More Germans poured over the hill, running from the unstoppable Soviet force behind them. Fire from behind the earth bank cut them down.
Maurice looked to his left. Sergeant Nikolaev fired single rounds or short bursts. Every shot brought down a German soldier.
On Maurice’s right, the Maxim machine gun rattled continuously. Serhiy Koval fed the ammunition belt into the side of the gun as Taras Kuchnir held the trigger. Occasionally, he hit something. Sparks flew off the side of the crippled Panzer. A German soldier rose to fire back. Taras pumped six high-calibre rounds into him.
Maurice aimed his rifle carefully at the German soldiers in the vanguard, knowing they posed the greatest threat to his comrades. He got a grey uniform in the sights of his gun and squeezed the trigger. The man fell backward, disappearing in the tall grass.
The remaining Panzer fired its cannon toward the earthen bank. The round struck twenty metres to Maurice’s left. The explosion sent soil high into the air, and buried the comrades sheltering behind it.
The Panzer’s machine gun strafed left. Sergeant Nikolaev, Mykhailo, Maurice and Dmitry ducked below the edge. Nikolaev popped up again a moment later, firing his submachine gun.
To the right, the heavy anti-tank gun spoke again. Flames enveloped the Panzer.
But now there were a hundred German soldiers only fifty metres from the earthen bank.
“Get them! Everyone shoot!” Sergeant Nikolaev shouted, laying down a continuous stream of bullets from his submachine gun. Rows of Germans fell into the high grass, but they kept coming. The Germans had fast, efficient submachine guns that sprayed the bank and the men above it. Maurice saw a man to his right fly back as a bullet hit him.
He dropped below the lip along with Mykhailo. He waited a beat, then rose again to shoot.
Mykhailo stayed down, shaking. Nikolaev grabbed him by his jacket and pulled him upright with one hand. “Fight, you kokhol coward.”
Maurice fired at a German soldier and ducked down again to pull back the bolt on his rifle. He popped up again, aimed and fired, then dropped below the bank without waiting to see whether he had hit anything as he chambered another round. Wide-eyed, Mykhailo copied Maurice’s action, firing over the bank then dropping down immediately to chamber another round.
Nikolaev stayed where he was, coolly firing single shots or short bursts from his submachine gun—along with other Red Army soldiers strung out for fifty metres along the berm.
As Maurice loaded a fresh magazine into his rifle, an explosion shook the bank. He closed his eyes for a moment. The noise, the smell of cordite and smoke and oil, urine, the earth under his nose, the vibration of the earth under his body— took his mind back to the bank of the Psel River three years earlier, when he had been a lieutenant commanding an anti-tank unit. He remembered the Panzer splashing across the shallow river, unstoppable, merciless, immune to the fire of the panicking Red Army. He remembered seeing whole squadrons of Soviet soldiers blown to bits by the German cannons, entire armies surrounded and cut to shreds.
Another explosion shook the ground behind his back, covering him in soil. When he opened his eyes again, he was surprised to see a rifle in his hands, instead of an officer’s revolver, and cloth boots instead of black leather on his feet.
I’m not an officer anymore. It’s not 1941. It’s 1944, and we’re not retreating, we’re driving the Germans back to Germany.
We’re winning.
He pushed the full magazine home and rose, putting the barrel of his rifle on the top of the bank. The battle was nearly over. One Panzer burned, surrounded by dead bodies in grey uniforms. The second tank still fired a machine gun, but one tread had been blown off and it leaned onto that side. Maurice saw the turret swivel toward him and heard the anti-tank gun to his right. The Panzer shook and exploded. All the men ducked below the top of the bank.
Except for Sergeant Nikolaev. He stayed in position, firing his submachine gun in short, controlled bursts. “Get back up and finish them off, you fucking cowards,” he growled.
Maurice, Dmitry and Mykhailo rose to see both Panzers burning. Dead men lay across the field. A German officer rose from the wheat and ran back toward the tree line, even though they could all hear more explosions and gunfire from behind the hill.
Dmitry fired and the German fell. “Got him.”
As Maurice turned to Dmitry, he heard a metallic clink at the same moment a small, round hole appeared in the side of Dmitry’s helmet. The young man toppled into Maurice’s arms, blood streaming over his face.
“Son of a bitch,” said Nikolaev, firing a long burst over the bank.
Maurice laid Dmitry’s body gently on the ground at his feet. “Get up, Bury,” he heard the sergeant say. “Get up and shoot.”
Maurice rose just high enough to see over the bank. The flames on the Panzer were the only things to move on the field.
Lieutenant Schwatchko climbed onto the bank and jumped onto the field, his heavy revolver in his hand. He walked to a body in the wheat, and Maurice could see the man was struggling to rise. Schwatchko bent and pulled the wounded man up by the shoulder of his uniform. He turned toward the Soviets. “This is the bastard who shot comrade Rusnak.” He raised his revolver and fired into the German’s bare head, letting the body drop.
Mykhailo turned and vomited at Maurice’s feet.
Niemen River
October 10, 1944
The sun shone into Maurice’s eyes as Sergeant Nikolaev called a halt. He leaned back and let his pack slide off his shoulders, then sat down, grateful for a minute’s rest. The temperature had been dropping all day, and Maurice’s nerves were pulled taut from the sounds of machine guns and bombs that grew ever closer as they marched. The Germans continued to retreat, but the men knew they were marching toward an enemy defensive position.
The flatland of Lithuania continued as far as they could see, but maybe two hundred metres to the south, a shallow, broad river valley crossed the plain. That was the source of occasional gun- and cannon-fire.
“The Niemen. Across that is East Prussia. Germany,” said a young officer, passing by. “Don’t get too comfortable. That’s where we’re heading.”
By sunset, the gunfire died down. The two armies were stalemated, facing each other across the valley of the Niemen River, also known as the Neman and, in local Lithuanian, the Nemunas. When the sky was dark, the officers quietly ordered the men in Maurice’s troop to move to the fortifications the Red Army had already dug, fifty metres from the bank.
No one knew, no one told them, but Stavka, the Soviet high command, had already tried to penetrate into East Prussia to take the strategic fortress of Konigsberg. The Baltic Offensive had succeeded in driving the Germans out of most of Estonia and Latvia and had finally taken Riga back from the Germans. Soviet General Bagramyan had pushed the Third Panzer Army down the Baltic coast, where they holed up in the town of Klaipeda, which the Germans had renamed Memel in 1939.
With the town surrounded, the Soviets then committed four armies to attack into East Prussia, driving for a line fifty kilometres further south.
General Erhard Raus’s Third Panzer Army stopped the Red Army, though, and held it at the Neman River. The Stavka decided to hold that position until it could bring in more reinforcements to allow it to use its deep operations strategy. Maurice’s unit was part of that.
The soldiers already at the river had dug trenches and made fortifications a few metres back from the banks. Maurice’s unit found a place to set up camp. The next morning, they settled into a new routine: patrolling the fortifications, watching the enemy across the broad river, firing a few shots across just to let the enemy know they were watching. When their watch was over, they went back for food and snatched what sleep they could.