first chapter of my novel (eastern front) - please read

this is the first chapter of my novel, which follows the story of Viktor Semyonovich, a disgraced officer in the red army who ends up in a penal battalion. in this chapter, he is running from the scene of a failed attack on german positions near rzhev.


Chapter 1

Viktor Semyonovich hunched over, his blood-stained hands on his knees, his rasping breathing heavy and uneven.
As he did so, and this fleeting moment of relief passed away, his senses were suddenly bombarded by a barrage of sensations that seemed to melt into one, sensations that had left him during his panicked flight through the forest. A more poetic man would have noted how the soft whistle of the wind as it passed gracefully through the trees and the gentle warmth of the afternoon sun peering innocently through the branches above him contrasted with the hot, sickening stench of battle on the air, but to him they were all indistinguishable from the terror that had engulfed him. It ebbed through his body, infiltrating every inch of his being. It clouded his thoughts and blurred his vision. The forest around him seemed to spin though he stood frozen still, his muscles rigid with fear, his feet one with the forest floor.
As his breath returned to him, and the ground beneath his feet stabilised, he found himself able to make sense of his surroundings for the first time. The last twenty minutes was a blur, like a distant, dreamlike memory from his childhood, and with each second that passed more of it slipped away. He could barely recall what he had felt as he had scrambled through the thick foliage, darting between trees, trying to navigate a path through the natural labyrinth of the deep forest. Only fear, only pure, indescribable terror had driven him, like a machine, with no apperception of anything else in this world other than the task it was built to perform and the fuel that drove it. This horror had been his fuel. It had empowered him, focusing his mind on one clear task, the only one that mattered; being as far as possible away from wherever, or whatever, it was he was running from.
But what was he running from? At the time he had not cared. It had been unimportant, a peripheral detail, a minor thought unable to claw its way to the surface through the chaos that clouded his disturbed mind. It was only when his heart rate slowed, only when the throbbing in his head faded to the level of a low, numbing pain that Viktor Semyonovich was forced to distance himself from the horror of his present situation and drag his mind back to the reason he was here. This proved to be an agonizing and frustrating task. With each futile attempt to break through the barriers that had formed in his mind, he was met only with a vague mishmash of colours, sounds and emotions. As he tried to pull apart the threads of this confusing tapestry and weave them into a clear image, his head began to spin and he suddenly felt sick and claustrophobic. The trees seemed to encircle him, looming over and leering down on him. It was useless.
Distressed and confused, Semyonovich’s eyes darted frantically around for the smallest clue that could help. But there was nothing. The forest around him was silent, save for the soft rustling of the natural world. The only thing amiss in these calm surroundings was the smell. The heavy, gut-wrenching stench of war, of smoke, of blood and of death clung to his nostrils. Sickening as it was, it did nothing to aid his memory which remained frustratingly distorted. It was at this point that he first felt the warm blood oozing from his shoulder. This gruesome revelation did not surprise him. He simply gazed at the wound, disgusted yet fascinated by the way the blood trickled slowly down his left arm and dripped onto the forest floor, forming a dark puddle which rose up around his feet. The sound of each droplet of blood as it hit the surface of the pool below filled him with calm. The eerie sound was something constant, and his mind clung to this security.
The shrill, piercing shriek of a bird somewhere above ripped through him, bringing him back to reality with the terrible realisation that he was alone, lost and bleeding heavily, with no memory of where he was or how he had got there. The fear which had consumed him began to creep up once more in the dark corners of his mind and his heart rate quickened. Before he knew what he was doing, he was running again, possessed. He tore down the sloping ground, crashing through the undergrowth like a terrified, stampeding beast, crushing helpless nature beneath his boots. His bleeding shoulder left a trail of scarlet as he ran, down, down, down towards the clearing at the foot of the slope. He did not know it at the time, but with each step he took, he drew nearer and nearer to a murderous future. If there was such thing as fate, and Semyonovich believed in no such thing, he was playing into its hands.

