Chapter Five
M1900 76.2mm Artillery Piece
Southwest of Toboltura, Siberia
One good thing Comrade Goloshchyokin had to congratulate himself and his side on; it had taken so long to get everything together, and to move the full distance, that spring had almost come upon them. Oh, yes, there was still snow on the ground and likely would be for some weeks, but the weather—that godawful Siberian winter—had mellowed into a godawful Siberian spring, still bloody cold but in every way to be preferred to its less merciful cousin.
Despite the warmer weather, Comrade Goloshchyokin cursed again at the artillery battery leader, reaching out to slap him for the third time that morning.
“Lazy, ignorant fool! Once again, Nikitin, you’ve let the imperialist swine escape! Why did I even bring you and your monkeys along?”
“Comrade Goloshchyokin,” countered the artilleryman, Nikitin, ignoring the blow, “these targets are like phantoms. They appear from odd directions, without warning, fire a few or a few hundred shots, and then disappear. By the time I can get my guns unlimbered they are gone! Would you have me waste ammunition?”
Inwardly, the gunner fumed. Of course, it might have helped if you had given me, as I asked you to, more time to train my gunners. But noooo.
“Bah,” said Goloshchyokin. “Get back to your monkeys and at least try to pretend you have value commensurate with the food I waste on you and the oxygen you breathe.”
At the mention of “oxygen” the artilleryman paled. He’d heard Goloshchyokin refer to “wastes of oxygen” before, before one of his sham trials and genuine hangings.
“Yes, comrade!”
Dismissing the artillery from his mind, Goloshchyokin turned his attention to the northeast, the direction from which so much harassment had come.
And that’s all it’s been, so far, the Red mused, harassment, clearly intended to slow us down. Well, it won’t work.
“We press onward!” he said, loud enough to be heard a hundred arshini or more away. A few men of the two companies spreading out to the front turned to see who was shouting.
“Pay attention to your front, you dogs!”
Young Colonel Georgy Lesh, crouching low behind one of his camouflaged heavy machine guns, itself encased in a strong bunker composed of logs, stone, earth, and ice, watched what looked to be about four hundred Reds, in two groups, one north of and one south of the little hamlet of Degtyarevo, spreading out with perhaps two arshini per man between them, or slightly more. They advanced confidently. The platoon from the Grenadiers that had been harassing them passed through Lesh’s lines with well-rehearsed ease, before turning south, then west, to join the rest of the reinforced Guards Grenadier company and Dratvin’s First Battalion of the Semenovsky Regiment.
Not much experience of war, then, have you? thought the new colonel, watching the carefree Reds approach. Well, we’ll fix that soon.
Lesh was dirty and unshaven, like his men, and his hands were, also like theirs, blistered from sawing logs and abatis and cutting down into the frozen ground. Behind him stood several messengers and a bugler.
There were four heavy machine guns along the line of stream-fed woods west of Toboltura. Their arcs of fire were intermeshed across the front. Out further, abatis lay in long, straight lines, some forming triangles along the lines the machine guns were sighted on, with others to hide just where those lines of sight were.
The first line of Reds reached one of the line of abatis. They peeled around it, filing into gaps in the line, before coming upon a longer and still more solid line.
“Hold your fire,” said Lesh. “Wait for them to build up.”
“Yessir,” said the guardsman sitting bent over behind the Maxim, peering intently through the rectangular vision port in the gunner’s shield. The gunner’s thumbs twitched incessantly with anticipation.
“Sir,” said the gunner, after a few minutes, “there must be forty of them lined up.”
Lesh, who had a better point of view than that of the gunner, replied, “Oh, surely more than that. Ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fire!” said Lesh, slapping a palm down on the gunner’s shoulder for emphasis.
Instantly, the gunner’s thumbs depressed. With only an imperceptible delay, the water-cooled Maxim began spitting out bullets at the rate of about ten per second. This was no light machine gun, either, where one had to ration out the rounds to avoid overheating. Rather, as the water in the barrel shroud turned first hot and then to steam, the gun kept firing, spitting out six hundred bullets a minute, a constant stream, more of an obstacle, on its own, than a mere barbed wire fence.
Lesh watched with satisfaction as the Reds bunched up along the line of abatis began to fall, some knocked directly to the ground and others spun like tops before sinking slowly. Even over the rattle of the gun he could hear their cries of pain and fright.
Close to four hundred rifles, an even dozen Lewis Guns, four per company, and the other three heavy duty Maxims, joined in.
