Сергей Огольцов – DIY Masterpiece (страница 7)

'Understood… Now, soldiers, regarding the combat mission and the current situation. All unit personnel, rest and prepare. We've been encircled for several days already, and therefore we must refresh and build up our strength. Because in the morning we'll be breaking out of the cauldron again. What’s been left unbroken today, we'll finish off tomorrow, and with our white bodies we'll make the cursed fascists use up all of their cursed ammunition, no matter how many of our forces there remain… And you, Shchurin, don't worry too much and loosen up your vigilance. The NKVD Major, your buddy at the division headquarters, doesn't give a damn about such talk. Over there, behind that grove, the said officer is relaxing in the car with his superior. They have nowhere to rush. That fleeting Junkers put a fat full stop mark to the officers' careers. Didn't you see it?'

'Yes, that’s right!'

'You mean, “Wow! How right the bomb was dropped”? Or, “Right, I didn't see it”?’

'Yes, I saw it, Comrade Platoon Commander… Junior Lieutenant.'

'Well done! I commend you for your service, Sergeant. Now, Private Zhilin, under my command, is moving out to that ravine to provide combat security. You'll be there at 2:30 to relieve him, and make sure you're on time, since you’ve grabbed the watch from Sergeant Major Krynchenko.'

'So, Comrade Junior Lieutenant… what does he need it for now?'

'You have all night to consider this matter, until 6:00. Then the Germans will drink their coffee, saddle up the bombers, and be back with their surprise to this here pocket. By 7:30, Shchurin, you have a terrific chance to meet the Sergeant Major and report to him: why he does not need a watch now.’

Shchurin's right hand, clenched into a fist at attention, twitched slightly. His wrist pressed tighter against his hip the hard bulge of the wristwatch, covered by the frayed cuff of his tunic.

Can he see right through him, that bastard? No wonder the Staff Major instructed to keep an eye peeled on the platoon commander…

. . .

The Major, however, in the dim condensing twilight turning to night, was completely uninterested in all this (as the Junior Lieutenant had already mentioned).

Stretched supine, as far as the back seat would allow, he motionlessly kept his face up, just like the Brigadier General to his right. Both of their gazes were glued to the ceiling of the cabin, nothing but holes stained with the brains of Agrafena, the Brigadier General's telephone operator.

She, sitting in front, had nothing left to tilt back or turn; above her shoulders, there remained just void instead of the cheeky whore whose yummy forms all the staff officers licked their jaws at, while they still wanted something… as they were alive yet… before this here cauldron…

The driver, his face wearily resting on the steering wheel, didn't notice that the M-car's door was torn off, that his left hand had been hanging outside for hours, that the tunic on his back was covered in brown bloodstains, impossible to tell whose—his?… the passengers'?…

In civilian life, Vadim Krynchenko’s photo was a fixture on the Voronezh City Taxi Depot Honor Board. He could put apart completely and reassemble his car, – named after Comrade Molotov, rolled off the assembly line at the Gorky plant, where it was made by workers of the Soviet Union after designs from the Ford Company of America (still bourgeois), under a 10-year contract, – screw by screw. However, even he couldn't repair the sieve left by a single bomb from a Junkers fighter plane in a ground-hugging flight…

A month ago, before the offensive began, he received orders to report to division headquarters, where a Major from the Special Department ‘Death to Spies’ bored with his glare the private reporting at his office… That's how Vadim became the division commander's driver.

When he popped back into his platoon to collect his backpack, the men envied the new, wide stripes of a Sergeant Major on his shoulder straps. Yep! You can't keep walking through all of the war!

. . .

The all-knowing bastard Platoon Commander sneered at Shchurin's tense posture, as he muffled the ticking of his watch by pressing it tightly against his hip.

‘At ease, Sergeant! Platoon! Fall out! Private Zhilin, follow me.’

Junior Lieutenant Romanov, without looking back, confidently walked into the darkness of the cratered field.

