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

by David L. Robbins

  But he’ll convince no one like that. The armies around him and God alike will think he’s simply lost his nerve. Gone weak.

  No. He must become the thing he despises. To defy God you must be a god. Ilya will reap so many lives, undo so much of His work, that He will have to pay attention. Only then, Ilya will rest.

  At 0845 the air force returns and bombs the heart of the citadel just as Misha predicted. For an hour the fortress is slammed, continuing to drive the enemy garrison outward into their field defenses. Again Misha chooses the spot beside Ilya to watch the bombardment; again he issues a running commentary. Ilya has learned that Misha calms himself with the sound of his own voice. Ilya makes no response. He can barely hear the little motoring mouth. Inside him, the sixty hold out their arms, they accept a great deal and hold it in trust for Ilya. He takes them things: the whompmg bombs, Misha’s yak, crawling time, his own fading humanity. The sixty enfold whatever Ilya brings them, he bears gifts to them from life. They nod slowly, waver like seaweed, and Ilya moves on lighter.

  At 1000 hours, the last bomb falls, the planes wane from the sky. A minute of heavy silence settles in the crater around Ilya. The men tense at his back.

  Misha tells them, “Not yet. Stay loose.”

  He is right. The banks on both sides of the Oder vent a sudden and powerful noise. Three huge artillery pieces, 203mm howitzers with shells as big as butter churns, have been fanned out and positioned at point-blank range, no more than four hundred meters from the citadel’s fortifications. The rounds from these guns strike their targets almost the moment they’re out of the barrels. Concrete dugouts and pillboxes are ripped apart in deafening explosions, reduced to rubble and steel bars. Stones the size of men are flung up and into the river, Ilya thinks some of them are men.

  At 1030 hours two divisions and one full regiment, almost twenty thousand men, began to creep from all sides into the river in assault boats. At 1040 a yellow alert flare scorches across the morning.

  Ilya rises. The platoon crowds at his back.

  Misha appears at Ilya’s elbow. His brows are just below Ilya’s great shoulder.

  “Sergeant Shokhin?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll be right here. Today, I mean. Right here. All right?”

  Talking is an effort for Ilya, as it would be for a corpse. He looks away from the little man when he says, “All right. Stay next to me.”

  “Thank you, Ilya.”

  The red flare of attack sears a high, arcing scratch over the morning.

  Ilya bounds out of the crater. The company shouts, “Urrah! Urrah!”

  In ten steps Ilya leaps onto the top of the dike. Running one stride back, but at his side, is little Misha. Behind them, the fifty-man platoon screams their revenge, obviously terrified.

  Ilya moves fast to distance himself from the clumping men at his back. Bullets reduce their number in the first twenty meters. He hears the sough of rounds, catches the soft clap of bullets hitting bone behind him. He leaps off the parapet into the wreckage of the first pillbox. Misha lands beside him, wild-eyed.

  The stunned Germans manning the machine gun cannot swivel as fast as Ilya moves in from their left. He rises into the air as though winged. He ricochets off the busted masonry to crash down behind them and rip them with his own submachine gun. Misha stupidly runs right in front of their muzzle but they are dead before a finger can jerk. Ilya glares at him, then flashes into the debris.

  He emerges again on the strip of dike leading to the citadel walls. The platoon has already taken cover in the rubble. Ilya alone, without hesitation, without yelling orders, turns and runs forward, headlong at the fortress. Misha shouts at the ducking platoon, “Go, go, go! With Ilya, dammit! Go!”

  Ilya’s feet pound under him, his heart pounds throughout him, boots scrape and run behind. Voices and rifles and bullets are in full throat. Enemy blood, enemy metal and concrete, everything is mad and dashing about, running out of place, blood belongs inside men, bricks belong in neat walls, water should be flat and not coughed up in pillars. But the sky is a lovely gentle blue, the light is tempered and even, as though God maintains His home nicely, no matter what chaos of man rails below.

  Ilya levels his submachine gun and fires bursts from the hip. He runs in a serpentine path over the dike, never letting enemy gunners draw a bead. He tosses grenades ahead, he swivels his own gun barrel left and right and straight, firing like three men, running behind his weapons like a hunter riding behind his hounds. He leaps down into craters and emerges at full tilt, his long footfalls land wherever there is heavy debris on the concrete surface, these are the spots where Ilya knows there are no unexploded mines. He pauses behind cover only enough to let the lagging platoon that advances in his footsteps close the gap, or to let Misha gather himself. There is no strategy in his head. Misha with a heaving chest continues to suggest, “You go round that way, I’ll take five men and go this way.” Ilya answers him with another wordless charge into the enemy guns. All Misha can do is mutter, “Shit,” and run behind.

  In combat Ilya has always been quick and agile, even with his size and strength. He’s often battled calmly, other times—at Stalingrad—enraged. But he’s never fought with this kind of physical prowess. He leaps barbed obstacles, dodges bullets which seem to bend around him like light through a prism, he feels nothing of the wounds mounting on his legs and arms. His own gun silences every German who challenges him. His flung grenades fly through the smallest apertures in those remaining concrete casements. No fatigue mounts his back. No falter slows his legs.

