War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] Read Free Page A

stations.
     
    By the third morning, the Polish army had fallen into disarray. Isolated units fought hard to beat off frontal attacks in Thorvald’s sector outside Krakow. Finally his assignment came from Command: his eight-man sniper squad was to creep up during lulls in the fighting and shoot into the Polish trenches and strongholds. Command wanted its snipers to drain the enemy’s fighting spirit.
     
    For four days Thorvald and his men crawled at dawn to within five hundred meters of the enemy. Thorvald collected seventy-one confirmed kills, more than the rest of his unit combined.
     
    While the other snipers bragged at the evening meals and compared journals, Thorvald read books. The commander of his division came around and handed out tin tokens, one for each kill. These were to be redeemable at the end of the war for one hundred deutsche marks apiece, the army’s equivalent of a bounty. Thorvald gave his tokens away.
     
    During the invasion’s second week, Thorvald’s company encircled a large Polish force. One morning at dawn, he looked out of his shooting cell at the sound of trumpets and pounding hooves. He watched in disbelief as a brigade of Polish cavalry leaped over the parapets and galloped across the open plain. Through his scope, he gazed at the colorful mounted soldiers, their gloved hands holding pennants and lances high, trying to rally their comrades.
     
    He lined up his first target at six hundred meters and fired. The rider fell. Before he could acquire a second mark, the booming of tanks erupted behind him, raising columns of dirt and flame on the plain. He watched through the crosshairs; in minutes the magnificent Polish cavalry charge became a scattered collage of dismembered men and horses.
     
    “And what,” he asked the assembled class at the end of this day’s tale, “do you think is the moral?”
     
    Thorvald smiled at the young men. No hands went up. They knew better than to speak during his stories, even to answer a question.
     
    They are so ready, Thorvald thought, looking at the faces, the ease of confidence in their movements, the juice of youth in their veins; they’re tugging at the reins to go off to battle to earn their own reputations, to move their crosshairs over the hearts of real men. I know how a man can kill. But I wonder how he can be so anxious to risk his life to go and do it.
     
    “The lesson, my young, ignorant boys,” he said, holding his hands out to them as if to show the breadth of his sizable wisdom, “is this: don’t be a hero, on horseback or otherwise. Stay behind cover.”
     
    * * * *
     
    TWO
     
     
    MINUTES AFTER HOFSTETTER’S BODY HAD BEEN ca rried to the rear, orders came for Nikki’s company to move from their position west of the Tractor Factory. The final assault on the next factory, the Barricades, was under way. This offensive would be the knockout punch; it should take just one or two more weeks to push the Reds out of the Barricades and into the Volga.
     
    Captain Mercker split the eighty-man company into patrols of ten. Mercker was leery of snipers and migrating machine guns that might carve into his troops and bog them down in a firefight if they moved as one. He counted out the first ten men.
     
    “Corporal.” He pointed at Nikki. “You know our objective?”
     
    Nikki nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”
     
    “You’re in charge of the first squad. Get to within fifteen hundred meters of the Barricades. Find a secure spot for the company to assemble.”
     
    “Yes, sir.”
     
    “Keep your head down. Move.”
     
    Nikki looked at the nine men assigned to scurry behind him through the gauntlet ahead. All young, pale, grimy faces like his own. All interchangeable, he thought, each one dispensable, like a throw-away rag. He said a quick and silent prayer that there would still be nine when he next counted.
     
    “Go only where I go,” he said. “Move only how I move.”
     
    Nikki bent at the waist and knees. His rifle hung