The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 7: The Cellist

Karen Hamilton had never been in a battle before. She'd been in a fight. She'd been in several fights. She'd even killed a man with her own hands, smashing his skull in with a shovel.

But fights weren't battles.

Karen Hamilton had never been in a battle, but neither had most of the men fighting beside her.

There were nine men in a Russian rifle squad, and all but one of them had been called up in June. That meant that they were, in military jargon, "green". Commanders couldn't rely on green soldiers, because green soldiers hadn't been tested in combat. You could train them, you could drill them, you could build their confidence, but once bullets started to fly and artillery started to explode you could never predict how a "green" soldier would really react.

Karen was green just like they were. She'd been trained, too, but she hadn't been trained how to fight. She'd been trained how to heal...well, sort of.

Designated as the platoon's combat medic, Karen's training had been rudimentary. She knew little more than how to apply a compress and bandages. She did know where to inject someone with morphine, but she'd also been warned not to waste the valuable pain killer. "Don't use it on the dying," she was advised. "Only use it on the men who can actually be saved."

It was a heartless edict, and one that she kept secret from her squad mates.

There were three rifle squads, and only one medic, to an entire platoon. In fact, most platoons didn't even have a medic. So Karen's squad-mates felt very fortunate to have Karen attached to their unit. They had already nick-named her "Angel", fully expecting her to ease the pain of their inevitable deaths.

Karen didn't have the heart to tell them otherwise.

Karen's squad occupied a trench that had once been the basement of an apartment house. The home's roof had been turned to ash; its brick walls shattered. The whole building had crumbled into piles of collapsed rubble.

But Karen had helped move those piles, clearing out a section of the cellar, creating a narrow slit of brick and broken concrete in which she and her squad-mates huddled.

Karen occupied the rear of the trench, where it was safe. But she couldn't see over the walls of rubble. All she could see was the smoke-hazed sky.

So she crawled up next to Anton, the squad's machine-gunner.

Karen liked Anton. He was older than most of her squad-mates. He said he was thirty-four. He was a Siberian, big-boned with a bearded face.

But he loved reading more than he loved the rugged outdoors of his native land. He had taught drama at the local school, and his favorite play was Chekhov's The Three Sisters.

He also loved Brecht, and it was that love of Brecht that so confused him. He insisted that the Germans couldn't possibly be as bad as everyone claimed. A culture that created art as profound as Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage couldn't be the monsters they appeared. Besides, Brecht himself had been a communist; surely there must be Germans in the ranks of the invading army as culturally evolved as he was.

It wasn't a very popular argument with the men.

Karen defended Anton's position despite the fact that she had little evidence to support it. She had been captured by Germans, and they most definitely had been monsters. If Petr hadn't rescued her the Nazis would have executed her.

But, like Anton, Karen loved German art. She loved Beethoven and Bach and even Wagner. So she felt a kinship to Anton since, like him, she couldn't reconcile the Nazi invaders with the beauty of their artistic culture. The men in her platoon didn't agree with Karen, but they didn't argue with her. They didn't want to offend their "Angel".