by Victor Serge
The six men waiting in the shelter formed an obscure mass, huddled within its silence. How many would return? They were a broad sample of the people of the Union. Each had turned over his documents — penciled letters and few personal belongings; the commander was now arranging these in little piles on the table, like the possessions of the dead. What a gap is left inside a man, when he has to part with his letter from home! They were trying on the white shrouds, lowering hoods over eyes, experimentally … Anonymous, faceless; dim white phantoms equipped with light weapons and a square of chocolate (chocolate is a treat even for those who court death, but it must not be eaten straightaway, however annoying it can be to die before eating it … ). A tram driver from Rostov-on-Don — Rostov, that had been burned to the ground; a tractor mechanic from the country outside Voronezh — the bombed, the ransacked Voronezh; a schoolteacher from Chernikov — occupied, ransomed Chernikov, inhabited by the hanged; a cattle farmer from the steppes of the lower Volga — a Muslim or perhaps a Buddhist, and the war was almost there; a young wine grower from the green and russet hills of Kakhetia — its hamlets emptied of young men; a printer from Moscow — wounded, famished, blacked-out Moscow … What will they achieve tonight, what will become of them, these peaceful men who believe in the future? Six, seven men counting the lieutenant, twenty-five bereavements suspended in their wake, en route to the torture of cold, darkness, fire, murder, and unknowable death …
They know it all, Daria thought, they are plunging tranquilly into an abyss, they are monstrously aware. If their souls could explode, broadcasting their lamentation to the world, all wars would end, how simple it would be! Simply impossible. The Ukrainian, Tziulik, asked the commissar for a glass of vodka. “Wiseass! You know how to exploit the situation,” said the commissar. “Pass the bottle around to the others, schoolteacher.” “If I don’t come back, you’ll be sure to write to my wife?” “I promise, but you’ll be writing to her yourself, lucky bastard.” The voices of these men were fraternal. The commissar put on a satisfied expression. “As for me, if one of these days I don’t make it back from the middle of nowhere, there won’t be anyone writing to anybody … I don’t have anyone left. A bird in the air with no nest!” Tziulik clapped him heartily on the back. “You’re a lucky bastard too.” Move! Daria was seeing men moving out for the first time in her life. She realized that such sorties had been taking place for years now, a hundred, a thousand times a day or night, along thousands of miles of battlefronts, on both sides of the lines, for the others are like us — the same dread, the same obedience. A hundred thousand times already these men had moved out never to return, but always they were replaced by fresh men sprung from the depths of the earth and the wombs of women, from the depths of the weeping and gnashing of teeth, from the depths of rotting cadavers and of love. Pure madness.
The commando unit moved off down a winding lane through the snow dune. It was instantly swallowed up by sepulchral whiteness. The twilit land was beginning to merge with empty space, and space into darkness. On the other side of a half-invisible sloping bank, pale as death, the presence of the river was palpable under its crust of ice and snow, an expanse of camouflaged pitfalls crisscrossed by hidden threats. The woods, that by day gave every horizon a bluish tinge, were now invisible, and there was nothing left but the absolute silence of uninhabited expanses. Distant explosions and quick-fading flashes in the sky did not interrupt so much as magnify the silence and the vastness. This site of immobility evoked only feelings from beyond despair: total extinction, uselessness, the biting cold. The landscapes of dead planets must look like this. “From here, Daria Nikiforovna, you can see a long way into enemy positions, but take care not to go past the salient, they have it under observation … We’ve had men killed there.” But there was nothing to be seen, neither there nor here, the two dead men had left no trace. And yet numberless eyes were on the lookout, trained through lenses; sound detectors were listening; radar beams were searching through space; field telephones were active from station to station; patrols were crawling over the ice … This is what man has become, this murderous worm! Machines for riddling puny human bodies, smashing holes into concrete, pulverizing the earth, whipping snow into squalls, drowning the night under torrents of fire, orchestrating screams of agony, drinking the blood of sacrifice, all these latent machines were crouched expectant on the brink of fury. The earth was as primed with violence as the air was with cold, the sky with snow, and the human spirit with that resigned anguish which journalists have distilled into “Bravery.”
At the command post, men were playing cards with a pack reduced to tatters. Noncoms were on the line to other hidden dens, swiftly writing down the hour, the minute, the response, “all quiet, all quiet.” Vosskov had dropped off with his elbows on the map, a wax dummy. Time flowed like invisibly falling snow, the time of the last certainty, charged like all else with the inevitability of catastrophes moving closer and closer. A devouring second toward what, yet another second toward what? Who will ever understand?
“It’s starting,” whispered the chubby-cheeked telephonist.
“Right,” Vosskov said, shaking himself out of his torpor, “pass me the receiver.”
