Red Army (43 page)
At the sound of a single shot, the girl flung an arm into the air, as if waving to someone in the distance, and dark blood splashed from the hollow under her shoulder. An instant later she collapsed, disappearing into the shimmering grass.
Bezarin’s other officers had been more successful than their commander, and he was pleased to learn that none of his tankmen had abandoned their tanks to participate in the free-for-all violence with the motorized riflemen. He took some comfort in the thought that the men he had trained himself remained disciplined soldiers.
Bezarin threatened Lasky, the commander of the attached motorized rifle troops, with a court-martial under wartime conditions in accordance with the provisions of Article 24 if he lost control again. Failure to act, under battlefield circumstances, could be punishable by death. Bezarin made the threat just as his anger peaked, and as he began to realize how deeply the episode had shaken Lasky, he regretted having made it. None of the motorized rifle officer’s school training or unit experience had prepared him for this. Lasky stuttered, half-pleading, insisting that such a thing would never -- could never -- happen again. Bezarin had read and been told many times how war made boys into men. Yet the very opposite seemed true. Men who swaggered across the parade ground and bullied their way through the administrative rigors of peacetime soldiering became as helpless as children in the face of battle. Bezarin thought again of Tarashvili, his regimental commander, and of Lieutenant Roshchin, the boy who had broken down on the battlefield and perished with his company. Lasky appeared to be so unnerved that Bezarin wondered if he would go into shock. Where in the program of instruction did they teach you how to handle officers who went to pieces in combat? Or who were frightened into stasis by the unexpected behavior of their men? Having begun by raging at Lasky, Bezarin found himself spending precious time in an attempt to rebuild the officer’s confidence, to put him back in control of himself and his men. He assured Lasky that there would be a chance to even things up at the river, if not before, although he knew that there would be a price to pay for this massacre -- Bezarin could find no other word for it -- and that he and Lasky were the two officers most likely to face a military tribunal.
“It’s all right,” Bezarin said. “The men are back in their squad groups with their vehicles. All you have to do is go through the motions. They’ll listen to you. They’ve got it out of their systems. Just show them you’re in control.”
But the motorized rifleman could not control his hands well enough to light his cigarette. Bezarin lit one for him, then guided it into the other man’s hand. Lasky’s fingers felt like electric wires, frantic with too much current. He gripped the cigarette so hard that the small paper tube bent as he jammed it between his lips. Bezarin turned his back, unable to spare another moment. He felt as though he had squandered his efforts reinforcing failure. Lasky would have to make it on his own, as would every one of them, in the end. The thing now was to move.
Bezarin had lost two more tanks and three infantry fighting vehicles, along with most of the crew members. He loaded his wounded into the largest, sturdiest civilian vehicles that remained in running order, then he put a medical orderly in charge of two riflemen who claimed they could drive. Bezarin directed the orderly to retrace the detachment’s route as best he could, stressing that it was essential to put enough distance between his charges and the scene of the engagement to disassociate the wounded men from the massacre. He worried that any enemy forces or even civilians in the area would take vengeance upon his wounded. Bezarin wished the orderly luck, unhopeful.
Nothing more could be done. The Germans or the English would have to tend their own casualties. Bezarin forcefully shut his mind to the suffering around him. But a part of him felt as though he were the lone occupant of a fragile boat in the middle of a storm at sea. All a man could do was hang on.
He moved along his disordered line of vehicles, shouting at officers and men to mount up, to regroup their platoons. He screamed and cursed at them all until his voice began to fail, and even then he forced the mingled commands and obscenities out of his raw throat. He sensed that the only way to hold his dwindling unit together was by sheer force of will.
The unit pulled together. The vehicles had a battered, overloaded look, a caravan of military gypsies. Camouflage nets trailed over decks, and stowage boxes had been torn open. Vehicle fenders had twisted into chaotic shapes, and cartridge casings littered every flat surface on the infantry fighting vehicles. The self-propelled guns worked their way down from the ridge, and, at Bezarin’s wave, the little column began to move again. He had heard nothing from Dagliev’s advance element, but he contented himself with the thought that he had told the company commander to use the radio only to warn of trouble ahead. He took the quiet as a positive sign.
