Stalemate (The Red Gambit Series) (6 page)

Lee-Enfields, bolts being worked furiously, added their own .303” rounds to the wall of metal into which the Cossacks of the 3rd Battalion charged.

A bugle sounded, bringing to the battlefield a feeling of days long gone by, of times when Napoleon and his peers had held sway in matters of war.

Many bullets found trees or occasionally nothing, hurtling on into the approaching night beyond.

Those that were left found flesh, horse and man, in equal measure.

Two hundred and ninety-one riders and mounts had started the attack, the remaining strength of the experienced cavalry unit.

Now, dead men and horses filled the woods in front of the Gurkha positions, the attack losing momentum as the trees restricted alternative manoeuvre and obstructed the second wave.

A
Soviet officer rode forward, picking his way through a number of wounded beasts, commanding his men to dismount and fight on foot until a rifle round plucked him from the saddle.

Angered more by the loss of their mounts than the deaths of their comrades, small groups of Cossacks started to organize and push forward, their superiority in numbers finally coming into play.

Soviet mortars were quickly brought into firing position, and accurate shells dropped on the defensive lines once more, buying time for the attack to be restarted.

Some cavalrymen deployed their own machine-guns
, and a deadly exchange commenced, lives being claimed on both sides.

Kazakov opened his eyes, the effects of his collision with the ground heavy on him still.

His horse had been chopped from underneath him and collapsed immediately, throwing the old Cossack into the forest floor face first, temporarily stunning him.

Spitting out a combination of blood, earth
, and teeth, Kazakov tried to orient himself, whilst the self-preservation part of his brain checked that he was in some sort of reasonable cover.

Babaev watched him, desperate to attract his attention but unable to move, unable to shout, unable to cry out for release.

His mount had also been shot down in the charge and the Captain had been thrown off as the dying animal fell forward, hurling him against a tree.

That would have been painful enough
, but Babaev was still on that tree, transfixed by a stubby branch root that stood proudly out of his back.

Hanging two feet off the ground, the Cossack officer was dying in excruciating pain
, but his damaged lungs and windpipe did not permit him the release of screaming.

He tried to speak
, and managed a tortured sound, enough to attract the attention of the man he had recently humiliated.

Kazakov examined the apparition, noting the large amount of blood and protruding wood with a detached professional interest.

Shaking his head to rid himself of the final effects of his fall, he rolled over to the base of Babaev’s tree.

The officer’s eyes were streaming with tears, blood trickling from his nose and mouth, occasionally surging,
fresh and crimson, occasionally absent.

“Shoot me
, you bastard. For fuck’s sake, shoot me.”

The act of speaking almost achieved the same result, as the effort induced coughing that brought on more bleeding.

The former Sergeant opened his holster, extracting a Tokarev pistol.

“That’s right
, you fucking bastard, shoot me!”

Checking that he was unobserved,
Kazakov spoke quietly to the Captain.

“The pleasure is all mine
, Kapitan, all mine.”

He pulled the trigger, sending a single bullet into his nemesis.

Not quite as Babaev intended, for the muzzle of the pistol was against the officer’s genitalia, which was destroyed by the passage of the heavy bullet.

Leaving the horribly wounded man to die,
Kazakov looked around for a place to hide until the attack was over.

One rush of Cossacks had made it
across the road to the 7th Platoon position, withering and dying in the direct fire from Brens and Stens, the brave Russians hacked down to a man.

The position around the damaged Vickers seemed vulnerable, so Captain Graham
, the company second in command, moved his handpicked reserve group there to bolster it before another thrust was made.

That attack came two minutes later
, and what resulted was a fight more reminiscent of an older age, of bloody Cannae, or of Alexander at Gaugamela.

The cavalrymen had gathered and launched a disciplined and focussed attack, centering on the position adjacent to Gurung’s Vickers.

A flurry of grenades had caused heavy casualties in the centre and Soviet left side, and DP light machine guns lashed into the machine-gun position just as Graham arrived. Smoke from the Soviet mortars completed the hasty preparation for a rush.

The experienced Nepalese prepared themselves, the remaining Brens parting the smoke with small bursts of fire, the gunners unable to see if their efforts were bearing fruit.

As more grenades emerged from the smoke, others, hurled by the Gurkhas, flew in the reverse direction.

Shrapnel flayed the wearers of both uniforms, flesh and bone giving way to hot metal, the defenders ravaged by heavy casualties, the offensive force decimated in turn.

The combination of the failing light, the woods, and the flash of weapons, made for a surreal atmosphere.

A riderless horse, wounded and p
anicked, ran through the no man’s land, its body struck by the bullets from both sides before it dropped in front of the old German trench and coughed out its final seconds.

Suddenly,
Allied control was lost, as Graham was felled by a stone thrown up by a grenade, and the Jemadar shot down and killed by a speculative burst from the other side of the smoky divide.

CHM Gurung was already down, a bullet in his left shoulder as he had directed the Vickers
’ fire against a large group of cavalrymen.

The Cossacks charged forward on foot, firing as they ran.

Again, the Gurkhas claimed lives with their accurate fire, but lost men in return.

The Vickers, swiftly relocated to a secondary position, stuttered back into
life, and stopped the assault in its tracks, carving the leaders into pieces and driving the survivors into cover.

