The train started off very slow, and it took me past my family again.
I could see my poor little orphaned kids bunched up together, waving their hands and trying to smile, but not managing it.
And Irina had her hands clasped to her breast; her lips were white as chalk, and she was whispering something, and staring straight at me, and her body was all bent forward as it she was trying to walk against a strong wind. And that's how I'll see her in my memory for the rest of my life- her hands clasped to her breast, those white lips, and her eyes wide open and full of tears. That's mostly how I see her in my dreams too. Why did I push her away like that?
Even now, when I remember, it's like a blunt knife twisting in my heart. ·
"We were drafted to our units at Belaya Tserkov, in the Ukraine.
I was given a three-tonner, and that's what I went to the front in.
Well, there's no point in telling you about the war, you saw it yourself and you know what it was like to start with.
I got a lot of letters from home, but didn't write much myself.
Just now and then I'd write that everything was all right and we were doing a bit of fighting. We may be retreating at present, I'd say, but it won't be long before we gather our strength and give the Fritzies something to think about.
And what else could you write?
Those were grim times and you didn't feel like writing.
And I must say I was never much of a one for harping on a pitiful note. I couldn't stick the sight of those slobbering types that wrote to their wives and girlfriends every day for no reason at all, just to rub their snot over the paper- oh, it's such a hard life, oh, I might get killed!
And so he goes on, the son-of-a-bitch, complaining and looking for sympathy, blubbering away and he can't understand that those poor unhappy women and kids are having just as bad a time of it back home as we are.
Why, they were carrying the whole country on their shoulders.
And what shoulders our women and children must have had not to give in under a weight like that!
But they didn't give in, they stuck it out!
And then one of those whimperers writes his pitiful letter and that just knocks a working woman off her feet.
After a letter like that, the poor thing won't know what to do with herself or how to face up to her work.
No!
That's what a man's for, that's what you're a soldier for- to put up with everything, to bear everything, if need be.
But if you've got more woman than man in you, then go and put on a frilled skirt to puff out your skinny arse, so you can look like a woman, at least from behind, and go and weed the beet, or milk the cows, because your kind aren't needed at the front. The stink's bad enough there without you!
"But I didn't get even a year's fighting done. I was wounded twice, but only slightly both times, once in the arm, the second time in the leg. The first was a bullet from an aircraft, the second a chunk of shrapnel.
The Germans holed my lorry, top and sides, but I was lucky, mate, at first.
Yes, I was lucky all the time, until I was unlucky .... I got taken prisoner at Lozovenki in the May of 'fortytwo. It was an awkward set-up. The Germans were attacking hard and one of our 122 mm howitzer batteries had nearly run out of ammo. We loaded up my lorry chockful of shells. I worked on the job myself till my shirt was sticking to my back.
We had to get a move on, because they were closing in on us; on the left we could hear the rumble of tanks, and firing on the right and in front, and things didn't look too healthy. "'Can you get through, Sokolov?' asks the commander of our company.
He need never have asked.
Was I going to sit twiddling my thumbs while my mates got killed?
'What are you talking about!' I told him.
'I've got to get through, and that's that.'
'Get cracking then,' he says, 'and step on it!'
"And step on it I did.
Never driven like that before in my life!
I knew I wasn't carrying a load of spuds, I knew I had to be careful with the stuff I'd got aboard, but how could I be, when the lads were fighting out there empty-handed, when the whole road was under artillery fire.
I did about six kilometres and got pretty near the place. I'd have to turn off the road to get to the hollow where the battery was stationed, and then what did I see? Strike me, if it wasn't our infantry running back across the field on both sides of the road with shells bursting among them.
What was I to do?
I couldn't turn back, could I?
So I gave her all she'd got.
There was only about a kilometre to go to the battery, I had already turned off the road, but I never reached them, mate. Must have beeri a long-range gun landed a heavy one near the lorry.
I never heard the bang nor anything, just something burst inside my head, and I don't remember any more.
How I stayed alive, and how long I lay there by the ditch, I've got no idea.
I opened my eyes, but I couldn't get up; my head kept jerking and I was shaking as if I had a fever. Everything seemed dark, something was scraping and grinding in my left shoulder, and my body ached all over as if somebody had been lamming into me for two days running with anything he could lay hands on.
I squirmed about on my belly for a long time, and in the end I managed to get up.
But still I couldn't reckon out where I was, nor what had happened to me.
My memory was clean gone.
But I was scared to lie down.
I was scared I'd never get up again, so I just stood there swaying from side to side like a poplar in a gale.
"When I came to myself and had a look round, my heart felt as if someone had got a pair of pliers round it. The shells I'd been carrying were lying about all round me. Not far away was my lorry, all buckled up, with its wheels in the air. And the fighting? The fighting was going on behind me. Yes, behind me!
"When I realised that, and I'm not ashamed to say it, my legs just caved in under me and I fell as if I'd been pole-axed, because I realised I was cut off behind the enemy lines, or to put it point-blank, I was already a prisoner of the fascists.
That's war for you.
"No, it's not an easy thing to understand, mate, it's not easy to understand that you've got taken prisoner through no fault of your own.