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

Zaitsev and Medvedev were the only members of their division’s sniper unit who worked directly along the front line. The other dozen shooters stayed burrowed in the rubble a few hundred meters back. Working so close to the Germans called on all their skills as hunters, testing their nerves and cunning, but it enabled the two Siberians to shoot several hundred meters deeper into the German rear. Their crosshairs found not just infantry, machine gunners, and artillery spotters, the fodder of war, but unsuspecting officers.

Viktor dug from his pack a half-full bottle of vodka. He inclined the lip toward Zaitsev. “Nice shooting, Hare.” He took a swallow, then put the bottle in Zaitsev’s outstretched hand. Zaitsev tipped it.

Viktor laughed. “You’ve got more patience than me.”

Zaitsev wiped his lips. “How so?”

The Bear laughed harder. “I would have shot that fucking canteen.”

SS COLONEL HEINZ VON KRUPP THORVALD FACED THE applause.

His students clapped, fifteen of them who’d gathered on the distance range to see their teacher, the headmaster of the SS’s elite sniper school, win a bet.

Lieutenant Brechner strode forward, ten marks in his hand. He laid the money in his colonel’s outstretched palm, then bowed in a theatrical burst.

Thorvald accepted the money and returned the bow. He reached out to the puffing private who’d run back from one thousand meters across the field with the paper target.

Thorvald held the target up to Brechner and stuck his index finger through the perforation in the center of the bull’s-eye. He waggled the finger. “This is a worm,” he said, “sticking out of a Russian’s head.”

The men laughed. The remarkable ability of their colonel to make such spectacularly long shots was useless as a military tactic, for at such a distance it was impossible to tell if a target deserved shooting. Nonetheless it was an impressive feat, one that Brechner at least was willing to wager ten marks to witness.

“That’s just how I got them in Poland,” Thorvald said, handing his Mauser Kar 98K with a 6X Zeiss scope to the private, his attendant. “Two hundred of them. Back in thirty-nine.”

Part of Thorvald’s teaching philosophy was that his students should aspire to be like him: confident, calm on the trigger. They need not emulate his flabbiness and bookish nature, but he desired to see intellect in their marksmanship. He wanted them to reason out their shots, replacing the body—the enemy of the sharpshooter, with all its distractions and throbbing motion—with the still, sharp focus of the mind. He desired to see them behave and shoot like Germans.

Daily, Thorvald told stories of his own exploits on the battlefield as part of their training here in Gnössen, just outside Berlin. This morning, after the early practice session and the bet by Brechner, he gathered his charges under a large oak and had coffee served. While they sipped and settled on the grass, Thorvald told this class of young, eager snipers the tale of the Polish cavalry charge.

Within forty-eight hours of Germany’s invasion of Poland, begun September 1, 1939, Thorvald had been transferred as a sniper to the Fourteenth Army under General Heinz Guderian. It was Guderian and his staff who’d conceived the lightning strikes, the overwhelming blitzkrieg tactic combining waves of air and land bombardment with highly mobile tanks and armored infantry. In the opening days of the Polish invasion, Thorvald, then a captain, found himself on his first live battlefield with little to do while the German forces easily split the Poles into fragments. Above the front lines, the Luftwaffe’s Ju-87 Stuka bombers perforated the enemy’s lines with their low-level, screaming accuracy. Then came a flood of armored cars, motorcycles, and tanks. Next came the rumble of infantry and artillery. When weaknesses were found, the German infantry knifed through to fan out into the rear, cutting communications and surprising supply stations.

By the third morning, the Polish army had fallen into disarray. Isolated units fought hard to beat off frontal attacks in Thorvald’s sector outside Krakow. Finally his assignment came from Command: his eight-man sniper squad was to creep up during lulls in the fighting and shoot into the Polish trenches and strongholds. Command wanted its snipers to drain the enemy’s fighting spirit.

For four days Thorvald and his men crawled at dawn to within five hundred meters of the enemy. Thorvald collected seventy-one confirmed kills, more than the rest of his unit combined.

While the other snipers bragged at the evening meals and compared journals, Thorvald read books. The commander of his division came around and handed out tin tokens, one for each kill. These were to be redeemable at the end of the war for one hundred deutsche marks apiece, the army’s equivalent of a bounty. Thorvald gave his tokens away.

During the invasion’s second week, Thorvald’s company encircled a large Polish force. One morning at dawn, he looked out of his shooting cell at the sound of trumpets and pounding hooves. He watched in disbelief as a brigade of Polish cavalry leaped over the parapets and galloped across the open plain. Through his scope, he gazed at the colorful mounted soldiers, their gloved hands holding pennants and lances high, trying to rally their comrades.

He lined up his first target at six hundred meters and fired. The rider fell. Before he could acquire a second mark, the booming of tanks erupted behind him, raising columns of dirt and flame on the plain. He watched through the crosshairs; in minutes the magnificent Polish cavalry charge became a scattered collage of dismembered men and horses.

“And what,” he asked the assembled class at the end of this day’s tale, “do you think is the moral?”

Thorvald smiled at the young men. No hands went up. They knew better than to speak during his stories, even to answer a question.

They are so ready, Thorvald thought, looking at the faces, the ease of confidence in their movements, the juice of youth in their veins; they’re tugging at the reins to go off to battle to earn their own reputations, to move their crosshairs over the hearts of real men. I know how a man can kill. But I wonder how he can be so anxious to risk his life to go and do it.

“The lesson, my young, ignorant boys,” he said, holding his hands out to them as if to show the breadth of his sizable wisdom, “is this: don’t be a hero, on horseback or otherwise. Stay behind cover.”

MINUTES AFTER HOFSTETTER’S BODY HAD BEEN carried to the rear, orders came for Nikki’s company to move from their position west of the Tractor Factory. The final assault on the next factory, the Barricades, was under way. This offensive would be the knockout punch; it should take just one or two more weeks to push the Reds out of the Barricades and into the Volga.

Captain Mercker split the eighty-man company into patrols of ten. Mercker was leery of snipers and migrating machine guns that might carve into his troops and bog them down in a firefight if they moved as one. He counted out the first ten men.

“Corporal.” He pointed at Nikki. “You know our objective?”

Nikki nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

“You’re in charge of the first squad. Get to within fifteen hundred meters of the Barricades. Find a secure spot for the company to assemble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep your head down. Move.”

Nikki looked at the nine men assigned to scurry behind him through the gauntlet ahead. All young, pale, grimy faces like his own. All interchangeable, he thought, each one dispensable, like a throw-away rag. He said a quick and silent prayer that there would still be nine when he next counted.