The sensations attacked her nervous system: the overwhelming smell of engine smoke and gasoline, the cruel bouncing as the tank’s suspension absorbed and then passed along the shocks of its encounters with the rough ground, the shriek of the incoming artillery, the percussion of its detonation. Nearby, a tank was hit and, in a second, vanished into a shearing blade of light as its destruction issued vibration and shrapnel through the air, to beat and cut at what lay in its route. She clung desperately, trying to stay with the beast beneath her, but it was not easy. Another sniper, clinging to another handhold on the other side of the tank, slipped off, as if into a gritty sea, and was never seen again.
The tanks rolled through the storm and through an ocean of noise as each engine, each shell, each crack of a tree limb crushed beneath treads seemed to hang in the air, like a whole climate of noise, all of it beating at her senses until so powerful was the experience that it seemed to numb her out.
Then she saw them, a mile off, small and seemingly inconsequential. The machines of the 2nd Panzer Corps, three divisions’ worth, Das Reich, Totenkopf, and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. From the distance, they were black shapes on the horizon, which rose and fell in accordance to their own tank’s course through the dips in the landform.
At a mile, the Germans opened up. It was simple strategy; any child could figure it out. The German armor was thicker, the German guns bigger and more powerful. Distance was the German ally. If it was only about shooting, the Germans—superb tank marksmen, superb battlefield maneuverers—would triumph. The tanks of the 5th Guards had to close the gap, get inside the German formation, find angles into the enemy that would let their lighter 76mm shells penetrate and kill. The cost of this adventure was paid in life. Sixty percent of the Soviet tanks would make it to the target; the other 40 percent would die in flame and high-explosive energy at the end of the 88mm trajectories. So it had to be. So it would be. The price would be paid. Who would pay it?
Around her, tanks began to light up. Some, hit squarely by the 88s, vaporized and, when the smoke abated, seemed not to have existed at all. But there were so many variations on death in that charging wave of vehicle and bravado. Hit, a 34 might be tilted askew, flames licking at it, until it suddenly blossomed, went to total fire. Or it might not burn at all, merely throwing a track and thrashing in roaring frustration as its treadless wheels ground away, spitting earth and buzzsawing itself more deeply into the ground.
So powerful was the vibration of her vehicle, Petrova could see none of this clearly. Her eyes were teared up from the dust that had settled in them, her purchase on survival was focused entirely on the strength in her hands that clung to the steel rung preventing her from slipping off and away, her head pounded in pain from all the vibrations that shuddered against it, the fumes of engine exhaust, explosive residue, and the smell of cooking meat. Images seemed to fly before her and vanish, as if she were in a cinema where the projector was mounted to the back of a crazed horse and pitched its visions on the walls and ceiling. Burning men. The shear of light from a blast. The recoil when her own tank fired. The pressure from others. The far-off blisters of illumination from the Tiger 88mm muzzles, the rain of dust, the smack and sting of debris, it was all a kind of Dostoyevskian vision of hell.
Then it went away as her tank slid into a dip in the land and, with dozens of its co-attackers, was momentarily out of the view of German gunsights. It felt like an abrupt passage to heaven as the ground beneath became smooth, almost reasonable. The tanks were grinding through a wheat field; she looked back to see the long scars each vehicle inscribed into the undulating sheaves of wheat, that staple in which her father had invested his life and even, it could be said, died to protect.
I will not let you down, Tata, she thought. I will be as brave as you. I will protect the wheat.
At that moment they crested the slope, their momentary disengagement finished, and plunged into a storm of violence. The German tanks were close. She’d seen them before, crawling tentatively through Stalingrad’s wrecked streets, but not like this, columns and columns of the things, with their remorseless angularity, their pitiless precision, the somehow Teutonic-knight definition of their profiles. The Germans were beyond panic; they were beyond anything but pure, calm, relentless battle skill. The gunners chose and worked targets as the Soviet force closed, and even when it became obvious that there were enough survivors of the charge to breach the German formation and turn the battle into a melee, the German gunners simply lowered their trajectories, tracked their targets, and continued to fire.