What your fortress does have, though, is a modestly sized garrison equipped only with small arms; narrow rifle pits and trenches dug by hand; the fragile walls of buildings perforated by shells from infantry fighting vehicles, to say nothing of tanks and artillery. Your fortress does not have mighty defences with fortified gun posts. But aren’t you on your own land? Aren’t you fighting for your people’s very right to exist? So you don’t have machinery for digging trenches? No problem. We’ll dig them by hand. Besides, our enemies have plenty of machinery. Combat machinery. And they’re eager to help you out… How does the law of ballistics go again? Two shells never hit the same place twice? Well, that’s perfect. The bomb and shell craters will become our hideouts. They’re hitting the same place again? That’s because they’re firing thick and fast. It’s not the rule, just a one-off. You know that any populated area, no matter how frail its buildings, can be transformed into a sturdy fortress, given the will. And our will is strong enough – oh, yes. And that is what gives you a very important edge over your enemies.
That is the reason the city’s defenders are stronger in spirit. It’s why the enemy cannot smash the resistance and take this fortress. And it’s why this lethal battle has endured for many long days and nights. It is dragging on relentlessly. The enemy are not tiring. They have plenty of soldiers; the weary ones are relieved by fresh forces. But nor do you tire. You cannot afford the luxury of growing weary. For there is no one to take your place. You swap positions, but the positions are everywhere. Shrapnel litters the entire city. The one place where you can snatch some rest is the forward line of own troops. There the enemy are simply too close. They cannot use their artillery or aircraft for fear of friendly fire. All they can do is shoot. But can their shooting stop you from sleeping like a baby? No. Even the roar of the guns mixed with the bombs acts as the perfect lullaby. The thing is to adapt to it. And you are adapting to it. Slowly you begin to realize that fighting from inside an encirclement is not the end; it’s merely combat in four directions. And the combat going on for month after month has its advantages. It won’t let you slacken or relax. It teaches you to treasure each moment of life. To understand the inevitability of death. The closeness of death makes a philosopher of you. Well, perhaps your philosophy is strange and unintelligible to the vast majority of people. But who are these people? They’re God’s creatures, just like you, and they are mortal too. If your philosophy is alien to them, that’s nothing to worry about. You can understand them easily enough. But you cannot demand understanding from them. You’re wiser than that. You realize that death is not terrifying. Death is wonderful if you know what it is you’re dying for. You’ve learnt to live in combat. No, not to exist in the constant expectation of death. But to live a full-blooded, unforgettable life while embracing your death. To savour each moment.
And you realize that you will never again sense life so fully as now. Even if you survive. There will be long, painful memories. They’ll bring an endless pining for comrades who can never again smile; they’ll bring a quiet, bitter-sweet nostalgia for this fullness of life, already lost for ever. Suddenly you realize that no matter how long your life continues after this, you’ll die agonizingly long and live maddeningly briefly. Yes, even if you live to a hundred, your life will be briefer than just a few minutes of life spent here. ‘Normal life’ will take its course and it won’t stop to notice you dying each day over and over in your memories. You will never again love life as you love it now, when it is so palpably brief.
All that will come later, assuming this stupid body of yours isn’t left to lie in the rubble and it journeys on further with you. In the meantime, live! While life goes on. Don’t think of death. It doesn’t matter that almost every day you see people departing from this mortal world. No, do think of death. But don’t think of the life you had or the one you could have had beyond this kingdom of death. Let your past life remain as memories. They will hold you back from the edge of the abyss when the present becomes too terrible.
And so you live in the present moment. You sever yourself from the past and reject the future, instinctively realizing it’s the only way to cope with the pressures of war. You think about the past only as something utterly strange and unreal, as if those events didn’t happen to you. The past is a dream, and not always a happy one. What of the future? The best future you could hope for would be instant death. That’s how things seem if you judge by the reality of the situation. But if you judge by the state of your soul, you have to survive. Your principle, ‘I want, I can, I must,’ won’t let you give in and depart from this world so quickly and easily. You are interested in observing yourself. You are interested in seeing what awaits you. You write poetry. For some reason your finest poems emerge during the most difficult and dangerous times of your life. Or perhaps they seem the finest to you because they’re written at moments like these? Beyond the city there is nothing. There is no one. Nobody needs you there. All the living have already buried you mentally. Yes, your body is functioning, but you yourself are dead. You are a warrior. Have you forgotten? And a warrior is dead from birth. His soul never belongs to this mortal world. But this realization will make you strong and won’t let you give in. You will survive because you’ve already been buried.
7
The most horrific image in war is that of refugees. Not the destruction of once-flourishing towns and villages, not the death before your eyes of dozens of people – friends and strangers, civilians and combatants. Not the bestial cruelty. No, that’s not fair. Beasts aren’t crueclass="underline" they’re hungry. Whereas the enemy, the soldiers of the Russian Army, are cruel. They’re not hungry, they’re cruel. Senselessly cruel. Without any objective. No reason – just for kicks. And death is not terrible. Death is the natural and inevitable end of the path, the end of everything bad which you cling to because you know no better. You witnessed how thirty women were buried in the cellar of a three-storey building that had taken a direct hit from a bomb. All of them were women. They’d come from the neighbouring houses and gathered in the cellar, thinking it the safest refuge. It was a bomb shelter which they’d known of since Soviet times. What they didn’t know was that during the Soviet era such bomb shelters were built not to protect the population from nuclear bombs but as mass graves for the easy burial of corpses. Military engineers in the Soviet Army could hardly be suspected of being short on intellect: they understood perfectly well the sheer folly of such shelters in these wars, when your capital, as a major industrial centre, was likely to be among the first hit in a nuclear attack. But the women weren’t experts on nuclear blasts, just as you weren’t (you found this out from a retired major who’d served in the Strategic Rocket Forces), and they hid in the Soviet bomb shelter, hoping for protection from the Russian bombs.
The explosion blew away half the building. Of the thirty women, thirteen were dead. The city had no rescue service; there were only the resistance fighters defending the city. It was they who pulled out the victims from the wreckage of the building. They hauled them all out but one. They couldn’t free her. A heavy reinforced-concrete slab had come crashing down on to her and smashed her hips. And three storeys of the building had collapsed on to the slab. To raise this slab they’d need lifting equipment. Or time, plenty of time. But they had neither. Trying to alleviate her agony, they give her some sips of water and wipe her face with a damp cloth. She is young, maybe thirty-five, pretty. She begs them to finish her off, she can’t take this horrific pain any more. The pain-killing injections do not help. There is no hope of pulling her out alive: she’ll die before they manage to dig through the rubble by hand. But she’ll die in terrible agony. And then a fighter pulls the trigger. And he weeps. Loudly, unashamed of his tears. You realize this fighter won’t survive the war; he won’t be able to live after this. And he does indeed die soon after. Need I add, heroically?