Шон Хатсон: Sabres in the Snow

“What the hell do you mean, they were ready for us?” Rostov demanded.

“They knew we were coming,” the major said, draining what was left in the bottle and tossing it aside.

Rostov looked puzzled.

“That’s impossible,” he said.

“Then why were they prepared?” Namarov said. “We rode into a trap.”

Rostov was unimpressed.

“Coincidence,” he insisted.

“If they knew we were coming, why did they hang around in the village? Why not just leave during the night? They knew they were outnumbered but they stayed there because they knew they had the advantage of surprise.”

“But how could they know?” Rostov demanded, more angrily this time.

Namarov was silent. His eyes scanned the faces of the men before him. Rostov. Petrovski. Kuragin. Amassova.

Kuragin swallowed hard and dropped his gaze.

Namarov remained silent.

“You’re trying to say that there’s a traitor amongst us?” said Petrovski.

“All I’m saying is, Kleiser knew we were coming. That ambush was too well organised to be coincidence,” said the one-eyed officer.

“Most of us have ridden together for two years or more and now you suddenly decide that one of us is a traitor.” Rostov gaped. “I think that bang on the head must have been harder than you first thought.”

Namarov rounded on him.

“Then how do you explain what happened in Ridanski?” he said, angrily.

“Well, I don’t think it was anything to do with a traitor for one thing,” Rostov told him.

“Who would want to betray us, Andrei?” said Petrovski.

Namarov did not speak.

“We attacked at the wrong time,” said Rostov. “We should have gone in before dawn, slaughtered the bastards in their beds.”

“It would have made no difference what time we attacked,” Namarov said.

The other men stared at him for long moments, all except Kuragin who was still gazing at the ground beneath his feet.

“How many men did we lose?” the major wanted to know.

Amassova spat a stream of tobacco juice into the snow.

“Twenty-seven dead, nearly forty wounded. We lost about thirty horses,” the cossack told him.

Namarov nodded slowly.

“So now what do we do?” demanded Rostov.

“We can’t move on yet,” the major told him. “I think we should spend the night here. Give the horses and the wounded time to rest, then we go after Kleiser tomorrow.”

“And the people in Ridanski?”

At last Kuragin spoke.

“What about them?”

“They’re probably dead already. They probably were when we attacked this morning,” said Namarov, eyeing his companion suspiciously. “There’s nothing we could have done for them.”

All heads turned as, from far away, the sound of gunshots split the air and, as the men watched, the first of many plumes of dark smoke began to rise into the sky. Their source was the village of Ridanski.

Through the relative stillness too, came the sound of powerful engines gradually receding until there was only silence again. The cossacks watched those plumes of smoke which rose like accusatory fingers, prodding the skies which were already heavy with cloud. The sun was swallowed up by them and the golden rays were wiped away.

It began to snow lightly. Small flakes, as if the heavens themselves were weeping for Ridanski and its people.

Kuragin walked away, his boots making deep indentations in the snow, and no-one saw the single tear that trickled down his cheek.

When Boniak awoke, it was dark. He sat up quickly, the pain in his shoulder biting at him like a snapping dog. He touched the wound tentatively and found that it had been heavily bandaged. Beside him another cossack, his head bandaged, slept peacefully. The boy rubbed his eyes and blinked hard, things gaining clarity as he looked around.

There were a number of camp-fires burning-men, as usual, huddled around them. He caught sight of Rostov, that familiar pipe in his mouth, chatting animatedly with some other men from his squadron.

Petrovski was sharpening his sabre. Mig was cleaning his with an oily rag, wiping the last blotches of dried blood from the razor-sharp steel.

“Feeling any better?”

The voice startled the youth who turned a little too quickly and hurt his shoulder again. He winced, squinting through the darkness to see Namarov at his side.

“How long have I been out?” asked Boniak, rubbing his injured shoulder gently.

“Ever since we came back from the attack,” Namarov told him. “Seven hours. Perhaps more.”

Boniak lay back once more, one hand across his forehead.

“What happened this morning?” he said, dreamily.

“We rode into a trap,” the officer told him.

Boniak looked up, puzzled.

“A trap?”

Namarov nodded.

“Kleiser and his men knew we were coming,” he said. “They were ready for us.”

“But that would mean…”

Namarov cut him short.

“A traitor.”

Boniak nodded.

“Who?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t be sure.”

“But you have an idea?”

“What I have is twenty-seven dead, forty wounded and thirty dead horses. The rest I can only guess at.”

The two of them did not speak for long moments then Namarov coughed, almost selfconsciously.

“You saved my life this morning,” he said. “Thankyou.”

Boniak smiled.

“Then that makes us even,” he said. “Because, if you hadn’t found me in that cave that day, I would probably be dead by now.”

Namarov smiled and ruffled the boy’s hair.

There was another long silence, finally broken by Boniak.

“What about Kleiser?” he said.

“He got away,” Namarov told him. “We go after him tomorrow. It shouldn’t be difficult to pick up his trail. I’ll send six men to watch his movement.” The major got to his feet. “I think you’d better get some rest now, there’s a lot to be done come daybreak.”

Namarov walked slowly away, murmuring words of encouragement to some of the other wounded as he passed.

Boniak gazed up at the dark sky, his mind turning over the events of the day and also what was to come. Would they catch up with Kleiser and his men or would the bastard escape once more? He took one of the bear claws from his pouch and held it before him, studying the curve and the sharp point. It reminded him of a miniature version of his own sabre. He looked at it a moment longer, then dropped it back into the pouch.

He ate some of the soup which was brought to him by Voronzov but it was thick and made him feel sick. The man next to him, with bandaged head, ate his own and then offered to eat up Boniak’s too and he let him have it, watching as the man drank from the shallow metal bowl, using a piece of stale bread to mop up the dregs, he belched loudly and was asleep within ten minutes.

Boniak however, lay awake much longer, listening to the hooting of an owl and the soft neighing of the horses as they padded the snow. Sentries rode slowly back and forth along the perimeter of the camp and, one by one, the camp-fires were allowed to burn out.

Night took hold of the land and did not release it for another six hours and, in that blackness, Boniak lay thinking of Kleiser and of revenge.

Some of the huts still smouldered as the cossacks rode into what was left of Ridanski.

The snow, which had stopped falling during the night, was now coming down even more thickly and Namarov realised that Kleiser’s trail might well be obscured so he swiftly despatched Petrovski and five other riders to tail the fleeing SS unit. They had orders to report back to him when they had found the Germans.

But now, riding slowly through the narrow lanes between gutted shells of houses, the cossacks had other things on their minds. The bodies of comrades who had fallen the previous day had been stacked up in the middle of the village, along with their horses and burned. A huge blackened pile of scorched flesh the only testament to their existance. There were still thin wisps of grey smoke rising from the funeral pyre. The blood had frozen and been covered by fresh falls of snow as had most of the burned-out huts. German corpses had been left where they fell and many now lay in rigored poses, lying in the snow like useless mannequins.