by Ralph Peters
The situation at the northern bridge had broken down into a standoff. The enemy held the western approach now, but they could not get across. Dunaev’s handful of defenders killed every vehicle that approached, and the automatic mortars husbanded their last rounds to support Dunaev whenever things got too hot. The southern bridge had been lost back to the enemy in its entirety, and British regulars had pushed the defending air-assault troops north behind the ring boulevard. The only thing holding the British back now was their apparent reluctance to take the casualties one big rush would cost. The air-assault troops had run low on everything, including combat-capable soldiers. To Levin, it began to seem miraculous that they had held on for so long.
One quarter of the old town had caught fire, and flames separated the defenders from the enemy at the southern bridgehead. The beautiful old houses burned enthusiastically, as though they had grown weary of their existence. The destruction no longer struck Levin as tragic. He was too worn down for grand feelings. The spreading conflagration merely saddened him, sapping a bit more of his psychological juice. Perhaps, he thought, Gordunov had been right. It did not matter when you looked at it from the grand perspective. There were other old cities, even other men to replace those dying here.
Levin left the old town hall without trying the radios again. He had not been able to reach any distant stations since dawn. The location in the river valley was poor to begin with, on top of which the enemy jamming made communications impossible. Perhaps the burst transmissions had gotten through. But no responses had arrived. He wondered how the war was going overall. He had fully expected to greet Soviet tanks by now, to enjoy a scene like those in the old patriotic films. He had even imagined that he might be a hero, and that Yelena might take a renewed interest in him, and that they might be happy again. Now, weary beyond much emotion, he reflected that he might never see his son again, and that Yelena would not really mind losing him. He had been a mistake for her; her father had been right. Yelena would not be content with the things that contented him, not ever. She would not miss him.
Levin dashed across the little square, followed by the skip of a distant machine gun. In a well formed by a protrusion of buildings, a mortar section hurried lobbed rounds to help Dunaev push the enemy back one more time. Levin felt the enemy noose tightening. He strained to hear greater battle noises in the distance, the sound of Soviet tanks. But there was only the close-in chopping sound of automatic weapons and the dull thuds of grenades and mortar rounds. The enemy had concentrated an inordinate amount of force to reduce the bridgehead. Obviously, it was a critical objective. Why, then, hadn’t his forces made a greater effort to break through? It made no sense to him.
Keeping the burning area to his right, Levin worked his way down a series of passages and alleys, past garbage bins and a pair of civilian corpses. At a loss for decisive actions now, he automatically began to inspect the perimeter positions one more time. He worked in through the back of a barroom where a machine-gun post anchored the corner of the defense.
The entire front of the building had been gutted. He had to look hard to distinguish the bodies of his soldiers.
The enemy had gotten through. He could not understand how he had avoided running into them. He tried the battered field phone in the outpost’s wreckage. But the device was dead.
Levin retraced his steps, assault rifle at the ready. Soaking with sweat, he experienced real fear now, concentrated in a pain behind his eyes. The situation was out of control.
Foreign voices startled him. He drew back into a blown doorway. Footsteps slapped down on the cobblestones, the sound of men running.
Two British soldiers dashed down the alley and across Levin’s line of sight. He tensed to rush out behind them, prepared to kill. But he held back at the last moment, grown newly cautious. His easy courage of the night before seemed to have sputtered out of him like air out of a balloon.
When the footsteps faded, he hustled across the alley to the covered passageway down which he had come. Off to the side, he heard firing. He realized that he had behaved badly. The British soldiers he had allowed through were engaging his men.
Levin ran. But when he reached the end of the tunnel-like passage, he discovered that the broad shopping street before him was the scene of a wild firefight. The headquarters elements in the town hall fired out of the window frames. The mortar section he had so recently passed had been overrun, and the crew members lay dead around the tipped-over weaponry.
He did not know what to do. His men were still fighting, cut off here and there. He knew that he, too, should fight. But the very knowledge of combat behavior had gone out of him. He felt that the situation was hopeless, in any case, and that he was uselessly small and ineffectual. He thought of the bodies in the vaulted basement room. None of the men in the headquarters element would survive five minutes after the town hall fell.
He knew that he did not want to die. Not here, and certainly not like this. He had once pictured himself falling, heroically and painlessly, in dramatic combat, a hero of the Soviet Union. Now the notion, with its childish images, seemed like a revoltingly childish game. He felt as though all of his actions of the past night and day had been taken without any realization of their consequences, as though it had all been play.
Foreign weapons bit into the walls and street. Levin backed up a pair of steps, pressing himself against the cool masonry. Then he turned away from the fighting and worked his way along the back alleys until he found a door that had been broken open. A cluttered passage smelling of mildew led into a department store. He found himself stumbling through a shadowy maze of baby clothes, still perfectly displayed on their racks.
Clothes the like of which his son would never have. At least not purchased by a natural father’s hand. The accompanying set of images, in which Levin would not have indulged at any other time, struck him hard now. He could not resist the strangely warming melodrama of his vision. He began to cry.
