on them. When they’re good and close, we’ll blow them to bits. So maybe you’ll see something yet.” He put on his goggles, changing back from a bright-eyed boy into a faceless grim spotter.
Victor Henry said, “They’re watching across the river for your batteries to fire.”
The spotter clumsily waved both heavy-clad arms. “Good, but we can’t let those bastards take the town from the rear, can we?”
“I hear airplanes.” Pug turned his glasses westward to the sky. “
“
“Airplanes too?” Pamela’s voice trembled. “Well, I’m more used to them.”
“That’s the German drill,” said Victor Henry. “Tanks and planes together.”
The oncoming planes, three Stukas, were growing bigger in Pug’s glasses. The spotter switched his binoculars to the tanks again, and began cheering. Pug looked in that direction. “Holy cow! Now I call this military observing, Pam.” Tanks in another column were coming out of the woods about halfway between the Germans and the town, moving on a course almost at right angles to the panzer track. He handed her the glasses and squinted toward the airplanes.
“Oh! Oh!” Pamela exclaimed. “Ours?”
“
A hand struck her shoulder and knocked her to her hands and knees. “They’re starting their dive,” Victor Henry said. “Crawl up close to the dome and lie still.” He was on his knees beside her. His cap had fallen off and rolled away, and he brushed black hair from his eyes to watch the planes. They tilted over and dove. When they were not much higher than the belfry, bombs fell out of them. With a mingled engine roar and wind screech, they zoomed by. Pug could see the black crosses, the swastikas, the yellowish plexiglass cockpits. All around the church the bombs began exploding. The belfry shook. Flame, dirt, and smoke roared up beyond the parapet, but Pug remained clearheaded enough to note that the flying was ragged. The three ungainly black machines almost collided as they climbed and turned to dive again in a reckless tangle. The Luftwaffe had either lost most of its veteran pilots by now, he thought, or they were not flying on this sector of the front. Anti-aircraft guns were starting to pop and rattle in the town.
Pamela’s hand sought his. She was crouched behind him, against the dome.
“Just lie low, this will be over soon.” As Pug said this he saw one of the Stukas separating from the others and diving straight for the belfry. He shouted to the spotter, but the airplane noise, the chatter of A.A. guns, the clamor and cries from the town below, and the roar of the wind, quite drowned his voice. Tracers made a red dotted line to the belfry across the gray sky. The tin dome began to sing to rhythmically striking bullets. Victor Henry roughly pushed Pamela flat and threw himself on top of her. The plane stretched into a sizable black machine approaching through the air. Watching over his shoulder to the last, Victor Henry saw the pilot dimly behind his plexiglass, an unhelmeted young blond fellow with a toothy grin. He thought the youngster was going to crash into the dome, and as he winced, he felt something rip at his left shoulder. The airplane scream and roar and whiz mounted, went past, and diminished. The zinging and rattling of bullets stopped.
Pug stood, feeling his shoulder. His sleeve was torn open at the very top and the shoulder board was dangling, but there was no blood. The spotter was lying on the bricks beside the overturned binoculars. Bombs were exploding below; the other two planes were still whistling and roaring over the town; one plane was smoking badly. Blood was pooling under the spotter’s head, and with horror Pug perceived white broken bone of the skull showing through the torn shot-away cap, under blond hair and thick-moving red and gray ooze. Pug went to the spotter and cautiously moved his goggles. The blue eyes were open, fixed and empty. The head wound was catastrophic. Picking up the telephone, Pug jiggled the hook till somebody answered. He shouted in Russian, “I am the American visitor up here. You understand?”
He saw the smoking plane, which was trying to climb, burst into flames and fall. “
“Airplane killed him.”
“All right. Somebody else will come.”
Pamela had crawled beside the spotter and was looking at the dead face and smashed head. “Oh, my God, my God,” she sobbed, head in hand.
The two surviving planes were climbing out of sight. Smoke rose from fires in the town, smelling of burning hay. To the east, the two tank unit tracks had almost joined in a black V, miles long, across the plain. Pug righted the binoculars. Through smoke billowing in the line of vision, he saw the tanks milling in a wild little yellow-flashing vortex on the broad white plain. Five of the KV monsters bulged among lighter Russian tanks. Several German tanks were on fire and their crewmen were running here and there in the snow like ants. Some German tanks and trucks were heading back to the woods. Pug saw only one light Russian tank giving off black smoke. But even as he watched, a KV burst into violent, beautiful purple-orange flame, casting a vivid pool of color on the snow. Meantime the rest of the German tanks began turning away.
“Kitty! Oh, Christ, Christ, no, stop it!” Pam snatched up the cat, which was crouching over the dead man. She came to Pug, her tearstained face gaunt and stunned, holding the creature in her arms. Its nose and whiskers were bloody and its tongue flickered. “It’s not the animal’s fault,’ she choked.
“The Russians are winning out there,” Victor Henry said.
She was staring at him with blank shocked round eyes, clutching the black cat close to her. Her hand went to the rip at his shoulder. “Dearest, are you hurt?”
“No. Not at all. It went right on through.”
“Thank God! Thank God!”
The ladder jumped and rapped, and Colonel Amphiteatrov’s face, excited and red, showed at the top. “Well, you’re all right. Well, I’m glad. Many people killed. Quick! Both of you. Come along, please.” Then his eye fell on the body lying in blood. “
“We were strafed,” Pug said. “He’s dead.”
The colonel shook his head and sank out of sight saying, “Well, please, come quickly.”
“Go first, Pam.”
Pamela looked at the dead spotter lying on the bricks in snow and blood, and then at the tin dome, and out at the tank fight, and the black V gouged in the landscape. “It seems I’ve been up here for a week. I can’t get down the ladder with the cat. We mustn’t leave it here.”
“Give the cat to me.”
Tucking the animal inside his bridge coat, steadying it with one arm, Victor Henry awkwardly followed her down the ladder and the spiral stairs. Once the cat squirmed, bit, and scratched, and he almost fell. He turned the cat loose outside the church, but the clanking vehicles or the rolling smoke alarmed the animal and it ran back in and vanished among the wounded.
Through the open door of the black automobile Tudsbury waved his cane at them. “Hello! There’s a monstrous tank battle going on just outside the town! They say there’s at least a hundred tanks swirling around, an utter inferno, happening right this minute. Hello, you’ve torn your coat, do you know that?”
“Yes, I know.” Though drained of spirit, Victor Henry was able to smile at the gap between journalism and war, as he detached his shoulder board and dropped it in his pocket. The reality of the two small groups of tanks banging away out there on the snowy plain seemed so pale and small-scale compared to Tudsbury’s description.
“We had a view of it,” he said. Pamela got into the car and sank into a corner of the back seat, closing her eyes.
“Did you? Well, Pam ought to be a help on this story! I say, Pam, you’re all right, aren’t you?”
“I’m splendid, Talky, thank you,” Pam said, faintly but clearly.
Pug said to the colonel, “We saw the Germans starting to run.”
“Good. Well, Kaplan’s battalion got the word from down south. That is a good battalion.” Amphiteatrov slammed the car door. “Make yourselves comfortable please. We are going to drive straight back to Moscow now.”
“Oh no!” Tudsbury’s fat face wrinkled up like an infant’s. “I want to have a look when the fight’s over. I want to interview the tank crews.”
