His officers, as they filtered in, appeared both tired and anxious. Yet there was a reassuring readiness in them, a clumsy energy that was largely nerves, and the determination to get into the fight. Anton wondered if any of the rest of them were ill. He had had his share of experiences in training areas and on maneuvers with diarrhea, even dysentery and hepatitis. But somehow, he had assumed that those were peacetime problems, and that the seriousness of war would make them go away. Now he wondered if he alone was suffering, or if other men were similarly weakened by sickness.
Anton had always been fastidiously clean, with scrubbed nails and well-fitted uniforms. Now he sensed that he must stink of his own waste as he moved about the room full of officers, and he felt as though this, too, made him smaller and less capable.
His officers wanted to get back to their units, to prepare for combat. They had felt cheated in their waiting impotence, remaining in the rear as their comrades died and the war raced on without them. These were largely picked men, the best the Soviet army could offer. There was a bit of nervousness about the Americans, since they were, after all, the great, almost mythical enemy behind all of the other enemies. But there was a willingness, too, even a desire, to get right to the heart of the issue with the ultimate opponent. The thing that most bothered them was the restriction on employing radio communications prior to contact with the enemy. They felt, as a body, that here in the enemy’s heartland, west of the Weser River, speed alone could provide sufficient security. They complained of columns breaking up and units lost on the wrong routes.
Anton disagreed. He reiterated his position, backed as it was by the corps commander, that radio transmissions were not allowed prior to contact with fresh enemy forces of at least battalion strength. Anton knew that some of his subordinates had already broken the rules in the confusion of minor skirmishes, but he ignored the violations. He, too, missed the ease of coordinating through the airwaves. But he still wanted to take every possible measure to conceal the brigade. To hide, he told himself frankly, no matter how hopeless the attempt might be. To hide against the terrible magic deaths of a new age.
As the hasty briefing session came to a close and the officers prepared to chase down their units in the dark Anton slipped away to the toilet, lighting his way through the dark house with a pocket lamp. Behind him, his staff officers were already stripping the maps from the walls, preparing to jump forward to maintain control of the brigade on the move. Anton went slowly, careful in his weakness. Even in the narrow beam of light, it was evident that the house was gorgeously furnished. Very rich, even by the standards to which he, a high-ranking general’s son, had become accustomed. It was the sort of house he wished he could provide for Zena. Fine, dark polished wood and brass. Oriental carpets of silken feel even through the heels of combat boots. There was a baby grand piano in one of the rooms through which he journeyed, and at any other time, he would have paused to touch the keys to life. But the oppression of the situation and his cramping bowels hurried him on.
As he crouched alone in the dark Anton thought of his father once again. The old man was pulling it off. He was beating them all. Anton felt gladness for the old man, but no pride. He could not summon up any pride in the achievement because it was all so thoroughly his father’s triumph, echoing in the night with the son’s lifelong inadequacy. He remembered how, when he was a child, his father had proudly, delightedly, taken him to military parades, reveling in the pageantry that his army and his nation staged so well that it temporarily redeemed a host of other failures. Anton remembered how he thrilled to the brilliant clanging of the music, enraptured more by the tonal spurs to the imagination than by the big metal reality of the parade. His father held him up to see the tanks and the big guns and the sleek new missiles, affirmations of might and capability, of the nation’s greatness. But Anton had only been frightened by the stinking, growling monsters of steel. He watched them warily, anxious for them to be gone and for the wonderful music to come again.
General Malinsky’s personal helicopter pilot had been with him since the hard days in Afghanistan. A major and a pilot-first-class, he had developed the habit of calling Malinsky’s attention to interesting features along the flight route. His younger eyes were far sharper than Malinsky’s, and he had shown a knack for spotting details that other men would have flown by in ignorance in the stony mountain deserts of Afghanistan.
Now, however, the details were evident even to Malinsky’s tired eyes. The night flight took them through corridors of fire, where towns and cities burned like enormous lamps to mark their course.
“Hannover coming up on the right,” the pilot declared. “That’s the big group of fires at one o’clock.”
Malinsky saw a demonic blur of light.
“You can see Hildesheim cooking if you look out the left side, Comrade General.”
The pilot was terribly excited about it all. There seemed to be no human reality, no implied misery in it for him.
Well, Malinsky thought, perhaps that was to be preferred. If all soldiers, or even just the officers, fully perceived the human consequences of their actions, it would be impossible to make war with them. No, it was probably better to have this stupid gleefulness, this naive awe, in the face of the destruction of an enemy’s land.
As the city of Hannover drifted by on the right side of the aircraft Malinsky examined his handiwork. The blur began to be defined. He could see now that the conflagration actually consisted of a series of smaller fires. Not all of the city burned, and he sincerely regretted that any of it was ablaze. But you could not make war neatly. The Germans and some of the British had backed into the city, drawing the Soviets after them like steel filings to a magnet. He had ordered Starukhin not to close the encirclement too tightly. The front had neither the time nor the troops to get bogged down in a significant level of urban combat, and the city’s primary value was as a hostage. But one of Starukhin’s division commanders had let himself be drawn into a fight for an outlying district. And the battle of Hannover had begun, taking on a life of its own against the will of either side. Soviet aircraft had gone in to pound the enemy positions. And the heavy guns had come up. Malinsky shifted in his seat, restrained by his safety belt. It was hard to destroy a city, especially a modern one. No doubt, when the smoke cleared, the damage would not be all that bad. But Malinsky knew that the city had not been officially evacuated, and he wondered what it was like for the remaining residents and the soldiers trapped in the inferno.
In the end, his vision did not move the soldier in him. He realized that it would be naive to imagine that war, given the modern technology of destruction and the timeless characteristics of the human animal, might have grown any nicer. And in the end, it was better for German citizens to die than to lose Russians. After all, hadn’t the Germans begun this themselves almost a century before? Malinsky had long believed that future historians would stand back and look at the twentieth century only to marvel that its inhabitants could not see its fatal continuities. It was, in a sense, the century of the German problem, and its wars, so neatly packaged as distinct world wars in prologue to this encounter, really constituted one long struggle, a new hundred years’ war, with Germany at the center of it all.
Below the helicopter windows, strings and stars of miniature fires marked the residue of smaller actions. Vehicles in catastrophe marked the highway lines like poorly spaced flares. Malinsky had received reports of engagements fought amid refugee columns getting out of hand, and of isolated units committing atrocities. But even as the thought of needlessly killing civilians revolted Malinsky as unsoldierly, he nonetheless realized that such tragedies were unavoidable. He had issued strict orders stating that unit and formation commanders would be held personally responsible for instances of indiscipline committed by their subordinates, and they would be charged under the provisions of the Law on Criminal Responsibility for Military Crimes. But he recognized that restraint could only be a matter of degree. He was, in fact, relieved that the situation had not degenerated further and on a broader scale. The conditions of warfare that brought some men to sacrifice and great heroism turned others into beasts. War was the great catalyst for the terrible chemistries dormant inside humanity.