—— Red Army Sniper ——40But ‘over there’ grenade explosions were resounding more
and more frequently, and the chatter of machine guns was
intensifying. Pained by my inactivity and seeing no way of helping
them, I began firing at the gunports of the German pillboxes,
from which streams of fire were pouring forth. Several points fell
silent for a while. More I could not do, however much I might
have wished it, because a big ‘extravaganza’ began about sixty
metres from me – on the other side of the deep, wide ditch or
gully dividing our trenches. Along the bottom of this gully flowed
a stream, which had not frozen even in the winter. And sixty
metres from the gully stood an isolated singlestorey and quite
respectable looking house, built entirely of wood, with a sloping
roof and chimney, which had survived the war by some miracle.
I had spent a long time looking at it, particularly since the houses
around it had been razed to the ground or torn apart to provide
materials for German dugouts. What was in this house I did not
know, just as our scouts probably did not know. And now, behind
this house, a real battle unfolded.
For some reason smoke suddenly began to pour out of the
chimney – thick smoke, which drifted away into the frosty, winter
sky. And within a minute or two something around the house itself
began to give off smoke, but the shooting beyond it also intensified,
becoming disorganised and frequent. Putting all these events
together, – the grenade explosions, and the firing, and the smoke
from the chimney – I became firmly convinced that this was our
lads’ work. Now I transferred all my attention exclusively to the
house. And there something quite unimaginable was going on.
The grenade explosions had ceased, but the rifle fire had
intensified. Still more smoke appeared around the house, actual
flames could be seen here and there, and the rifle fire was being
discharged in coordinated bursts, seemingly by a hundred
marksmen at once.
‘The house is on fire!’ I thought,’ and recognised the organised,
coordinated firing smacks of cartridge boxes exploding! But where
were the lads themselves? What was happening there now?’