David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

The commissar looked up from his pad like an animal hearing a curious sound. Hurriedly, he turned to a fresh page and bore down with his pen.

Zaitsev continued. “I want each of you to know why I have accepted the assignment to teach you. It’s because I view you as my revenge. If I die in battle, yours will be the bullets I’ll still fire at the Nazis. I’ll fight them from my grave through you.”

He paused to look over the intent faces of the recruits. “Each of you,” he repeated, his voice solemn. He waved his open palm across the trainees as if in benediction.

“Each of you must know your own reason for being here, as I know mine. It will keep you alive.”

Zaitsev extended the rifle to the poacher Chekov. The private took it, and Zaitsev held it with him for a moment.

“And it will make you die very, very dearly,” he said. He released the rifle into the man’s grasp.

The room was silent save for the echoes of Zaitsev’s voice and the flipping of paper while Danilov whisked to a new sheet.

THE REMAINDER OF THAT MORNING WAS SPENT ON WHAT Zaitsev and Viktor called “fieldcraft.”

Viktor presented the topic to the recruits in a simple fashion: field-craft was nothing more than hunting, right up to the point of pulling the trigger. The skills of silence and unseen movement were the most important abilities a sniper could develop. “Your shooting eye will improve with practice,” he told them, “but missing a shot at three hundred fifty meters will never get you killed so long as your enemy doesn’t know where you are.

“Stalingrad is not the forests or wheat fields of your homes. It’s a giant pile of bricks, concrete, and metal. Hunting Germans in Stalingrad is not the same as hunting squirrels on the farm. Squirrels don’t shoot back. To survive and kill in this city, you’ll need new ways to move and hide. You must learn to use the ruins and craters, to run bent over with your head almost to your knees. We’ll practice crawling and dragging your weapon in a sack behind you. Picking your routes through the debris requires a keen eye and patience. Most important—and this is something you may already know if you’re really hunters—you must lie still for hours until the one shot presents itself. A move made too soon can be your last.”

Viktor and Zaitsev led the recruits up the steps out of the basement to the first floor of the Lazur. Collapsed walls and ceiling joists formed a huge, jumbled wasteland. For four hours the two sergeants watched and shouted while the trainees crawled over and around the wreckage, dragging mock rifle sacks behind them. Whenever a head or shoulder popped above the debris, Viktor shouted “Bang! Dead Ivan! Now get down!”

The smaller recruits were better at escaping detection in the ruins. Many of the bigger ones, like Griasev and the freshman Michailov, bumped and jangled their way through the rubble.

To take advantage of these differences, as well as minimize the risks, Zaitsev divided the class into two teams. One squad, the “hares,” would come under his tutelage. The hares would be the shorter, more slender soldiers, like Zaitsev himself, who could move undetected in the debris. Viktor’s group would be the “bears,” the larger men who needed extra instruction on how to keep their heads down and their feet from fouling each other’s ropes but possessed greater physical strength.

In the late morning they ate a lunch of tea, soup, and bread. The hares and bears sat separate, as units, talking and laughing. Members of each group produced bottles of vodka.

Danilov approached Zaitsev, carrying sheafs of notes.

“Comrade Zaitsev,” Danilov began, offering a cigarette, “tell me. What do you think of our new heroes?”

Zaitsev accepted the cigarette. “The women.”

“You object to the presence of women in our sniper school?”

“They’ll create problems among the men. They always do.”

“Well, Vasily, let’s see if you can’t teach them to cause more problems for the Germans than for us.” Danilov laid his notes aside. “You understand why it must be done this way. In the Red Army, there are tens of thousands of women serving alongside the men, on radios in the bunkers, stanching the men’s blood as nurses, and working the artillery. This first sniper unit gives us the opportunity to tell the world that the Nazis are being defeated on the battlefield not just by Russian men but by the Russian people, all of them, men and women. We can say we have risen to fight as one. The Communist order is truly united, without distinction by class or sex. Think of the impact at home among the civilians to see pictures in Red Star of their sisters, armed and dangerous. Not even the Americans can claim that their women are shooting down their enemies with rifles.”

Zaitsev ground his cigarette beneath his heel.

“I have less objection to your decision than the fact that I was not consulted,” he said. “Please do Viktor and me the courtesy of asking our opinions in the future. For now, we’ll make your women into killers.” If they’re not already, Zaitsev thought, walking away from the commissar. The Armenian one, Slepkinian, though heavy, moved well and claimed she was an experienced hunter. Viktor had told him about the blonde, Chernova. The Bear had shared a bottle with the guards who’d brought her and the big boy, Michailov, in from the trenches on the edge of no-man’s-land. She said she’d been a partisan from Byelorussia. When she’d heard the Lazur plant was to be the site of the new sniper school, she insisted on being among the first trainees.

What has she seen? There’s so little news from the occupied areas. I’ve heard it’s hard there, terrible. Is she a solid fighter, the guerrilla’s reputation, or just able to mount a good stare on that pretty face? We’ll find out.

Zaitsev looked at Chernova, sitting with the men. Her spoon was tucked into her boot like a regular foot soldier. She took a gulp of vodka and finished by inhaling through her sleeve. The men enjoyed her. They ignored the other, thicker woman.

He stopped his walk among the men and watched only her. Even clapping his hands to break up lunch and move on with the lessons, she tugged at his attention. Her voice rose above the others. She was behind him, standing, her hands on her hips. Ignore her, he thought.

Trouble.

ZAITSEV WALKED TO THE BASE OF THE CINDER-BLOCK WALL. He turned his back to the recruits, most of whom sat cross-legged in a semicircle on the shop floor. Late afternoon light flowed through the high, broken windows. Overhead, swirling dust glittered like mica.

“Out there”—Zaitsev pointed to the window above him—”it’s sometimes very quiet. That silence can be deceiving. It can lull you into carelessness.”

He walked to the middle of the group.

“Remember, you’re not just infantry anymore. You’re snipers. You need new habits, new ways of thinking. A foot soldier’s battles are fought with noise and explosions, screaming and shouting and rushing around. You will fight in silence. Just because it’s quiet around your trench or your shooting cell, don’t think you’re alone. There are arms, legs, and eyes everywhere in the ruins. Every building, every destroyed house, every pile of rubble is under watch. Supply units are running through trenches carrying ammo, mines, and food. From the tops of buildings, artillery observers are training their binoculars in all directions. Sappers crawl through the debris to find enemy bunkers and tunnels. Runners from headquarters are carrying messages to units trapped without radios. Never forget: the battlefield is alive with activity, even when you can’t hear it or see it. And you, the sniper, will lie in the middle of it all, unseen, unheard, watching everything, letting it pass you by until it’s time to strike.”