  There’s a way a man moves in open warfare, even the boldest man. When an enemy gunner sights along his barrel for this target, he sees a figure, a familiar sight, he’s shot at running men before. But when one comes who is totally without fear—not merely courageous but a man devoid of dread—he comes differently, oddly, with a rare force. This one is hard to predict, hardest of all to survive.

  In his advance Ilya is not cruel, in the same manner he is not heroic. He kills those of the enemy who have been placed in front of him to kill. This is what he set out to do. He seems to run beside himself, outside his body. All effort and will are gone, he acts without need of them.

  Eight minutes after the attack signal, Ilya reaches the thick fortress wall. He moves along it to spot where the wall has been shattered by the artillery. This gap is dead ground, where flanking fire cannot find him for the moment. Misha is behind him the whole way. He arrives looking flayed, his scar vibrant.

  “Ah,” Misha huffs, his hands on his knees. “Ilya, what ... ? Ah, shit.”

  Ilya can hear Misha no better than a man standing near a dynamo could hear him.

  Within a minute the platoon catches up. There are only two dozen left. The rest lie out on the dike or float in the Oder. The survivors grit their teeth in exhaustion and pain. Ilya sees several bullet-riddled uniforms, almost every one of them has his own blood on his hands. The men are on their feet leaning against the bricks and looking at him with strange faces.

  Awe.

  Ilya picks out two soldiers who answer his eyes with a quaver. Then some alchemy strikes them under Ilya’s gaze and they become firm before him, resolute to go where he goes.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  The two nod.

  “Everyone reload.”

  All the soldiers put new clips into their rifles. Many hands tremble. Ilya shoves a new magazine into his PPSh. Spent clips fall to the ground.

  When they are done, Ilya says, “Misha, follow with the rest. You understand?”

  The little soldier spits once to clear his mouth. His eyes plead with Ilya for something small, some accommodation in this hell. He insists he be called, even now, “Sergeant Bakov.”

  Ilya answers. “Then follow, Sergeant Bakov.”

  The two chosen move close behind him. Ilya presses close to the wall. He raises his barrel beside his cheek. The metal has cooled to a fleshly warmth.

  He nods his helmet, one, two
...

  Together the three leap around the jutting bricks and into the gap.

  Bullets peel the two men away from Ilya. They die in a second, in grunts, their alchemy completed. The Germans in the fortress yard have presighted a machine gun at the gap. Ilya feints right and dives left. A vein of bullets pulses inches from his waist. There’s nowhere to hide. He runs right at the enemy machine gun, no dodge, no confusion. He lowers his submachine gun and fires to empty his weapon, to empty himself through it. He screams to hasten the draining of himself into the battle.

  Ahead, the machine gun is silenced. Ilya doesn’t slow to wonder at it. He slides to his belly and lifts his gun to cover the gap. He takes shots at scurrying Germans, knocks down two. Behind him comes Misha’s shout, “Urrah, Ilyushka! Urrah!” The platoon courses through, firing and bellowing his name. On top of the parapets, Red soldiers from the assault boats have climbed the walls with ropes and grappling hooks and now pour into the courtyard. Someone up there brandishes a crimson Soviet banner.

  In minutes, the courtyard swarms with hand-to-hand fighting. Panzerfausts and grenades blow at close range, bullets knit back and forth across the yard. Ilya stays at the heart of the battle, dropping his gun to pick up another and another when each is spent. The combat quickly becomes savage. The point is soon passed where surrender is not an option; defenders and attackers alike fight in the passages, staircases, and courtyard not for country or leaders but for the unadorned human lust to kill an enemy. For an hour, every man in the ancient Prussian fortress is unleashed to further Ilya’s cause, to kill.

  By noon the German garrison is overwhelmed. The trickery of the air bombardment last night and this morning worked; most of the enemy were caught outside the fortress when the Red infantry attacked over the dikes and across the river.

  Ilya sits alone crumpled against a pillar when Misha finds him. The little man doesn’t have much of a body over which to spread such weariness and fright.

  His voice is listless when he slides down another column to sit opposite Ilya.

  “Well. We need a pew platoon again.”

  Ilya says nothing. There are no words after this kind of fighting. Smoke is not a word, blood is not, and they are the only responses.

  The two sit facing each other for a long while. Soldiers and officers walk about, marching off prisoners, collecting weapons and bodies, doing the aftermath of the struggle for the Küstrin citadel.

  Ilya closes his eyes but opens them when he finds too much there. He leaves them open, preferring the world outside him, it’s less unsettling, even this world. He watches Misha and feels himself go blank.

  After a time Misha looses a low chuckle. The sound is damaged, like a broken music box. Slowly he slides over from his post.

  “Now, Ilyushka, don’t bite me.”

  The little man skids close to look at Ilya’s wounds, all snips, nothing deep. Ilya doesn’t move under the scrutiny. Misha himself bears several bullet marks. When he’s satisfied that Ilya isn’t going to bleed to death propped against his pillar, he moves away.

