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Chapter Seven


Comrade Goloshchyokin

Comrade Goloshchyokin



Southeast of Ushakova

If they had a competent commander, thought Kostyshakov, they’d go through us like crap through a Christmas goose. Or maybe he is competent, but being held in check by someone who is not. It’s not like we’ve never seen that before, during the war. Or maybe we’re just that good . . . nah, we’re—three quarters of us, anyway—hastily trained militia with a sprinkling of semi-trained conscripts.

I confess, if only to myself, it worries me. Eventually, given time, they’re going to figure out how light is the net we’ve cast around them. Then there’ll be Hell to pay. Unless, of course, we can drive them in closer and make the net a good deal tighter and heavier.

In fact, the Guards Brigade had only three adequately held sectors. The strongest was the one to the northeast, in the vicinity of Toboltura, which was held now by two heavy machine guns and two thirds of Lesh’s battalion. Lesh’s other company was strung out—thinly strung out—along the northwest side of the Tobol River, in little patrols who could not have hoped to prevent a breakout but who could, and so far had, prevented the Reds from discovering there was a way to break out.

They had two chances at this: one was finding and engaging a Red patrol on the way out. The other was finding and engaging it on the way back in.

There was another one to the southwest, held now by a single company of Dratvin’s battalion. That company was depleted, since beating off two Red attempts to retake their trains, and then having to launch a vicious and bloody counterattack to retake Khudyakova. It mustered perhaps eighty-five still healthy men, though it retained a good complement of Lewis Guns and a preposterous amount of ammunition, courtesy of the Reds’ carts and sleighs.

Southeast of the Red sausage, in a line running from Kutarbitka almost to Kostyshakov, and then from just past him to Toboltura, four of Dratvin’s remaining six platoons did the same thing the people on the other side of the river were doing: preventing Red patrols from finding a way out.

Only in the center did Kostyshakov have a maneuvering force, this consisting of Cherimisov’s company of Grenadier Guards, two platoons under Dratvin, the 37mm gun section, the mortar section, and a section of two heavy machine guns.

Under three hundred men; it wasn’t a lot to try to split a brigade in two, then hold the pieces apart, and that at the place where that Red Brigade’s firepower was greatest, right at the battery position of their four pieces of artillery.

But the mortars, thought Kostyshakov. Tatiana, who saw it, told me they put out a surprisingly powerful blast . . . if they can get close enough.


The grenadier company, borne on their skis, had passed perhaps an hour and a half before. The moon was down and would not rise for another three hours. That was three hours to get those three hundred men into position before there was enough light to attack by.

Though, at least, it will be a pretty bright moon, thought Private Romanova, sometimes called “Your Imperial Majesty.” Bright enough to see the enemy by and, as important, to see each other, despite the white camouflage.

There was one carbide-fueled light Tatiana could make out clearly, though. Backed up as it was by snow between it and the enemy, and turned down as was the feed of water to the carbide, she thought it unlikely anyone on the other side could see it. To left and right, too, were others, but giving even fainter light. She hoped no one who wasn’t supposed to be able to could see those, either.

Tatiana had been assigned to drive the ammunition sleigh for the two mortars. It was a larger than normal sleigh, pulled by two sturdy Yakut horses. Waiting and bored, the horses hooved the snow in front of them to get at the still-green grass beneath.

There were actually two sleighs of ammunition. One load of one hundred twenty rounds was here, being driven by Tatiana. Another one hundred twenty were in the field trains with Romeyko. The remainder, some forty-four rounds, in total, was on the backs of the men of the mortar section, along with their disassembled mortars, and their own personal gear. It was a prodigious load for each.

It was also a noisy load, even leaving aside the grumbling of the men. There was just a lot of metal there to clang against other metal. Tatiana doubted, what with the still, cold and dense air, that they’d get within what the manual had called “effective range” before being heard.

Lost in her thoughts, Tatiana didn’t hear the approach of Panfil, the mortars’ chief.

“Your Majesty?”

She recovered quickly. “Please, Leonid, for now it is only ‘Private Romanova.’”

“In a few hours,” he said, “it’s our big day, our premier performance. I’d be a lot happier if you would give this one a miss and go back to Tobolsk or, at least, to the field trains.”

“So would I,” she said, “but I can’t. Funny, though; if I’m too afraid to go back, I’m also pretty afraid of the coming day.”

Panfil made a sort of brushing gesture. “Well,” he said, “as to that,I can tell you from my own experience and what I’ve seen from hundreds of others over the course of the war; you’re really afraid that you won’t prove up to it. You’re afraid of being too afraid to perform.”

