The son of the regiment read in short form. Online book reading son of the regiment son of the regiment

Kataev’s story “Son of the Regiment” was written in 1944. In the book, for the first time in Soviet literature, the theme of war was revealed through the perception of a child - Vanya Solntsev, a twelve-year-old boy. For the story “Son of the Regiment” Kataev was awarded the Stalin Prize, II degree. The work was written within the framework of the literary tradition of socialist realism.

The story “Son of the Regiment” is included in the 4th grade literature curriculum. You can read a summary of “Son of the Regiment” chapter by chapter directly on our website. The proposed retelling will be of interest to schoolchildren, as well as anyone who needs to quickly become familiar with the plot of the work.

Main characters

Vanya Solntsev- a 12-year-old boy, an orphan, who was found by scouts. He became the “son of the regiment”, and then was enrolled in the Suvorov Military School. The scouts gave him the nickname “shepherd boy.”

Captain Enakiev– a 32-year-old man, battery commander. He wanted to adopt Vanya, but was killed during the battle.

Corporal Bidenko- intelligence officer, before the war he was a Donbass miner, a “bony giant.” Together with Egorov and Gorbunov, they picked up Vanya in the forest.

Other characters

Corporal Gorbunov- scout, friend of Bidenko, “hero”, “Siberian”, before the war he was a Transbaikal lumberjack.

Sergeant Egorov– a 22-year-old man, a scout.

Chapter 1

Three scouts were returning on an autumn night through a damp, cold forest. Unexpectedly, they discovered a boy in a small trench, delirious in his sleep, muttering something. The child woke up and, jumping up sharply, snatched “from somewhere a large sharpened nail.” One of the scouts, Sergeant Yegorov, reassured him that they were “theirs.”

Chapter 2

Captain Enakiev, the commander of the artillery battery, “was brave,” but “at the same time he was cold, restrained, and calculating, as befits a good artilleryman.”

Chapter 3

The boy found by the scouts, Vanya Solntsev, was an orphan. His father died at the front, his mother was killed, his grandmother and sister died of hunger. The boy went to “pick up the pieces” and was caught by the gendarmes on the way. They put Vanya in a children's isolation ward, where he almost died from scabies and typhus, but soon escaped. Now he was trying to cross the front. He carried a sharpened nail and a tattered primer with him in his bag.

Vanya reminded Enakiev of his own family - his mother, wife and seven-year-old son, who died “in '41.”

Chapter 4

The scouts fed Vanya “an unusually tasty little baby.” The hungry boy ate greedily and with gusto. “For the first time in these three years, Vanya was among people who did not need to be feared.”

Bidenko and Gorbunov promised Vanya to enroll him “for all types of allowance” and train him in military affairs, but first they need to receive an order for enrollment from Captain Enakiev. However, contrary to the wishes of the intelligence officers, Egorov conveyed to Bidenko Enakiev’s order to send Vanya to the rear in an orphanage. The upset boy says that he will still run away along the road.

Chapter 5

Bidenko returned to the unit the next day late in the evening, gloomy and silent. At this time, the army, pursuing the enemy, advanced far to the west.

Chapter 6

Bidenko did not want to admit that Vanya ran away from him twice, but after questioning he still told him. The first time, the boy jumped out of the truck at a turn and hid in the forest. Bidenko would never have discovered Vanya if the primer had not fallen on the corporal - the boy fell asleep sitting on the top of the tree.

Chapter 7

To prevent Vanya from running away again, Bidenko tied a rope to his hand, the other end of which he wrapped around his fist. In the truck, the corporal periodically woke up and, pulling the rope, checked whether Vanya was still there. However, having slept a little more, the corporal discovered in the morning that the second end of the rope was tied to the boot of a female surgeon traveling with them. The boy ran away.

Chapter 8

Vanya, after wandering along military roads for a long time, came to headquarters. On the way, he met a “luxurious boy” in full marching uniform of the Guards Artillery - “the son of the regiment”, who served as a liaison under Major Voznesensky. It was this meeting that prompted Vanya to find the main commander and ask for help to return to the scouts.

Chapters 9 – 10

Vanya, not knowing Enakiev by sight, mistook him for an important commander. The boy began to complain to the captain that the strict Enakiev did not want to take him as a son of the regiment. The captain takes the boy with him to the scouts.

Chapter 11

The scouts were very happy about the boy's return. “So Vanya’s fate turned out magically three times in such a short time.”

Chapter 12

Bidenko and Gorbunov took Vanya on reconnaissance without informing the commander that they were taking the boy with them as a guide - he knew this area well. Vanya had not yet been given a uniform, so in appearance he looked like a “real village shepherd.”

Chapter 13

The scouts sent Vanya ahead, but after a few hours only his horse returned. Gorbunov sent Bidenko to the unit to report what had happened.

The scouts did not know that while Vanya was finding out the way, he was simultaneously making sketches in the margins of the primer using a compass - trying to take a map of the area. The Germans caught him doing this, grabbed him and put him in a dark dugout.

Chapter 14

Vanya was interrogated by a German woman. Despite the fact that the drawings in the primer and the Russian compass were obvious evidence against the boy, he did not say anything.

Chapter 15

Vanya woke up in the dugout to the sounds of bombing. One of the bombs blew apart the doors of the dugout, and the boy saw that the Germans had retreated. Soon Russian troops appeared.

Chapters 16 – 17

After what happened, Vanya was given a haircut, taken to the bathhouse, given new uniforms and “put on full pay.”

Chapter 18

“Vanya had the lucky ability to please people at first sight.” “Captain Enakiev, like his soldiers, fell in love with the boy at first sight.” Having learned about the mission in which Vanya participated, Enakiev became very angry with the scouts who loved the boy too “fun”.

The captain called the boy to his place and appointed him as a messenger.

Chapters 19. – 20

From that day on, Vanya began to live mainly with Enakiev. The captain wanted to personally raise the boy. Enakiev “assigned Vanya to the first gun of the first platoon as a reserve number” so that he could learn “to gradually perform the duties of all gun crew numbers.” “In the first days, the boy really missed his scout friends. At first it seemed to him that he had lost his family. But he soon saw that his new family was no worse than the old one.”

Chapters 21. – 22

Talking with gunner Kovalev about Vanya, Enakiev shares his plans that he would like to adopt the boy.

Suddenly the Germans began to advance. The enemy surrounded the infantry units.

Chapter 23

“Captain Enakiev ordered by telephone the first platoon of his battery to immediately remove itself from its position and, without wasting a second, move forward.” “He ordered the second platoon to shoot all the time, covering the open flanks of Captain Akhunbaev’s strike company.”

Chapter 24

While in the first platoon, Vanya helped the soldiers as best he could. At the height of the battle, Enakiev noticed the boy and ordered him to return back to the battery. Vanya refused. Realizing that it was useless to argue with the boy, the captain wrote something on a piece of paper and asked Vanya to deliver the package to the headquarters commander.

Chapter 25

When Vanya returned back, the battle was already over. The boy did not know that having fired all the cartridges, the soldiers fought the Germans with shovels and bayonets, and then Enakiev “called the battery fire on himself.” Vanya walked across the battlefield, and finally saw the killed Enakiev on the cannon carriage.

Bidenko approached the boy. “It was as if something had turned and opened in Vanya’s soul.” He hugged Bidenko and cried.

Chapter 26

In Enakiev’s pocket they found a note in which the commander said goodbye to his battery, asked to be buried on his “native, Soviet soil,” and to take care of Vanya’s fate. Soon, Bidenko, at the direction of the artillery regiment commander, took Vanya to the Suvorov Military School. The scouts gave him food, soap and shoulder straps of Captain Enakiev, wrapped in the Suvorov Onslaught newspaper.

Chapter 27

On his first night at the school, Vanya dreamed of running up the marble stairs, “surrounded by cannons, drums and pipes.” It was difficult for him to climb, but a gray-haired old man with a diamond star on his chest led him up the steps, saying: “Go, shepherd boy... Walk boldly!” .

Conclusion

In the story “Son of the Regiment,” Kataev describes the story of a simple peasant boy, Vanya Solntsev, from whom the war took away his home and family. However, difficult trials only strengthened Vanya’s spirit, and among the soldiers he finds his second family. The author shows the boy's courage, courage and endurance even in the most difficult situations.

The story “Son of the Regiment” was filmed twice and was also staged at the theater for young spectators in Leningrad.

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Dedicated to Zhenya and Pavlik Kataev.

This is the path of many glorious ones.

Nekrasov

By a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of June 26, 1946, Valentin Petrovich Kataev was awarded the Stalin Prize of the Second Degree for the story “Son of the Regiment.”

Valentin Petrovich Kataev wrote his story “Son of the Regiment” in 1944, during the days of the Great Patriotic War of our people against the fascist invaders. More than thirty years have passed since then. We remember our great victory with pride.

The war brought our country a lot of grief, troubles and misfortunes. She destroyed hundreds of cities and sows. She destroyed millions of people. She deprived thousands of children of their fathers and mothers. But the Soviet people won this war. He won because he was completely devoted to his homeland. He won because he showed a lot of endurance, courage and bravery. He won because he could not help but win: it was a just war for happiness and peace on earth.

The story “Son of the Regiment” will take you, young reader, back to the difficult but heroic events of the war years, which you know about only from textbooks and the stories of your elders. She will help you see these events as if with your own eyes.

You will learn about the fate of a simple peasant boy, Vanya Solntsev, from whom the war took everything: family and friends, home and childhood itself. Together with him you will go through many trials and experience the joy of exploits in the name of victory over the enemy. You will meet wonderful people - soldiers of our army, Sergeant Egorov and Captain Enakiev, gunner Kovalev and Corporal Bidenko, who not only helped Vanya become a brave intelligence officer, but also brought up in him the best qualities of a real Soviet man. And, after reading the story, you, of course, will understand that a feat is not just courage and heroism, but also great work, iron discipline, inflexibility of will and great love for the Motherland.

The story “Son of the Regiment” was written by a great Soviet artist, a wonderful master of words. You will read it with interest and excitement, because it is a truthful, fascinating and vivid book.

The works of Valentin Petrovich Kataev are known and loved by millions of readers. You probably also know his books “The Lonely Sail Whitens”, “I am the Son of the Working People”, “A Farm in the Steppe”, “For the Power of the Soviets”... And if you don’t know, then you will definitely meet them - it will be a good and joyful meeting.

The books of V. Kataev will tell you about the glorious revolutionary deeds of our people, about the heroic youth of your fathers and mothers, and will teach you to love our beautiful Motherland - the Land of the Soviets - even more.

Sergey Baruzdin

It was the middle of a dead autumn night. It was very damp and cold in the forest. A thick fog rose from the black forest swamps, littered with small brown leaves.

The moon was overhead. It shone very strongly, but its light barely penetrated the fog. The moonlight stood near the trees in long, slanting ledges, in which, magically changing, strands of swamp vapors floated.

The forest was mixed. Now, in the strip of moonlight, an impenetrably black silhouette of a huge spruce tree appeared, looking like a multi-story tower; then suddenly a white colonnade of birches appeared in the distance; then in the clearing, against the background of the white, moonlit sky, which had fallen into pieces like curdled milk, bare aspen branches were subtly depicted, sadly surrounded by a rainbow glow.

And everywhere, where the forest was thinner, white canvases of moonlight lay on the ground.

In general, it was beautiful with that ancient, wondrous beauty that always says so much to the Russian heart and makes the imagination draw fabulous pictures: a gray wolf carrying Ivan Tsarevich in a small cap on one side and with a Firebird feather in a scarf in his bosom, huge mossy the paws of a devil, a hut on chicken legs - you never know what else!

But least of all in this dark, dead hour, three soldiers returning from reconnaissance thought about the beauty of the Polesie thicket.

They spent more than a day behind German lines, carrying out a combat mission. And this task was to find and mark on the map the location of enemy structures.

The work was difficult and very dangerous. We crawled almost the entire time. Once I had to lie motionless for three hours in a row in a swamp - in cold, stinking mud, covered with raincoats, covered with yellow leaves on top.

We dined on crackers and cold tea from flasks.

But the hardest thing was that I never managed to smoke. And, as you know, it is easier for a soldier to do without food and without sleep than without taking a puff of good, strong tobacco. And, as luck would have it, all three soldiers were heavy smokers. So, although the combat mission was completed as well as possible and in the senior’s bag there was a map on which more than a dozen thoroughly explored German batteries were marked with great accuracy, the scouts felt irritated and angry.

The closer it was to its leading edge, the more I wanted to smoke. In such cases, as you know, a strong word or a funny joke helps a lot. But the situation demanded complete silence. It was impossible not only to exchange a word, but even to blow your nose or cough: every sound was heard unusually loudly in the forest.

The moon also got in the way. We had to walk very slowly, in single file, about thirteen meters apart from each other, trying not to fall into the streaks of moonlight, and stop and listen every five steps.

The elder walked ahead, giving the command with a careful movement of his hand: raise his hand above his head - everyone immediately stopped and froze; stretches his arm to the side with an inclination towards the ground - everyone at the same second quickly and silently lay down; waves his hand forward - everyone moved forward; will show back - everyone slowly backed away.

Although no more than two kilometers remained to the front line, the scouts continued to walk as carefully and prudently as before. Perhaps now they walked even more carefully, stopping more often.

They had entered the most dangerous part of their journey.

Yesterday evening, when they went out on reconnaissance, there were still deep German rear areas here. But the situation has changed. In the afternoon, after the battle, the Germans retreated. And now here, in this forest, it was apparently empty. But it could only seem so. It is possible that the Germans left their machine gunners here. Every minute you could run into an ambush. Of course, the scouts - although there were only three of them - were not afraid of an ambush. They were careful, experienced and ready to take on a fight at any moment. Each had a machine gun, a lot of ammunition and four hand grenades. But the fact of the matter is that there was no way to accept the fight. The task was to go over to your side as quietly and unnoticed as possible and quickly deliver to the commander of the control platoon a precious map with spotted German batteries. The success of tomorrow's battle largely depended on this. Everything around was unusually quiet. It was a rare moment of calm. Apart from a few distant cannon shots and a short machine-gun burst somewhere to the side, one would think that there was no war in the world.

However, an experienced soldier would have immediately noticed thousands of signs that it was here, in this quiet, remote place, that war was lurking.

The red telephone cord, slipping imperceptibly under my foot, indicated that somewhere nearby was an enemy command post or outpost. Several broken aspens and dented bushes left no doubt that a tank or self-propelled gun had recently passed through here, and the faint, not yet weathered, special, alien smell of artificial gasoline and hot oil showed that this tank or self-propelled gun was German.

In some places, carefully lined with spruce branches, stacks of mines or artillery shells stood like woodpiles. But since it was not known whether they were abandoned or specially prepared for tomorrow’s battle, it was necessary to move past these stacks with special caution.

Occasionally the road was blocked by the trunk of a hundred-year-old pine tree broken by a shell. Sometimes the scouts came across a deep, winding passage of communication or a solid commander's dugout, six steps deep, with a door facing west. And this door, facing west, eloquently said that the dugout was German, not ours. But whether it was empty or whether there was someone in it was unknown.

Often the foot stepped on an abandoned gas mask, on a German helmet crushed by the explosion.

