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| - Doomed |
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DoomedThe 167th Cadet Brigade was formed in a rather unusual manner - from scrapings off the very bottom of the barrel. After German troops took Rostov and burst out into the wide open spaces of the Kuban' in the summer of 1942, cadets at military academies in the Northern Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus regions were hurriedly formed into several infantry brigades. In the process of doing so, every academy, including mine own, the Ordzhonikidze Military Academy, divided its cadets into the "clean" and the "unclean". I wound up as one of the latter. A majority of the "unclean" cadets were your classic "bad seeds" from the Cossack settlements dotting the region, as well as some ex-convicts. How I, a straight arrow with top marks in both combat and political courses, found myself among the "unclean" cadets was not entirely clear to me at first. It didn't seem to have anything to do with my being Jewish, at least, since a classmate of mine named Jasha Richter wound up among the "clean" cadets (by the way, at the end of the 10th grade he was still 17, and so technically he was exempt from conscription - but he went down to the recruiting station and got himself called up regardless - L.Veger). After trying to think of any "sins" I may have committed recently I recalled that a couple of months ago I had a run in with my section leader. He yelled a racial slur at me, I pushed him, and we had a typical schoolyard fight (he was the same age as I), which wound up being broken up by the battalion commissar passing by. At the evening roll call they doled out our sentences: the section leader was demoted back to a regular infantryman, while I got 10 days in the brig. Of course, I didn't think this one fight was big enough of a "sin" to be transferred out of my unit along with all the "unclean" cadets. Thinking back, I think the real cause of the whole thing was my mother. At nineteen, she left her nice Jewish family behind and went off to fight for freedom and justice along with all the other revolutionaries. She had wound up joining the anarchists, who continued to fight even after the Soviets came to power. After a few arrests, in 1922 she was exiled to Solovki, where I was born. Naturally, when the time came for me to fill out my first ever entrance application, the one to the military academy, an honest and principled member of the Komsomol that I was I dutifully wrote down that my parents were purged. In all, our academy had about 50 "unclean" cadets. We were shipped by rail to Baku, where similarly sized "unclean" groups from the other academies were being gathered to ultimately form the 167th Cadet Brigade. As I realized later on, I lucked out in being assigned to an artillery battery. Since we didn't actually have any guns, we wound up learning our new trade from a purely theoretical standpoint. I did get to be personally responsible for one of our horses (ours was listed as a horse-drawn battery - L.Veger), a large, bony colt. My relationship with my horse was rather complex - I was a little careless while brushing him, and not at all willing to share my sugar ration. He tried to kick me at every opportunity, and absolutely refused to recognize my authority over him. Soon after our brigade was formed, the situation at the front grew even worse. The Germans were rapidly advancing towards the oilfields at Grozny in Chechnya. One day, our brigade was gathered up and loaded into railcars, and we moved out by that evening. My battery still didn't have any guns - they had told us that we'd get them when we'd arrive at our destination. They didn't even have enough rifles for everyone in the brigade. Still, the train sped us towards the front. At some point during the night, our guys showed off their uncontrollable nature. A few of them somehow managed to climb on top of the moving train, and - God only knows how - clean out the railcar with our food stores. Soon enough all of us were stuffing ourselves with bread and meat rations. Early in the morning, we were unloaded near some village in Osetija. The battalions began to dig trenches a couple of kilometers away from the village, while my battery stayed put, still waiting for its guns. For the next few days, things were pretty quiet as we awaited the advancing Germans. I can only recall one specific episode. Our battery commander was an ex-con who'd done time in labor camps on the Belomor-Baltic Canal. Come to think of it, all our section and platoon leaders were ex-cons - I think that was because of the similarities of life in the army and in the labor camps. And they were, as a rule, a little older, a little more worldly, and could actually get the rest of us to follow their orders. In any case, one day, our battery commander, who had a habit of giving me the least pleasant details, assigned me to the night watch for the third night in a row and against regulations. I lost it and told him that