The Ford
The Varn — Day Twelve
Pyotr Ilyanko had been a lieutenant for nine weeks and a company commander for eleven days, and in that time he had learned that fear was not one thing but two.
The first was the fear of the enemy.
That was clean, and it lived in the body, in the dry mouth and the cold hands and the skin that tightened across the shoulder blades when a gun spoke.
A man could stand it.
A man could even find in it a certain thin, hard clarity.
The second was the fear of the captain sitting three meters behind him on an upturned ammunition crate, writing in a small black notebook, and it lived somewhere much lower down, in the gut, and it did not clarify anything at all.
“Your men,” said Captain Grigor Talanov, “are not eating.”
It was four in the morning on the twelfth day.
They were sheltering in a flooded orchard on the eastern bank of the Varn with a thin ground fog around their boots and the black trunks of apple trees standing in it like the legs of drowned animals.
Eighty-eight men sat in the wet with their backs to the trunks.
Some had fires of a sort, a few twigs and a scrap of ration tin.
Most did not.
A dry cold came off the river and cut through wool and skin.
“They’ve had bread, Comrade Captain,” said Ilyanko.
“I observed a number of them declining it.” Talanov turned a page in the notebook.
He was thirty-two, narrow-shouldered, with pale eyebrows and a mild scholar’s face, and he had a way of speaking to everyone as though he were about to be disappointed by them, but was prepared to be patient.
He had come to the company from the regiment’s political section seven days ago.
He had introduced himself to the men by name, one at a time.
He had shaken every hand.
“Is there a morale difficulty in the second platoon, Lieutenant?”
“No.”
“I will note that there is not.”
He wrote something.
Ilyanko watched the pencil move.
It made a very small sound, dry and neat, against the paper.
He did not know what it recorded and he had learned not to ask, because to ask was already to have said something.
He was twenty-four.
He had studied agronomy for two years in a provincial institute before the call-up.
He had been a rifleman, then a corporal, and then in the space of six weeks a sergeant and a junior lieutenant, not because he had done anything remarkable but because the men above him had died and someone had to be given their rank.
Now he commanded a company that had been a hundred and twenty in the autumn.
He had four sergeants left.
He had a pistol he had not fired, a map he did not trust, and a political officer who sat behind him and wrote.
The guns began at twenty to six.
They began with a single crack far behind the orchard, a flat heavy report like a door slammed in a deep well, and then a second, and then a whole rolling sequence of them, the 152s of the regimental artillery battalion, six tubes firing as fast as they could be loaded.
A moment later the shells came overhead.
It was not a whistle.
It was a long, tearing, ripping sound, like a bolt of heavy cloth torn from one end of the sky to the other, and it passed above the orchard with a pressure that Ilyanko felt in his chest and his teeth.
Apple blossom, dead since autumn, sifted down out of the black branches.
The men flinched and pressed themselves into the mud.
Across the river, beyond the beet field, the first shells struck the embankment.
He raised his binoculars.
In the grey pre-dawn he could see a line of small flashes, orange and instant, running along a low dark ridge fifteen hundred meters away, and then a long time afterward the sound arrived, a dull, slow, drumming thud.
Smoke went up in pale columns.
He counted the flashes.
Then he began to count the shells.
Twenty minutes of preparation had been promised him by the regimental staff.
It was going to be six.
“Lieutenant.” Talanov had risen beside him.
His face was calm.
“The battalion order is that the company will cross at six-oh-five. You have twenty minutes to bring your men to the water.”
“There is no armor, Comrade Captain. The tanks are nine days behind. We have no vehicle to cross with. The bridging engineers—”
“The bridging engineers will follow when a bridgehead exists.” The political officer wrote a line.
“The Chairman has been assured that the Varn line will be held by the twelfth. It is the twelfth.”
He looked up.
His eyes were pale, mild, kind.
“I am sure you will do your duty, Lieutenant. I would so much prefer not to have to report otherwise.”
The water took his breath.
He went in at six-oh-seven at the head of the second platoon with his rifle held above his head in both hands and his pistol in his belt, and the cold hit him below the ribs like a fist.
It was a December river.
It came from the mountains, and it was black and fast, and at the ford it was waist-deep on a tall man and chest-deep on a short one.
The cold locked his chest.
His lungs would not fill.
For three steps he could not tell whether he was breathing or drowning, and his legs, numb to the thighs, did not seem to belong to him.
Around him eighty-odd men were doing the same.
There was no talk.
A private beside him gasped, a small high sound, a puppy’s sound, and held his weapon over his head with shaking arms.
Their breath rose in a fog.
Somewhere upstream a man had slipped and gone under and come up cursing.
They were halfway across when the Compact guns answered.
