Last Citadel wwi-3

by David L. Robbins

  When will he know me, Dimitri wondered? Never. The roads separated too soon, my son’s and mine, there was not enough time, the war and the Communists came too swiftly. This boy learned the sword and now the tank. But Valya does not know his father, as I did not know mine until now. Perhaps that’s just how it works. We do not know, that’s why wars are fought, great wars like the one in the river valley at the end of this road, infinitesimal wars like the one in the space between the locked eyes of father and son. And perhaps we will not know God the Father until too late also. Dimitri sighed for all this stumbling around blind. What a design, to make things this way, pieces that will never fit, what sort of machine is life to be like that? That’s why it runs so rough. Before his sigh was done it became a good laugh. This was Dimitri’s gift, the true Cossack’s gift, to switch sides nimbly, to pick the winner and go with him.

  He eased beside Valentin, and laid his arm across the boy’s shoulders. He gave Valya’s frame a squeeze, pleased to feel muscle and grit there.

  ‘Have you heard from your sister?’

  ‘No. She hasn’t written in weeks.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s alright.’ Dimitri turned his son away from the free northern fields, back to the waiting tank and the clustered, diesel-choked road to Prokhorovka. ‘She doesn’t have me to deal with. Come on, Lieutenant. Put your arm around me. I’m just your father.’

  Valentin’s hand did not go around Dimitri. The boy said, ‘Papa, let me go.’

  Dimitri took down his arm, as ordered.

  July 11

  0900 hours

  Voroshilov

  After the Psel river bridge at Voroshilov, the traffic thinned. They were all now within the lines of 5th Guards Tank Army. Vehicles and infantry scattered south into the fields to reinforce their assigned units. The sounds of combat batted in the air, rising on smoke. The Germans were trying hard to move up north of the Psel, to keep abreast of their advance on Prokhorovka south of the river. More soldiers Valentin had picked up jumped off the General after crossing the bridge. Open-bedded trucks waited for them. The soldiers packed themselves in and were jolted across the valley grasses to be set like pikes in the Germans’ way. Sasha, Pasha, and Valentin dropped back into their seats. Valentin stood in his turret. Dimitri kept the General stroking ahead southeast on the road, pushing them through a ground-hugging haze of artillery smoke. The guns were firing from a nearby hill into the alley of land west of Prokhorovka, where the battle with the SS waged.

  Last night’s rains and high winds had given way to a morning of rising heat and humidity. Cloud cover clamped them down to the earth like a hen’s feathered rear. Dimitri’s goggles fogged on him but he couldn’t pull them down because of the dust he drove into. He refused to lower his hatch, that would make him too dependent on Valya’s directions or the boy lieutenant’s damned boots. Dimitri had accepted his place in the confusing schemes of life and war, but this did not mean he relished it.

  At mid-morning Valya ordered him off the road. Ahead, a handful of T-34s did the same and led the way south. Dimitri got in behind them and finally let the General bolt. He shook Valya out of his turret hatch and made the boy settle his rear into the safety of his seat. Five tanks, all scarred T-34s, raced over the fields. Dimitri pulled even with them and they ran side by side, no one eating dust this way. They passed an immense concentration of weapons and men, all of them on the move or digging in. Trucks towed artillery pieces into long lines and tiers by caliber, tankers hollowed out trenches for hull-down firing positions, pyramids of artillery rounds waited to be stashed, soldiers shoveled out foxholes to stand their ground. Dimitri kept the throttle open. The five T-34s shot past rifle brigades, tank brigades, a regiment of airborne looking sharp and determined marching forward, every one of them fresh and unblooded. Every man they passed turned their way, to watch the five veteran tanks fly forward, trailing dust plumes like wild stallions.

  One by one the tanks peeled away, finding their units, until only the General Platov was left. Valentin’s boot low on his neck told Dimitri to slow down. He shifted back reluctantly, clinging to the thrill of rushing over flat ground and rippling stalks of grass, carefree and racing alongside steely comrades. It felt good to fly.