That first probe was simply crushed, leaving from seventy to eighty Reds littering the field, either dead or writhing in pain while crying for aid. How many less grievously wounded may have run away or been dragged off was anyone’s guess. They’d also made no impression on the defenders nor even on their wooden obstacle system.
Hardly any return fire, either, thought Lesh. They went down or scampered off too fast.
Artillery should be next, I think. This he thought while watching the shattered remnants of those two Red companies running for their lives. Not a lot active that I can do about that, on this end. Everything we can do has been done.
Lesh shouted out to the men standing behind him. “Bugler, blow ‘stop.’” This was one of only four tactical bugle calls in the Imperial Army. “Messengers, get the word to the companies to take shelter; we’re about to take a pasting.”
The machine guns and their crews, along with Lesh, however, would remain in their bunkers.
“Get your guns into action without delay,” ordered Comrade Goloshchyokin.
“Yes, Comrade,” Nikitin said, before trotting off to give the orders. He knew there would be a lengthy delay and knew there was nothing to be done about it.
There’d be no indirect fire here; he himself was the only one who knew how to compute it. And I don’t have any observers, anyway, nor field telephones for them to give me observations, nor wire to connect us. Maybe someday I’ll have the time to train some. Besides, that silly turd, Goloshchyokin, hasn’t actually given me any instructions on what he wants my guns to actually do. “Destroy, Comrade Goloshchyokin? Suppress, Comrade Goloshchyokin?” And I’d ask, too, except that he can be very dangerous when someone asks him a question to which he lacks an answer.
The horses pulling the four cannon and the caissons weren’t any better trained than the men. Getting them into a position, some twenty-four hundred arshini southwest of where the fire had come from, was an exercise in sheer frustration.
They eventually formed a battery of four guns, pointed generally in the right direction, albeit not perfectly aligned.
But that doesn’t matter, thought Nikitin, I’m going to have to talk them through direct lay anyway. Fortunately, I’ve at least been able to drill them on setting sights and fuses.
Nikitin put his French-made, range-finding binoculars to his eyes. Unfortunately, this set depended on seeing a horse or upright man to determine the range by matching either to a silhouette inside the binoculars. But; No, not a damned thing to see. Still, I can make a good guess as to the range. But they could see me, I think, if they were trying. I’m guessing they knew we had artillery and have pulled back mostly into bombproofs for shelter. There’s something wrong with that theory, though. I can’t quite put my finger on it but . . . Why would they . . . ? Aha! They couldn’t have built bombproofs if they’d only had the time between our first skirmish and now, or even several days ago. So they either don’t have them or they’ve been watching us for some time.
What can I do about that? They could still be on the line and just waiting for another infantry assault. In that case, if I fire, they’ll fire back. So . . .
After consulting his firing table, Nikitin shouted out, “Battery, at my command, one round, shrapnel. Combination fuse. Set your fuses for one and one quarter seconds. Elevate your guns to ten degrees. Your target is the center of the wood-line twenty-four hundred arshini to your front.”
After waiting for some seconds while the fuses were set, the guns loaded, the guns trained to bring them on target, and the gun chiefs announced, “Ready!” Nikitin raised his binoculars back to his eyes and ordered, “Fire!”
Snow on the ground billowed out, forward of the guns, while trees shook and evergreens deposited white fluff and needles. The guns’ barrels leapt back, compressing both the oil cylinder and the forty India rubber rings in the trail. A bit over a second later, four small dark clouds materialized in Nikitin’s view. Crappy sheaf, he thought, sourly. Well, to be expected.
Any reasonably experienced observer, and Nikitin had a good deal of experience, could spot where the shrapnel balls struck the ground by the soil, water, or snow they cast up. He gave the guns a new elevation and fuse setting.
“Fire!”
Except for two shrapnel balls that came into the firing port, hit the gunner’s shield, and then ricocheted off to bury themselves in the dirt, the shrapnel pattered harmlessly around the mostly abandoned line.
“I don’t know about you men, but the sound of rain on a tin roof always helps me to fall asleep,” Lesh joked with the gun’s crew. Rank hath its privileges so, even though it was a fairly old and weak joke, it still raised snorts of laughter from the crew.
There was one louder bang; a shrapnel shell’s fuse apparently failed, causing it to revert to impact detonation. However, the explosive charge inside a shrapnel shell was usually trivial. (There was a German shell, the Einheitsgeschoss, that contained more explosive and fewer balls, but this tended to do a fairly poor job with each, so had not been copied by the Russians. Or anyone else.) After the noise of several hundred machine gun rounds inside a tight bunker, the men with Lesh barely noticed.
