The Russian, hoping to save his orchard, had offered us the putrefying fruit he kept for his pig. As soon as we realized this, we shook the tree, which filled a tent cloth. The Popov disappeared into his lair.
We could hear guns to the northwest; our advance troops must have made contact with the enemy. We were ordered to move out. Half an hour later, we climbed down from the trucks again. The feld’s whistle was blowing for combat readiness. Fighting was in progress about half a mile, away, in a small village built round a factory.
Wesreidau quickly explained that we had to neutralize a large enemy force which was holding the place. Two companies had been detached for the job; the rest of the group would keep moving.
With our guns slung, we walked toward the village, while our tractors pulled our rocket launchers and anti-tank guns into firing position. Almost immediately, the Russians, who were watching from their trenches, showered us with a rain of shells. If their aim had been more precise, it would have been the end of us. As it was, their only effect was to make everyone run for cover. Our two companies spread out and partly surrounded the fortified point. Then we had about ten minutes of quiet while our captain, sheltered behind a pile of stones, discussed the forthcoming action with his subordinates.
The noncoms rejoined us and told us what positions we should try to reach. We scanned our surroundings as they talked, observing with our combat sense, which by now was quite well developed, every fold and hollow which might offer some shelter. Everything was quiet, and the. instructions seemed ludicrously easy.
Nothing was moving, and the silence would have been total, if it had not been for the vehicles of our armored group bumping along the rocky road below us, filling the air with exhaust and deafening noise. The Russians kept quiet, and many of us thought they had already been knocked out. The immediate presence of our main body of troops reassured us, and it seemed likely that the approaching fight would be no more than a skirmish.
We were ordered to move out, and from every nook and cranny troops proceeded toward the village, bent double. Here and there we could hear someone laughing, and wondered if it was innocence or bravado.
Our men reached the first houses. The Russians remained silent and invisible. I had just joined my group, which included Hals, the dear friend who so often saved me from feeling completely lost. His innocent, good-natured face smiled at me from the crowd, and I smiled back. We exchanged a look which said a great deal more than many long conversations do.
The war seemed quite different to us now that we had an aerial escort. Our terrible memories of the Don, and the retreat from Belgorod belonged to the past, and to bad times which wouldn’t come back. Of course, we knew that the war wasn’t over, but for the last week we had been making the enemy run.
We were watching the progress of about thirty of our men who were leaping through the ruins of a brickworks. Five or six Panzer grenadiers were running along beside the principal building. One of them had just thrown a grenade through a gaping window. A moment later the air was shaken by its explosion, which was immediately followed by a heartrending scream of a kind we had often heard before. We knew that that nothing must distract us from our objective; however, we saw a human figure dressed in white fall from the window and roll down to the feet of our soldiers. It was a Russian civilian, a woman, who had been cowering beside the window, probably praying to all the saints. In spite of her fall, she seemed to be unhurt, and ran toward us, screaming. One of our soldiers lifted his gun, and we thought we heard it fire, but nothing happened. The Russian woman in her white shirt ran screaming through the ranks of petrified men.
No one said a word, and for a half minute, the war seemed to be standing still. Our grenadiers had already kicked in the door, and were in the house. Three other civilians came out, two men and a child. Once again we watched as they ran through our astounded ranks.
The Russians had not evacuated the village, and we would have to take the civilian population into account.
Wesreidau, who had just realized this, installed a loudspeaker on a half-track, which drove between the rows of houses waving a white rag fastened to a pole. The loudspeaker crackled out some nasal Russian words, while the four men on the half-track looked desperately at their comrades, who had remained in shelter.
The loudspeaker must have been giving the Russians a chance to evacuate civilians or to lay down their arms. But the half-track had gone less than a hundred yards when the irreparable occurred. It suddenly seemed to fly upward, as a series of deafening explosions rang out, and five or six huts disintegrated. The truck had driven over a minefield.
A heavy cloud of dust and smoke hid the village from our eyes. We could see two black silhouettes gesticulating in the flaming halftrack, and hear them screaming.
“Look out for mines!” someone shouted.
But his voice was drowned by the roaring of mortars and Paks, as the ground in front of us burst into geysers of flame and earth. Thatched roofs flew off in one piece, leaving the houses exposed, like bald men who’ve lost their wigs.
The Russians reacted, using at least two batteries of heavy howitzers. Every shell landing within 150 yards of us made the ground shake under our feet, and sucked the air from our lungs. Despite the almost certain presence of mines, the assault whistles blew. Everyone left shelter and ran for the nearest embankment. Our mortars pounded the ground some thirty yards ahead of us, to disrupt the arrangement of mines, and if possible explode some of them. The Russians, with multi-barreled machine guns set up on trucks, poured a devastating fire on everything they could see.
What had seemed so simple only fifteen minutes earlier now looked impossibly difficult, and suddenly no one felt confident. There were five of us hiding in the rubble of the brickworks, and our faces, pressed into the ground, knocked against the dirt with every explosion. From another heap of shattered bricks, a noncom was shouting at the top of his lungs to fire at anything we could see. One at a time we risked looking out, but the whine of shells made even the boldest duck down immediately.
Only our mortars and rocket launchers kept on firing steadily and profusely at an enemy who, for the moment, had the upper hand. In the distance, the metallic factory tower we had noticed when we arrived was proving curiously resistant to our Pak shells, which must have passed right through it at several points. Once again, we had to jump to a more advanced position. Some men were shouting to give themselves courage. Others, like me, ground their teeth, and clenched their sweaty hands on their guns, less from emotion than from a reflex akin to that of a drowning man hanging on to a rope.
Accompanied by deep or shrill sounds, and brilliant or fading light, the earth flew up all around us, sometimes engulfing pathetic human figures dressed as soldiers. About thirty yards away, on our left, five of our men who had hidden behind a small wooden building, like a blacksmith’s shed, fell, one after the other. The last two had no idea where to run, and looked frantically for the enemy who would presently knock them off too. Finally, they threw themselves down among the bodies of their companions. A thick stream of blood ran out from the tangled mass of limbs and trunks and sank into the gray dust, which absorbed it like blotting paper.
Suddenly, to our left, a raging fire broke out in a cluster of four or five sheds. Its smoke and heat climbed into the sky, and a huge sheet of flame quivered and grew with astounding speed, giving off giant wreaths of black smoke and intense heat, which we could feel even where we were.
Our men surged back rapidly from that quarter. The metal roofs of the sheds buckled in the heat, and the isbas closest to the fire burst into flame. A horde of Russians — both civilian and military — ran from the burning buildings; our soldiers shot them down like rabbits.