Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

They were still riding forward but they were cantering now. The horses were foaming, their coats dripping sweat. They came to a stream, the horses stopped to drink and some of the men jumped into the water.

‘Get on your horses – no dismounting. Now! Keep advancing, keep moving,’ Zhurko yelled at them.

Now they loped more easily, crossing cornfields, riding through sunflowers. What time was it? They had charged in the early morning but now it seemed much later. The sun burned high. Each field they came to there was an enemy position but, at the sight of them, the men, wearing feathers in their hats, jumped up shouting and ran away. Benya and Garanzha galloped after them, Benya swinging the sabre. What damage cold steel could do, he thought. Enemies still fled, dropping helmets, mugs, boots, pans, until riven by steel they fell and didn’t rise again.

The guns were quieter behind them, Benya noticed. Still fritzing with adrenalin, he was almost jumping out of his skin with exhilaration. ‘This is how victory feels!’ said Prishchepa, whirling his shashka over his head, flicking out a spray of sweat. The sky seemed to Benya to reflect a blast of energy. It was as blue as the sea, a sea upside down.

They rode on and on, under the scorching sun, over fields full of broken young men lying amongst the ripened wheat.

The words those fleeing boys were shouting sounded so graceful. It was not German, or Hungarian; could it be Romanian? No, you idiot, realized Benya, it was Italian. They had been chasing Italians.

‘Halt!’ Zhurko pulled his reins and held up his hand. The squadron managed to stop on a slight spur, though Koshka went straight over his horse’s head on to the ground and lay there whimpering.

‘Look!’ Sergeant Panka rode up to Zhurko. ‘A church tower, captain. A village ahead.’

‘Form into two squadrons, sergeant,’ said Zhurko. ‘You take Squadron One to the east. Squadron Two, come with me. Let’s go!’

They rode down the street feeling as light as a pack of wolves on the hunt.

An old Cossack woman is cooking a goose for a hundred men in the house by the church, a pot meant for the Italian soldiers who had been occupying the village until hours earlier. The old man beside her sleeps in an alcove with its scarlet rugs and tassels; her children are packed together like puppies in a basket. She’s toothless with sunken cheeks and she sucks her gums as she watches the men who’ve just ridden in, her eyes as murderous as sickles. If they expected a warm welcome at this liberation, they do not find one here. Benya understands there is no welcome amongst broken people – even if their liberators are fellow Russians.

It’s early afternoon. It’s too hot to move yet everyone is moving. To Benya the village seems bright and rich. After years of a life in black and white, in prisons, Camps, military training, every moment in this village will be imprinted on Benya’s mind forever, like the first film you ever see in colour. They clop down the street, standing high in their stirrups, yahooing loudly, singing songs, brandishing swords still streaked with blood and grass. Ahead of them, a dead horse, then a man with rosy cheeks and open eyes but missing the top of his head, a dome of creamy matter still immaculate and quivering in its fragility: these are just some of the sights that overwhelm him. The village seems a land of plenty; it radiates the heat of freedom with its colourfully painted cottages, eggshell blues and fiesta reds, and some of the girls have dressed up in white blouses and skirts in red and green, woven with white hems hung with bells. The horsemen follow the swing of the girls’ hips with their eyes. They smell the food, hear the ringing water of the stream. It is a time that will live in the men’s memory in the perpetual present, a time of wonder divided into jagged but discrete scenes.

The Shtrafniki find olive oil and chocolate and even eggs. There’s wine and vodka and the men start drinking immediately. These Italians have things Benya hasn’t seen since he was in Madrid. And what uniforms they have left strewn around: helmets with feathers and peaks and bonnets. The place is fragrant from the cooking. The Italians left in a hurry when the Shtrafniki galloped right into the village, that’s for sure. There’s coffee ground in a helmet, real coffee, and plates of polenta and vermicelli that are still warm. There is a dead man in the yard and Smiley is pulling off his boots and trying them on. ‘These’ll do,’ he says.

Someone has already tossed the pockets of the dead Italian, spilling love letters in playful italic writing and sepia photographs of a beautiful woman posing with a chocolate-box-ish background in a studio in some small Italian town. The letters are spread into a fan-shaped collage that reduces the story of an entire life to its pathetic essentials: a body, an ID card, a photo of a family. Finis . We killed them without even bothering to find out who they were, thinks Benya.

After swigging some water and swallowing a piece of cheese, Benya walks his horse to a stable where the vet Lampadnik and the farrier Tufty Grishchuk are checking the horses. He hands Silver Socks to Lampadnik, worried about her neck. ‘Oh dear. Doesn’t look good. Sorry, Benya,’ Lampadnik says.

‘What do you mean?’ says Benya, suddenly worried.

‘What do you think?’ asks Lampadnik, turning to Panka.

The old Cossack touches the neck carefully, checks his finger. ‘She is still bleeding.’

‘What do we do?’ Lampadnik is cautious and shy. Doubt is sketched on his long face with horsey teeth, and Benya knows he has been tentative since he was sentenced to ten years in the Camps in 1937 for ‘Trotskyite wrecking’ after two horses died of croup.

‘Golden, be calm. Let me do this,’ says Panka, his teak-coloured face grave. ‘I have some old twine in my saddlebag and, Lampadnik, you scald some tree bark. Ask the woman for some honey.’

Benya holds Silver Socks, who is pouring sweat, and talks to her while Panka finds the twine in his saddlebags and quickly binds Socks’s upper lip to distract her and then washes the wound in water, then with the juice of scalded bark. He threads the twine through the eye of a knitting needle and sews up the gash in Socks’s neck with lightning dexterity, pulling it tight, applying more of the scalded bark and painting on the honey. ‘A poultice, you see?’ and then he releases the horse’s mouth. Socks is still shivering but her eyes are different, relieved somehow.

‘There,’ says Panka, stroking her muzzle. ‘You’re going to be fine. I’ll watch her. Golden, go and get some grub and sleep. It’s always sunny on the steppe, eh?’

Outside the Cossacks in the squadron cheer Benya and rub his shaven head with its spiky grey-blondness. ‘I saw him swing his sabre,’ they tease him.

‘I thought he could only lift a pen,’ says Spider Garanzha.

‘The Jew has it,’ says Panka.

‘That’s a compliment from Panka. He might even call you “brother”,’ jokes Fats Strizkaz, embracing him, kind suddenly and Benya loves him with the love of men who kill and die together.

Panka shrugs and spits, busy with the other horses. He is too experienced to share the exhilaration of the hopped-up Criminals but he has a shot of vodka or two and is cheerful in his level way.

Benya looks around him. His companions are scarlet-cheeked and shiny-eyed with butchery. There’s madness in the air, and they swagger giddily with the strange aura of rare men who’ve ladled out death and know the secrets of the world. Benya wonders if they are going to slip the reins and go berserk in the village. Socks is going to live though, and he has been through a battle – and he feels eerily powerful, hungry for more war, more savagery.