Red Army

Bezarin had read and been told many times how war made boys into men. Yet the very opposite seemed true. Men who swaggered across the parade ground and bullied their way through the administrative rigors of peacetime soldiering became as helpless as children in the face of battle.

Bezarin thought again of Tarashvili, his regimental commander, and of Lieutenant Roshchin, the boy who had broken down on the battlefield and perished with his company. Lasky appeared to be so unnerved that Bezarin wondered if he would go into shock. Where in the program of instruction did they teach you how to handle officers who went to pieces in combat? Or who were frightened into stasis by the unexpected behavior of their men? Having begun by raging at Lasky, Bezarin found himself spending precious time in an attempt to rebuild the officer's confidence, to put him back in control of himself and his men. He assured Lasky that there would be a chance to even things up at the river, if not before, although he knew that there would be a price to pay for this massacre—Bezarin could find no other word for it—and that he and Lasky were the two officers most likely to face a military tribunal.

"It's all right," Bezarin said. "The men are back in their squad groups with their vehicles. All you have to do is go through the motions. They'll listen to you. They've got it out of their systems. Just show them you're in control."

But the motorized rifleman could not control his hands well enough to light his cigarette. Bezarin lit one for him, then guided it into the other man's hand. Lasky's fingers felt like electric wires, frantic with too much current. He gripped the cigarette so hard that the small paper tube bent as he jammed it between his lips. Bezarin turned his back, unable to spare another moment. He felt as though he had squandered his efforts reinforcing failure. Lasky would have to make it on his own, as would every one of them, in the end. The thing now was to move.

Bezarin had lost two more tanks and three infantry fighting vehicles, along with most of the crew members. He loaded his wounded into the largest, sturdiest civilian vehicles that remained in running order, then he put a medical orderly in charge of two riflemen who claimed they 264

RED ARMY

could drive. Bezarin directed the orderly to retrace the detachment's route as best he could, stressing that it was essential to put enough distance between his charges and the scene of the engagement to disassociate the wounded men from the massacre. He worried that any enemy forces or even civilians in the area would take vengeance upon his wounded. Bezarin wished the orderly luck, unhopeful.

Nothing more could be done. The Germans or the English would have to tend their own casualties. Bezarin forcefully shut his mind to the suffering around him. But a part of him felt as though he were the lone occupant of a fragile boat in the middle of a storm at sea. All a man could do was hang on.

He moved along his disordered line of vehicles, shouting at officers and men to mount up, to regroup their platoons. He screamed and cursed at them all until his voice began to fail, and even then he forced the mingled commands and obscenities out of his raw throat. He sensed that the only way to hold his dwindling unit together was by sheer force of will.

The unit pulled together. The vehicles had a battered, overloaded look, a caravan of military gypsies. Camouflage nets trailed over decks, and stowage boxes had been torn open. Vehicle fenders had twisted into chaotic shapes, and cartridge casings littered every flat surface on the infantry fighting vehicles. The self-propelled guns worked their way down from the ridge, and, at Bezarin's wave, the little column began to move again. He had heard nothing from Dagliev's advance element, but he contented himself with the thought that he had told the company commander to use the radio only to warn of trouble ahead. He took the quiet as a positive sign.

Bezarin had directed that the vehicles maintain twenty-meter intervals, but the difficulty of moving along the refugee column soon squeezed that distance down to an average of less than ten meters. He allowed the crowding as long as they marched immediately beside the panic-stricken traffic, sensing that his enemy would not stage an air attack against his column as long as it hugged living refugees. Besides, he did not want to lose control of a single vehicle.