—— Shoot the Firefighters! ——41The minutes seemed like hours. At last I saw some human
figures moving rapidly from shell hole to shell hole across no
man’s land. They were all heading in one direction – coming
towards me. I cautiously trained my rifle on the first of the figures
approaching me.
‘Hey, halt! Who’s creeping along there?’ I decided to speak up
and snapped the breech of my rifle shut.
‘Fr iends.’
‘Halt, I say. What friends? Password!’
‘But it’s us, Yevgeni. Didn’t you recognise us, or what? Where
did you bury yourself?’. I recognised the voice of Senior Sergeant
Ma x i mov.
‘Get over here, Maximov! Well, what happened to you over
there?’ I asked him as soon as he slid, breathless, into my crater.
‘How did you contrive to bump into Germans?’
‘Well, we found out that this house,’ and he jerked his thumb
back to where clouds of smoke were rising ever more thickly,
‘contains a supply of ammunition; a prisoner told us!’
‘Well, we decided to blow this temple up. We took quite a
detour and that’s why we didn’t come out where we planned,
and got held up a bit. But at least the building’s alight! You can
imagine how scared the Germans were! With their ammo about
to go up any minute! Well, of course, we didn’t manage it without
a fig ht.’
‘Are the lads all safe and sound? Or.. .’
‘All safe and sound for the time being. Hang on, let’s count
them now,’ said the senior sergeant and lay down beside me.
The rest of the scouts were already crawling past us. The first
ones were dragging some bound Nazis wrapped up in waterproof
capes. Behind them came the rest, quickly crawling on their
elbows.
‘We’ve swaddled a couple of them!’ said Maximov with a
contented air. ‘You see, everything in order. All twelve have
returned. There’s the last officer crawling up now.’
And he began to signal to Junior Lieutenant Vladimirov.