—— Red Army Sniper ——44beams and huge clumps of earth went up in the air, all colliding
with one another. All this fell around us with a crash.
We lay there for what seemed about fifteen minutes. But as soon
as we felt that the last fragments had plunged deep into the earth
and silence descended, we crept out to the surface. Looking round
at the landscape, which had substantially changed in the course of
these ten minutes, we ran quickly to our trenches. Not a single shot
was heard behind us; there was nobody left to shoot. Everything
around the ammunition dump, which had exploded into the air,
had been swept from the face of the earth. All that remained were
a huge dark crater and clumps of fresh, smoking earth.
In the dugout in the evening I marked the stock of my rifle
with four normalsized and six small stars, using white oil paint.
They signified that with this rifle I had wiped out fortysix Nazi
invaders. It only remained to add some large stars in place of the
small ones.