Nine Days in a Culvert
The Varn, west bank — Day Twenty-One
They had held the dead ground at the foot of the embankment for nine days, and in that time the seventeen men who had reached it on the twelfth day had become eleven, not from any single engagement but from a slow, grinding attrition that Lieutenant Pyotr Ilyanko had come to think of as the war’s true rhythm — not the great crashing moments but the long grey erosion between them, a man lost to a stray round while filling a canteen, another to a fever nobody could name and nothing they had could treat, another simply gone one morning, walked off in the night toward the river, and never spoken of again by the others, as though speaking of it might make the option contagious.
The culvert itself, a drainage pipe wide enough for a crouching man, had become the eleven survivors’ entire world: home, hospital, and grave, all in a space twelve meters long and dry only when it did not rain, which in nine days had been never.
Talanov had stayed with them the whole time.
That was the detail Ilyanko turned over most, lying in the wet dark with his back against the corrugated iron, listening to Rudenko’s ragged breathing three feet away — the sergeant had taken a fragment in the shoulder on the fourth day and had refused, twice, to be sent back across the river for it, on grounds that made no tactical sense and that everyone in the culvert understood anyway.
The political officer could have gone back.
Officers of his rank were not expected to sit in a drainage pipe for nine days under intermittent tank fire, coordinating nothing, commanding nothing that mattered, because there was nothing left to command beyond the single question of whether eleven exhausted men would still be alive at dawn.
He had stayed.
He wrote in his notebook every day, the same dry economical scratching, and Ilyanko no longer knew what it recorded, and had stopped, several days ago, caring. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
“Lieutenant.” Talanov’s voice, in the dark, was quieter than it had been in the orchard.
Something in it had worn away over nine days, the way a stone wears in a stream.
“May I ask you something, off the record.”
“There’s no record here, Comrade Captain. There’s a pipe and eleven men.”
A pause.
“Fairly said.” Another pause, longer.
“Do you regret it? The second platoon. Rudenko’s men. Kuzmin.”
Ilyanko had not expected the question, not from this man, not in this voice, and for a long moment he said nothing at all, listening to the rain finding its way through a gap somewhere above them, a steady, patient dripping onto the iron.
“Every day,” he said finally.
“I regret it every single day, and I would give the same order again tomorrow, and I don’t know what that makes me, and I’ve stopped trying to work it out, because working it out doesn’t keep anyone alive.” Read the latest chapters at g.com.
“No,” said Talanov.
“It doesn’t.” A rustle of paper, the small dry sound of a notebook page being turned in the dark, though there could have been nothing to see.
“I have written eleven reports since the crossing, Lieutenant. Each one accurate. Each one necessary, according to the terms I was given when I joined this company. I have started to wonder, in the last few days, whether accuracy and necessity are the same thing I once believed them to be.”
“Is that a confession, Captain?”
“It is an observation, made off a record that does not exist, in a pipe that will not survive the war to be asked about it.” A dry, humorless breath, not quite a laugh.
“I would ask you not to repeat it. Not because I fear what happens to me. Because I no longer know what use the fear would serve.”
The relief came on the tenth morning, not because Corps had finally found the will to send it, but because the Compact line on the embankment, after nine days of grinding artillery duels and drone strikes from both directions, had thinned enough at its northern shoulder that a full battalion could cross under cover of a smoke barrage and take the position from the flank rather than the front — an assault that owed nothing to the eleven men in the culvert and everything to a different unit, on a different day, whose story Ilyanko would never hear told.
He led his eleven up out of the drainage pipe into a grey morning thick with drifting smoke, past the wreck of a Corvane Hound still smoldering on the embankment’s crest, past a scatter of Compact dead the follow-on troops had not yet had time to collect, and did not look too closely at any of it, because nine days in a pipe had taught him that looking closely at things you could not undo only slowed you down on the way to the things you still might.
Rudenko walked beside him with his arm in a filthy sling, and said nothing, and Ilyanko understood that this, too, was a kind of report, filed in a language that needed no notebook and answered to no political officer at all.