by Ralph Peters
Perhaps Starukhin was right. Keep up the pressure. Don’t allow the enemy breathing space.
The earth twitched beneath his feet. The artillery preparation had begun, concentrating all available fires on the known or estimated British positions. The broad, low valley filled with light, as though a bizarre morning had arrived ahead of schedule. Shells crashed and sputtered, ripping into the horizon by the thousands. Duzov could not understand how men survived such shelling. Yet he knew that some of them always did. It was, at times, amazingly difficult to kill the human animal.
The streaking dazzle of a multiple rocket launcher barrage rose from the left of the observation post. Then the canopy of scheduled illumination began to unfold, with lines of illumination bursting in crooked ranks, four to six hundred meters apart. The British had a significant gunnery advantage in the dark, so all local units had been ordered to fire a high percentage of illumination, while the heavier rear guns concentrated their efforts on target destruction.
The attacking regiment had been well-drilled, and now, tired from the march, going into battle for the first time, struggling with the unfamiliar terrain, the subunits nonetheless appeared in good order, flooding over the near crests in company columns that soon drilled out into columns of platoons, all the while making good combat speed. Duzov admired his troops and the power of the overall spectacle. On the valley floor, the platoons fanned out and the combat vehicles came on line. Duzov could easily pick out the positions of the company and battalion commanders, of the staggered ranks of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, and the air-defense weaponry trailing to the rear. On the trail of the maneuver battalions, the lean-barreled self-propelled guns snooped along, ready to provide immediate fire support to the assault. Then, at the very rear, odd support vehicles and little clusters of ambulances followed. It was one of the most complete maneuvers Duzov had ever seen, and it suddenly translated into timelessness for him. It had never struck him before, but now he saw in the surging lines the perfect modern version of the old Imperial armies marching out in their ready ranks, the men of Suvorov or Kutuzov. The only difference was that today the rank and file wore layers of technology, armor, and mechanization in place of the colorful uniforms of old. In a moment of skepticism and refusal, he told himself that there was really no comparison between these squat, ugly steel bugs beetling across the valley floor and the antique brilliance of hussars and grenadiers. But it was the same. He could not deny it now. It was exactly the same, and the revealed truth of it burned into Duzov. What ever changed about war? he asked himself.
The British gunners and tank crews began to find targets, even with the Soviet artillery still crashing upon them. Duzov had to admire the British. He doubted that many men, especially those who had not previously known war, would even briefly attempt to stand their ground in the face of such an onslaught. Here and there, one of Duzov’s vehicles convulsed into a tiny bonfire or fell, crippled, from the advancing ranks. Duzov returned to his insistent vision. It was all so much the same he could hardly believe it. The way you pictured men falling away at the first enemy musket volleys. Only now the men had been made a part of fighting systems.
Upon reaching the incline on the far side of the valley, his tanks briefly halted, not content with suppression fired from the move. Commanders’ machine guns traced toward targets selected for subunit volleys. The ranks of steel rippled with muzzle blasts and recoils. Then they began to march again, picking up speed as they closed. You could almost hear the drumbeats and clipped, shouted commands issued under sweat-drenched mustaches. Close ranks, close ranks, you scum.
The artillery shifted to a deeper concentration line as the Soviet vehicles approached the military crest. Duzov watched, pained, as more and more of his vehicles fell out, some ending their journeys with volcanic explosions from which no survivors would emerge. Hundreds of garish parachute flares hung in the sky at once, and the battle took on a burnished hyperreality. The effect was as though the entire world were made of metal. The advancing lines wavered as individual tanks or platoons sought ways around local terrain impediments. But the classic, magnificent formations never broke.
As the last artillery lifted a new presence appeared over the battlefield, to the accompaniment of green flares. This element could not be fitted so neatly into Duzov’s historical model. Three pairs of helicopter gunships rode in through the flare-scarred sky, coming from the right, huge flying monsters, frightening in their aspects even to Duzov. The ugly aircraft had a presence both horrid and magical, spitting rockets like flying dragons or slowing into missile-attack runs. Then they disappeared over the waves of Soviet vehicles.
