Hundreds of vehicles poured past Maurice’s position. The Germans returned fire, but that did not slow the shock troops. As the day brightened, the men could see the German positions in the town of Valga, about two kilometres to the west. Smoke billowed up from dozens of spots. Buildings crumbled as shells from Soviet tanks and cannon struck.
Successive lines of Soviet tanks, trucks, guns and men moved across the fields toward the first buildings of the town. Men fell, trucks burst into smoke and fire but the shock troops kept moving forward.
And then, the returning fire stopped. Maurice could see the Red Army moving fast down a road away from him, like a sink draining. Another wave of planes screeched past overhead, flying past the town and bombing the distance.
“Ahead, boys!” Sergeant Nikolaev called. Maurice and the men picked up their automatic rifles. Four pulled the Pulemyot Maxima machine gun. Although the lieutenant and the men called it the “Maxim,” it was actually a Russian-made variant of the original Maxim heavy machine gun. Mounted on a two-wheeled carriage, it had a high shield and a special cap for water to cool it. It required at least two to operate it: one to load the belts of ammunition, and one to aim and fire. It was mostly used for defending against counterattacks.
Ahead, Maurice saw Red Army men jump up and climb on the decks of the T-34s, squat behind the turret and aim their rifles, but he stayed on the ground, thinking of the lieutenant’s warning that the tanks would be the Germans’ main targets.
When they reached the burned forest, they had to follow the road. A single tank led three odalenyes. Taking his turn to help pull the Maxim, Maurice felt vulnerable, squeezed among so many men concentrated onto the road. One shell would kill this whole unit. But no shells fell. They could hear explosions and fighting ahead of them. They passed a metal sign, bent and punctured by bullets, reading Valga. Other than the grinding and clanking of the tanks and the sound of marching feet, the morning was now quiet.
They had to get off the road where a crater made it impassable, exactly where it crossed a railway. “Fritz blew that as they were retreating,” said Corporal Shewchuk. Six men struggled to pull the Maxim over the soft ground beside the road.
A burning house on the left side of the road marked the beginning of the town. Smoke poured from a hole in its roof. Fifty metres ahead, at an intersection with a side street, stood what looked like the remains of an inn, its walls blackened and scarred.
The tank moved ahead and the men spread out as much as they could. Maurice heard a crack and the man beside him screamed and fell, clutching his leg. Another crack and a man dropped from the tank deck to the ground and did not move any more.
Maurice dropped to the ground. “Sniper in the inn!” Nikolaev called. A dozen Soviet rifles chattered and Maurice saw chips fly off the wall around a first-storey window. More cracks answered, but without visible effect.
The tank’s turret swiveled and the cannon roared. The top of the inn disappeared in a flash and a burst of smoke and splinters. Seconds later, three men in grey uniforms ran out of the ruins of the inn, weaponless, hands high in the air. Soviet guns barked and the three men dropped, dead.
They were surrendering, Maurice thought. Why did we shoot? Then he realized that he was squeezing the trigger of his own rifle. I shot. Did I hit one of them? He could not know.
The tank moved on. Maurice stood up and followed it, along with the other men in his odalenye. They trotted to keep up and entered the town.
Not a building was left undamaged. Bullets had scarred every wall that was still standing. Houses had collapsed, shops crumbled. The road was choked with rubble and bodies in German uniforms and civilian clothing.
Amid houses and shops, Maurice felt more vulnerable than ever before. He and the boys tried to look in all directions at once. Every window and doorway could conceal a German sniper or a Latvian partisan.
“This way, men,” shouted an officer, leading them down a side street. The company picked their way past the rubble of shattered houses and shops. They worked their way carefully past blasted civilian cars and trucks. More civilian bodies lay in the street. Young Olesh cried out a little when he saw a young mother and a small girl sprawled in a doorway. They heard fighting somewhere ahead, chattering rifles and barking cannons. The air was filled with smoke and falling ash, and the smell of burning wood, rubber and flesh.
Maurice saw a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye and turned toward a dark alley between two houses. Someone else fired, hitting a wall. A small black dog yelped and ran out of the alley and down the street where the Soviets had come from.
The street they were on ended a block away, where another intersected from the right. Smoke billowed around the corner and the sound of fighting was louder. They heard submachine guns and rifles crackling, and then a deep boom, followed by a crash. A thick plume of smoke rose over the building in front of them.
At Sergeant Nikolaev’s hand signal, the men pressed against the low brick building on their right. Nikolaev peeked around the corner, then waved the men on as he ran around it.
Maurice and his comrades looked down a short street lined with low shops that opened into a square. In the square were the broken stumps of trees. Red Army soldiers lay dead or crouched behind burned vehicles and broken masonry, firing their rifles across the square. At the far end was a mobile field gun. Its barrel, pointed across the square, was still smoking. Behind it lay the carcasses of the horses that had hauled it.
Across the square, the town’s train station belched smoke through its main entrance doors. From second-storey windows, Maurice could see rifle barrels and could hear rattling submachine gun fire.
The field gun fired again and two windows on the second storey vanished into smoke and dust. Maurice heard rumbling as the wall below them collapsed and spilled brick, masonry, timber and glass onto the square. When the smoke cleared, he saw two bodies in grey uniforms among the wreckage.
The gunfire from the train station had ceased. The Red soldiers fired another volley as Maurice, Corporal Shewcuk and Mykhailo Boyko aimed the Maxim. Maurice readied the ammunition belt as Shewchuk aimed. For a few seconds, the only sounds he could hear were the rapid breathing of frightened soldiers and the soft sounds of a fire burning somewhere inside the station. Far off, they could hear more gunfire and the occasional explosion of fighting somewhere else in the town.
Something moved at the hole where the train station’s main entrance used to be. “White flag,” someone called. “Come out, Fritz!” he called, and then repeated it in German: “Raus!”
The improvised flag waved again, and a Soviet officer called “Raus” again. A face appeared at the door of the train station, then a form. A man stepped forward, hands up, waving a white cloth frantically.
“Civilian,” said a Soviet soldier. “Come forward, comrade. Men, hold your fire.”
The man was small, thin, grey-haired and dressed in civilian clothes. As he stepped into the square, more people staggered out of the smoke: two more men and a barefoot woman with a torn skirt and ragged coat.
A sergeant stepped forward, rifle aimed at the civilians. “Put your hands on your heads,” he ordered, then demonstrated when he saw they did not understand Russian. He grabbed the first man by the lapel of his jacket and pulled him to the side of the square. The others followed until more Soviet soldiers took them by the arms and pushed them across the square. They made them stand against the wall of a burned restaurant.
“How many left inside?” the sergeant demanded of the first man out of the station. He repeated it in German.