Stray bullets smashed glass and punched into the wall ahead of him. At first, he thought his presence had been detected. He wanted to shout apologies, to beg, to swear that he had not meant any of it. But no other bullets followed the initial burst.
He climbed a motionless escalator with no clear aim. He absently considered seeking out a place to hide, even though he knew they would find him. He wished he could find the strength to die a hero’s death, to at least avoid shaming himself. He knew he had fought well. But his actions of the evening and night before seemed to have been the work of a different person. He could neither understand nor master his sudden inability. He kept thinking back to the tangled bodies in the town-hall basement, picturing his own corpse among them. He could not steel himself to return to the fighting.
He wandered through displays of women’s clothing. They were so rich. It did not seem fair to him. He had worked so hard all of his short life, and he had been an honest man to the extent of his capability. He had believed in the ultimate goodness of his fellow man. Now he would die in a burning town in Germany, and he would not see his son again.
As he meandered through the men’s clothing department it occurred to him that he could dress as a German, and that he might just be able to conceal his identity until Soviet forces finally arrived on the scene. He set down his assault rifle and stripped off his combat harness. Pulling at his paratrooper’s tunic, he began to hurry himself into clumsiness, almost into panic, tearing at the unwilling garment. He tried to identify a shirt in the correct size, but it was all too confusing. He tore open packages until he had freed a shirt that looked right. He grabbed a tie. Without bothering to find a mirror, he hurried into the shirt and pulled the tie into a knot. Then, in shirt and tie and undershorts, he rooted through the racks of men’s suits, settling for a gray jacket and trousers that had a lovely, expensive feel. The trousers were too loose, but he cinched them in snugly with a belt. He drew on the jacket.
Somewhere, there had to be shoes. He could not see any shoes, and he began
to shake with nerves. He tore down the aisles in disbelief. There must be shoes, fine Western shoes.
In his rampage, he caught an unexpected glimpse of himself in a mirror. He stopped. And he began to laugh uncontrollably. He stared at himself through wet eyes.
His face was filthy, blackened by the residue of battle, and a clotted cut stood out above one eye. The fine jacket hung limply, ridiculously, and the trouser cuffs dragged along the floor. He looked like a child masquerading in his father’s suit. His dirty hands had fatally soiled the shirt.
He collapsed onto the floor in his laughter, sitting down hard. The noise he made broke into sobs. He cried into the fine gray cloth of the jacket sleeves. He was a fool. He even looked like a fool. He could never pass himself off as a German. He was ridiculous, and a coward, as well. Levin the fool. He doubted that he could even pass himself off as a human being anymore.
He crawled back toward his abandoned uniform, watched by the dead eyes of the massacred prisoners. He slapped his assault rifle out of the way and buried his face in the damp, stinking material of his tunic. He rocked onto his side and drew his knees up to his chest. Then he got a last desperate, fragile hold on himself.
Levin sat up. He pulled the camouflage uniform back on, fighting childishly against the unwillingness of the legs and sleeves. Then he reached for his holster. He thought of the men murdered in the basement room. He sensed them back in the shadows, behind the piles of sweaters and the absurd variety of socks. A sound like ocean waves drowned the noise of battle. He thought helplessly of his son and his faithless wife. Then he became angry at it all, hating for the first time in his life, hating indiscriminately.
He dropped his shoulders back against a wooden display rack and cocked his pistol. He closed his eyes. The taste of the metal was foul on his tongue. It was a relief to pull the trigger.
Nineteen
The radio reports from his forward element had not begun to prepare Bezarin for the scene in the valley below him. He had painfully worked what was left of his battalion — now designated as a forward detachment — through the confusing network of roads southwest of Hildesheim. There had been fighting down in the small city, where another forward element on a converging axis had been engaged, and funnels of black smoke rose high into the blue sky. Bezarin labored to keep clear of the action in Hildesheim, following the path blazed by Dagliev and his reconnaissance and security element. The mission was to reach the Weser at Bad Oeynhausen — not to get bogged down in local actions unless it proved absolutely unavoidable.
Dagliev had reported back to Bezarin about the backed-up traffic along the east-west artery of Highway 1, which was the main line of communication Bezarin hoped to exploit. The company commander became emotional over the radio, searching for adjectives, describing the scene up ahead in apocalyptic terms. But Bezarin had only his mission in mind. He ordered Dagliev to stop acting like a nervous little virgin and get moving.
As Bezarin’s tank broke over the ridge the view forced him to halt his march column. Dagliev had not been succumbing to emotionalism. Stretching across the landscape, civilian vehicles packed the vital highway, all struggling to move west. There was so little vehicular motion in the jammed-up lanes that, at first glance, the column appeared to be at a complete standstill. But once the eye began to seek out details, slow nudging movements became apparent, really more nervousness than actual progress. Along what had once been an eastbound lane, a column of military supply vehicles smoldered where they had been caught in the open by Soviet air power. Here and there, clusters of wrecked or burned civilian automobiles and small trucks further thickened the consistency of the traffic flow. Some vehicles had evidently been abandoned by panic-stricken occupants, and on both sides of the road, a straggling line of civilians with suitcases, packs, and bundles trudged along. Bezarin judged that this was the last wave fleeing southwest from the major urban center of Hannover and its satellite towns, trying to get across the Weser to an imagined safety less than fifty kilometers away. It was a pathetic scene, but Bezarin forcibly reined in his sympathies. The enemy would have put the Russian people in the same condition, if not in a worse one, had they been allowed to strike first. He doubted that a West German or an American tank battalion commander would have wasted as much thought on the situation as he had already squandered. He pictured his NATO counterparts as fascist-leaning mercenaries, fighting for money, unbothered by human cares.