In one place in a clearing, illuminated by smoky moonlight, the scouts saw among the trees scattered in all directions a huge crater from an aerial bomb. In this crater lay several German corpses with yellow faces and blue eyes.

A flare took off once; it hung for a long time above the treetops, and its floating blue light, mixed with the smoky light of the moon, completely illuminated the forest. Each tree cast a long, sharp shadow, and it looked as if the forest around was on stilts. And until the rocket went out, three soldiers stood motionless among the bushes, looking like half-leafed bushes in their spotted, yellow-green raincoats, from under which machine guns protruded. So the scouts slowly moved towards their location.

Suddenly the elder stopped and raised his hand. At the same moment, the others also stopped, not taking their eyes off their commander. The elder stood for a long time, throwing his hood back from his head and turning his ear slightly in the direction from which he thought he heard a suspicious rustling sound. The eldest was a young man of about twenty-two. Despite his youth, he was already considered a seasoned soldier at the battery. He was a sergeant. His comrades loved him and at the same time were afraid of him.

The sound that attracted the attention of Sergeant Egorov - that was the surname of the senior - seemed very strange. Despite all his experience, Egorov could not understand its character and significance.

"What could it be?" - thought Yegorov, straining his ears and quickly turning over in his mind all the suspicious sounds that he had ever heard during night reconnaissance.

"Whisper! No. The cautious rustle of a shovel? No. File squealing? No".

A strange, quiet, intermittent sound unlike anything was heard somewhere very close, to the right, behind a juniper bush. It seemed like the sound was coming from somewhere underground.

After listening for another minute or two, Egorov, without turning around, gave a sign, and both scouts slowly and silently, like shadows, approached him closely. He pointed with his hand in the direction where the sound was coming from and motioned to listen. The scouts began to listen.

Do you hear? - Yegorov asked with his lips alone.

“Hear,” one of the soldiers answered just as silently.

Egorov turned his thin dark face to his comrades, sadly illuminated by the moon. He raised his boyish eyebrows high.

Don't understand.

For some time the three of them stood and listened, putting their fingers on the triggers of their machine guns. The sounds continued and were just as incomprehensible. For one moment they suddenly changed their character. All three thought they heard singing coming out of the ground. They looked at each other. But immediately the sounds became the same.

Then Egorov gave the sign to lie down and lay down on his stomach on the leaves, already gray with frost. He took the dagger into his mouth and crawled, silently pulling himself up on his elbows, on his belly.

A minute later he disappeared behind a dark juniper bush, and after another minute, which seemed long, like an hour, the scouts heard a thin whistling. It meant that Egorov was calling them to him. They crawled and soon saw the sergeant, who was kneeling, looking into a small trench hidden among the junipers.

From the trench one could clearly hear muttering, sobbing, and sleepy moans. Without words, understanding each other, the scouts surrounded the trench and stretched out the ends of their raincoats with their hands so that they formed something like a tent that did not let in the light. Egorov lowered his hand with an electric flashlight into the trench.

The picture they saw was simple and at the same time terrible.

A boy was sleeping in the trench.

With his hands clenched on his chest, his bare feet, dark as potatoes, his legs tucked in, the boy lay in a green, stinking puddle and was heavily delirious in his sleep. His bare head, overgrown with long-uncut, dirty hair, was awkwardly thrown back. The thin throat trembled. Hoarse sighs flew out of a sunken mouth with fever-swept, inflamed lips. There was muttering, fragments of unintelligible words, and sobbing. The bulging eyelids of the closed eyes were an unhealthy, anemic color. They seemed almost blue, like skim milk. Short but thick eyelashes stuck together in arrows. The face was covered with scratches and bruises. A clot of dried blood was visible on the bridge of the nose.

1897–1986

About Valentin Kataev - the author of this book

There is a good Russian word - “essay”. Today's schoolchild does not always understand this word correctly: he thinks that an essay is something assigned for school. And he, unfortunately, not without the help of teachers, is right in some ways, because all schoolchildren have to write essays in class, that is, do something that is not always pleasant, but obligatory, and even receive marks for this task.

I would like to remind you that the word “composition” was and still is called the works of Pushkin and Byron, Lermontov and Jack London, Nekrasov and Mark Twain, Turgenev and Jules Verne, Tolstoy and Conan Doyle, Chekhov and Kipling, Gorky, Rolland, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Hemingway and many other domestic and foreign writers. And it is no coincidence that when the most complete edition of a writer’s books is published, the words “Complete Works” are written on them.

To compose or compose, our compatriot, expert on the Russian language Vladimir Ivanovich Dal once said, is to invent, invent, invent, create mentally, produce with the spirit, with the power of imagination.

These are very precise words, and they can be attributed to the work of every real writer, artist, composer, scientist, when he invents, creates, creates, and we believe in this created, because this happens, this could or may happen in life.

Valentin Petrovich Kataev has always been and remains such a writer, such an artist for me. I knew and accepted him as such when, as a boy, I read “The Lonely Sail Whitens” and “I, the Son of the Working People...”, and a little later (it just happened!) – his previously written novel “Time, Forward!” And then, when during the Patriotic War the story “Son of the Regiment” appeared - one of the best books in Soviet literature for children - it was natural for me that Valentin Kataev wrote it.

The continuation of the reader's friendship with the writer in the post-war years was the acquaintance with the books “A Farm in the Steppe”, “Winter Wind”, “For the Power of the Soviets”, which, together with the story “The Lonely Sail Whitens”, were later included in the epic “Waves of the Black Sea”, and, finally, with the book by V. Kataev “The Little Iron Door in the Wall”, an unusual book, but very interesting for the reader and the work of the writer himself.

The works of Valentin Kataev have become good companions for people of all ages - big and small. They excite the reader, they reveal to him a large and complex world of life. They sometimes, for example, like the “adult” story by V. Kataev “The Holy Well,” cause heated debate. But people argue about what they care about...

Before talking about the story “Son of the Regiment,” which you will read in this book, I would like to talk a little about its author. I know that children, and not only children, are interested in the life of every favorite writer, his biography: when and where he was born, how he behaved in childhood and how he studied, and, of course, how he became a writer.

To begin with, I will quote the words of V. Kataev himself:

“I was born in Ukraine. My childhood, adolescence and youth passed there. My father was a native Russian. Mother is a native Ukrainian. “Ukrainian” and “Russian” have been intertwined in my soul since my earliest years. Or rather, it’s not even intertwined, but completely merged.”

Valentin Petrovich Kataev was born in Odessa on January 28, 1897. He learned to read early. Shevchenko, Pushkin, Gogol, Nikitin, Koltsov, Tolstoy became his first favorite writers and teachers. This happened naturally and simply, perhaps even unnoticed by the future writer: he grew up in a family where they truly knew and loved classical literature. At the age of thirteen, Valya Kataev published his poem “Autumn” in a newspaper. His brother Zhenya was also passionately drawn to literature (later the wonderful Soviet writer Yevgeny Petrov - one of the creators of the novels “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf”).

Valentin Kataev grew up and matured as a person, citizen and writer in a turbulent historical era. The revolution of 1905, the beginning and collapse of the First World War, the Great October Revolution, the years of socialist construction and the first five-year plans - these are the events of which he was a witness or participant and which later formed the basis of many of his books.

A major role in the creative biography of Valentin Kataev was played by such outstanding masters of our culture as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Demyan Bedny, Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Eduard Bagritsky, Yuri Olesha, with whom the writer’s life encountered him over the years. . They were V. Kataev's faithful friends, his good advisers and teachers.

Valentin Kataev wrote the story “Son of the Regiment” in 1944, during the days of the Patriotic War of our people against the Nazi invaders. Remembering this time, Valentin Petrovich said: “Always and everywhere, in the most critical moments, Soviet writers were with the people. They shared with millions of Soviet people the hardships and deprivations of the difficult war years.”

War correspondent for the newspapers Pravda and Krasnaya Zvezda, writer Valentin Kataev himself walked and drove thousands of kilometers of front-line roads.

The war brought our country a lot of grief, troubles and misfortunes. It devastated tens of thousands of cities and villages. It made terrible sacrifices: twenty million Soviet people, more than the population of other states, died in that war. The war deprived thousands of children of their fathers and mothers, grandfathers and older brothers. But our people won this war, they won because they showed the greatest endurance, courage and bravery. He won because he could not help but win. "Victory or death!" - our people said in those years. And they went to their death so that the others who survived would win. It was a fair struggle for happiness and peace on earth.

The story “Son of the Regiment” returns the reader to the difficult, heroic events of the war years, which today’s children know only from textbooks and the stories of their elders. But textbooks don’t always talk about this in an interesting way, and elders don’t always like to remember the war: these memories are too sad...

After reading this story, you will learn about the fate of a simple village boy, Vanya Solntsev, from whom the war took everything: family and friends, home and childhood itself. You will learn how, having become a brave intelligence officer, Vanya took revenge on the Nazis for his own and the people’s grief. Together with Vanya Solntsev you will go through many trials and experience the joy of heroism in the name of victory over the enemy. You will meet wonderful people, soldiers of our army - Sergeant Egorov and Captain Enakiev, gunner Kovalev and Corporal Bidenko, who not only helped Vanya become a brave intelligence officer, but also brought up in him the best qualities of a real person. And, after reading the story “Son of the Regiment,” you, of course, will understand that feat is not just courage and heroism, but great, great work, iron discipline, inflexibility of will and, most importantly, great love for your Motherland...

Valentin Kataev's stories have been around for many decades. Over the years, they have been read and loved by millions of readers not only in our country, but also abroad. Like many other books, we fell in love with Valentin Kataev - a great writer, artist, master of words. And if you have not yet read everything from Kataev’s works, then you can only envy you: you have a lot of good and joyful things ahead.

Sergey Baruzdin

Dedicated to Zhenya and Pavlik Kataev

This is the path of many glorious ones.

1

It was the middle of a dead autumn night. It was very damp and cold in the forest. A thick fog rose from the black forest swamps, littered with small brown leaves.

The moon was overhead. It shone very strongly, but its light barely penetrated the fog. The moonlight stood near the trees in long, slanting ledges, in which, magically changing, strands of swamp vapors floated.

The forest was mixed. Now, in the strip of moonlight, an impenetrably black silhouette of a huge spruce tree appeared, looking like a multi-story tower; then suddenly a white colonnade of birches appeared in the distance; then in the clearing, against the background of the white, moonlit sky, which had fallen into pieces like curdled milk, bare aspen branches were subtly depicted, sadly surrounded by a rainbow glow.

And everywhere, where the forest was thinner, white canvases of moonlight lay on the ground.

In general, it was beautiful with that ancient, wondrous beauty that always says so much to the Russian heart and makes the imagination draw fabulous pictures: a Gray wolf carrying Ivan Tsarevich in a small cap on one side and with a Firebird feather in a scarf in his bosom, huge mossy the paws of a devil, a hut on chicken legs - and you never know what else!

But least of all in this dark, dead hour, three soldiers returning from reconnaissance thought about the beauty of the Polesie thicket.

They spent more than a day behind German lines, carrying out a combat mission. And this task was to find and mark on the map the location of enemy structures.

The work was difficult and very dangerous. We crawled almost the entire time. Once I had to lie motionless for three hours in a row in a swamp - in cold, stinking mud, covered with raincoats, covered with yellow leaves on top.

We dined on crackers and cold tea from flasks.

But the hardest thing was that I never managed to smoke. And, as you know, it is easier for a soldier to do without food and without sleep than without taking a puff of good, strong tobacco. And, as luck would have it, all three soldiers were heavy smokers. So, although the combat mission was completed as well as possible and in the senior’s bag there was a map on which more than a dozen thoroughly explored German batteries were marked with great accuracy, the scouts felt irritated and angry.

The closer it was to its leading edge, the more I wanted to smoke. In such cases, as you know, a strong word or a funny joke helps a lot. But the situation demanded complete silence. It was impossible not only to exchange a word, but even to blow your nose or cough: every sound was heard unusually loudly in the forest.

The moon also got in the way. We had to walk very slowly, in single file, about thirteen meters apart from each other, trying not to fall into the streaks of moonlight, and stop and listen every five steps.

The elder walked ahead, giving a command with a careful movement of his hand: raise his hand above his head - everyone immediately stopped and froze; stretches his arm to the side with an inclination towards the ground - everyone at the same second quickly and silently lay down; waves his hand forward - everyone moved forward; will show back - everyone slowly backed away.

Although no more than two kilometers remained to the front line, the scouts continued to walk as carefully and prudently as before. Perhaps now they walked even more carefully, stopping more often.

They had entered the most dangerous part of their journey.

Yesterday evening, when they went out on reconnaissance, there were still deep German rear areas here. But the situation has changed. In the afternoon, after the battle, the Germans retreated. And now here, in this forest, it was apparently empty. But it could only seem so. It is possible that the Germans left their machine gunners here. Every minute you could run into an ambush. Of course, the scouts - although there were only three of them - were not afraid of an ambush. They were careful, experienced and ready to take on a fight at any moment. Each had a machine gun, a lot of ammunition and four hand grenades. But the fact of the matter is that there was no way to accept the fight. The task was to go over to your side as quietly and unnoticed as possible and quickly deliver to the commander of the control platoon a precious map with spotted German batteries. The success of tomorrow's battle largely depended on this.

Everything around was unusually quiet. It was a rare moment of calm. Apart from a few distant cannon shots and a short machine-gun burst somewhere to the side, one would think that there was no war in the world.

However, an experienced soldier would have immediately noticed thousands of signs that it was here, in this quiet, remote place, that war was lurking.

The red telephone cord, slipping imperceptibly under my foot, indicated that somewhere nearby was an enemy command post or outpost. Several broken aspens and dented bushes left no doubt that a tank or self-propelled gun had recently passed through here, and the faint, not yet weathered, special, alien smell of artificial gasoline and hot oil showed that this tank or self-propelled gun was German.

In some places, carefully lined with spruce branches, stacks of mines or artillery shells stood like woodpiles. But since it was not known whether they were abandoned or specially prepared for tomorrow’s battle, it was necessary to move past these stacks with special caution.

Occasionally the road was blocked by the trunk of a hundred-year-old pine tree broken by a shell. Sometimes the scouts came across a deep, winding passage of communication or a solid commander's dugout, six steps deep, with a door facing west. And this door, facing west, eloquently said that the dugout was German, not ours. But whether it was empty or whether there was someone in it was unknown.

Often the foot stepped on an abandoned gas mask, on a German helmet crushed by the explosion.

In one place in a clearing, illuminated by smoky moonlight, the scouts saw among the trees scattered in all directions a huge crater from an aerial bomb. In this crater lay several German corpses with yellow faces and blue eyes.

A flare took off once; it hung for a long time above the treetops, and its floating blue light, mixed with the smoky light of the moon, completely illuminated the forest. Each tree cast a long, sharp shadow, and it looked as if the forest around was on stilts. And until the rocket went out, three soldiers stood motionless among the bushes, looking like half-leafed bushes in their spotted, yellow-green raincoats, from under which machine guns protruded. So the scouts slowly moved towards their location.

Suddenly the elder stopped and raised his hand. At the same moment, the others also stopped, not taking their eyes off their commander. The elder stood for a long time, throwing his hood back from his head and turning his ear slightly in the direction from which he thought he heard a suspicious rustling sound. The eldest was a young man of about twenty-two. Despite his youth, he was already considered a seasoned soldier at the battery. He was a sergeant. His comrades loved him and at the same time were afraid of him.

