Sixth Guards alone manned two belts in depths up to ten miles and widths to twenty. And there were thirteen more Soviet armies with defenses just as solid throughout the Kursk bulge, with seven extra armies held in reserve.
There were eight defensive belts in all, the first three of which were gargantuan, and every one of them was connected by trenches, there must have been a thousand miles of trenches dug on 6th Guards’ front alone.
Dimitri shook his head at just what little parcel of it all he could see. When the Germans finally do attack, they’ll have to wade through more than hell.
Hell will be just their front door.
What kind of force have the Germans put together on their side to believe they can smash through this? It’s got to be just as big. Just as historic. Dimitri thumped his heels again on the barrel to let the stupendousness of the idea sink in. He was a part of this history, though just a small and insignificant mote. Beneath the humming German plane come to take his picture sitting on his barrel, Dimitri resolved that insignificance would not be his lot.
He stood from the barrel, his rear was sore and imprinted by the metal rim. He waved to the departing reconnaissance plane. Goodbye, he wished to the German pilot and photographer. I hope you got a good look.
He brought his eyes down to the massive groundworks growing by the shovelful in front of where he stood. The sound of the plane faded, the slips of clouds obscured the wings.
Dimitri stretched and yawned. He looked down the little rise from where his company of tanks sat under camouflage netting. One hundred meters away, a thousand civilians hacked at the earth with shovels and picks to excavate an anti-tank trench. He had been watching these girls, women, and old men work all morning, they dug like people out of the Bible, ancient Jews building something for a pharaoh, they filled buckets with dirt and the dirt was hauled away in barrows to dark piles, and these piles were hauled elsewhere to build protective berms. The ditch had grown to over ten feet deep and wide; it was perhaps a half-mile long. No tank could go into that and expect to get out. These trenches would serve to funnel the enemy attack to preordained channels, directly into minefields or under the sights of Soviet artillery. Dimitri had spent his morning watching these human ants nibbling at the steppe to change it, this was their own fight against the invaders.
‘Hey, Andrei!’ Dimitri shouted over to the next tank in line.
‘Yeah!’
‘Keep an eye on the General for me.’ Valentin was gone in a company truck to pick up their new crew for the General.
Dimitri recalled the Cossack fable about the old stallion and the young colt. The young one said to the old, Let’s run down the hill and get us a filly!
The old stud shook his great mane and replied, No. Let’s walk down and get them all.
Dimitri strode into the steppe grass, the reeds were as high as his waist, the color of bare and untanned skin. He ran an open hand over their tops and recalled the feeling of silk skirts, long, clean hair, and gentle, nervous flesh. It had been a while.
He walked to the lip of the trench and stopped. He was an old horse, yes, but he only wanted the one. He looked down at her, he’d kept a watch on this one all morning from his perch on the fuel barrel. She was one of dozens toiling below his boot-tips at the lip of the trench but she stood out.
She would not lean on her shovel handle and gab, she paused only to mop sweat from her brow. She assaulted the soil and heaved great heaping shovelfuls into the waiting buckets, filling them with only three or four loads of her spade. She was not lean like some hungry peasant waif but a woman, with curves and swoops in her figure, she was ample. Around her worked old men in hats and beards with shirtsleeves rolled up, and girls dressed in billowy blouses and patterned skirts with kerchiefs around braided hair. She laughed once at something one of the girls said and he’d heard her through the scraping of a hundred tools and grunts and flopping dirt. He picked up an empty bucket with a rope attached to its handle and tossed it down into the trench. It landed with a hollow thump just where he willed it, at her feet.
Without looking up, the woman righted the bucket. With a few deep stabs of her shovel, she topped it with dirt. She paused now to run her sleeve across her forehead. The bucket did not disappear the way it was supposed to. She followed the slack rope up the trench wall into Dimitri’s hands.
‘Take it away,’ she said.
Dimitri tilted his head at her now that he had her eyes on him. Her voice was like her body, deep and round. He liked it.
‘Take it away,’ she said again, knowing what the old fool over her head was doing. She made her voice an instruction, a schoolmarm to a stupid student.
Dimitri inclined his head as though she were royalty and tugged up the bucket. He dumped it at his own feet, not on the pile behind him where the dirt belonged, and tossed the pail down to her again. She raised her eyebrows and turned away to another empty bucket. She filled that, and found Dimitri at the rope of this one too, pulling it to the surface to dump the dirt again in the wrong place.
She turned on Dimitri. Even ten feet below him, her eyes were sea green.
‘You’re not helping.’
Dimitri put his hands to his hips. He pretended to be wounded by her scold.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’
Dimitri clambered down the slope of the pit. His boots skidded and he almost fell, the ditch was steep. His hurry and lack of balance made her laugh. This was her second laugh for his ears.
Dimitri tugged his shirt tail out of his pantaloons and pulled the tunic over his head. Bare-chested, he reached for the woman’s shovel. She did not hand it over. He locked on to her eyes and saw how she took him in.
‘What?’ he prodded, expecting her to comment on his slim torso.
‘You’ve got no hair on your chest,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the chest of a woman.’
Okay, Dimitri thought, good, the filly bucks. He pulled his eyes from hers and slid them down her.
‘So do you, my dear.’
She sent her face skyward, shaking her noggin at something up there, her God, a dead husband, something, and said, ‘Ha!’
She would not give up her shovel. Dimitri turned to the girl behind him, she was a teenager, and asked her if she needed a rest. The girl sighed in relief and handed over her tool.
Dimitri made a display of his strength and stamina. He dug two to the woman’s one, filled buckets, and showed impatience when they were not hauled up fast enough. He worked for fifteen minutes, almost to the point of exhaustion. He finally speared his shovel into the ground and left it. She stood behind him with a ladle of water.
He poured it over his head. He handed it back to her. She walked away to bring him another. Yes, Dimitri thought, she’s ample.
She returned with the ladle dripping. He quaffed the lukewarm water and ran a filthy forearm across his lips. Again she laughed at him.