Vendetta - Derek Lambert

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in disbelief.

      ‘Until I remembered what they had done to our people. Until I remembered the corpses strung up in the villages.’

      ‘The Fritzes might have been pissing icicles at Moscow,’ the soldier with the wounded leg remarked, ‘but when they first arrived in Stalingrad they were singing and playing mouth-organs.’ He turned to Antonov. ‘You don’t talk much, comrade. What do you think about Germans? Do you feel sorry for them?’

      Antonov realised that the soldier thought he might be a Nazi sympathiser: the Red Army was obsessed with spies, and exhausted men saw them on the tattered fringes of their fatigue. But Antonov wasn’t sure what he felt about Germans. Occasionally during shell-splintered sleep, he saw young men harvesting golden wheat on the steppe or carving ice for drinking water from a frozen river or coaxing girls into the deep green depths of the taiga and the young men were neither Russians nor Germans.

      When Antonov didn’t reply the other soldier, wagging one finger, asked: ‘Where are you from comrade? The Ukraine? I heard that when the Fritzes invaded last year a lot of Ukrainians fought for them.’

      Razin prodded the barrel of his pistol towards the soldier. ‘I come from the Ukraine,’ he said.

      ‘You obviously decided to fight on the right side.’ The soldier regarded the pistol without fear. ‘But what I’m saying is true?’

      ‘A few joined the Germans,’ Razin admitted. ‘In Kiev, for instance, the people were bewildered. In the space of twenty years they had been occupied by Germans, Austrians, Reds, Whites, Poles … Maybe all they wanted was the use of their own backyard. And isn’t that what we’re all fighting for? One hell of a great backyard?’

      The other soldier spread his hands in front of the incandescent stove. ‘That isn’t what Sergei asked. Where,’ nodding at Antonov, ‘do you come from?’

      More Katyushas, Little Kates, exploded nearby. They made an awesome noise and the Germans called them Stalin Organs. For the Russians firing from the other side of the Volga it was easy enough to shell the Germans over their comrades’ heads; for the Germans it wasn’t so easy to pound the Russians because the Soviet positions were so compressed that there was always a risk that they would hit their own infantry.

      ‘Does it matter? We’re all Soviets.’ But to Antonov it did matter; the army had taught him that. Republics, regions, races … all harboured ancient hostilities.

      The wounded soldier said: ‘A country boy by the look of you. Blue eyes, fair hair beneath that helmet … Or is it straw?’

      Antonov drew a swastika on the dust on one of his tall boots. ‘Siberia,’ he said after a while. ‘A village near Novosibirsk.’

      In fact it was fifty miles away from the city, a collection of wooden cottages with pink and blue fretted eaves, a pump and a wooden church that was used as a granary.

      ‘Well,’ the wounded soldier said, ‘you look as if you’ve had an easy war so far.’

      Razin said: ‘Very easy. He’s only shot twenty-three so far. Two more won’t make much difference.’ He smiled crookedly at the two soldiers.

      They began to understand, expressions tightening. ‘You’re not–’

      Removing the rag from the telescopic sights of his rifle, Antonov said: ‘My name’s Yury Antonov,’ and, without pleasure, observed the effect of his name on the two visitors.

      Leaning against the belly of a stricken locomotive, Karl Meister ate his lunch. Stale bread, sausage and a can of sliced peaches.

      He wondered what Antonov was doing. Cleaning his rifle probably. If you weren’t eating or sleeping or shooting you were cleaning your rifle.

      Katyushas exploded down the ruptured track near Univermag, the department store. They sounded like elephants bellowing. Fragments of metal struck the other side of the big black engine.

      Cold eased its way down from the north. No teeth to it yet but when it really began its advance – next month according to the pundits – it would be inexorable. More than anything else the Sixth Army feared the cold: it had bitten the Wehrmacht to pieces outside Moscow.

      Feeling its breath, Corporal Ernst Lanz, a thirty-year-old Berliner with a bald patch and a thief’s face, said: ‘We were supposed to have gobbled up this arschloch of a place in August.’

      He was leaning against a piston drinking Russian beer from a fluted brown bottle. His grey-green tunic was stained but the Iron Cross 1st class on his chest shone brightly. His helmet, upturned, lay beside him like a bucket.

      ‘The generals didn’t reckon with street fighters,’ Meister said. ‘The Ivans would fight for a blade of grass – if there was any left.’

      ‘Stalingrad!’ Lanz threw aside the empty bottle. ‘Six months ago I’d never heard of it.’

      ‘I doubt whether the Führer had. No one expected a battle here. We thought we’d be half way across Siberia: the Russians thought they would be across the Dneiper.’

      In Lanz’s presence Meister tried to compensate for his lack of battle experience with tactical hindsight and foresight. He doubted whether either was effective: not even shared adversity could dispel the suspicions separating classes: all they had in common was a city upbringing and even that was marred by Lanz’s low opinion of Hamburg.

      He wondered how, given a common tongue, he and Antonov would hit it off if they hadn’t been ordered to kill each other. According to Soviet propaganda Antonov was the son of the soil, a Siberian. Would he want to socialise with a college boy?

      ‘So,’ Lanz said, taking a cigarette from a looted silver case and lighting it, ‘when are you going to start hunting each other again? What is this? A rest period?’

      Meister swallowed the last slippery segment of peach. ‘When I’m ready,’ he said.

      ‘Supposing he gets ready first? Gets a bead on you from over there,’ pointing towards what was left of a warehouse.

      ‘He won’t, he’s not stupid, he knows I’d see him first silhouetted against the sky.’

      ‘That’s what you call instinct?’

      ‘Antonov has instinct. He was a hunter. I have aptitude.’

      Aptitude, substitute for talent. Squinting through the sights of a Karabiner 98K on the college rifle range because he knew he could never excel at sport. Muscular co-ordination, that was what he had lacked but when it came to punching bullseyes with bullets he knew no equal and when he became a crack shot he had as many girls flirting with him as any lithe-limbed athlete, one girl in particular, Elzbeth, who had blonde hair like spun glass. He kept a photograph of her in his wallet, posing with him in Berlin when he won the Cadet Marksman of the Year award, he with his black hair glossy in the flashlights smiling fiercely over the rim of the enormous cup. Elzbeth said his face was sensitive. Some qualification for a sniper!

      Lanz drew on his cigarette, cupped in his hand convict fashion. ‘Instinct versus aptitude … Which will win?’

      ‘You’d better pray for aptitude. If I lose, you lose and there’s no place in the Third Reich for losers.’

      ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Lanz said. ‘I’m a survivor. And if you want to survive take a few tips from me; that’s why we’re partners. Remember?’

      ‘I remember,’ Meister said.

      ‘So make your move when we launch the next attack on Mamaev Hill.’ They had lost count of how many times the hill commanding Stalingrad had changed hands. At the moment it was shared, a pyramid of rubble, exploded shells and corpses, some not quite dead. ‘You’ll have good cover. Smoke, shell-bursts. Tanks – T-34s or Panthers.’

      Which,

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