The attack made the crest, and the vehicles continued down into the next valley. A radio set in the observation post squealed and coughed with requests for more illumination, even as another station reported that they had driven through the British position. A spontaneous cheer went up from the group of officers, clerks, and signalers assembled at the observation post. But Duzov surveyed the wastage in the valley and on the far slopes as the last flares sputtered into oblivion.
He turned to the regiment’s commander.
“Don’t stop. Drive them. The British will throw in everything they have now; they’ll try to block you at all costs. But we have the initiative. The Three-thirty-first Tank Regiment will be up shortly after dawn. Do whatever else you must, but don’t let anything stop your tanks.”
Lieutenant General Trimenko closed his eyes to the false dawn that rimmed the horizon, resting as best he could in the shuddering helicopter seat. He knew he needed a few hours of real sleep. But he wanted to make just one more visit forward, to check up on the commander of the Sixteenth Guards Tank Division.
Trimenko felt a weary elation that kept him moving. He kneaded the pouch of pistachio nuts in his pocket, reflecting that he would have to fill it up as soon as he returned to the army command post. The night was going well, after all. It had been a near thing, and the situation still was not entirely under control. But the indicators were good. The German counterattack had been contained, after a few desperate hours, well south of the line of Highway 71. In the end, it appeared that the Germans had only loaded more of their forces deeper into Malinsky’s trap. And the Dutch simply had not mustered enough punch to make a difference. According to the last report he had received, the lead regiments of the Sixteenth Tank were loose in the German rear, amplifying the favorable situation created by the forward detachments and inexorably closing the clamp behind the German operational grouping. Trimenko saw clearly that the only hope for the West German corps at this point was a full-scale breakout attack to the rear, followed by an attempt to stabilize the situation on the Weser River line. But there were no indications that the Germans were even considering such an alternative, and Trimenko doubted that it would come to pass. The Germans were determined to trap themselves. In any case, he was convinced that his forces would be on the Weser in sufficient strength by noon the next day to create panic. No, he corrected his weary brain. Today. Noon today. It’s already today.
Trimenko slipped off his headset, sick of the pilots’ blather. He settled lower behind his seat belt, thinking of Starukhin and how furious his rival would be to find that Trimenko had beaten him to the Weser, while Starukhin himself was still struggling to achieve his own breakthrough. And why stop at the Weser? Trimenko felt confident now that he could beat Starukhin to the Rhine, as well. It was a matter of detailed calculation, of efficiency, of forcing men and events to conform to the rigorous science of war. Starukhin’s reliance on ardor and native wit had brought the Third Shock Army commander up short. Starukhin had had better tank terrain, far better than the muck through which Trimenko had been forced to attack. And Starukhin had had more support from frontal assets. Really, he had enjoyed all of the advantages. But Starukhin was an anachronism.
The pilots saw the tracer rounds rising toward the windshield. The senior pilot had made the decision to fly higher than usual, afraid of snagging
power lines in the morbid German darkness. He had not expected any problems with air defenses so far behind Soviet lines.
But the tracers reached insistently toward the little aircraft, pulsing up toward the pilots with a peculiar slow-motion effect. The pilot-navigator shouted from the right-hand seat, and the senior pilot tried to bank the helicopter away from the staccato flashes.
The desperate maneuver of the aircraft woke Trimenko from his reverie. Over the shoulders of the pilots, the distant battlefield turned on end until it was a vertical band of light. Trimenko’s maps and papers skittered off the seat, and he grasped for anything he could use to stabilize himself. Then the aircraft jolted several times in rapid succession, and a shock of white filled Trimenko’s eyes as one of his own mobile air-defense guns blasted him out of the sky.
