Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

Men who have been held in reserve for a long time feel a special tension as they board the trains that will take them to the front line. Young officers dream of special orders from Stalin in sealed envelopes . . . More experienced men, of course, don’t dream of anything of the sort: they just drink hot water, soften up their dried fish by banging it against a table or the sole of a boot, and discuss the private life of the major or the opportunities for barter at the next junction.

They already know only too well what happens when a train unloads at a station in the middle of nowhere, a place apparently known only to the German dive-bombers . . . How the new recruits slowly lose their high spirits; how, after the monotony of the journey, you can no longer even lie down for an hour; how for days on end you don’t get a chance to eat or drink; how your temples seem to be about to burst from the incessant roar of overheated motors; how your hands barely have the strength to move the gears and levers. As for the commander – he’s had more than enough of coded messages, more than enough of being cursed and sworn at over the radio. His superiors just want to plug a gap in the line – they don’t care how well the men did in their firing exercises. ‘Forward! Forward!’ That’s the only word the commander ever hears. And he does press forward – at breakneck speed. And then sometimes the unit gets flung into action before he’s even had time to reconnoitre the area; an irritable, exhausted voice simply orders: ‘Counter-attack at once! Along those heights! We’ve got no one there and the enemy’s pushing hard. It’s a mess.’

Then, in the ears of the drivers and mechanics, of the radio-operators and gun-layers, the roar of the long march blurs into the whistle of German shells, the crash of exploding mortar-bombs.

This is when the madness of war becomes most obvious . . . An hour later there is nothing to show for all your work except some broken-down, burning tanks with twisted guns and torn tracks. Where are the hard months of training now? What has become of the patient, diligent work of the mechanics and electricians?

And the superior officer draws up a standard report to cover up the useless waste of this fresh unit, this unit he flung into action with such thoughtless haste: ‘The action of the forces newly arrived from the rear temporarily checked the enemy advance and made possible a regrouping of the forces under my command.’

If only he hadn’t just shouted, ‘Forward! Forward!’ – if only he had just allowed them time to reconnoitre the area and not blunder straight into a minefield! Even if the tanks hadn’t achieved anything decisive, at least they’d have given the Germans a run for their money.

Novikov’s tank corps was on its way to the Front. The naïve young soldiers, men who had not yet received their baptism of fire, believed they were the ones who would take part in the decisive operation. The older men just laughed; Makarov, the commanding officer of the 3rd Brigade, and Fatov, the best of the battalion commanders, had seen all this too many times before.

The sceptics and pessimists had gained their knowledge and understanding through bitter experience; they had paid for it with blood and suffering. In this they were superior to the greenhorns. Nevertheless, they were wrong: Novikov’s tank corps was indeed destined to play a decisive role in an operation that was to determine both the outcome of the war and the subsequent fate of hundreds of millions of people.