Prologue: It Was Them, or Us

Prologue: It Was Them, or Us
Unterfeldwebel Rupert Schmidt

Crack! The bullet sliced through the air as it left my rifle. After a split second, I saw poor Ivan flinch as his peace was disrupted by the rude interjection of my lead. The rifle dropped from his hands as he slumped over, no longer an active player in this skirmish. Instinctively, I promptly got ready for whatever next shot that will await me by tugging back the bolt handle on my rifle as the empty shell spewed out of her right side.

It was my favourite piece of consolation after taking such a gruesome shot – the expended shell brushes against the metal receiver of my Karabiner 98k to make that familiar noise metals tend to make when touching. It’s reassuring to break the trend of exclusively worrying about what was often several hundreds of meters surrounding me to reach forward within my personal space and tend to my rifle for even just a moment. Pulling that bolt handle back has always been a wordless avenue for my rifle and me to communicate after hacking somebody’s soul away from their body. It’s as if my rifle – Ilsa, by the way – was also distraught over what we had just done, and just needed a shard of contact from somebody near and dear. My hand that reached forward to grab her bolt handle was essentially a hug from a loved one in a time of need. Little does Ilsa know that my hand needs that brief slice of reassurance as well, and this “hug,” as I called it, was welcomed from both sides.

Ilsa and I only really end up having each other out here. While we both might not be terribly enthralled about our morbid actions, we can at least spread its burden across one another. It’s not too unlike “groupthink,” where everyone in a herd goes along with something just because they think the others want to, but unbeknownst to them all, nobody wants to. Throw in the necessity of killing to survive, and you get a sombre reference to us soldiers in this war.

The last treasured moment of my bolt-pulling-back ritual came to a close as another round took the place of the previous. On the frontlines, you always have to be ready to take another shot, because who knows if another Soviet was out there. Taking too long to reload, not paying enough attention, not relocating when you should have – those things can get you killed. Or even worse, could get somebody else killed. Our souls were burdened down enough by the horrors of what we’ve seen, what we’ve done out here on the front, so I vowed to make sure I did everything within my meagre abilities to make sure as few of my comrades as possible are killed.

Another Russian caught my sight, about 150meters away. He was taking cover behind a large shelled-out building. One of my German comrades was inconveniently taking cover on the other side of it, and I couldn’t tell if he could see the Russian or not, but I didn’t think he does. I didn’t have time to relocate. I couldn’t risk letting a fellow German get jumped because I was too busy lollygagging around back here. Ilsa reactively pointed herself towards our next unsuspecting target. We needed to pull it off quick, because it’s against my experience to stay in a spot for more than a couple shots, and I’m about at my limit at this spot. You always need to stick to your experience, because that’s the biggest reason besides sheer luck that any of us are still kicking after so long out here.

That second Ivan kept poking his head out for just a split second as if he sensed I was targeting him. Just long enough to at least get a picture of what was going on beyond his little niche. As tempting as it is to take the bait, I opted to hold my fire. I was living on borrowed time by still being in the same spot I just discharged from, and second off, he would know for sure I am targeting him if I miss. Plus, it would have been a difficult shot, considering how briefly he exposed such a tiny part of him to hit.

I’ve thought about taking one of these challenging shots so many times in the past. If I hit him, hey I did my job, and if I didn’t, he would hopefully just run away, I wouldn’t be forced to claim another victim, and my comrade won’t get killed. But that was exactly the problem with these Soviets – there was no running back for them. Somewhere between the fanatical zeal they had formed to avenge their communist nation after our ill-fated invasion, their bond they had with each other in combat, and the primal instinct inside of them that desires violence, there was no retreat for them. Truthfully, all soldiers find some sort of rudimentary urge to fight, and in that aspect, I was probably not too different from that particular Ivan. But what really separated us Germans from the Russians was their command.

Nobody’s command in war really cares about a common soldier. If they really cared about us, we wouldn’t be fighting in the first place. But the Soviets really took it to extremes. We heard stories of entire battalions getting executed by members of the Soviet High Command when they were caught retreating, which was inconceivably horrid – could you imagine, after all those poor soldiers have gone through, being caught in an impossible firestorm where fighting back was completely futile, and not being allowed to lose just a couple hundred meters of land to regroup? It’s Russia, for Heaven’s sake – they have the land to spare! But the Soviet High Command would literally throw away the lives their own men. Such atrocities made my blood boil because it means that soldiers like myself had to end the life of bastards like the one I’m trained on now, solely because there was no hope of forcing him to retreat. And I’ll be damned if he thought I was going to let him get one of my guys before I got him.

My comrade didn’t notice his enemy on the other side of the building and started firing his rifle into the distance on the other side of the wall. Ivan, on the other hand, did. You could tell when they were about to make a dash forward. The way they look over the walls changes. It was more aggressive instead of a curious one as if he was channelling all the pent-up rage inside of him to be able to force his body to lurch from the familiar safety of his cover and charge into whatever dangers await him. There was no convincing myself that I didn’t need to get this guy now. As it always seemed to be, it was them, or us.

