“How will I fight then, Comrade Captain?” My helmet clamped awkwardly under one arm, I looked at my artificial leather boots, two sizes too big, and had the distinct thought: All dressed up, and no way to fight.
“For you new recruits, the main weapon for now will be the shovel.”
A shovel.
Not really a dramatic moment, is it? There isn’t a sweeping Prokofiev theme for a new recruit heroically digging trenches. But that was my entrance to the 25th Chapayev Rifle Division: a shovel rather than a rifle, and a disorganized scramble into a mass retreat rather than a headlong sprint toward glory.
One of the many ways in which real life is not like a film.
I WOULDN’T SHOOT a single bullet for nearly a month—and most of that month is only fragments in my memory. Clarity came to me with a trigger; before that it was chaos and clods of earth, confusion and clotted blood. Perhaps it’s different for the generals, the men commanding large military units who look at nice clean maps and see the bigger picture, the whole machine. For us cogs, only the earth directly under our boots is clear. I’d been flung headfirst into a welter of attacks and counterattacks, surges and retreats—I marched, I obeyed every order shouted at me, I learned to stop flinching at the sound of artillery overhead. What I didn’t learn was how to fight, even as battles raged the entire length of our borders. There was no time to catch my breath or even learn the name of the man marching beside me, much less fight.
Fragments.
I remember the regiments traveling in the day and in the night once we began the scrambling retreat across the Black Sea steppes—trucks, horse-drawn carts, on foot. I remember tumbling down to sleep at night fully dressed, too exhausted to watch my back, though it didn’t matter because in such chaos the men in my company had no energy to register that Comrade Private Pavlichenko was female, much less do anything about it. I remember the steppe as it looked on the warm summer nights, spread out on both sides of the road like an opened book—and how it looked in the day, booming with cannon volleys, pricked everywhere by fires, the smell of burnt gunpowder lingering bitterly in the nose. I remember civilians retreating with us, whole caravans of factory workers and equipment; farmers prodding herds of livestock from the collective farms; women and children trudging along with laden baskets and knapsacks, shuddering whenever a Focke-Wulf droned overhead.
I remember digging trenches with small sapper spades by the light of the moon, as long-range enemy artillery crackled. I remember realizing I’d been at the front a full month and hadn’t yet written my father. Belovs don’t retreat—yet we were retreating, burying our dead in bomb craters as we went. We were retreating in swaths all along our own diminishing border, falling back before the swastika.
I remember a field of wheat going up in billowing sheets of flame under a flight of German bombers; remember the twisted shells of burnt towns and fire-bombed machinery. The Junkers flying overhead would line up a cratered road crammed with walking families and strafe directly down the center—as my company was ordered off into the trees for cover. One blood-laced twilight, a rawboned woman whose cart had just been bombed to splinters spat at me when I came back to the road with the rest of my company. “To hell with you,” she hissed. “Why aren’t you fighting these bastards?” I remember lowering my eyes, shouldering my pack, and falling into formation, unable to say a word.
I remember the fear. Push it away, push it down, I told myself, but there was no pushing it away, it was everywhere: we lived fear, breathed fear, ate and drank and sweated fear. Every drone of German planes overhead could mean my end, and I had nothing to defend myself with but a shovel.
That changed on a July morning along the shattered, cratered hellscape that marked the Novopavlovsk to the Novy Artsyz line. The artillery fire had been sounding in waves; for the moment my regiment was dug in. Dug in, a pretty term for hiding, sheltering in makeshift trenches and stands of splintered trees, hunkering down on our heels every time another wave of deafening fire rolled through like the footsteps of a giant. The man sheltering next to me in our dugout slit of a trench was little more than a boy, freckled and earnest, fiddling so constantly with his rifle that I wanted to box his ears. Another surge of shellfire crashed; I laced my hands behind my neck and lowered my head, hissing at the boy to keep his head down. “Ride it out,” I shouted over the din, nearly choking on my own reflexive terror, “the attacks come in waves, it’s like childbirth—” but he just gave me a puzzled look. Of course he did; what a useless analogy to give a man, and I hunted for another one, but suddenly his face was a sheet of blood. He touched his forehead, looking even more puzzled, and I saw the side of his head had been cratered like an egg. He toppled slowly into me; I tried to support him, but he was too heavy, sliding down into the mud.