And keep your voices down: noise carries across that open field.
The Germans could move a tank up quickly, of course. And we don’t have anything to use against a tank. Our slit trenches are tiny.
The signalman summoned Boyev to the phone. He was only a couple of paces farther down their trench. It was the commander of the sound-ranging battery again. He was very anxious: the Germans had captured his left listening post! All they had been able to report was “They’re trying to surround us. They’re in white camouflage.” And that was all.
He asked Boyev: “What’s happening over there, Pavel Afanasych?”
“I can’t see anything so far.”
“No one’s attacking my central station yet. But I’m bringing in my boxes—I don’t want to lose them. So you’d best keep your eyes peeled. And you can pull in your line.”
Boyev held on to the receiver for a time, as if he was waiting to hear something more.
But there was only silence.
The battle had already begun.
To Myagkov he said: “Take everyone we’ve got and position them in a semicircle about two hundred meters to our front. Leave one man on the telephone and another with the sled.”
Myagkov went off quietly to pass on the orders.
Setting up a protective screen was a risky move: you could find out more quickly when the Germans were advancing, but you couldn’t fire from here without hitting your own men. But if everyone stayed in one bunch they’d be caught like a flock of sheep.
He wasn’t agitated; his mind was working calmly and clearly. Various scenes passed through his mind: the battles near Oryol, the Desna River, Starodub, the battle near Rechitsa. Each battle was different, and each death was different. One thing he never did was to waste his shells in pointless firing.
There was the triumph of the Bobruisk pocket, the pursuit across Poland, the vicious bridgehead near Pultusk. And still, he’d come through them all.
. . . Just hold on until morning . . .
A few bursts of machine gun fire came from the northeast, about two kilometers away. Then there was silence.
That was roughly where Baluev had gone.
~ * ~
20
The shells had been stacked near the guns at Toplev’s position. But it didn’t look as if they would have to do any firing before first light. Yet the battalion commander had ordered all the gun crews to get their carbines ready. The carbines were scarcely ever needed, and the men never carried them; they were stacked in ammunition boxes. Gunners in heavy artillery weren’t expected to fight with rifles. The reconnaissance men and the headquarters platoons carried submachine guns, and they were all at the OPs.
There was nothing to be seen toward his front or his flanks; everything was lost in this semi-darkness.
Even before this, Toplev had been pacing about, alarmed and uncertain; but now, after the battalion commander’s order to distribute the carbines . . .
All eight guns stood in a row, as they were rarely positioned; batteries were always located separately. Toplev paced about nervously, looking very small beside this row of massive guns.
Not every gun had even half its crew; the others had gone to the nearby houses and were sleeping where it was warm and dry. A few of them had even managed to find some German alcohol. The drivers were all asleep somewhere.
He roused all four platoon commanders: Distribute the carbines and get ready to defend our position. Some jumped to follow his orders, others moved reluctantly. If only the deputy political officer, who was usually hanging around, were here: they were afraid of him, at least. But the brigade commissar had kept him with him, on duty until morning.
The Germans wouldn’t attack without some preliminary bombardment, though; they’d drop a few shells or mortar rounds on them and give them some warning.
But it was quiet. There was no sound of tanks moving about, either.
He kept listening, but there was nothing to be heard.
He should take another look around the position.
He went to the headquarters truck in Klein. That’s where they kept all the files. So if anything did happen ... then what? He ordered the driver to stay with the truck and the radio operator to keep trying to contact Ural. Then he went back to Adlig, to the guns.
“Comrade Captain!” It was the telephone operator calling him in a muffled voice from the entryway to a house where he had made a place for himself. “It’s the battalion commander for you.”
He took the receiver.
Boyev said in a steely voice: “Toplev! We’re being surrounded here! Get ready to defend yourselves!” He hadn’t put the cover back over the telephone receiver, and Toplev could hear shot after shot being fired! Then everything went silent. The connection had been lost.
Then Toplev felt something strange happening to him: His kneecaps began to tremble, entirely on their own and separately from his knees. They were jumping up and down.
Now he had no need to call out all the gun crews. The platoon commanders were rushing along the row of guns: Prepare for action! They’ve already attacked the battalion commander!
Now the whole place was jumping.
What about the headquarters truck? If anything should happen? He sent a soldier with a jerry can to pour gasoline over it.
If we don’t pull out, we’ll burn the truck.