  Another crooked snicker escapes Misha.

  “Well, I guess we’ll be lieutenants next.”

  * * * *

  SEVEN

  * * *

  March 30, 1945, 1:50 p.m.

  Aboard the President’s train, the Ferdinand Magellan

  Approaching Warm Springs, Georgia

  B

  eside the train tracks citizens stand waving hankies and flags and pink palms. A warm Good Friday afternoon puts them in shirtsleeves. These are farmers and small-town folk, the best believers in democracy, the givers of sons and daughters to the war, the poor and honest for whom Roosevelt has crusaded in all his four terms.

  He is so tired, he must be careful not to let his forehead rest against the windowpane watching them flow past. Behind the people, fields of alfalfa and corn are still mostly crested dirt, little green tufts show where America’s wealth will grow under this sun. Peach trees blossom. Evergreens and oaks freshen their color. Nature keeps most of her promises. Roosevelt likes that thought.

  He wants to be done. He wants to shake the constraints of office after thirteen years and keep some promises to himself, see how he could bloom as a natural man outside the presidency. His vigor will come back, he’s sure of it. He’s said this before, privately to his aides, that he’ll resign once the United Nations is operating. Let Truman take over, let power pass from the Hudson to the Missouri. But he’s never before spoken seriously of quitting; always he does it in jest or to cheer up Eleanor, or address his doctors’ concerns, every time he’s said he’ll toss in the towel he’s done it just to put a temporary stop to some irksome discussion of worry over his health. But now he thinks he might mean it. He just might want this over with.

  The overnight ride down from Washington was restless. Roosevelt slept in fits on the train. He’d spent the previous four days in Hyde Park trying to restore himself. It didn’t work, he still feels weary. He stayed in the White House just for yesterday afternoon, enough to sign some cables to Churchill drafted by his staff and hold some luncheon meetings. Now he intends to rejuvenate with two weeks beside the ravine at the Little White House in Warm Springs. He’s got his stamp collection with him. He’ll take long country drives, he’ll watch the sun set over the mountain. He’ll hold a book in his lap so no one will bother him, and nap. Anna couldn’t come this time, her six-year-old boy got a last-minute gland infection. He asked Eleanor not to come, said he didn’t want to take her away from her important agendas—she’s never liked Georgia anyway, all the poverty and segregation, honeyed accents and Spanish moss. Instead, he has his two favorite female cousins along for company, so he’ll be pampered by women.

  A mile outside the Warm Springs station the momentum of the train breaks. It’s the moment of anticipation in all journeys, when the trip slows to arrival. Roosevelt does not feel the accustomed tinge of pleasure. He wants the train to accelerate and keep going, not stop, not creep at this creaky, tippy speed. The ride was better, life was more of an even thing when it was lived faster. He doesn’t want to be in Warm Springs to heal. He wants to be a movie cowboy and climb out on the roof of the train cars, fight a villain, duck a coming tunnel. Roosevelt misses pace. He misses the coal shoveled into his belly, the resultant fire. He wants the train to charge on forever.

  He pulls his face from the glowing window. He wants no more Georgia strangers looking in at him. He eases his head against the seat back. His secretary Grace Tully moves down the aisle to him. She braces herself with each step against the rocking floor.

  “Mr. President. We’re almost at the station. Let me take these papers and put them away.”

  “Toss ‘em out the window.” Roosevelt would like to smile when he makes this joke but he doesn’t.

  “Sit down, Grace.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Roosevelt takes a hand from his lap and lays it on the tabletop. Under his fingertips are thin paper sheets and folders. Strong veins run ridges into his big hand. He still has the wrists of a boxer and a hero.

  “You looking forward to the vacation?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. You could use some real rest and quiet.”

  He meant to ask about her feelings, but if she wants to turn it back to him, that’s fine.

  He taps a finger on one of the sheets.

  “You know what this one says?”

  Grace Tully doesn’t take her eyes from his. Roosevelt observes her face reflect everything on his own. He crinkles his eyes before he speaks, she does the same, she catches the identical expression of disappointment he tries to mount. She’s like all the women around him, sympathetic, Harry is that way too, all but Eleanor.

  “It says I’m a liar.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not true.”

  “Says so right here. Stalin calls me a liar. Not in so many words, of course. He says the talks with that Nazi in Switzerland are just a smoke screen. That while we’re negotiating with
the Germans, Hitler’s moved three more divisions out of Italy to the Russian front. Right here, Grace, listen: This circumstance is irritating to the Soviet Command and is grounds for distrust!’

  Grace Tully repeats the last word. “Distrust. Oh for heaven’s sake!”This time she leads the way, her scrunching face sends Roosevelt the cue and he follows.

  “I know, I know. I can’t be trusted by the Russians, that’s what Joe’s saying.”

  “After all you’ve done for him.”

  Roosevelt enjoys that he doesn’t have to say this for himself.

  He taps another sheet, as though to wake it, to have it tell out loud what perfidy resides on it.