SHE WAS LYING in a ditch – her tank helmet forward over her eyes. She pushed it back, taking stock of her surroundings. How she had managed to get out of the tank, she didn’t know. She looked along the road to where Galechka stood, smoke pouring from her open hatches and turret. Lapshin. Lapshin had dragged her out.
‘Is everyone all right?’ Lapshin asked, shouting because there was so much noise.
Polya lifted her hand, which was all she could do. She couldn’t speak.
‘Polya?’
Lapshin crawled along the ditch towards her on his elbows. She could see a dead man hanging from a branch above her, his clothes on fire, swaying as if being pushed by a breeze. She thought it might be the guide.
‘I don’t think I can walk,’ she managed to say. Her foot was angled strangely, although it didn’t hurt. Lapshin’s left cheek was red and blistered and he’d lost most of the hair on his head – but he was alive. He checked her over, opening her tunic, looking for a wound. She could hear swearing close by and glanced over to see Avdeyev putting a tourniquet on Vitsin’s mangled leg.
‘She’s going to go at any moment,’ Avdeyev said. ‘We need to move back.’
At first Polya thought he must be talking about her. She was conscious now that there were other men lying along the shallow ditch, their blood staining the snow that filled it red. The scouts that had been on top of the tank – some dead, some alive. She felt something hit her face, small and sharp. A splinter from where bullets were hitting the trees around them. The burning corpse was knocked off his branch by one and fell onto the snow a few metres away.
‘Let’s take Polya first. Quick now.’
She felt Avdeyev take her under her shoulders and Lapshin took her legs, smiling down at her reassuringly. They stumbled and slipped their way up into the forest until they found a fallen tree. They placed her gently behind it, the solid trunk protecting her. It seemed far quieter in here. She looked around for them but she was on her own.
She waited. She wondered what would happen if they couldn’t come back. What if they were killed? What would she do then?
But here they were. Vitsin and his mangled leg swaying between them. Other men were coming up through the trees now – she recognized a man from one of the other tanks and an infantry sergeant.
‘We’re safe here,’ Lapshin said.
And then the explosion came, the force blowing through the forest like a storm.
‘I’m afraid Galechka is gone,’ Lapshin said. ‘Don’t take it hard, Little Polya.’
‘Poor Galechka,’ she said, feeling dazed. She had built Galechka, driven her and named her. For her mother. ‘She always did her best for me. And when they took her away from me, she set me on a path to you.’
Lapshin squeezed her shoulder gently.
‘We’ll get you another one. Although, who knows, maybe we’ve done enough. Maybe they’ll let us spend some time in hospital. And maybe, by the time we get out, it will all be over and we can all go home.’
Polya smiled – amused that Lapshin thought she’d been talking about the tank.