“How long before they try another assault, do you think, sir?” asked the chief of the gun crew.
“Your guess is as good as mine, corporal. I don’t think it will be all that soon, though.”
Daniil Kostyshakov, Ivan Dratvin, Pyotr Cherimisov, Sergeant Yahanov, and Corporal Panfil crouched in a tight group on the safe side of a low ridge south-southwest of the hamlet of Degtyarevo.
Cherimisov’s entire company of grenadiers, now brought up to strength with nearly one hundred sixty men, were arrayed likewise along that friendly side, forbidden to look over the ridge. Further southward, hidden in some woods, was Dratvin’s First Battalion, and for now only battalion, of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, among which were mixed the 37mm infantry guns under Sergeant Yahanov, plus Panfil’s mortars. The same shallow ridge concealed the lot from the gunners trying to ply their trade, south of the town.
Panfil and Yahanov were already well known to the company from the steady support provided by the 37mm gun section during the rescue in Tobolsk.
“Can’t range that far, sir,” Panfil told Kostyshakov. “We can do a little over nine hundred and sixty arshini. Little more with a tailwind, sure, but not even that with a headwind. You’ve got to get us close to do the job.”
“Just that? Nine hundred and sixty arshini? I can almost get more range out of our machine pistols. Well, I can get more from the Lewis Guns and a good deal more from the heavy machine guns.”
“Probably, sir,” Panfil agreed, “but will a round from your machine pistols or Lewis Guns scour an area free of healthy life within a radius of thirty or so arshini?”
“No, I suppose not,” Kostyshakov admitted. “Can you fire at night? We can get you close enough once the sun goes down. There’s a very low ridge between us and them.”
“We still going to have about half illumination for most of the night, sir?” Panfil asked.
“Yes, should have better than that, if no clouds roll in.”
“Then, yes, probably I can. The cannon should be pretty obvious, after all.”
“I get a lot more range out of the 37mm guns,” Yahanov offered. “The problem is we don’t get nearly as much effect on the target. Not much explosive in those little shells, after all.”
“Sir,” asked Cherimisov of the short and dark Colonel Dratvin, “can you take out the guns tonight with both of these supporting you?”
“Probably,” the colonel replied. “My problem comes in in holding the space against the anticipated counterattack. Yes, even with the guns. It might not be a problem, mind you, if Lesh sends me two of the heavy machine guns as he is supposed to, tonight.”
“I’d trust Georgy to follow orders,” said Kostyshakov. “Why do you ask?” he demanded of Cherimisov.
“Well, sir,” Cherimisov answered, “My scouts report that the Red field trains are located in the town to our west, Kutarbitka. Maybe I can take and hold their trains and maybe I can’t, but I’ll bet my life I can at least hold them long enough to burn everything.”
“Daniil,” said Dratvin, “I can hold on here with two companies and give Pyotr one company of rifles to help. Frankly, even a threat to their trains will likely thin them out enough to make it a lot easier to get to those guns.”
Dan raised a quizzical eyebrow at Cherimisov.
“Yes, sir. Moreover, after we beat off the inevitable counterattack, I can probably ski back here to help Colonel Dratvin attack the guns. Even moving in a wide circuit, we’re a lot faster on skis than they’ll be in boots.”
“When do you want to hit them?”
“As soon as I can get there. These will be rear echelon types, even less ready to die for Lenin than the ones in front. The company Colonel Dratvin gives us needn’t be there for the assault, only to take our place so we can come back here.”
Kostyshakov thought about the proposal, which was only really an opportunistic modification to the original plan, itself full of places to be modified.
“All right, with one proviso: swing a little further out and drive as many as possible of their support personnel into the mass between Kutarbitka and Toboltura. You can ask why.”
“Thank you, sir; why?”
“Food, blankets, and panic, but especially food. If you push them into the main formation, the Reds’ infantry and gunners—they don’t seem to have any cavalry—will be forced to share what they have with those support people. This will shorten the time before they all start going hungry. It will also, if you don’t burn anything, increase our stockage of food and ammunition. Yes, I’ll understand if you must burn it all, and I expect you to prepare to burn anything that can’t be moved quickly, but I’d rather we get to shoot and eat everything available, as well as get the horses, sleighs, and carts.
“Oh, and Cherimisov?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Cut the telegraph line as you pass, but not in any way we can’t fix easily.”
“Yes, sir.”