The sound that attracted the attention of Sergeant Egorov - that was the surname of the senior - seemed very strange. Despite all his experience, Egorov could not understand its character and significance.

"What could it be?" - thought Yegorov, straining his ears and quickly turning over in his mind all the suspicious sounds that he had ever heard during night reconnaissance.

"Whisper! No. The cautious rustle of a shovel? No. File squealing? No".

A strange, quiet, intermittent sound unlike anything was heard somewhere very close, to the right, behind a juniper bush. It seemed like the sound was coming from somewhere underground.

After listening for another minute or two, Egorov, without turning around, gave a sign, and both scouts slowly and silently, like shadows, approached him closely. He pointed with his hand in the direction where the sound was coming from and motioned to listen. The scouts began to listen.

- Do you hear? – Yegorov asked with his lips alone.

“Hear,” one of the soldiers answered just as silently.

Egorov turned his thin dark face to his comrades, sadly illuminated by the moon. He raised his boyish eyebrows high.

- I don’t understand.

For some time the three of them stood and listened, putting their fingers on the triggers of their machine guns. The sounds continued and were just as incomprehensible. For one moment they suddenly changed their character. All three thought they heard singing coming out of the ground. They looked at each other. But immediately the sounds became the same.

Then Egorov gave the sign to lie down and lay down on his stomach on the leaves, already gray with frost. He took the dagger into his mouth and crawled, silently pulling himself up on his elbows, on his belly.

A minute later he disappeared behind a dark juniper bush, and after another minute, which seemed long, like an hour, the scouts heard a thin whistling. It meant that Egorov was calling them to him. They crawled and soon saw the sergeant, who was kneeling, looking into a small trench hidden among the junipers.

From the trench one could clearly hear muttering, sobbing, and sleepy moans. Without words, understanding each other, the scouts surrounded the trench and stretched out the ends of their raincoats with their hands so that they formed something like a tent that did not let in the light. Egorov lowered his hand with an electric flashlight into the trench.

The picture they saw was simple and at the same time terrible.

A boy was sleeping in the trench.

With his hands clenched on his chest, his bare feet, dark as potatoes, his legs tucked in, the boy lay in a green, stinking puddle and was heavily delirious in his sleep. His bare head, overgrown with long-uncut, dirty hair, was awkwardly thrown back. The thin throat trembled. Hoarse sighs flew out of a sunken mouth with fever-swept, inflamed lips. There was muttering, fragments of unintelligible words, and sobbing. The bulging eyelids of the closed eyes were an unhealthy, anemic color. They seemed almost blue, like skim milk. Short but thick eyelashes stuck together in arrows. The face was covered with scratches and bruises. A clot of dried blood was visible on the bridge of the nose.

The boy was sleeping, and reflections of the nightmares that haunted the boy in his sleep ran convulsively across his exhausted face. Every minute his face changed expression. Then it froze in horror; then inhuman despair distorted him; then sharp, deep features of hopeless grief erupted around his sunken mouth, his eyebrows rose like a house and tears rolled from his eyelashes; then suddenly the teeth began to grind furiously, the face became angry, merciless, the fists clenched with such force that the nails dug into the palms, and dull, hoarse sounds flew out of the tense throat. And then suddenly the boy would fall into unconsciousness, smile with a pitiful, completely childish and childishly helpless smile and begin to very weakly, barely audibly sing some kind of unintelligible song.

The boy's sleep was so heavy, so deep, his soul, wandering through the torments of dreams, was so far from his body that for some time he did not feel anything: neither the gaze of the scouts looking at him from above, nor the bright light of an electric flashlight, point-blank illuminating his face.

But suddenly the boy seemed to be hit from the inside, thrown up. He woke up, jumped up, and sat down. His eyes flashed wildly. In an instant, he pulled out a large sharpened nail from somewhere. With a deft, precise movement, Egorov managed to grab the boy’s hot hand and cover his mouth with his palm.

- Quiet. “Ours,” Egorov said in a whisper.

Only now the boy noticed that the soldiers’ helmets were Russian, their machine guns were Russian, their raincoats were Russian, and the faces bending towards him were also Russian, family.

A joyful smile flashed palely on his exhausted face. He wanted to say something, but managed to utter only one word:

And he lost consciousness.

2

The battery commander, Captain Enakiev, was sitting on a small plank platform built on the top of a pine tree, between strong branches. The site was open on three sides. On the fourth side, on the western side, several thick sleepers were placed on it to protect against bullets. A stereo tube was screwed to the top sleeper. Several branches were tied to her horns, so that she herself looked like a horned branch.

In order to get to the site, it was necessary to climb two very long and narrow stairs. The first, rather flat, reached about half the tree. From here it was necessary to climb the second staircase, almost vertical.

In addition to Captain Enakiev, there were two telephone operators on the site - one infantry, the other artillery - with their leather telephone sets hung on a scaly pine trunk, and the head of the combat area, commander of the rifle battalion Akhunbaev, also a captain.

Since there was no room for more than four people on the platform, the remaining two artillerymen stood on the stairs: one was the commander of the control platoon, Lieutenant Sedykh, and the other was Sergeant Yegorov, already familiar to us. Lieutenant Sedykh stood on the upper steps, resting his elbows on the boards of the platform, and Sergeant Yegorov stood lower, and his helmet touched the lieutenant’s boots.

The battery commander, Captain Enakiev, and the battalion commander, Captain Akhunbaev, were busy with a very urgent, very important and very painstaking task: they were orienting their maps on the ground, clarifying the data delivered by artillery reconnaissance. These cards, marked and marked with multi-colored pencils, lay nearby, spread out on the boards. Both captains were reclining on them with pencils, erasers and rulers in their hands.

Captain Akhunbaev, pushing his green helmet to the back of his head and tilting his gloomy, almost brown wide forehead, moved a transparent ruler along his map with sharp, impatient movements of his thick fingers. He used either a red pencil or an eraser and at the same time quickly glanced sideways into Yenakiev’s face, as if saying: “Well, what are you stalling for, dear friend? Let's move on. Let's hurry up."

He, as always, got excited and did not hide his irritation well.

In those last hours, maybe even minutes, before the fight, everything seemed too slow to him. He was seething internally.

Captain Enakiev and Captain Akhunbaev were old comrades. It so happened that for the last two years they acted together in almost all battles. That’s how everyone in the division got used to it: where Akhunbaev’s battalion fights, that means Enakiev’s battery also fights.

Enakiev and Akhunbaev made a glorious journey shoulder to shoulder. They beat the Germans near Dukhovshchina, they beat them near Smolensk, together they surrounded Minsk, together they drove the enemy from their native land. More than once, not twice, not even three times, our capital Moscow, on behalf of the Motherland, illuminated the evening clouds over the Kremlin with fiery volleys in honor of the valiant front where Akhunbaev’s battalion and Enakiev’s battery fought.

The fighting friends ate a lot of bread and salt together, at one camp table. They drank a lot of water from one camp flask. It happened that they slept next to each other on the ground, covered with one raincoat. They loved each other like brothers. However, they did not make the slightest concession to each other’s service, remembering well the saying that friendship is friendship, and service is service. And they never compromised their dignity in front of each other. And their characters were different.

Akhunbaev was hot-tempered, impatient, and bold to the point of insolence. Enakiev was also brave no less than his friend Akhunbaev, but at the same time he was cold, restrained, and calculating, as befits a good artilleryman.

Now, transferring onto his map the data obtained by Yenakiev’s scouts, Captain Akhunbaev was in a hurry to finish this matter and quickly release the messengers sent from each company for diagrams of the explored area: they stood below under the tree and waited.

The order to attack had not yet been received. But from many signs it could be concluded that it would begin very soon, and before it began, Akhunbaev wanted to be sure to visit the companies and personally check their combat readiness.

However, no matter how quickly Akhunbaev’s celluloid ruler slid across the map, no matter how quickly the red pencil drew circles, diamonds and crosses among the curly images of forests and blue veins of rivers, things were not moving nearly as quickly as the captain would have liked. Almost before every new symbol that Akhunbaev was going to put on the map, Captain Enakiev stopped him with a courteous but firm movement of a small, lean hand in a worn brown suede glove:

- I ask you to. Wait a minute, I want to check. Lieutenant Sedykh!

- Look at yourself. Square nineteen five. Forty-five meters north-northeast of a single tree. What did you notice there?

Without haste, but without delving either, Lieutenant Sedykh pulled the tablet toward him, which lay on the boards at the level of his chest, lowered his slightly swollen eyes, reddened from lack of sleep, and, coughing, said:

– A damaged tank, dug into the ground and turned by the enemy into a stationary firing point.

- How is this known?

- According to intelligence reports.

“That’s right, that’s right,” Captain Akhunbaev said quickly, impatiently untying and tying the ribbons of the raincoat around his neck. – My intelligence reports the same thing. This means there cannot be two opinions. Feel free to apply.

“Still, wait a minute,” said Captain Enakiev, after thinking.

He leaned over and looked down over the edge of the platform.

- Sergeant Egorov!

“Here, comrade captain,” Sergeant Yegorov responded from the stairs.

– What is that knocked out tank you have there on square nineteen-five? Are you not composing?

- No way.

– Have you seen it in person?

- Yes sir.

- With my own eyes?

- Yes, exactly, with my own eyes. We walked there - I saw it, and on the way back I saw it. It's in the same place.

- So what are they? It turns out they turned it into a stationary firing point?

- Yes sir. To a stationary firing point.

- How is this known?

“They are doing excavation work around it.

- Are they burying them?

- Yes sir.

- Or maybe they want to take him out?

- No way. They brought him ammunition in a lorry just when we were there.

– Did you see it yourself?

- Yes sir. With my own eyes. They were unloading boxes. That's when we spotted it.

- Fine. Nothing else.

- Exactly! Exactly! - Captain Akhunbaev exclaimed joyfully through his teeth and put a small red diamond on the map.

And then suddenly, clarifying the position of some target, Captain Enakiev, making his polite but firm stopping gesture, knelt down in front of the stereo tube and - as it seemed to Captain Akhunbaev, for a very long time - scoured the foggy, layered horizon, every now and then coping with card and applying a celluloid circle to it. At this time, Akhunbaev was ready to grind his teeth with impatience and did not grind only because he knew his friend too well. Creak or don’t creak, it still won’t help.

One glance at Captain Enakiev was enough, at his old, but exceptionally neat, well-fitting overcoat with black buttonholes and gold buttons, at his hard cap with a lacquer strap, a black band and a straight square visor, pulled slightly over his eyes, at his flask, neatly trimmed with soldier's cloth, on an electric flashlight attached to the second button of his overcoat, on his strong, but thin boots, polished to a shine in all weathers, in order to understand all the conscientiousness, all the precision and all the inflexibility of this man.

The morning was gray and cold. The frost that fell at dawn lay fragile on the ground and did not melt for a long time. It slowly evaporated in the damp blue air, cloudy like soapy water. The trees at the edge did not move. But this impression was deceptive. The top of the pine tree swayed in a circle, and the platform swayed along with it, as if it were a raft that was floating smoothly around a wide, slow whirlpool.

The air shuddered all the time from cannon shots and explosions. This constant and uneven state of the air could not only be felt. You could kind of see him. With each blow, the trees in the forest shook, and the yellow leaves began to fall thicker, spinning and swaying.

3

To an unaccustomed person it might seem that there was a big battle going on and that he was in the very center of this battle. In fact, it was an ordinary artillery firefight, not even very strong. Some battery, ours or German, wanting to shoot at a new target, fired several shells. This battery was immediately spotted by enemy observers, and immediately some special counter-battery platoon struck it from the depths. This platoon, in turn, began to be hunted. Thus, very soon such a mess was brewing in the area that you could at least plug your ears with cotton wool. From all sides, guns of small calibers, even smaller calibers, medium calibers, larger calibers, finally large, very large, the largest, and sometimes super-powerful guns were firing, barely audibly heard deep in the rear and suddenly with an unexpected howl, grinding, overthrown by a whirlwind their colossal shells into some seemingly innocent forest, above which a rocky cloud, black as anthracite, and riddled in the middle with lightning, rose into the air along with the bushes and trees and fell down.

Sometimes, from somewhere, from an unexpected direction, a fragment would burst in, hit the ground with force, ricochet, spin, crackle, ring, whine like a top, and with a disgusting groan rush away, knocking branches and pine cones from the trees along the way.

However, the people working on the map at the top of the pine tree seemed to hear and see nothing of this. And only occasionally, when in some place the fire became especially frequent, the telephone operator turned the handle of his leather apparatus and said quietly:

- Give me Violet. Is this "Violet"? "Chair" says. Checking the line. What are you doing there?... Is everything quiet yet? OK. Everything is quiet here too. Keep fighting. Goodbye.

When the work was finally finished, Captain Akhunbaev immediately cheered up. He quickly stuffed the map into his field bag, resolutely tied the ribbons of the raincoat around his short neck, jumped onto his short, strong, slightly crooked legs and shouted down to the messenger:

Then he looked at his watch:

- Check it out. I have nine sixteen. You?

“Nine fourteen,” said Captain Enakiev, glancing over his hand.

Captain Akhunbaev made a short, triumphant, guttural sound. His eyes narrowed, sparkling with glossy blackness.

- You're falling behind, Captain Enakiev.

- No way. I'm keeping up. I have it right. You are in a hurry... as usual.

- Zaitsev, exact time! – Akhunbaev shouted excitedly.

The telephone operator immediately called the regiment command post and reported that the time was nine hours and fourteen minutes.

“You took it, god of war,” Akhunbaev said peacefully and, putting his watch to Yenakiev’s watch, moved the hands. “Let it be your way this time.” Goodbye, battalion commander.

Roughly rustling his cloak, he, in one spirit, without making a single stop, went down past the artillerymen who were standing aside, down both stairs, threw the map to the adjutant, jumped on his horse and rushed off, showered with yellow leaves.

After that, Captain Enakiev removed the tight rubber belt from his notebook and moved to the stereo tube. The goals were written down in the book. All these targets were sighted. But Captain Enakiev wanted them to be shot even better. He wanted to ensure that, if necessary, his battery could immediately, from the very first shots, go to kill, without wasting precious time on re-shooting. “Going through the goals” was, of course, not difficult. But he was afraid that his battery, pushed far forward into the infantry line and well hidden, might reveal itself ahead of time. The whole task was precisely to strike completely unexpectedly, at the very last, decisive moment of the battle, and to strike where it was least expected. Such a place, according to Captain Enakiev, was on the right flank of the combat area, between the forks of two roads and the exit to a rather deep gully overgrown with young oak trees.

Dedicated to Zhenya and Pavlik Kataev

1

It was the middle of a dead autumn night. It was very damp and cold in the forest. A thick fog rose from the black forest swamps, littered with small brown leaves.

The moon was overhead. It shone very strongly, but its light barely penetrated the fog. The moonlight stood near the trees in long, slanting ledges, in which, magically changing, strands of swamp vapors floated.

