A high moon, pa y veiled b rtl y swift-rolling clouds, dusted the thatched huts and the rutted empty road blue-gray. Across the road in the woods, soldiers, were sadly singing to an accordion. Victor Henry and Pamela Tudsbury sat down on a rough bench, hands clasped, huddling close in the frigid wind which blew straight up the road. Underfoot the mud was ridged hard.
"Dear God," Pamela said, it's a long long way to Tipperary, isn't it?"
'Washington, D.C."s even further.anks for bringing me out, Victor. I was sitting there not daring to move. I love the smell of this countryside, but lord, that wind cuts you!"
Yellow flashes ran along the sky and loud thumps followed fast.
Pamela winced against him, with a little gasp. "Oh, oh! Look at that. Talky was a pig to drag me out here, wasn't he? Of course it suits him. He dictated two hours by candlelight tonight, and he Couldn't have written a line himself. It's quite a story, I'll say that. Are those tanks as startling as he claims? He says in his last sentence that if the Soviet Union can massproduce them, the war's as good as over."
"Well, that's journalism. Size isn't everything. Any tank, no matter how big, can be an incinerator for crews if it's built wrong.
How maneuverable is it? How vulnerable is it? The germans'll find the weak spots.
They'll rush out a new gun that can penetrate these things.
They're good at that. Still, it's quite a tank."
"Count on you!" Pamela laughed. "I think that was why I couldn't sleep. I had this vision of the war coming to a sudden end. It was such a weird, dazzling idea! The Germans beaten, Hitler dead or locked up, the lights going on again in London, the big cleanup, and then life continuing the way it used to be! All because of these monster tanks rolling by the thousands to Berlin-my God, those guns do sound dose."
'It's a pipe dream," Victor Henry said. "The Germans are winning'.
We're pretty close to Moscow here, Pam."
After a silence she said, looking up at the moon and stars and then at Pug's shadowy face, "When you just said those tanks couldn't end the war, do you know what? I felt relieved. Relieved! What kind of mad reaction was that?"
"Well, the war's something different, while it lasts." Victor Henry gestured at the angry yellow flare-ups on the black western clouds. "The expensive fireworks-the travel to strange places-' "The interesting company," Pamela said.
"Yes, Pam. The interesting company." The accordion was playing alone now, a plaintive tune like a lullaby, half drowned by the cracking and sighing of trees in the wind.
'What is that sensation of sudden remembering supposed to mean?"
she said. "The sort of thing you felt yesterday at the Tolstoy place?"
Pug said, 'Isn't it a kind of short circuit in the brain? Some irrelevant stimulus triggers off the sense of recognition when it shouldn't. So I once read."
"()n the Bremen, the second day out," said Pamela, "I was walking the deck in the morning. And so were you, going the other way. We passed each other twice. It was getting silly. I decided to ask you, next time we passed, to walk with me. And I suddenly knew you'd ask me. I knew the exact words you'd use. You used them. I made a remark about your wife as though I were acting a play, and your answer came like the next line in the play, all old and familiar. I've never forgotten that."
A tall soldier, muffled in his greatcoat, trudged by with smoking breath, the unsheathed bayonet of his rifle glinting in the moonlight.
He stopped to glance at them, and passed on.
"Where are we heading tomorrow, Victor?"
"I'm going into the front line. You and Talky will stay in a town several miles back. Up front one sometimes has to make a dash for it, the colonel says, and of course Talky can't do that."
"Why must you go?"
"Well, Amphiteatrov offered. It'll be informative."
"This is the flight to Berlin again."
"No. I'll be on the ground all the way, on friendly territory.
Quite a difference."
"How long will you be gon from us?"
"Just a few hours."
A green radiance blinded them, a sudden blaze filling the heavens.
Pamela uttered a cry. As their pupils adjusted to the shock, they saw four smoky green lights floating very slowly down below the thickening clouds, and heard the thrum of engines. The sentry had darted off the road. The village showed no sign of life: a tiny sleeping Russian hamlet of thatched huts in the woods an a mud road, like a hundred others, with a stage-setting appearance in the artificial glare. All the tanks under repair had been camouflaged.
'You look ghastly," Pam said.
-You should see yourself. The)ere searching for this tank battalion."
The lights sank earthward. One turned orange and went out. The airplane sounds faded away. Pug glanced at his watch. "I used to think the Russians were nutty on camouflage, but it has its points."
He stiffly rose and opened the cabin door. 'We'd better try to sleep."
Pamela put a hand out, palm up to the black sky. The clouds were blotting out the moon and stars. "I thought I felt something." She held her hand toward Pug. In the light of the last falling flare he could see, melting on her 'aim, a fat snowflake.
The car crossed a white bare plain in a steady snowfall in leaden gray light by which the driver guided the jolting, Tlight. Pug could s no roa sliding, shaking machine. What about mines? Trusting that Pug could Amphiore appetite than he to get blown up, Pug said nothing.
teatrov had no m In about an hour an onion-top belft-y of yellow brick loomed ahead They entered a town where soldiers milled and through the veil of snow. wood houses.
army trucks lurched on mud streets between unpainted idlers peered the livid, bloody, bandaged faces of so From some trucks sadly.