That they weren’t spotted while moving Cherimisov attributed to the snow camouflage and the slight but important undulations in the ground, all greatly enhanced by the apparent lack of any real reconnaissance capability on the part of the Reds.
In any case, moving four or more times faster than Dratvin’s foot, the Grenadiers covered the roughly seven miles to southwest of Kutarbitka in a little over an hour, which was nothing especially impressive for an athlete but by no means bad for a laden infantry company.
They were still out of sight of Kutarbitka, which was discernable only by virtue of the smoke rising from the chimneys of buildings abandoned when the Guards moved the people out, and now full of Reds trying to keep warm without working.
Cherimsov stopped, turned around, and made a signal with his hands for the company to get on line, First Platoon on the left, Second in the middle, and Third on the right, as they faced the town. The newly formed weapons platoon, which included the sniper teams, of which there were two, as well as the twelve-man engineer section, which ported two flamethrowers, and the Lewis Gun section, fell in behind Cherimisov.
He’d seen the town before, during the period of reconnaissance and set up, so he knew where he wanted the Lewis Guns to go. He called the section to him and, as he drew in the snow, gave his orders. “I want number one gun on the road that runs southwest to northeast, orienting its fire to the northeast, and I want number two gun on the road that runs northwest to southeast, fire orients to the northwest. Kostyshakov wants us to drive them all to the northeast, but there’s too good a chance of some of them rallying in that part of the town, so listen carefully; nobody escapes across those roads. When we reach them, I’ll toss a grenade into the crossroads. That’s your signal to back off the roads into the area already cleared by us, and race to rejoin us at the crossroads. Don’t shoot anyone wearing white camouflage like us. Understood?”
“Yes, sir . . . yessir.”
“Good, move out.”
“Snipers?”
“Here, sir,” answered the best of them, Corporal Nomonkov, the short, stocky part Tatar with the best eyesight anyone in the brigade had even heard of.
“Cut northwest toward the Tobol River. Spread out. Prevent anyone from escaping to the north.”
“Yes, sir. Both teams, sir?”
“Both, yes; I think it will take both. Let them escape to the northeast or east, though, if they seem to be heading that way.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, for the rest of you, kick off your skis and remember that the same rules apply as during the rescue of Her Majesty: no prisoners; no quarter. Platoon leaders, limit of advance, the far side of town. Now back to your men.”
After a few minutes’ wait to let the platoon leaders get back, Cherimisov gave the command, accompanied by his right arm rising and then cutting downward, “Forward!”
Konstantin Maksimovich Bortnik warmed his hands by placing them, palm to the front, near the fire-fed Russian stove in one of the houses in the northeastern part of the town. Yes, yes, he was supposed to be on guard, and, for the most part, he was. Surely this didn’t prevent a man from taking a break and warming his hands and feet.
Glass was not unheard of, even for peasants, even in small towns in the hinterland. Bortnik’s current house had three windows of six panes each facing to the southeast. He could almost perform his duties as guard from inside it, where it was warm. If the windows could have been opened he could have done more watching, of course, but this was Siberia where windows did not open and where fresh air was let into a house in the winter via the mechanism of pulling a plug from a round hole or pipe in the walls.
“And what’s the point of guarding, anyway?” Konstantin muttered aloud. “It’s not like I have a rifle or anything. Sure, sure; we were supposed to get rifles with a resupply. But that hasn’t shown up and isn’t likely to now.”
The fixed windows shook with the blow of another salvo from the northeast.
“I’d best get outside anyway, I suppose.”
Opening the door, Konstantin was hit by the expected wall of frigid air. Then his eyes were hit by something completely unexpected, the sight of half a dozen white-clad men, maybe eight or nine hundred arshini away, bearing some strange-looking firearm along with a number of rifles.
“Holy shit, those are not ours!”
The leader of First Platoon, Feldfebel Kostin, was actually the first man in the company to reach one of the houses. There was no smoke coming from the chimney—not that a big Russian stove gave off a lot of smoke—so he took a chance on it not being occupied. Instead of kicking it open and throwing in a grenade to smooth over awkward introductions, he kicked it open and burst in. Furiously he swept the muzzle of his MP-18 from left to right, holding his fire though for lack of targets.
“Chalk it,” he said to the two nearest men outside the house. “Chalk it and leave the door open. As for the rest of you, who told you to fucking stop?”
From about four hundred arshini to the east, Kostin heard the first grenade explode, followed by the rattle of a machine pistol, both sounds full and loud in the dense, cold air.
Konstantin Bortnik stood frozen in the doorway. He was no fanatical Red; he was just a teamster who could keep his horses going and his cartwheels turning.
