The floodplain pays its bill
The reckoning after the Grabek crossing at Pustówka
The artillery over the old oxbow of the Grabek only fell silent around five in the morning. But the silence rising now over the reeds and the shattered alder groves at Pustówka-Grabek is heavier and more terrible than any barrage — because it stands over the rows of bodies laid out on tarpaulin at the crossing.
Let me say it plainly, because no one in the offices upstairs will write it down: the price of this night is monstrous. Of the 611th Independent Assault Battalion, one hundred and eight men remained by dawn out of four hundred and seventy; of the 618th, which crossed first on the shattered pontoon, twenty-nine of the one hundred and thirty men in the lead assault group reached the far bank. These are not lines in a sanitary bulletin that will cycle back from rear hospitals in a month. These are gutted battalions lying now on the swampy left bank, holding a patch of willow scrub that was paid for five times over what it was worth.
Worst of all is who paid this bill. Take the personnel rolls of the 611th and 618th and look where these boys were called up from: Chuvash villages beyond the Sura, Volga hamlets around Mariinsky Posad, the deep back-country of Mari El where the scheduled bus runs on Wednesdays. It was they who went down first under Polish machine guns on the pontoon ribbon. In a rural community of eighty households, losing a dozen young men means the school will close for good, two thirds of the tractor drivers will vanish in a single night, and the songs in the native tongue will begin to fade. Their future was burned into Polish peat before they ever reached the border stone.
And in the rear, where discipline should be rebuilt, the old rot has bloomed again — dedovshchina. Exhausted platoon leaders look the other way while broken “old-timers” from the April intake take their bitterness out on eighteen-year-olds. This is not toughening; it is decay from within. In the army I served in, brotherhood and iron discipline kept us alive against a real enemy; what I am seeing right now in the rear camps at Kołogonty-Dolne is not military pride, but the ugly collapse of desperate men biting their own.
And past the checkpoint wire at Mravčice, the Czechs and the road to Ostrava are already waiting for us.
They are dug in along the dyke of the Lesná Rybníček fishery, receiving reinforcements by rail, and they know we are coming. Taking the bridge at Mravčice, and Ostrava behind it, may look like a glorious line on a staff officer’s acetate, but at the current rate we will make that road only by scraping the very bottom of our Volga villages and our smaller nations. If, to force the Moravian Gate, we spend the last young men of Chuvashia and Mari El — what do we bring home? Occupied land cannot save a nation that hollowed out its own soul and murdered its own youth to get there.
