The leaves had fallen from the few trees still standing after years of warfare, and looked dead and depressing. As the Soviets had done three years earlier, the retreating Germans had burned everything behind them. The Germans are so much more thorough than we were, Maurice thought. They had burned ripe fields to stubble and ash, burned houses too, wrecked trucks and left animal carcasses to rot. When Hitler ordered them to leave nothing behind the Soviets could use, they made certain of it.
By sundown, the troop still had seen no sign of the Germans. Not even a plane had flown by. The Colonel called the troop to a halt. Stepan slumped down on a stump, all that remained of a shelled tree, and wiped rain from his face. “Miserable day.”
Young Olesh came up beside them. “I’m soaked through. This uniform is lousy.”
Maurice did not dare to say aloud what he was thinking. He felt the cold deep in his arms and legs. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth so they would not chatter.
But this is much better than it was three years ago. Then, our uniforms were rotten, falling off the men. The only replacements were from taking slightly less damaged clothes from your dead comrades. Officers had good leather boots, but the men had just felt boots that wore out until they had to wrap their feet in old newspapers.
We didn’t even have enough ammunition—not that any of it was any use against the Panzer.
He remembered the weeks of retreating to trenches dug by local inhabitants; how they would dig in, how the Luftwaffe dropped bombs precisely where they’d kill as many Reds as possible, how the Soviet shells bounced off the Panzers’ armour. He thought of the few times a shell found a vulnerable spot and destroyed a German tank.
How many tanks did I destroy? Three?
He thought of all the young Ukrainian and Russian men dead on the fields, how they had to leave those bodies on the ground to retreat again, moving at night, terrified at the sound of an engine because they knew it had to be German.
And then, the capture. Five whole armies encircled and taken prisoner at once. Hundreds of thousands of men crammed into an ancient castle, starved and worked to death.
I got out, and I got my men out, too. All thanks to Bohdan. And where is he now? Wounded, dead? Killed by one of those freed prisoners from Kharkiv?
And he knew he could not speak a word of this to anyone in the Red Army, because that would mean he was a deserter—he had not reported for duty when the Soviets came back to Ukraine.
Three years later, the men had new uniforms. Their boots were still cloth, but at least they could be replaced when they wore out. They all had weapons and ammunition.
And thousands of trucks. All courtesy—literally—of the Americans, who had shipped hundreds of Studebaker trucks for the Red Army. Maurice marveled at the number of American-made implements used by the proletariat’s army: rifles, pistols, bullets, clothes, canned food. For their moral inferiority, the capitalists could deliver a lot of goods.
The Red Army now had tanks, too—the vaunted, Russian-made T-34. Lighter and faster than the monstrous Stalin tank of the early war, the tank that towered two stories above the soldiers and dominated the field of battle until it sank into the mud. The T-34 would later be called the best tank of the war, and it outclassed the Germans’ Panzers—even the Tigers.
Maurice took out his pack of cigarettes from his inside pocket. They were damp, too, but he managed to light one and held the match for Stepan to light his, too. Even our cigarettes have to come from America. And they’re better than Russian cigarettes, too.
“Dig in, boys,” said a sergeant from another company. “Captain wants you to raise a berm along here,” he swept his arm along, indicating a line from a stand of burnt trees to a blasted barn. “Four men stand watch behind it at a time. The rest can sleep in what’s left of that barn.” He left to order other men to raise temporary, rudimentary defenses on the other side of the little camp.
The men shoveled and made a low dike with a shallow moat in front of it, good enough to hide behind and protect them against bullets. A lieutenant took three other men into the barn’s roofless loft as lookouts, even though they would not be able to see anything on this rainy night.
The berm complete, Maurice and a few other men set up the Maxim behind it and then huddled in the slightly dryer lee of a burned shed to eat their mobile rations. “Even our food comes from America,” he muttered, and surprised himself when he realized he had spoken aloud.
“Those cowboys know how to cook, too,” said another young soldier that Maurice did not know. He opened his tin can of rations. “This ham is very tasty.”
“It’s better than what we used to get,” said Maurice. Damn. I shouldn’t have said that.
“What did you used to get?” asked Taras around a mouthful of food.
“Just the Russian garbage. Sometimes, it was just stale bread.”
“When was that?”
Think fast, Maurice. “During training. The food was crap in the Donbas.”
The others nodded as if that made sense, and Maurice stifled a relieved sigh.
“Think the war will be over soon? Fritz is on the run,” said the man who liked the ham.
“It’s still a long way to Germany, and Hitler doesn’t want to give up any land,” Serhiy Koval said.
“France has been liberated, Belgium and Luxembourg too, and I heard that the Canadians have entered Holland,” said the ham lover. “Bulgaria and Hungary have turned against Germany, too. Germany can’t last.”
Maurice laughed bitterly. France had been liberated, or most of it, anyway. Italy soon would be completely free of Hitler. But what about Latvia? Estonia had declared itself a free country when the Red Army drove the Germans out, but its government had to flee the Soviets, too. Latvia would soon be firmly in Stalin’s grip.
And Ukraine? The Red Army had rolled across its flat fields in a matter of months, rolling up the Germans almost as quickly as the Germans had taken the country in 1941. Ternopyl had been destroyed in the fighting. The fall of Hitler’s empire would be the rise of Stalin’s.
A truck groaned up to the barn and parked for the night. The driver got out and three other men jumped out of the back and started unloading. Maurice shivered and felt water seeping through the canvas uppers of his boots. He looked longingly at the truck’s cabin. He thought fleetingly of climbing in the back once it was unloaded, but did not want to risk an officer’s ire. Instead, he walked up to the front of the truck and leaned against the grill. The engine’s damp heat suffused him, strengthened him. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, thinking deliberately of his mother’s kitchen, of Katerina’s bed, of warm sunshine on the hills. For a delicious minute, he was no longer at war, but studying again beside his sister Hanya, sitting by the pietsch, his huge cat on his lap, a heavy book balanced on the table.
It couldn’t last. The sergeant walked into the barn, turning slightly as he passed Maurice. “Bury, you’re on first watch. Get up to the line.” Then he disappeared behind the blackened and splintered wall.
Maurice sighed, picked up his rifle and slogged back to the hole he had dug. There was an inch of water in the bottom. He found a log on the ground, pulled it close to the hole and sat on it, looking southwest to where the Germans supposedly were. Taras and Olesh had spread straw on the bottoms of their foxholes to try to make a barrier against the water, but it gradually soaked through. “This damned drizzle just won’t let up,” Taras moaned as he lit a cigarette.