Blood Mountain by Leo Kessler

Author:Leo Kessler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752488882
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

THREE

It was the next morning.

Roswitha stood at the entrance to the caves surveying the terrain below, her keen gaze sweeping the smooth gleaming white surface of the mountains, checking for the enemy, but at the same time enjoying the view. How beautiful the great curved sweep of the valley was, cradled in the embrace of the high mountains and falling away gently to the south!

She turned and stared at the mountain, gleaming pink and pure in the dawn light. One day, she promised herself, she would conquer it too. Those twin peaks would be hers. A warm feeling swept through her body, as she visualized surmounting those peaks which looked so like the breasts of some proud young virgin, as yet unconquered by the importuning male. The next moment she dismissed the feeling, as decadent and unworthy of a feminist, who did not succumb to the foolishness of the general run of womanhood. Taking a deep breath of pure mountain air, she thrust back the canvas cover to the main entrance to the cave system and for an instant surveyed her still sleeping troop, their bodies wrapped in their heavy down sleeping bags, which rose and fell rhythmically as the women enjoyed the last moments of their time free of war.

She smiled, her face full of compassion and pride. They had laughed at her in Moscow when she had offered them her militia unit back in July 1941. What good were women, they had asked contemptuously, save as nurses, or perhaps snipers? ‘Give me and my girls a chance,’ she had pleaded. In the end, grateful for anyone capable of carrying and firing a rifle, they had; and she had proved just what her girls could do. On the coldest night of the year in January 1942, when sentries froze to death at their post, she and her girls had climbed the ramparts of the German-held fortress outside beleaguered Leningrad, slaughtered the divisional commander and his staff who were billeted there, and escaped without a single casualty.

The exploit had occasioned sensational headlines in the Soviet Press. But it had been nothing in comparison with her girls’ bold attempt to break through the German Volga front by scaling the heights and assassinating the commander of the German Sixth Army. That attempt had failed. But it had made the Fritzes so insecure that they had begun to see partisans everywhere. Stalin himself had ordered the girls to be paraded through Moscow, and to be received and heaped with decorations at the Kremlin. The legend of the ‘Red Ravens’, as the popular press called them due to their myriad decorations, had been born. Now no one, even the most anti-feminist general in the Stavka, dare denigrate her girls. The Red Ravens were a unit to be reckoned with, even if they did wear skirts when they were not in line. As Stalin himself had told the Russian people, ‘Wherever the front is the hottest, comrades, you will find my bold and beautiful Red Ravens.

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