The voice at the other end launched into an algebraic report, the pencil traced a curve on the map as though impelled by a will of its own. “I see, good, very good …” This meant: disastrous. Major Vosskov was no longer listening, but he could hear through the silence. Patkin’s six stumble into hell one hour before the projected time. Bad. They will be destroyed because of that timing. First a volley of machine-gun fire rips through the emptiness, instantly followed by tracer bullets striping the night with low arcs, like maddened colored stars. Now a planet ignites in the sky and spreads a colossal glare over the white desert it conjures into being. Ice and snow become peopled with shadows, obscure forms drawing bursts of projectiles from automatic weapons; most of these shadows turn out to be illusory. Everything dies down suddenly in a panicked silence, a darkness of inexistence. And then it all begins again, the rising and sinking of northern lights, the whistling upward blast of a torpedo … Major Vosskov rose to his feet and put on his shroud, imitated by several men and by Daria. Outside, at first, they saw nothing. Even the snow was black. But there are different kinds of nothingness, and this one was a sham. Sure enough, less than a mile away a searchlight skimmed the snows like a small, jerky snake. Were the seven men headed back across the river already? Was that possible? Downstream bright planets leaped, the facing shore thundered chaotically, silence fell, and the river arched its back in an eruption of black water and fire. “They’re breaking up the ice, the vicious bastards!” Vosskov hesitated. Should we start firing, to create a diversion? His orders were to operate discreetly and husband the ammunition. The enemy would fire back, which could hamper the return of the commando unit and entail the loss of a few men … Things might escalate into an artillery duel, prompting the division to hold an inquiry into the waste of munitions occasioned by his recklessness … Then should he do nothing? Like an anxious schoolboy, Vosskov imagined the general shouting: “And you simply sat back? Where did your duty lie?” A note would appear in his file: “Lacks initiative.” Where did his duty lie? Our bank was silent, or nearly. Ring through to post 4 with instructions to open fire? Patience, I shall be patient as death. “Find out,” he told the liaison officer in a steady voice, for the leader must display exemplary calm. “What have they seen? Have they spotted them?” Under a rigid posture, he was squirming. “No, sir.” A cone of pink light had stabilized out there, boiling on the spot with each regular explosion. At last the riposte was under way. Vosskov was delighted to see that the order had been given by someone else (one less responsibility). Dark white sprays spurted up beyond the Neva, a thick cloud blurred the left flank of the luminous cone. “Ten to one the survivors are through safe … Did you understand the operation?” he asked Daria. “I think so …” It was hideously beautiful. “You there, Rodion, run back and check the c
asualty figures. If our people are inside the sector, increase firing for another five minutes …” He stooped to light his pipe under a soldier’s coat. “I reckon they’ve taken more losses than we have … That big strike you saw, it must have hit a blockhouse …” His pipe had gone out immediately; he was inhaling imaginary smoke and expelling it through protruded lips. “All right, the night has had its little epileptic fit. Home we go.” The battle was tapering off into ever-shorter spasms of brilliance and noise. Darkness reclaimed the snow, dappled at first, then total.
Nothing had happened. “Reporting sporadic incoming fire, location, time …” Propped over the map, Vosskov was dozing again, a wax statue. One hundred and four hours on duty and so little sleep! All he wanted was sleep. He would lie down in piles of warm fresh straw, he would sleep on stoves in peasant kitchens, sleep in meadows of grass, rest against the wall of a shelter, collapse wherever he could! The miracle of sleep began to steal over him, there was a lively country fair, children singing … “Right,” he groaned, his blissful expression morphing into a scowl, “hand me the receiver …” Colonel Fontov was on the line. “No, Comrade Colonel, no sign of them yet … Nothing to report …” Time crept onward, malign and inconceivable. Daria was prowling back and forth between the claustrophobic shelter, the trench, and the eternity of darkness beyond. There she ran into the colonel. During the incident, he had given himself one of those injections against physiological depression. (Humiliating to know how much we depend on our glands!) “Ah, it’s you! Enjoying a breath of northern air? Bracing, isn’t it? Did you like our little party? It went off very well. My plan executed to the letter. Our men are coming back …” She was still lost for a reply when he turned and ambled off, spry despite the stick, trailing a fan of shadows. Daria wrung her hands in the emptiness.
Four men returned, bringing one prisoner. Patkin reported the death of Tziulik, the Ukrainian. “I crawled up to him, I felt his head, my fingers went into his brains. A minute later the ice turned over under him. Sidorov” (the tractor mechanic from Voronezh, who had made no physical impression) “took several bullets in the back, the stretcher bearers picked him up … Leifert, dead for sure, he was a real brick, he drew the enemy fire so we could get through … I think he was in the way of that torpedo …” Killed several times over, then, the printing worker of German descent. “We’ve brought you one NCO, the other drowned.” “Congratulations, Patkin!” the colonel said loudly (his face was like a Chinese mask with bad teeth). “Go get some rest. Have them bring in the prisoner …” The basic mission had been accomplished. The colonel’s rheumatic knee, the right, was aching.
The prisoner marched in with a certain assurance. Stripped of his white shroud and the fur coat of Tziulik the Ukrainian, he appeared in a faded Wehrmacht uniform, with the insignia of a subaltern. Wrists lashed together, age about twenty-five, fair hair, domed forehead, pale clipped mustache, fluttering eyes.
