Romilinsky was speaking of the new obscurant rounds that had been compounded to attenuate the capabilities of enemy observation and target designation equipment. The existence and purpose of the rounds were well known, but the security personnel still insisted that they be handled as though they were vital state secrets.
“Be patient,” Shilko said. “We’ll fire them up tomorrow, and then we won’t have to guard them.” He had learned long ago not to argue security issues. “Have all of the troops been fed?”
Romilinsky nodded. He had an exaggerated manner of nodding, like a trained horse determined to please his master. “I’m not certain it was the finest meal we ever served, but it was hot.”
Shilko was glad. He tried to feed his battalion as though they were all his own children, although it was very hard. Now he didn’t want them going to war on empty stomachs. The food in the Soviet military was of legendarily poor quality, but his battalion’s garrison farm was one of the finest in the command. Shilko himself came from peasant stock, and he was proud of it. In the past year, his battalion had been able to raise so many chickens that they not only exceeded the official meat allocation per soldier but were able to sell chickens to other units for almost five thousand rubles. His soldiers were better fed than those in any other battalion of which Shilko was aware, yet he used only six soldiers full-time in the agricultural collective… although each boy had been carefully selected because of his background and expertise. The brigade had gotten quite a bit of mileage out of the accomplishments of Shilko’s “gardeners,” and their achievements had even been featured in a military newspaper as an example to be emulated by all. It had been Shilko’s finest hour with the high military authorities and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Shilko slipped into one of his old peasant attitudes. The Party. He was in the habit of occasionally going down and working a bit with the soldiers in the garrison garden and poultry sheds. He had realized too late how much he loved the land and animals and the sense of growing things, and he suspected that he really had been born to be a farmer, like his forefathers. But, as a young man, he had viewed life on the collective farm as hopelessly drab and unsatisfying. Now, when he dug, the political officer got nervous. Publicly, Shilko received praise for his spirit of proletarian unity and his vigorous conformity to the essential principles of the Party. In fact, however, he knew very well that it made the full-time Party boys very nervous when lieutenant colonels took up shovels and hoes. Afraid they might have to do a little proletarian duty themselves. Shilko had half expected to be denounced as a Maoist, and, while he had in fact been a full member of the Party for twenty years, he had never taken that membership too seriously. It was something you did because you had to do it, like wearing the correct uniform for the occasion. But all of the theory had been a bit too much for him. He liked things he could do with his hands.
His son was another matter. Pasha had a better mind than his father; he was clever and quick. Although he had been an enthusiastic Young Pioneer and a good Komsomolist, Pasha had never immersed himself in the theoretical aspects of Marxism-Leninism to any unusual extent. He had simply accepted the Party as a fact of life, as did most young men of reasonable ambition. Then he had come back, legless, from Afghanistan, to find himself last on the list for everything. No salutes for the boy without legs. And Shilko had watched his son turn from a loving, open youth into an extraordinarily dedicated member of the Party. The Party accepted Pasha the invalid, seeking to exploit him even as they genuinely sought to help him. But Pasha had turned the full weight of his talents and his anger to exploiting the Party. Shilko knew from experience that that was the kind of ambition on which the Party thrived. At first, upon his son’s return, Shilko had worried about the practical aspects of his well-being. Then he had watched the legless boy develop himself into a man with long arms.
Pasha was doing very well within the Party apparatus. He seemed to have developed a taste for manipulation, and Shilko had no doubt that his son would become a powerful man, that he would long ride the ribbons he had been given to compensate for his missing legs. Shilko no longer needed to worry about the mundane aspects of his son’s welfare. Pasha would have a fine ground-floor apartment, or an apartment in a building where the elevator worked. But the simple, loving father in Shilko worried now about other aspects of his son’s future.
And in a matter of minutes, there would be a war. It still seemed unreal to Shilko, as though this could not possibly be a rational decision. But there was no mistaking the level of preparation, the intensity, the inevitability of it all. Shilko wondered if the decision to begin this war had been made by the kind of men his son was coming to resemble. The men who knew best, for each and every living creature.
Well, Shilko thought, it didn’t matter. He and his boys would fight and fight well, no matter who made the decisions. The event was infinitely greater than the men caught up in it.
The mood in the fire control post had begun to change. The frantic action tapered off. Officers began to sit down. Men looked up at the master clock above the communications bank.
It would not be long now. Shilko looked at his watch, even though he had just glanced at the clock. He went to the samovar and tipped himself another cup of tea. Then he took his chair near the situation map, proofing the schedule of fires one last time.
The radios were silent. Romilinsky sat down beside Shilko and nervously patted the handle of the field telephone, the wires of which led directly to the gun batteries. Soon it would be time to pick it up and say the single word that would unleash the storm.
Shilko was almost as proud of the big guns with which he had been entrusted as he was of his men. When he had entered the service, his first unit had been equipped with field pieces designed before the Great Patriotic War, towed by Studebaker trucks from the war years. Now the enormous self-propelled pieces in his battalion made those little towed weapons seem like toys. Shilko felt that he had seen enormous progress in his lifetime.
“Comrade Battalion Commander,” Romilinsky said, “you seem admirably relaxed.”
“The sleep did me good,” Shilko said, content to wait and think through these last minutes.
But the chief of staff wanted to talk. “I believe we are as ready as possible.”
Shilko accepted that the needs of other men were different from his own. If his chief of staff needed to talk away the final minutes of peace, Shilko was willing to oblige him.
“I’m confident that we’re ready, Vassili Rodionovitch. This is a good battalion. I have great faith.”
“I can’t help thinking, though, of things we should have done, of training that should have received more stress…”
Shilko waved the comment away. “No one is ever as prepared as they should be. You know the dialectic. A constant state of flux.”
“Five minutes,” a voice announced.
Shilko looked up at the clock. Then he sat back. “You know,” he began in his most personable voice, “when I was a junior lieutenant, I was horrified by the conditions I found upon arrival at my first unit. Nothing seemed to be as we had been promised at the academy. Nothing was as precise, or as rigorous, or even as clean. I was very disturbed by what I viewed as a betrayal of the high standards of the Soviet military. Oh, I wasn’t especially ambitious. I never expected to change the world. But this unit didn’t seem as though it could go to war against a pack of dance-hall girls. Half of the equipment didn’t work. The situation seemed intolerable to a brand-new lieutenant who had been coached to go up against the capitalist aggressors at a moment’s notice. Anyway, my commander was a wise man — a veteran, of course, in those days. He watched my struggles with some amusement, I think. Then, one day, he called me into his office. I was worried. It wasn’t so common for a battalion commander to speak to a lieutenant in those days. And it usually didn’t happen because the lieutenant had done something to be proud of. So I went to his office in quite a state. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done incorrectly. But you never knew. Anyway, he asked me how I enjoyed being in the army, and how I liked the unit. He was teasing me, although I didn’t realize it then. I talked around my real feelings. Finally, he just smiled, and he called me closer. Very close to his desk. And he said he was going to reveal to me the one military truth, and that if only I remembered it, I would do very well in my military career.”