Page 128 of Fall of Giants (The Century 1)

To their surprise, Allenstein was full of well-dressed German citizens going about their normal Thursday afternoon business, posting letters and buying groceries and walking babies in perambulators. Grigori's unit halted in a small park where the men sat in the shade of tall trees. Tomchak went into a nearby barbershop and came out shaved and with his hair cut. Isaak went to buy vodka, but returned saying the army had posted sentries outside all the wine shops with orders to keep soldiers out.

At last a horse and cart appeared with a barrel of fresh water. The men lined up to fill their canteens. As the afternoon cooled into evening, more carts arrived with loaves of bread, bought or requisitioned from the town's bakers. Night fell, and they slept under the trees.

At dawn there was

no breakfast. Leaving a battalion behind to hold the town, Grigori and the rest of 13 Corps were marched out of Allenstein, heading southwest on the road to Tannenberg.

Although they had seen no action, Grigori noticed a change of mood among the officers. They cantered up and down the line and conferred in fretful huddles. Voices were raised in argument, with a major pointing one way and a captain gesturing in the opposite direction. Grigori continued to hear heavy artillery to the north and south, though it seemed to be moving eastward while 13 Corps went west. "Whose artillery is that?" said Sergeant Gavrik. "Ours or theirs? And why is it moving east when we're going west?" The fact that he used no profanity suggested to Grigori that he was seriously worried.

A few kilometers out of Allenstein, a battalion was left to guard the rear, which surprised Grigori, since he assumed the enemy was ahead, not behind. The 13 Corps was being stretched thin, he thought with a frown.

Around the middle of the day, his battalion was detached from the main march. While their comrades continued southwest, they were directed southeast, on a broad path through a forest.

There, at last, Grigori encountered the enemy.

They stopped for a rest by a stream, and the men filled their bottles. Grigori walked off into the trees to answer a call of nature. He was standing behind a thick pine trunk when he heard a noise off to his left and was astonished to see, a few meters away, a German officer, complete with spiked helmet, on a fine black horse. The German was looking through a telescope toward the place where the battalion had stopped. Grigori wondered what he was looking at: the man could not see far through the trees. Perhaps he was trying to make out whether the uniforms were Russian or German. He sat as motionless as a monument in a St. Petersburg square, but his horse was not so still, and it shifted and repeated the noise that had alerted Grigori.

Grigori carefully buttoned his trousers, picked up his rifle, and backed away, keeping the tree between himself and the German.

Suddenly the man moved. Grigori suffered a moment of fear, thinking he had been seen; but the German expertly turned his horse and headed west, breaking into a trot.

Grigori ran back to Sergeant Gavrik. "I saw a German!" he said.

"Where?"

Grigori pointed. "Over there-I was taking a leak. "

"Are you sure it was a German?"

"He had a spiked helmet. "

"What was he doing?"

"Sitting on his horse, looking at us through a telescope. "

"A scout!" said Gavrik. "Did you shoot at him?"

Only then did Grigori remember that he was supposed to kill German soldiers, not run away from them. "I thought I should tell you," he said feebly.

"You great fairy, why do you think we gave you a fucking gun?" Gavrik yelled.

Grigori looked at the loaded rifle in his hand, with its vicious-looking bayonet. Of course he should have fired it. What was he thinking? "I'm sorry," he said.

"Now that you've let him get away, the enemy know where we are!"

Grigori was humiliated. This situation had never been mentioned during his time as a reservist, but he should have been able to work it out himself.

"Which way did he go?" Gavrik demanded.

At least Grigori could answer that. "West. "

Gavrik turned and walked quickly to Lieutenant Tomchak, who was leaning against a tree, smoking. A moment later Tomchak threw down his cigarette and ran to Major Bobrov, a handsome older officer with flowing silver hair.

After that everything happened quickly. They had no artillery, but the machine-gun section unloaded its weapons. The six hundred men of the battalion were spread out in a ragged north-south line a thousand yards long. A few men were chosen to go ahead. Then the rest moved slowly west, toward the afternoon sun slanting through the leaves.

Minutes later the first shell landed. It made a screaming noise in the air, then crashed through the forest canopy, and finally hit the ground some distance behind Grigori and exploded with a deep bang that shook the ground.

"That scout gave them the range," said Tomchak. "They're firing at where we were. Good thing we moved. "

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