He shook his head as a light, humorous tone entered his voice. “Don’t worry about it. Least likely thing to happen because you’re going to be too busy to be afraid.”

“Is that the truth?” she asked.

“Gospel . . . well, Torah truth, Private Romanova.”

“Oddly, you know, that does make me feel better.”

“Sound theology,” Panfil joked, “has a way of doing that.”

Tatiana smiled then, saying, “Thank you, Leonid.”

At that time, a ski-borne messenger from Cherimisov came up. “Sergeant Panfil?”

“That would be me.”

“We’ve cleared to within about nine hundred arshini of the last spot we know the Red artillery was seen. I’m here to guide you forward to a position the commander found. It’s not a great one, but the best we could find for you.”

“Lead on.”


The mortar section was demonstrably not borne on skis. Thus, they were actually quite slow, struggling through the snow under their weighty packs.

Panfil noticed a slight rise, then asked his guard, “How much further?”

“See the lights ahead?” asked the guide. “They used to look like just one to you, yes? Well, when you can see them as distinct lights it means you’re maybe two hundred and fifty arshini away.”

“Two hundred and fifty? I see. Private Romanova?”

There was a witness who wasn’t in on the scheme. “Here, sergeant,” she said in as deep a voice as she could muster.

“He’s very young,” Panfil counseled the guide. “But we were scraping the bottom of the barrel in Tobolsk to field this brigade so . . .”

To Tatiana, Panfil said, “I see a slight rise to our right. I want you to settle the sleigh in there and keep it, the horses, and yourself under cover.”

“Buyes, sergeant.”


Nikitin and his gunners didn’t hear it. One thing that can be said of artillerymen the world over and since the invention of the first big guns: they tended to be deaf as haddocks.

Instead, it was Konstantin Maksimovich Bortnik, the displaced and harried teamster, who first heard the jingle of metal on metal, to the southwest of the battery’s firing position.

He sought out Nikitin and, having found him, said, pointing to the southeast, “Comrade, there’s something out there and it sounds both deliberate and dangerous.”

Nikitin knew his hearing was rotten. He wasn’t shy or defensive about it, either; it simply came with the territory. He listened, even so, for several minutes, hearing nothing.

“Are you certain, comrade?”

“As certain as I am of anything,” Konstantin replied.

“How close, do you think?”

The teamster thought about that, then listened some more. “Less than half a verst,” he finally said, “but not a lot less. Maybe . . . six hundred arshini?”

“Right. Well done . . . who are you?”

“Konstantin Maksimovich Bortnik,” came the reply. “I attached myself here, from the field trains.”

“Glad you did, Bortnik. And now, if you will excuse me?”

Nikitin then walked to the nearest gun. Kicking the crew until he found the chief of the gun, he said, pointing to the southwest, “Get your men up and swing the gun as quietly as possible that way. Get half a dozen shrapnel shells and set them for a tenth of a second, then another half dozen set for a second and a quarter.”

“Yes, comrade.”

“I’m going to bring the other guns on line with yours. If there are a bunch of imperialists waiting out there to attack, they’re going to be in for the surprise of their lives. When I give the command to fire, I want you to traverse your gun left to right between shells and then right to left again.”


Cherimisov, like the men of his company, waited, crouching low above the snow. In the east, when he looked, he saw the first faint rays of light from the sun, now climbing but still just below the horizon.

It was time. The commander stood, as did his men, in twos and threes, and just as he was about to give the order to assault, he heard from the Red battery, “Ogon!” Fire!

Instantly, four double red blossoms bloomed. Each of these were composed of the muzzle flash of the guns and then the shrapnel shells’ bursting charges. The air was filled first with the shocking blasts, then with the whizzing sound of hundreds of projectiles lashing through the air, and then the far more ominous sounds of dozens of men screaming in pain as they were hit.

For now Cherimisov was not hit. The bastards were waiting. One chance . . . only one . . .  He stood and shouted, “Urrah!” then charged for the guns.

He got maybe fifty or sixty arshini before he felt his legs knocked from under him by the passage through his flesh of one or more shrapnel balls. Though the bones were not broken, the flesh was badly mangled. Cherimisov fell to his face, trying to keep from crying out. With that, the assault collapsed. Men took what cover they could and hid from the searching fire of the guns.


Nikitin laughed aloud as, for once in this battle, his guns had had a chance to show what they could do.

