The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (4 page)

“Almost there, I think.”

Ilya halts their slither to get his bearings. Winter-naked trees rise all around. Between every trunk there is a tank, a T-34; there must be a hundred silhouettes he can make out from where he and Misha lie in the starless gloom. The tanks are silent, turrets elevated like saluting troops, all pointing west toward the German lines. Behind these tanks there are a thousand more, and behind them rows of artillery pieces by the ten thousands arranged backward by caliber. Men and machines, everywhere—two full armies, half of another—crammed into this fourteen-mile-wide bridgehead which Zhukov captured on the west bank of the Vistula in August. Another two tank armies are lined up behind them on the east bank of the river. South of Zhukov’s force, there is another, larger bridgehead on the river, where there is massed another battle group just as big under Koniev.

In days or weeks, Ilya thinks, the signal will come. This gigantic, pent-up hammer will strike west into Poland, then pulverize all the way to Berlin. Nothing will stop us.

Once this battle starts, I will get it all back. More. There are a million men around me. But I will be noticed.

I will be cleansed.

Through the trees Ilya catches a glimmer of lantern light dimmed by the thick canvas of a tent. It is a strange sallow glow, a mushroom of light on a forest floor covered by sleeping metal beasts. Officers, Ilya thinks. Only they will have a lantern lit this time of the morning. Only officers will be up this late gathered around a bottle and a deck of cards and letters scribbled for home. Ilya knows. The regular foot soldiers aren’t drinking right now; they’re resting, if they can find the comfort under a tarpaulin or in a hole to do so. When the cold sun is overhead the lowly Ivans have too many artillery pieces to camouflage, roads to grade, tons and tons of food, ammo, and fuel to lug forward, privies to empty, garbage to bury. Fortifications must be built and trenches dug in case the enemy in the dark decides to go on the offensive first. The railway tracks through eastern Poland are the wrong gauge, they have to be widened for Russian supply trains. Wreckage from the frequent German artillery barrages must be repaired or hauled away. Field trips are taken to the fetid death camp in Majdanek, liberated by the Red Army last July, where political commissars drive home even harder the point that the Germans are monsters. No, those men inside the warm tent have their feet up. Ilya begins to crawl toward them. Officers. He knows this because four months ago he was one of them.

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 birth 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.