Fifteen
Levin stood in a deserted restaurant in Hameln, munching on bread and cold ham. Outside, small-arms fire intermittently tested the night around the air-assault battalion’s perimeter, but there was a definite lull in the fighting. You could sense it as clearly as you could predict what was coming next during an uninspired political lecture or in a mediocre piece of music. Levin knew that the war would return, that the British or the Germans or somebody would come back hard at the air-assault force. They would come with well-organized firepower, with determination, perhaps in the last moments before dawn. But now, in the darkness, there were a few moments during which a man could think.
Levin tried to remember anything that he might have left undone, any small detail that might contribute to the outcome of the fighting. But his mind strayed willfully back to the experience of the air assault itself, and to the heady first minutes of combat. Levin had alternated between an awareness of his own fear and the electrifying thrill of the experience. He remembered the absolute joy of overrunning the enemy position from behind, the feeling of accomplishment disproportionate to the actual event. And the conflict with Gordunov over the importance of preserving the historical monuments in the old town. The great surprise, however, was how much he frankly had enjoyed the fighting. He had worried for
years that he might be a coward, and he had expected to feel somber and troubled with cosmic guilts in the wake of battle. But the action only left him eager and confident. He felt younger than he had felt in years, almost a schoolboy at play.
At the meeting of the command and staff collective, the defense had been rationalized. To Levin’s surprise, Gordunov had ordered him to take command of the approach that led from the railway station and Highway 1 to the east back to the town center and the near ends of the bridges. He had been given a platoon reinforced with an automatic grenade launcher section. Levin had not been entirely sure whether the battalion commander had given him the assignment as a reward or as an ironic joke, since the failure to hold the main road approach to the ring road that circled the medieval heart of the town could funnel the combat right into the old town itself. But it was a key position, in any case, since its penetration would split the eastern-bank defense in two.
Levin had positioned his handful of men carefully, trying to remember all of the rules learned from textbooks and training exercises. He tied in to Anureyev’s company on the southern approaches and the southern bridge itself, and to the special assault platoon in the hospital grounds and on the northern bridge. A special assault squad detailed to seize the railway station had failed, but now they formed an outpost line for Levin’s defense. He organized the supply of ammunition and rations for his force. Feeding the men turned out to be the easiest part of the mission, since the German shops were astonishingly full. There was even fresh bread.
Everything seemed plentiful, not just food. Despite the confusion and urgency of battle, it had been impossible not to notice the riches tumbled about in the shattered storefronts. Airborne and air-assault soldiers were highly disciplined; still, it had been difficult to keep them out of the shops. At one point, Levin had been forced to shout at and threaten several troops who were looting a jewelry store, helping themselves to watches and trophies for girlfriends back home.
Breaking up the thievery proved unusually difficult for Levin, since he could not quite bring himself to blame or disdain the boys with any heartfelt vigor. In the wreckage of the jewelry shop, the disordered contents of smashed showcases shone like mythical treasures under the beam of his officer’s pocket lamp. He could not understand how the West Germans could make up their minds what to buy from so vast a selection. And, while he would never have dreamed of taking anything for himself, he had been tempted to grab up a trinket for Yelena.
In the end, he had mastered himself. He took nothing. But he had not been particularly harsh on the soldiers. He chased them away but allowed them to flee with treasures in hand.
Levin gnawed off another mouthful of ham and thought of Yelena. She had acquired a totally unexpected taste for Western things. She especially liked Western fashions now, although they did not suit her. She had grown into a woman unfathomably different from the girl with whom he had fallen in love. Yelena had always had the quickness and edge of a city girl. Yet, when they first met under the hilariously correct circumstances of a Komsomol gathering, she had spoken as a true believer, speaking her lines with conviction when the exchanges covered the triumphs of socialism and the road to inevitable communism, or the dignity of the proletariat and the need to revitalize the role of the Party through restructuring. But there had been nothing dignified or formal in her lovemaking. It was youthful, and animal, and it held Levin spellbound. It was only much later that he realized the extent to which she had led the way. He had fancied himself as serious and mature, destined to lead men. But Yelena had led him. Her father, an urban Party official of influence, had opposed their marriage at first. Levin had been at a loss to understand why, since he had a perfect Komsomol record and he was a model student at the academy for military-political education.