I'll shoot him like a dog the moment combat starts. The CO was taken aback by my threat, I think it even scared him a little, and reported me to our commissar. That night, the commissar called me in - and by the way, the officers in our brigade were also considered "unclean", but mostly for some minor failing during a previous battle, with service in our brigade substituting for an outright demotion. Our commissar was a harsh, silent man; he never gave us any political briefings, and somehow appealed to me. On my way to his quarters, I was ready for pretty much any degree of punishment. Threatening to shoot your commander was considered a serious offense, especially since, rumor had it, this had actually happened a few times. After hearing out my excuses, rather than berate me the commissar told me in a fatherly tone that the battery isn't fully staffed, that there just isn't anyone else who can be assigned to the night watch, and that even he couldn't get his regulation pistol and was lucky enough to scrounge up a carbine. In the end, the commissar gave me a reprimand and sent me on my way. The next day, the Germans reached our defenses. They bombed and shelled us incessantly. Our battery didn't have any way of supporting our infantry or conducting counter-battery fire - we still didn't have our guns. After a while, the Germans brought up their tanks, and the 167th Cadet Brigade ceased to exist. Two thousand 18 year old kids, yesterday's schoolboys, were erased from existence. Someone had to be sacrificed, and they were it. Of course, it's not like they were angels. They didn't recognize the rule of law, or any moral norms. They were the product of the remaining vestiges of the Cossack self-rule, half-bandits, believing only in strength. In the olden days, they would have likely wound up in the peasant armies of Ermak, Razin, or Pugachev. In our highly regimented and tightly controlled way of life, they would have had a truly hard time. May God judge them, and those who had sent them to their deaths without adequate weapons or training… By evening, the sounds of combat moved to somewhere behind us. Green rookies, all of us, we didn't understand that we were being encircled and were about to share the fate of our comrades in the infantry battalions. No-one wanted to give the order to retreat (by that time, Stalin had already issued his famous order to shoot anyone who falls back from the front - L.Veger). In fact, no-one who could give that order could be found - all of our commanders just disappeared. In the end, our commissar - the same commissar I'd gone to the night before - wound up saving all our necks. He just led his horse out of the stable and moved out. We took this to mean "do like I do", got on our horses (bareback - we didn't have any saddles), and trotted after him. How he could orient himself at night, in unfamiliar terrain, and with sounds and flashes of combat all around us, I will never know. Well - he wasn't completely without help. At some point during the night we were joined by a local Chechen, about thirty, very friendly. He told us that someone with a blood feud against him had just showed up in his village; it must have been pretty serious for the Chechen to leave his home and family behind. All night long he never strayed from the middle of our group. We trotted after our commissar for the entire seemingly endless night. At dawn, we decided to take a brief rest. It was nearly impossible to get off our horses, without saddles, ours and the horses' skins were rubbed raw, and as the blood dried out we practically merged to our mounts. After we finally made it back on the ground, we could only walk around half-bent, legs spread far apart. It turned out that by dawn there were a lot fewer of us than when we'd set out the evening before. Some of the guys apparently took off for their home villages during the night. I let my horse graze for a bit, and noticed a white sheet of paper on the grass. It was one of the leaflets dropped by a German plane, the text went something like "People of the mountains! Remember the councils of Shamil! Throw the Russians off your lands…" and so forth. After a while, some kids from a nearby Chechen village ran up to us, offering us food in exchange for our weapons. We were pretty hungry, and traded away whatever we could. I exchanged a fistful of bullets for a meat-filled pastry and quickly consumed it. Then, we accomplished the impossible: got back on our horses and continued to trot towards our lines. Around noon, we stumbled on a blocking detachment. They ordered us to turn over our horses and make our way to the unit reconstitution area. We didn't even get to say our good byes to the commissar, he was just sent off somewhere and we parted ways without even knowing his name, as so often happens at the front. I didn't say good bye to my horse, who'd pretty much saved my life, either. Didn't even stroke it once before I left. The war had made us into cruel lone wolves.
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