They didn’t even give me a damned rifle, he thought, once again.
What got him moving was the sight of a half dozen or so of his colleagues of the field trains, reaching the road that ran roughly south, stepping out into it at a run and being cut down by the weapon—A machine gun; it must be a machine gun, but so small and light?—and left lying and bleeding out on the icy road.
Even then he stood frozen, as the shock of what he’d seen warred with the realization of what it meant. They’re killing everybody. No prisoners! Oh, God that the Reds tell me I’m not supposed to believe in, help me now!
Instantly, leaving the door swinging behind him, Botkin bolted for the northeast, shrieking his lungs out, “Run! Run! Run for your lives!” His shrieking was loud enough and sincere enough to start a panic, with streams of Red support troops abandoning everything from horses and carts to their field kitchens and aid station.
There was little fighting and the only casualty—fortunately a non-fatal one—in the Grenadier Company was from a friendly fire incident arising from the confused clearing of a house. One private stood over another one, the stricken one, apologizing in a profuse stream.
At the far side of town the troops stopped, whereupon the platoon leaders turned matters over to their seconds and went looking for Cherimisov.
Kostin was the first to find his company chief. “Go secure that little hamlet up north, Khudyakova,” Cherimisov ordered. “Take one of the Lewis Guns with you, the one on the left. Watch out for our snipers who may or may not have gotten into position.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kostin, saluting and trotting off to rejoin his platoon and round up his light machine gun.
Third platoon leader arrived next. The was Guards Senior Lieutenant Molchalin, doing double duty as company exec and Third Platoon leader. There was a promotion for Molchalin, the orders had been cut and signed, as soon as the unit grew enough for a second company. Taciturn as always, Molchalin said, “Area cleared, sir.”
“That wood line, Lieutenant. Take the other Lewis gun. Orient your fire to the northeast.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, we passed by the Reds’ field kitchens on the way. There’s a good deal of bread and soup there to pass out to the men.”
“I’ll have Mayevsky”—Mayevsky was the grenadier’s first sergeant, for whom a promotion was also waiting—“see to it.”
“Also, sir, the supply sergeant ought to do an inventory. There are a lot of horses and vehicles we passed by.”
“Ordinarily, since you are the exec,” said Cherimisov, “I’d tell you to worry about it. But platoon leading is more important at the moment. Mayevskycan handle this, too.”
“Sir.”
“Second Platoon Leader?” called Cherimisov.
“Here, sir,” said Feldfebel Pasternak, the new platoon leader of the platoon formed from parts of the old First and Second Assault Platoons, with fill from the rest of the original force. “Lost one man, friendly fire. Don’t really know how. He’ll live but is out of the fight.”
“We’ll figure it out later, Pasternak. For now, I want . . .” Cherimisov pointed out the arc he wanted defended, north of the town.
“And now we wait for Dratvin’s boys to catch up to us.”
Degtyarevo
The blast of the guns was sufficiently unpleasant to Comrade Goloshchyokin that he’d retired to nearly half a verst behind the firing line and still felt the need to cup his hands over his ears. Thus, he didn’t immediately hear the firing from the rear, in the vicinity of Kutarbitka and Khudyakova. Even the occasional blast of a grenade didn’t quite reach through, possibly for the beating his hearing had already taken from Nikitin’s first salvoes.
Thus it was that the first warning Goloshchyokin had of the disaster in his rear was the pell-mell flight of several hundred of his support troops from behind him, heading for the front. Indeed, the very first warning was Comrade Konstantin Bortnik. It was only after that one had passed that Goloshchyokin turned around to see the rest.
He may not have had military experience before about a month and a half prior, but the Red had enough experience of protesting crowds fleeing the Tsar’s cavalry to know panic when he saw it. Goloshchyokin identified one particular man, even now veering slightly to his right to avoid smashing into him. Moving a few steps, the Red leader straight-armed the panic-stricken soldier, taking him across the throat and dropping him, choking and gagging, in his tracks.
Before the felled soldier could arise, the Red Commissar dropped to one knee, grabbing the collar and shaking the man like a rat in a terrier’s mouth.
“What in the name of Ilyich is going on?” Goloshchyokin demanded. Getting no immediate answer he shook the man again, then released the collar and slapped him hard across the face several times.
“Next time I ask a question and don’t get an answer I shoot you,” said the Red, putting his hand to his pistol for emphasis.
“The . . . the . . . thousands of them . . . killing everybody . . . came out of nowhere.”
