Bezarin wanted to ask the lieutenant when on earth he had had time to write love letters. But he kept to his resolve to behave decently. It suddenly occurred to him that this boy might not be alive for more than a few hours. And that he had a young wife who meant as much to him as… Bezarin switched mental tracks, recalling Roshchin’s pride in displaying the stupid-faced bridal snapshot taken by some hung-over staff photographer in a cavernous wedding palace, where marriages were matters of scheduling and norms as surely as were military operations. The stiff, unknowing smiles in the snapshot had made Bezarin unreasonably jealous as the lieutenant insisted on showing them to his new commander.
“I suppose… that you miss her,” Bezarin said, measuring out the words.
“How could I not miss her?” Roshchin answered. “She’s a wonderful girl. The best.” There was new life in the lieutenant’s voice now.
“And… how does she like army life?”
“Oh, she’ll get used to it,” Roshchin said cheerfully. “It takes time, you know. Really, you should marry, Comrade Commander. It’s a wonderful state of affairs.”
Advice from this naive, clumsy lieutenant was almost too much for Bezarin to bear. But he let it roll off.
“You should go and get a little sleep,” Bezarin told the boy. “I don’t want you to be exhausted. We’ll get into the fight today.”
“Do you really think so?”
If we’re not caught in this stinkhole of a forest, lined up like perfect targets on a damned road, Bezarin thought.
“I’m sure of it. And I want you at your best.”
“I won’t let you down, Comrade Commander. I wouldn’t want Natalya to be ashamed of me.”
Leave me, Bezarin thought. Get out of here, you son of a bitch.
“You’ll do fine,” Bezarin said. “Now get back to your company.”
The first morning light had crept up on the two officers during their talk. To Bezarin, the mist wrapping loosely around the trees resembled dirty bandages.
“Go on,” Bezarin repeated with forced affability. “I’ll wake you in plenty of time.”
The lieutenant saluted. Something in the alacrity of it made Bezarin feel as though the boy were saluting a grizzled old general, or his father. Well, I’m not that old, Bezarin thought. Not quite. Thirty-one isn’t old enough to be the father of a senior lieutenant.
For an instant, the terrible responsibility he had for the lives of his men glimmered in front of Bezarin. Then the vision evaporated into more conditioned and customary forms of thought. But the morning felt suddenly damp, and his head ached. He repositioned his tanker’s helmet. They said that the close-fitting headgear made you go bald, if the war went on too long. What would Anna think of him with a bald pate? And what did she think of him, anyway? Did she think of him at all now? He remembered how she had liked to touch his hair. With one specific, unchanging gesture. No, a bald head would not do. My captain, she said. My fierce warrior captain. But he was a major now, and she was part of history.
Anna liked the birches when their small leaves went the color of old copper. One by one, the leaves deserted as the northern wind probed and gathered force. Then a gusting assault tore them away by the hundreds, revealing the silver-white fragility of the limbs. He remembered the feel of the buttons on a woman’s dress. And if I see her again. If ever I see her again…
Bezarin smiled mockingly at himself. You can tell her you were supposed to be commanding a tank battalion on the edge of a battle and you thought of laying her ass down in some borrowed apartment.
But his practiced cynicism did not work to its full potential now. He attempted to turn his thoughts back to his duty. Yet he knew that she would be there now, just beyond the edge of his vision. That one time in his life he had been truly afraid. Terrified to ask a thin, laughing girl with hair the color of pouring brandy if she would marry him. Because she laughed so easily when they were alone, and he knew he loved her helplessly and that he could bear losing her more easily than he could have borne her laughter in that unarmed instant. In the subtle light he could see the broad steel shoulders of his tanks taking shape up along the road, and it struck him as absurd that he should be allowed to command such lethal machines when he could not bring himself to risk the wound of a girl’s decision.
The radio spoke.
Bezarin recognized the voice of the regiment’s commander, passing a brevity code. Bezarin scrambled to copy the message, then to break it out using the sheets he kept in his breast pocket.
Movement. In ten minutes.
The time was unreasonably short after so long a wait. Bezarin hoped he could wake everyone and get all of the engines started in time. It would have been better to warm the engines slowly, since they had been sitting for several hours. Bezarin thought that he would have been wiser to have been readying his force instead of indulging in reveries. But the past was unalterable, and he forced himself to concentrate on the present.
Twenty-six tanks and a bedraggled motorized rifle company. Bezarin shouted at his crew to get their gear on and start up the tank, then he hoisted himself out of the commander’s hatch. It required an awkward maneuver to slip down over the jewel boxes of reactive armor that had been bolted onto the tank, and Bezarin hit the ground flat-footed, jolting himself fully awake. He ran along the column, shouting to the officers, nagged by a small, cranky worry over additional mechanical breakdowns. He found that the prospect of moving toward the battle did not bother him at all but filled him with unexpected and even unreasonable energy. He was delighted to find that he was not afraid when it mattered. Only scared of the girls, he decided.
The regiment’s route, studded with traffic controllers, led them through the wreckage of earlier fighting. It was possible to reconstruct much of how the battle had gone from the position of the hulks. In one broad field, a Soviet tank company had been ambushed in battle formation. The burned-out wrecks formed an almost perfect line of battle. Bezarin felt certain that, somehow, he would never let that happen to his battalion, but he wondered simultaneously at the effect such a sight must have on his men as they rolled by with their hatches open.
The enemy appeared to be exclusively British, which both surprised and disappointed Bezarin. He had always pictured himself fighting the Americans or the West Germans. Now he wondered if his unit had not been shunted into a secondary sector, a sideshow. He felt punished by the lack of information from higher headquarters.
There were plenty of ruined British vehicles in evidence, even though visibility remained limited to a few hundred meters on either side of the road. But the obviously larger number of slaughtered vehicle carcasses from Soviet units annoyed Bezarin. The level of destruction appeared to have been terrible on both sides, but the losses were clearly not in balance. Bezarin soon stopped counting and comparing, consoling himself with the smoldering conviction that he would do better.
The British had died mostly in defensive positions, although here and there you could tell that a specific element had waited too long to pull off its position and had been caught in the open. One chaotic intermingling told the story of a local counterattack. The residue of battle left a bitter taste, as though neither side had shown the least mercy.
Bezarin blamed the superior quantitative performance of the British on technology. Of all the fears that intermittently gripped the Soviet officer corps, Bezarin knew that the greatest was of the technological edge the NATO armies possessed, all Party propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. Often, the fear bordered on paranoia, with worries about secret weapons that NATO might have concealed for sudden employment on the first day of the war. Bezarin saw no evidence for wonder weapons now, but he cursed the mystifying superiority of the Western models of standard battlefield equipment.
One curious aspect of the battlefield was how few bodies were in evidence. Occasionally, a cluster of dead sprawled in a burned fringe around a combat vehicle or lay half-crushed along the roadway. But the greater effect was as if the battle had been a contest of machines, a tournament of systems, with only a handful of human puppeteers. That was an illusion, Bezarin knew. A troubling percentage of the stricken Soviet tanks had their turrets blown completely off. The hulls lay about like decapitated beasts. No crew member could survive such a catastrophic effect. When they died, the great steel animals devoured their human contents, as if in a last act of vengeance.
The last of the morning ground fog clung to the woodlines like decayed flesh slowly loosening from bones. The sky remained overcast, but the heaviness was gone, and the last gray would burn off as the sun climbed higher. Bezarin scanned the grayness. He could already hear the aircraft ripping by just above the visual ceiling. There was no way of telling whose aircraft these were, and Bezarin feared the impending clarity of the day. The march column