Otto gazed into the empty depths of the boy’s eyes, searching for a spark, some indication of life behind those blank pupils. Only hours ago, these eyes may have been full of light, of joy, sorrow or boredom. There was nothing there now, only darkness. Otto had signed up to defend the fatherland when he was just 19. Two years he’d been in the army now, two long bloody years. He had seen death before. He’d seen men torn to shreds by artillery fire. He’d seen bayonets thrust through flesh, watched his comrades die slowly on the battlefield, screaming for their mothers. At one point, he’d thought his experiences had dehumanized him, made him immune to the suffering he saw on a daily basis. He had been wrong. He was still very human. And that was so much worse.
The face which looked lifelessly back up at him was young, possibly late teens, the skin smooth and hairless, untouched by age. There was a look of shock across his pale face, the ghost of his last moments etched across his features. Why had Otto’s bullet taken someone so young? Of course, when he had squeezed the trigger of his Mauser, he had not seen a human being, a boy like he had once been, with a head full of empty dreams and endless ambitions. He had seen a Russian, a Bolshevik, a target. It never made it easy, but it numbed the shock of murdering another human being in cold blood if you could convince yourself they were animals, subhuman. He looked into the boys eyes once more, and once again asked himself the question that had plagued his thoughts for the past few months. Was this the face of the Asiatic beast their leaders had taught them to hate? Try as he might, he could not lie to himself, nor could he erase the boy’s face from his mind, where it had silently settled, ready to emerge from the shadows whenever he closed his eyes. The terrible picture would prey on his dreams for many nights to come.
“Ha!”
The sharp exclamation had come from the Feldwebel at his left shoulder. The old man bent over the corpse, his cold eyes devoid of emotion. He made a retching sound in his throat then spat on the churned up, muddy ground between the Russian’s legs.
“****ing Reds,” he growled, “how do they expect us to hold out against another attack like that?”
Otto said nothing. He tore his eyes from the boy’s face and turned to face the Feldwebel. An exceptionally bitter and pessimistic man, the old officer looked more tired than ever. Dark rings had formed beneath his eyes and his ghostly pale skin was drawn tightly across his thin, exhausted face. Although all the men referred to him as “the old soldier,” Otto knew he was no older than 30. Three years of war had aged him.
“I tell you what, boy,” he continued grimly, glaring down at the body with disgust in his eyes, “this damn country will be the death of us. Just you wait and see. Give me the South of France any day. Hell, give me ****ing Poland.”
The sound of an explosion some hundred metres behind them ripped through the silence. Instinctively, Otto threw himself to the floor of the trench and lay there in the dirt, his heart beating furiously. The Feldwebel didn’t even flinch, but cursed under his breath.
“Bloody mortars,” he grumbled, “can’t they give it a rest for 5 minutes?” As if only just noticing he was there, the old soldier glanced down at Otto lying face down in the mud, before giving him a violent shove in the side with the toe of his boot.
“On your feet boy,” he snapped, his apathetic expression suddenly gone. He was now alert. “Ivan never stays quiet for long. Go see the chain hounds and see if you can find anyone to get to work clearing these damn bodies; they’re stinking up the place. Might put the boys of their lunch. ”
Otto climbed to his feet, wiping the caked dirt from his eyes and looked around him. The sight that met him made his stomach churn and he felt vomit rise up in his throat. There was much clearing up to do. Mounds of olive-green clad corpses littered the area around them for several hundred metres, the slit trenches criss-crossing across the field overflowing with the dead, rotting under the glare of the afternoon sun. Ravens clambered over the piles, tearing at the uniforms with their claws to reach the flesh within. The young Russian soldier at their feet was just one of hundreds that had torn across the open field, food for German machine guns, slaughtered like cattle with their piercing cry of “Urrah!” still on their lips. However, this particular Bolshevik had made it across the field and jumped into the trench where Otto and his platoon were stationed. He had cut down three men, bayoneting them in the gut, before Otto had pumped a rifle bullet through his throat. He lay where he had fallen, slowly soaking in a pool of blood and filth.
Otto fumbled for a cigarette in the pocket of his tunic and realised his hand was trembling. Exhaustion, the kind that only a soldier understands, caused his legs to weaken and they longed to collapse beneath him. He glanced at the Feldwebel, searching for the same symptoms, but the old soldier showed no such exhaustion. Maybe it was possible after all, to shut it all out, to stop feeling. The thought dissolved with one last look into the deep, unending darkness of the young soldier’s eyes.

