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

Kulikov had put bullets into close to a hundred men, Zaitsev almost twice that many. Kulikov and Baugderis had turned the art and need and ugliness of killing into a game to ease the days. Zaitsev thought back to the slaughter in the Nazi officers’ bunker. That night, troubled by the senselessness of the act and its utter lack of military necessity, he’d been lucky. He, too, had felt the malady of his murders, as sharply as Kulikov felt his now. But Zaitsev had been near the flame of Tania to melt the ice in his heart, to tame his pain until he could bridle it. Now Kulikov sat in this trench staring over his bloody shoulder at the fruit of his own. sport, the death mask of Baugderis, and rued the rot of Stalingrad in his soul.

Whose fault is it? Zaitsev wondered to Kulikov’s sobs. Isn’t this what we’re told to do, every moment? Kill the Nazis. Beat them into the ground, bite them, claw them, blow them up, stab, shoot, kill them until they are no longer on our soil. We’re in a frenzy, all of us, we’re rabid, all of us. Every word we hear and read, in In Our Country’s Defense and Red Star, kill the Germans. The politrooks, kill the Germans or die. The vodka which never seems to dry up for us, stay drunk, stay dim-witted and numb, kill the Germans. Wherever you find them, in battle, taking a piss, sleeping in their bunks, they’re never less than what they are: invading, miserable, stinking Nazis, the enemies of Communism, never forgiven, never pitied, never saved. Kill the Nazis or die.

Zaitsev laid the rifle across the dead Georgian’s lap. He unbuttoned the coat and ran his hand to the inside pocket to pull out Zviad Baugderis’s Komsomol card.

“Let’s go, Nikolay. Can you stand?”

Kulikov struggled to his feet. Zaitsev steadied him. He pressed on the wounded man’s back to remind him to stay low.

Zaitsev picked up Kulikov’s periscope. He looked around on the trench floor.

“Where’s your rifle?”

Kulikov looked down also. “It’s right… where is it?”

The rifle was gone.

Zaitsev felt as if he had fallen amidst the floes in the Volga. Cold needles nicked at his skin.

He’s been here, he thought. He’s been in this trench.

In his mind’s eye, Zaitsev saw the high black boots of the Nazi colonel walking where he now stood.

Perhaps he left a clue? No, not him.

He looked one last time at Baugderis. This isn’t enough? he thought. The bastard is making his own sport now, collecting trophies of his kills.

Or no, wait. Not trophies. He knew he’d shot two snipers today, didn’t he? He had to come see if one of them was me. That’s his assignment. When he kills me, he goes home.

He’s got my picture from In Our Country’s Defense.

The Headmaster waited for the German attack to move past, then he came out behind it. Now he knows he missed me. And he took the Moisin-Nagant as a bonus. It’s better than his Mauser, and he knows that, too.

Zaitsev ducked lower in the trench and pushed Kulikov ahead of him. Is Thorvald still in those buildings? Is he dug in and waiting for me to come to the rescue of one of my hares? Is this a trap? Is Nikolay a bait? Or did he leave Kulikov alive to tell me how incredible his shooting was?

“Come on, Nikolay,” he said. “Let’s go. Quickly.”

THORVALD ROLLED HIS WHITE CAMOUFLAGE SLEEVE down over his wristwatch. Nikki had been gone for close to an hour.

He looked again out the window through the dust and smoke wheeling under the swelling sun. He lay back. His body recalled the night spent there, the tongue-and-groove flooring unyielding to his back. The boy certainly moves carefully, he thought. Four hundred meters out, four hundred back, and it takes him an hour to do it. Patience as a tool, a weapon. Nikki understands. Nikki has the stuff of a sniper. I may train him myself when we get back to Berlin.

Thorvald wrapped his arms again around his rifle to rest them on his chest. He’d lain like this since Nikki left, like a corpse clutching a rifle instead of a lily. He raised his head to gaze down his white canvas tunic and pants to his boots. He clicked his toes together once, enjoying the slapstick of the move. Still alive, he thought. Still kicking. He touched his nose to the rifle barrel. The gun had grown metallic cold now, the warmth of the two spent bullets long drifted out of its black skin. The smell of oil and smoke, of flash and speed, trickled from the opening onto his cheek. Thorvald hugged the gun. He rubbed the bottom of his stubbled chin against the nub of the open sight at the end of the barrel. The rifle in his arms represented all that he was not. It was the missing part of him, the hardness and clarity not in his own flesh. The gun holds its spirit well, he thought. It smells of the kill, it feels of its nature: deadly, cold, hard. It is complete, resolved.

The sounds of the German attack flitted in the window. Before he left, Nikki had said that it probably wasn’t Zaitsev lying out there in the trench. The Hare wouldn’t have made those mistakes, wouldn’t have stayed to the bitter end just for the kills. That’s beneath him, not worthy of the legend. Bad form. No, Thorvald thought, this Zaitsev is not a sportsman, no mere marksman like me. He’s a hunter. He likes his prey in the wild.

Thorvald looked into the charred rafters. He focused on a sliver of ceiling plaster, hanging by some thin force, swinging in the moving chill. He was learning more every day about Zaitsev even as he learned about Stalingrad. The two, he thought, the man and the city, are clearly inseparable. They are exact opposites and thus perfect complements. The city is a cruel, indiscriminate battleground. It is misery incarnate, with its lice, filth, and terrible faces, death and injury infecting every shadow. Stalingrad is a fallen thing, jagged and ugly. It screeches and shakes with each thrust of pain like an old dying mule. But Zaitsev, he stays silent under the city’s screams. He is the solid, quiet ice and dicing cold of the Russian dawn. He has will. He’s not stripped naked like the city. He’s clothed in pride with his muttlike Siberian determination to endure. This sergeant with the forest in his veins, he doesn’t even know where he is. He thinks he’s still in the damned woods, somewhere in the mountains. He doesn’t realize the colors are gone. The forest has burned down, and in that blaze the first victims were preordained: honor, order, and mercy, the very traits that elevate us above Zaitsev’s precious wild beasts. As told in the great operas of Wagner, the ethics of Schopenhauer, the superman of Nietzsche, we are lifted above the animals, we are the more noble creatures. But in vicious battle, where men yearn only to kill each other, the raging heat of their hatred cremates their humanity. They become no more than savage, frightened brutes. Zaitsev hunts their animalness; he finds them by it and destroys them for it.

Zaitsev won’t wake up, him and his one-man-one-bullet credo, his morality; he’s sleepwalking. Ridiculous, the notion of killing with honor—it’s an oxymoron. So there it is. The Hare is so different from Stalingrad that the city masks him, even protects him, because in some way, some intuitive hunter’s way of being in but not actually of the forest, the city cannot even touch him.

No. That is not Vasily Zaitsev dead in the trench. Not yet.

NIKKI CALLED UP THE STAIRS. THORVALD HAD NOT heard him approach.

“Colonel, I’m back. Come down.”

Thorvald rose stiffly to his feet. His joints ached from the ninety minutes of cold and inactivity. “Well?” he asked, descending the steps. “How did we do?”

Nikki hefted a long Russian rifle with a scope. “There were two snipers down, sir. No Zaitsev.”