War Girls Complete Collection Chapter 190

Chapter 4: Stan

S

tan and Bartosz snuck around the eastern edge of the town, accompanied by a dozen of their new Soviet

comrades

, intending to overrun the assumed enemy command center while the rest of the unit swarmed out to engage the pockets of Germans in the vicinity.

But when they entered the stone building, it was completely empty. Their group leader stopped cold in his tracks. Stan’s senses shot into high alert, instantly focusing his vision and amplifying his hearing. Then he heard it: Footfalls. Hissed commands. Gunfire.

Stan groaned. They’d been set up and walked into the trap like mice looking for cheese. Trapped inside the building that was taking serious mortar fire from a German tank ambling down the street.

“We need to get out of here before this building comes down around our ears,” Stan hissed.

“We’re surrounded,

minetschik

. There’s no way out,” one of the Russians said.

Stan spoke enough Russian to understand the swear word and glared at the other man. Since the fateful moment he’d been forced to join the Red Army, he’d been waiting for an opportunity to desert. But that would have to wait. Right now, he was solely concerned with survival.

The group leader seemed to share Stan’s opinion and said, “Everyone form up at the back entrance. On my signal, rush out in pairs. Go round the village and join up with the rest of the battalion in the south.”

As a plan, Stan wasn’t convinced that it would work, but anything was better than sitting inside waiting to be plucked off like ducks on a glassy pond. Stan translated to Bartosz, who still lacked Russian language skills.

“You think that’ll work?” Bartosz murmured, but they both knew it was their only chance. Sometimes the odds weren’t stacked high enough in favor of a strategy.

“We’ll get through this together,” Stan said, as much to bolster up himself as his friend.

They gathered at the back door and at their group leader’s signal they dashed to the right of the building. Stan crouched behind a low wall, aiming his machine gun at the Nazi soldiers swarming the rubble left by the fierce fighting earlier today. Only the devil knew where they’d suddenly appeared from.

He squeezed the trigger and watched one of the Nazis fall to the side.

Nice shot

, he thought. A fleeting blast of pleasure hit his chest right before his neck hair rose and tingled. His throbbing pulse and roiling gut told him to turn his head. Slowly, he pivoted only to stare into the muzzle of a German Schmeisser.

Shit!

“

Waffe weg und Hände hoch!”

Drop your weapon and put your hands up, the German soldier demanded. Stan did what was requested. The soldier holding him at gunpoint was a boy, not more than eighteen years of age, fear clearly written across his face.

Someone pulled a trigger and Stan flinched. But much to his surprise it was the young German who fell like a tree with a loud flop.

“Go!” someone shouted and Stan ran for his life. He managed to reach the other side of the street with bullets whizzing past his ears. Somehow, he jumped across a hedge and ducked headfirst into a ditch. Bartosz followed, just as another round of mortar fire pulverized the hedge. With a pounding heart, Stan lay crumpled in the ditch listening to the sounds of battle explode around them. Judging from the prevalent language in the screams and shouts, he guessed the Germans were finishing off the Russians. After a while the noise died down, but he and Bartosz remained immobile. If they pretended to be dead, they might stay undetected.

After an endless amount of time, Stan peeked out from his cover onto the deserted street. “Seems like everyone’s gone,” he said to Bartosz, who raised his helmeted head to check for himself.

“And now? Go back and find our unit, or…?”

Stan knew that Bartosz hated being part of the Red Army as much as he did, and the prospect to defect and find a Home Army unit tempted them both. They were now approximately three quarters of a mile from the point where they’d first entered the town and were supposed to meet up again with their unit.

“I heard there’s Home Army about ten miles up north. Think we could make a dash for them?” Bartosz asked.

Anything was better than being ridiculed and harassed by their so-called comrades. Animosities between Soviets and Poles had been rampant for centuries and weren’t easily overcome. Witnessing how those depraved bastards treated the Polish civilians, and especially the women, had only deepened Stan’s hate for everything Soviet.

They nodded at each other and then crawled from the ditch, walking crouched down until they reached the next building. Stan kept his eyes trained from 9 o’clock to 3 o’clock ahead, while Bartosz covered the same area behind. It reminded him of the good old days, living in the forest and sabotaging the Nazis. Stan and Bartosz had been friends for close to a decade and they’d been fighting in several partisan units together since Hitler’s invasion five years ago.

Only empty fields lay ahead of them once they reached the end of the village. As they hadn’t seen another soul since leaving their ditch, Stan pointed at a tree in the distance. Bartosz nodded. After so many years together, they didn’t need words to communicate.