Bezarin gave the order to move out, deploying cautiously into combat formation to facilitate a safe crossing of the high fields that tapered down to the highway. He still had no heavy air-defense protection, and he worried about getting caught in the open. He ordered the self-propelled howitzer battery to remain on the ridge, covering the movement of the tanks and infantry combat vehicles. His spirits had fallen off sharply. He had imagined that, once in the enemy’s rear, the roads would be clear. Now he had to work around this exodus. He could not see how he would be able to make adequate time.
But remaining static would not solve anything. Bezarin figured that, at a minimum, he could stay close to the refugee column, exploiting them as passive air defense. The enemy would have to strike his own people to hit Bezarin’s tanks. Bezarin was far from certain that the NATO officers would show any compunction about such an action, but it offered a better chance than driving openly through fields all day long. Bezarin wondered if the West Germans had perhaps even planned this, using their own people as a shield to block the progress of the Soviet Army on the roads. Well, he would make the most of this situation, too.
He found himself thinking of Anna. She did not fit in here, but her image was insistent. She scolded him, flashing her high Polish temper, demanding that he see the mass of frightened humanity down on the road as a crowd of terrified individuals, seeking nothing more than safety.
All the same, the refugees were an annoyance. Bezarin felt like a cavalryman with new spurs since the engagement along the ridgeline with the British, and he wanted to drive his steel horse faster and faster, to water it on the banks of the Weser.
His tattered battalion unfolded from the high road and the crown of trees, opening into a quick, if somewhat ragged, battle formation. The self-propelled guns sidled off to firing positions as the wave of tanks, followed by infantry fighting vehicles, plowed toward the valley floor. The warriors who had survived the morning’s engagement had a changed feel to them now. Bezarin could sense it even through the steel walls of the tanks. It was, he suspected, the feel of men who had tasted the blood of their enemies.
Tanks sprayed dirt and mud in their trails as they maneuvered across the declining slope. Turrets wheeled to challenge the flanks. Bezarin saw only the readiness, the will to combat, ignoring the unevenness of the line. He knew that his demanding approach to training, despite the resentment it caused, had paid off. He felt that he could match his tankers against any in the world.
Along the highway, still nearly a kilometer distant, the refugees on foot began to run at the sight of the skirmish line of tanks. First a few of them ran, then other runners gathered around the first clusters like swarming insects. Some fell. Others discarded their last possessions.
At first, this response surprised Bezarin. It had never occurred to him that this slow river of humanity should be afraid at the sight of his tanks. The idea of causing them any intentional injury had never crossed his mind. In a moment’s revelation, he saw the world through the fear-widened eyes of the refugees. Despite the seal of his headset over his ears, he imagined that he could plainly hear their screams.
Bezarin was about to redirect his formation toward a secondary road heading off to the west, refusing his right flank, when the first muzzle blast flashed from across the valley.
Beyond the stream of fleeing civilians, an enemy force of undetermined size either had been waiting in ambush or had just reached the wooded ridge on the opposite side of the valley. Other muzzle blasts flared in quick succession, and Bezarin’s tanks maneuvered to take advantage
of the sparse local cover. They had been caught fully exposed on the slope.
On his right, Bezarin saw one of his tanks erupt, its turret lifting like the top of a mountain raised by the force of a volcano. Some of his platoons had begun to fire back, but the enemy was at extreme range, and the tanks had to fire from the halt to have any hope of hitting their targets.
Another of his tanks began to burn.
Good gunners, Bezarin thought. The bastards.
His first instinct was to pull everyone back up into the treeline. His ridge was considerably more commanding than the one occupied by the enemy.
“Attention,” Bezarin called into the radio mouthpiece. “Do not return fire unless you have positively identified a target. Voronich,” he called, dispensing with call signs, “your task is to identify targets for volley fire. The artillery is to suppress the enemy position along the treeline. Neshutin, you — ”
Bezarin froze. The enemy were coming out. It was senseless. They had good concealed firing positions. They were willingly putting themselves at the same disadvantage Bezarin’s vehicles were in.
Then he got it. They were trying to rescue, to cover, the refugee column. Again, Bezarin was startled by the enemy’s apparent perception of the threat his tanks posed. But he did not waste time on moral philosophy. The enemy had just told him, frankly, where their values lay.
“Everybody,” Bezarin called over the radio net. “All tanks and fighting vehicles. Move forward now. Full combat speed. Get in among the refugee traffic. Use the automobiles for cover. Fire smoke grenades and move now. All tanks back on line. Now.”