  The General passed a crossroads town. This was Prokhorovka. The place wasn’t much more than a collection of shanties and outbuildings, a handful of barns, a granary, a meeting hall. A railroad track ran atop an embankment into the center. The town, like every civilian area in the battle zone, was overtaken by guns. On all sides Prokhorovka was bracketed by armor and artillery facing west, a hundred tanks, twice that number in field pieces, a hundred times that in men and rifles. Dimitri couldn’t help but think if these machines of war had been tractors, if the host of soldiers digging the black steppe had been plowing, if this need to fight were instead a will to harvest, Prokhorovka would be a kingdom of plenty. Breaking things was always fun, but when the battles were over Dimitri rode away from the pieces and forgot them. What made him wistful now looking at Prokhorovka sliding behind him was the waste, for this town, for himself, for all these young men, because what will count in the end for them will be not what they destroyed but what they planted. Crops. Children. The things a man doesn’t ride away from.

  When he was called to a halt, he shut the General down. The other three climbed out of the tank. Sasha leaned his head into the driver’s hatch and said, ‘Come on, Dima, let’s get some air,’ but Dimitri kept his seat. Freshly painted tanks moved on all sides, skidding to take up positions. The air Sasha wanted to breathe was clogged with metallic noise. This place was so far from where Dimitri wanted to be. He wanted nothing of these new comrades or this task.

  Five kilometers ahead, an awful battle roiled, kicking up roars and billows of smoke, the smell on the breeze was explosives. The battle raged around a spot of high ground beside the Prokhorovka road, and for a small state farm below it. From the looks of things at this short distance, ample Soviet forces were keeping the Germans at bay for the morning. But this was the SS out there. Dimitri knew his time would be tomorrow, with the 32nd Tank Brigade around him and the four, five, six hundred other Russian tanks in more waiting units, when the SS broke through and came for Prokhorovka.

  He stood out of his hatch into the buzzing day. He scanned the land corridor before him, five kilometers wide between the Psel and the rail mound, searching for the place where he would fight. If he had a horse he would ride the terrain, know the land before you trust it to be your ally. But there was only a slowly undulating steppe expanse here, wide and shallow balka valleys without features of advantage for either army, the earth would not choose sides here. Straight to the west rose the curtain of smoke and clamor, the opening fight for the hill and state farm. Opposite, in the east, looking on from the outskirts of Prokhorovka, Dimitri stood in his driver’s place.

  In the middle, on the floor of a broad and shallow valley, set like a golden stamp in a great brown sheet, spread a field of sunflowers. These blooms turned their heads with the shifting light. Today they gaped right, then left, at warring nations. Tomorrow, Dimitri knew, there would be none of them standing at all.

  CHAPTER 24

  July 11

  1840 hours

  Oktyabrski state farm

  ‘Walk with me, Balthasar.’

  The gunner rose from the ground on rubbery feet. No one but Luis in the Tiger crew had straightened his legs in over six hours. Luis stood aside until the gunner took his hands from the tank and was steady. The other three crewmen had sat up when Luis approached. They laid themselves out flat when Balthasar and Luis walked away.

  Luis and the gunner strode off from the rest of the tanks in the company. Again Luis had brought them through another day of hard fighting without losing a tank. In fact, when the trailing elements of Leibstandarte caught up to the rest of the division in the early morning, they brought with them six more Mark IVs, two had been assigned to Luis. Now, at the end of his fourth day commanding the com
pany in combat, they numbered sixteen tanks.

  Luis and Balthasar walked through the remains of Oktyabrski. A gray snow of ash filtered down from the smoldering timbers of barns and silos. A dead Russian lay face up with his hands and legs spread wide, blown there to the ground, a teenager, and he looked to Luis like a boy making a snow angel in the spilling ashes. This was a cold image, Luis did not like it. It reminded him of Leningrad, where he took his wound.

  He opened his mouth to speak to Balthasar, then thought better of it. He would have to shout to be heard in this dirt lane, crowded with grenadiers flooding in to take positions in the rubble. Tanks and armored troop carriers careered around the debris piles, and medical wagons collected SS dead and wounded. All the Red corpses were hoisted onto trucks and dumped out on the steppe to be burned. The snow-angel boy was so stiff he was lifted and swung up to the truck like a hammock.

