Prohibition of Interference. Book 1. Макс Глебов
if you understand it, then there's no need to ask stupid questions. Let's better think about how to report to the commander that this railroad won't lead us to Uman.”
“It's no use,” Boris shook his head, “He won't listen to you, and he won't listen to me either. What are you suggesting? To turn into the fields and go straight ahead? But you can lose your way easily, as there are no landmarks. And the rails are right there, you can't get lost.”
“I'll show us out,” I said without proper confidence. I understood that, but I really didn't want to go where the First Lieutenant was leading us.
“Listen to me, Pyotr…” I could hardly make out Boris's grin in the darkness, “Do you believe yourself? At night, without a road, with the wounded in our arms, in unfamiliar terrain… It's not like you can drive your finger on a map of your home country in the warmth and comfort of your own home. No offense, but it's all nonsense. After all, we have an order, and it has to be obeyed.”
Then we walked in silence, gradually getting into the rhythm, and about 30 minutes later it was our turn to carry the wounded, and there was no time to talk.
No matter how hard the First Lieutenant tried to move quickly, but we still had to make three stops. The men were too exhausted for the day, and they were simply unable to endure the continuous march through the night while carrying the wounded. After the defeat of the echelon there were about 150 of us left. There were 27 wounded on stretchers, but by morning six of them had died, yet our losses did not end there. Apparently, I was not the only one who did not like the idea of walking blindly and unarmed toward the advancing Germans, and the fact that the front line was not far away could only be doubted by a deaf person.
At the last resting place just before dawn, the sergeant conducted a roll call on the orders of the commander. Our unit was 17 men short. I was beginning to understand why the First Lieutenant was so sour about my suggestion to give us the rifles of dead soldiers.
The morning greeted us unpleasantly. The indistinct roar that had sounded all night in the west had turned into a continuous rumble, in which individual violent explosions were already clearly distinguishable. But the worst thing was that it was now heard not only from the west, but also from the north and even from the northeast. It finally dawned on the First Lieutenant, too, that something wasn't going quite the way he wanted it to, despite all his unwavering determination to follow orders.
“Soldiers!” He looked at us with a frown, “Anybody here from these parts?”
The answer to the commander was silence. We were all mobilized in the eastern regions of the country. Boris, with his Voronezh, was probably the most western of us, so we couldn't please the First Lieutenant in any way. Well, almost.
“Red Army man Nagulin!” I went out of the line.
“You again?” The First Lieutenant's voice had a bad tone to it, “Are you from around here?”
“No, Comrade First Lieutenant. But I can draw a schematic map and roughly show you where we are.”
“A schematic map, then?” The commander said thoughtfully, looking at me frowningly, “Where did you come from, Red Army man Nagulin? You're newly mobilized, right? You haven't even had basic training. In fact, you should have been sent to the reserve unit first, but that's just the way it is. But you're a good shot with a rifle, I've seen it myself, and now it turns out you can read a map, and not only read a ready-made map, but draw your own. Where did you learn?”
“My father taught me. We lived almost on the border of the USSR with the Tuvan People's Republic. He was an Old Believer, he was educated in Czarist Russia, and then his grandfather finished his schooling on our farmstead. I grew up in the taiga, so I'm a good shot and I know how to handle weapons. And I've been interested in geography since childhood. I dreamed that when I grew up, I would travel and discover new lands. I know this area from the map quite well, but I have not been here myself before.”
The First Lieutenant didn't believe me, he didn't believe me at all, but nodded and took a notebook and a chemical pencil out of his field bag.
“Draw your map, Nagulin, but watch out if you lead us to the Germans…”
“Comrade Commander,” I tensed up as I drew the railroad line from Talny to Khristinovka and a little further to show the general direction to Teplik, “I, like you, don't know where the enemy is now. I'll draw a map, but it's not for me to decide where to go.”
Fyodorov only nodded silently, showing that he had heard me, and continued to watch attentively as on a sheet of his notebook the railway line leading from Khristinovka to the southeast to Uman was appearing, and as I marked these settlements.
“What about roads, rivers, bridges, woodlands?” asked the First Lieutenant when I handed him the prepared diagram.
“My memory also has its limits, Comrade Commander,” I answered, “I depicted what I remember. According to my rough guess, we are somewhere around here, about 15 kilometers from the Khristinovka station.”
“So you're saying that all night we walked the wrong way and didn't get even a meter closer to Uman?”
“That's right, Comrade Fir…”
“Silence!” bellowed Fyodorov, “Why didn't you report at once?!”
“I tried, Comrade First Lieutenant. You wouldn't listen to me.”
The First Lieutenant was silent as he continued to glare at me. He didn't have anything to say, but he seemed to really want to grind me down. Yes, I know how to make enemies, and I need to do something about it.
“Get in formation,” he finally ordered, putting my map away in his clipboard, and turned to our thinned out team, “We continue along the railroad tracks. At the nearest station we will hand over the wounded to the medics, report back to Uman, and get further instructions. Get the stretchers! Start moving!”
The situation was worse than I thought. Fyodorov did not want to admit his mistake, or maybe he just thought his actions were right. The idea of getting help at the station would have made perfect sense if it weren't for the constant rumble of the front line coming toward us.
Satellites broadcast a bleak picture from orbit. The Germans had already captured the Khristinovka station, where our commander was so eager to go. The railroad track in several places in front of us and behind us was smashed by enemy bombs. In addition to our train, two more trains were burning out on the tracks, and under the circumstances, no one was going to repair anything or remove the burnt-out cars from the tracks, nor would they have been able to do so if they wanted to. And to the north of the railroad we were rapidly encircled by the 16th motorized division of the Wehrmacht, which had almost reached Talny, and the troops defending there were clearly unable to prevent the Germans from capturing this settlement. Behind our back in the east Novoarkhangelsk was still in the hands of the Red Army, but it was already being approached from the south by the 11th German Tank Division and the SS Division Leibstandarte.
Counterattacks organized by the Southwestern Front command struck with extreme fierceness, but they crashed against the viscous defenses intelligently built by the Germans, meanwhile, the threat of a complete encirclement was already clearly looming over the 6th and 12th Soviet Armies, as well as the remnants of the Second Mechanized Corps. The battle was simmering all around us, but by some miracle our unit had not yet been directly affected, except, of course, by the destruction of the train in which we were on our way to the front.
Something had to be done urgently, otherwise our commander, who was unreservedly devoted to the cause of Lenin-Stalin but was completely inadequate, would lead us into German captivity, which was absolutely not in my plans. Except that I didn't yet understand exactly what to do.
Our luck ran out after about 15 minutes. First, a lone I-153 Seagull fighter with red stars on its wings flew almost over us to the east, which caused great excitement in our column. The plane was going low and clearly had combat damage, but I was the only one in our squadron who saw it. The rest of the soldiers waved their hands and caps, welcoming the first representative of Soviet aviation they had seen since the defeat of our train. And then I felt the familiar