Although I nearly didn’t have any corporals to help me lead it, because Fyodor and Kostia were both no help at all with the new recruits that first day. In fact they considered it hugely amusing to sit back and watch me get my temper up stamping all over the new men, and I threatened to send the pair of them up to Dromin for laughing at their commander. “I wasn’t laughing,” said Kostia, statue-faced, his eyes dancing, and as for Fyodor, he could barely be peeled guffawing out of the mud. I made them dig latrines for three hours.
So I had riflemen under my command again, but there weren’t many proper sorties to get them seasoned. The first half of November was a series of furious skirmishes trying to push back against the Hitlerites, who had fortified Mekenzia in hopes of using it as a base to push toward the rear of the city’s defenders. They were now driving like an arrow for Sevastopol, which meant not sniper work but blind firing, counterattacking under heavy mortar fire . . . weeks of German attacks and our own counterattacks, not only when we were at Mekenzia but all up and down the defensive lines of Sevastopol.
“Twenty-five days,” Kostia said, and I heard the speculation in his voice. Twenty-five furious days the Fritzes had attacked Sevastopol, never wavering, never faltering until they’d pushed us back a few precious kilometers. The attackers around Odessa would never have had such steely will, not under the rain of death we were pouring down.
“They’ll have to regroup now,” I said, scanning no-man’s-land through my binoculars: a neutral strip laced on either side with trenches, communication passages, machine-gun nests, minefields, antitank ditches. “Things will be quiet for a bit. So you know what that means.”
Kostia pointed out the spot I’d already marked, along the high ridge of the Kamyshly gully. It wouldn’t be a crossing point ordinary troops could make without withering fire pouring down, but snipers at night? I nodded. “There.”
“They’ll be sending theirs through, too,” Kostia noted. “Scouts, reconnaissance teams.” But the first man my platoon and I barreled into on evening patrol was one of our own, not a Hitlerite.
The forest here was like a maze once we were past the excavated stretches of trenches and barbed wire. It sprang to life in a living tangle of juniper, hornbeam, garland thorn, wild rose—plants I could identify by sight now, after gathering so many leaves and flowers for Slavka. I’d been leading my platoon along the ridge, where we’d just flushed a dozen German submachine gunners armed with Schmeissers. Though out of our range, they hastily retreated, and we had no orders to follow minor patrols. For the sake of training, I had the men target-shoot at the distant gray dots of German uniforms until they vanished into the trees. Gunsmoke was still wreathing the hills, the last shots resounding around the gullies, when a white-haired man melted out from a thicket.
Fyodor snapped his rifle up, but I shoved the barrel down. The old man’s hands were raised, showing what looked like a Soviet passport; he was shouting, “Friend! Friend!”
“If you’re a friend,” I called without moving a step, “what are you doing on the military lines of the 54th Regiment, and how did you get past the enemy lookouts?”
“It’s not difficult.” He spat into the leaves at his feet. “The Germans are afraid to venture too far into the woods, and I know the hidden tracks. I’ve been a ranger here for thirty years.”
“A ranger?” I echoed, dubious. In his gray civilian jacket and knapsack, his white beard growing dense and scraggly nearly up to his eyes, that thin stooped figure looked more like an elderly wood sprite than a woodsman.
“I was.” The old man met my eyes, and his whole face screwed up in a paroxysm of grief. He swiped at his eyes before the tears could fall, saying gruffly, “I’m known as Vartanov here. And if you listen to me, I can give you the German staff headquarters at Mekenzia.”
THERE’S A HOUSE. Caterpillar armored transports with aerials beside it, machine guns on the roofs of the cabs, tractor-borne cannons, motorbikes with sidecars. That’s the one.”