The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  Ilya is powerful stealing over the frozen ground, in and out among the barely visible tanks. The only breathing he hears is from skinny Misha behind him. He turns to see billows of vapor heaving out of the man’s drooping mouth. To keep his comrade from giving them away to the guards who must be posted near the command tent one hundred meters away, Ilya pauses at the treads of a tank.

  He sits up to ease his back against the tank. He leans against a painted wooden crate.

  Ilya suppresses a laugh. This is one of the hundreds of false tanks, part of the massive Maskirovka campaign Zhukov has put in place to fool German reconnaissance, artillery, and bombers into wasting their barrages in the wrong places. The weapon at his back is made of sacking, wire, and a pipe for the gun barrel. Very convincing. Ilya wonders how many he and Misha crept past tonight. He wagers that all the tanks he sees around him are Maskirovka. Clever. He decides he likes these tank officers in the tent ahead of him.

  Misha slips next to him. He runs a slender hand around the rim of a wooden cask that suffices for a wheel.

  “Nicely done,” Misha murmurs with a wheeze. “I never saw better.”

  Ilya nods. He waits while his companion’s breathing slows to normal. After two minutes, Misha seems ready. Ilya rolls onto his stomach. Misha makes no move to follow.

  “Misha. Now. Let’s do it like we discussed.”

  The other private wags his head.”No, Ilyushka. I’m thinking no. You go the last bit without me. I’m not really designed for this sort of thing.”

  Ilya shifts forward to sit again next to his companion. “I’ve got you this far. You can come the rest of the way.”

  “I’ll make a mistake. We’ll get caught.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We have to go on to find out.”

  “Why do you want me with you, Ilya? We just met. What do you know about me? I’m the last person in the company I’d take.”

  “That’s why you’re the one I picked.”

  Ilya looks into the man’s eyes. He does not tell his comrade the complete truth: that he wants the others to see that if Ilya Shokhin can get puny, scared Misha to do this, he must still be a very good leader of men.

  He looks into Misha’s eyes. This little sissy will finish the job.

  “Michail Stepanovich. Let me ask. Do you like being in the Eighth Guards penal battalion?”

  Misha makes no answer. None is needed.

  “You’ve been stuck in it since, what, July? Do you like knowing you’ll be in the first rank of every attack from now on, just a target so the men behind you can find out how strong the enemy is and where they’re shooting from? Hmmm? Do you take pride in being an infantry private, surrounded by cowards, bandits, brawlers, and madmen, instead of an intelligence captain carrying General Chuikov’s coffee? Do you like your shame as much as you used to like your medals and your cot? What do you hear from home, is your family proud of your accomplishment?”

  Misha tenses at this mention of his family.

  “I didn’t run,” he says. Ilya raises a finger. Misha lowers to a hiss. “I didn’t run. I evacuated headquarters before the Germans surrounded us. I had battle maps all over the place. I couldn’t let them be captured.”

  Ilya eases his tone. “The commissar tells me you were screaming, Misha.”

  “I grabbed the plans and I evacuated. That’s all I did.”

  “You ran to the rear without your rifle.”

  “I forgot it. The commissar was wrong. I forgot my gun. There were Germans everywhere.”

  “And General Chuikov, if I’m not mistaken, informed you that’s when you need your gun most, Misha.”

  There is not much light but there is enough for Ilya to note a gleam rimming Misha’s eyes.

  “Ilya,” the man says, “please.”

  “Yes”—Ilya pauses and chews on the word—”please.”

  Please nothing, he thinks. There is no please in this life, no being granted a favor for the asking. Does Misha believe there is justice, that you get what you deserve, or that you can keep what you earn? No. Ilya will never make that mistake again. Anything can be taken away, whether or not it’s fair, or if it even makes no sense. Do or do not say “please”; no one hears you.

  Misha has dried his eyes. He looks firmly into Ilya’s face. He wants to ask a question of his own now. This must be what Misha’s training is: queries, not battle.

  “You were a major?”

  “Yes, Misha. A major.”

  “How long have you been in Eighth Guards?”

  “Before Stalingrad. When we were still the Sixty-second.”

  Misha’s eyebrows go up. Anyone who fought at Stalingrad has an aura for those who did not see it, the greatest single battle in the history of mankind. One medium-sized Soviet city on the Volga in the winter of 1942 became the dead end of the German advance into Russia. There the Red Army killed or captured 1.2 million Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians. Russian losses were titanic as well. But from Stalingrad on, the Germans have not taken a step farther east into the Rodina. They did not cross the Volga. The tide turned. Chuikov’s men fought so well, they have become known as the Defenders of Stalingrad, and were awarded the honorific “Guards Army.” Once the signal is given here on the Vistula, the offensive across Poland will scorch a path to the Oder River, the German border. Then the Nazis’ retreat back into their own homeland will be complete, and the battle will rage around their villages and cities, not Russia’s.