The forest was mixed. Now, in the strip of moonlight, an impenetrably black silhouette of a huge spruce tree appeared, looking like a multi-story tower; then suddenly a white colonnade of birches appeared in the distance; then in the clearing, against the background of the white, moonlit sky, which had fallen into pieces like curdled milk, bare aspen branches were subtly depicted, sadly surrounded by a rainbow glow.

And everywhere, where the forest was thinner, white canvases of moonlight lay on the ground.

In general, it was beautiful with that ancient, wondrous beauty that always says so much to the Russian heart and makes the imagination draw fabulous pictures: a Gray wolf carrying Ivan Tsarevich in a small cap on one side and with a Firebird feather in a scarf in his bosom, huge mossy the paws of a devil, a hut on chicken legs - and you never know what else!

But least of all in this dark, dead hour, three soldiers returning from reconnaissance thought about the beauty of the Polesie thicket.

They spent more than a day behind German lines, carrying out a combat mission. And this task was to find and mark on the map the location of enemy structures.

The work was difficult and very dangerous. We crawled almost the entire time. Once I had to lie motionless for three hours in a row in a swamp - in cold, stinking mud, covered with raincoats, covered with yellow leaves on top.

We dined on crackers and cold tea from flasks.

But the hardest thing was that I never managed to smoke. And, as you know, it is easier for a soldier to do without food and without sleep than without taking a puff of good, strong tobacco. And, as luck would have it, all three soldiers were heavy smokers. So, although the combat mission was completed as well as possible and in the senior’s bag there was a map on which more than a dozen thoroughly explored German batteries were marked with great accuracy, the scouts felt irritated and angry.

The closer it was to its leading edge, the more I wanted to smoke. In such cases, as you know, a strong word or a funny joke helps a lot. But the situation demanded complete silence. It was impossible not only to exchange a word, but even to blow your nose or cough: every sound was heard unusually loudly in the forest.

The moon also got in the way. We had to walk very slowly, in single file, about thirteen meters apart from each other, trying not to fall into the streaks of moonlight, and stop and listen every five steps.

The elder walked ahead, giving a command with a careful movement of his hand: raise his hand above his head - everyone immediately stopped and froze; stretches his arm to the side with an inclination towards the ground - everyone at the same second quickly and silently lay down; waves his hand forward - everyone moved forward; will show back - everyone slowly backed away.

Although no more than two kilometers remained to the front line, the scouts continued to walk as carefully and prudently as before. Perhaps now they walked even more carefully, stopping more often.

They had entered the most dangerous part of their journey.

Yesterday evening, when they went out on reconnaissance, there were still deep German rear areas here. But the situation has changed. In the afternoon, after the battle, the Germans retreated. And now here, in this forest, it was apparently empty. But it could only seem so. It is possible that the Germans left their machine gunners here. Every minute you could run into an ambush. Of course, the scouts - although there were only three of them - were not afraid of an ambush. They were careful, experienced and ready to take on a fight at any moment. Each had a machine gun, a lot of ammunition and four hand grenades. But the fact of the matter is that there was no way to accept the fight. The task was to go over to your side as quietly and unnoticed as possible and quickly deliver to the commander of the control platoon a precious map with spotted German batteries. The success of tomorrow's battle largely depended on this.

Everything around was unusually quiet. It was a rare moment of calm. Apart from a few distant cannon shots and a short machine-gun burst somewhere to the side, one would think that there was no war in the world.

However, an experienced soldier would have immediately noticed thousands of signs that it was here, in this quiet, remote place, that war was lurking.

The red telephone cord, slipping imperceptibly under my foot, indicated that somewhere nearby was an enemy command post or outpost. Several broken aspens and dented bushes left no doubt that a tank or self-propelled gun had recently passed through here, and the faint, not yet weathered, special, alien smell of artificial gasoline and hot oil showed that this tank or self-propelled gun was German.

In some places, carefully lined with spruce branches, stacks of mines or artillery shells stood like woodpiles. But since it was not known whether they were abandoned or specially prepared for tomorrow’s battle, it was necessary to move past these stacks with special caution.

Occasionally the road was blocked by the trunk of a hundred-year-old pine tree broken by a shell. Sometimes the scouts came across a deep, winding passage of communication or a solid commander's dugout, six steps deep, with a door facing west. And this door, facing west, eloquently said that the dugout was German, not ours. But whether it was empty or whether there was someone in it was unknown.

Often the foot stepped on an abandoned gas mask, on a German helmet crushed by the explosion.

In one place in a clearing, illuminated by smoky moonlight, the scouts saw among the trees scattered in all directions a huge crater from an aerial bomb. In this crater lay several German corpses with yellow faces and blue eyes.

A flare took off once; it hung for a long time above the treetops, and its floating blue light, mixed with the smoky light of the moon, completely illuminated the forest. Each tree cast a long, sharp shadow, and it looked as if the forest around was on stilts. And until the rocket went out, three soldiers stood motionless among the bushes, looking like half-leafed bushes in their spotted, yellow-green raincoats, from under which machine guns protruded. So the scouts slowly moved towards their location.

Suddenly the elder stopped and raised his hand. At the same moment, the others also stopped, not taking their eyes off their commander. The elder stood for a long time, throwing his hood back from his head and turning his ear slightly in the direction from which he thought he heard a suspicious rustling sound. The eldest was a young man of about twenty-two. Despite his youth, he was already considered a seasoned soldier at the battery. He was a sergeant. His comrades loved him and at the same time were afraid of him.

The sound that attracted the attention of Sergeant Egorov - that was the surname of the senior - seemed very strange. Despite all his experience, Egorov could not understand its character and significance.

"What could it be?" - thought Yegorov, straining his ears and quickly turning over in his mind all the suspicious sounds that he had ever heard during night reconnaissance.

"Whisper! No. The cautious rustle of a shovel? No. File squealing? No".

A strange, quiet, intermittent sound unlike anything was heard somewhere very close, to the right, behind a juniper bush. It seemed like the sound was coming from somewhere underground.

After listening for another minute or two, Egorov, without turning around, gave a sign, and both scouts slowly and silently, like shadows, approached him closely. He pointed with his hand in the direction where the sound was coming from and motioned to listen. The scouts began to listen.

- Do you hear? – Yegorov asked with his lips alone.

“Hear,” one of the soldiers answered just as silently.

Egorov turned his thin dark face to his comrades, sadly illuminated by the moon. He raised his boyish eyebrows high.

- I don’t understand.

For some time the three of them stood and listened, putting their fingers on the triggers of their machine guns. The sounds continued and were just as incomprehensible. For one moment they suddenly changed their character. All three thought they heard singing coming out of the ground. They looked at each other. But immediately the sounds became the same.

Then Egorov gave the sign to lie down and lay down on his stomach on the leaves, already gray with frost. He took the dagger into his mouth and crawled, silently pulling himself up on his elbows, on his belly.

A minute later he disappeared behind a dark juniper bush, and after another minute, which seemed long, like an hour, the scouts heard a thin whistling. It meant that Egorov was calling them to him. They crawled and soon saw the sergeant, who was kneeling, looking into a small trench hidden among the junipers.

From the trench one could clearly hear muttering, sobbing, and sleepy moans. Without words, understanding each other, the scouts surrounded the trench and stretched out the ends of their raincoats with their hands so that they formed something like a tent that did not let in the light. Egorov lowered his hand with an electric flashlight into the trench.

The picture they saw was simple and at the same time terrible.

A boy was sleeping in the trench.

With his hands clenched on his chest, his bare feet, dark as potatoes, his legs tucked in, the boy lay in a green, stinking puddle and was heavily delirious in his sleep. His bare head, overgrown with long-uncut, dirty hair, was awkwardly thrown back. The thin throat trembled. Hoarse sighs flew out of a sunken mouth with fever-swept, inflamed lips. There was muttering, fragments of unintelligible words, and sobbing. The bulging eyelids of the closed eyes were an unhealthy, anemic color. They seemed almost blue, like skim milk. Short but thick eyelashes stuck together in arrows. The face was covered with scratches and bruises. A clot of dried blood was visible on the bridge of the nose.

The boy was sleeping, and reflections of the nightmares that haunted the boy in his sleep ran convulsively across his exhausted face. Every minute his face changed expression. Then it froze in horror; then inhuman despair distorted him; then sharp, deep features of hopeless grief erupted around his sunken mouth, his eyebrows rose like a house and tears rolled from his eyelashes; then suddenly the teeth began to grind furiously, the face became angry, merciless, the fists clenched with such force that the nails dug into the palms, and dull, hoarse sounds flew out of the tense throat. And then suddenly the boy would fall into unconsciousness, smile with a pitiful, completely childish and childishly helpless smile and begin to very weakly, barely audibly sing some kind of unintelligible song.

The boy's sleep was so heavy, so deep, his soul, wandering through the torments of dreams, was so far from his body that for some time he did not feel anything: neither the gaze of the scouts looking at him from above, nor the bright light of an electric flashlight, point-blank illuminating his face.

But suddenly the boy seemed to be hit from the inside, thrown up. He woke up, jumped up, and sat down. His eyes flashed wildly. In an instant, he pulled out a large sharpened nail from somewhere. With a deft, precise movement, Egorov managed to grab the boy’s hot hand and cover his mouth with his palm.

- Quiet. “Ours,” Egorov said in a whisper.

Only now the boy noticed that the soldiers’ helmets were Russian, their machine guns were Russian, their raincoats were Russian, and the faces bending towards him were also Russian, family.

A joyful smile flashed palely on his exhausted face. He wanted to say something, but managed to utter only one word:

And he lost consciousness.

2

The battery commander, Captain Enakiev, was sitting on a small plank platform built on the top of a pine tree, between strong branches. The site was open on three sides. On the fourth side, on the western side, several thick sleepers were placed on it to protect against bullets. A stereo tube was screwed to the top sleeper. Several branches were tied to her horns, so that she herself looked like a horned branch.

In order to get to the site, it was necessary to climb two very long and narrow stairs. The first, rather flat, reached about half the tree. From here it was necessary to climb the second staircase, almost vertical.

In addition to Captain Enakiev, there were two telephone operators on the site - one infantry, the other artillery - with their leather telephone sets hung on a scaly pine trunk, and the head of the combat area, commander of the rifle battalion Akhunbaev, also a captain.

Since there was no room for more than four people on the platform, the remaining two artillerymen stood on the stairs: one was the commander of the control platoon, Lieutenant Sedykh, and the other was Sergeant Yegorov, already familiar to us. Lieutenant Sedykh stood on the upper steps, resting his elbows on the boards of the platform, and Sergeant Yegorov stood lower, and his helmet touched the lieutenant’s boots.

The battery commander, Captain Enakiev, and the battalion commander, Captain Akhunbaev, were busy with a very urgent, very important and very painstaking task: they were orienting their maps on the ground, clarifying the data delivered by artillery reconnaissance. These cards, marked and marked with multi-colored pencils, lay nearby, spread out on the boards. Both captains were reclining on them with pencils, erasers and rulers in their hands.

Captain Akhunbaev, pushing his green helmet to the back of his head and tilting his gloomy, almost brown wide forehead, moved a transparent ruler along his map with sharp, impatient movements of his thick fingers. He used either a red pencil or an eraser and at the same time quickly glanced sideways into Yenakiev’s face, as if saying: “Well, what are you stalling for, dear friend? Let's move on. Let's hurry up."

He, as always, got excited and did not hide his irritation well.

In those last hours, maybe even minutes, before the fight, everything seemed too slow to him. He was seething internally.

Captain Enakiev and Captain Akhunbaev were old comrades. It so happened that for the last two years they acted together in almost all battles. That’s how everyone in the division got used to it: where Akhunbaev’s battalion fights, that means Enakiev’s battery also fights.

Enakiev and Akhunbaev made a glorious journey shoulder to shoulder. They beat the Germans near Dukhovshchina, they beat them near Smolensk, together they surrounded Minsk, together they drove the enemy from their native land. More than once, not twice, not even three times, our capital Moscow, on behalf of the Motherland, illuminated the evening clouds over the Kremlin with fiery volleys in honor of the valiant front where Akhunbaev’s battalion and Enakiev’s battery fought.

The fighting friends ate a lot of bread and salt together, at one camp table. They drank a lot of water from one camp flask. It happened that they slept next to each other on the ground, covered with one raincoat. They loved each other like brothers. However, they did not make the slightest concession to each other’s service, remembering well the saying that friendship is friendship, and service is service. And they never compromised their dignity in front of each other. And their characters were different.

Akhunbaev was hot-tempered, impatient, and bold to the point of insolence. Enakiev was also brave no less than his friend Akhunbaev, but at the same time he was cold, restrained, and calculating, as befits a good artilleryman.

Now, transferring onto his map the data obtained by Yenakiev’s scouts, Captain Akhunbaev was in a hurry to finish this matter and quickly release the messengers sent from each company for diagrams of the explored area: they stood below under the tree and waited.

The order to attack had not yet been received. But from many signs it could be concluded that it would begin very soon, and before it began, Akhunbaev wanted to be sure to visit the companies and personally check their combat readiness.

However, no matter how quickly Akhunbaev’s celluloid ruler slid across the map, no matter how quickly the red pencil drew circles, diamonds and crosses among the curly images of forests and blue veins of rivers, things were not moving nearly as quickly as the captain would have liked. Almost before every new symbol that Akhunbaev was going to put on the map, Captain Enakiev stopped him with a courteous but firm movement of a small, lean hand in a worn brown suede glove:

- I ask you to. Wait a minute, I want to check. Lieutenant Sedykh!

- Look at yourself. Square nineteen five. Forty-five meters north-northeast of a single tree. What did you notice there?

Without haste, but without delving either, Lieutenant Sedykh pulled the tablet toward him, which lay on the boards at the level of his chest, lowered his slightly swollen eyes, reddened from lack of sleep, and, coughing, said:

– A damaged tank, dug into the ground and turned by the enemy into a stationary firing point.

- How is this known?

- According to intelligence reports.

“That’s right, that’s right,” Captain Akhunbaev said quickly, impatiently untying and tying the ribbons of the raincoat around his neck. – My intelligence reports the same thing. This means there cannot be two opinions. Feel free to apply.

“Still, wait a minute,” said Captain Enakiev, after thinking.

He leaned over and looked down over the edge of the platform.

- Sergeant Egorov!

“Here, comrade captain,” Sergeant Yegorov responded from the stairs.

– What is that knocked out tank you have there on square nineteen-five? Are you not composing?

- No way.

– Have you seen it in person?

- Yes sir.

- With my own eyes?

- Yes, exactly, with my own eyes. We walked there - I saw it, and on the way back I saw it. It's in the same place.

- So what are they? It turns out they turned it into a stationary firing point?

- Yes sir. To a stationary firing point.

- How is this known?

“They are doing excavation work around it.

- Are they burying them?

- Yes sir.

- Or maybe they want to take him out?

- No way. They brought him ammunition in a lorry just when we were there.

– Did you see it yourself?

- Yes sir. With my own eyes. They were unloading boxes. That's when we spotted it.

- Fine. Nothing else.

- Exactly! Exactly! - Captain Akhunbaev exclaimed joyfully through his teeth and put a small red diamond on the map.

And then suddenly, clarifying the position of some target, Captain Enakiev, making his polite but firm stopping gesture, knelt down in front of the stereo tube and - as it seemed to Captain Akhunbaev, for a very long time - scoured the foggy, layered horizon, every now and then coping with card and applying a celluloid circle to it. At this time, Akhunbaev was ready to grind his teeth with impatience and did not grind only because he knew his friend too well. Creak or don’t creak, it still won’t help.

