The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (59 page)

The cannonade goes on and on. It extends deep into the German lines, what looks to Ilya like eight to ten kilometers of killing ground. Ten minutes into the barrage a hot wind whips across Ilya’s face, the explosions are so dense, they’ve created their own atmospheric disturbance. Along the Soviet bridgehead, hundreds of Red banners flap enthusiastically in the false breeze.

After thirty minutes of solid bombardment, a searchlight beams a brilliant girder straight up into the night sky. Immediately, hundreds of multicolored flares burst overhead. This is the signal for the infantry to move out of their trenches and advance. The artillery will shift their fire to a rolling curtain ahead of the charging troops.

It turns out to be another signal as well. Across the Küstrin bridgehead, a hundred and fifty giant antiaircraft lights are switched on, aimed straight across the battlefield at the German positions. The idea is not only to illuminate the ground for the forward troops but to sow confusion and panic among the enemy. The Germans who survived the shelling will have to struggle now with being blinded as well as shocked and deafened. The beams warm the back of Ilya’s neck. He steps out of the trench.

The platoon follows at his back. Misha is in his place at Ilya’s elbow. Ilya can feel the little man’s eyes on him. He does not return the look.

Ilya does not run ahead. He takes one muddy tread at a time, finger resting on the trigger of his submachine gun. He jangles with knifes, grenades, another rifle across his back, but there are no targets so soon. There are on all sides of him only soldiers of his army garishly lit from behind, backs and profiles all green and damp like him, every man waiting for the enemy’s response. There hasn’t been a shot fired from the Germans since the attack began. Shells continue to pound and pulse several kilometers ahead. The bootsteps of a hundred thousand men make wet noises in the river-fed mud. Ilya senses the surge he is in, a tiny bit of shell swept in a tidal wave. The anonymity of his own footsteps dilutes him, comforts him.

He walks into an eerie nighttime. Every soldier, every mound of debris and whittled-down tree casts multiple shadows from the searchlights. The shadows are long and all spanning ahead so that Ilya cannot tell what is still and what is moving along the ground; he could walk into a German trench and not see it until he fell in. The explosive force of the rolling bombardment continues to heave dust and smoke into the air. Trees and village huts burn on the rims of the plain, adding their smoke to the clouds from the artillery. Those giant lights to the rear strike this fog wall and turn it into a whiteout. The Germans inside the bank will have Russian soldiers silhouetted against the mist, plastered against the searchlights, throwing many shadows onto the fog; the Reds may as well be waving their arms for attention from enemy gunners.

Misha has calculated the same. He calls a young one in the platoon to him. Ilya recognizes the boy as one sent to the punishment company for cowardice.

“Go back and tell them to cut off those lights. We can’t see a damn thing up here. Tell them that. Find a general.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”The boy gushes, clearly glad to be sent back.

Ilya looks down now to Misha and nods. Misha pats him, again, on the back. We’re still a team, the touch says. On the spongy ground Misha’s shadow cuts as far ahead as Ilya’s.

Ilya sends out his other senses. To the rear, he hears the grumble of support tanks and self-propelled artillery. The searchlights and their generators hum with the angry crawling sound of a hive. Behind the lights, on the east shore of the Oder, the rest of Zhukov’s hundreds of thousands cheer and plunge across the water.

In fifteen minutes from the start of the assault, Ilya’s platoon walks one thousand meters from their trenches. There has been no response from the Germans. Ilya sees no bodies in the smoldering crater pits, his platoon enters the charred relics of bunkers and fortifications to find them empty.

“They’ve figured us out,” Misha says.”They’ve pulled back to their second line of defense.”

The terrible rain of shells fell on open land. The Germans wait in the cloud, looking down from the Seelow Heights, in full strength.

The searchlights switch off. An audible groan rises from the ten thousands on all sides. As one man, they come to a halt, blinded by the sudden shift.

In moments the lights flash back on. Ilya imagines the yelling going on in some general’s headquarters. The lights are a bad idea, but they are the bad idea of someone powerful.

He presses ahead, the platoon trailing, Misha on his flank. For the next twenty minutes, the lights go on and off as more irate commanders in the field order them shut down and some offended general argues to keep them burning. Ilya has walked for thirty minutes and heard or seen nothing yet from the enemy. At two thousand meters, with the lights off at the moment and the dust cloud thickening the dark, he stumbles into a drainage ditch. He manages to break his fall before he lands on his chest, but he is soaked and mud-caked from the knees down. Behind him, Misha halts the platoon. In the night, unseen to their right, other men crash down in the slit and curse.

Ilya slogs across and scrambles up the other side of the ditch. He continues to walk without a word. Misha leads the men splashing through.

They are two kilometers from their rear lines now, and the terrain has changed. Streams and canals dice their path. The blinking searchlights have finally gone off in this sector—some officer put his foot down or took a pistol and shot out a few.

The going grinds to a slow probe forward. Support tanks which have left the roads to accompany the infantry are stymied by the many obstacles and cuts in the plain. The soldiers who charged from their positions a half hour ago now have soaked trousers and mud-laden boots. They slip and tumble into invisible moats. The Germans have not used one shell to slow the advance, for the time being letting the earth do their work.

One by one, many of the tanks that can still move begin to desert the open field, hoping to find one of the few roads leading to Seelow. The men, walking blind into an obscured valley, slow their progress. Layer by layer, the advance bunches up.