Villagers, mostly snow-flecked old women and boys, stood in front of the houses, dourly watching the traffic go by.
At the steps of the yellow brick church, Pug parted company with the others. A political officer in a belted white leather coat, with the slanted eyes of a Tartar and a little beard like Lenin's, came to take him off in a small British jeep. Talky Tudsbury happily said in Russian, pointing to the trademark, "Ah, so British aid has reached the front at last!"
The political officer replied in ragged English that it required men and gunfire, not automobiles, to stop Germans, and that the British vehicles were not strong enough for heavy duty.
Pamela gave Victor Henry a serious wide-eyed stare. Despite the wear and soil of travel she looked charming, and the lambskin bat was tilted jauntily on her head. 'Watch yourself," was all she said.
The jeep went west, out of the tumultuous town and into a snowladen quiet forest. They appeared to be heading straight for the front, yet the only gunfire thumps came from the left, to the south.
Pug thought the snow might be muffling the sound up ahead. He saw many newly splintered trees, and bomb craters lined with fresh snow.
The Germans had been shelling the day before, the commissar said, trying in vain to draw the fire of Russian batteries hidden in the woods. The jeep bounced past some of these batteries: big horse-drawn howitzers, tended by wearylooking bewhiskered soldiers amid evergreens and piles of shells at the ready.
They came to a line of crude trenches through the smashed fallen trees, with high earthworks sugared by snow. These were dummy dugouts, the commissar said, deliberately made highly visible. They had taken much of the shellfire yesterday. The real trenches, a couple of hundred yards further on, had escaped. Dug along a riverbank, their log tops level with the ground and snowed over, the actual trenches were totally invisible. The commissar parked the jeep among trees, and he and Victor Henry crawled the rest of the way through the brush.
"The less movement the Fritzes can observe, the better," said the Russian.
Here, down in a deep muddy hole-a machine gun post manned by three soldiers-Victor Henry peered through a gun slit piled with sandbags and saw Germans. They were working in plain view across the river wi
th earth-moving machines, pontoons, rubber boats, and trucks. Some dug with shovels; some patrolled with light machine guns in hatnhde.
GUenrlike the Russians, concealed like wild eatures in the earth, mans were making no effort to hide themselves or what they were doing.
cr Except for the helmets, guns, and long gray coats, they might have been a big crew on a peacetime construction job. Through binoculars handed him by a soldier-German binoculars-Victor Henry could see the eyeglasses and frost-purpled cheeks and noses of Hitler's chilled men. "You could shoot them like birds," he said in Russian.
It was as close as he could come to the American idiom, "they're sitting ducks."
The soldier grunted. "Yes, and give away our position, and start them shelling us! No thanks, Gospodin American."If they ever get that bridge finished," said the commissar, "and start coming across, that'll."
"That's what we're waiting for," said a pipe-smoking soldier with heavy drooping moustaches, who appeared to be in command of this hole in the ground.
Pug said, "Do you really think you can hold out if they get across?"
The three soldiers rolled their eyes at each other, weighing this question asked in bad Russian by a foreigner. Their mouths set sourly.
Here, for the first time, in sight of the Germans, Victor Henry detected fear on Red Army faces. "Well, if it comes to that," said the pipe smoker, every man has his time. A Russian soldier knows how to die."
The political officer said briskly, "A soldier's duty is to live, comrade, not to die-to live and fight. They won't get across. Our big guns are trained on this crossing, and as soon as they've wasted all the time it takes to build a bridge, and they start across, we'll blast these Hitlerite rats! Eh, Polikov? How about it?"
"That's right," said a bristle-faced soldier with a runny nose, crouched on the earth in a corner blowing on his red hands. "That's exactly right, Comrade Political Officer."
Crawling through bushes or darting from tree to tree, Victor Henry and the commissar made their way along the dugoutsp pillboxes, trenches, and one-man posts of the thinly held line. A battalion of nine hundred men was covering five miles of the river here, the commissar said, to deny the Cennans access to an important road. "This campaign is simply a race," he panted, as they crawled between dugouts.
"The Germans are trying to beat Father Frost into Moscow. That's the plain fact of it. They are pouring out their lifeblood to do it.
But never fear, Father Frost is an old friend of Russia. He'll freeze them dead in the ice. You'll see, they'll never make it."
The commissar was evidently on a morale-stiffening mission. Here and there, where they found a jolly leader in a trench, the men seemed ready for the fight, but elsewhere fatalism darkened their eyes, slumped their shoulders, and showed in dirty weapons, disarrayed uniforms, and garbage-strewn holes. The commissar harangued them, exploiting the strange presence of an American to buck them up, but for the most part the hairy-faced Slavs stared at Henry with sarcastic incredulity as though to say-'If you're really an American, why are you so stupid as to come here yourself? We have no choice"worse luck."
The Germans were in view all along the river, methodically and intimidating, calmly preparing to cross. Their businesslike air was more Pug thought, than volleys of bullets. 'neir numbers were alarming, too; where did they all come from?