One glance at Captain Enakiev was enough, at his old, but exceptionally neat, well-fitting overcoat with black buttonholes and gold buttons, at his hard cap with a lacquer strap, a black band and a straight square visor, pulled slightly over his eyes, at his flask, neatly trimmed with soldier's cloth, on an electric flashlight attached to the second button of his overcoat, on his strong, but thin boots, polished to a shine in all weathers, in order to understand all the conscientiousness, all the precision and all the inflexibility of this man.

The morning was gray and cold. The frost that fell at dawn lay fragile on the ground and did not melt for a long time. It slowly evaporated in the damp blue air, cloudy like soapy water. The trees at the edge did not move. But this impression was deceptive. The top of the pine tree swayed in a circle, and the platform swayed along with it, as if it were a raft that was floating smoothly around a wide, slow whirlpool.

The air shuddered all the time from cannon shots and explosions. This constant and uneven state of the air could not only be felt. You could kind of see him. With each blow, the trees in the forest shook, and the yellow leaves began to fall thicker, spinning and swaying.

3

To an unaccustomed person it might seem that there was a big battle going on and that he was in the very center of this battle. In fact, it was an ordinary artillery firefight, not even very strong. Some battery, ours or German, wanting to shoot at a new target, fired several shells. This battery was immediately spotted by enemy observers, and immediately some special counter-battery platoon struck it from the depths. This platoon, in turn, began to be hunted. Thus, very soon such a mess was brewing in the area that you could at least plug your ears with cotton wool. From all sides, guns of small calibers, even smaller calibers, medium calibers, larger calibers, finally large, very large, the largest, and sometimes super-powerful guns were firing, barely audibly heard deep in the rear and suddenly with an unexpected howl, grinding, overthrown by a whirlwind their colossal shells into some seemingly innocent forest, above which a rocky cloud, black as anthracite, and riddled in the middle with lightning, rose into the air along with the bushes and trees and fell down.

Sometimes, from somewhere, from an unexpected direction, a fragment would burst in, hit the ground with force, ricochet, spin, crackle, ring, whine like a top, and with a disgusting groan rush away, knocking branches and pine cones from the trees along the way.

However, the people working on the map at the top of the pine tree seemed to hear and see nothing of this. And only occasionally, when in some place the fire became especially frequent, the telephone operator turned the handle of his leather apparatus and said quietly:

- Give me Violet. Is this "Violet"? "Chair" says. Checking the line. What are you doing there?... Is everything quiet yet? OK. Everything is quiet here too. Keep fighting. Goodbye.

When the work was finally finished, Captain Akhunbaev immediately cheered up. He quickly stuffed the map into his field bag, resolutely tied the ribbons of the raincoat around his short neck, jumped onto his short, strong, slightly crooked legs and shouted down to the messenger:

Then he looked at his watch:

- Check it out. I have nine sixteen. You?

“Nine fourteen,” said Captain Enakiev, glancing over his hand.

Captain Akhunbaev made a short, triumphant, guttural sound. His eyes narrowed, sparkling with glossy blackness.

- You're falling behind, Captain Enakiev.

- No way. I'm keeping up. I have it right. You are in a hurry... as usual.

- Zaitsev, exact time! – Akhunbaev shouted excitedly.

The telephone operator immediately called the regiment command post and reported that the time was nine hours and fourteen minutes.

“You took it, god of war,” Akhunbaev said peacefully and, putting his watch to Yenakiev’s watch, moved the hands. “Let it be your way this time.” Goodbye, battalion commander.

Roughly rustling his cloak, he, in one spirit, without making a single stop, went down past the artillerymen who were standing aside, down both stairs, threw the map to the adjutant, jumped on his horse and rushed off, showered with yellow leaves.

After that, Captain Enakiev removed the tight rubber belt from his notebook and moved to the stereo tube. The goals were written down in the book. All these targets were sighted. But Captain Enakiev wanted them to be shot even better. He wanted to ensure that, if necessary, his battery could immediately, from the very first shots, go to kill, without wasting precious time on re-shooting. “Going through the goals” was, of course, not difficult. But he was afraid that his battery, pushed far forward into the infantry line and well hidden, might reveal itself ahead of time. The whole task was precisely to strike completely unexpectedly, at the very last, decisive moment of the battle, and to strike where it was least expected. Such a place, according to Captain Enakiev, was on the right flank of the combat area, between the forks of two roads and the exit to a rather deep gully overgrown with young oak trees.

At the moment there was nothing interesting about this place. It was deserted. There were no firing points or defensive structures on it. Usually on battlefields there are quite a lot of such uninteresting, unremarkable places. The battle passes them by without stopping. Captain Enakiev knew this, but he had a strong, precise imagination.

For the hundredth time, picturing the upcoming battle in all possible details of its development, Captain Enakiev invariably saw the same picture: Akhunbaev’s battalion breaks through the German defensive line and bends the right flank against a possible counterattack. Then he impatiently throws his center forward, consolidates himself on the defensive slope of the high-rise, opposite the fork in the road, and, gradually drawing up reserves, accumulates for a new, decisive blow on the road. It is not far from this place, between the fork in the road and the exit to the ravine, that Captain Akhunbaev stops. He must stop there, as the logic of the battle will require it: it will be necessary to replenish ammunition, pick up the wounded, put the companies in order, and most importantly, rebuild the battle formation in the direction of the next strike. And this requires, although not a lot of time, time. It is impossible that the Germans would not take advantage of this pause. Of course they will. They will throw away the tanks. This is the best time for a tank attack. They will unexpectedly throw out their tank reserve hidden in the beam. And Captain Enakiev had almost no doubt that German tanks would be hidden in the beam, although he had no positive information on this matter. This is what his imagination told him, based on experience, on a subtle understanding of maneuver and on that special, mathematical mindset that always distinguishes a good artillery officer, accustomed to quickly and accurately comparing facts and drawing unmistakable conclusions.

“Or maybe we should still take a risk and try?” - Captain Enakiev asked himself, turning the stereo scope eyepieces over his eyes.

The blurry gray horizon brightened and became denser. The cloudy outlines of objects took on an extremely clear form. The panorama of the area magically came closer to the eyes and clearly stratified into several plans, protruding from one another, like theatrical scenery.

In the foreground, out of focus, the tops of the very forest where the pine tree with the observation post stood stood out dimly and strangely wavy. Even one branch of this pine tree, monstrously close, really stuck out in the eyes with huge clusters of needles and two huge cones.

Behind him was a strip of field. Along the lower edge of this field, with stereoscopic clarity, stretched the wavy line of our leading edge. All his structures were carefully camouflaged, and only a very experienced eye could reveal their presence. Captain Enakiev didn’t so much see as he guessed the locations of embrasures, communication passages, and machine-gun nests.

Along the upper edge of the field, just as clearly and in just as much detail, but much smaller, German trenches stretched parallel to ours. And the dead space between them was so compressed, so reduced by optical approximation, that it seemed as if it did not exist at all.

Even further away, Captain Enakiev saw a watery panorama of the German rear. He walked along it casually. Bare groves, flattened swamps, hills, as if glued one on top of the other, and the ruins of houses quickly flashed by.

And finally, Captain Enakiev returned to that very place between the fork in the road and the narrow gap in the ravine, which was entered in his notebook under the name: “Range finder 17.”

He peered intensely at this unremarkable, deserted place, and his imagination - for the umpteenth time this morning! - this place was inhabited by the moving chains of Akhunbaev and the small silhouettes of German tanks, which suddenly began to crawl out of the mysterious crack of the ravine one after another.

“Or is it better not to?” – thought Enakiev, trying to bring the focus of the stereo scope to this place as accurately as possible. It wasn't indecisiveness. It wasn't hesitation. No. He never hesitated. He did not hesitate now. He weighed. He wanted to find the most correct solution. He wanted to give himself a full account of what was still more profitable for him: to shoot “target number seventeen” with the greatest accuracy, even if for this he had to take the risk of prematurely detecting his battery, or not detecting the battery until the very last minute, at the risk of losing several minutes for adjustments at a critical, perhaps even the decisive moment of the battle.

But at that time voices were heard below, the stairs began to shake, the rattling jingle of spurs was heard, and a young officer, almost a boy, with a dark, snub-nosed face and very black thick eyebrows, jumped out onto the landing, breathing heavily. It was the liaison officer. On his face, which tried its best to be formal and even stern, there was a hot, boyish smile.

He hit his spurs, briefly threw his hand to the visor, as if he had torn it down with force, and handed the package to Captain Enakiev.

- When? – asked Enakiev.

- At nine o'clock forty-five minutes. Signal - two blue rockets and one yellow. It is written there. May I go?

Enakiev looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock thirty-one minutes.

“Go,” he said.

The communications officer slammed his spurs, stretched out, threw his hand to the visor, tore it down with force, turned around with such precision and panache, as if he were not at the top of a tree, but in the canteen of an artillery school, and in one breath he poured down the stairs, tearing off his spurs crossbars and cheerfully cursing.

- Lieutenant Sedykh! - said Enakiev.

- I'm here, comrade captain.

- You heard?

- Yes sir.

- The command post is here. Communication between me and all platoons is telephone. When moving forward, build up the wire without the slightest delay. Don’t tear yourself away from the platoons for even one second. In the event of a telephone connection failure, duplicate on the radio in clear text. Under the commander of each company, appoint two people - one liaison officer, the other an observer. Report any changes in the situation immediately by wire, radio or rockets. Is the task clear?

- Yes sir.

- Any questions?

- No way.

- Take action.

- I obey.

Lieutenant Sedykh went down one step, but stopped:

- Comrade captain, allow me to report. It completely slipped my mind. What do you want to do with the boy?

- With which boy?

Captain Enakiev frowned, but immediately remembered:

They reported to him about the boy, but he had not yet made a decision.

- So what do you have with the boy? Where is he located?

- For now, with me, at the control platoon. From the scouts.

- Has the little one come to his senses?

- It’s like nothing.

-What is he saying?

- He says a lot of things. But Sergeant Egorov knows better.

- Let's get Egorov here.

- Sergeant Egorov! – Lieutenant Sedykh shouted down. - To the battery commander!

- Here! – Egorov immediately responded, and his helmet, covered with branches, appeared above the platform.

- What's wrong with your boy? How is he feeling? Tell us.

Captain Enakiev said not “report”, but “tell.” And in this Sergeant Egorov, always very sensitive to all shades of subordination, sensed permission for the family to speak. His tired eyes, reddened after several sleepless nights, smiled openly and clearly, although his mouth and eyebrows continued to remain serious.

“The matter is well known, comrade captain,” said Yegorov. – My father died at the front in the first days of the war. The village was occupied by the Germans. The mother did not want to give the cow away. The mother was killed. Grandma and little sister died of hunger. One left. Then the village was burned down. I went with my bag to collect the pieces. Somewhere on the road I was caught by field gendarmes. They forcibly sent me to some terrible children's detention center. There, of course, he became infected with scab, caught scabies, suffered from typhus - he almost died, but somehow he managed. Then he ran away. For almost two years he wandered, hid in the forests, and kept wanting to cross the front. Yes, the front was far away then. He became completely wild and overgrown with hair. He became angry. A real wolf cub. I always carried a sharpened nail with me in my bag. He invented such a weapon for himself. I definitely wanted to kill some Fritz with this nail. We also found an ABC book in his bag. Torn, shabby. “What do you need an ABC book for?” - we ask. “So as not to forget how to read and write,” he says. Well what can you say!

- How old is he?

- He says twelve, thirteen. Although it looks like there’s no way to give it more than ten. Hungry, emaciated. All skin and bones.

“Yes,” said Captain Enakiev thoughtfully. - Twelve years old. Therefore, when all this began, he was not yet nine.

“I’ve been drinking since childhood,” Egorov said, sighing.

They paused, listening to the sounds of artillery fire, which began to noticeably subside, as always happens before the start of a battle.

Soon there was a tense, deceptive silence.

- So what, good guy? – asked captain Enakiev.

- Wonderful boy! So smart, so smart! - Yegorov exclaimed in a completely homely manner.

The captain frowned and turned away.

Captain Enakiev once had a boy, a son, Kostya, although he was a little younger - now he would have been seven years old. Captain Enakiev had a young wife and mother. And he lost all this on one day three years ago. He left his apartment in Baranovichi, called to the battery in alarm, and since then he has never seen his house, his son, his wife, or his mother. And he will never see it.

All three of them died on the road to Minsk, on that terrible June morning of forty-one, when German attack aircraft attacked defenseless people - old people, women, children, walking along the Minsk highway from the robbers who had broken into their native country.

An eyewitness, his old comrade, who happened to his unit near the highway at that time, told Captain Enakiev about their death. He did not convey details that were too terrible. Yes, captain Enakiev didn’t ask questions. He didn't have the heart to ask questions. But his imagination immediately painted a picture of their death. And this picture never left him, it always stood before his eyes. Fire, shine, explosions tearing the air to shreds, machine-gun bursts in the air, a maddened crowd with baskets, suitcases, strollers, bundles and a small four-year-old boy in a blue sailor's cap, lying around like a bloody rag, with his waxen arms outstretched between the roots of the torn out of the ground. pine trees Captain Enakiev saw especially clearly this blue sailor’s cap with new ribbons, sewn by his grandmother from his mother’s old jacket.

This summer, despite his thirty-two years, Captain Enakiev turned a little gray at the temples, became drier, more boring, and more stern. Few people in the regiment knew about his grief. He didn't tell anyone about it. But, left alone with himself, the captain always thought about his wife, about his mother, about his son. He always thought of his son as if he were alive.

The boy grew in his imagination. Every minute the captain knew exactly how many years and months he would be now, what he would look like, what he would say, how he would study. Now his son, of course, would already know how to read and write, and his sailor’s cap would no longer suit him. This cap would now lie in his mother’s chest of drawers among other things that his Kostya had already outgrown, and perhaps his grandmother would now use it to make some other useful thing - a bag for feathers or a cloth for cleaning shoes.

- What is his name? - said captain Enakiev.

- Just Vanya?

“Just Vanya,” Sergeant Yegorov answered cheerfully, and his face broke into a wide, kind smile. – And the last name is so appropriate: Vanya Solntsev.

“Well, then,” said Enakiev, after thinking, “we’ll have to send him to the rear.”

Egorov's face fell.

- It's a pity, comrade captain.

- So how is it a pity? – Yenakiev frowned sternly. - Why is it a pity?

- Where will he go in the rear? He has no relatives there. An orphan. It will disappear.

- It won’t be lost. There are special orphanages for orphans.

“That’s how it is, of course,” said Egorov, still maintaining a family tone, although firm, commanding notes were already heard in Captain Enakiev’s voice.

“That’s how it is,” Yegorov repeated, shifting on the shaky steps of the stairs. “And yet, how can I say this, we were already thinking of keeping him with us, with the control platoon.” A very smart guy. A born intelligence officer.

“Well, you’re just fantasizing,” said Enakiev irritably.

- No, comrade captain. A very independent boy. He navigates the terrain just like an adult scout. Even better. He asks himself. “Train me,” he says, “uncle,” to become a scout. I will, he says, scout out your targets. “I’m here,” he says, “I know every bush.”