Misha lays a hand across Ilya’s shoulder.

“Let’s wait till dawn, Ilyushka. We can’t see what we’re doing.”

“No.”

“Everyone else is stopping. We’re losing our tank support.”

“I know that.”

Without more comment Ilya continues to walk into the brothy night.

Misha overtakes him.

“They’ll follow you, Ilya. You know that too.”

“Yes. Aren’t they supposed to?”

“They’ll follow you and get killed. They’re not you, Ilya. I’m not you. There’s nothing ahead but Germans we can’t see. We’ll walk behind you right into their guns. You’ll keep walking and these men and maybe me will be lying dead behind you. Ilya, no. We’ve got to wait for sunup.”

Misha touches Ilya’s arm. Misha behaves lately as though Ilya will not hear him unless there is contact between them, as though words are not a strong enough bridge to where Ilya resides.

“Ilya. Can you wait?”

“All right, Misha.”

“The Germans will wait for you, I promise.”

Misha turns to lead him back to the platoon. He laughs over his shoulder.

“That’s because they don’t know you’re coming.”

Misha orders the men to take out their ground cloths and settle in. Dawn is two hours off.

Waiting for the sun, Ilya listens to the battle that is not taking place. All around in the dusty, pitch night, Red forces flounder in the muck and crisscrossing streams. On the leading edge where Ilya’s platoon waits, almost no forward progress is made; behind them the masses of men and machines wad up into an uncoordinated morass. The assault on Seelow has come unwound before the Germans have pulled one trigger anywhere on the plain.

At dawn the weather shows it will be a bright spring morning. Ilya stands on knees creaky from the damp. Men grunt when Misha prods them with his boot.

Ilya turns a full circle, surveying the situation on the Oderbruch. Six kilometers ahead, the Heights wait. The Germans there have a commanding view of the entire Red attack. They can pick their targets. In the near distance behind and beside him, Ilya spots those targets as easily as will the enemy: tanks, self-propelled artillery, and trucks clogging the roads, jammed at intersections, stuck in mud and streambeds. Infantry by the ten thousands are bunched behind them. Three-quarters of a million men and their machinery are trying to squeeze into this marshy valley. Ilya looks into the clearing sky. He sees himself with the clarity the German gunners can see him. With a jangle of weapons, he moves forward.

“Let’s go,” Misha shouts behind him. “Up, up, up!”

Within minutes the Germans on the Seelow Heights unleash their guns. The Oderbruch rocks again, but this time the shells fly into the Soviet lines. Ilya’s platoon forges ahead, just fifty men out of ten thousand in the van of the assault. Artillery rounds rocket past to strike at the mired bulk of the offensive behind them. The whooshing of shells overhead makes a hissing canopy, like trees rustling before a storm.

The ground here is drier, the sun is up, and the platoon makes better time. They draw some attention from the enemy, diving to the ground a dozen times from artillery potshots at them. They advance like this for another hour, walking while trying to discern from the scrubbing sounds overhead which shell is aimed at them. But the German guns are mostly occupied trading jabs with Soviet artillery and bombers. Ilya leads the men straight at Seelow.

They are stopped two kilometers from the slopes at the bank of a flooded canal.

“The Haupt Canal,” Misha says, displaying his ability to recall maps. Ilya looks up and down the length of the ditch, fifty meters wide. The swollen green water in it runs fast. Two hundred meters to the right there’s a stone bridge across. Another bridge is far to the left.

Ilya takes a step in the direction of the closer bridge. Another group of soldiers is already crossing it.

“Wait,” Misha says. “Ilya, no. Watch.”

In that moment the bridge is engulfed in a hail of fire and concussion. The squad on the bridge is dismembered and flung off the bridge.

“The Germans are going to have every one of these crossings pre-sighted,” Misha says. “What do you think, they’re going to let us walk right up to them?”

Below Ilya the canal water rushes by reddened. Bodies and bits float past as a warning to those downstream to stay off the bridge there too.

Shaking his head, Misha says, “We’ll have to wait for the engineers to bring up a crossing.”

Ilya looks back across the plain, and the tangle that is the Soviet offensive. The engineers will have a devil of a time getting up here through that.

Ilya sits with the platoon, facing the Oderbruch. The screech of shells going to and from the Heights is an awesome canopy overhead. The Germans try to knock out the Oder crossings where the main body of the Soviet army still masses, waiting to enter the fray. The enemy try also to create havoc in the ranks of Red troops making their way across the soggy plain or stuffing themselves onto the few roads. In return, Zhukov’s bombers and big guns must eliminate resistance on the Heights so his offensive can sweep onto the road and rail junctions in the town. Once Seelow falls, Zhukov can flank the other towns arranged along the Heights. Not until the long ridge is controlled can he aim for Berlin.

Another three hours pass before the engineers make their way to the canal. For that time Ilya’s platoon hugs the ground, ducking shells fired almost straight down on them from the Heights. The morning warms with the hoisting sun, the feeling on the back of Ilya’s neck is the same heat that came from the useless searchlights of the predawn launch. Misha rolls and smokes twenty cigarettes. Out on the Seelow plain there must be dead by the thousands, while the living push and shove to go nowhere under the German onslaught.

Finally a call comes to the men waiting near the canal: “We have a bridge!”