Peter Idone - Red Vengeance

As if a summer storm had swept through with thunder and hail and then, just as swiftly, the sky turned clear again, the fever among the crew suddenly broke. Without needing to be ordered, the grenadiers returned to the last of their chores and made ready to depart. Voss collared Angst. “Come with me, Corporal.” They went back into the farmhouse. He was tempted to ask the corporal how he felt after that display of zealotry. He wanted to slap Angst and the entire crew for taking part in such an obscene performance. Instead, he merely ordered the corporal to select the best lengths of floorboards that he had pulled up and secure them to the mud guard of the personnel carrier. “It might be of some use,” he added. Angst began to form a stack of the least splintered pieces, careful not to catch his hand on the nails that remained in the wood.

“A little more alacrity on your part, eh, Corporal,” Voss said. His arms loaded with several odd lengths of board, Angst left for the vehicle. Voss noticed a paraffin lamp on the table and removed the wick housing. He splashed the contents of the glass reservoir on the shelves of books, the cheap curtains and the little writing desk. He drained the last of the paraffin onto the floor and dropped the lamp. The glass shattered. After striking a match he threw it and watched as fire spread from one puddle to the next. The room became a bright orange glow, like the autumn sunset. Let it all burn , he thought, as the flames quickly spread. The great dreams, the visions, lebensraum, even final victory—let it all be devoured by fire and smoke. Within minutes the house had been transformed into a maelstrom of flame and had spread to the barn as the vehicles drove away.

Falkenstein had Sergeant Vogel slow down to allow the personnel carrier to pass them by. They hadn’t been on the road for more than fifteen minutes, and the light that remained from the sunset was fading. All they could expect to do was put as much distance as possible from the tractor station until the darkness and the terrain forced them to stop. The day was lost. The only consolation was that he had retrieved everything he had come for. There was no stopping now. He felt good about the crew; they seemed up to the task, and that was cause for elation. His adjutant, Voss, on the other hand, he was not sure. The dash and vigor the young officer displayed upon their first meeting was no longer apparent. He wondered if he’d been too hasty in following Beutel’s recommendation. He signaled to Khan to come down from the turret. Not without difficulty, he raised himself out of the seating compartment as the Mongol slithered effortlessly around him and into the vacant seat. Now, raised behind the 20 mm gun, he kept his head lowered so as not to become totally enveloped by the dust churned up by the carrier’s tracks. He had taken along the engraved box. It had caught his eye in an abandoned house during the Balkan campaign. Some partially destroyed village outside of Sarajevo. He took it as a keepsake of having passed through that way and had filled it with letters and the snapshot history of his military life and the letters of his married life—which seemed so dim and distant, it could have been the life of some other man. His beloved Maria and little Hans. He could not remember if he’d ever held the child in his arms. Hans had been born while he was in Russia, and Falkenstein had seen him for the first time when he returned wounded. The child cried uncontrollably when Maria brought him to visit at the hospital. The bright, cold whiteness of the room, the odor of disinfectant, and a trace scent of ether, and then mother and child were confronted with a mauled, burned creature wrapped in gauze. He remembered the sisters taking the boy out of the room and leaving his wife there alone, only the two of them, with little to say. He could no longer afford the weight of this ballast, which was why he had buried the box months ago. Now resurrected, he could admit that the contents and the memories they stirred belonged to some other man from a different time. He undid the latch and opened the lid. He untied the ribbon; the same violet ribbon Maria had used to tie up her hair. It once possessed her scent but now reeked of the cold earth from having been buried for so long. The dry wind bore the ribbon aloft, and the tissue thin letter paper followed. One by one the snapshots fluttered out and scattered over the steppe. Empty, Falkenstein passed his fingers over the cool metal, sensing the fine-tooled lines of the craftsmanship. He let the box fall from his hands and watched as it bounced and tumbled across the ground, yet another piece of flotsam left behind by a retreating army.

Reconnaissance Group Falkenstein found itself boxed in on all sides. Whatever gains in time and distance the captain had hoped to achieve on the return trip were irrevocably lost. Voss raised the suggestion that they make for the crossing at Dnepropetrovsk, drive south to Zaporozhye, and recross via the dam carriageway. The Novo-Moskovsk rail line was blocked with stalled trains for kilometers on end, probably as far as the river. Falkenstein wavered. In theory, the lieutenant’s idea was sound, but he had reservations. Should the crew get a whiff of the river… see if their morale didn’t suffer. Watching troops and civilians pour over the bridge at Dnepropetrovsk while they would have to eventually return to the other side further south would only weaken the crew’s resolve. He did not share this confidence with the lieutenant but simply dismissed the plan without giving a reason.

The situation had proven to be no better as they drove east. Once again trains were backed up to the north of Pavlograd and as far south as Sinel’nikovo. Depots had been established at key points to load the harvests of fruits and grain, agricultural and industrial machinery, and military equipment. NCOs and Reichsbahn officials ran along the sidings, shouting orders, cursing and making threats to the Wehrmacht and civilian workers. Their expletives could not get the rolling stock loaded any faster or move locomotives. At every bridge, rail, or highway crossing, there was some high-ranking officer, backed up by a retinue of field police, who invariably pointed Falkenstein in a direction he did not want to go.

The vehicles came to a halt at the bank of the Samara northwest of Pavlograd. Engineers had detonated the first of a series of munitions that mined the production facilities and small-scale industrial works on the outskirts of the city. More than twenty-four hours had elapsed since leaving the kolkhoz, and the Reconnaissance Group was still short of its original point of departure. Falkenstein was anything but pleased. With binoculars in hand, he left the scout car and accompanied Voss down to the edge of the riverbank to observe the situation. Bits of litter rained down from the controlled explosions. Traffic barely moved along the main artery. Staff cars, trucks and lorries, interspersed among horse-drawn carts were funneled one by one between the rear and front ends of two trains that had left a narrow opening where the tracks crossed the road. The reason for the delay was obvious. The army field hospital was in the process of evacuation, and the wounded were being carried aboard the Red Cross train. Surgical equipment and supplies, everything from beds to bedpans, were loaded as well. The chief medical officer overseeing the project was taking his time. Despite the cajoling railroad administrators desperate to hurry things along, the officer was not about to subject his patients to unnecessary discomfort or lose a single life for the sake of expediency. The wounded came first, and as far as he was concerned, property, especially loot, could wait.

Civilians not pressed into immediate service for the Reichsbahn were leaving the city in droves. Those not fortunate enough to possess a horse and cart carried what they could in a sack tied to their backs, in a wheelbarrow, or in a battered cardboard suitcase. A measure had been decreed that all able-bodied males were to accompany the army on the retreat. There were no exceptions. The reason was to deprive the Red Army of manpower. Upon retaking German-occupied territory, the Soviets had adopted a policy of forced conscription, pressing into its ranks men and boys between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Sometimes issued a helmet and boots—most times not—and a partial uniform, the new recruits were taught how to load and fire a rifle. Many went into battle unarmed and had to retrieve a weapon from a dead or wounded comrade. The crushing numbers of mass infantry attacks made up for the lack of combat experience. The wives, children, and parents accompanied these boys and men on the trek to the west. Increasing the numbers of refugees were the peasants who sought to avoid the retribution the Bolsheviks would exact upon them for having lived under German occupation. Tainted by foreign influences and suspected as collaborators, they were considered a threat to the fabric of Soviet life.