The captain grinned:

– He asks himself... He doesn’t ask for much. Not allowed. And how can we take responsibility? After all, this is a small person, a living soul. Well, how will something happen to him? It happens in war that you can get shot. Isn’t that right, Egorov?

- Yes sir.

- You see. No no. It’s too early for him to fight, let him grow up first. He needs to study now. With the first car, send him to the rear.

Egorov hesitated.

“He’ll run away, comrade captain,” he said uncertainly.

- So how does it run away? Why do you think so?

“If,” he says, “you start sending me to the rear, I will still run away from you along the road.”

- Did you say so?

– That’s what he said.

“Well, we’ll see about that,” Captain Enakiev said dryly. “I order him to be sent to the rear.” He has no business hanging around here.

The family conversation is over. Sergeant Egorov stood up straight:

- I obey.

“That’s it,” Captain Enakiev said briefly, as if he had cut him off.

- May I go?

And while Sergeant Yegorov was going down the stairs, a pale blue star slowly flew out from behind the cloudy wall of the distant forest. Before it had time to go out, another blue star rolled out in its wake, followed by a third yellow star.

“Battery, ready for battle,” said Captain Enakiev quietly.

- Battery, ready to fight! – the telephone operator shouted loudly into the receiver.

And this ringing exclamation immediately filled the ominously silent forest with a hundred near and far echoes.

4

Meanwhile, Vanya Solntsev, his bare feet tucked under him, was sitting on spruce branches in the scouts’ tent and eating from a kettle with a large wooden spoon an unusually hot and incredibly tasty crumble of potatoes, onions, stewed pork, pepper, garlic and bay leaves.

He ate with such hasty greed that unchewed pieces of meat kept stopping in his throat. The sharp, hard ears moved from tension under the braids of gray hair that had not been cut for a long time.

Raised in a sedate peasant family, Vanya Solntsev knew very well that he ate extremely indecently. Decency demanded that he eat slowly, occasionally wiping the spoon with bread, and not sniffle or slurp too much.

Decency also required that from time to time he would move his bowler away from him and say:

“I am very grateful for the bread, for the salt. I’m full, that’s enough,” and did not begin to continue eating until he was asked three times: “You are welcome, eat more.”

Vanya understood all this, but he couldn’t help himself. Hunger was stronger than all rules, all decency.

Holding tightly with one hand to the pot that was pushed close, Vanya quickly moved the spoon with his other hand, while at the same time not taking his eyes off the long slices of rye bread, for which there were no longer enough hands.

Holding tightly with one hand to the pot that was pushed close, Vanya quickly moved the spoon with his other hand...

From time to time his blue eyes, as if slightly faded from exhaustion, glanced with timid apology at the soldiers who fed him.

There were two of them in the tent: the same scouts who, together with Sergeant Yegorov, picked him up in the forest. One is a bony giant with a good-natured gap-toothed mouth and exorbitantly long, rake-like arms, nicknamed “skeleton,” Corporal Bidenko, and the other is also a corporal and also a giant, but a giant of a completely different kind - or rather, not a giant, but a hero : a smooth, well-fed, round-faced Siberian Gorbunov with a reddened blush on his thick cheeks, with blond eyelashes and light pig stubble on his pink head, nicknamed Chaldon.

It was not without difficulty that both giants fit into a tent designed for six people. In any case, they had to press their legs tightly to prevent them from crawling out.

Before the war, Bidenko was a Donbass miner. The coal dust was so deeply ingrained into his dark skin that it still had a bluish tint.

Gorbunov was a Transbaikal lumberjack before the war. It seemed that he still smelled strongly of vigorous, freshly chopped birch firewood. And in general, he was all sort of white, birch.

They both sat on fragrant spruce branches in quilts draped over their heroic shoulders, and watched with pleasure as Vanya swallowed the baby.

Sometimes, noticing that the boy was embarrassed by his indecent gluttony, the sociable and talkative Gorbunov would kindly remark:

- You, shepherd boy, nothing. Don't be embarrassed. Eat to your heart's content. If it's not enough, we'll give you more. We have a firm grip on grub.

Vanya ate, licked the spoon, put large pieces of soft soldier’s bread with a sour chestnut crust into his mouth, and it seemed to him that he had been living in a tent with these kind giants for a long time. Somehow I couldn’t believe that just recently – yesterday – he was making his way through a terrible, cold forest, alone in the whole world, at night, hungry, sick, hunted, like a wolf cub, seeing nothing ahead but death.

He couldn’t believe that three years of poverty, humiliation, constant oppressive fear, terrible mental depression and emptiness were behind him.

For the first time in these three years, Vanya was among people who did not need to be feared. It was wonderful in the tent. Although the weather was bad and cloudy, an even, cheerful light, similar to sunlight, penetrated into the tent through the yellow canvas.

True, thanks to the presence of giants, the tent was a bit cramped, but how neatly, sensibly everything was laid out and hung!

Every thing was placed in its place. Well-cleaned and greased machine guns hung on yellow sticks that propped up the tent from the inside. Overcoats and raincoats, folded evenly, without a single fold, lay on fresh spruce and juniper branches. Gas masks and duffel bags, placed at the heads instead of pillows, were covered with clean, harsh wipes. When leaving the tent there was a bucket covered with plywood. Mugs made from tin cans, celluloid soap dishes, tubes of toothpaste and toothbrushes in multi-colored cases with holes were placed in a large order on the plywood. There was even a shaving brush in an aluminum cup, and a small round mirror hanging. There were even two shoe brushes stuck into each other with bristles, and next to them was a box of polish. Of course, there was also a bat lantern there.

The outside of the tent was carefully dug in with a ditch to prevent rainwater from flowing in. All the pegs were intact and firmly driven into the ground. All panels are tightly and evenly stretched. Everything was exactly as it should be according to the instructions.

It was not for nothing that the scouts were famous throughout the battery for their thriftiness. They always had a hefty emergency supply of sugar, crackers, and lard. At any moment you could find a needle, thread, button or a good brew of tea. There is nothing to say about tobacco. Smoke was available in large quantities and of the most varied varieties: simple factory shag, Penza samosad, light Sukhumi tobacco, Putin cigarettes, and even small captured cigars, which the intelligence officers did not respect and smoked in the most extreme cases, and then with disgust.

But this was not the only thing the scouts of the entire battery were famous for.

First of all, they were famous for their military deeds, known far beyond the borders of their unit. No one could compare with them in audacity and intelligence skill. Climbing into the enemy rear, they obtained such information that sometimes even the division headquarters threw up their hands. And the head of the second department did not call them anything other than “these professors of Captain Enakiev.”

In a word, they fought heroically.

But they are used to resting after their hard and dangerous work.

There were only six of them, not counting Sergeant Egorov. They went on reconnaissance mostly in pairs, every two days to the third. One day the couple was assigned to duty, and one day the couple rested. As for Sergeant Egorov, no one knew when he was resting.

Gorbunov and Bidenko, bosom buddies and constant partners, were resting today. And although there was a battle going on in the morning, the air in the forest was shaking, the earth was shaking, and every minute the low, deafening noise of stormtroopers going to or from work rang through the treetops, both scouts serenely enjoyed a well-deserved rest in the company of Vanya, whom they had already fallen in love with. and even give him the nickname “shepherd.”

Indeed, in his brown homespun trousers, dyed with onion skins, in a torn jacket, with a sack over his shoulder, the barefoot, bare-haired boy looked just like the shepherd boy he was depicted in the old primers. Even his face - dark, lean, with a beautiful straight nose and large eyes under a cap of hair that resembled the thatched roof of an old hut - was exactly like that of a village shepherd.

Having emptied the pot, Vanya wiped it dry with a crust. He wiped the spoon with the same crust, ate the crust, stood up, bowed sedately to the giants and said, lowering his eyelashes:

- We are very grateful. I'm very pleased with you.

- Maybe you want more?

- No, I'm full.

“Otherwise we can put you another pot,” said Gorbunov, winking, not without boasting. “It means nothing to us.” Eh, shepherd boy?

“It doesn’t bother me anymore,” Vanya said shyly, and his blue eyes suddenly flashed a quick, mischievous look from under his eyelashes.

– If you don’t want it, whatever you want. Your will. We have this rule: we don’t force anyone,” said Bidenko, known for his fairness.

But the vain Gorbunov, who loved for all people to admire the life of the scouts, said:

- Well, Vanya, how did you like our grub?

“Good food,” said the boy, putting a spoon in the pot, handle down, and collecting bread crumbs from the Suvorov Onslaught newspaper, spread out instead of a tablecloth.

- Right, good? – Gorbunov perked up. “Brother, you won’t find such grub anywhere in the division.” Famous grub. You, brother, are the main thing, stick with us, the scouts. You will never be lost with us. Will you stick with us?

“I will,” the boy said cheerfully.

- That's right, and you won't get lost. We'll wash you off in the bathhouse. We'll cut your locks. We'll arrange some uniforms so that you have the proper military appearance.

“And, uncle, will you take me on reconnaissance missions?”

“And we’ll take you on reconnaissance missions.” Let's make you a famous intelligence officer.

- I, uncle, am small. “I can climb everywhere,” Vanya said with joyful readiness. “I know every bush around here.”

– It’s also expensive.

– Will you teach me how to fire from a machine gun?

- From what. When the time comes, we will teach you.

“I wish I could just shoot once, uncle,” said Vanya, looking greedily at the machine guns swinging on their belts from the incessant cannon fire.

- You'll shoot. Don't be afraid. This won't happen. We will teach you all military science. Our first duty, of course, is to enroll you in all types of allowances.

- How is it, uncle?

- It’s very simple, brother. Sergeant Egorov will report about you to Lieutenant Sedykh. Lieutenant Sedykh will report to the battery commander, Captain Enakiev, Captain Enakiev will order you to be included in the order. From this, it means that all types of allowance will go to you: clothing, welding, money. Do you understand?

- I see, uncle.

- This is how it is done here, among the scouts... Wait! Where are you going?

- Wash the dishes, uncle. Our mother always ordered us to wash the dishes after ourselves and then put them in the closet.

“She ordered correctly,” Gorbunov said sternly. – It’s the same in military service.

“There are no porters in military service,” the fair Bidenko edifyingly noted.

“However, wait a little longer to wash the dishes, we’ll drink tea now,” Gorbunov said smugly. – Do you respect drinking tea?

“I respect you,” said Vanya.

- Well, you’re doing the right thing. For us, as scouts, this is how it’s supposed to be: as soon as we eat, we immediately drink tea. It is forbidden! - Bidenko said. “We drink extra, of course,” he added indifferently. – We don’t take this into account.

Soon a large copper kettle appeared in the tent - an object of special pride for the scouts, and also a source of eternal envy for the rest of the batteries.

It turned out that the scouts really didn’t take sugar into account.

The silent Bidenko untied his duffel bag and placed a huge handful of refined sugar on the Suvorov Onslaught. Before Vanya had time to blink an eye, Gorbunov poured two large breasts of sugar into his mug, however, noticing the expression of delight on the boy’s face, he splashed a third breast. Know us, the scouts!

Vanya grabbed the tin mug with both hands. He even closed his eyes with pleasure. He felt like he was in an extraordinary, fairy-tale world.

Everything around was fabulous. And this tent, as if illuminated by the sun in the middle of a cloudy day, and the roar of a close battle, and the kind giants throwing handfuls of refined sugar, and the mysterious “all types of allowances” promised to him - clothing, food, money - and even the words “pork stew” printed in large black letters on the mug.

- Like? – asked Gorbunov, proudly admiring the pleasure with which the boy sipped the tea with carefully stretched lips.

Vanya couldn’t even answer this question intelligently. His lips were busy fighting the tea, hot as fire. His heart was full of wild joy that he would stay with the scouts, with these wonderful people who promised to give him a haircut, give him uniform, and teach him how to fire a machine gun.

All the words were mixed up in his head. He just nodded his head gratefully, raised his eyebrows high and rolled his eyes, thereby expressing the highest degree of pleasure and gratitude.

“He’s a child,” Bidenko sighed pitifully and subtly, twisting a pretty goat’s leg with his huge, rough, as if sooty fingers and carefully pouring Penza samosad into it from a pouch.

Meanwhile, the sounds of battle had already changed their character several times.

At first they were heard close and moved evenly, like waves. Then they moved away a little and weakened. But now they raged with new, tripled force. Among them, a new, hasty, seemingly chaotic roar of aerial bombs was heard, which kept falling and falling somewhere in a heap, in one place, as if hammering on the shaking earth with monstrous sledgehammers.

“Our people are diving,” Bidenko noted casually, listening in the middle of the conversation.

“They hit well,” Gorbunov said approvingly.

This went on for quite some time.

Then there was a short respite. It became so quiet that the solid sound of a woodpecker was clearly heard in the forest, as if telegraphing in Morse code.

While the silence continued, everyone was silent and listened.

Then from afar came the crackling sound of rifles. She grew stronger and stronger. Its individual sounds began to merge. Finally they merged. Immediately along the entire front, machine guns began to rattle in dozens of places. And the formidable battle machine suddenly groaned, whistled, howled, and clattered like a rotary machine in full swing.

And in this merciless, mechanical noise, only a very experienced ear could catch the gentle, consonant chorus of human voices, somewhere very far away, singing “a-a-a...”.

“The queen of the fields went on the attack,” said Gorbunov. “Now the god of war will sing along with her.”

And, as if to confirm his words, again hundreds of guns of various calibers struck from all sides in different ways.

Bidenko listened attentively for a long time, turning his ear towards the battle.

“You can’t hear our battery,” he finally said.

- Yes, he is silent.

“I suppose our captain is waiting.”

- It's as usual. But then you’ll gasp...

Vanya looked from one giant to another with his blue, frightened eyes, trying to understand from the expressions on their faces whether what was being done was good for us or bad. But I couldn’t understand. But I didn’t dare ask.

“Uncle,” he finally said, turning to Gorbunov, who seemed kinder to him, “who is defeating whom: are we the Germans or the German is us?”

Gorbunov laughed and lightly slapped the boy on the back of the neck:

Bidenko said seriously:

“You, Chaldon, would probably run to the radio operators and find out what you hear there.”

But at that time the hurried steps of a man who tripped over a peg were heard, and Sergeant Egorov entered the tent, bending over.

- Gorbunov!

- Get ready. Kuzminsky was just killed in the infantry chain. You will take his place.

– Our Kuzminsky?

- Yes, with a burst from a machine gun. Eleven bullets. Hurry up.

While Gorbunov, bent over, hastily put on his overcoat and threw equipment over his head, Sergeant Egorov and Corporal Bidenko silently looked at the place where the now killed scout Kuzminsky had previously been located.

This place was no different from other places. It was just as neatly - without a single wrinkle - covered with a green raincoat, and at the head there was a duffel bag covered with a harsh cleaning cloth; only on the cleaning tray were two triangular letters and an issue of the multi-colored magazine “Red Army Man,” brought by the field postman in Kuzminsky’s absence.

Vanya saw Kuzminsky only once, at dawn. Kuzminsky was in a hurry to get to his shift. Just like Gorbunov now, Kuzminsky, bent over, put on equipment over his head and straightened the folds of his overcoat from under a revolver holster with a large ring of a copper ramrod.