  Luis walked Balthasar toward the western edge of the state farm. He smelled himself and the gunner. Their odors were identical, acidy from the backwash of day-long cannon fire, a sort of spoiled citrus tang of sweat and chemical stained their skin and uniforms. The smell of mechanized combat was on them. Luis wanted a postcard of this, to send to his father, and one to Hitler.

  The two stood where it was quieter now. They gazed over the terrain they’d seized today. Leibstandarte had clawed another five kilometers closer to Prokhorovka, lunging at first light northeast out of Komsomolets state farm. The division attacked across a wide front, spanning all across the land corridor, from the edge of the Psel to south of the rail mound. The Russians fought hardest on this ground, defending the state farm in the middle. When his panzer company rolled up to attack, they came up short in front of the biggest antitank ditch he could imagine, the proportions were remarkable, the thing was as wide and deep as a river. This underscored Luis’s loathing for the Soviet peoples, revived his thinking of them as drones, to dig such a thing was primitive. His armored attack was thwarted for the morning. This angered him more for the hissing in his head, the sound of the Führers draining patience for this misadventure in Russia. The assault was redirected until bridging equipment could be brought up to cross the giant ditch. An hour later, after regrouping, Luis’s company came at Oktyabrski from the northwest, where the Reds were expecting them. A barrage of machine-gun fire sprang out of the farm buildings, catching the accompanying grenadiers by surprise; even behind tanks they couldn’t advance. Luis would not move ahead into the sting of the dug-in Red infantry without ground troops – this was how Thoma had lost so many tanks – and the attack stalled again. Luis grew grimmer in his commander’s seat, counting minutes, knowing that Hitler in Berlin counted minutes and the swelling number of Americans on the beaches in Sicily. Stukas were called in to cover the pioneers bridging the tank moat in front of the state farm. Finally, at 1400 hours, the ditch was spanned. Every tank of Leibstandarte attacked at once. Ground was gained a meter at a time. Armored transports hauled a full regiment of panzergrenadiers to the leading edge of the battle, Luis’s tanks provided cover and firepower, and together they plowed into the defenders of Oktyabrski. The Reds sent out a paltry rank of T-34s to deflect the assault; a dozen were shot out of their number in the first ten minutes. Balthasar got three of them. The Tiger gunner showed an uncanny hand now with the speed and agility of the Soviet tanks, they didn’t dodge him so well anymore. The state farm fell twenty minutes ago, and with it the last high ground before Prokhorovka, Hill 252.2. Leibstandarte claimed twenty-one Soviet tanks destroyed.

  The division was called to a final halt for the day. Again the flanking forces had lagged, leaving Leibstandarte exposed in the middle. The attack on Prokhorovka was forced to wait until morning, to allow Das Reich and Totenkopf to pull alongside. Luis looked backward, at the seven more kilometers they’d captured, up from Komsomolets state farm. The land was darkened and shredded by fighting. Rear elements of the division crept over the plain in the late-afternoon light, bringing food and ammunition and bandages to the warriors walking under the drifting ash of the state farm. It seemed a mighty thing to have done, to have taken this ground back from the Russians. Luis wanted Hitler to stand here with him and see it, he would present Hitler with this present of a swath of Russia, and promise him more.

  But the Americans. How can Hitler ignore them? They’re an unknown quantity, an industrial behemoth let loose now in the war in Europe. What kind of fighters will the Americans be? Luis knew the Yanks were in the Pacific tangling with the Japanese, but nothing else. He stared over the churned patch of Russia he’d conquered that day. Japan, America, Italy – those nations were far away and without weight, they were not here in the smoke of killed tanks out on that plain and the burned state farm behind him. He could not conceive that what Grimm had told him would come true, that Hitler would lose his nerve and take this away from him. He did not believe that tomorrow the SS would fail to ram forward another seven kilometers and take Prokhorovka. What could the Reds throw at him tomorrow that they had not thrown today?

  Luis raised a palm over the captured plain. His hand floated in the air above the crushed grasses and turned soil, some black smoke plumes. This hand, frail and pale as chalk, did this to the land.

  ‘It seems like a lot, doesn’t it?’ he asked Balthasar.

  ‘Yes, sir. It does.’