He heard nothing before it.
The river lifted on his left, a tall white column of water and mud and torn reeds thrown straight up into the grey light, and the shock wave struck his side like a thrown door, and for an instant he was sitting down in the water and did not know how. Find the original chapter at g.com.
A second column rose.
A third.
They walked toward him along the ford in a line, each one heavier than the last, and the water around him began to boil and hiss with falling fragments.
A man screamed.
Another screamed.
The water at Ilyanko’s waist went warm for a moment and then cold again and he saw, a few meters off, a soldier floating on his back with his rifle still in one hand and his face turned up to the sky, quite calm, with the top of his skull gone.
He did not stop.
He did not decide not to stop.
His legs were moving and he was being carried with the rest of them toward the far bank, into the noise.
He came out on the western shore on his hands and knees, with the mud in his mouth and his rifle still in his fist.
The Varn crossing took nineteen minutes.
In that time eighty-eight men of the Third Company, Second Battalion, Sixty-First Assault Regiment entered the water.
Sixty-three reached the western bank.
Of those, fourteen were wounded and six could not be moved.
Ahead of them lay sixteen hundred meters of open beet field.
It rose in a long, gentle, ploughed slope toward a railway embankment, brown, wet, bare of trees or walls or ditches except for a drainage cut that ran at a diagonal from the river to the embankment’s foot.
On the embankment, dug into the ballast, with their hulls hidden behind mounds of shoved earth and only their turrets and long guns showing, waited fourteen Corvane Bastions of the Third Armored Corps, with thirty-odd infantry vehicles beside them and a battery of self-propelled howitzers half a kilometer behind.
Each tank carried a thermal sight that could pick a man out of the cold dark as a lamp picks a moth.
They had been sitting there for three days.
The battalion order had specified the timetable.
It had not specified what lay in front of it.
“Up!” Sergeant Ostap Rudenko was on his feet in the mud, a heavy, grizzled man of forty with a broken nose and a voice like a shovel scraped along stone.
“Up, you sons of bitches! Up! Forward!”
They went.
They went in a long straggling line across the plowed ground, bent double, rifles held across their chests, and for a hundred meters nothing happened.
It was so quiet that Ilyanko could hear the suck of boots pulling out of mud.
He could hear his own breath, and the slosh of water in his boots, and the small metallic knocking of magazines in the pouches on the man beside him.
He thought, distinctly, they haven’t seen us.
He thought it with a kind of hope so pure that afterward he was ashamed of it.
The first shot from the embankment was a single flat crack, a tank gun, and the round hit forty meters ahead and to the left of him and he felt it through the soles of his feet.
It was a high-explosive round.
It burst at ground level in a black spreading cloud, and something went past his cheek with a sound like a ripped sheet, and behind him a man made a small sound, oh, as one does at a spilled cup, and sat down.
Then all of them fired.
He had never in his life heard anything like it.
The whole ridge lit.
There were flashes along its whole length, orange, red, white, and the ground erupted in front of the line in great dark fountains of earth.
The thirty-millimeter autocannon on the fighting vehicles opened up, and it was a sound like a giant zipper being torn open, a long ripping brrrrrrt that put a line of fountains along the plowed ground and walked them back through the men.
He saw a man cut in half at the waist and take three steps.
He saw another go down with his arms outspread and his mouth open and no sound coming from it, in the total noise.
The air tasted of iron.
It tasted of hot metal and earth and something else, faintly sweet, that he knew from the slaughterhouse behind his uncle’s farm.
A wave of heat and pressure struck his back and he was lying on his face in the mud with a ringing in his skull, and the ringing went on, and on, and all the sounds of the world came from very far off, through water.
“Ditch!” he screamed.
He could not hear himself.
“Ditch! Ditch!”
The drainage cut.
Forty meters to his right.
He saw Rudenko already heading for it, half-crouched, dragging a wounded boy by the collar, and he ran.
By six-forty there were thirty-one of them in the ditch.
It was a foot and a half deep.
It was full of cold brown water and rotten beet tops, and the thirty-one men who lay in it had their faces pressed into the mud and their arms over their heads and did not move.
Above them, the air was full of iron.
Rounds cracked over the lip of the ditch, and every few seconds a shell landed and the whole cut shook and a curtain of soil spilled in on top of them.
Ilyanko lay on his side.
He could feel his heart in his throat, in his ears, in the soles of his feet.
His hands were shaking so hard he could not close them.
He tried to count, and got as far as twenty-seven and had to begin again.
Crawling along the ditch on his elbows, hard by, came Captain Talanov.
He was filthy.
He had lost his cap and his notebook was in his hand, dark with wet, and his pale, scholarly face was streaked with mud from forehead to chin.
