Chapter 119
The Red Army was an organization and a society, and as such, it had its own ‘social life’.
Even though Marshal Budenny acted like our father who scratched his ass at home, he was a commander of the army and a hero of the Soviet Union.
If a division commander gave an order, mountains would move and streams would change their course, let alone a marshal.
That’s why the soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Army sometimes suffered.
“Hahaha! Take this!”
Budenny swung his bulletproof medal on his chest and sprayed bullets at the Germans. His horse, Rogina, lifted her front legs and neighed loudly.
The German soldiers, who had already lost their morale and almost ran out of ammunition, fell one by one, bleeding.
Budenny, who laughed heartily, threw a grenade and charged with his sword at the last remaining German who resisted in the trench.
“Long live the Soviet Union! Ura! Ura!”
“Ura!! Ura!! Ura!!”
His subordinates raised their arms and cheered for their marshal’s heroic deeds.
The military journalists held their huge cameras and flashed them.
Perhaps tomorrow morning, the morning newspaper would publish an article like this.
Of course, there was a slight flaw in the image of the Mongol Khan that Beria’s NKVD had spread.
Also, the army was a society, and there were always deep reasons behind everything.
In fact, the German soldiers who had just been in a ‘fierce battle’ were the ones who had been surrounded by countless Soviet soldiers and pressured to consume their ammunition.
They had no bullets left to harm the marshal, but the staff officers of the cavalry army somehow spread rumors that the German soldiers wanted to fight to the end.
And they urgently took Budenny to the battlefield and made what they called a ‘picture’.
Of course, our people’s hero Budenny didn’t think of such things at all.
He just opened his mouth wide and roared with his assault rifle pointing at the sky.
The old cavalryman, who was frustrated by various political intrigues and operations, was just happy to be able to fight on the battlefield.
“Uraaaaaa!!”
“Waaaaaa!”
His bushy mustache fluttered, and his hairy chest was exposed between the buttons of his shirt that he ripped open. The soldiers responded with enthusiastic applause to the wild marshal’s force.
“Where’s next?”
“Yes, marshal. There’s another group of enemy soldiers about 4km away from here who are still resisting… But you can rest for today…”
“No way! Since we’re on the battlefield, let’s go all the way like men! Come on!”
The soldiers who were trying to cool off their sweat had to follow the eager marshal. They had to follow him until he gave the order.
“Hey! Let the comrades who followed me since this morning rest. I can do this even at this age! Hahahahaha!”
His cry became even more passionate and cheerful than before.
The soldiers couldn’t contain their liking, and the officers were flustered and tried to stop them. But Budenny waved his hand.
“As you all know, soldiers need to rest to advance. So do the horses. This time, I’ll take only… volunteers!”
“I volunteer! I volunteer!”
“Me too!”
In an instant, about fifty soldiers gathered.
They were all sweating and their faces were flushed.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime honor to follow the legendary cavalry leader.
Budenny picked twenty of them who looked young and fit, and jumped on his horse.
And he started running.
Follow me!
He shouted and swung his sword, and the soldiers followed him.
“Ura! Ura! Ura!”
***
The fire was fierce. Rogina also seemed to be in a bad mood, shaking her tail left and right.
The heavy air on the battlefield felt quite different from what Budenny had seen before.
“Hmm… Something’s strange…”
A strange sensation scratched the back of the veteran’s neck. He felt his hair stand on end.
The rookie soldiers who followed him didn’t know anything and scratched their rifles against the bushes. But only startled wild birds flew into the cloudy sky.
‘Where are the Germans? Have they already been annihilated?’
Budenny thought so. He knew it roughly. That the era of cavalry was over.
Cavalry couldn’t beat infantry who dug trenches and took defensive positions.
The Soviet cavalry army had many light tanks, artillery, and even tanks, so they could break through the trench lines with their horse-riding cavalry.
But now they were only pure cavalry of about twenty.
They were armed with grenades and new assault rifles, but human bodies were made of flesh.
Budenny started to miss the metal chunks that he had despised.
“Hmm… This is…”
It was ominous. His intuition warned him.
To make matters worse, they didn’t bring any radios, so they had to run several kilometers to contact their subordinates.
Budenny blamed himself for his rash action.
‘Damn it… I’m really old.’
Honestly, he had been doing reckless things lately because of the blood in his head.
The chief of staff, NKVD, and the Politburo made fun of him, the best veteran of the Red Army.
Not only that, they dismissed the generals who had served since the civil war and promoted young generals like Zhukov or Vasilevsky to important positions.
They said that it was not the era of cavalry anymore. That Budenny’s era, who ‘only knew the horse’s ass’, was already gone. He heard them whispering that, pretending not to know.
He knew it himself.
He was orthodox about cavalry more than anyone else, so he couldn’t ignore the fact that the decline was coming.
He tried to deny it.
He wanted to show them that cavalry could still do this, even if he became a laughingstock.
So he took the shameful propaganda pictures and tried to go to the battlefield without Beria’s interference. And he boasted that he showed the greatness of cavalry more than anyone else.
One more time, before time ran out, one more time!
Tatatatatata!! Tatatatatang!
Machine guns popped out of the bushes. Six of them spewed fire at the twenty-one cavalrymen.
“Aaaah!”
A young soldier fell to the ground with a thud. The others screamed as they were splashed with his blood and flesh. The inexperienced soldiers couldn’t cope well with this ambush.
“Rogina!”
The machine guns missed Budenny and pierced his horse instead. His leg was burning, but Rogina was more important.
He couldn’t get off the horse that fell to the side, and his left leg was crushed under it. But even in that moment, he called his mare’s name.
“Ivan, Yuri! Go back right now…”
He couldn’t say more because of the rising pain.
He barely remembered the names of the two young soldiers and shouted them.
