“Shoot me, you bastard. For fuck’s sake, shoot me.”
The act of speaking almost achieved the same result, as the effort induced coughing that brought on more bleeding.
The former Sergeant opened his holster, extracting a Tokarev pistol.
“That’s right, you fucking bastard, shoot me!”
Checking that he was unobserved, Kazakov spoke quietly to the Captain.
“The pleasure is all mine, Kapitan, all mine.”
He pulled the trigger, sending a single bullet into his nemesis.
Not quite as Babaev intended, for the muzzle of the pistol was against the officer’s genitalia, which was destroyed by the passage of the heavy bullet.
Leaving the horribly wounded man to die, Kazakov looked around for a place to hide until the attack was over.
One rush of Cossacks had made it across the road to the 7th Platoon position, withering and dying in the direct fire from Brens and Stens, the brave Russians hacked down to a man.
The position around the damaged Vickers seemed vulnerable, so Captain Graham, the company second in command, moved his handpicked reserve group there to bolster it before another thrust was made.
That attack came two minutes later, and what resulted was a fight more reminiscent of an older age, of bloody Cannae, or of Alexander at Gaugamela.
The cavalrymen had gathered and launched a disciplined and focussed attack, centering on the position adjacent to Gurung’s Vickers.
A flurry of grenades had caused heavy casualties in the centre and Soviet left side, and DP light machine guns lashed into the machine-gun position just as Graham arrived. Smoke from the Soviet mortars completed the hasty preparation for a rush.
The experienced Nepalese prepared themselves, the remaining Brens parting the smoke with small bursts of fire, the gunners unable to see if their efforts were bearing fruit.
As more grenades emerged from the smoke, others, hurled by the Gurkhas, flew in the reverse direction.
Shrapnel flayed the wearers of both uniforms, flesh and bone giving way to hot metal, the defenders ravaged by heavy casualties, the offensive force decimated in turn.
The combination of the failing light, the woods, and the flash of weapons, made for a surreal atmosphere.
A riderless horse, wounded and panicked, ran through the no man’s land, its body struck by the bullets from both sides before it dropped in front of the old German trench and coughed out its final seconds.
Suddenly, Allied control was lost, as Graham was felled by a stone thrown up by a grenade, and the Jemadar shot down and killed by a speculative burst from the other side of the smoky divide.
CHM Gurung was already down, a bullet in his left shoulder as he had directed the Vickers’ fire against a large group of cavalrymen.
The Cossacks charged forward on foot, firing as they ran.
Again, the Gurkhas claimed lives with their accurate fire, but lost men in return.
The Vickers, swiftly relocated to a secondary position, stuttered back into life, and stopped the assault in its tracks, carving the leaders into pieces and driving the survivors into cover.
Soviet cavalrymen fired back, but the Vickers pinned them in place.
One Cossack officer attempted to relocate one of his own machine-gun teams, but he and they were betrayed by their muzzle flash, and they permanently lost interest in the battle.
The Vickers kept firing, swivelling from left to right, its damaged cooling jacket losing hot water and steam as the constant firing increased the temperature.
A DP burst struck home and the gunner rolled away, clutching his stomach.
One of the loaders kept the weapon going, preventing the Cossacks from rising up and continuing the assault.
Gurung moved gingerly, his wounded shoulder reminding him of its wretched state. He took over firing the gun whilst the loader went back to his task of joining the ammo belts together, so the gun could keep firing.
An enterprising Cossack had crawled forward to attempt a grenade at the new Vickers position. As he pulled back his arm, a rifleman shot him in the face, the primed grenade dropping back to earth, and putting the brave man out of his misery.
The Soviet battalion commander ordered his mortars into one last effort, the last of their rounds to be fired off on to the 7th and 8th Platoon positions. He organised as much of his available manpower as time permitted, and focussed them on the intended breakthrough point.
A salvo of 82mm shells fell amongst Gurkha positions, one spectacularly striking an ammunition stash, sending a shower of .303, and unarmed grenades, in all directions.
A few fires started, illuminating the defenders from behind.
The third salvo saw a high-explosive round drop close to the Vickers, knocking the weapon over, killing one of the loaders, and throwing both Gurung and the other man off their feet.
The Cossacks rose up again and this time they were not going to be stopped.
Submachine guns spewed out streams of bullets one way, Bren and Sten guns replying, each second the volume of fire dropping as another man was silenced by a bullet strike.
B Company’s commander, an experienced Major, had realised the difficulty and committed his final reserve to 8th Platoon’s aid. Screaming like a mad man, he led forward a special forty-man group, consisting of men from the Battalion carrier platoon and B Company headquarters, and completed by the some members of the battalion pipe band.
They arrived at the same moment as the Cossacks penetrated the front line positions and a gutter fight commenced, the Major knocked down immediately by SVT rounds, dying silently as his men swept forward and into the Cossacks.
A sudden surge in one of the fires illuminated part of the battlefield.
CHM Gurung saw the danger and reached for a nearby Enfield. Picking up the weapon, he fought the pain in his shoulder and fired into a group of Soviet cavalrymen sneaking around the left side of the main position.
The survivors withdrew, dragging two of their number with them, leaving a third motionless behind them.
Successfully seeking out his own Thompson, Gurung discarded the rifle and checked that the men around him were ready to go.
The melee to his front was growing in intensity, and on the left side, hand-to-hand combat had developed.
The Cossacks were lovers of their long Shashkas, and remembering how the deadly blades had given them the edge in many such encounters with the Germanski, a number of men bared their weapons and rushed in close, whirling the sabres in time-honoured fashion.
Starting on the Gurkha right, the front positions started to descend into chaos. Men, too close for modern weapons of war to do their jobs, fell back on more ancient tools for the close-in killing.
At first, rifle butts and bayonets responded to Shashkas, but it was not long before the Gurkhas discarded their guns for their weapon of choice, and the Kukris flashed in the last light of the dying sun.
The Shashka was a superb weapon, slightly curved and very strong, as well as legendary for its sharpness. It was also designed to be nothing but a killing machine, a job it performed extremely efficiently in the hands of an experienced swordsman.
The Kukri was beaten on length at seventeen and a half inches, being just about half the length of the Soviet blade. Its origins were as a work knife but, historically, the tool had converted easily into a wholly efficient weapon of war, and the strangely shaped blade meant that it delivered optimum cutting power when in the hand of a proficient soldier.
Both the Cossacks and the Gurkhas knew their craft and whilst bullets and butts still claimed lives, it was the sharp blades of the Shashka and Kukri that did most of the killing in the awful close-quarter fighting.
Graham, recovering, but still groggy, assessed the situation and summoned men to him. He rushed them forward to the position that was under most pressure. Halting behind it, he ordered rapid fire and bullets smashed into the cavalrymen who were gaining the upper hand there, reducing the numerical superiority of the enemy to his front.