  Misha swallows before continuing. “How ... ?”

  “Don’t ask”—Ilya cuts him off. “It was bad and it was two years ago. Let it rest. I’ll tell you some other time.” Ilya lays a big hand on Misha’s lap. “We’ll talk about it in Berlin, all right?”

  “What did you do?

  “Misha, no.”

  “That’s my deal, Ilya. If you want to show off that, after only a week in the penal battalion, you can drag someone like me all the way out here in the middle of the night to steal another division’s banner, then you have to answer me one more question. Tell me, and I’ll go with you.”

  Misha. A cunning and quick little devil.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ilya Borisovich. No one gets busted from Stalingrad major to penal private for nothing.”

  “Nothing is the truth. But it seems I am related to the wrong uncle.”

  Misha prods not with his voice but by knitting his fingers, to say, I’m listening.

  Ilya puffs his cheeks once, then speaks.

  “My uncle Pavel was a general on the STAVKA staff in Moscow. Last October, when the Polish Home Guard rose against the Germans in Warsaw, he was in favor of helping them. He said this at a meeting attended by Stalin.”

  Ilya looks into the curtain of the Polish night, northward where fifty kilometers away the city of Warsaw lies in ruins along the banks of the Vistula. The Germans put down the brave revolt by the Poles with brutality while the Red Army, the strongest gathered force on the planet, sat on the opposite shore of the river and let the Nazis obliterate one of Europe’s oldest cities, butcher its citizens, and stamp out the last of the resistance. Poland, an ally of Russia, cried for help which had only to come from ten kilometers away. Stalin sat on his hands for months while the Germans did his bidding, exterminating those Poles who might feel they had liberated their own country.

  Ilya’s uncle said this openly. He first wrote it to Ilya in a letter, whose reply, a prayer for Pavel to keep quiet, was either not received in time or not heeded.

  Within weeks of the meeting, Pavel was removed from his post. He was forced to retire from the army, then put in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison across Red Square from the Kremlin. His wife was evicted from her home. His three children, Ilya’s cousins, were taken from their schools, separated, and placed with foster parents outside Moscow. Pavel’s older brother Boris—Ilya’s father—had early in the war met a hero’s end starving to death during the three-year siege of Leningrad, Ilya’s birt
h city. Ilya’s mother and sister, both nurses, were left untouched by the long fangs of the vozhd. But Pavel’s nephew, Major Ilya Borisovich Shokhin of the Eighth Guards Army, thirty-year-old commander of the proud Second Rifle Battalion, three times wounded, who had killed Germans with every weapon put in his hands, and even without weapons a dozen times with his huge bare fists, was tracked down by the minions of Stalin’s wrath. Last week he was stripped of his office, his awards and command, and dropped into hell. Company A of the Eighth Guards penal battalion. Stalin is thinking of us, indeed.

  Now, on another chilled and dreary night of waiting for the order to attack, Ilya will steal the divisional banner from the First Guards Tank Army, their battle partner rammed in close at the rear of Eighth Guards. Tomorrow morning, First Tank’s orange-and-black flag will fly over General Chuikov’s headquarters tent. It is an act of boldness, insolence, and revenge. First Tank stole Chuikov’s jeep two days ago and painted it orange and black. Their prank must be topped. When word gets out that someone from Eighth Guards penal did this, First Tank will be humiliated. Ilya and Misha might not be punished; if so, only with light sentences. Eyebrows and open hands will be raised at their backs. Misha will have done his first brave act for all to see. Ilya will prove again what he has proven many times under lethal conditions, that he is a born leader of men.

  Explaining his history to Misha in whispers takes five minutes. When he is done, Ilya is surprised that he was so open with this man he knows nothing about except that he is a coward and a fellow officer. But it feels good to have spoken to Misha’s intelligent eyes. There is no one else to talk with. The company and battalion officers are martinets, themselves trying to remove some smirch on their records. The rest of the men are the dregs.

  Misha continues to nod even after Ilya has grown silent.

  “Stop that,” Ilya says.

  “Sorry. Old habit.”

  “Can we go now?”

  “I’m sorry, Ilya. It’s not right what was done to you.”

  “This is war, Misha.”

  “Perhaps.” Misha rocks forward from the wooden tank. “All right, Comrade Major. I will follow.”

  Ilya joins him flat on the ground. The cold seeps through his coat into his chest.

  “We’ll get to within twenty meters, then stop and see what we see. Move quietly, Misha. Go only when and where I go.”

  Ilya slides over the ground at a pace he believes the smaller man can keep up with. He thinks back to Stalingrad now that Misha has brought it forth. From September of 1942 until February of ’43, you moved like this in the rubble, with stealth and strength and patience, or you drew a bullet from a sniper. There were no alternatives.

  The eighty-meter creep seems to take a long time, waiting for Misha to catch up, but Ilya knows it is less than ten minutes. When they come to rest behind a log pile, Ilya notes that Misha’s breathing is not labored but under control. The little man has done well.