Yelena had her way. They married. She was an only child, and she always had her way with her family. Levin had dutifully volunteered for the airborne forces, and, as a new junior lieutenant, he received a prized posting to the Baltic Military District.
They had a child. Mikhail. Levin, who spent his off-duty time studying and preparing his classes for the troops, was astonished when this new life appeared, as though Yelena’s months of pregnancy and complaints had merely been another academic problem. Suddenly, he was a father. Now when he spoke at lectures and political-education seminars about the duty of the Soviet soldier to prepare the road to a better future for all mankind, the word “future” and the tumult of concepts and images associated with it resonated with a deeper meaning than ever before. A better future. A better world. Levin realized, to the tune of an infant’s cries, how these notions really had been little more than cold abstractions for him in the past. But now it was all different. The better world would be the world in which his son would live.
Yelena changed after the child came. Perhaps she had already been changing, although he had not noticed it. But the event of childbirth seemed to unleash something unexpected in her, an uncomfortable and unwelcome new spirit. She began to joke about the Party and about Levin’s beliefs. He could not comprehend the change in her. And she complained that he only had time for his books, and that he was naive and blind to opportunity. She gained weight.
She demanded that he leave the army as soon as he could. Her father was in a position to secure him a very good Party job; perhaps he could even arrange for an early release from Levin’s military commitment. He needed a job with a future, she insisted. And he knew that she meant a job with perquisites and comfort and material possibilities. He was learning fast as a father.
He, too, saw many things differently now. Yet he continued to believe. He read history, and he reviewed how far the people had come. Socialism was far from perfect. But it was continually evolving under the tension of the dialectic. And it had made the world a better place, Levin believed. It had rescued Russia from its fatal ba
ckwardness, and it had made the Soviet Union a great power. If the price had been high, then so had been the achievement. There was a new equity and security in the life of the average man. If there were many problems that remained unsolved, it was up to the present generation to address them, to fight inertia and complacency. Really, it was an exciting time to be alive, rich with new possibilities. He could not understand how Yelena had so fully lost her vision, how she could fail to see the dynamic at work.
And he loved the army. He found the purely military side of his duties almost more stimulating than the political, even as he enthusiastically embraced every opportunity to reach out to the young soldiers, to help mold them into better citizens of a better state. Slogans that others mocked were sacred to him, and he labored long over the most minor paperwork. He sought to perfect his abilities as a leader and his political-didactic skills.
Yelena had an affair with a moronic line officer. When Levin found out and confronted her, months after the rest of the garrison had known about the situation, Yelena stamped and screamed that he neglected her, that he did not love her, and that he did not even care enough to provide for the future of his child.
The accusations about the child hurt him most. Even though he could not accept them as true. It was Yelena who showed little concern for the infant. At times, she seemed to regard their son’s care as nothing but a loathsome duty to be discharged with as little effort and conviction as possible. She was not even very clean about it all, and their cramped apartment grew slovenly.
Yet her threats about leaving him reduced him to panic. He had long loved her, and he had never wavered in that love. Now, at the revelation of her betrayal — a betrayal she had not tried very seriously to hide — he felt his love for her overripen to desperation. He hated the humiliation of it. And he loved her anyway. She let herself go. In a matter of months, she looked ten years older than her age. She painted herself with far too much makeup, becoming a cartoon of a Western harlot. And, as she took from him, he only wanted to give her more. He wondered how he could possibly make a contribution to saving the world if he could not even save the woman he loved. He begged her not to leave him, to give him a chance, leaving all of his accustomed notions of manliness in ruins.
