Diggers by Viktors Duks

Author:Viktors Duks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS027090 HISTORY / Military / World War I, HIS027100 HISTORY / Military / World War II, HIS027080 HISTORY / Military / Weapons
Publisher: Boson Books
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

The Classicist carefully removes a land mine from the clay.

Oh, yeah—of course I took the machine gun. Sorry, I forgot to tell you. We never leave things like that behind.

Anyway, the mine was without a detonator—thank God. Having been sunk into the mud for decades, the unique device looked as though it had been canned for all those years.

“Man, you’re lucky!” said the Classicist. “I’d take something like that.”

“Finally I’ve got one!” I was delighted.

My emotions were heightened by the fact that the Classicist was happy about my find. The Classicist is the Classicist because he knows when he sees something good. I don’t know how I overcame my stinginess, but after a long debate inside myself I was ready to present the set to him. A set—it may sound like this was the first time that we had ever found a mine. No, but it was the first iron robot mine with a wooden pole that was stuck into the ground. It was the pole that was the most interesting part of the mine for me. How long can a dead and mechanically processed piece of wood survive in the forest? Well, apparently for 60 years. That’s how long it had been since the war.

“Listen, I have a question,” I said, just to annoy the Classicist.

“What?”

“Would you maybe like one just like this one—a full set?” I stuck my hand into the mud up to the below and found something similar to the previous find.

“Of course I would.”

“Well, hop in and pull it out,” I smiled, pulling my legs out of the muddy mess with some difficulty.

A cloud of tobacco smoke enveloped me. The Classicist looked too good not to take a picture.

“These have been amateurs before us,” the Classicist griped. “I don’t know what they found, but how could they not find these things? Absolute amateurs.” In a short while he had pulled out three beautifully preserved mines from the hole, complete with their wooden poles.

The last scene played out similarly to the one at the previous bunker. “Finally,” said the Soul of a soldier that had long been looking for peace. “Finally I have a grave, too. Small, not with all of the bones, but it’s mine anyway.”

The time had come to go back to the highway, for two reasons. First of all, Sancho Panza (that’s me) was tired of carrying a backpack that weighed 20 kilograms. Secondly, it was getting dark in the forest. As we passed by “Machine Gun Hill,” however, we decided to stop for a couple of minutes. We ended up staying for half an hour. We had assigned names to many places in this former battlefield—Machine Gun Hill, Komsomol Hill, The Field Engineer’s Place, and so on. That makes it easier for me to tell you about our adventures. Once, thinking about the events of the war, we concluded that on a hill that we were looking at there had once been a Soviet army unit. Things we dug up allowed us

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