The laugh died quickly, though. What killed it was twin flashes from almost a verst away, followed at length by two unusually powerful explosions, much more so than from his own three-inch shells, a hundred or so arshini short of the battery’s position.

“What?” Nikitin asked himself. “How did they get artillery this close? No matter; they did!”

“Aim for the flashes!” he cried out to his gunners. “They’re the only things that can harm us now. Aim for the flashes.”


By the faint light, Panfil and his mortar crews worked frantically to adjust the range to bring the battery under fire. Neither group was especially well trained, but the Red artillery was just that much better. Before a second volley could be launched from the brace of Stokes, the artillery put four rounds of shrapnel into the air just short of the mortars.

Panfil took a ball to his helmet, which prevented his brains from being splashed out onto the snow, but didn’t stop the energy of the ball from knocking him senseless. One of his ammunition bearers, on the other hand, was literally eviscerated by a chunk of shrapnel casing that tore through the flesh of his belly, allowing his guts to spill out in a stinking bloody mass onto the snow-clad ground. Though the light remained dim, it didn’t take high noon to see the sudden discoloration of the snow, to smell the contents of raped guts, or to hear the pure agonized shriek of the dying victim.

The remaining men bolted for the last covered place they knew of, the little hollow in which the bulk of their ammunition was secured.


“Hah, you bastards!” Nikitin exulted. “How do you like taking some of what you’ve been dishing out?”

After half a moment’s reflection, Nikitin called out, as loudly as possible, “Cease fire! Cease fire! But load another round of shrapnel set for muzzle burst: zero seconds.”


Tatiana was close enough to feel the blast from the cannons’ muzzles rippling her internal organs in a way that was more disgusting than anything she’d ever felt.

How much worse for the men who’ve been hit? she asked herself. In a lull in the firing, she risked a peek over the ripple in the ground behind which she sheltered with the sleigh and ammunition. When she looked, she saw eight or nine men fleeing in her direction.

She felt her fear surge at this show of disaster . . . surge and then drain away, as if it were someone else’s. For now, she had a job to do. And that mattered. And besides, they don’t call me

“the Governess” for nothing.

Taking up her machine pistol, Tatiana stepped out into the open.

“And just where do you people think you’re going?” she demanded.

“Everyone’s dead!” exclaimed one of the privates, coming to a halt. “The Reds . . . the cannon . . . Sergeant Panfil . . . dead . . . Ivanov . . . dead . . .”

“Which explains perfectly why there are . . . let me count, nine of you running like rabbits. Now, let me tell you what is going to happen. You are going to turn around and go back to the mortars. I am going to follow you with the ammunition. If we’re lucky and quick, we’ll get there without being seen and fired up. But seen or unseen, fired upon or not, we are going and we are going to smash those cannon.”

She pointed the MP-18 menacingly. “Now turn around and get back where you belong.”


Nikitin looked around until he found the one man with his battery that he really didn’t need at the moment. He called over Bortkin.

“Konstantin Maksimovich,” Nikitin said, “I need to you carry a message to Comrade Goloshchyokin. I think he’s settled into Degtyarevo. Find him and tell him what has happened here, that we’ve broken the attack by the imperialists completely. Tell him that I think if he could get in a counterattack while they’re pinned, he could reap large. Now go!”


The bright moon peeked over the trees at almost exactly the time that Tatiana managed to bring the sleigh in behind the fold in the ground that sheltered the mortars. From somewhere behind her she heard the faint sound of what she supposed were the 37mm infantry guns, trying to take on the cannon.

Glancing down, Tatiana looked at the eviscerated man, lying in a pool of his own guts, shit, and blood, and managed—barely—not to throw up. He, at least, was mercifully dead.

But what of Leonid?

She cast her eyes around. There was only one other body lying on the snow. The mortars themselves were one standing and one knocked over by something, possibly one of the fleeing troops.

“Get both of them set up and ready to fire,” she ordered, then raced, keeping as low as possible, for Panfil’s supine form.

Kneeling down next to him, she was relieved to see that he was, in the first place, still breathing, and, in the second, not bleeding out.

She shook him by the shoulder, insisting, “Leonid! Leonid? Leonid, wake the hell up!!!”

“Go away,” Panfil said, groggily. “Can’t you see I’m dead?” He opened his eyes and saw two beautiful angels, crouched above him. “See? Even the Christian angels—or maybe Valkyries—have come to take me away.”

“You’re not dead,” Tatiana insisted. “I wonder what . . .” She picked up and examined the badly dented helmet, then matched the dent to a large goose egg now visible on Panfil’s head. “Oh, I see.