  The lantern inside the tent has stayed on. Now Ilya hears voices fluttering into the bare branches overhead, a card game among the officers. And vodka, surely.

  A single guard strolls a wide circle around the tent stakes. He has no lantern. At the front of the big tent no more than ten meters from the flaps, a skinned tree has been driven into the ground for a flagpole. At the top of the pole, attached to a tether, is the First Tank’s pennant, limp in the breeze-less night. Ilya counts under his breath while the guard makes two revolutions around the tent. The man walks without hurry. One lap takes him about a full minute.

  “Misha.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “When the guard is at the far corner of the tent, he’ll have about thirty seconds until he comes out there on the other side. When I say go, you run out and take down the banner.”

  “Me?”

  “Quiet.”

  “You want me . . . ? What kind of a plan is that? I thought you came out here to do it.”

  “No. I came out here to make you do it.”

  Misha drops his face on his hands. Ilya grabs the back of his coat and lifts his head for him.

  “Get ready”

  “Ilya, please.”

  “Don’t ever say that to me again. Now, get ready. Are you ready?”

  “What if I don’t go?”

  “You’ll have to face me later. And if you do go, I’m on your side later. You choose.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I’m too recognizable. If I’m seen running off with the flag, I’m easy to pick out of a crowd. You, no one will remember.”

  Misha rattles his head.

  “Besides,” Ilya whispers, “I want you to get the glory.”

  “You want me to get the stockade. All right. I can’t believe I’m doing this. When?”

  “Get up to your knees. Quiet. Wait ... wait ... and ... now. Go.”

  With startling nimbleness, Misha leaps to his feet. Bent low, he hurries to the flagpole. He grabs the rope and tugs to lower the pennant. But the line is tied around a peg, and Misha’s chilled fingers struggle with the knot. Ilya counts to ten, fifteen.

  Misha looks back to the log pile, the lantern glow from inside the tent illumines the whites of his frightened eyes. Ilya rises to his knees and swirls his finger in fast circles, hurry!

  The guard emerges from the far corner of the tent. He does not yet see Misha, who picks at the knot, but in five more seconds he will.

  At that moment, Misha untangles the knot. With fast hands, he lowers the banner just as the guard rounds the corner.

  The guard lifts his rifle from his shoulder and walks over.

  “What are you doing?” His challenge is not loud nor violent. He doesn’t want to disturb the officers and their drinking game. He can handle one little unarmed interloper.

  Misha freezes, but only for a second. He begins to fold the standard.

  “Do you know this banner has to be taken down at night?” Misha asks in a resolute voice.”It’s disrespectful to have it up after the sun goes down.”

  Sharp, Ilya thinks. Very sharp.

  The guard shoulders his rifle, any threat seemingly absent. Misha continues to fold.

  “All right,” the guard agrees, ”leave it with me and I’ll have it put up at sunrise.”

  Misha wags his head.

  “No, I’m afraid I’ll have to take this with me. This is a violation. I’ll have to show it to my superiors.”

  The guard reaches for the flag. Misha holds it back. The guard asks to see Misha’s papers. “What unit are you with?”

  Inside the tent, a voice calls out, “What’s going on out there?”

  “Something about the flag, sir,” the guard responds, beginning to tug at it with Misha.

  Misha calls into the tent, “There’s no problem, men. Go about your business.”

  But there is a problem. Ilya hears chairs scraping. The lantern light moves, shadows on the tent walls shift.

  Ilya has slipped without sound two meters behind the arguing guard. With one blow of his fist to the middle of the guard’s back, he fells him facedown at Misha’s feet.

  Ilya grabs Misha and hauls him and the flag away at top speed, dodging the dark trees and fake tanks.

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  January 1, 1945, 2:00 a.m.

  Pariser Strasse shelter

  Wilmersdorf, Berlin

  lottie is exhausted. her fingers ache. she has played her cello without break for two hours.

  She completes the final passage and lowers her bow hand. Enough, she thinks, I’ve done enough tonight.

  The thirty-five people in the air raid shelter pause before they clap, the way they’ve been trained to do. In Berlin, classical music is loved as nowhere else except perhaps in Vienna. When Lottie indicates she is finished, they clap fingertips to palms, not to resound too much ruckus off the cold dirt walls. Besides, they are still moved by Lottie’s playing, she can tell, especially the last piece, a soaring solo from Strauss’s Don Juan. Gentle appl
ause is appropriate. The appreciative faces flicker, are made angular by candlelight and shadows.

  “I’m going to put it away now,” Lottie tells her mother, Freya, seated next to her. An older man, saying nothing, rises to help with the large cello case. When the instrument is stored, the man sits. Lottie slides again next to her mother. In the absence of the music, silence detonates among those gathered on the benches and plank floor. The quiet is a crater, as though a bomb has found them after all in their hole beneath the small church and they are every one of them dead but still sitting upright.