Bezarin had directed that the vehicles maintain twenty-meter intervals, but the difficulty of moving along the refugee column soon squeezed that distance down to an average of less than ten meters. He allowed the crowding as long as they marched immediately beside the panic-stricken traffic, sensing that his enemy would not stage an air attack against his column as long as it hugged living refugees. Besides, he did not want to lose control of a single vehicle.
He had issued strict orders to cause no wanton damage. But the panic that flowed like a bow wave in front of the armor caused the refugees to harm themselves in their desperation, and collisions proved unavoidable. Bezarin clenched himself as tightly as possible, forcing his mind not to accept the implications of the string of small tragedies that marked the path of his tanks. He peered forward, unseeing, as his war machines rumbled to the west. He scanned the sky and the rising line of mountains that hid the Weser, shutting out everything but the mission of reaching and crossing the river. His tanks rode the berm of the highway or took short detours along parallel routes and across the fields wherever the debris and confusion of the human flood threatened to become overwhelming. Here and there, bombed-out enemy march columns blocked the way, blackened trucks steering into eternity, their drivers crude, shrunken figures carved from charcoal. Several times, enemy aircraft boomed overhead. But their rockets and bombs never sought Bezarin. He did not know whether or not they were even aware of his column, whether their ordnance was predestined for other, greater threats than the one his presence posed. He only knew the sudden intervals of terror, almost impossible to master, as the jets came screaming down along the highway, seemingly aimed straight for his tanks, only to blast on by to the east.
Intermittently, Bezarin’s forward detachment surprised enemy soldiers in stray transport vehicles or perched along the side of the road, tasked to administer the rear area. Some attempted to fight it out. Bezarin’s vehicles cut them down. Others, astonished, simply raised their hands in surrender and went ignored. Bezarin refused to permit his tiny force to be diverted. He wondered what had become of Dagliev’s advance element. When he tried to raise him on the radio, there was no answer. Neither was there any sign of his passage. Bezarin relegated the Dagliev problem to his list of lesser concerns so long as things were going well.
The column seemed to be touring the guts of the enemy formations now, the individually unimportant targets that joined in a great combination to make a modern army function. The Soviet tanks and infantry fighting vehicles merely raked the sites with machine-gun fire from the move. The only sharply focused efforts at destruction were directed against enemy vehicles with antennae in evidence. Bezarin did not intend to give the enemy any free intelligence on his location. When the path to the west led his tanks around a congested village and right through the middle of a British vehicle-repair site, Bezarin almost lost control of his force again. The target seemed too rich to be passed by, crowded with equipment and technicians, and officers and men took it upon themselves to destroy as much as possible. Bezarin screamed into his microphone, whipping his officers back into column formation with more curses and threats. Even as he shouted, he wondered how much longer he would be able to keep it up, how long his willpower would endure. Then he barked another command and forced his self-doubt down into a private dungeon. The unit pulled away from the support site, spraying suppressive light-weapons fire in its wake to prevent the British from employing any man-packed antitank weapons.
Bezarin felt certain that the enemy must know his location by now, and he pounded at the rim of his turret hatch when another clot of vehicles at a valley crossroads brought his tanks to a halt. Threats and warning shots failed to undo the great knot of vehicles, and Bezarin finally directed his driver to batter the civilian vehicles out of their path. The destruction seemed vicious and senseless and unavoidable to Bezarin. As if in punishment, one of Lasky’s infantry fighting vehicles threw a track as it attempted to work its way up out of a field and across a lateral road. There was no time to repair the vehicle, simple though the operation would have been, and Bezarin ordered that it be further disabled. Then the crew mounted up with their more fortunate comrades. Bezarin felt as though fate were chipping away at him, defying him to reach the river. Yet there was good fortune, too. His tanks were obviously moving faster than the enemy could react, and none of the bridges over the tertiary streams had been blown. The passage of local water gaps, which might have held up the column, merely involved clearing off the refugee traffic. And as Bezarin’s vehicles raced past still more British support sites, it was apparent that none of them had been forewarned. The British were in a process of dissolution without even knowing it.