“Sergeant Panfil,” she said, more gently this time, “I assure you that you are not dead. However, if we can’t take out those cannon we most certainly are going to be dead, and very soon.”


The contemptible pops Nikitin heard from somewhere to the south were followed by two small explosions just behind his guns. He scanned across the horizon—his artilleryman’s eyes were in much better shape than his artilleryman’s ears—but couldn’t see where the shells had come from. Even his binoculars failed to help.

Then he heard another two shots, and saw two small columns of snow, slush, and ice arise, off in the distance.

“Don’t bother to unload the guns! Fire what you have and then load shrapnel with the fuses set for three seconds!”


Lieutenant Molchalin, Third Platoon Leader and executive officer of the company, usually said little. This time he was at a loss for words. He didn’t know what had become of the CO, Cherimisov. From where he lay, he couldn’t see more than three of his own men. He supposed he could have seen more and done more if he’d been able to lift his head more than a foot above ground level but the scything Red cannon to the front had ruled that out.

From behind he heard a couple of not terribly loud pops, the second such pair he’d heard. From ahead, half a minute later, he heard four much more powerful blasts. The passage of artillery shells overhead, sounding more like passing freight trains than anything else, was followed in less than two seconds by four more blasts behind him. After that he heard the tell-tale whiz of scores of shrapnel balls, heading away.

As long as the Red artillery is concentrating on the two 37mm jobs—and God look over them please—we can at least crawl forward. Get enough of us into small arms range and we still have a chance.

With that, and without raising his head more than six inches, Molchalin shouted out, “Third Platoon, Grenadier Guards Company, forward, after me, crawl!


“Leonid, what’s the range?” Tatiana asked. “I’m not good at doing math in my head.”

“It should be . . . should be . . .”—Panfil turned to the side to retch—“something like max range. Seven-fifty on the clinometer.”

Tatiana adjusted the setting on the clinometer, the device for measuring angles when placed against a mortar tube.

“Wait! Are you sure that’s the range?”

“No,” Panfil replied. “It was too dark to be sure.”

“It’s not too dark now,” she said.

“No, but I can’t see well enough. Here,” he said, handing over the small collapsible range finder she’d given him from her father’s collection.

“I don’t know how,” she said. “You never showed me.”

“It’s not complicated. Look inside . . . no, the other way, with the little lenses up to your eyes and the big ones toward what you want to see. See the little curved line with the cross bars?”

“Yes, I see that.”

“The space between cross bars is an average man’s height.” Panfil stopped to throw up again. “Gah. Frame an upright man inside those and look to the left; that will be the range in the British system of yards, which is also the system on the clinometer.”

She’d led a sheltered life before the war, but Tatiana was no dummy. Taking the rangefinder and crawling up the little embankment to the front, she framed one upright Bolshevik who seemed to be in command of the guns. On the side of the line in the sight she read, “725.”

Good enough.

Sliding back down the embankment, she set the clinometer at seven hundred and fifty, then placed it against the tube. Holding it there with one hand, she manipulated the mortar until the bubble in the clinometer was between the lines. Then she went and did the same thing with the other mortar.

But aim where? I can’t see the guns from here.

“Get over here,” she told one of the privates. “I’m going to stand up and tell you when to move the mortar. Ready?”

“Yes, your

“Private Romanova,” she corrected him. “I am Private Romanova.”

With that, Tatiana stood to her full five feet, nine inches, looked over the embankment to the front, glanced down at the white line painted on the top of the mortar barrel, and said, “Left . . . little more . . . little more . . . no, back . . . and that’s good.”

She checked the mortar again with the clinometer, then went the thirty arshini to the next tube and did the same.

“All right, everybody, get two shells and remove the safety pins . . . got it? Let me see . . . good. Make sure they each have four rings of charges. Now when I say ‘fire,’ we’re going to drop . . . no, wait . . . instead, keep an eye on me. I’ll point to who I want to drop a shell and then into which mortar. Ready?”

Tatiana pointed to one man, then to the tube to her left, and said, “Fire!” She turned to another and, before even the first shell had been dropped, pointed again and then to the other mortar, saying, “Fire.”

Before she could turn back, there came two blasts in rapid succession as the first man dropped both shells down the tubes, one after the other.

“You! Fire!”

“Fire!”

“Fire!”

“Fire!”


Nikitin knew instantly what the first muzzle blasts from his front meant. Crap; they’ve got those other guns, whatever they are, back in action.

“Cease fire!” he exclaimed, “Target, left front, some kind of heavy gun, maybe mortars. Load shrapnel and set your fuses for one second.”