Finally, like a lion going after his prey, he sprung from his safe haven behind the rubble of the destroyed building and made a dead sprint to the other side of the structure, submachine gun at the hip and ready to fire. He was quicker than I had imagined, and I learned that Matching his speed with the subtle difference of aim of my rifle would have taken too much time. Ilsa tried anyway, but it was too late – he made it to the other side of the building. The Ivan flicked to the side and noticed my comrade. The poor German noticed too, but from facing the other direction, his chances of survival were slim. He would have had to swing his rifle all the way around his body faster than the Ivan could flick his wrist and change the aim of his submachine gun to his desired target.

The Russian’s teeth were exposed. It was another expression I had become familiar with while on the front. This Ivan was no longer a human at that moment - he was an animal, ready to kill. He brandished a PPSH – those absurd contraptions could spew out more than 900 bullets in a single minute. That means in a mere half a second, my comrade could absorb seven or eight bullets. It would be a brutal showing, and especially at the close proximity he was to his attempted assailant, there wouldn’t be much left of my poor comrade afterwards.

At this point, time surely slowed to a crawl for all of us. The intensity made my heart pound at what seemed to be a million pumps a minute. Though by judging the face of sheer terror on my comrade’s face, I could only imagine what his heart must have been like. His expression showed he had already accepted death. He probably had already accepted death long ago because of this war, but never as seriously as during this specific instance. Despite this, somewhere between instinct and experience, his body was clocking overtime, whipping his rifle around faster than what he would normally be capable of as a last-ditch effort to survive.

I once read about how a body can go beyond its limits when faced with a life-or-death situation. The article had an example where a mother was able to flip a gargantuan, otherwise immovable boulder from off a carriage in order to save her child’s life. That’s exactly what my comrade was doing right now – should he survive his gaze into the eyes of death, his arm would likely be drained by exhaustion from pushing his body to such a speed. But such a feeling would be undoubtedly welcomed by this man stuck so firmly between a rock and a hard place, no pun intended.

Even as someone whose life would not directly affected by the immediate outcome of this situation, that moment was absolutely overwhelming for me. The weight of responsibility it gave me took a lot of conflict within myself to even be bearable. I realised it was frowned upon to have such a mindset, but in that sliver of a second, I was the hand of God, deciding who lives or who dies. My old priest back at home would be upset at me for having such a mentality, but I didn’t ask for this responsibility, I didn’t ask to take somebody’s life, and I sure as hell didn’t ask for us to attack the Soviet Union. It was this gotdamn war that had us on the brink of everything from life to insanity that really made me ask myself what the dickens we are doing out here in this God-forsaken land that we tried to conquer solely for our own greed. But now that the first domino had fallen, we couldn’t just stop fighting and say to Russia, “hey, we’ve had enough war, we’re sorry, we were wrong to attack you guys, we’ll give you your land back, let’s just all live in peace.”

This entire war was eerily similar to the moment I was in right then, except there’d probably be six or seven more Russians surrounding me at the same time my poor comrade out there would be swamped by his own half dozen or so more. There was always so many of them. We had already lost this war. We had been defeated a long time ago. But for some reason we were still fighting, like my comrade’s arm futile last stand, knowing he has such an impossibly slim chance to survive. The only wild card for him was me, a miracle for this man because if I could pull off a shot to save his life, it would be as if God swooped in the big picture to remove the paddle from the Soviet Union’s hand while simultaneously pulling Germany’s drawers up. It would be a miracle if we just stopped getting paddled, if even for just a little bit.

Alas, regardless of the similarities, the situation was not too terribly like Germany in the war. In spite of my doubts, my desire to fight no more, even the sweat that seemed to be pouring out of the entirety of my body right now, I was confident in my abilities. I had experiences in positions like this, and I have accomplished difficult shots. But just like the “hug,” I get from pulling the bolt back on my rifle after a successful shot, the biggest consolation I take away from this was that while Germany seems to no longer have God’s assistance in the war, at least this poor German chap hopefully will if I can strike effectively. This Ivan may think of himself to be the God of his situation, in reality, I hope to be. But for all I know, there could be another God with his own Ilsa about to judge my own life right now.

It was bewildering to me how in literally half a second of time, all of these thoughts could flow through me. Perhaps they have been around, and this little glimmer at the far reaches of sanity was exactly the spark needed to set the entirety of my mind ablaze. But it was my turn to be the judge now, with Ilsa as my hammer, and my bullet as the jury. With my heart about to burst out of my chest, I had finally made my verdict. I carefully pulled the trigger and felt Ilsa’s familiar kickback. The jury was out.

With the bullet soaring through the air and no longer within my control, I suddenly realised that all the God-like power I thought I possessed had instantly disappeared. All of my previous thoughts on who was God are now void, as who really decided where my bullet would land, who really determined if I was lucky enough to place my round where I intended it to go, who really chose life or death for any us lowly mortals, was none other than God Himself.