Storymania - Russian Front by Aidan Steer

Russian Front (16)
Aidan Steer

CAT AND MOUSE?

Not for the first time, Hugh wondered about the tank.

The battle had stalled over the preceding two days. The dreadful struggle seemed to have exhausted both sides. Light snow had fallen yesterday and last night, but now, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the sky was a bright, metallic blue. The temperature was a degree or so below freezing.

The German super-sniper had arrived and made his presence felt in this area, killing a number of soldiers. The victims were not foot-sloggers but specialists, including an officer. The quality of the casualties suggested a trained marksman who picked his targets. Significantly, a Russian sniper team had been sent in to deal with the problem and both had been killed within hours. Whoever was doing the killing knew his business and how to look after himself.

And then there were the leaflets mocking Yuri’s recent inactivity. These had been showered over the Russian-held areas of the city. The Germans had learned that Yuri had been wounded, but speculated in sneering terms that he had lost his nerve. Evidently Hugh’s efforts at Pavlov’s house had gone unnoticed. More worryingly, the Germans had also found out or guessed that there was some relationship between Yuri and Tania. ‘Is Yuri too busy with his tart to come out and fight like a man?’, ran the headline.

Back in their insanitary little cubby-hole in the headquarters bunker, Hugh had asked Sergei how the Germans had got their information. Sergei had simply shrugged and said ‘deserters.’

Hugh had volunteered to scout the area to see if he could pick up any of the sniper’s sign. ‘It can’t do any harm to let “Yuri” be seen in the front lines one last time,’ he had pointed out.

‘We can’t afford to let you get killed or, what’s worse, captured,’ replied Sergei, biting his lip with anxiety.

‘I’ll be careful, you can be sure of that. I’m not suggesting any deeds of derring-do. I want to stay alive. I could just crawl into the area and see what I can see.’

‘I will help you,’ Tania promised.

Sergei, still looking worried, had talked it over with Kruschev, and received permission for Hugh to make a cautious sortie to the lines in the area where the Major was thought to be operating.

That night, he and Tania had constructed a hide about fifty feet out into No-Man’s Land, pausing to freeze into immobility if a flare went up. Better to keep still rather than fall to the floor. The human eye notices movement above all else.

The hide was little more than a belly scrape, not deep enough for them to do more than lie flat without being seen. The top of the hide was covered with a very wide wooden door acquired by the engineers at the bunker, laid flat and covered with painted canvas. Four wooden pegs at each corner of the door, outside the area of the scrape, held it between five and six inches off the ground, thus making it the hide’s roof. A long piece of gauze, blotched with shades of gray and black, was attached to the door and hung down and around for about one hundred and eighty degrees. A piece of gray blanket was attached to the back of the door, to act as an entrance flap at the back and prevent light from getting in at the back and the sides. Everything had been carefully blotched with shades of paint to match the surrounding rubble.

After they had placed the door-ceiling over the hide, they had carefully covered the roof of the hide with bits and pieces from the surrounding terrain: broken brick, dirt, an occasional shard of wood and an empty tin can. The best materials for camouflaging a hide are to be found in the immediate vicinity.

Hugh had decided to build the hide because he wondered if the Major might be operating in No Man’s Land. He knew something about German sharpshooters: they tended not to have a tradition of long-distance shooting. When sniping skills had first been introduced to the German Army, during the last war, the personnel had been drawn from the great forested estates, where hunting took place at relatively close range. By contrast, snipers in the British Army were often used to shooting at distance on mountains and moorland. German snipers usually preferred to get relatively close to their targets, and were often to be found in cover in front of their own lines. The purpose of the hide was to get as close as possible to any cover a German sniper might be using.

Once they had finished their construction work, Hugh and Tania had gone back to the bunker for a bite of food and some rest before returning to crawl into the hide through the rear flap half an hour before dawn. They had dressed warmly in carefully dirtied gray overalls over Russian battle-dress, with their rifles, water bottles, and some bread. Tania had even managed to scrounge a thermos of hot tea from God knew where. They had blackened their faces with soot and Hugh was wearing a piece of dark-colored cloth he had picked up somewhere around his shaved head as a kind of bandanna. Tania, who had tied the knot, said it made him look like a pirate. She was wearing a black woolen cap.

He stretched his legs in the hide. He was cold and stiff but he had a good view of the battlefield and the enemy lines. He was lying full-length and if he raised his head cautiously until it touched the wood of the hide’s cover, his eyes were just above ground level. Snow had stuck to parts of the gauze, obscuring his view of some features, but he resisted the temptation to poke or shake the material with his fingers. He was facing almost due West and he could safely use his binoculars for a few more hours. Once the Sun moved around he would put them away and rely on his eyesight, which was in any case exceptionally good.