~ * ~
21
Loyalty to his father was the key to Oleg Gusev’s character. Who can be more sacred and exalted for a young boy than his father? And how badly his father had been wronged in the 1930s (Oleg understood, though he was just ten) when, for no good reason, he was pushed out of his post as a brigade commander and demoted to colonel. They were living in a two-room communal apartment, and an informer was living in the third room. (In fact there was a reason for what had happened: someone his father had served with had been arrested, though the boy only learned about that later.) And in his teens all he wanted was to follow in his father’s footsteps. At age sixteen (these were the months of the Stalingrad battle) he got his wish: after finally getting his father’s permission, he donned a private soldier’s overcoat.
Loyalty to his father meant not disgracing himself here, beside his two guns, and having his father blamed for his son’s actions. It would be better to be killed. Oleg was even happy that everything had turned out this way, that they had been positioned to guard the bridge by firing over open sights, something unheard of for a 152-millimeter gun. So—let those German tanks come rumbling out of the darkness, and the sooner the better!
This had been an unforgettable night for him, and he was anticipating even greater things.
Although each gun was supposed to be allotted sixty shells, there was only half that number, even after collecting shells from the other guns in the platoon. And the gun crews had only seven men, not eight. (Yes, Lepetushin, the missing man . . .) The lieutenant didn’t take a soldier from some other crew; that would not have been right. He’d make do with what he had. Better to help them himself, with his own hands.
The self-propelled gun and the fierce colonel had left the area, and the guns from Six Battery stood by the bridge, protecting it. Before them was only an empty, dark expanse; none of our people seemed to be there—and then suddenly people began running toward them.
There were a few surveyors from the reconnaissance battalion, one limping, another with a bandaged shoulder. They had been sent to survey in the guns while the moon was bright, but then they were caught in the darkness. They had been waiting for the clouds to pass. Interrupting one another, the surveyors told their story: It was a strange sort of attack, the Germans simply creeping up silently; some of them carrying shovels, some even knives; they fired only a few shots. There were still a few surveyors left back there.
The sleds from the sound-ranging battery with their reconnaissance equipment came through; they had managed to pull back in time. They had set free the draft horses captured from the Germans; their truck had gotten st
uck there and some of them were trying to pull it out.
So how many more people from the sound-ranging battery were still back there?
He asked Kandalintsev: “Pavel Petrovich, how can we fire when our own guys are still pouring in?”
“We’ll have to hold off for a bit.”
A burst of shooting would come from across the river, but well back; and then things would grow quiet again. Kandalintsev ordered his two free gun crews to prepare to engage the enemy with their rifles. Then he sent them to provide a defensive screen to the left and right of the bridge.
A few more of our troops were climbing up the road from the bridge. Then came a group carrying a wounded man on a groundsheet. They were infantry reconnaissance troops. They were exhausted and could barely carry him. Who was he?
Let’s make a place for him over here.
Oleg bent over the wounded man. A major. Hair the color of flax. He wasn’t moving.
“One of your people?”
“The CO of our regiment. He’s new. They only sent him in yesterday.”
“Badly hurt?”
“In the head and stomach.”
“Where’s your regiment, then?”
“Who the hell knows?”
Some of our gun crews took over from the stretcher bearers and carried the wounded man to the landowner’s house. “Have him taken to Liebstadt on our sled, then come right back,” Kandalintsev told them.
The town of Liebstadt stood at the intersection of six roads, and the artillery battalion had passed through it yesterday evening with no problems. But if we let the Germans get to it, they’ll have control over all the roads.
“So it seems our deserter wasn’t lying, Pavel Petrovich.”
“I’ve told the kitchen to feed him,” Kandalintsev muttered.
“What’s happened to our battery commander? He’s not answering our radio calls.”
And what about the rest of the battery?
The distant glow in the sky provided a bit of light. They stared into the darkness. Over there, another bunch of our guys. This way!
Then more over there. And over there.
Yes, there’s no way we could fire here.
Then, suddenly, to the right and to the left—and what were Four and Five Batteries doing!—some loud machine gun fire, and a lot of it.
Then, a huge shell burst! Another! An explosion behind us! And another!
~ * ~
22
The utter silence of the murky pre-dawn gloom erupted with bursts of machine gun fire raining down on Five Battery. The fire was coming from the forest on the right. There were no mortars, just three or four heavy machine guns that for some reason fired only tracer bullets. Long red streams gave notice of the death they dealt out—a rare occasion when one could see death coming an instant before it struck. A moment later, shouts of “Hurrah! Hurrah!” resounded from the forest—two hundred voices, perhaps. A wave of men, scarcely visible among the flickering streams of red, rushed toward the guns.
Only a few rifle shots replied from the area around the guns; they had no chance for more. The streams of red shifted leftward, to Four Battery, while Five Battery was showered with grenades. Fires flared up here and there.