“No weapons on him? Untie his hands!” the colonel ordered.
Two lamps placed at either end of the desk illuminated the captive from below. He snapped to attention. Vosskov stood behind him. Daria sat to one side with a notebook on her lap, ready to interpret. Colonel Fontov began: “Surname, first name, rank, specialty, unit!”
The prisoner, calm, answered with unhurried precision.
“How long has your unit held this position on the Neva?”
Daria noticed that the prisoner was swaying very slightly on the spot. As she translated, he looked oddly at her, blinking his eyes, and leaned toward the colonel to murmur something.
“What’s that, Sublieutenant? Repeat please.”
He repeated, in a low, strangled voice, “Why this playacting? I know where I am.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Forgive me …”
He waggled his head feebly.
The colonel demanded: “Are you feeling well? Are you sick?”
“I am feeling quite well, Inspector, thank you.”
He raised his eyes to the damp log beams above them, gleaming with icicles. A smile half formed on his face; the blue gaze was erratic and veiled, as if by smoke. His elbows twitched, so violently that Vosskov and the Mongolian soldier both jumped, ready to grab him … The colonel banged the flat of his hand on the table.
“Ask him if he’s frightened and if so, of what. Tell him we treat prisoners fairly here, in compliance with the rules of war …”
Daria went right up to the young man to look him in the face, and it was she who felt a touch of fear. The blue eyes were transparent, intoxicated. He was grimacing.
“Repeat, woman,” he said with an effort. “My head hurts … No, I am not frightened. Of anything. Why are you trying to deceive me? Why are you talking this foreign language? It is not worthy of you. I was expecting to be arrested. I have committed a serious offense before the Party and the Führer and I am ready to admit it.”
He threw back his head, making the Adam’s apple bulge against the rim of his collar, begging for the cutthroat’s invisible knife … Major Vosskov flung a glass of cold water into his face. It had an immediate effect. He wiped his face with his knuckles, and said, “I am obliged to you, sir. Ah! That’s better!”
“Are you a Nazi?”
(Almost all of them deny it … )
“Ja, Herr Offizier. Heil Hitler!”
He gave the raised-arm salute, impeccably smart.
“Ask him whether he understands his situation?”
“I understand. Tell the Military Police Inspector that I don’t expect clemency. The culprits are Klaus Heimann, Heinrich Sittner, Werner Biederman …”
Daria wrote down the names as fast as she could. “Units?” She translated in some perplexity as the prisoner went on,
“Klaus Heimann brought the enemy radio broadcasts back from Stettin. Sittner copied them on the regimental typewriter … Biederman gave me four pages that I hid in my kit so as to give them to the authorities … I’ve done my duty, and if I deserve to be punished I …”
Vosskov punched him hard between the shoulder blades. The prisoner rounded on him furiously, but was grappled back. He said, “Water, quick, please …” He took a face full of water without blinking, he was laughing out loud.
The colonel cocked his revolver and put it on the table.
“Tell him that if he doesn’t put an end to this pointless masquerade, I will blow his brains out.”
The prisoner was laughing, not listening. They allowed him to bend his head over to stare at the revolver. “Not mine,” he announced. Daria confronted him. “Listen here, prisoner of war. Look at me! Can you see me clearly? Now look at the colonel …” The word colonel brought him down to earth. He regarded Fontov with set chin, calmly. “The colonel has warned you …” The prisoner responded calmly enough, but his mouth grew unsteady.
“Kill me? But I’m innocent … You’ve no right … I’ve made amends. I await your orders, Colonel! Sir!”
His forehead wrinkled as he remembered something. “Prisoners of war? I don’t know …” A telephone call alerted them to some focused artillery fire against eastern positions, in such-and-such a sector … In case it were the prelude to an attack, the battalion urgently requested instructions and ammunition. Division wanted an evaluation of the raid’s success, with the number and quality of prisoners taken … Bits of ice and grit rained onto the table as the ground, shaken by an explosion, vibrated violently. Vosskov knocked over the nearest lamp as he dived for the shelter door; the light went down by half and shadows rebounded. All Colonel Fontov saw was the cherubic telephonist, going, “Post 7 is out, the line must be down, post 7 is out, the line …” “Will you please shut up!” scolded the colonel, his face sickly tense in the gloom, his beard blending with the mobile darkness. “Where’s Sitkin?” he asked, too loudly (Sitkin was the chief of staff). No one answered. The prisoner said, “Sittner was arrested last night.”
Daria translated without thinking.
“What?” aske
d Fontov who was assessing the strength of the threatened battalion, the quantity of available munitions, the ominous silence of post 7, and the wrath of the division. “What’s that, Sitkin arrested?” “No, no, Sittner.” “Who’s Sittner?” The floor rumbled again; there followed a gaping silence. Fontov caught sight of his revolver and the smoke-blind eyes of the prisoner, who was smiling, held by the arms. Daria translated: “Tell the colonel I am immortal. Immortal, it’s appalling … I am very sorry …”