Twilight began to wander down out of the side valley and treelines. The darkening shapes of low mountains rose, threatening to bar the way to the river like black fortress walls. As his column worked its way along the valley bottoms Bezarin recognized the possibility of an ambush from which there would be no way out. But the anticipated enemy fires failed to materialize, and each minute brought the Soviet tanks closer to the river.
Dagliev finally reported in. The advance element, intended to provide security and reconnaissance for the main column, had long since branched off on another route to the northwest, weaving into the mountains. That at least partially explained to Bezarin why the British had so consistently been unprepared for his arrival. Dagliev swore he had been trying to call in for hours but had been unable to raise Bezarin on the net, probably because the intervening mountains had blocked him from radio line of sight. Bezarin lost his temper. He could not understand how Dagliev could have diverged so widely from the anticipated route. Dagliev made a series of excuses, but the most telling point was that, despite his error, the company commander was within a half-hour’s march of the Bad Oeynhausen bridgehead. He had found an open road into the Weser hills. Accepting the situation, despite the residue of his anger, Bezarin ordered Dagliev to push on for the bridgehead without delay and link up with the air-assault forces.
Bezarin could not sort out his feelings with any clarity. Part of him tensed with jealousy that Dagliev had pushed so far ahead of the main body. By sticking to the most obvious route, Bezarin had lost time in the exodus of refugees. Dagliev had almost reached the objective, while he was struggling up the valleys, skirting to the north around the pink glow over the ridges that marked Hameln, and accomplishing little more than frightening a few British mess sergeants. Additionally, Bezarin felt newly vulnerable now that he knew for certain he had no security force in front of his column, and his mind filled with the varieties of possible dangers. Still, he decided that it would not do to stop and push forward another reconnaissance and security element. His force had shrunken to too small a size to permit any further detachments, and he was not even sure he had an officer left that he could trust to find his way efficiently in the dark. Bezarin decided to alter his course to reach the river valley as directly as possible. He calculated that he could strike the river at Rinteln, then work up the river valley. He reasoned that the refugee flow would have little reason to move northwest along the route he anticipated taking. In any case, he wanted to get clear of the mountain valleys.
The twilight deepened into a pale darkness, with night descending over the landscape like layers of silk. He would keep his force together and move as fast as he could. They were so close now. All the consequences could be sorted out later. The repercussions from the massacre along the highway were likely to be so severe that Bezarin reasoned he could do little to worsen the situation. It was time to take risks. Even if they were to court-martial him and have him shot, Bezarin had made up his mind on one thing. They would not do it before he reached the river.
Bezarin’s force seized the Weser River bridge at Rinteln almost by accident. It had not been part of the plan. The objective remained the crossing site at Bad Oeynhausen. But just as the remains of Bezarin’s unit straggled down out of the hills toward the river road junction at Rinteln, Dagliev radioed in with news both good and bad. He had managed to link up with the air-assault forces on the near bank at Bad Oeynhausen. But hard fighting continued at the crossing site, and he could not get his armored vehicles across the bridge because it lay in a direct line of fire from enemy positions on high ground just to the south. The enemy had not managed to blow the bridge before the air-assault forces seized bridgeheads on both banks, but now they were shelling it with everything they had, trying to drop it into the water or at least prevent anyone from crossing it. Still, the artillery could be managed. It was the direct fire threat that had brought any further progress to a halt. The twin Soviet bridgeheads could not move to support each other, and Dagliev suspected that the enemy would attempt to counterattack, reasoning that it would be foolish to waste any more time. The tension in Dagliev’s voice reassured Bezarin’s battered ego, and he felt a fresh surge of energy. There were problems to be solved, and he was the man to solve them.