—— Red Army Sniper ——186comrade’s hand and bid him farewell. He merely gritted his
teeth even more firmly, straightened up the stones on which
the machinegun was resting, lowered the sights and called out,
looking straight ahead:
‘We’ll avenge you, Vasily!’
And he began to shoot the Nazis with even greater fury.
Suddenly there was a violent shockwave, which knocked
Karpov away from his machinegun.
‘A mortar! Bastard! But where’s the machinegun?’
And overcoming the dull pain and oncoming nausea and
dizziness, he dashed towards his Maxim which enemy hands were
already reaching out for from beyond the parapet. One rifle shot,
one cry from a dead Nazi – and the hands were gone. Manoeuvring
himself into position, Karpov threw three grenades over the
parapet one after the other, and, clinging to the trench wall, caught
the sound of the earth shuddering and swaying beyond the trench
followed by the cries of the wounded Nazis.
Like Ivan, his troops began to toss grenades at the Nazis. And
this time the machine gunners did not allow the enemy to burst
into our trenches.
‘We haven’t done a bad job together, mate!’ said Ivan, patting
the machine gun and only now did he breathe a deep sigh of relief.
Then, taking advantage of a lull, as one of his occasional jokes,
he rapped out the folkdance tune ‘Barynya’ with bursts of his
machine gun.
The troops in the trenches smiled; it meant he was alive, Ivan
Karpov and his Maxim!
Karpov was in love with his machine gun. During the lulls
between battles he would take some oiled oakum, clean his Maxim
and talk to it as if it were a good friend.
‘It’s damp outside, so I’ll give you a good coating of oil now.’
And the sergeant’s face – broad, sharpchinned, obstinate and
determined – adopted an expression of deep concern. His bright
eyes lit up warmly when he was working on the jetblack steel of a
machinegun, banishing every cloudy thought...