Last Citadel

aflame and whole, some silent and still.

The toll of the battle was swinging away from him. Red soldiers trotted past, retreating north up the road and Hill 260.8, some without weapons, running from the beating they’d taken in their forward trenches. Two thousand black jots appeared around the arrays of German tanks, their panzergrenadiers advancing alongside their armor, the classic Blitzkrieg tactic, unbeatable.

The first tier of the final Soviet defense line before Oboyan had been breached. German tanks began to roll in front of their smoking dead comrades, the battlefield gobbled a hundred, two hundred meters more of the Oboyan road. Now the distance between the two tank armies was lessened. Valentin’s shots came faster, the enemy was larger in his sights.

Dimitri rambled through a thinning Russian force, the Germans came up the long grade like a tide, sweeping into the trenches, bubbling over the sandcastle redoubts of Russia that would not hold them back.

Dimitri parked between two immobile T-34s, one raging on fire, the other mute and whole. Sasha and Pasha went out the hatches at Valentin’s command to scavenge ammunition from the quiet tank. Sasha slithered out his escape hatch below his feet with a red stouthearted face, eager to do something besides shoot at airplanes he could never hit. Valentin heaved empty shell casings out his open hatch. Dimitri eased his hands, hoping the shroud of greasy vapor from the burning tank would hide the General’s life from the closing Germans. He lowered his goggles over his eyes against the smoke wafting in his hatch, and breathed into his sleeve to filter the smoke. Pasha and Sasha ferried shells in to Valentin, who shoved them into the racks. The flames from the tank beside Dimitri murmured and lapped. He looked out his hatch at the Germans teeming around the Oboyan road. The ranks of the Mark IVs and Mark IIIs crept closer, they were within five hundred meters now. Infantry ran hunched behind and beside them. A company of sappers crept ahead, watching for mines, dangerous work. He stared into the gaps in the swirling pall and knew the Oboyan road was about to be lost. The German formations came like spears. Then, while he watched, the tips of the wedges seemed to open, the lead tanks pulled aside. Out from their shield, moving to the point of the advance, rolled six Tigers. All six of the giants fired at once. The boom pushed aside every other noise of the battle, six smoke rings stupefied Dimitri in the split second before the rounds landed.

The barrage struck other targets, the ruse of the smoke had worked.

The .88s of the Tigers raised plumes in the dirt that sent Sasha and Pasha tumbling and squirming back into the General, hatch doors were screwed shut fast. Valentin’s voice cut through the scrambling in a bellow. ‘Go, go, go!’

Dimitri reacted by instinct, cutting loose the tank, shifting gears, pistoning his feet. But he did not pivot back up the hill to join the retreat.

Instead, he wheeled the General at the Germans.

For a moment Valya gave no reaction. Dimitri gunned into second gear and did not veer. Valentin’s boot tapped on Dimitri’s right shoulder.

Turn, the boot asked. Dimitri did not yield, driving at the heart of an enemy wedge, into the smoking center where a Tiger towered. The boot nudged again, like a kind angel on his shoulder beseeching him to come around and flee, to live and bear these others in the tank with him away to live.

Why? he asked, and in answer the center of the wedge four hundred meters away smoked again, a shell on a flat trajectory shrieked past and exploded somewhere behind. Sasha beside him leaned into his machine-gun and his vision block, firing and spinning the barrel at targets, they were close enough now to the German sappers for the boy to pitch in, and Dimitri thought, Good for you, Sasha. He was sorry to carry the two youngsters with him into the blackness he foresaw in his and his son’s futures, where there was no clan, where the Germans took the road today and Russia lost the battle for Kursk maybe tomorrow and finally the war, so there would be no more freedom. That would be a dead life, a conquered life. Sasha and Pasha won’t want that life, either. The battle mists sucked him forward, Dimitri shifted gears again. He didn’t decide this, to die today.

But the leaflet had said ‘at all costs.’ What was he, Dimitri Berko, to not be spent on the Oboyan road? He knew he was nothing worth preserving.

The General bounded over the field past charring hulks, into a range where there were no other living Red tanks but his. He waited for his son’s boots on his shoulders, for his earphones to split with a screamed command to turn and join the retreat. But behind him Pasha rammed one more of the rescued rounds into the breech. Sasha sprayed the machine-gun, and Valentin acquired a target.

Alright, Dimitri thought. He was so tired, and this felt good, to be almost finished.

He reached up and lowered his armored hatch door, cutting down his vision of the battlefield to nothing but the rectangular slice glowing inside his vision block. He gave the T-34 over to Valentin this way, completely, and gave himself away, too.

Now the tank was enclosed around the four of them. The close green walls shook, the treads ground and squeaked, the diesel engine blared.

Sasha exhausted one ammo belt and plucked another off the wall, slapping it into his breech. He laid on the trigger, brrrap, brrrap! Dimitri felt virtuous that he’d brought the red quiet child to this place where he was a man and hero. Pasha behind him, too, with a shell in his lap, sleeves rolled up, dirty and streaked, a warrior. Valentin’s boots on his shoulders were gentle, patting pressure left and right instead of pounding with insistence or panic or anger.

Both boot soles pressed beside Dimitri’s neck. At the signal he skidded to a halt. Sasha swayed at the failing momentum but kept firing his machine-gun, baring his teeth at what he watched himself do through his periscope. One of Valya’s feet left Dimitri’s shoulder for the firing pedal.

There were plenty of targets, tanks everywhere three hundred meters away.

Valentin wasted no time picking an enemy and letting fly. Within seconds the inside of the General was packed with the chattering machine-gun and the cannon, the reek of sulphur, the recoil and hot spitting of the spent casing, then the winding engine and Dimitri’s flailing arms weaving the General back and forth, wending snake-patterns into the path of the German advance. They were hectic moving toward their finish, all four doing their jobs, focused on their purposes, to finish well. How many shells did they have left? Dimitri wondered. They’d picked up an extra dozen, maybe they had twenty on board, five more machine-gun belts - it didn’t matter, there wasn’t enough, whatever the number. Dimitri drew the General closer to the advancing Germans.

He drove the tank into a crater, he hadn’t seen it coming. The chassis dipped. Dimitri’s head snapped forward. He downshifted to power out of the hole.

The intercom crackled.

‘Stay here.’

Dimitri halted the tank.

‘Back up.’

Dimitri reversed into the crater and eased the General’s hull below ground level. Only the turret was exposed now to the sights of the German armor.