It was a bad move, this letting them send parcels back from Germany. Now every soldier’s pack was bulging. And they never knew just what to take: they’d pick up one thing, then toss it aside when they found something better to make up their five kilos. Toplev could understand it all, but he didn’t like it because it got in the way of the job.
Then he set off back to the battalion headquarters truck on the edge of Klein Schwenkitten. Next to it was a little house that had a nice eiderdown. Time to stretch out and get some sleep, it was already past midnight. Not likely to get much sleep here, though.
~ * ~
The sky grew lighter behind the clouds. It was peaceful and quiet, as if there were no war going on.
Yet what would happen if some of them crept up from the east? Our shells weigh forty kilos apiece, and what with carrying them and reloading, it was never less than a minute between shots. And we’d never manage to pull out of here with these eight-ton gun-howitzers. It would be great if some other guns showed up, some antitank weapons from division. But there’s nobody.
Back at the truck he went to the radio again. He reported to the major: No contact with Ural. And no “sticks” either, though we’ve sent people out to look for them.
One of the sergeants sent here sprang into action. The hum of a motor could be heard from the road they’d taken to get here. It was a jeep. He couldn’t tell who was in it until the last minute.
A man jumped easily out of the jeep. Major Baluev.
Toplev reported: these were the firing positions of a heavy artillery battalion.
The major had a youthful voice, though it was very firm. This news cheered him up: “Do you mean it? Heavy artillery! That’s something I never expected!”
They went into the house, to the light. The major was lean, cleanshaven. And he looked quite worn-out.
“That’s quite amazing! It makes our job a lot easier.”
It turned out that he was the commander of an infantry regiment, the very one they’d been looking for. Now it was Toplev who was cheered: “That’s great! Now we’ll get everything back in shape.”
Not quite, though. It would be half the night before the first battalion of infantry could march here.
They brought a map to examine under the kerosene lamp.
Toplev pointed out the locations of our observation posts. And then there’s the sound-ranging battery, over here in Dietrichsdorf. But we still haven’t come across a single enemy unit.
The major, his cap tilted over his flaxen hair, focused his keen eyes on the map. He wasn’t a bit happy.
He examined the map for a long time. Using a finger, not a pencil, he traced out his proposed lines. Somewhere there, past the artillery OPs, he would position his infantry. He opened his own map case and wrote out his instructions. These he gave to the senior sergeant who had come with him.
“Pass this on to the adjutant. Take the jeep. If you see anything with wheels along the way, do your best to grab it. We have to try to get at least one company up here by transport.”
He kept two scouts with him.
“I’m going to see your battalion commander.”
Toplev obligingly took the major into Adlig. When they came to the end of the road he said, “It’s straight this way, just follow the sled tracks.”
They showed clearly on the ground.
It grew lighter. The moon was making its way through the clouds.
~ * ~
11
After being wounded in the lung on the Sozha River, Major Baluev was sent on a year-long course at the Frunze Academy. He was afraid he might miss the war, but he came back to the headquarters of the Second Belorussian Army Group just in time for the January offensive. From there he was sent to an army headquarters, then to a corps headquarters, and then a divisional headquarters.
It was only today—no, by now it was yesterday—that he had found this latest post. As it happened, the day before he arrived, a regimental commander had been killed—the third one since the autumn. Now he had taken his place; his orders would be signed later.
He managed to speak to the divisional commander for five minutes. But even that was enough for an experienced officer: he scarcely needed to read the map and could grasp the situation as soon as the artillery officer had moved his fingers over it and voiced a few of his concerns. Do the higher-ups have any idea of what’s going on here? They seem to be in a total fog and can’t make a decision. And look who gets promoted to general these days! What’s more, they have to keep to the nationality quota to make sure each minority is represented.
After working as part of a cohesive academic team fighting a theoretical war, you can’t help but be bowled over when you’re suddenly dropped into all this. You may have forgotten some of your old habits, but you’ve got to keep your spirits up.
Baluev, in fact, had managed to grasp something of the situation here while he was on the operations staff at the army headquarters. After 1942, our troops just kept rolling on; they seemed unstoppable! So why shouldn’t they seem a bit cocky? It was a wonderful, beautiful cockiness of a triumphant army. They took it with them when they cut Prussia in two. Now their support echelons were lagging behind, the infantry was lagging, but the Fifth Tank Army went rolling on, right to the Baltic. It was something to admire; it was thrilling, in fact!
Just the same, with a forward rush of such scale a single division no longer had the usual three to five kilometers of front. Suddenly a division had a forty-kilometer front! So, you’d better make sure your regiment was well extended. And ask for a couple of seventy-sixes.