At the bottom of the slope lay a calm, crystal clear stream, glistening under the late-summer sun, which poured through the clearing above. Its beauty and tranquillity could not have been more out of place. Semyonovich paused at its edge, entranced, and suddenly the weight of all the terrible emotions that had plagued him seemed to slip from his shoulders and relief overwhelmed him, numbing all pain. His knees gave way and he sat at the water’s edge, gazing into its shallow depths. His energy was spent. He could run no more.
It was as he sat here, drained of all feeling, that Viktor Semyonovich felt able to wade through the dark waters of his memory once more. To his surprise, this proved easier than before. The mishmash of sounds and colours seemed to pull apart and he could pick out specific images, the terrible, blinding flash of explosions against the stark grey sky, and sounds, the ear splitting roar of Katyusha rockets ripping through the air. Still they were too distorted to be strung together into one, clear sequence of events but for the first time, Semyonovich was able to understand his place in the terrifying situation he now found himself in.
It was it at this time that Semyonovich’s thoughts drifted inexplicably back to when he was nine years old. Everyday night, he would lie in the small wooden bed he shared with his two older brothers and try desperately from slipping away into sleep. His father, a factory worker in the industrial centre of Petrograd, worked long hours for seven days a week. He didn’t get home until late at night and come the next morning, he would be gone before Viktor, his two brothers and his sister had awoken. So the only time Viktor could see his father was in the short space of time after he returned from work in the evenings. Between eleven and twelve at night, Viktor would hear his heavy footsteps outside, hear the vodka pour into the glass and the groan of pure relief as he removed his boots. The door would creak slowly ajar and, to the young boys delight, his father’s gentle smiling face would appear in the opening. Even at that age, Viktor could sense the sadness in his eyes, smell the stench of alcohol on his breath. Dirty and ragged, he looked like a defeated man. But looking back, Viktor could see now he was anything but defeated. Tired and apathetic maybe, but not defeated, not broken.
On this particular night, he had told Viktor another story about Baba the mouse.
“Baba knows that if he leaves the concealment of the long grass, the falcon will swoop down and eat him,” he used to whisper, sitting the young boy on his lap and wrapping him tightly in his arms, “But Baba also knows that if he hides in the grass, the snake will have him for supper.”
“What does the mouse do?” Viktor used to murmur back, his eyes widening.
“There’s nothing he can do,” his father would reply, “except side with one of the predators and hope for the best. That’s all we can do in this world, Viktor, hope for the best.”
Whether or not this was drunken rambling or philosophical advice, Viktor did not know. Either way, these words made little sense to him. His father told many stories like this, each more elusive than the next. He had worked his way from the rural villages and had brought with him many folk stories, poems and songs. Why this particular story had surfaced in his mind at this particular time, Viktor did not know. It did him little good in his present situation. Still, the memory comforted him.
One evening, his father didn’t come back. Viktor lay there awake every night, listening for the footsteps on the stone floor, the clink of the vodka bottle against the glass but there was nothing. Only silence.

 

I like what you have here. Are you far along on this story? Is it published? I'm have two WWII stories published and am poised to publish a third.

 

That is a very interesting story

I have two WW2 stories planned out - one about some fictional Marines from 2/8 in the Pacific Theatre and the other about fictional paratroopers from Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 502nd PIR.