The attack caught Toplev at the far side of Four Battery. Now it was happening! They were prepared—he had prepared them himself—yet they could scarcely believe it was happening. The tension that had gripped them through the night had just begun to ease; a few had even begun to doze.
Look at them! Three times as many as us! Should he shout? Give some commands? But they’d never hear him, and there was nothing more he could do to rally them.
It all happened in a flash, like the thrust of a dagger in the darkness.
Now Toplev could do absolutely nothing! Should he run? Run to Klein and set fire to the headquarters truck?
Off he ran. He could hear the explosions behind him, close now, and between explosions there were shouts and cries. Ours? Theirs? He could still distinguish a few rifle shots—those were ours.
The plotter and the radio operator were ready for this moment. They splashed the cab of the truck with gasoline and then lit some tinder and tossed it in. The fire caught on all sides. Now go, go! Run!
That’s the last we’ll see of our firing chart! And they won’t get their hands on our files.
They had stopped throwing grenades at the battery. A few isolated shots could be heard here and there.
The Germans were still running toward the fire, bullets whistling around them. It was clear what they intended to do.
Toplev ran on with the two men from his headquarters. He ran, knowing only that he was going in the right direction, but had lost any idea of what to do other than flee. Someone was still running beside him, from the battery probably, he couldn’t tell.
Scenes from his childhood and his school flashed through his mind, one after the other, then all of them at once.
A soldier ahead paused for a moment to let the captain catch up. Breathless, he could say nothing, but words weren’t needed to understand. They had saved Six Battery when they’d withdrawn a kilometer down the road and across the bridge. Red flames from their burning truck glowed high above the trees. The battalion commander used to say that we’d get to Germany with this truck.
From the place where the other guns remained came only a few bursts of machine gun fire.
~ * ~
23
Later, Kandalintsev and Gusev had to help each other piece together as best they could just what had taken place. And then what happened? Whose gun had hit the first tank? What about that third tank? And what set that armored personnel carrier on fire?
They hadn’t been able to open fire until six o’clock: there was machine gun fire coming from the opposite bank to their front, but our own boys were still coming in from the German encirclement. None of our units were supposed to be there, yet a good many men had gathered in that snowy darkness.
Then, on the road from Dietrichsdorf on the left, they spotted the sidelights of tanks and APCs. The Germans are on the way! Sometimes the full headlights would flash, the drivers unable to resist turning them on. It was a whole mechanized column on the move. And the rumble of its engines grew louder and louder through the last bursts of machine gun fire.
There it was—the ugly snout of the first tank! Time to fire.
“Gun to the ready!” Kandalintsev’s voice barely carried across the road.
“Open sights!” Oleg roared at his crew. “Fire!”
Petya Nikolaev was aiming. Our gun belched. Koltsov’s gun belched.
Oleg rushed to help his crew with their next shell. Now we had to move fast!
The Germans weren’t expecting any fire from this spot. They began moving to the roadsides.
We weren’t going to let them pass. Fountains of sparks showered from the tank’s armor! The HE-fragmentation shell had done its job!
The tank stopped. Something behind it caught fire—probably the personnel carrier.
The column was still moving along the road. But we kept up our fire, almost two rounds a minute! We put a shell right into the ugly mug of a King Tiger tank. And what a stroke of luck! We knocked out one tank on the approach to the bridge, another right on it, and they blocked the whole bridge. It was amazing that the bridge itself survived.
The German tanks fired at us, but because our side of the river was so much higher than theirs, their shells ricocheted and passed over us. Our crews would dive down into the ditches along the road and then jump back to reload. Nikolaev and Koltsov never left their guns, and they came through it all unharmed.
At a time like that you don’t think of yourself or anyone or anything else, only how to keep pouring fire at them.
The Germans were mixing solid and regular shot, as they’d been doing since autumn. They must be very short of ammunition. Their solid shot didn’t cause any wounds from shrapnel, though a direct hit was fatal, of course. Still, young Yursh was wounded, along with
two of Koltsov’s crew. A shot from one of the tanks cut the equalizing column on Nikolaev’s gun.
So that was how they all reconstructed it later; but just who had done what and to whom, that no one could determine.
~ * ~
A number of things happened later. Our infantry platoon finally showed up from out of nowhere and took up positions along the river. The bridge was under fire. The Germans tried to squeeze past the knocked-out tanks one by one, but they were mowed down as they came. They tried crossing the ice and clambering up the steep slope while wallowing in the snow, but they couldn’t manage it. Then we ran out of shells and had nothing more to fire at the column across the river.
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 17