That’s how it is: An army on the move is an ever-changing structure. Sometimes it can form a wall as hard as marble in twenty-four hours; sometimes it can dissolve like an apparition in two hours. But that’s why you’re an officer in the regular army, and that’s why you’ve had this academic training.
And in this tempestuous whirl of unexpectedness, bitterness, and harshness, you find the very delight of being at war.
~ * ~
12
It continued to grow brighter, and by one o’clock the clouds had broken up. The moon wasn’t yet full, and it wouldn’t be out for the whole night. Lacking its left edge and tilted slightly westward, it began floating picturesquely behind the clouds, sometimes shining brightly, sometimes obscured.
It may have been getting brighter, but through the binoculars there was little that could be made out on the snowy field to their front; it did, though, seem completely empty beyond the depression. Yet there were those groves of trees here and there where the enemy could mass his troops.
The moon had had some special power over Pavel Boyev since he had been a child. In his youth, it would make him stop or sit or lie down simply to gaze at it. He would think about the kind of life that lay ahead of him and about the kind of girl he would meet.
But though he was strong, solid, and an excellent gymnast, for some reason girls were rarely if ever attracted to him. He racked his brain to try to find out what was wrong. True, he wasn’t very good-looking; his nose and lips were not quite straight. But does a man have to be handsome? Beauty is an entirely feminine quality, even in the least attractive women. Pavel would be simply paralyzed before a woman; he was in awe of her tenderness, her fragility, and he not only feared he might break her but even that he might scorch her with his very breath. Whether or not this was the cause, he didn’t marry before the war. (And it was only Tanya, the nurse at the hospital, who had later explained it to him: That’s just what we love, the strong hand of a man next to us, don’t you see that, silly?)
The moon was shining over his shoulder. He turned to look at it. Then a cloud obscured it again.
It was still the same: not a sound from anywhere. We must have hit the Germans right where they hurt.
Meanwhile, they had strung telephone lines from the guns to all three OPs. Via the listening post they had a connection with the sound-ranging battery in Dietrichsdorf and its posts to the left and farther
north. Their battery commander was complaining that there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere; they had moved their advance post across the lake to their front.
The lake formed a complete gap, and in the moonlight they could spot any Germans who might be there. So, the whole area two kilometers eastward was empty.
He also reported that the surveyors were using the moonlight to fix the locations of the listening posts and some had gone back to Adlig to survey in the guns.
So, an hour from now we’ll be ready to fire! But it’s not likely we’ll be staying here. We’ll be moving out.
It didn’t look as if there would be a thaw. He was going to spend the night here, so he picked up a pair of felt boots from the sled and changed.
Then Toplev reported: still no contact at all with brigade headquarters. That was odd. How long does it take them to get here? Could the Germans have intercepted them along the road? Then he remembered: the brigade commander had gone off to the hospital yesterday. Vyzhlevsky must be in charge.
Boyev tried to keep his distance from all the political officers; he had little use for such idle people. But he found Vyzhlevsky particularly obnoxious. There was something not right about him; perhaps that was why he was so particularly keen on all his commissar’s claptrap. People in the brigade said, on the quiet, that something in his service record from ‘41 didn’t quite add up. He had been in Odessa when the Germans had it surrounded; then there was a mysterious gap in his record for two or three months; and then, as if nothing had happened, he was serving on the western front again with a higher rank. And how was Gubaydulin linked with all this? Why did Vyzhlevsky immediately pluck him out of the group of reinforcements, put him into the political section, and promote him so quickly? (And he saddled Boyev with the job of party organizer.)
Again from Toplev: still no contact with brigade headquarters. But the commander of the rifle regiment had turned up and was following Boyev’s tracks to the OP.
Well, about time. Now at least that’s been cleared up.
~ * ~
13
“Comrade Senior Lieutenant! Comrade Senior …”
“What is it?” Kandalintsev responded immediately, in an alert voice.
“There’s a German here, a deserter!”
It was Corporal Neskin who had come into the barn to tell him this. The sentries were holding the German. He had walked straight across the field.
Gusev also heard. Great news! Both platoon commanders jumped down from the stack of hay.
They went outside to take a look. The moon was bright and they could easily make out his German uniform and see that he was unarmed. He wore a warm cap.
The German saw the officers and smartly raised his hand to his temple: “Herr Oberleutnant! Diese Nacht, in zwei Stunden wird man einen Angriff hier unternehmen!”
Neither one of them had much German. They could make out a few individual words but couldn’t understand them when they were put together.
The fellow was very excited.
