Mila 18 - Leon Uris [44]
“To your horses!”
Gagging and choking and bleeding, what was left of Company A found what was left of their mounts.
“Charge!” Andrei screamed. Batory, his black mane flying in defiance, led the broken and pathetic line of Ulanys down the knoll and into the German tanks. Andrei’s terrible anger could see only the infantry men behind the tanks. I’ll get them! I’ll get the bastards!
His men were blasted from their saddles before they had gone fifty meters. Andrei whipped around and dragged them to their feet and pulled them on their horses and tried to reorganize the attack. There was nothing left. It was a rout. They went back into the forest, with their captain after them, cursing them to make one more try.
Now the tanks inched forward up the knoll, German infantrymen crouched low behind their iron cover. The line of steel came within a hundred meters—point-blank—and let go again, and the infantry fanned out between the tanks.
In the woods there was the smell of burning flesh and burning wood and the sounds of screaming men and screaming horses. All was havoc. For ten, fifteen, twenty minutes Andrei was able to rally his men to hold the German infantry. He kicked them to their feet and tried to set them on their horses again, but they were bombed from the saddles and gunned and burned with methodical indifference.
And then he staggered around blindly as a cloud of smoke hit him in the face, and he cried for Batory and felt his horse and struggled into the saddle. “Come on, boy! Let’s get them!”
He spurred the animal toward the Germans, then he whirled about and the world began to spin, and when he opened his eyes he felt as though his chest were being crushed and all he could see was the blue sky above him and the tops of the burning trees whirling and whirling. Andrei thrashed about on his hands and knees, semi-conscious, crawling to Batory. “Batory! Get up! Get up, boy! Don’t lay there! Get up! Let’s kill them!”
First Sergeant Styka knelt over Andrei and shook him violently. “Captain, we are finished! Get up, sir! I have two horses. We must make a run for it, sir!”
Andrei lifted the dead horse’s head in his hands. “Batory! Get up!”
“Sir, your horse is dead! Nearly all the men are dead!”
The big soldier dragged Andrei to his feet. Andrei broke loose from his grip and kicked his lifeless animal. “Get up, God damn you! Get up! Get up! Get up!”
Chapter Eleven
HUMANITY HAD BEEN ENDOWED by the German people with their Beethovens and Schillers and their Freuds and the dubious gifts of a Karl Marx. Now the German people presented humanity with a new set of authors—General von Bock, General von Küchler, General von Kluge, General von Rundstedt, General von Blaskowitz, General List, General Haider, General von Brauchitsch. General von Reichenau. The book they wrote presenting mankind with a new innovation of German culture was called Blitzkrieg, lightning war.
Poland formed a huge bulge which fitted into the open jaws of Germany, with Prussia on the north, a common border of many hundred kilometers from the Baltic to Krakow, and in the south newly raped Czechoslovakia beyond the Carpathian Mountains.
The jaws bit down, and saber teeth in the form of armored columns tore deeply into the flesh of Poland. The Poles, arrogant and stubborn and filled with foolhardy national pride and an offensive-minded Polish Staff, doomed whatever small chance there may have been for some sort of stand.
Forgoing logic, Poland did not fall back on her few natural defensive river barriers. Instead, she dreamed in vain of holding a fifteen-hundred-mile border whereon the enemy chose his points of attack. She had further vision of making a counterattack in the form of a hell-bent-for-leather cavalry charge.
Poland’s forces were all but immobile, armorless and antiquated, her arsenal better suited to war five decades earlier. Sustained by raw courage, Poland asked the horse