Hugh looked down from his binoculars to his watch and murmured to Tania. ‘Eleven-twelve. Some vapor or smoke - query cooking? - corner of building, eleven o’clock, two-fifty yards.’ She made a note in Cyrillic script, then looked at him. ‘Uh, two-thirty meters. I think,’ he added. ‘Yes, two-thirty.’

Tania sighed and finished making the note of his observation. He could sense Tania’s growing boredom, saddled as she was with having to do all the note-taking, but this couldn’t be helped. Any writing had to be in Russian. He wasn’t bored himself. This part of the hunt didn’t bother him. You had to be prepared to wait for hours if necessary. And then, often enough, for some time after that. He put his eyes to his binoculars again. He looked immediately ahead of them, then scanned around to the right, checking details, waiting.

But the tank kept drawing his gaze. It was a Russian vehicle, a T34, side on to him, its hull pushed up against a pile of bricks. He could just see tracks that must have been blown off the far side of the tank and were lying on the ground in front of it, curving like a metallic crocodile. He had heard about the T34. It had a reliable diesel engine, a difficult-to-hit profile, and broad tracks to enable it to cross the varied terrain of the Soviet Union in baking summer, muddy autumn and snow-covered winter.

The chassis was designed to sit rather high off the ground for crossing rivers. Could someone be hiding underneath there, shooting between the rubber covered bogie wheels? They would have to be mad to do so. A muzzle flash would stand out like a star shell in the shadows under there. Perhaps he was getting bored, exhausted with staring out at a wasteland with nothing happening. The tank seemed to be the only recognizable object in a desert of rubble. It had become fascinating.

Hugh moved his binoculars back to directly ahead. Three hundred yards away, there was a movement. Very slowly, what looked like the top of a steel helmet appeared above a parapet. It stayed there, hardly moving. An inviting target. He half expected the impetuous, passionate Tania to reach for her rifle but she didn’t. She looked at him.

‘We’re not here to shoot, are we?’ she said. ‘It might be a dummy head. Even if it’s a target it might simply be the stupidest fascist in the Sixth Army, who will die soon anyway if he carries on like that. And a muzzle flash might give away our position.’

Hugh turned back to looking at the tank through his binoculars. The Major isn’t the only one in this neck of the woods who knows his business, he thought.

‘I killed Yuri,’ Tania said suddenly.

The words were three teardrops of unbearable guilt. Hugh glanced at her, then back to his binoculars. They weren’t here to talk, but he was curious.

‘I thought Yuri died on a mission.’

‘Yes. I was with him. He was training me. We were doing what you and I are doing now, watching and waiting.’

‘Training you?’

‘He taught me to shoot. When the fascists came he persuaded the High Command to set up a school, a snipers’ school, in an old factory. He trained others who trained us. It was all very basic – marksmanship, camouflage. You were supposed to learn the rest out here,’ she nodded to the German lines.

Hugh let her go on, unburdening herself.

‘I was about to finish my course. I was eager to get out and kill some fascists. Yuri appeared – and I mean that, just appeared, suddenly he was there among us, his stealth was amazing. He bawled out the major for not posting sentries and a junior officer scuttled off to find some.

‘He gathered us around him in a half-circle, lighting a cigarette and talking in a soft voice. “Headquarters need some information,” he said. We had to move closer to hear him. After weeks of crawling around the battlefield at night, when the slightest noise might have meant death, he could hardly raise his voice above a whisper.

‘He told us to get spare ammunition, field glasses, notebooks and pencils. Water and iron rations for two days, in case we had to go to ground. He was going to teach us how to gather intelligence behind enemy lines. Just like that. We hadn’t even finished the course. Our lives were needed at once.

‘We started to get out kit together while he wandered off to see what had happened to the officer who had been detailed to get sentries.’

Tania looked at Hugh sadly. ‘Yuri and I were lovers.’

Her frankness almost shocked Hugh. ‘You were … I assume you mean before the war. Or before the Germans came.’

She almost smiled. ‘Hugh, when you might get killed at any moment and almost certainly will in good time, a bunker is as romantic as any palace bedroom. A smoky oil stove, a little vodka …’

He couldn’t help reddening. Her eyes twinkled, teasing him.

‘It’s all right, Lieutenant English public school. We didn’t take all our clothes off. Which as just as well,’ she added, ‘neither of us had had anything like a bath for weeks.’

Hugh felt jealousy as much as embarrassment. He looked through his binoculars. The steel helmet had vanished. ‘Tell me about the reconnaissance. It’s useful to know how you lot do these things.’ He glanced at her. ‘If you don’t mind, that is …’

‘When our group – three of us, me and two chaps – were ready I went to find Yuri. I was hoping for a chance to be alone. He was by a doorway. The young officer had been shot by a fascist sniper and was lying on the ground. It was very sad. He was only nineteen, very merry and good fun to be with. He was an athlete before the war, he told me. He looked like he was sleeping, there was even a slight smile on his face. But he wasn’t breathing.

