Volume 1: The Last Rays of the Empire Chapter 15: Gasping for Breath
When entering this unknown village, Lin En suddenly became a "mud man" performing behavioral art. From head to toe, there was not a single clean spot, and even his hair had mud clumps that had already dried up. With just a casual jump, mud flakes would fall off with a rustling sound.
On the cruel battlefield, appearance has retreated to a secondary position. Look at those officers and soldiers who have withdrawn from the front line, their bodies are covered with mud, oil stains and even bloodstains. For them, being able to survive is more important than anything else!
With a body full of fatigue and soreness, Lin En sat on the ground outside a wooden stone structure with a pointed roof, following "Butcher". Not long after, a soldier in a relatively clean military uniform came over, carrying a half-sized basket in his left hand and a wooden bucket in his right. The basket was filled with many fist-sized breads, and the bucket was filled with vegetable soup - except for a few leaves and scattered oil, there was nothing else. At this time, although it was not yet noon, for those who had been in a state of semi-starvation on the front line, walked a long distance in the morning, and were several times on the verge of death, eating a piece of bread soaked in hot soup was already a great blessing from heaven.
The butcher didn't say a word, single-handedly opening the lunchbox and scooping out soup and taking a piece of bread. It seemed that losing several fingers on his left hand had no effect on him at all. However, watching his companion's actions, Lin En felt so sad he almost cried. He suppressed the overwhelming grief in his heart, took out the deformed lunchbox, silently scooped out the soup and took some bread, imitating the butcher by placing the lunchbox on his knee, tearing the bread into small pieces and soaking them in the soup, then slowly and savoringly devouring everything without leaving a single crumb.
Having eaten and drunk their fill, Lin En looked up at the small village of only twenty or so houses. With the arrival of over a hundred defeated soldiers, the village, which originally had some troops stationed there, seemed somewhat crowded, but on the only two crossroads, hardly anyone was seen walking around casually. The disheveled officers and soldiers either sat or lay down, mostly with their eyes closed, resting. After experiencing a tumultuous morning, even a brief respite seemed precious.
After resting for about ten minutes, Lin En finally took off his backpack and drum package from his back and placed them next to the Mauser rifle. He then pulled out the dull Mauser military pistol from his waistband. "Butcher" saw the gun and took it from Lin En's hand to examine it. Because his left hand had lost its fingers, he used his left elbow to hold the gun barrel, first ejecting a bullet from the chamber, then using the bullet head to push against the catch on the frame, pulling back the slide and disassembling the pistol into individual parts. "Butcher" picked up the hammer component, about half the size of a metal lighter, examined it carefully, and said a few words to Lin En while holding it up, Lin En didn't understand what he was saying but knew where the problem with the gun lay.
Even with one-handed operation, the speed at which "Butcher" assembled the gun left Lin En in awe. After reassembling the Mauser pistol, he handed it to Lin En and said another sentence - poor Lin En could only nod vaguely, and reinserted this treasured revolver into his waistband.
"Hey, pig killer!"
A familiar voice came, and Lin En and "Butcher" both looked up to see two men with large earflaps on their steel helmets walking quickly towards them. They were subordinates of the "Butcher". After experiencing that terrible "Road of Death", there might be only four of them left from this morning's nine-man combat squad!
The "Butcher" had his injured hand bandaged with a handkerchief, and one of the soldiers immediately took out a first-aid kit to help him treat it. Throughout the process, the "Butcher" remained silent, and when Lynn saw the severed stump of his finger again, he felt suffocated in his heart.
After treating the wound, the two soldiers chatted with "Butcher" for a while and sat down to rest against the wall. If they could just bask in the sun until dusk, this might become Lin's most beautiful time in three days. However, less than half an hour later, the air raid siren sounded. A relatively neat officer at the intersection guided the soldiers to disperse around the village with his voice and gestures. Lin wanted to help "Butcher" up, but was fiercely pushed away by him. The guy got up stubbornly, grabbed his unchanged submachine gun, and ran forward in big strides. Lin picked up his weapon and followed closely behind him with two other soldiers. After running about 400 meters, they arrived at the trench located on the north side of the village - it was not dug as deep as over two meters like the front-line position where Lin had stayed before, and the trench wall was not reinforced with wooden bars. The bottom of the trench accumulated muddy water in some places that didn't pass his feet.
In the trenches, he found a section with fewer soldiers and "Butcher" completely disregarded the muddy water on the ground and sat down with a plop.
