—— Red Army Sniper ——154‘A shell hole, damn it!’ I guessed. Well, it could be very handy at
the moment.
Little by little I crept up towards the opposite edge and carefully
raised my head – the dugout was right beside me. Now all my
attention was concentrated on it: who would go in, for how long,
and when they would come out?
Then four Germans came out of the dugout together and
dispersed in pairs along the trench in different directions. I tried
to work it out mentally, how many of them were there in total?
Who was now left inside? There could be another four: an officer,
his batman, a radio operator and possibly a sentry for the next
shift. I lay there, almost without breathing, and listened. Were the
Germans going to start talking? Maybe I could learn something
from their conversation?
Once more I remembered my Tambov school with gratitude – it
had trained me well! All the knowledge obtained within its walls had
come in handy on the front, especially the foreign language. Huge
thanks were due to our teacher, Varvara Afanasyevna Belyaeva.
Under her direction we had put on whole plays in German on the
school stage and I had always played the lead roles in them.
Again the dugout door opened, and out came one more Nazi.
I sensed he was a tall because his bass voice was audible much
higher up than the level of the trenches. And when he had moved
a few metres away from the dugout, I saw indeed how high his
silhouette stood. The sniper within me spoke up: ‘You should fire
now at the silhouette!’ The thought flashed through my mind,
but instantly vanished again; the Beanpole approached the sentry
and began to tell him something. I listened in. So far as I could
understand, the Beanpole was off to Uritsk, to the rear, for a Frau!
‘Thinking of recreation, the bastards! Just you wait! You’ll pay
for this too, just give us time!’ I thought.
I worked it out and decided that there could be only one or two
people in the dugout now. What should I do? Was I going to be
lying there waiting for a long time? Dawn could come quickly –
then it would be all over for me.