Still, he’s got to go to battalion headquarters. They gestured for him to go. Neskin led the way, and behind the prisoner marched little Yursh with a carbine (that fellow was always there when you needed him). Yursh passed on more information to the officers as they walked. “We’ve already tried talking a bit of ‘vas-ist-das’ to get through to him. He knows some language that’s closer to ours, but we still couldn’t make out anything.”
The prisoner had something urgent to pass on, by the look of it.
It wasn’t far to the headquarters truck here in Klein. While they were walking they tried questioning him again. And the German did his best. He began speaking some language that was not German and sounded somehow familiar. It might sound familiar, but they couldn’t understand a damned thing.
There was one separate word that he kept repeating: “ Angriff! Angriff!”
Wasn’t that a word we knew? “Assault”? “Attack”?
Well, that we could certainly expect.
The radio operator in the headquarters truck wasn’t asleep, and he woke the plotter, who knew a bit of German, though not much more than the officers. He quickly rolled out of bed and began speaking with the deserter. He translated, but slowly and awkwardly, not word for word.
“So, this fellow here is a Sudeten German. He knows a bit of Czech as well. He came to warn us that in another hour or two, here in our sector, the Germans are launching a big general offensive.”
Maybe he’s just trying to fool us.
But why should he? That would make it even worse for him.
The German’s voice was pleading, plaintive, even imploring.
And he was certainly getting on in years, even older than Kandalintsev.
Kandalintsev felt sorry for him. He’d had enough war, the poor fellow.
Who wouldn’t have enough after so many years?
You poor devil. And now that we’ve got our hands on you, how many more years before you see your family?
He sent the runner Yursh to Adlig to find Captain Toplev and pass on the information.
~ * ~
14
After questioning the deserter, using the plotter as an interpreter, listening to his voice and seeing how friendly and willing he was, Toplev decided that the man was telling the truth. How did he get away? That was easy enough, across an empty field without a single line of troops on it—why not just walk over?
Fine. We’ll hold the deserter at the headquarters truck.
But if he’s telling the truth and hasn’t made a mistake, our guns are completely defenseless. The infantry still haven’t arrived!
Toplev was an efficient and thorough officer: Stand at attention! Toe the line! And he always tried to understand the situation, get a full grasp of it, and succeed in what he did.
But now, what should he do? What could he do now?
He had to locate brigade headquarters, and locate it at once!
He told the radio operator to call headquarters at once.
But still no contact.
What’s going on with them? This doesn’t make sense!
He grabbed the telephone to call the battalion commander—but what was this? There was no contact here either. There hadn’t been any shelling, so how could the line be broken? He sent out a lineman, cursing, though not using the foulest words. That he never did. That telephone operator was a scatterbrain. You had to watch him every moment!
And if he used the radio, how could he explain it? He couldn’t send a message in clear, but they didn’t have the code words to use in a case like this. “Fetch Ten,” he ordered the radio operator.
He heard Boyev’s voice, deep, always assured and reliable, and he calmed down a bit. Boyev would make the decision now. His eyes fixed on the red eye of the radio, Toplev began a roundabout explanation.
Some old guy has just come to us ... He’s not one of ours ... From the other direction, you know ... Doesn’t seem like a liar, and I’ve checked his story from beginning to end. He says that in an hour or two ... and now it’s even less . .. He says they’re coming! A whole lot of them! That’s right, lots of them ... And there’s still no contact with Ural... What are your orders?
Boyev took some time to reply. He wasn’t very talkative in any case. He was thinking. He asked once more: “Still no contact with Ural, you said?”
Toplev, almost crying, replied: “Not a peep!”
Boyev thought a bit more.
“Here’s what we’ll do. Move all of Kasyanov’s people back across the river. Right away. Have them take up firing positions there.”
“And the other two?”
He could even hear Boyev’s sigh through the phone.
“The other two? They’ll stay where they are for the moment. But make sure, absolutely sure, they’re on full alert. Now, what’s happened to the telephone line?”
“I don’t know. I’ve sent someone out.”
“Everyone is to be ready for action, watching and listening. The minute anything h
appens, give me a report.”
A few minutes later the lineman came running in, swearing it was God’s truth: “In the woods over there somebody’s cut off a piece of wire this long. Looks like it was done with a knife. And there’s tracks off to the side.”
The Germans?
Here already?
~ * ~
15
And so Baluev and his two scouts walked along the sled tracks to a group of dark figures on an open, snow-covered spot.
He introduced himself and explained who he was.
Major Boyev, slightly shorter than Baluev, was wearing a white fur jacket.
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 15