Шон Хатсон: Sabres in the Snow

The only building which had not been burned was the church and it was towards that sturdy-looking edifice that Namarov now led a group of his men, Kuragin and Boniak amongst them.

The doors were slightly open and Namarov dismounted, walking towards them.

Kuragin was close behind and he recoiled as he saw what lay beyond the solid wooden barrier.

“Oh God,” murmured the major, walking inside. He coughed, trying to fight back the nausea he felt rising within him. The stench inside the church was appalling. A rank, fetid odour of blood, excrement and vomit.

Kuragin and Rostov joined their superior inside the building, which had been transformed into a charnel house.

Scattered all over the floor, piled three deep in places, were the bodies of the villagers. Men, women and children who had once peopled the little village now lay in blood-spattered heaps. Some had even been hung from the beams and they twisted gently in the breeze which swept in when Namarov opened the doors. The walls and floor were splashed with blood, particularly the floor, which felt spongy where so much of the crimson liquid had soaked into the wood.

Namarov stood gazing at the scene of slaughter for long seconds then he knelt and lifted the head of the nearest corpse. It was a woman in her thirties. There was a single bullet hole in the nape of her neck and her eyes, still bulging open, seemed to stare at the major. He moved to another corpse, an old man. He too had been neck-shot. As had the next. And the next.

Further down the church the bodies were riddled with bullet holes and he recognised the spent cartridge cases from MP40s. Obviously the SS had tired of their favourite past-time and decided to finish the job quickly with automatic weapons. A woman lay on her back, a small child still clutched in her arms. Both were drilled through with at least a dozen holes and a thick puddle of congealed blood had spread out around them. Gobbets of intestine and sticky lumps of brain matter were clinging to the walls like obscene decorations where six people had been lined up and then cut down. An empty magazine lay next to one body, almost unrecognisable due to the damage done to it and Namarov realised with disgust that the entire 32-round magazine had been fired into just one corpse.

Kuragin was checking the bodies, looking at people he had seen alive just twenty-four hours earlier, now mangled beyond belief by the fury of close-range gunshots. He lifted the heads of many corpses, seeing people he had known well in life and his despair was tinged with something like disgust and also hatred, both for Kleiser and himself. The knowledge that he had allowed his comrades to ride into a trap hurt him as much as having to search through the mounds of bodies.

“Kuragin.”

He recognised the voice as Namarov’s.

“Your family. Are they here?” the major asked.

The big cossack swallowed hard, not knowing whether Kleiser had kept his side of the bargain or not. He wondered if the next face he looked into would be that of his wife or one of his daughters.

They were not amongst the other corpses.

“They’re not here,” he said, his voice a mixture of relief and foreboding and he was not slow to catch the glance which Namarov shot him.

The major nodded, almost as if a suspicion had been confirmed, then he turned and walked out of the church. Kuragin and some of the others lingered, looking once more at the bullet-torn bodies as if doubting the truth of what they saw. It was all Boniak could do to prevent himself vomiting.

“Take a good look, son,” said Rostov. “That’s how the Germans fight wars.” He too stalked off.

But the lad had seen this kind of thing before and at much closer quarters. He had seen his own parents killed in this manner, he had seen bodies burned, men hung, neck-shot… The thoughts trailed off until just one word, one name remained in his consciousness. A word which had become synonymous with slaughter such as this.

Kleiser.

He spoke that hated name aloud, gazing once more at the carnage inside the church, then he turned and joined his companions who were outside in the square.

“Do we bury them?” asked Rostov, hooking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the church.

Namarov shook his head.

“We move on.”

No-one protested.

“We’ve got to find Kleiser, that’s the only thing that matters now,” added the major. “Petrovski will be reporting back as soon as he sights the bastard.”

“And then what?” Rostov wanted to know.

Namarov shrugged.

“We attack him and just hope that we don’t run into any more traps.”

“Do you still seriously believe that what happened yesterday was the result of betrayal?” There was a harsh note of disbelief in the squadron commander’s voice.

“Until I know otherwise, I must think so. We must all be prepared.” The major looked at those around him and, for long moments, his eyes fastened on Kuragin who held the stare for as long as he could then rode off to find his squadron. Rostov did likewise.

Within a matter of minutes, the cossacks were moving away from what had once been Ridanski.

Kuragin felt tired. He had slept little the previous night and now he almost nodded off as his horse made steady progress through the snow which was still falling like chill confetti. Behind him, his squadron plodded along wearily, many of them still wounded from the engagement with the SS troops. Those who had grown beards looked as if they had been attacked by some maniac with a whitewash brush, the snow sticking to the thick, unwashed growths of hair. Kuragin rummaged in his pocket and produced a hip flask. He pulled the top off with his teeth and took a hefty pull from the flask, allowing the fiery liquid to burn its way to his stomach.

He rode alone, ahead of his men, as did all the squadron leaders. To his right he could see Rostov, the pipe gripped between his teeth. Ahead of him, Namarov.

Kuragin was beginning to suspect that his superior realised he was the one to blame for the incident in the village the day before and Kuragin felt, once again, that peculiar ambivalence within himself. He could not allow his family to die, they came before everything. He would give his own life for them but he had, by his bargain with Kleiser, probably doomed most of his colleagues to death. Twenty-seven of them already lay back in the smoking ruins of the village and he wondered how many more would have to die before the matter resolved itself. If, indeed, it did. What, he wondered, would happen if he were killed? With no-one to supply him information, Kleiser would have no more use for Olga and the two girls. If Kuragin died, then so too would his family. The thought made him shudder and he took another long pull from the flask.

Maybe his family was already dead and Kleiser was just stringing him along. Perhaps they were back there in Ridanski, their bodies hidden somewhere. Or they might have been hung after the SS left the village. He shuddered to think that he might come across them dangling from the next tree.

Thoughts tumbled through his mind, never settling long enough for him to contemplate and he sought solace in the hip flask once more.

Rostov chewed irritably on the stem of his pipe. It had gone out a while ago and he had no more tobacco to fill it with but he kept it in his mouth more out of habit than anything else. Like Kuragin, he too would glance back every now and then at his squadron. His eyes settled on Boniak. The lad was now in the front rank and Rostov marvelled at the change in the boy since they had first discovered him so long ago. He looked along the line, his mind pondering over one question. Was Namarov right about them having a traitor in their midst? And, if so, who the hell was it? What would they have to gain by betrayal? He shook his head, trying to push the questions to the back of his mind. He had no answers anyway. He looked up and saw the major riding at the head of the leading squadron. Rostov had a fierce respect for the man and, during the two years they had ridden together, he had not yet known the major to be wrong in questions of strategy or tactics. But, was he wrong with his theory about the traitor?