Cruel Romances

I don’t remember when or how he appeared in our platoon, but I know for sure that within three days his voice, with a falsetto like a woman’s, rang out here and there across the trenches: “Dzyk, soldiers, dzyk!” That’s how they nicknamed him Kolka-dzyk. He arrived with us in the artillery division platoon with the rank of junior lieutenant—not for the intended purpose at all. By forging an education certificate, stretching it from five grades to eight, he completed officer school somewhere in a remote military backwater, an infantry school; and on the front, in the infantry, with his cheeky character, he might have “dzyk”-ed at soldiers once or twice, but on the third time he probably wouldn’t have made it. Another misunderstanding among a thousand and thousands of misunderstandings? But if we, having barely learned to handle the steering wheel of a “gazik,” brought the entire auto-squad—five thousand people—into Moscow for the acceptance of “Studebekkers” as drivers of unheard-of class and comprehensive preparation, both morally and technically, then why shouldn’t Kolka Chugunov arrive at the front as the commander of the command/control platoon of the artillery division? He didn’t know where they charged the gun—front or back, and he hadn’t seen any artillery at all, except a rifle; he hadn’t seen how they dig the ground, but once he realized that in the command platoon they don’t fire artillery, only direct fire, manage a complicated artillery operation, and—most of all—keep digging the ground. Digging and digging, day and night: pits for command dugouts, observation posts, trenches, communication trenches between them, signalmen’s nests, and even soldiers’ loopholes, if the soldiers had the strength for it.