location had also been allotted to a signals unit, and a muddled engineer bridging company blocked the ingress of Shilko’s guns, then became entangled in their deployment. When an oversized pontoon section backed into the side of a gun carriage, Shilko lost his temper. He screamed at the engineer company commander, calling him an asshole with arms. Then Shilko took over the engineer company himself, straightening them out by sheer force of personality and tucking them into a nearby treeline that would not do for his batteries. Shilko’s staff officers were more startled by the outburst than was the engineer officer, and as Shilko calmed himself down and settled back into his usual demeanor, his subordinates moved with unusual caution in his proximity. Even Romilinsky had been jarred by the evidence that there was an alligator inside of Shilko after all.
Miraculously, resupply trucks appeared, most of which carried rounds of the needed caliber for Shilko’s guns. The breakdown of the ammunition and the trans-loading had to be done largely by hand, but everyone had been shocked back into wakefulness, and the men worked as swiftly as their growing exhaustion permitted. Soon, the battalion began to receive fire missions. The data link would not be reestablished for some time, if ever, and the missions came in clear text over the radio. Shilko pushed his communications officer to lay land lines as swiftly as possible, but the first missions could not wait.
The program of fires alternated between artillery duels and shelling of enemy concentrations cut off in and around the town of Walsrode. Shilko was ordered to fire white phosphorus into the town to flush the enemy out into the open. The enemy counterfire appeared less organized than Shilko had expected. The day before, there had been extremely heavy attrition of lower-echelon Soviet artillery and multiple rocket launcher units. But the enemy did not seem interested in responding to Shilko’s powerful volleys. He wondered if they were short on ammunition, and he began to feel at ease as his pieces threw their huge rounds toward their distant targets.
Shilko was drinking a cup of tea when disaster struck. Enemy rounds landed on top of one of his gun platoons with artistic precision. Shilko hurried down to the battery position even before the secondary explosions had subsided, outraged that anyone could have hurt his boys and his guns. As he left the fire direction center he screamed at Romilinsky to prepare to displace.
The gun platoon was finished. One gun lay on its side like a fallen horse, nuzzling its long tube into the dirt. The last of the resupply trucks had been caught just as they were about to depart. The support soldiers had lingered to watch the big guns at work. Now a soldier’s corpse, still physically intact, waved limp paws down at Shilko from the branches of a tree, while other corpses smoldered with tiny patches of fire. There were many wounded men; not one soldier in the immediate area had escaped untouched.
The platoon commander, who was doubling as senior battery officer, lay open-eyed on his back, gasping as though he were trying to swallow the entire sky. The lieutenant was the sort of officer who excelled at everything, yet who had a guilelessness and natural generosity about him that prevented his peers from growing jealous. He was, above all, a wonderfully likable young man, seemingly immune to life’s inevitable indecencies and indiscretions. He appeared relatively unharmed, only scratched here and there, and sooty-faced. But the boy’s eyes were lucid and quick with the intelligence of mortality.
“Damn it,” Shilko shouted at the medical orderly leaning dumbly over the lieutenant, “he can’t breathe. Open the airway, man.”
But the orderly appeared desperate to pretend that he did not hear or did not understand. He only called to a companion who knelt, wiping cotton over another sufferer. The second medic came over and stared down at the lieutenant, mimicking the first orderly.
The lieutenant’s chest shook with his efforts to breathe. Up close, Shilko could see that his jaw was strangely out of line with the rest of his skull, and there was, indeed, blood sliming out over the grimy skin.
“The trachea,” Shilko told the orderlies, “you’ve got to open his trachea.” He could not understand their inaction. He would have knelt and done the operation himself, but he did not know how.
The second orderly obediently drew a medical knife from his kit. His hand shivered, and he had to steady it by grasping himself under the wrist. He punched the blade into the lieutenant’s neck, but the windpipe seemed to jerk out of the way. Blood poured out. The orderly gripped the lieutenant’s neck, trying to hold it still as he stabbed him a second time. The lieutenant rasped at the sky, eyes huge. The boy was trying to scream.
