Red Army

All of the men turned to face him, one even lifting his assault rifle. As soon as they recognized an officer, they all straightened, backing away from the girl as if it was only an accident that she and they were discovered in the same place. The soldier who had raised his weapon quickly lowered it.

"Pigs," Bezarin shouted at them. "You shit-eating pigs. What do you think you're doing?"

None of the soldiers responded. Bezarin cursed himself empty, then could find no sensible words to express himself, and a difficult silence enveloped them. He almost launched into an angry series of platitudes about their duty and mission and the trust of the Soviet soldier. But this was all much too immediately human and terrible for classroom phrases.

Bezarin shook his head in disgust. "All of you. Get back to your vehicles. Now."

The soldiers obeyed immediately. Bezarin watched them go, weapon at the ready. He did not fully trust these strangers now.

And yet . . . they were his soldiers. They had fought together, and they would undoubtedly be forced to fight together again before the war ended for them.

Bezarin turned to the girl, embarrassed more by what his soldiers had done than by her charmless nakedness. He took care to look only at her face, which was red and beyond the range of normal expression. Still, she backed nervously against a smashed automobile, as though she expected Bezarin to become her next tormentor.

"Go," Bezarin said. "Get out of here. Your people are up there." He pointed, wishing he could tell her in her language.

"Go," he barked. He did not know what else to do. There were still shots and cries, and he had no doubt that his experience of what his soldiers were really like had not yet come to an end. He wanted to get 262

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away from here, away from this lost girl. But he was afraid to leave her alone.

The girl covered herself with her hands, tugging down the torn sweater in a hopelessly inadequate gesture. Bezarin closed on her, watching her fear grow. But he had no time to waste. He grabbed her by the upper arm and dragged her along so swiftly that she could not resist. He drew her to the edge of the highway, facing the now-silent ridgeline from where her would-be guardians had come. Another small horror awaited him as he discovered a tumbled clutter of bodies in the drainage ditch by the roadside and trailing away from the raised berm.

"Go," Bezarin ordered, pointing the way with his weapon. Visibility was far too good, despite the residue of battle smoke, and he worried that enemy aircraft would descend upon them. He knew he had to get his troops back under control, to get moving again.

He pushed the girl toward the enemy's hill. She looked at him in fear and confusion. He pointed again.

Either the girl finally understood him or she simply obeyed what she perceived to be his desire. She began to pick her way down between the corpses. As her foot touched one of them the body moved with a life of its own, and Bezarin realized that, surely, there were many wounded along the column and out in the fields. But he could not cope with that issue now; he had no assets, and he had a mission to fulfill. He struggled to shut his mind to the welling visions.

He stepped back behind the cover of an abandoned vehicle and watched the girl go. She was a scrawny thing, little more than a child, and her naked behind looked like two stingy pouches of skin tucked onto a skeleton. Bezarin could not imagine anyone having sexual feelings for her. As she worked her way up through the field her half nakedness called up nothing in him but a sense of human weakness, of the miserable level to which human life was reduced in the end.

At the sound of a single shot, the girl flung an arm into the air, as if waving to someone in the distance, and dark blood splashed from the hollow under her shoulder. An instant later she collapsed, disappearing into the shimmering grass.

Bezarin's other officers had been more successful than their commander, and he was pleased to learn that none of his tankmen had abandoned their tanks to participate in the free-for-all violence with the motorized riflemen. He took some comfort in the thought that the men he had trained himself remained disciplined soldiers.

Bezarin threatened Lasky, the commander of the attached motorized 263

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rifle troops, with a court-martial under wartime conditions in accordance with the provisions of Article 24 if he lost control again. Failure to act, under battlefield circumstances, could be punishable by death.

Bezarin made the threat just as his anger peaked, and as he began to realize how deeply the episode had shaken Lasky, he regretted having made it. None of the motorized rifle officer's school training or unit experience had prepared him for this. Lasky stuttered, half-pleading, insisting that such a thing would never—could never—happen again.