  Luis lowered his hand.

  ‘It’s not enough.’

  Balthasar made no answer. Luis was not curious for what the gunner’s silence said about the man’s reasons for fighting. Probably he’s like the rest, Luis thought. He’s here because he believes in Germany more than he believes in himself. Luis couldn’t be more different. He didn’t want to stop the advance because Germany might get a bloody nose. He’d cover Germany in blood if he could. Russia, too. And Italy and America. Luis alone would know when there had been enough.

  ‘We can take Prokhorovka,’ he said. ‘Did you know I used to be a bullfighter?’

  Balthasar showed nothing of the disdain the Nordic peoples held for the barbarism of bullfighting. The gunner was still a very young man, he’d likely never been far from his own town in Germany before the war swept him up, never known a Spaniard. Balthasar probably thought all Spaniards were bullfighters.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I can read what a bull is thinking. I can tell which way he’s going to jump. My father taught me this. Having my life depend on it taught me, too. And I can tell you, Balthasar, about the Russians. I can read them. We can beat them. They know it. All their attacks are from the flanks. They’re afraid to come right at us. They nibble at our sides. Every one of their direct assaults has been weak. They’re defensive. We’ve bled them, Balthasar, we’ve bled them almost to where they’ll fall. We’ve got to go forward. We’ve got to push the blade in deeper.’

  Luis and Balthasar looked west, at the depth the blade was already into the Russian heart. It was not enough.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Luis promised.

  This sun over the conquered western corridor went down in the time of Luis’s mind and came back up tomorrow, glowing red in the east, chasing stars, beginning the end. And there it was again, the partisan’s heart beating in his hand. And there were bulls’ hearts throbbing there, too. But the sensation was different, not only the pump of one man’s stolen heart and the ended lives of animals but the pulse of all Russia, right in Luis’s fist. He held his hand up, cupped as though holding a real heart, and looked into his curled palm.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said again, ‘we’ll take Prokhorovka.’

  CHAPTER 25

  July 12

  0410 hours

  with the 32nd Tank Brigade

  2 kilometers west of Prokhorovka

  The commissars surfaced at first light. They came with bottles of vodka.

  The cartons in their grips rang with knocking glass. The boxes sounded to Dimitri like the bells of fishermen on the Black Sea, when the boats came home from a day’s haul and called all to the docks who wanted to buy fresh catc
h. The commissars spread out among the tank brigade, ringing the men awake in the charcoal morning. They wore the same mustard uniforms as infantrymen, but with many medals and ribbons pinned to their tunics, and with only a sidearm slapped on their belts. The politrooks set the cardboard cartons down at their feet. They began their own calls, fishermen themselves, baiting with the vodka.

  Dimitri had been awake for hours, watching lightning ripple over the steppe. He’d listened to the night workers out on the battlefield, to the thumps of explosives as engineers blew up disabled T-34s too damaged to be towed away and repaired. Sappers crawled to the front to lay mines where German tanks were certain to come today. From the other direction came the logistics corps bringing up food and ammo, lubricants and diesel. Dimitri eyed the laden commissars, he was the first to traipse to the nearest one. He leaned down to take a bottle by the neck out of the box. The bottle was corked by a bit of rag.

  ‘Courage!’ the commissar bellowed at Dimitri, as though the two were on opposite sides of a field. Dimitri held the bottle up by the neck like a chicken for dinner.

  ‘Courage,’ he echoed and walked off.

  Sasha appeared from somewhere in the night – Dimitri stayed close only to his tank, casting his senses out to the battlefield, to the dark sunflower field on the valley floor – and slid down beside him. The boy was freckled and orange-cast and wrapped white, grinning bravely through his pain. Dimitri handed the warm glass over. The two sat listening to the keening commissar.

  A crowd of the tankers gathered around the man, perhaps a hundred. They came for the bottles and stayed in the commissar’s net. None of these boys had been in the fight for Kursk yet, Dimitri could see it on them. They were frightened and needy of the commissar’s calls for bravado, they did not know yet what they would do today. Great things, the commissar told them, great things, and Dimitri knew this to be true, because living through today or dying in these flowers and grainfields would be remembered as great.