The taste of wetting one's buttocks on a cold winter day was not good, but their close-fitting clothes had long been mixed with sweat and mud. Lin En and the others didn't care about "soaking" for a while longer. In the damp trenches, some sunlight could still be reflected, which brought some positive emotions to the German soldiers who had just experienced a life-and-death test. So when the Soviet warplanes came in droves, everyone raised their heads to gaze at the sky with ease, and almost no one's face showed a fearful expression. At this time, the seven German tanks that had previously heavily damaged the Soviet tank troops were nowhere to be seen on the positions around the village. Their white camouflage was obviously used to avoid enemy air raids - just find a grove of trees to stop in, and then cover up the surrounding track marks with mud and sand. Even if the Soviet pilots opened their eyes wide, they would have a hard time finding any trace of them!
Before the Soviet warplanes began to drop bombs, the rumble of artillery fire had already sounded, and most of the black smoke from the explosion of anti-aircraft shells was in the lower sky. The Soviet air raid also differed greatly from the pattern of Western Allied forces dropping bombs in formation at high altitude as shown in pictures and movies: dozens of fighter planes flew in at an altitude slightly higher than the treetops, attacking German ground fire with small air-to-ground rockets or aircraft cannons. Single-wing single-engine light bombers and attack aircraft soon followed at roughly the same height, attacking German villages and positions with ordinary air bombs and machine guns. After that, several dozen single-wing twin-engine medium bombers flew in at a faster speed, at an altitude of about 200 to 400 meters, each dropping a string of bombs, but much fewer than those dropped by Allied heavy bombers.
Within a few minutes, tons of bombs rained down on the village, shaking the ground and buildings with an overwhelming force. The pointed house where Lynn and the others were sitting was directly hit by a black bomb, and the large wooden structure collapsed instantly in the intense explosion, with stones and wood debris flying everywhere! Looking at this scene, people who remained in the village would have no way to survive unless they were hiding in a deep cellar.
At the most violent moment of the explosion, like the German soldiers in the trenches, Lynn tightly plugged his ears with both hands to alleviate the burden on his eardrums. After enduring multiple shellings and bombings for three consecutive days, he had already felt a significant decline in his hearing ability. It was uncertain whether it would fully recover later, but one thing that could be basically confirmed was that if this continued, the damage to his hearing might become permanent.
The sound of dense explosions covered everything, but the German anti-aircraft fire was still firing. Near the trench where Lin and others were staying, a quadruple machine gun installed on the edge of the forest, camouflaged with branches and leaves, was roaring hard. Several soldiers in gray uniforms and steel helmets were busy transporting and loading ammunition for the machine gun, ignoring the enemy's strafing. A hundred meters away, a single-barreled high-altitude cannon was also firing at the air at a speed of dozens of rounds per minute, and the German soldiers responsible for supplying ammunition were also busy. Under their efforts, two Soviet planes were soon shot down. They were both single-wing twin-engine structures, with subtle differences in outline. Lin had studied more about World War II German and American equipment, and there was relatively richer text and picture materials on this aspect. Due to various reasons, the Chinese materials on Soviet equipment of the same period were often rougher, with discrepancies and even contradictions between different books, and due to the difference between three-dimensional objects and two-dimensional pictures, Lin could only roughly guess that they were Soviet SB or TU series medium bombers, but it was also possible that they were IL-4 or bombers aided by the Allies to the Soviet Union.
From the moment the Soviet planes appeared until the bombing ended, not a single German fighter plane was seen in the sky. It wasn't until the Soviet bombers were leaving the range of the German anti-aircraft fire that two squadrons of gray-green camouflaged fighters appeared on the northern horizon. They dived down from high altitude, their speed as swift as short arrows shot from strong crossbows. The Soviets weren't unprepared either; the fighter planes escorting the bombers immediately broke away to engage in combat. Squinting against the sunlight, Lin En counted and found that his side's fighters were at a disadvantage of roughly one to two. He hoped the outcome of the dogfight wouldn't be as one-sided as it was earlier that morning. Unfortunately, there was a small grove of trees about 20 meters east of their trench, blocking part of his view. Lin En only saw half of the dogfight. The Focke-Wulf (FW-190) fighters were like agile and ferocious hawks, often chasing after Soviet planes in hot pursuit, but the Soviet fighters weren't bad either, some of them also displaying dazzling tactical skills. However, they didn't have the same kind of desperate determination to fight to the death as the German pilots did. In the end, this dogfight also ended with their voluntary withdrawal. The German fighters shot down more Soviet planes at a relatively small loss, while the Soviet pilots successfully protected their bomber fleet - one side achieved a tactical victory, and the other a strategic one; it wasn't hard to see who won or lost.