Kuzminsky's overcoat smelled coarsely and deliciously of soldiers' cabbage soup. But Vanya did not have time to look at Kuzminsky himself, since Kuzminsky immediately left. He left without saying goodbye to anyone, like a person leaves, knowing that he will return soon. Now everyone knew that he would never return, and silently looked at his vacated place. The tent felt somehow empty, boring and cloudy.

Vanya carefully reached out his hand and touched the fresh, sticky issue of “Red Army Man”. Only now did Sergeant Yegorov notice Vanya; the boy expected to see a smile and prepared to smile himself. But Sergeant Yegorov looked at him sternly, and Vanya felt that something was wrong.

- Are you still here? - said Egorov.

“Here,” the boy whispered guiltily, although he did not feel any guilt.

“We’ll have to send him,” said Sergeant Egorov, frowning exactly as Captain Enakiev frowned. - Bidenko!

- Get ready.

“The battery commander ordered the boy to be sent to the rear. You will deliver him with a passing vehicle to the second echelon of the front. There you will hand it over to the commandant against receipt. Let him send him to some orphanage. He has no business hanging around with us. Not allowed.

- On you! – Bidenko said with undisguised grief.

- Captain Enakiev gave orders.

- It’s a pity. Such a smart boy.

- It’s a pity, not a pity, but it’s not supposed to be.

Sergeant Egorov frowned even more. He himself was sorry to part with the boy. To himself, even at night, he decided to keep Vanya with him as a liaison and, over time, make him a good intelligence officer.

But the commander's order was not subject to discussion. Captain Enakiev knows better. It is said - do it.

“It’s not allowed,” Yegorov said again, emphasizing in an imperious and harsh tone that the issue had been finally resolved. - Get ready, Bidenko.

- I obey.

“Well, then, so and so,” said Gorbunov, straightening the folds of his overcoat from under the limp, worn-to-gloss revolver holster. - Don't bother, shepherd. Once Captain Enakiev ordered, it must be carried out. This is military discipline. At least you can ride in a car. Is not it? Goodbye brother.

And with these words, Gorbunov quickly, but without fuss, left the tent.

Vanya stood small, sad, confused. Biting his lips, swollen with fever, he looked first at Bidenko, who was getting dressed, then at Sergeant Yegorov, who was sitting on the bed of the murdered Kuzminsky with half-closed eyes, throwing his hands between his knees, and, taking advantage of the free moment, dozed off.

Both of them understood perfectly well what was going on in the boy’s soul. Just now, just two minutes ago, everything was so good, so wonderful, and suddenly everything became so bad.

Oh, what a wonderful, what a delightful life began for Vanya! Make friends with brave, generous intelligence officers; have lunch and drink tea with them, go on reconnaissance missions with them, take a steam bath, fire from a machine gun; sleep with them in the same tent; get uniforms - boots, a tunic with shoulder straps and guns on the shoulder straps, an overcoat... maybe even a compass and a revolver with cartridges...

For three years Vanya lived like a stray dog, without a home, without a family. He was afraid of people and felt hunger and constant terror all the time. Finally, he found kind, good people who saved him, warmed him, fed him, and loved him. And at that very moment, when everything seemed to be so wonderful, when he finally got into his own family - fuck! - and all this is missing. All this dissipated like fog.

“Uncle,” he said, swallowing tears and carefully touching Bidenko’s overcoat, “and uncle!” Listen, don't take me. No need.

- Ordered.

- Uncle Egorov... Comrade Sergeant! Don't tell me to send you away. It’s better that I live with you,” the boy said with despair. - I will always clean your pots and carry water...

“It’s not allowed, it’s not allowed,” Yegorov said tiredly. - Well, what are you doing, Bidenko! Ready?

- So take the boy and go. Now, just from the regimental exchange point, a five-ton truck with spent cartridges is leaving on its return flight. Grab some more. And then ours moved four kilometers forward. Are fixed. Now the rear will begin to catch up. Where are we going then? With God blessing!

- Uncle! – Vanya shouted.

“It’s not allowed,” Yegorov snapped and turned away so as not to be upset.

The boy realized that it was all over. He realized that between him and these people, who so recently loved him like their own son, good-naturedly called him a shepherd, now a wall had grown.

From the expression of their eyes, from their intonations, from their gestures, the boy felt for sure that they continued to love and pity him. But he also probably felt something else: he felt that the wall between them was insurmountable. At least bang your head against it.

Then suddenly pride began to speak in the boy’s soul. His face became angry. It seemed to immediately lose weight. The small chin tucked up, the eyes stubbornly sparkled from under the brows. His teeth clenched.

“I won’t go,” the boy said defiantly.

“You’ll probably go,” Bidenko said good-naturedly. - Look, you’re so furious. "I will not go"! I’ll put you in the car and drive you - that’s how you go.

- But I’ll still run away.

- Well, brother, it’s unlikely. No one has ever run away from me. We'd better go, otherwise we won't take the car.

Bidenko lightly took the boy by the sleeve, but the boy angrily broke out:

– Don’t touch me, I’ll do it myself.

And, tenaciously moving his bare feet, he walked out of the tent into the forest.

And in the forest, the transporters were already tying luggage onto the carts, the drivers were starting the cars, the soldiers were pulling tent stakes out of the ground, and the telephone operators were winding wires onto spools.

A cook in a white coat over his greatcoat was hastily chopping bright red lamb on a tree stump with an ax.

Empty boxes, straw, tin cans with torn edges, pieces of newspapers were scattered everywhere, and in general everything indicated that the rear had already set off after the advancing units.

5

The next day, late in the evening, Bidenko returned to his unit. He was very angry and hungry.

During this time, great changes took place at the front. The offensive unfolded quickly. Pursuing the enemy, the army advanced far to the west.

Where the battle took place yesterday, today the second echelons were stationed. Where the second echelons stood yesterday, today it was quiet and deserted. And the front line passed where just yesterday the Germans had deep rears.

The forest was left far behind. The battle that had begun there now continued in the open, among fields, swamps and small hills overgrown with bushes.

This time the reconnaissance team was no longer housed in a tent, but occupied a German officer’s dugout - a beautiful, solid structure, covered with thick logs in four layers and covered with turf on top.

Economic intelligence officers spotted this dugout even when it was in a German location and German officers still lived in it. While spotting German firing positions, the scouts, just in case, also spotted this dugout, which they really liked even then.

When Bidenko, without asking anyone along the way and solely guided by his unerring instincts as a scout, reached the dugout, it was already completely dark.

There was a booming roar and growl on the western horizon. There, long crimson flashes continuously flashed and twitched, reflected in the ominous clouds.

Going down the earthen steps covered with planks, Bidenko entered a spacious dugout. The first thing that caught his eye was a new carbide lamp, pouring from under the ceiling a very bright, but somehow caustic, chemical, deathly greenish light. Apparently, the Germans in a hurry did not have time to carry it away.

In the walls, in special wooden niches, in neat rows like books, stood German hand grenades with long wooden handles.

In the middle stood a sturdy dining table driven into the ground. A red-hot cast-iron German camp stove was burning in the corner, and next to it there was a small supply of firewood, also prepared by the Germans.

As you can see, the Germans settled here firmly, like a business owner, and expected to spend the winter. In any case, they even hung a picture in a wooden frame on the wall. It was a large colored photograph of a beautiful house with a Gothic roof, surrounded by brightly blooming apple trees. Through all this sweet pink and white picture there was a red printed inscription: “Frühling im Deutschland,” which meant: “Spring in Germany.”

In all other respects, the dugout already had a completely lived-in Russian appearance: at the head of the bunks, covered without a single wrinkle with Russian artillery overcoats, blankets and tents, there were green duffel bags covered with clean wipers; the famous copper kettle was warming on the stove; on the table covered with sheets of "Suvorov's Onslaught", wooden spoons and mugs were placed in strict order around a large loaf of bread, and well-cleaned, greasy Russian weapons hung in the corners under green Russian helmets.

The dugout was full of people. There was that rare occasion when all the scouts gathered together. Bidenko also noticed many strangers. These were acquaintances and fellow countrymen from other platoons. They came to the hospitable, wealthy intelligence officers to smoke good tobacco and drink tea from the famous teapot.

Judging by all this, Bidenko realized that during his absence there had been a change of units in the division and that their battery was currently in reserve.

Almost everyone smoked, and in the hotly heated dugout there was that same strong soldier’s spirit about which they usually say: “At least hang an ax.”

- Oh, great, Vasya! - seeing his friend, said Gorbunov, who at that time was doing his favorite thing - treating the guests.

Holding the loaf to his stomach, he cut thick slices of bread.

- Well, did you rat out the boy? Sit down at the table. Just in time for tea.

He was without a tunic, in only a calico shirt, in the unbuttoned collar of which his powerful, fat, pink chest was visible.

- And we, brother, are now in reserve. We're walking. Undress, Vasya, warm yourself. Here is your bed, I cleaned it. Well, how did you like our new apartment? Brother, you won’t find an apartment like this anywhere in the entire division. Special!

Bidenko silently undressed, walked up to his bed, angrily threw his equipment and overcoat onto it, squatted down in front of the stove and extended his large black hands towards it.

- Well, what do you hear at the front headquarters, Vasya? Haven't the Germans asked for peace yet?

Bidenko was silent, not looking at anyone and snoring gloomily.

– Maybe you’ll light a cigarette? - said Gorbunov, noticing that his friend was very out of sorts.

- Oh, it all went to hell! - Bidenko muttered unexpectedly, went to his bed and sluggishly fell on his stomach.

It was clear that some kind of trouble had happened to Bidenko, but the intelligence officers considered it extremely indecent to show excessive curiosity about other people’s affairs. If a person is silent, it means he does not consider it necessary to speak. And if he doesn’t think it’s necessary, then he doesn’t need it. If he wants, he will tell you himself. And there is no point in pulling a person’s tongue.

Therefore, Gorbunov, not at all offended and pretending that he did not notice anything, busied himself with the housework, continuing to tell the batteries about how he was almost killed yesterday in the infantry chain, where he took the place of the killed Kuzminsky.

– I, you understand, just took up the rocket launcher. I'm going to give one green so that ours will move the fire a little further. When suddenly she’s next to me, it’s enough! It exploded right under my feet. The air is blowing me away! Completely knocked off my feet. I don't understand where is up and where is down. Even my head went dark for one minute. I open my eyes, and the earth is there, right here, right next to my eye. It turns out that I’m lying down. – Gorbunov laughed a happy laugh. “I feel like I’m all beaten up.” Well, I think it's done. I won't get up. I look around myself and don’t notice anything like that. There is no blood anywhere on me. So, I think it was me who hit me with the ground. But there are six holes in the overcoat. The helmet has a dent the size of a fist. And, you understand, the heel on the right boot was completely torn off. As if he never happened. It was just cut off like a razor. Such nonsense happens! And on the body, as if to laugh, not a single scratch. This is how the heel came off. Look, guys.

Smiling joyfully, Gorbunov showed the guests the damaged boot. The guests examined him carefully. And some even politely touched it with their hands.

“Yes, that’s a big deal,” one remarked matter-of-factly.

“It happens,” said another, looking sideways at the refined sugar that Gorbunov was laying out on the table. - And the same thing happened to us. When we crossed the Berezina near Borisov, in our platoon Red Army soldier Tyotkin had his waist belt cut by a shrapnel. And he himself wasn’t even affected. You will never take this into account.

Meanwhile, Vanya Solntsev, his bare feet tucked under him, was sitting on spruce branches in the scouts’ tent and eating from a kettle with a large wooden spoon an unusually hot and incredibly tasty mole of potatoes, onions, pork stew, pepper, garlic and bay leaf.

He ate with such hasty greed that unchewed pieces of meat kept stopping in his throat. The sharp, hard ears moved from the tension under the braids of gray hair that had not been cut for a long time.

Raised in a sedate peasant family, Vanya Solntsev knew very well that he ate extremely indecently. Decency demanded that he eat slowly, occasionally wiping the spoon with bread, and not sniffle or slurp too much.

Decency also required that from time to time he move the pot away from him and say: “I am very grateful for the bread, for the salt. I’m full, that’s enough,” and did not begin to continue eating until he was asked three times: “You are welcome, eat more.”

Vanya understood all this, but he couldn’t help himself. Hunger was stronger than all rules, all decency.

Holding tightly with one hand to the pot that was pushed close, Vanya quickly moved the spoon with his other hand, while at the same time not taking his eyes off the long slices of rye bread, for which there were no longer enough hands.

From time to time his blue eyes, as if slightly faded from exhaustion, glanced with timid apology at the soldiers who fed him.

There were two of them in the tent: the same scouts who, together with Sergeant Yegorov, picked him up in the forest. One is a bony giant with a good-natured gap-toothed mouth and exorbitantly long, rake-like arms, nicknamed “skeleton,” Corporal Bidenko, and the other is also a corporal and also a giant, but a giant of a completely different kind - or rather, not a giant, but a hero : a smooth, well-fed, round-faced Siberian Gorbunov with a reddened blush on his thick cheeks, with blond eyelashes and light pig stubble on his pink head, nicknamed Chaldon.

It was not without difficulty that both giants fit into a tent designed for six people. In any case, they had to press their legs tightly to prevent them from crawling out.

Before the war, Bidenko was a Donbass miner. The coal dust was so deeply ingrained into his dark skin that it still had a bluish tint.

Gorbunov was a Transbaikal lumberjack before the war. It seemed that he still smelled strongly of vigorous, freshly chopped birch firewood. And in general, he was all sort of white, birch.

They both sat on fragrant spruce branches in quilts draped over their heroic shoulders, and watched with pleasure as Vanya swallowed the baby.

Sometimes, noticing that the boy was embarrassed by his indecent gluttony, the sociable and talkative Gorbunov would kindly remark:

You, shepherd boy, nothing. Don't be embarrassed. Eat to your heart's content. If it's not enough, we'll give you more. We have a firm grip on grub.

Vanya ate, licked the spoon, put large pieces of soft soldier’s bread with a sour chestnut crust into his mouth, and it seemed to him that he had been living in a tent with these kind giants for a long time. Somehow I couldn’t believe that just recently - yesterday - he was making his way through a terrible, cold forest, alone in the whole world, at night, hungry, sick, hunted, like a wolf cub, seeing nothing ahead but death.

He couldn’t believe that three years of poverty, humiliation, constant oppressive fear, terrible mental depression and emptiness were behind him.

For the first time in these three years, Vanya was among people who did not need to be feared. It was wonderful in the tent. Although the weather was bad and cloudy, an even, cheerful light, similar to sunlight, penetrated into the tent through the yellow canvas.

True, thanks to the presence of giants, the tent was a bit cramped, but everything was neat, intelligently laid out and hung.

Every thing was placed in its place. Well-cleaned and greased machine guns hung on yellow sticks that propped up the tent from the inside. Overcoats and raincoats, folded evenly, without a single fold, lay on fresh spruce and juniper branches. Gas masks and duffel bags, placed at the heads instead of pillows, were covered with clean, harsh wipes. When leaving the tent there was a bucket covered with plywood. Mugs made from tin cans, celluloid soap dishes, tubes of toothpaste and toothbrushes in multi-colored cases with holes were placed in a large order on the plywood. There was even a shaving brush in an aluminum cup, and a small round mirror hanging. There were even two shoe brushes stuck into each other with bristles, and next to them was a box of polish. Of course, there was also a bat lantern there.