He didn’t need to watch the gun crews as they went through their drill. Instead, Nikitin watched by moonlight the slow-moving shells, spinning end over end, now descending from on high.

“Not going to be quite quick enough,” he muttered. “Oh fucking well.”

At the end, not really ever having been a Bolshevik but just a man caught up in the web of fate, Nikitin crossed himself and asked the Almighty to see to the souls of his men. They did their best for what they believed in, Lord, and you cannot ask for more than that.


“Yes!” Tatiana exulted, as the shells began falling on and around the Red battery. “Yes!” she repeated at the best part, which was when one shell apparently went off right underneath one of the Red cannon, also touching off some unfired propellant that really should have been moved elsewhere, and sending the entire gun—along with diverse bits of the crew—into the air a good fifty or sixty arshini.

“Yes!” she repeated, throwing her arms around one of the crew and spinning him like a child.

“Yes!”


Molchalin decided to risk his head to look forward when he heard the mortars come back into action. He saw the Bolshevik battery deluged with a storm of shells. When he saw one of the guns lift, he knew it was his time.

Standing erect, Molchalin shouted, “Grenadier Company; Urrah! Urrah! Urrah! Charge!”

By ones and twos, and then, inspired by those, by the mass, the company arose to its feet and began running forward. The Lewis Guns, held at an angle to prevent stoppages, were the first to begin marching fire. The rifles joined in shortly after that.

Ah, but when the machine pistols kicked in, slaughtering everything in sight and setting the Reds still living and hale to running for their lives . . . 


Dratvin, too, saw the gun fly up, spinning. The two platoons he had left to himself, having detached everyone else in his battalion to a different mission, were comparatively unscathed, as were the heavy machine guns sent to him by Lesh.

Standing up, he said, “All you men of the Preobrazhensky, on your feet. Machine guns?”

“Here, sir.”

“Get ready to wheel your guns fast.”

“The grenadiers will cut to the river. It’s our job to make sure they aren’t taken in the rear as they do, and to prevent the enemy from linking up again.”

“Now, let’s go!”


Degtyarevo, Siberia

Konstantin Maksimovich Bortnik hadn’t yet found Comrade Goloshchyokin even a few minutes after the explosions behind him said that the artillery battery to which he’d attached himself was no more. Indeed, he turned around in time to see the gun that had been launched skyward crash down to Earth.

He stopped for a moment, before continuing his search, to contemplate what they meant.

What it means is that my alibi is gone. No Comrade Nimikin to vouch for me that I was doing my duty when I left the line. Now what will that very unreasonable communist make of this? Oh, I know, I’ll be strung up to a tree before I can utter my first explanation.

So, this being the case, why don’t I get my revenge for my upcoming murder, in advance?

With that, Bortkin spent a few minutes hunting for a club. He found a piece of wood that would do, picked it up in a gloved hand, and went looking for Goloshchyokin.


Southwest of Ushakova

“It’s only a matter of time, now,” said Kostyshakov. “We’ve got them herded into two small perimeters, no bigger than a thousand arshini across, either of them. They’ve got no food, no tents. And we can keep them from building any fires, too. While the days have turned warmer, the nights remain rather bitter.”

He looked at Romeyko and asked, “So how do we get them to surrender? I don’t want to lose another man here if we can help it.”

“Speaking of which,” said Romeyko, “there are a couple of points of interest. I think we can set the field kitchens upwind of the trapped Reds, first one, then the other, and tempt them to surrender by the smell of good hot soup cooking and some bread being baked. Another is they say Cherimisov will live and will not lose his legs, though we shall lose the use of him for probably two or three months. The final matter, however, concerns just who was in charge of the mortars when they silenced the Red battery . . .”


Of course no good deed goes unpunished . . . 

“You did WHAT?” Kostyshakov stormed at his empress. “Are you out of your imperial MIND? Yes, I know inbreeding has made you royals dumber than the general run of mankind, but this is really beyond the pale. WERE YOU INSANE?”

“I was trying to help,” she sniffed, softy. She wasn’t a girl given much to crying but a tear rolled down her face even so. “And I didn’t want to feel anymore that I wasn’t doing my part and

“ENOUGH! And, Your Imperial Majesty, I have had enough.”

With that, Kostyshakov removed his epaulettes and threw them at her feet. “If you’re going to go around me like that then you don’t need me for a commander. Find someone more interested in putting up with your spoiled little girl games. I am through!”

With that, the former commander of the Brigade of Guards turned on his heel and stormed out.




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