Derek Lambert: Vendetta

‘We heard that when you saved Moscow the war was as good as over. What went wrong?’

The other soldier said: ‘Rostov was a victory,’ and when Razin laughed: ‘I mean it, Rostov was the turning point. It was after Rostov that Stalin said: “Not a step back.’”

‘And we haven’t taken any steps back?’

‘We’ll hold the bastards here. Stalingrad. This is the one.’

Razin, nipping the glowing tip off his cigarette and, pouring the residue of tobacco into a tin that had contained throat lozenges, said: ‘I was in Moscow when Panfilov’s men held the Fritzes.’

The two soldiers fell silent as Razin retold the story that had already acquired the lustre of a legend.

As the German offensive faltered outside Moscow in late 1941, nearly a year ago, twenty-eight anti-tank gunners commanded by an officer named Panfilov had defied the mailed fist of a panzer attack on the Volokolamsk Highway. They had fought with guns and grenades and petrol bombs and the political officer, mortally wounded, had grabbed a clutch of hand grenades and thrown himself under a German tank. The battle had lasted four hours. The Germans lost eighteen tanks and failed to break through.

Ah, such sacrifice. Even when Razin had finished the tale Rodina, Mother Russia, lingered in the crater and briefly Panfilov and his men with their petrol-filled bottles were more real than the outrage that was Stalingrad.

Razin said: ‘At the end of the battle for Moscow you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the Fritzes. It was so cold that the oil in their guns froze and the poor bastards were still wearing summer uniforms – greatcoats and boots if they were lucky – and when they went for a piss… snap!’ Razin picked up a splinter of wood and snapped it in half.

‘You felt sorry for the parasites?’ The soldier with the eloquent hands stared at Razin in disbelief.

‘Until I remembered what they had done to our people. Until I remembered the corpses strung up in the villages.’

‘The Fritzes might have been pissing icicles at Moscow,’ the soldier with the wounded leg remarked, ‘but when they first arrived in Stalingrad they were singing and playing mouth-organs.’ He turned to Antonov. ‘You don’t talk much, comrade. What do you think about Germans? Do you feel sorry for them?’

Antonov realised that the soldier thought he might be a Nazi sympathiser: the Red Army was obsessed with spies, and exhausted men saw them on the tattered fringes of their fatigue. But Antonov wasn’t sure what he felt about Germans. Occasionally during shell-splintered sleep, he saw young men harvesting golden wheat on the steppe or carving ice for drinking water from a frozen river or coaxing girls into the deep green depths of the taiga and the young men were neither Russians nor Germans.

When Antonov didn’t reply the other soldier, wagging one finger, asked: ‘Where are you from comrade? The Ukraine? I heard that when the Fritzes invaded last year a lot of Ukrainians fought for them.’

Razin prodded the barrel of his pistol towards the soldier. ‘I come from the Ukraine,’ he said.

‘You obviously decided to fight on the right side.’ The soldier regarded the pistol without fear. ‘But what I’m saying is true?’

‘A few joined the Germans,’ Razin admitted. ‘In Kiev, for instance, the people were bewildered. In the space of twenty years they had been occupied by Germans, Austrians, Reds, Whites, Poles… Maybe all they wanted was the use of their own backyard. And isn’t that what we’re all fighting for? One hell of a great backyard?’

The other soldier spread his hands in front of the incandescent stove. ‘That isn’t what Sergei asked. Where,’ nodding at Antonov, ‘do you come from?’

More Katyushas, Little Kates, exploded nearby. They made an awesome noise and the Germans called them Stalin Organs. For the Russians firing from the other side of the Volga it was easy enough to shell the Germans over their comrades’ heads; for the Germans it wasn’t so easy to pound the Russians because the Soviet positions were so compressed that there was always a risk that they would hit their own infantry.

‘Does it matter? We’re all Soviets.’ But to Antonov it did matter; the army had taught him that. Republics, regions, races… all harboured ancient hostilities.

The wounded soldier said: ‘A country boy by the look of you. Blue eyes, fair hair beneath that helmet… Or is it straw?’

Antonov drew a swastika on the dust on one of his tall boots. ‘Siberia,’ he said after a while. ‘A village near Novosibirsk.’

In fact it was fifty miles away from the city, a collection of wooden cottages with pink and blue fretted eaves, a pump and a wooden church that was used as a granary.

‘Well,’ the wounded soldier said, ‘you look as if you’ve had an easy war so far.’

Razin said: ‘Very easy. He’s only shot twenty-three so far. Two more won’t make much difference.’ He smiled crookedly at the two soldiers.

They began to understand, expressions tightening. ‘You’re not–’

Removing the rag from the telescopic sights of his rifle, Antonov said: ‘My name’s Yury Antonov,’ and, without pleasure, observed the effect of his name on the two visitors.

Leaning against the belly of a stricken locomotive, Karl Meister ate his lunch. Stale bread, sausage and a can of sliced peaches.

He wondered what Antonov was doing. Cleaning his rifle probably. If you weren’t eating or sleeping or shooting you were cleaning your rifle.

Katyushas exploded down the ruptured track near Univermag, the department store. They sounded like elephants bellowing. Fragments of metal struck the other side of the big black engine.

Cold eased its way down from the north. No teeth to it yet but when it really began its advance – next month according to the pundits – it would be inexorable. More than anything else the Sixth Army feared the cold: it had bitten the Wehrmacht to pieces outside Moscow.

Feeling its breath, Corporal Ernst Lanz, a thirty-year-old Berliner with a bald patch and a thief’s face, said: ‘We were supposed to have gobbled up this arschloch of a place in August.’

He was leaning against a piston drinking Russian beer from a fluted brown bottle. His grey-green tunic was stained but the Iron Cross 1st class on his chest shone brightly. His helmet, upturned, lay beside him like a bucket.

‘The generals didn’t reckon with street fighters,’ Meister said. ‘The Ivans would fight for a blade of grass – if there was any left.’

‘Stalingrad!’ Lanz threw aside the empty bottle. ‘Six months ago I’d never heard of it.’

‘I doubt whether the Führer had. No one expected a battle here. We thought we’d be half way across Siberia: the Russians thought they would be across the Dneiper.’

In Lanz’s presence Meister tried to compensate for his lack of battle experience with tactical hindsight and foresight. He doubted whether either was effective: not even shared adversity could dispel the suspicions separating classes: all they had in common was a city upbringing and even that was marred by Lanz’s low opinion of Hamburg.

He wondered how, given a common tongue, he and Antonov would hit it off if they hadn’t been ordered to kill each other. According to Soviet propaganda Antonov was the son of the soil, a Siberian. Would he want to socialise with a college boy?

‘So,’ Lanz said, taking a cigarette from a looted silver case and lighting it, ‘when are you going to start hunting each other again? What is this? A rest period?’

Meister swallowed the last slippery segment of peach. ‘When I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Supposing he gets ready first? Gets a bead on you from over there,’ pointing towards what was left of a warehouse.