About halfway to the tree, a white-hot streak of fire shot down Stan’s leg, making him cry out in pain. Bartosz stopped and looked back, but Stan waved him forward. Adrenaline pumping through his veins, he ignored the pain and kept running, panic urging him forward. Minutes later, he arrived at the tree and crumpled against the trunk. His hand reached for his left leg and felt hot liquid. Blood pumped from the gunshot wound and soaked his uniform with a dark red spot that became bigger with each heartbeat. He pressed his hand onto the wound, the thrumming pulse in his ear drowning out all other sounds.

Bartosz rummaged in his backpack and found a dressing that he used to apply a pressure bandage to Stan’s leg.

Stan leaned against the tree, the pain crashing in waves across his body with every beat of his heart. He gritted his teeth so hard he feared they’d fall out. Oblivious to his surroundings, he fought the black stars dancing in front of his eyes and sighed with relief when Bartosz stopped mistreating his leg.

“Get up,” Bartosz said.

Stan tried, but didn’t manage more than a few inches before he fell back on his bottom. “I can’t. You go and find the Home Army unit.”

“I’m not leaving you, stubborn asshole. Here, take my hand. I’m gonna carry you.”

Stan had lost plenty of weight over the years, but he was still a big man; Bartosz wouldn’t have a whiff of a chance to escape with the additional load on his back. Looking into Bartosz’s face, Stan gave a half-grin at his friend’s determination. He would have done the same. Only a bastard would leave his wounded friend behind.

They’d walked less than five minutes when German shouts rang through the air. Since neither of them was in a position to fight, Bartosz turned around, raising his hands, while Stan slid down his back and somehow managed to hold himself upright on his good leg.

A group of Wehrmacht soldiers approached them and kicked their weapons away with mud-coated boots. One of them, standing a short distance away, motioned to Bartosz and forced him to kneel with his hands locked behind his head.

Deprived of the firm support Bartosz had presented, Stan swayed on his one leg, unable to put weight on the wounded one. He tried desperately to keep his equilibrium but when forced to raise his hands, he fell facedown into the field. Big hands grabbed his shoulders and rolled him over. Stan let out a loud cry of distress and thought he’d faint with the unbearable pain.

“

Der sieht schlimm aus

,” the German said, a trace of pity in his voice. This one looks bad.

Having grown up near Lodz where many Germans lived, Stan spoke fluent German and Russian, in addition to his native language Polish and some English he’d learned at school.

They discussed whether to leave him to die. Stan held his breath. In the end, someone put in a good word for him and they decided that the other prisoner should carry the wounded fellow to the camp. Stan must have passed out on the way, because he woke up cooped up in the back of a lorry.

Disoriented, reality caught up to him with the next bump in the road and the painful reminder of the wound in his leg. He glanced down and watched blood oozing through the bandage. He groaned with the excruciating pain and his vision became dizzy again. Another captured Russian soldier with a red cross on his sleeve bent over him and removed the bandage, just to secure it again with more pressure.

The soldier murmured something in Russian, but Stan didn’t care to listen. Without medical treatment, he’d bleed out. Another wave of intolerable pain washed over him and he prayed to lose consciousness. No such luck. Every bump in the road rattled through his body, electric zings of agony reaching every last cell.

Bartosz appeared by his side saying, “You still alive, man?”

“Barely.”

“Hold on. You’re not gonna die on me here.”

A short time later, the lorry stopped, and voices yelled German commands to hurry down the lorry. Stan and two other wounded prisoners were unloaded and brought to a field hospital while the rest had to camp outside in something that looked like a cage.

“He won’t make it through the night,” one medic said.

“Or he’ll die on the train. That’s not our concern. We’re just doing our job. We treat all the captured soldiers as best as we can.”

Stan decided to make it through the night, just to prove them wrong.

The next morning,

his eyes snapped open to the rising sun. The bleeding in his thigh seemed to have stopped and while he still couldn’t get up, he was alive.

Together with the other prisoners he was crowded onto a train. As infection infiltrated his gunshot wound, fever took up residence in his body. He passed the three-day journey mostly in delirium with beads of sweat peppering his forehead. When the unloading jostled him back to awareness, it barely registered in his brain. Someone dumped him onto the bare ground in a tent already filled with groaning and whimpering men.

Stan didn’t care. Between the excruciating pain and the ghastly thirst his brain had stopped working. Nobody bothered to offer him water or even help him with his bodily needs. Since the debilitating injury and the high fever left him unable to do anything but lie there and shake, he came to a point where he simply let it flow.

Delirious with fever, he slipped in and out of consciousness. Throughout the ordeal, only one thought penetrated the fog in his brain. He hoped to see his brother Peter again – in this world or the next one.