grit in his desperation to overcome the terribly timed illness. But now, at the sight of the burning alive of perhaps a thousand human beings, he doubted he could manage any more of the charcoal.
He fought the need to go off into the smoldering woods, struggling to hold out until one of his staff officers or a subordinate commander made his way forward. It was forbidden, even for a brigade commander, to employ radio communications during the march. The commitment of the corps was to have been a sudden shock, its stealthy momentum propelling it deep into the enemy’s rear area. There was an intricate system of heliborne and road couriers, of predesignated rest, provisioning, and information points, structured to move the entire corps without resort to the electromagnetic spectrum. Yet how, Anton asked himself, could anyone have expected to hide such an enormous organization during a hasty daylight march on the exposed road network between the Letzlinger Heide and Hannover? There were too many obvious bottlenecks and water obstacles, and the border crossing sites were huge naked gashes on the countryside. It was well known that the enemy had sophisticated technical means of reconnaissance. The dialectic had shifted, perhaps decisively, and men refused to face up to the consequences. How could his own father have permitted such a thing to happen?
Even as he tentatively oriented the blame for his loss toward the enormous image he carried of his father, Anton realized that the old man had reached so grand a position of authority over his fellow man that the loss of this battalion was levels removed from his concern. No, this was not his father’s doing. This was the work of a chain of lackadaisical staff officers and of commanders intoxicated by the confusion and pace of the operation. It was, finally, his own work.
Still, it infuriated him that all of the rules had been so readily discarded. Of course, even darkness was no longer much of a shield against modern intelligence systems. Yet there was a margin of advantage. Or was it nothing more than the psychological security the darkness brought to the man with something to hide? Anton could not think the problem through now. He began to feel slightly faint. His bowels pressed outward, swelling in him, a body in mutiny.
He stopped attempting to analyze and relaxed back into his initial anger. The foolishness, the collective idiocy, that had created so perfect a target seemed beyond belief. On an open and obvious high-speed route, the last common sense and measure of security had been sacrificed for speed. Company-sized refueling stations had been clustered about an intersection with a network of feeder roads in such a manner as to allow an entire reinforced battalion to refuel simultaneously. Then the site had taken on a life of its own, obeying the secret law that a nucleus of military hardware inevitably attracts more hardware. It did not require sophisticated detective work to recognize the types of tactical sites in the burned-over wasteland. The burst sausages of the reserve fuel trucks had been parked in the disorder endemic to rear-services troops. And the stricken companies, his companies, unlucky in their timing, lay slaughtered where they had been calmly sucking at their fuel tits. Quite near the intersection itself, the commandant’s service had marked off its own little fief. And some technical-services officer, spotting an opportunity, had put in tracked- and wheeled-vehicle repair sites, running the two functions close together at a location where they could troubleshoot vehicles pulled over to refuel. Clever peacetime efficiency had turned deadly in war. Amid the blasted repair vans, stranded assemblies and major components lay strewn about in the chaos that Soviet soldiers achieved at the least opportunity. But perhaps worst of all, field hospital tentage had been set up against the treeline. The tents had blown down during the attack, burning their smothering occupants alive. All of the rules of dispersal had been ignored in the natural human tendency to crowd. And death had come in an instant, from a source that remained unknown.
Anton recalled reading articles that warned of Western assault breaker systems and reconnaissance strike complexes, the new bogeymen of the technological battlefield. And he had intellectually understood the implications. But words on a page could not prepare any man for this. Anton had been well over a kilometer away from the target area, working his way along the endless columns of his brigade, when, without warning, gigantic blossoms of flame had sprouted above leaves of midnight smoke, filling the horizon and dazzling his eyes so hard they ached. The blast waves seemed to lift his light vehicle off the roadway.
He had automatically ordered his driver to push forward, aware that this was his duty. But the continuing secondary explosions and the impenetrable heat had erected a barrier in the atmosphere, holding them back for long minutes. The inferno seemed to guarantee an end to all life within its radius.
Yet, as the densest smoke opened out into the blue sky, heading off in a trail that had to be dozens of kilometers long, a few living men had become evident, despite the impossibility of survival. And the man whose forearms had been torn away and whose face had been burned to an African grimness had wandered out of the dead landscape. His face reminded Anton of the pathetic look of the students from Patrice Lamumba University or the Third World military students at the Frunze Academy experiencing their first Russian winter.
Anton felt absolutely powerless. He knew he had to take actions to protect his remaining units and to reestablish the required march tempo. The plan demanded the corps’ commitment beyond the Weser in the Third Shock Army’s breakthrough sector during the coming hours of darkness. And they were already slipping behind schedule. The trained officer in him knew it was critical to maintain momentum. But his soul expected that somehow, after this, sensible men would agree to call it all off. How could such things be allowed to continue? It was madness.
A tracked command vehicle skirted noisily up along the blocked column, pluming exhaust. It was the brigade’s operations officer. As he dismounted to report to Anton he got his first good look at the devastation, and the routine formula of the military greeting broke apart in his throat.
Anton felt his lower belly quaking; the pressure of his sickness threatened to overpower him. He wanted to grasp his abdomen and bend over the pain. An unbearable cramp struck him, and he no longer had the control to await his subordinate’s report.
The operations officer did not reply, except to salute haltingly and quickly turn to his mission. Already moving, Anton looked about him for anything that might shield his impending nakedness from passing vehicles. He rushed dizzily toward the blackened no-man’s-land, clutching his map case, thrusting his hand inside to seek notepaper, anything with which he might cleanse himself. He felt as though he were exploding with filth.
Shilko found it unreasonably difficult to accept the lieutenant’s death. Intellectually, he understood that men died in war, and that the calamities of the battlefield did not discriminate between good men and bad, or between young and old. But he could not reconcile himself to the senselessness of this particular death. The thought of his lost gunners troubled him, as well. They were all his children. But the pathos, the stupidity, of the lieutenant’s end haunted him.
Following the delivery of hasty fires during the chaotic night battle, Shilko had rounded up his battalion to resume the march. Traffic controllers diverted all of the local movement down the same stretch of highway upon which Shilko’s guns had worked until they exhausted their on-board loads of ammunition. In the light of a clearing day, Shilko had gotten to see the results of his craftsmanship.
The forest road had been a well-chosen target, and, after some initial adjustment, his gunners had hit it dead on. Even after enough of the wreckage had been bullied aside to allow the great snake of Soviet vehicles to pass, the human and material devastation in evidence was such that Shilko could barely muster the hollowest feelings of professional pride. He felt no joy or moral satisfaction as the victor in this engagement. The Germans had been slaughtered; there was no other word in Shilko’s vocabulary that fit the scene. The enemy vehicles had been backed up in close order along the highway, unable to turn off into the thick stands of trees. Virtually every arm of the enemy’s service was represented in death. Artillery pieces sat enshrouded in soot, and the buckled skeletons of high-bedded trucks had the feel of dead draft animals. Burn scars and lacings of junk marked the locations where fuelers or ammunition haulers had been stricken. Even medical carriers had been caught by the blind artillery rounds, and a series of red crosses on white fields had been discolored by waves of flame. The clearing party had piled the dead from the center of the roadway into disorderly mounds against the treelines, where the bodies looked like plague victims already partially burned.
If there were such a thing as a God… such a being, Shilko told himself… He might not be able to forgive this. But at the same time, Shilko knew that he would do it again, instantly. Perhaps that made him hopelessly damned. But he would do his duty.
They reached their next designated firing locations just behind the artillery reconnaissance group that was responsible for preparing the site.
The quartering party had been delayed and all movements seemed to be out of sequence. The assigned unit