The outside of the tent was carefully dug in with a ditch to prevent rainwater from flowing in. All the pegs were intact and firmly driven into the ground. All panels are tightly and evenly stretched. Everything was exactly as it should be according to the instructions.

It was not for nothing that the scouts were famous throughout the battery for their thriftiness. They always had a hefty emergency supply of sugar, crackers, and lard. At any moment you could find a needle, thread, button or a good brew of tea. There is nothing to say about tobacco. Smoke was available in large quantities and of the most varied varieties: simple factory shag, Penza samosad, light Sukhumi tobacco, Putin cigarettes, and even small captured cigars, which the intelligence officers did not respect and smoked in the most extreme cases, and then with disgust.

But this was not the only thing the scouts of the entire battery were famous for.

First of all, they were famous for their military deeds, known far beyond the borders of their unit. No one could compare with them in audacity and intelligence skill. Climbing into the enemy rear, they obtained such information that sometimes even the division headquarters threw up their hands. And the head of the second department did not call them anything other than “these professors of Captain Enakiev.”

In a word, they fought heroically.

But they are used to resting after their hard and dangerous work.

There were only six of them, not counting Sergeant Egorov. They went on reconnaissance mostly in pairs, every two days to the third. One day the couple was assigned to duty, and one day the couple rested. As for Sergeant Egorov, no one knew when he was resting.

Gorbunov and Bidenko, bosom buddies and constant partners, were resting today. And, although there was a battle going on in the morning, the air in the forest was shaking, the earth was shaking, and every minute the low, deafening noise of stormtroopers going to or from work rang through the treetops, both scouts serenely enjoyed a well-deserved rest in the company of Vanya, which they had already enjoyed fall in love and even give him the nickname “shepherd”.

Indeed, in his brown homespun trousers, dyed with onion skins, in a torn jacket, with a sack over his shoulder, the barefoot, bare-haired boy looked just like the shepherd boy he was depicted in the old primers. Even his face - dark, lean, with a beautiful straight nose and large eyes under a cap of hair that resembled the thatched roof of an old hut - was exactly like that of a village shepherd.

Having emptied the pot, Vanya wiped it dry with a crust. He wiped the spoon with the same crust, ate the crust, stood up, bowed sedately to the giants and said, lowering his eyelashes:

Very grateful. I'm very pleased with you.

Maybe you want more?

No, I'm full.

Otherwise, we can put another pot for you,” Gorbunov said, winking, not without boasting. - This means nothing to us. Eh, shepherd boy?

“He doesn’t bother me anymore,” Vanya said shyly, and his blue eyes suddenly flashed a quick, mischievous glance from under his eyelashes.

If you don't want it, whatever you want. Your will. We have this rule: we don’t force anyone,” said Bidenko, known for his fairness.

But the vain Gorbunov, who loved for all people to admire the life of the scouts, said:

Well, Vanya, how did you like our grub?

“Good grub,” said the boy, putting a spoon in the pot, handle down, and collecting bread crumbs from the Suvorov Onslaught newspaper, spread out instead of a tablecloth.

Right, good? - Gorbunov perked up. - You, brother, won’t find such food from anyone in the division. Famous grub. You, brother, are the main thing, stick with us, the scouts. You will never be lost with us. Will you stick with us?

“I will,” the boy said cheerfully.

That's right, and you won't get lost. We'll wash you off in the bathhouse. We'll cut your locks. We'll arrange some uniforms so that you have the proper military appearance.

And, uncle, will you take me on a reconnaissance mission?

We'll take you on reconnaissance missions. Let's make you a famous intelligence officer.

I, uncle, am small. “I can climb everywhere,” Vanya said with joyful readiness. - I know every bush around here.

It's also expensive.

Will you teach me how to fire from a machine gun?

From what. When the time comes, we'll teach you.

“I wish I could just shoot once, uncle,” said Vanya, looking greedily at the machine guns swinging on their belts from the incessant cannon fire.

You'll shoot. Don't be afraid. This won't happen. We will teach you all military science. Our first duty, of course, is to enroll you in all types of allowances.

How is it, uncle?

This, brother, is very simple. Sergeant Egorov will report about you to Lieutenant Sedykh. Lieutenant Sedykh will report to the battery commander, Captain Enakiev, Captain Enakiev will order you to be included in the order. From this, it means that all types of allowance will go to you: clothing, welding, money. Do you understand?

Got it, uncle.

This is how we do it, scouts... Wait a minute! Where are you going?

Wash the dishes, uncle. Our mother always ordered us to wash the dishes after ourselves and then put them in the closet.

“She ordered correctly,” Gorbunov said sternly. - It’s the same in military service.

There are no porters in military service,” the fair Bidenko edifyingly noted.

However, wait a little longer to wash the dishes, we’ll drink tea now,” Gorbunov said smugly. - Do you respect drinking tea?

“I respect you,” said Vanya.

Well, you're doing the right thing. For us, as scouts, this is how it’s supposed to be: as soon as we eat, we immediately drink tea. It is forbidden! - Bidenko said. “We’ll drink extra, of course,” he added indifferently. - We don't take this into account.

Soon a large copper kettle appeared in the tent - an object of special pride for the scouts, and a source of eternal envy for the rest of the batteries.

It turned out that the scouts really didn’t take sugar into account.

The silent Bidenko untied his duffel bag and placed a huge handful of refined sugar on the Suvorov Onslaught. Before Vanya had time to blink an eye, Gorbunov poured two large breasts of sugar into his mug, however, noticing the expression of delight on the boy’s face, he splashed a third breast. Know us, the scouts!

Vanya grabbed the tin mug with both hands. He even closed his eyes with pleasure. He felt as if he were in an extraordinary, fairy-tale world. Everything around was fabulous. And this tent, as if illuminated by the sun in the middle of a cloudy day, and the roar of a close battle, and the kind giants throwing handfuls of refined sugar, and the mysterious “all types of allowances” promised to him - clothing, food, money - and even the words “stewed pork” printed in large black letters on the mug.

Like? - asked Gorbunov, proudly admiring the pleasure with which the boy sipped the tea with carefully stretched lips.

Vanya couldn’t even answer this question intelligently. His lips were busy fighting the tea, hot as fire. His heart was full of wild joy that he would stay with the scouts, with these wonderful people who promised to give him a haircut, give him uniform, and teach him how to fire a machine gun.

All the words were mixed up in his head. He just nodded his head gratefully, raised his eyebrows high and rolled his eyes, thereby expressing the highest degree of pleasure and gratitude.

“He’s a child,” Bidenko sighed pitifully and subtly, twisting a pretty goat’s leg with his huge, rough, as if sooty fingers and carefully pouring Penza samosad into it from a pouch.

Meanwhile, the sounds of battle had already changed their character several times.

At first they were heard close and moved evenly, like waves. Then they moved away a little and weakened. But now they raged with new, tripled force. Among them, a new, hasty, seemingly chaotic roar of aerial bombs was heard, which kept falling and falling somewhere in a heap, in one place, as if hammering on the shaking earth with monstrous sledgehammers.

“Ours are diving,” Bidenko noted casually, listening in the middle of the conversation.

They hit well,” Gorbunov said approvingly.

This went on for quite some time.

Then there was a short respite. It became so quiet that the solid sound of a woodpecker was clearly heard in the forest, as if telegraphing in Morse code.

While the silence continued, everyone was silent and listened.

Then from afar came the crackling sound of rifles. She grew stronger and stronger. Its individual sounds began to merge. Finally they merged. Immediately along the entire front, machine guns began to rattle in dozens of places. And the formidable battle machine suddenly groaned, whistled, howled, and clattered like a rotary machine in full swing.

And in this merciless, mechanical noise, only a very experienced ear could catch the gentle, consonant chorus of human voices, somewhere very far away, singing “a-a-a...”.

The queen of the fields went on the attack,” said Gorbunov. - Now the god of war will sing along with her.

And, as if to confirm his words, again hundreds of guns of various calibers struck from all sides in different ways.

Bidenko listened attentively for a long time, turning his ear towards the battle.

“You can’t hear our battery,” he finally said.

Yes, he is silent.

I suppose our captain is waiting.

This is as usual. But then you’ll gasp...

Vanya looked from one giant to another with his blue, frightened eyes, trying to understand from the expressions on their faces whether what was being done was good for us or bad. But I couldn’t understand. But I didn’t dare ask.

Uncle,” he finally said, turning to Gorbunov, who seemed kinder to him, “who is defeating whom: are we the Germans or the German is us?”

Gorbunov laughed and lightly slapped the boy on the back of the neck:

Bidenko said seriously:

You, Chaldon, would probably run to the radio operators and find out what you hear there.

But at that time the hurried steps of a man who tripped over a peg were heard, and Sergeant Egorov entered the tent, bending over.

Gorbunov!

Get ready. Kuzminsky was just killed in the infantry chain. You will take his place.

Our Kuzminsky?

Yes, with a burst from a machine gun. Eleven bullets. Hurry up.

While Gorbunov, bent over, hastily put on his overcoat and threw equipment over his head, Sergeant Egorov and Corporal Bidenko silently looked at the place where the now killed scout Kuzminsky had previously been located.

This place was no different from other places. It was just as neatly - without a single wrinkle - covered with a green raincoat, and at the head there was a duffel bag covered with a harsh cleaning cloth; only on the cleaning tray were two triangular letters and an issue of the multi-colored magazine “Red Army Man,” brought by the field postman in Kuzminsky’s absence.

Vanya saw Kuzminsky only once, at dawn. Kuzminsky was in a hurry to get to his shift. Just like Gorbunov now, Kuzminsky, bent over, put on equipment over his head and straightened the folds of his overcoat from under a revolver holster with a large ring of a copper ramrod.

Kuzminsky's overcoat smelled coarsely and deliciously of soldiers' cabbage soup. But Vanya did not have time to look at Kuzminsky himself, since Kuzminsky immediately left. He left without saying goodbye to anyone, like a person leaves, knowing that he will return soon. Now everyone knew that he would never return, and silently looked at his vacated place. The tent felt somehow empty, boring and cloudy.

Vanya carefully reached out his hand and touched the fresh, sticky issue of “Red Army Man”. Only now did Sergeant Yegorov notice Vanya; the boy expected to see a smile and prepared to smile himself. But Sergeant Yegorov looked at him sternly, and Vanya felt that something was wrong.

Are you still here? - said Egorov.

Here,” the boy whispered guiltily, although he did not feel any guilt.

“We’ll have to send him,” said Sergeant Egorov, frowning exactly as Captain Enakiev frowned. - Bidenko!

Get ready.

The battery commander ordered the boy to be sent to the rear. You will deliver him with a passing vehicle to the second echelon of the front. There you will hand it over to the commandant against receipt. Let him send him to some orphanage. He has no business hanging around with us. Not allowed.

On you! - Bidenko said with undisguised grief.

Captain Enakiev gave orders.

It's a pity. Such a smart boy.

It’s a pity, not a pity, but it’s not supposed to be.

Sergeant Egorov frowned even more. He himself was sorry to part with the boy. To himself, even at night, he decided to keep Vanya with him as a liaison and, over time, make him a good intelligence officer.

But the commander's order was not subject to discussion. Captain Enakiev knows better. It is said - do it.

“It’s not allowed,” Egorov said again, emphasizing in an imperious and harsh tone that the issue had been finally resolved. - Get ready, Bidenko.

I obey.

Well, then, so and so,” said Gorbunov, straightening the folds of his overcoat from under the limp, worn-to-gloss revolver holster. - Don’t worry, shepherd boy. Once Captain Enakiev ordered, it must be carried out. This is military discipline. At least you can ride in a car. Is not it? Goodbye brother.

And with these words, Gorbunov quickly, but without fuss, left the tent.

Vanya stood small, sad, confused. Biting his lips, swollen with fever, he looked first at Bidenko, who was getting dressed, then at Sergeant Yegorov, who was sitting on the bed of the murdered Kuzminsky with half-closed eyes, throwing his hands between his knees, and, taking advantage of the free moment, dozed off.

Both of them understood perfectly well what was going on in the boy’s soul. Just now, just two minutes ago, everything was so good, so wonderful, and suddenly everything became so bad.

Oh, what a wonderful, what a delightful life began for Vanya! Make friends with brave, generous intelligence officers; have lunch and drink tea with them, go on reconnaissance missions with them, take a steam bath, fire from a machine gun; sleep with them in the same tent; get uniforms - boots, a tunic with shoulder straps and guns on the shoulder straps, an overcoat... maybe even a compass and a revolver with cartridges...

For three years Vanya lived like a stray dog, without a home, without a family. He was afraid of people and felt hunger and constant terror all the time. Finally, he found kind, good people who saved him, warmed him, fed him, and loved him. And at that very moment, when everything seemed to be so wonderful, when he finally got into his own family - fuck! - and all this is missing. All this dissipated like fog.

Uncle,” he said, swallowing tears and carefully touching Bidenko’s overcoat, “and uncle!” Listen, don't take me. No need.

Ordered.

Uncle Egorov... Comrade Sergeant! Don't tell me to send you away. It’s better if I live with you,” the boy said with despair. - I will always clean your pots and carry water...

It’s not allowed, it’s not allowed,” Yegorov said tiredly. - Well, what are you doing, Bidenko! Ready?

So take the boy and go. Now, just from the regimental exchange point, a five-ton truck with spent cartridges is leaving on its return flight. Grab some more. And then ours moved four kilometers forward. Are fixed. Now the rear will begin to catch up. Where are we going then? With God blessing!

Uncle! - Vanya shouted.

“It’s not allowed,” Yegorov snapped and turned away so as not to be upset.

The boy realized that it was all over. He realized that between him and these people, who so recently loved him like their own son, good-naturedly called him a shepherd, now a wall had grown.

From the expression of their eyes, from their intonations, from their gestures, the boy felt for sure that they continued to love and pity him. But he also probably felt something else: he felt that the wall between them was insurmountable. At least bang your head against it.

Then suddenly pride began to speak in the boy’s soul. His face became angry. It seemed to immediately lose weight. The small chin tucked up, the eyes stubbornly sparkled from under the brows. His teeth clenched.

“But I won’t go,” the boy said boldly.

“You’ll probably go,” Biden-ko said good-naturedly. - Look, you’re so furious. "I will not go"! I'll put you in the car and drive you - that's how you go.

But I'll still run away.

Well, brother, it's unlikely. No one has ever run away from me. We'd better go, otherwise we won't take the car.

Bidenko lightly took the boy by the sleeve, but the boy angrily broke out:

Don't touch me, I'll do it myself.

And, tenaciously moving his bare feet, he walked out of the tent into the forest.

And in the forest, the transporters were already tying luggage onto the carts, the drivers were starting the cars, the soldiers were pulling tent stakes out of the ground, and the telephone operators were winding wires onto spools.

A cook in a white coat over his greatcoat was hastily chopping bright red lamb on a tree stump with an ax.

Empty boxes, straw, tin cans with torn edges, pieces of newspapers were scattered everywhere, and in general everything indicated that the rear had already set off after the advancing units.