you, next time we passed, to walk with me. And I suddenly knew you’d ask me. I knew the exact words you’d use. You used them. I made a remark about your wife as though I were acting a play, and your answer came like the next line in the play, all old and familiar. I’ve never forgotten that.”
A tall soldier, muffed in his greatcoat, trudged by with smoking breath, the unsheathed bayonet of his rifle glinting in the moonlight. He stopped to glance at them, and passed on.
“Where are we heading tomorrow, Victor?”
“I’m going into the front line. You and Talky will stay in a town several miles back. Up front one sometimes has to make a dash for it, the colonel says, and of course Talky can’t do that.”
“Why must you go?”
“Well, Amphiteatrov offered. It’ll be informative.”
“This is the flight to Berlin again.”
“No. I’ll be on the ground all the way, on friendly territory. Quite a difference.”
“How long will you be gone from us?”
“Just a few hours.”
A green radiance blinded them, a sudden blaze filling the heavens. Pamela uttered a cry. As their pupils adjusted to the shock they saw four smoky green lights floating very slowly down below the thickening clouds, and heard the thrum of engines. The sentry had darted off the road. The village showed no sign of life: a tiny sleeping Russian hamlet of thatched huts in the woods on a mud road, like a hundred others, with a stage-setting appearance in the artificial glare. All the tanks under repair had been camouflaged.
“You look ghastly,” Pam said.
“You should see yourself. They’re searching for this tank battalion.”
The lights sank earthward. One turned orange and went out. The airplane sounds faded away. Pug glanced at his watch. “I used to think the Russians were nutty on camouflage, but it has its points.” He stiffly rose and opened the cabin door. “We’d better try to sleep.”
Pamela put a hand out, palm up to the black sky. The clouds were blotting out the moon and stars. “I thought I felt something.” She held her hand toward Pug. In the fight of the last falling flare he could see, melting on her palm, a fat snowflake.
Chapter 55
The car crossed a white bare plain in a steady snowfall in leaden light. Pug could see no road by which the driver guided the jolting, sliding, shaking machine. What about mines? Trusting that Amphiteatrov had no more appetite than he to get blown up, Pug said nothing. In about an hour an onion-top belfry of yellow brick loomed ahead through the veil of snow. They entered a town where soldiers milled and army trucks lurched on mud streets between unpainted wood houses. From some trucks the livid, bloody, bandaged faces of soldiers peered sadly. Villagers, mostly snow-flecked old women and boys, stood in front of the houses, dourly watching the traffic go by.
At the steps of the yellow brick church, Pug parted company with the others. A political officer in a belted white leather coat, with the slanted eyes of a Tartar and a little beard like Lenin’s, came to take him off in a small British jeep. Talky Tudsbury happily said in Russian, pointing to the trademark, “Ah, so British aid has reached the front at last!” The political officer replied in ragged English that it required men and gunfire, not automobiles, to stop Germans, and that the British vehicles were not strong enough for heavy duty.
Pamela gave Victor Henry a serious wide-eyed stare. Despite the wear and soil of travel she looked charming, and the lambskin hat was tilted jauntily on her head. “Watch yourself,” was all she said.
The jeep went west, out of the tumultuous town and into a snow-laden quiet forest. They appeared to be heading straight for the front, yet the only gunfire thumps came from the left, to the south. Pug thought the snow might be muffling the sound up ahead. He saw many newly splintered trees, and bomb craters lined with fresh snow. The Germans had been shelling the day before, the commissar said, trying in vain to draw the fire of Russian batteries hidden in the woods. The jeep bounced past some of these batteries: big horse-drawn howitzers, tended by weary-looking bewhiskered soldiers amid evergreens and piles of shells at the ready.
They came to a line of crude trenches through the smashed fallen trees, with high earthworks sugared by snow. These were dummy dugouts, the commissar said, deliberately made highly visible. They had taken much of the shellfire yesterday. The real trenches, a couple of hundred yards further on, had escaped. Dug along a riverbank, their log tops level with the ground and snowed over, the actual trenches were totally invisible. The commissar parked the jeep among trees, and he and Victor Henry crawled the rest of the way through the brush. “The less movement the Fritzes can observe, the better,” said the Russian.
Here, down in a deep muddy hole — a machine-gun post manned by three soldiers — Victor Henry peered through a gun slit piled with sandbags and saw Germans. They were working in plain view across the river with earthmoving machines, pontoons, rubber boats, and trucks. Some dug with shovels; some patrolled with light machine guns in hand. Unlike the Russians, concealed like wild creatures in the earth, the Germans were making no effort to hide themselves or what they were doing. Except for the helmets, guns, and long gray coats, they might have been a big crew on a peacetime construction job. Through binoculars handed him by a soldier — German binoculars — Victor Henry could see the eyeglasses and frost-purpled cheeks and noses of Hitler’s chilled men. “You could shoot them like birds,” he said in Russian. It was as close as he could come to the American idiom, “they’re sitting ducks.”
The soldier grunted. “Yes, and give away our position, and start them shelling us! No thanks, Gospodin American.”
“If they ever get that bridge finished,” said the commissar, “and start coming across, that’ll be time enough to shoot a big dose down their throats.”
“That’s what we’re waiting for,” said a pipe-smoking soldier with heavy drooping moustaches, who appeared to be in command of this hole in the ground.
Pug said, “Do you really think you can hold out if they get across?”
The three soldiers rolled their eyes at each other, weighing this question asked in bad Russian by a foreigner. Their mouths set sourly. Here, for the first time, in sight of the Germans, Victor Henry detected fear on Red Army faces. “Well, if it comes to that,” said the pipe smoker, “every man has his time. A Russian soldier knows how to die.”
The political officer said briskly, “A soldier’s duty is to live, comrade, not to die — to live and fight. They won’t get across. Our big guns are trained on this crossing, and as soon as they’ve wasted all the time it takes to build a bridge, and they start across, we’ll blast these Hitlerite rats! Eh, Polikov? How about it?”
“That’s right,” said a bristle-faced soldier with a runny nose, crouched on the earth in a corner blowing on his red hands. “That’s exactly right, Comrade political Officer.”
Crawling through bushes or darting from tree to tree, Victor Henry and the commissar made their way along the dugouts, pillboxes, trenches, and one-man posts of the thinly held line. A battalion of nine hundred men was covering five miles of the river here, the commissar said, to deny the Germans access to an important road. “This campaign is simply a race,” he panted, as they crawled between dugouts. “The Germans are trying to beat Father Frost into Moscow. That’s the plain fact of it. They are pouring out their lifeblood to do it. But never fear, Father Frost is an old friend of Russia. He’ll freeze them dead in the ice. You’ll see, they’ll never make it.”
The commissar was evidently on a morale-stiffening mission. Here and there, where they found a jolly leader in a trench, the men seemed ready for the fight, but elsewhere fatalism darkened their eyes, slumped their shoulders, and showed in dirty weapons, disarrayed uniforms, and garbage-strewn holes. The commissar harangued them, exploiting the strange presence of an American to buck them up, but for the most part the hairy-faced Slavs stared at Henry with sarcastic incredulity as though to say — “
The Germans were in view all along the river, methodically and calmly preparing to cross. Their businesslike air was more intimidating, Pug thought, than volleys of bullets. Their numbers were alarming, too; where did they all come from?
The commissar and Victor Henry emerged from one of the largest dugouts and lay on their elbows in the