Shilko smashed the orderly aside with an oversized fist. He knelt in the mud and placed his left hand firmly on the boy’s scalp, feeling the matted hair flatten under his callused fingers. He desperately wanted to repair the incompetent damage to the boy’s neck, to rescue him for other, better days, to see him promoted and married and moved to a better assignment than this. But he had no idea where to touch, or how.
A fountain of blood played into the air, then fell back. Another crimson plume followed, then another, matching the dying boy’s pulse.
The lieutenant was crying, tears sparkling in the soot-rubbed corners of his eyes and streaming down his temples to catch at his ears. Shilko realized that the boy knew with certainty that he was about to die.
The first battery sent another volley toward the enemy. The kick of the big guns shook the earth under Shilko’s knees. Then a second volley followed the first, firing one last mission before moving.
“It’s all right,” Shilko said. “It’s all right, son.” And he kept on repeating himself until the last life settled out of the boy and his eyes fixed upon the fresh blue sky.
Levin stared at his own death. Apart from the helpless revulsion he felt at the sight of the murdered men, he also recognized with sickening clarity that, if relief forces did not break through soon, he would die. In the excitement of battle, the thought of surrendering had never occurred to him. Yet now, with that option suddenly and irrevocably closed to him, he felt his resolve weakening, his confidence slipping through his fingers. He tried to convince himself that he was only feeling the effects of exhaustion and stress. But he realized that if he was captured, they would hold him personally responsible for this butchery, and they would kill him. He knew how the Germans had treated captured commissars in the Great Patriotic War — a single shot in the base of the skull. And the political officer, on a humbler level, was heir to the mantle of the commissar. Even if the enemy today was not as crudely barbaric as the Hitlerite Germans, they would nonetheless associate him, the battalion’s deputy commander for political affairs and the senior officer remaining in Hameln, with the massacre.
The soldiers attempted to explain what had happened. The event even had its own sordid logic. A few of the prisoners of war tried to rush the two tired guards. But the prisoners were too slow. The guards cut them down. But the two frightened boys had not stopped at that. They continued to fire into the basement room full of prisoners, their fear blooming into a momentary madness. They emptied all of their magazines before the communications detachment from the upper level reached them. The signalmen found the guards stalking through the room, firing single shots to guarantee that each of the prisoners was dead.
Summoned by a panic-stricken young sergeant, Levin had, for the first time in his life, experienced the feeling of willful disbelief of what the eyes took in. He could not believe that such a thing had happened under his command. Stunned, he could not even lose his temper. He simply walked through the dungeonlike room in a wordless daze, surveying the gore with his pocket lamp. His boot soles smacked and sucked at the wet floor. The dead men in the British uniforms at least looked like soldiers, hard-faced boy-men, and NCOs with broken teeth. But the German reservists, for the most part, looked like fathers and uncles, hapless men caught up in events for which they were utterly unprepared. The smell had been of a slaughterhouse, with the reek of burst entrails catching at the top of the throat.
Levin knew that the British or Germans would kill him for this. It even occurred to him that there might be a peculiar justice in the act.
He sent the two guilty soldiers out to fight on the line. He could not judge them. Somehow, it was all too easy to understand. He should not have left them alone, unsupervised. Yet there had been no realistic alternative. The only officer who remained fit for combat, other than Levin himself, was Lieutenant Dunaev, to whom Levin had assigned the defense of the northern bridge. The sergeants were of little use. Gordunov, the battalion commander, had been missing since early morning. Captain Karchenko was dead. The defense of the west bank had collapsed, and the isolated firing from that side of the river sounded as though the enemy were methodically rooting out the last resistance.
The situation at the northern bridge had broken down into a standoff. The enemy held the western approach now, but they could not get across. Dunaev’s handful of defenders killed every vehicle that approached, and the automatic mortars husbanded their last rounds to support Dunaev whenever things got too hot. The southern bridge had been lost back to the enemy in its entirety, and British regulars had pushed the defending air-assault troops north behind the ring boulevard. The only thing holding the British back now was their apparent reluctance to take the casualties one big rush would cost. The air-assault troops had run low on everything, including combat-
