The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 10: The Cellist

Karen's Red Army instructors had been obsessed with cowardice. They inundated all the new recruits with stories about cowards, shaming dead soldiers who had shrunk in fear and allowed cowardice to prevent them from performing their duty.

Karen remembered one such story about a soldier who wept when he faced death. This young man was the last in his foxhole, facing a German assault, and instead of resisting to his last bullet he just wept. He was killed anyway, of course, and his tears didn't do anyone a single bit of good. He was cowardice incarnate, Karen's instructors insisted, and such shameful displays didn't just reflect badly on that soldier, but on the entire Red Army, and, even worse, boosted German morale.

Right now Karen was the one who was weeping. She wasn't the last in the foxhole, but she was among the last in her platoon. Only Petr and Anton remained alive. Everyone else was dead and soon, Karen knew, she and her last companions would be dead, too.

But that's not why Karen was weeping. She wasn't crying for herself. She wasn't crying out of fear.

She was crying out of grief.

In Leningrad, when Karen had been forced to watch her best friend murdered, she hadn't allowed herself to grieve. Weeping then would have given away her hiding place and she would have been the next person killed by the German patrol. Back then she'd kept her terrible sadness to herself, locked deep inside.

But now there was no reason to hold back. The Germans knew exactly where she was, and she would be killed whether she wept or not.

So that's how Karen realized that her instructors had been wrong to shame that young soldier. Like her, he probably wasn't weeping out of fear. He was weeping because he had just lost all his best friends.

Petr and Anton knew exactly why she was crying. They didn't blame her, and they didn't think she was a coward. They were carrying their own heavy emotional baggage, but they had a machinegun to man, and so like Karen had done so many months ago in Leningrad they were holding their grief deep inside.

Besides, Petr had already given into it the night before. That's when he'd written the letters – letters to the families of Josef, Martin, Demyan, Kazimir, and the other members of his squad. Technically writing those letters was Lieutenant Bespalov's duty. But Bespalov was dead so Petr took on the responsibility himself.

He described how courageously each man had stood against the German assault. How they had fought hard to hold back the German tide, and how the Wehrmacht had used a smoke screen to move unseen and flank their position with multiple machineguns. Once that happened the Germans forced Petr's men down with the machineguns and then charged trench. Josef and the other men fought bravely in hand-to-hand combat with pistols and spades. But the Germans had submachineguns and superior numbers and the conclusion was never really in doubt. Petr blamed himself in every single letter. He should have been there with them, he told their relatives, personally leading them in a tactical retreat. But that, too, was a lie. There was no place to which they could have retreated; no piece of cover where they could have fallen back. And even if they'd tried, they would have been gunned down by their own political officers who would have branded them as cowards.

In truth, Petr hadn't been able to save the lives of his men, but it's possible he'd saved the lives of other men, further back, men he'd never met. Because if Petr had stayed where he was, the Germans would have taken this position, instead. They wouldn't have even needed a smoke screen and multiple machineguns and superior numbers. All they would have needed was to kill Karen.

That's what they had tried on the first day. But Karen, Petr and Anton had managed to hold them off.

Mostly it was Anton, his silly little light machinegun that looked more like a record player than a deadly weapon. It had seemed so unmenacing to Karen; certainly less menacing than the German machineguns.