But they reacted quickly. Seeing the young soldiers who swiftly turned their horses to the direction they came from, Budenny clenched his teeth and pulled out his gun.
He fired his assault rifle at the place where the machine guns were shooting.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
But he didn’t know how many enemies there were, and in an instant, the twenty-one men were reduced to one.
Every time the familiar sound of the Kar98 rifle rang, his subordinates fell one by one.
He despaired.
He had lived with his horse. And if death came to him, he wanted to die on his horse.
But what was this? His chest as a rider was torn, having to send his horse first. And now, a step late, the shadow of death began to loom over him.
The German soldiers who had been camouflaged revealed themselves one by one.
They snickered.
He didn’t know what they were saying, but he didn’t need to know German to know that they were mocking him.
“Soviet Union Marshal Semyon Budenny?”
In awkward Russian, one of the Germans spoke to him.
The others surrounded the fallen Budenny, smiling all over their faces. Budenny swallowed his saliva.
Whatever they interpreted it as, the Germans burst into laughter.
“Just look at that mustache. And the medals.”
“Oh, my! Marshal, you should have taken off your rank and pretended not to know… Hehehe!”
“…”
The elite members of the Friedenthal special unit laughed heartily.
They chatted in German for a while.
“He’s bigger than I thought. It might be a bit hard to capture him alive and take him with us…”
“Isn’t his head enough? If necessary, shall we peel off his face too?”
“What are you… a barbarian? Even the Scythians wouldn’t do that.”
They exchanged jokes like that and decided on a rough plan, nodding their heads.
The special unit member’s hand as big as a pot lid groped Budenny’s neck and tore off his dog tag.
“Ouch!”
“Oh, old man. What’s with the resistance…”
Thwack! The special unit member swung his dagger and slapped Budenny’s cheek with a clean hit.
It wasn’t a clapping sound, but a thud.
The German soldiers laughed uproariously.
He didn’t know if his lips were torn and bleeding, or if he bit them and bled.
The special unit member twisted his wrist and snatched the dagger, then ripped off the identification plate on the dog tag and peeled off the medals on his chest.
“Is this gold?”
“Wow… You’re going to sell it for gold?”
The special unit members took the things that could identify Budenny. The dog tag, the medals, the shoulder straps, and even the marshal’s star.
“Old man, honestly… we can’t just leave you alone after catching you, can we? Hehehehe.”
“Damn you, fascist hunting dogs…”
They didn’t understand each other’s words, so they just said what they wanted.
Budenny spat out his broken teeth and glared at the special unit member who searched his body.
The member seemed sorry, and tried to speak softly.
Killing him was enough. He didn’t have to take his head or peel off his face.
It would be best to capture him as a prisoner, but since it was the Soviet territory, he didn’t know when they would lose him… Killing him was the cleanest.
The German soldiers pulled Budenny out from under the horse’s corpse.
His arm was dislocated and his leg was broken, so he couldn’t resist.
He tried to resist, but he was only kicked in the chin.
“Well! Do you have any last words?”
“…”
The Friedenthal special unit members didn’t think about what they had done, and tried to be courteous in their own way.
They straightened Budenny’s uniform that was wrinkled from rolling on the ground and tearing off the medals.
They held his shoulders and made him kneel, and pointed a gun at the back of his head.
He didn’t answer their question.
“Comrade marshal, say your last words! Your last words!”
When one of the soldiers who knew Russian said that, Budenny looked at him with a gloomy expression.
A soldier who came with a huge camera took pictures of the Friedenthal special unit member who pointed a gun at the back of Budenny’s head.
The flash went off, and they both squinted.
“Wow… this is really amazing, isn’t it? One more shot!”
“Are you not going to say your last words? Captain, he’s not saying anything.”
Click, the gun was loaded. Budenny felt the cold metal on his head and sensed the end of his life.
“…For the Soviet Union, we fought with blood! Long live the victory!”
“Yep. I recorded your last words!”
The soldier who spoke Russian nodded, as if he understood.
His last words were a verse from
***
“First of all, the battleships that should have been anchored to defend the Azores were all mobilized to destroy Leningrad, so there must have been a lot of trouble with the defense of the Atlantic. It will take a while for them to come back… Contact the Americans.”
“Yes, comrade chief of staff.”
“Hmm, the rest will be taken care of by General Konev.”
In the middle of the Atlantic, how much blood did the Americans shed to take the Azores, the heavenly naval base!
They fought a war on both the Pacific and the Atlantic, which was no less fierce than the Eastern Front, even if it was smaller in scale.
If things had gone as planned, Iceland and the Faroe Islands should have been the strategic bombing bases for the Americans, but they became impossible options when Britain fell.
They had no way to deal with the German land-based attack aircraft stationed in Britain or Norway.
So the Americans chose the Azores as a second option.
Now Germany had to give up the Atlantic as the price for destroying Leningrad.
“We have to cooperate more closely with the Americans. The development of long-range heavy bombers will take some more time, but…”
“We will develop the bombers as soon as possible!”
If they developed a large strategic bomber like the B-29, they could bomb Berlin, the Rhine area, and the industrial zone of the Ruhr from the Azores.
They could also strike the German mainland from the Soviet territory.
“Good. Good. Very good. By the way… How are things going in the north and the center?”
“Yes! Thanks to Marshal Budenny’s leadership, the soldiers’ morale is very high. The fascist 9th Army in Smolensk still doesn’t seem to anticipate the encirclement.”
“Haha… That’s Marshal Budenny for you!”
Caw, caw, caw. Suddenly, the sound of crows cawing was heard outside. There were a few crows sitting outside the window.
“Ominous… Shoo! Shoo!”
He banged on the window, and the crows cawed a few more times and flew away.
The sky seemed strangely cloudy.
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