“Thousands of what, you fool?”
“Imperialists! Imperialists, sir! We’ve got to get away. They’ve overrun the trains, the field kitchens, ammunition, food, and fodder. They’ve got everything. And there are THOUSANDS of them!”
Uh, oh.
Of course, Comrade Goloshchyokin was not a soldier. If he had been, he might well have studied Clausewitz. In that study, he might have come across the military pearl of wisdom: “Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.”
Being an amateur, however, he took the report at face value. There are, he was instantly convinced, thousands of Imperialists in my rear. Thousands of them. I should have expected treachery. Did that bastard Jew, Sverdlov, set me up? What must I do? What can I do? I know what I can’t do; if I cannot break through the thousand or so I am told, I must stop the attack forward and set up a perimeter! Yes, that! And I must get control of whatever ammunition and food we have remaining. I’ll search the men . . . have them searched, rather. Lifeboat rules, those are all that can save us. And I must get a message back. I must be relieved. Lenin must know how the Imperialists have grown, the new threat they present.
Kutarbitka
Cherimisov could hardly believe it. He expressed his shock and amazement to the commander of the company from Dratvin’s First Battalion of the reborn Semenovsky Regiment.
“I don’t get it, Pavel,” the grenadier commander said to the man leading his relieving company, Pavel Aminoff. “There aren’t even two hundred of us here. We’re not dug in. The enemy outnumbers us twenty to one and has artillery, to boot. Yet no counterattack. By now they could have turned around everyone attacking Lesh’s Preobrazhenskys, if that was all they had, and reached us. But it isn’t all they had. I should have been talking to you now while hiding in some peasant’s basement. And yet here we stand, in the open and unmolested. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Aminoff shrugged. “No matter, we’ve got a lot more firepower than you do; nine Lewis Guns, after all. We can hold.”
“Good man,” Cherimisov said. “And now, if you please, I’m going back to Dratvin to do our next job of the day.”
Aminoff looked at the sun, now fairly far down in the west. “I doubt you can get there in time, Pyotr, despite the skis.”
“Then we’ll attack at night,” said the grenadier. “It’s not like we haven’t done it before, and in worse circumstances.”
Southeast of Ushakova
It was not long before nightfall when the truth dawned on Comrade Goloshchyokin. He’d spent the last few hours reorienting the troops to the northeast to a defense, the troops to the southwest, the same, and the artillery, with two companies of foot, to all-around defense in the center. At the moment, he was in the center, with the artillery.
“Comrade Goloshchyokin,” asked Nikitin, the artilleryman, “How do we know that there were thousands of imperialists who overran the trains?”
“Because the ones fleeing told me so,” answered Goloshchyokin.
“Indeed? How many did you ask?”
“Well . . . one,” Goloshchyokin admitted, “but they were all running.”
“I’m sure,” said Nikitin, “I’m sure.”
Both went silent then as Goloshchyokin went over the matter in his mind. At length, with what he knew was a death sentence if he couldn’t fight his way out and to victory, the truth began to dawn.
“No,” he said aloud, when reality finally hit him. “This is not possible. If there had been ‘thousands’ of imperialists overrunning our supplies and transportation, they’d have kept coming. They didn’t so there couldn’t have been nearly so many.”
“No, there couldn’t have been,” agreed Nikitin. Not wanting to be shot or hanged for counterrevolutionary attitudes, the artilleryman added, “I am sure whoever told you this made for a creditable presentation. They always do.”
The likely death sentence, as Samuel Johnson once observed death sentences tended to do, concentrated Goloshchyokin’s mind “wonderfully.”
“So what is there, do you think? A few hundred?”
“Might even be less. These were rear echelon types, not combat soldiers, and mostly unarmed, to boot. They could have been routed by a cattle stampede.”
“What do I do then?”
Nikitin thought aloud, “I doubt they’ve had a chance to move more than a few of the wagons and sleighs. And if they’d burnt them we’d have seen smoke and fire. Also, while they may be in the buildings, the ground’s too hard for them to have done much digging in. A strong counterattack in the morning might yet retrieve our fortunes. Get as close as we can with fixed bayonets and no chambered rounds and then assault at first light. Why don’t you arrange a counterattack? With very little reorientation I can support with my guns from near here.
“You might also, comrade, start sending out patrols to find a way out of this treacherous imperialist trap.”
“You say we’re trapped?” asked Goloshchyokin, his voice heavy with suspicion.
“Not if we can find a way out,” answered Nikitin. “Because we’re not going to fight our way through the Maxims.”