There was a long graze along one cheek.
But he was breathing steadily and his eyes were entirely clear.
“Lieutenant.” He had to shout to be heard.
“I have spoken to the battalion. The bridgehead must be extended. The embankment is to be reached by seven.”
Ilyanko stared at him.
“It is sixteen hundred meters,” he said.
“You are a little over four hundred from the river. There is a culvert at the embankment’s foot, eleven hundred meters on, which offers cover. The battalion staff have identified it.” He raised his voice further.
“I understand it is difficult.”
“There is a wall of tanks. . .”
“I will note your reluctance, Lieutenant.”
The captain’s voice had not changed.
It was as mild and even as it had been in the orchard. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
He lifted the pencil and touched it to the wet page.
“I would prefer not to. It would be so much more agreeable to record that you had advanced.”
A shell landed twenty meters behind them and the ditch heaved.
Both men flinched.
Ilyanko lay with his cheek against the mud and looked at the pencil, at the small, patient, steady point of it, and understood precisely what it could do.
He thought about it for perhaps eleven seconds.
The ditch ran on a slant to the embankment.
Two hundred meters further along it turned into dead ground, a dip below the arc of fire of the tanks on the ridge, where a gun on the embankment could not depress low enough to hit a man at the foot of the slope.
If a man could reach that place he might live.
He had studied the map.
He had known it for three minutes and had not let himself know it.
But to reach it, the men in the ditch had to break from cover and run through a cone of fire for the length of a football pitch, and the tanks would kill three in four.
Unless something else drew their attention first.
“Rudenko.”
The sergeant crawled up out of the mud.
His face was grey.
He had a gash on his forehead and a boy’s blood down the front of his tunic.
“The culvert, on the left,” said Ilyanko.
He heard his own voice as if it belonged to another man, a calm one.
“The dry channel, on the far side of the ditch, four hundred meters. I need it rushed. Loud. Everyone, all the machine guns, all the launchers, everything you have. Nine, ten men. I need them to make the tanks look left.”
He did not say and die.
He did not have to.
Rudenko did not move.
He looked at the lieutenant for a long moment.
He was forty.
He had been a sergeant for eleven years.
He had shown Ilyanko how to load a rifle in the first week of his service, patiently, in the dark, without contempt, and had kept him alive for nine weeks by pushing him down into holes before he knew there was a reason.
“That’s the second platoon,” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
“That’s Kuzmin. That’s Danil Kuzmin. He’s eighteen.”
“I know.”
“Right.” The sergeant nodded slowly, as one confirms a price.
He looked at the captain crouched a meter away, at the pencil, at the notebook.
His face did not change.
“Right, Lieutenant,” he said.
“We’ll make it loud.”
He went back down the ditch on his elbows.
Ilyanko heard his voice a moment later, low, giving orders, and the small sounds of men fixing magazines, and once a short cough that might have been a laugh.
Then eleven men came up out of the ditch, running, shouting, firing from the hip.
They ran left along the dry channel toward the culvert with their rifles going and the two PKMs hammering, and an RPG went up with a whooshing scream that left a trail of white smoke across the grey light, and the whole line of the ridge turned toward them.
“Now,” said Ilyanko.
“Now. Go.”
He ran.
He ran with twenty men behind him along the slanting ditch, bent double, with the iron crashing on his right and the sound of the eleven on his left growing thinner and thinner, and he did not look.
He heard a boy’s voice, very high, over the noise, calling for his mother, and it stopped.
He heard a PKM stop in the middle of a burst.
He kept running.
The dead ground took him in like a mouth.
There were seventeen of them at the foot of the embankment, lying on a shelf of cold clay under a wall of ballast and rail, with the sky in strips above them and the whole weight of the tank line looming over their heads.
The tank guns could not reach them.
They could hear the engines.
They could hear, very clearly, a man’s voice above them, shouting something in a language none of them spoke.
Ilyanko sat with his back against the ballast and his knees drawn up.
He looked at his hands.
They were quite still now.
He noticed that with mild interest.
“Lieutenant.”
Talanov had come down the slope behind them, the last of the twenty.
He was on his knees in the clay, wet to the skin, breathing hard.
He had the notebook.
He opened it to a fresh page and wrote for some time, and Ilyanko watched the pencil and did not move.
“You have advanced further than any element of the battalion,” said the political officer at last.
His voice was gentle.
It was almost warm.
“You will be mentioned. I will see that the regiment knows it.” He smiled.
“You have done your duty very well.”
Ilyanko opened his mouth.
Nothing came.
Above them, on the crest of the embankment, something small and dark arched out over the edge against the strip of sky and turned over in the air, slowly, like a dropped stone, and fell toward the shelf of clay.
He counted.
One.