He strode toward the road, in a welter of soldiers bodies—almost on top of each other—mixed with parts of themselves and clods of earth thrown up by the explosions; where the skeletons of T-34 tanks bombed to parts during the day, the smashed to splinters stumps of the cavalry division's supply wagons, amid the remnants of gutted horses and other graphically disgusting chaos, mercifully concealed by the soft darkness of the young May night that had just descended on all 15 square kilometers of the "Barvenkovo Salient", – the crowning achievement of the united forces of 11 Red Army armies aimed at recapturing the city of Kharkov, occupied by the Nazi invaders. This attempt claimed the lives of 280,000 Red Army soldiers, as well as 20,000 troops on the German side (this figure includes the losses of auxiliary units from Hungary, Italy, and Romania).

In the future, this operation will be called the "Kharkiv Meat Grinder." Historians will note with surprise the incredible crowding in these 15 square kilometers, where more than 300,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were crammed. Analysts will put forward possible reasons for driving them into the "cauldron" – under incessant raids by bombers, which met no resistance neither from the ground nor in the air; under long-range artillery shelling from large-caliber (150 mm) guns.

Yes, it is no secret that there was a massacre of inexperienced, newly mobilized fighters by experienced troops with a long service record. The list of virtually unbroken victories in the European Theater of Operations.

Red Army conscripts came to replace the 1,000,000 fallen in the Battle of Moscow. There was no time to train them in combat tactics. The young men—not in quick dashes, but clasping hands to keep the fallen in the common line—cried "Hurrah!" as they advanced toward the enemy in broken lines of a loose circle dance, only to fall to the incessant roar of German machine guns.

‘Zu viele von ihnen! Das Maschinengewehr hält nicht! O, mein Gott! (They are too many! The machine-gun will not withstand the load! O, my God!)

God listened. The Russians retreated to attack the next day, and the next—so was the order… To be hit by one or another of the 7,700 tons of bombs expended during Operation Fredericus, to be caught in the explosion of a cannon shell fired from over the horizon, guided by spotters on the hills or by reconnaissance aircraft (the Soviet aces didn't interfere; their antediluvian aircraft had long since been shot down).

So it was, completely unlike the promise of the song "If tomorrow is war, we’ll march only forward… "

They failed to bury the enemy under the shower of their hurled hats, even from all 640,000 soldiers and officers involved in the Kharkov operation, including the helmets of tankers from 1,200 combat vehicles, excluding the horses of the 7 cavalry divisions; the animals served without headgear.

– - -

Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but it's out of pain. I had a country, and I was proud of it, and I was happy to live in such a great, heroic country, which had known so much grief (20 million people died in the Great Patriotic War alone). But why?

Over the years, holes began to creep into the image of my beloved country, from which a vile stench whiffed. The damned question kept creeping up more and more often: why?

Why was I taught to admire the rapists of the looting Food Squads? To love Pavlik Morozov? To be proud of the state system that burned Komarov and finished off Gagarin?

Lies won't patch up the holes; they'll only multiply them. Now I know that 20 million did not perish at the hands of the invaders, that the figure was brazenly falsified—it included 800,000 killed by the Leningrad City Executive Committee during the make-believe siege of the city, defensed by three times as many soldiers as in the German and Finnish units on the approaches to the Northern Capital, and the rations of the "besieged" troops were equal to, and sometimes exceeded, those of the attackers.

The "blockade" never closed; 70,000 horses were kept in the surrounding areas of the Leningrad region (the animals were unaware of the "blockade," and veterinarians in uniform received medals for preserving the herd), but they were unable to share their daily ration of oats with the dying. The condemned were not let out from the "besieged" city by the Red Army block-posts. High-calorie smoked meats were distributed among the "privileged" citizens, who made up more than half of the city's two-plus million residents (the necessary labor force, party activists, and so on).

I found it strange to realize that there were two categories of "siege survivors"—those doomed to death from the start, and those who had to live on, knowing but not remembering.