‘Yuri was crouched down to one side of the door, using a small mirror to look around outside. I was on the opposite side of the door and I jumped across. He slapped me across the face.

‘”I need you alive, you stupid cow. Don’t do that again.”

‘He struck you!’ Hugh said in surprise.

‘Not hard. Discipline is different in Russian Army,’ shrugged Tania. ‘And it showed he cared whether I lived or died. I tried to kiss him, but he pushed me away. We both looked at the boy. Yuri said that he was wondering how the boy got his nose broken. Then I looked at the boy’s face and I could see, his nose had been broken when he was young.

‘”Boxing match?’” I said. “Falling out of a tree? Who cares?” Yuri didn’t like me saying that, but he just stood up.

‘”Well, he’s got plenty to keep him company” he said, “and the madness isn’t over yet, not by a long way.” I hadn’t heard him talk like that before.

‘So we got the others and had something to eat. We had just started getting cans of American Spam. I translated the writing on the can for the others. We all thought it was deliciously rich meat. We slept for a while, huddled in our blankets and greatcoat, and I looked across at Yuri. I wanted him to give me some kind of special look, but he wouldn’t play. He saw me gazing at him, rolled over with his back to me and went to sleep.

‘Yuri woke us after dark. We checked our equipment. He made us smear mud over the shiny parts of the new rifles. Then he made us jump up and down in our kit to see if we had anything on us or in our pockets that clinked or rattled. We blacked up our faces and moved out.

‘He had already briefed us on our mission. We were supposed to go to a particular apartment block and hide on the top floor. Then, the next day, we were to observe enemy troop movements and report back. A radio operator was already there, he had been sent from a signals section.

‘It took us three hours to cover the one or two kilometers to the house. Much of the time Yuri would just stop, crouch or lie down, and do nothing but listen. There was a battle going on, I could see flares over the center of the city. Some tracer bullets came our way but they were too high. We could hear our soldiers around us repairing trenches and dugouts for the next day’s fighting.

Tania smiled. ‘We had stopped for a while and I was looking at the flares and I remembered something my mother told me about a winter festival in England. You all light fires in your gardens and have fireworks?’

‘Guy Fakes’ Night, yes’, said Hugh. ‘November the fifth.’

‘Guy Fox night!’ Hugh didn’t correct her. ‘I remember now! Anyway, Yuri was cross and told me to shut up. We just lay there for an age, but probably not more than twenty minutes. Yuri would have stayed there for days until it was safe to move. The funny thing was, the man at the rear had vanished by the time we got to the apartment block. Nobody knew what had happened to him, he just wasn’t there when we got to our destination.

‘Might he have got lost?’ suggested Hugh.

‘Perhaps,’ shrugged Tania. ‘He hasn’t turned up since. Perhaps his night vision wasn’t good and he got left behind. It’s possible he deserted but I don’t think so. He seemed a steady kind of man, and we’re all volunteers.’ She looked at Hugh. ‘He was just another soldier who disappeared in the middle of a war, never to be seen again.

There was nothing to say to that. After a moment Tania continued her story. ‘The house we had arrived at was about four stories high, and it was more or less intact except that all the windows had been blown out and an entire wall was missing. It was like a doll’s house with one side taken away. The stairs were on the exposed side of the house. Yuri sent me up first’ – this said with quiet pride – ‘to reconnoiter. The radio guy was there, hiding behind some furniture in the loft, scared shitless. The barrel of his submachine gun was shaking. You couldn’t blame him, all alone behind enemy lines, hearing somebody come up the stairs. I gave him the code word and we gave him some vodka, slaps on the back and so on.

‘Twelve hours later it was mid afternoon and I was bored shitless.’ Hugh smiled as she went on. ‘We had been peering through our field glasses and making notes for hours. Yuri told us that headquarters was particularly keen on knowing about the general state of morale among the Germans. So, apart from location, numbers, insignia on their shoulder flashes, all that stuff, we had to jot down whether they looked well-fed or hungry, clean or dirty, tired or fresh. When you hate the fascists as much as I do, it’s a little irritating to focus on one little Gefreiter and try to judge whether he’s happy in his work and ask yourself - did he enjoy his lunch?’

Hugh nearly laughed out loud. A part of him was delighted that she was opening up like this. He particularly admired the appearance of wry humor. For no reason that he could fathom a picture of Sally appeared in his mind. It was so vivid he shook his head.

‘What’s wrong?’ Tania asked, gesturing with her head. ‘Is anything happening out there?’

‘No, nothing. Carry on. What happened next?’ He kept his eyes glued to his binoculars, watching the plain of ruins in front of him for movement.

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