Girl with a Sniper Rifle by Yulia Zhukova

Author:Yulia Zhukova
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922387424
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

CHAPTER 6

Into Battle

The war, the front ... Many books have been written about this - both fiction and non-fiction, some authentic, others not particularly so. In some of them the events of those years are truthfully depicted, while others contain nothing but falsification and outright lies.

The way thinks worked out, I ended up at the front only at the end of 1944. I was not there long, but I know what war is. With my regiment I had experience of being both on defence and on the offensive, of knowing in full measure the bitterness of retreat and the tragedy of being encircled for many days at a time. I endured bombing raids and both artillery and mortar fire. I froze in the snow in no-man’s land, tracking down a target to hit, and got soaked in the Masurian Lakes area of north-east Poland. I cared for the wounded and spent time in hospital myself and subsequently, in the heat of bloody battles, I gave blood for the wounded. I made and lost friends. I escaped death by a miracle and was almost captured. Arduous experiences, physical stress and challenges to morale, cold, hunger, chronic lack of sleep, the filth of life in the trenches - all this is also part of war. And it was all compressed into several unbelievably taxing months.

And yet writing about the war itself is very difficult for many reasons. In the first place, so much has already been said about it that my recollections may seem trivial, commonplace and uninteresting. Apart from that, in the years that have passed since the war some things have been completely erased from my memory; many events have been, as it were, displaced in my consciousness and in time and space, and I cannot recall them in the order in which they occurred, or separate the important things from the secondary. It must also be borne in mind that I was a rank-and-file soldier and therefore the working out and implementation of military operations, even those of local significance, were beyond my ken. I saw the war mainly through the telescope lens of a sniper’s rifle.

Ahead lay the front.

The train was carrying us westward. The ‘us’ represented a whole trainload of girls who were mostly scarcely more than twenty or twenty-two years old. Our train consisted of a long line of heated goods waggons, which had been used before the war to carry cargo and livestock. Now they were carrying soldiers. The waggons had bunks like the barracks, but no pillows or other sleeping gear. I don’t remember precisely, but I think we slept on bare boards, spreading one half of our overcoats beneath us and covering ourselves with the other. In the middle of the carriage stood a cast-iron pot-belly stove. It provided a little warmth and we used it for cooking and making tea. For the whole journey we relied on concentrates, from which we boiled a sort of cross between a soup and a porridge. We had rusks in place of bread and salted herring instead of meat.

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