been delayed and all movements seemed to be out of sequence. The assigned unit location had also been allotted to a signals unit, and a muddled engineer bridging company blocked the ingress of Shilko’s guns, then became entangled in their deployment. When an oversized pontoon section backed into the side of a gun carriage, Shilko lost his temper. He screamed at the engineer company commander, calling him an asshole with arms. Then Shilko took over the engineer company himself, straightening them out by sheer force of personality and tucking them into a nearby treeline that would not do for his batteries. Shilko’s staff officers were more startled by the outburst than was the engineer officer, and as Shilko calmed himself down and settled back into his usual demeanor, his subordinates moved with unusual caution in his proximity. Even Romilinsky had been jarred by the evidence that there was an alligator inside of Shilko after all.
Miraculously, resupply trucks appeared, most of which carried rounds of the needed caliber for Shilko’s guns. The breakdown of the ammunition and the trans-loading had to be done largely by hand, but everyone had been shocked back into wakefulness, and the men worked as swiftly as their growing exhaustion permitted. Soon, the battalion began to receive fire missions. The data link would not be reestablished for some time, if ever, and the missions came in clear text over the radio. Shilko pushed his communications officer to lay land lines as swiftly as possible, but the first missions could not wait.
The program of fires alternated between artillery duels and shelling of enemy concentrations cut off in and around the town of Walsrode. Shilko was ordered to fire white phosphorus into the town to flush the enemy out into the open. The enemy counterfire appeared less organized than Shilko had expected. The day before, there had been extremely heavy attrition of lower-echelon Soviet artillery and multiple rocket launcher units. But the enemy did not seem interested in responding to Shilko’s powerful volleys. He wondered if they were short on ammunition, and he began to feel at ease as his pieces threw their huge rounds toward their distant targets.
Shilko was drinking a cup of tea when disaster struck. Enemy rounds landed on top of one of his gun platoons with artistic precision. Shilko hurried down to the battery position even before the secondary explosions had subsided, outraged that anyone could have hurt his boys and his guns. As he left the fire direction center he screamed at Romilinsky to prepare to displace.
The gun platoon was finished. One gun lay on its side like a fallen horse, nuzzling its long tube into the dirt. The last of the resupply trucks had been caught just as they were about to depart. The support soldiers had lingered to watch the big guns at work. Now a soldier’s corpse, still physically intact, waved limp paws down at Shilko from the branches of a tree, while other corpses smoldered with tiny patches of fire. There were many wounded men; not one soldier in the immediate area had escaped untouched.
The platoon commander, who was doubling as senior battery officer, lay open-eyed on his back, gasping as though he were trying to swallow the entire sky. The lieutenant was the sort of officer who excelled at everything, yet who had a guilelessness and natural generosity about him that prevented his peers from growing jealous. He was, above all, a wonderfully likable young man, seemingly immune to life’s inevitable indecencies and indiscretions. He appeared relatively unharmed, only scratched here and there, and sooty-faced. But the boy’s eyes were lucid and quick with the intelligence of mortality.
“Damn it,” Shilko shouted at the medical orderly leaning dumbly over the lieutenant, “he can’t breathe. Open the airway, man.”
But the orderly appeared desperate to pretend that he did not hear or did not understand. He only called to a companion who knelt, wiping cotton over another sufferer. The second medic came over and stared down at the lieutenant, mimicking the first orderly.
The lieutenant’s chest shook with his efforts to breathe. Up close, Shilko could see that his jaw was strangely out of line with the rest of his skull, and there was, indeed, blood sliming out over the grimy skin.
“The trachea,” Shilko told the orderlies, “you’ve got to open his trachea.” He could not understand their inaction. He would have knelt and done the operation himself, but he did not know how.
The second orderly obediently drew a medical knife from his kit. His hand shivered, and he had to steady it by grasping himself under the wrist. He punched the blade into the lieutenant’s neck, but the windpipe seemed to jerk out of the way. Blood poured out. The orderly gripped the lieutenant’s neck, trying to hold it still as he stabbed him a second time. The lieutenant rasped at the sky, eyes huge. The boy was trying to scream.
Shilko smashed the orderly aside with an oversized fist. He knelt in the mud and placed his left hand firmly on the boy’s scalp, feeling the matted hair flatten under his callused fingers. He desperately wanted to repair the incompetent damage to the boy’s neck, to rescue him for other, better days, to see him promoted and married and moved to a better assignment than this. But he had no idea where to touch, or how.
A fountain of blood played into the air, then fell back. Another crimson plume followed, then another, matching the dying boy’s pulse.
The lieutenant was crying, tears sparkling in the soot-rubbed corners of his eyes and streaming down his temples to catch at his ears. Shilko realized that the boy knew with certainty that he was about to die.
The first battery sent another volley toward the enemy. The kick of the big guns shook the earth under Shilko’s knees. Then a second volley followed the first, firing one last mission before moving.
“It’s all right,” Shilko said. “It’s all right, son.” And he kept on repeating himself until the last life settled out of the boy and his eyes fixed upon the fresh blue sky.
Levin stared at his own death. Apart from the helpless revulsion he felt at the sight of the murdered men, he also recognized with sickening clarity that, if relief forces did not break through soon, he would die. In the excitement of battle, the thought of surrendering had never occurred to him. Yet now, with that option suddenly and irrevocably closed to him, he felt his resolve weakening, his confidence slipping through his fingers. He tried to convince himself that he was only feeling the effects of exhaustion and stress. But he realized that if he was captured, they would hold him personally responsible for this butchery, and they would kill him. He knew how the Germans had treated captured commissars in the Great Patriotic War — a single shot in the base of the skull. And the political officer, on a humbler level, was heir to the mantle of the commissar. Even if the enemy today was not as crudely barbaric as the Hitlerite Germans, they would nonetheless associate him, the battalion’s deputy commander for political affairs and the senior officer remaining in Hameln, with the massacre.
The soldiers attempted to explain what had happened. The event even had its own sordid logic. A few of the prisoners of war tried to rush the two tired guards. But the prisoners were too slow. The guards cut them down. But the two frightened boys had not stopped at that. They continued to fire into the basement room full of prisoners, their fear blooming into a momentary madne
ss. They emptied all of their magazines before the communications detachment from the upper level reached them. The signalmen found the guards stalking through the room, firing single shots to guarantee that each of the prisoners was dead.
Summoned by a panic-stricken young sergeant, Levin had, for the first time in his life, experienced the feeling of willful disbelief of what the eyes took in. He could not believe that such a thing had happened under his command. Stunned, he could not even lose his temper. He simply walked through the dungeonlike room in a wordless daze, surveying the gore with his pocket lamp. His boot soles smacked and sucked at the wet floor. The dead men in the British uniforms at least looked like soldiers, hard-faced boy-men, and NCOs with broken teeth. But the German reservists, for the most part, looked like fathers and uncles, hapless men caught up in events for which they were utterly unprepared. The smell had been of a slaughterhouse, with the reek of burst entrails catching at the top of the throat.
Levin knew that the British or Germans would kill him for this. It even occurred to him that there might be a peculiar justice in the act.
He sent the two guilty soldiers out to fight on the line. He could not judge them. Somehow, it was all too easy to understand. He should not have left them alone, unsupervised. Yet there had been no realistic alternative. The only officer who remained fit for combat, other than Levin himself, was Lieutenant Dunaev, to whom Levin had assigned the defense of the northern bridge. The sergeants were of little use. Gordunov, the battalion commander, had been missing since early morning. Captain Karchenko was dead. The defense of the west bank had collapsed, and the isolated firing from that side of the river sounded as though the enemy were methodically rooting out the last resistance.