The commissar and Victor Henry emerged from one of the largest dugouts and lay on their elbows in the snow. "Well, I have finished my tour of this part of the line, Captain. Perhaps you will rejoin your party now."
"I'm ready."
With a grim little smile, the commissar stumbled to his feet.
"Keep in the shadows of the trees."
When they got back to the jeep, Pug said, "How far are we from Moscow here?"
"Oh, quite far enough." The commissar whirred the noisy engine.
"I hope you saw what you wanted to see."
"I saw a lot," Victor Henry said.
The commissar turned his Lenin-like face at the American, appraising him with suspicious eyes. "It is not easy to understand the front just by looking at it."
"I understand that you need a second front."
understand the The Commissar uttered a brutal grfurntn.t,"iTfhweenmyuosut, Captain Genry, main thing. But even without the second cockroaches."
we ourselves will smash this plague of German By the time they reached the central square of the town, the snowfall had stopped and patches of fast-moving blue showed through the clouds. The wind was bitter cold. The tangle of trucks, wagons, horses, and soldiers was worse than before. Vehement Russian cursing and arguing filled the air. The old women and the wrinkle-faced boys still watched the disorder with round sad eyes. In a big jam of vehicles around two fallen horses and an overturned ammunition wagon, the jeep encountered the black automobile. Talky Tudsbury, in great spirits, stood near forty yelling soldiers and officers, watching the horses kick and struggle in tangled traces, while other soldiers gathered up long coppery shells that had spilled from burst boxes and lay softly gleaming in the snow. "Hello there!
Back already? What a mess! It's a wonder the whole wagon didn't go up with a bang, what? And leave a hole a hundred feet across."
"Where's Pamela?"
Tudsbury flipped a thumb over his shoulder. "Back at the church.
An artillery spotter is stationed in the belfry. There's supposed to be a great view, but I couldn't climb the damned tower. She's up there making some notes. How are things at the front? You've got to give me the whole picture. Brrr! What frost, eh? Do you suppose Jerry is starting to feel it in his balls a bit? Hullo, they've got the horses up."
Amphiteatrov said he was taking Tudsbury to see a downed junker 88
in the nearby field. Pug told him that he had seen plenty of junker 88's; he would join Pam in the church and wait for them.
Ampbiteatrov made an annoyed face. "All right, but please remain there, Captain.
We'll come back in twenty minutes or less."
Pug said good-bye to the bearded commissar, who was sitting at the wheel of the jeep, bellowing at a scravmy soldier who clutched a live white goose. The soldier was coarsely shouting back, and the goose turned its orange beak and little eyes from one to the other as though trying to learn its fate. Making his way around the traffic tangle, Pug walked to the church on crunching squeaking dry snow. Freedom from the escort-even for a few minutes-felt strange and good. si the church, a strong unI In de churchlike miasma of medicine and disinfectant filled the air; peeling frescoes of blue big-eyed saints looked down from grimy walls, at bandaged soldiers who lay on straw mats smoking, talking to each other, or sadly staring. The narrow stone staircase spiralling up the inside of the belfry with no handholds made Pug queasy, but up he went, edging along the rough wall, to a wooden platform level with big rusty bells, where wind gusted through four open brick arches. Here he caught his breath, and wooden ladder.
mounted a shaky st brick walk, Pam waved and "Victor!" As he emerged on the topmo called to him. gi e job of tin sheets Seen this close, the bulging onion dome was a c,d yellow brick nailed rustily on a curving frame. Squared around it was a walk and parapet, where Pamela crouched in a corner, out of the whistling wind. The artillery spotter, shapeless and faceless in an ankle-length thick earflaps, manned brown coat, mittens, goggles, and fastened-down giant binoculars on a tripody pointed west. A fat black tomcat beside Pamela crouched over a bowl of soup, lapping, shaking its big head in distaste, nd the spotter were laughing at the cat. 'Too and lapping again. Pamela a look showed she clearly was much pepper, kitty?"
Pamela's gay flirtatious ched far east and south to enjoying herself.
Below, the bare plain stret distant forests, and west and north to the black wriggling river and sparse t of life, made thin noise in an woods. Straight downward the town, a clo empty white Hat world.
"Vy Amerikanski offitzer?" The spotter showed fine teeth in the hairy uncovered patch of his face.
"Da."
"Videte nemtzi?" Pug said. ("Can you see Germans?")
"Slishkom m'nogo." ("Too many.") 'Odin slishkom m'nogo," Pug said.
("One is too many!") With a grim nod and chuckle the spotter stepped away from the bithem to the oculars. Pug's eyes were watering from the wind; he put n eyepieces and the Germans on the riverbank leaped into sight, blurry and small, still at the same work.
"Doesn't it give you an eerie feeling?" Pam said, stroking the cat.
"They're so calm about it."
Victor Henry went to a corner of the brick parapet and surveyed the s, hands jammed in his blue snowy vista through all points of the compas south to north, made a slow coat. The spotter, turning the binoculars from east on a long black sweep along the river, talking into a battered telephone wire that dangled over the parapet." The cat was washing itself, and "Kitty, don't forget behind the ears.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 105