A silence fell then, drifting across the bloodied ground like the smoke. The Romanians had faded away, fallen back to regroup. Why do these strange pauses fall in the middle of furious fights? Battles seem to be living things, creatures that need to breathe as much as the soldiers who are fighting them. When these silences fall, the impulse is to huddle where you are with your head down, but only novices freeze. The experienced cram a hasty lump of bread down, unfasten trousers for a quick piss, check their ammunition with hands that their friends pretend not to see shaking. I wiped my rifle down and reloaded, flexing my trembling fingers. The man beside me had done the same and then pulled a battered copy of War and Peace from his knapsack and calmly propped it against his rifle sights.
“War and Peace?” I heard myself asking, bizarrely conversational. “You couldn’t bring anything more ironic to war?”
He turned a page. “Wanted to see how the Battle of Austerlitz turned out.”
“Napoleon won. Hope that doesn’t spoil the book for you.” I couldn’t remember the reader’s name—a blade-thin Siberian, black hair razored brutally close to his skull. “I never finished War and Peace. Never got past the New Year’s Eve ball.”
The Siberian raised his eyebrows. My taste in literature was clearly being judged.
“I prefer history to novels.” I shrugged. “Give me a good account of the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth/Ottoman Empire conflict any day.”
The Siberian returned to his book, but I saw the corner of his mouth quirk. “Philistine,” he said. I opened my mouth to reply—a vigorous philosophical discussion on the merits of imaginative fiction versus historical documentation seemed like just the way to pass the time in a muddy trench in between artillery attacks—when a strange skein of sound brought my head and the Siberian’s whipping round in unison.
The Romanian infantry was advancing again, not spreading out across the steppe, but packing forward in dense columns, feet swinging high to the drums as if they were on parade . . . and they were singing. Officers strode between the gaps in the columns, unsheathed sabers on their shoulders; on the left flank I saw a priest in a gold-embroidered gown, three church banners billowing behind. He was shouting, urging the men on under the heartbeat of the drums and the massed roar of the hymn.
Seven hundred meters away.
I marked my field of fire, calculations sliding liquid-quick through my brain: a fence at the edge of a cornfield, six hundred meters; some wolfberry thickets closer, five hundred meters . . . the dull roar of the hymn grew louder, and our mortar battery launched a strike. I saw earth fountain up against the sky among the gray columns, but the living closed ranks and marched over the dead. Bayonets lowered and the blades gleamed like shivers of trapped lightning. I made a quick count—perhaps two thousand bayonets, coming for my stripped-down regiment of four hundred. The priest kept on shrieking, and as my pulse pounded, I wondered what he was saying.
“Vive l’empereur?” guessed the dark Siberian at my side, as though reading my mind.
“ ‘Long live the emperor’？ Why—”
He brought up his rifle, and as I did the same, I realized what he meant. Napoleon’s troops had roared Vive l’empereur! as they marched in massed columns exactly like this, under eagles not so different from Hitler’s eagles, closing ranks around the dead and rolling inexorably toward Tolstoy’s heroes at Austerlitz . . . and they had marched in the same columns, screamed the same cries against Russians when Napoleon decided to invade the motherland.
Well, we all knew how that had turned out.
The rage was stirring in my stomach again, doing its work to drown the fear. Two thousand bayonets were coming right toward me, and my terror died. I waited just until they passed that fence by the cornfield and opened fire.
Click, click, click. Midnight struck on the clock with every second that passed. I was aware of the Siberian beside me firing calm and fast, rifle propped on the thick spine of War and Peace. I realized I’d run through all my cartridges; when I called Out! he pushed a bag of his own at me, a yellow-tipped Ball D heavy bullet gripped between his teeth, and I reloaded and kept firing. Got the priest, I heard someone grunt on my other side.