Soviet
cavalrymen fired back, but the Vickers pinned them in place.

One
Cossack officer attempted to relocate one of his own machine-gun teams, but he and they were betrayed by their muzzle flash, and they permanently lost interest in the battle.

The Vickers kept firing, swivelling from left to right, its damaged cooling jacket
losing hot water and steam as the constant firing increased the temperature.

A DP burst struck home and the gunner rolled away
, clutching his stomach.

One of the loaders kept the weapon going, preventing the Cossacks from rising up and continuing the assault.

Gurung moved gingerly, his wounded shoulder reminding him of its wretched state. He took over firing the gun whilst the loader went back to his task of joining the ammo belts together, so the gun could keep firing.

An enterprising Cossack had crawled forward to attempt a grenade at the new Vickers position. As he pulled back his arm
, a rifleman shot him in the face, the primed grenade dropping back to earth, and putting the brave man out of his misery.

The
Soviet battalion commander ordered his mortars into one last effort, the last of their rounds to be fired off on to the 7th and 8th Platoon positions. He organised as much of his available manpower as time permitted, and focussed them on the intended breakthrough point.

A salvo of 82mm shells fell amongst Gurkha positions, one spectacularly striking an ammunition stash, sending a shower of .303, and unarmed grenades, in all directions.

A few fires started, illuminating the defenders from behind.

The third salvo saw a
high-explosive round drop close to the Vickers, knocking the weapon over, killing one of the loaders, and throwing both Gurung and the other man off their feet.

The Cossacks rose up again and this time they were not going to be stopped.

Submachine guns spewed out streams of bullets one way, Bren and Sten guns replying, each second the volume of fire dropping as another man was silenced by a bullet strike.

B Company’s commander, an experienced Major, had
realised the difficulty and committed his final reserve to 8th Platoon’s aid. Screaming like a mad man, he led forward a special forty-man group, consisting of men from the Battalion carrier platoon and B Company headquarters, and completed by the some members of the battalion pipe band.

They arrived at the same moment as the Cossacks penetrated the front line positions and a gutter fight commenced, the Major knocked down immediately by SVT rounds, dying silently as his men swept forward
and into the Cossacks.

A sudden surge in one of the fires illuminated part of the battlefield.

CHM Gurung saw the danger and reached for a nearby Enfield. Picking up the weapon, he fought the pain in his shoulder and fired into a group of Soviet cavalrymen sneaking around the left side of the main position.

The survivors withdrew
, dragging two of their number with them, leaving a third motionless behind them.

Successfully seeking out his own Thompson, Gurung discarded the rifle and checked that the men around him were ready to go.

The melee to his front was growing in intensity, and on the left side, hand-to-hand combat had developed.

The Cossacks were lovers of their long Shashkas, and remembering how the deadly blades had given them the edge in many such encounters with the Germanski, a number of men bared their weapons and rushed in close, whirling the sabres in time-honoured fashion.

Starting on the Gurkha right, the front positions started to descend into chaos. Men, too close for modern weapons of war to do their jobs, fell back on more ancient tools for the close-in killing.

At first, rifle butts and bayonets responded to Shashkas, but it was not long before the Gurkhas discarded their guns for their weapon of choice, and the Kukris flashed in the last light of the dying sun.

The Shashka was a superb weapon, slightly curved and very strong, as well as legendary for its sharpness. It was also designed to be nothing but a killing machine, a job it performed extremely efficiently in the hands of an experienced swordsman.

The
Kukri was beaten on length at seventeen and a half inches, being just about half the length of the Soviet blade. Its origins were as a work knife but, historically, the tool had converted easily into a wholly efficient weapon of war, and the strangely shaped blade meant that it delivered optimum cutting power when in the hand of a proficient soldier.

Both the Cossacks and the Gurkhas knew their craft and whilst bullets and butts still claimed lives, it was the s
harp blades of the Shashka and Kukri that did most of the killing in the awful close-quarter fighting.

Graham, recovering
, but still groggy, assessed the situation and summoned men to him. He rushed them forward to the position that was under most pressure. Halting behind it, he ordered rapid fire and bullets smashed into the cavalrymen who were gaining the upper hand there, reducing the numerical superiority of the enemy to his front.

The English C
aptain had mastered all facets of his command, from the language and culture through to being able to hold his own in the Gurkha skills, and to that end, he carried his own Kukri.

With his Webley revolver in his left hand, he raised his right hand high. Brandishing his blade, he shouted the battle
cry loud enough to hearten the men fighting to his front.

“Ayo Gurkhali! Jai Mahakali! Ayo Gurkhali!”

His small group plunged forward into the fighting, immediately driving back the nearest cavalry troopers.

The sides fell briefly apart, and firing grew as blades were substituted for guns, both sides shocked by the nature of the fighting.

A burst from a PPSh knocked over a number of Gurkhas to the left of Gurung’s position.

In the centre, it seemed that Graham’s counter-attack had succeeded in restoring stability.

On the right, part of the mixed force had rushed to bolster the sagging 6th Platoon, but the fighting was hard and bloody.

The CSM made a quick assessment of where the next attack would focus.

It seemed obvious to the experienced NCO.

It would be on the left, where he was positioned, so Gurung readied his men for the charge.

The PPSh’s did more work, and another two riflemen fell, encouraging the Cossacks to push in once more.