Chapter Thirty-Two: Poltava
The war still raged across the Ukraine. But they were on the offensive, and it had changed everything, for everyone on the multiple fronts. Morale was up, confidence was growing. They kept fighting, and they kept winning. And in the case of Bella's Black Guards, they fought for themselves now, not for the Dark Lord in London.
Her Army left the burned, nuked ruins of the east bank of Dnepropetrovsk in the curling dust of snow. They covered ground, hard and fast, across the lowlands of the Dnepr river above the rapids. They headed north-northwest. To their north, driving south, was a Russian Army out of Sumy. In the middle, Voldemort's forces tried to hold the lines open for their armies to the east to continue retreating. They were working frantically, using slaves, the impressed, ensorcelled second-line troops, to prepare traps and fortifications.
If they could hold the position they were fortifying, they could keep a foothold on the left bank of the Dnepr. If they could hold the position they were fortifying, they could keep the Armies of the CIS off of Kiev, and keep the city subjugated to Voldemort's power. They could, indeed, resume the offensive with the next summer, and drive back deep into the eastern Ukraine and Russia.
If.
When Hermione first saw the intelligence reports, she couldn't help a dark laugh. Bellatrix looked up from where she had been taking down instructions, passed by radio from Astana. "What are you on about, Granger?"
"Never let it be said that God doesn't have a sense of irony, Ma'am," she answered with her strict on-duty formality. "They're fortifying Poltava."
"Well, yes, they are. What of, Granger?" Bellatrix shrugged and gestured at the map, looking vaguely irritated, that look which told Hermione that she was starting to wonder again if Hermione was really the Brightest Witch of Her Age.
But Hermione met it head-on, this time. "The Battle of Poltava in 1709 was fought after the Coldest Winter in Europe in five hundred years, Bellatrix. It weakened the Swedish Army until they could no longer resist the power of the Tsar Pyotr Velikiy. Then he finished them, the Swedish Army broke itself attacking his fortifications at Poltava."
She snorted, a sharp Hmph. "Well, that's a bit of a mixed message, isn't it? The enemy will be the ones defending the ground at Poltava, this time, and we will be attacking."
But Hermione had at least proved that she paid attention to her military readings. She couldn't resist a grin. "The advantage, is if we win, that's it. We wrap the campaign up with a bow," Hermione said, though she shook her head slightly at the increasing evidence of the dispositions. It was going to be a truly massive battle.
"If we break through," Bellatrix answered. "If."
"Do you think they were expecting us to deal with their forces in Dnepropetrovsk so quickly?"
"Certainly not," Bellatrix replied, before wordlessly extending her hand to take another mug of tea.
"That suggests they'll be weak in the south. They were probably hoping to force us to bypass even Novomoskovsk, maybe even advance through Pavlograd before turning west further north," Hermione mused. "I bet their line will be weakest in the south, around Kobelyaki. They will still be working to fortify it after we punched through here. So we should just go on ahead as fast as we can, and the Vorskla river is no real obstacle. If we cut them off from Kremenchuk, they can only retreat one way—direction Kiev. "
"We then turn north toward Reshetilovka to complete the cauldron?" Bella was looking sharply across the maps of roads and terrains. It was open, flat terrain, ideal for tank battles and manoeuvre warfare. Only the weather was bad. If it had been summer it would have been lovely, but there was barely a summer anymore. Instead, it was -40C and the wind was blowing snow and sculpting it into drifts across the land, hindering an advance which might have otherwise been blazing fast.
"Yes, that will do," Hermione agreed.
Dodson had been listening to the two witches, and nodded his assent. "I have no objections, Madame Black. It's only fifty klicks for our lead elements to reach Kobelyaki, shall we push on immediately?"
"Yes, do so!" Bella nodded, gesturing grandly with a gloved hand. " We'll move out shortly, Granger."
"Are we going to the front?" Hermione watched Bella closely, and could see the woman twitch, as if she was about to affirm that, of course she was going to go to the front.
Then she shook her head in the negative. "No, I need to stay with the command post and remain in charge of the operation for this one."
Hermione could see Dodson looking relieved as the General moved away to signal to their troops. She smiled. "Yes, it's going to be a very complicated operational mission. But we'll manage it. "
"Get yourself some tea, Granger. It will be a long day."
The snow hugged the ground, like a low running sea across the plain. It streaked and swept around hills and buildings, and caught and drifted downstream from fences. The low blowing snow obscured the roads, but provided a subtle tell-tale of a sunken patch across the surface. In the bitter cold, some of their vehicles had trouble operating, so they ran them constantly. They refuelled with the engines running, and ignored the risk.
Tracked MLRS launchers, down to some of their last reloads. Fuel tanker after fuel tanker, coming up behind the advance units. The armoured vehicles in the lead ploughed in columns through the blowing snow. They ran hard and fast, and their engines made them warm against the bitter cold. Armoured with sunglasses, balaclava and fur cap, the commanders sometimes popped their heads out of the hatches, but they didn't linger long. The wind blowing in this cold as the tanks moved fast was absolutely savage.
Near the hamlet of Lisne, about four and a half kilometres from Kobelyaki, the lead tank columns came in for a shelling. There was a battalion of 155's positioned near the city, and they laid down fires across the small village which was barely more than a strip of three roads with houses down each side. The tanks had already moved off the roads, so they buttoned up and moved in among the abandoned, banded riverbeds, where the meandering river Vorskla used to run. Bands of trees provided some cover, but the indirect fire from the enemy howitzers continued.
Shells fell down into the snow, slammed into the frozen ground below. The slap of a flash of light, the black column rising from the fertile bottomland earth, the thunderclap of the detonation. Over and over again, as the guns were served somewhere to the north of Kobelyaki, full shells descended, using concussion and maybe a lucky hit to knock out the armoured vehicles. The shrapnel, lethal to anyone exposed outside of the armoured cocoon of a fighting vehicle, forced them to slow, without anyone to sight for the manoeuvring of the tanks in the poor visibility.
The enemy had to have a team providing spotting, but the exact position was hard to say. That they were engaged less than five klicks from Kobelyaki implied the enemy had not been expecting them to go off-road to the north of the P52 highway and the town.
Bellatrix and Hermione consulted maps in the back of the rattling command track. Being in it at least meant they had hot tea, though they were cramped and surrounded by six subordinates, and comms messages were constantly coming and going. " Gaiova?" Hermione asked, looking at the name.
"I think it's 'Haiove'," Bellatrix sniffed. Of course, she was referring to a map in English.
"Russian, Ukrainian, English, start mixing and matching and you get confused fast," Hermione smiled for a moment, then it faded. "It has a clear line of fire down every one of the approach roads. We should send a reconnaissance in force there, they might have put a strong force east of the river to catch us in enfilade and we avoided it by having the lead columns circle north of Samarshchyna. Forward defence, since they didn't have time to fortify. "
Bella looked at her for a moment. "Aren't you a smartarse. But you're likely right. Let's send a regiment of Chally's through the forest to the south of 'Haiove' and we'll kick in the hornet's nest." She leaned over and picked up one of the radio headsets and looked at the commo. "The 17th ? Brigadier Gibson? I want you to pull off the road south of Sosnivka and proceed due north through the tree farm to the north of that village. Your objective is Haiove, take it quickly."
Hermione couldn't hear the man's replies, but she had to imagine that the former Janissary officers, hearing Bellatrix say 'take it quickly', would move aggressively, and without regard to the losses. Bellatrix, for her part, had casually thrown a brigade of some of the best tanks in the world forward on a supposition.
But it was a supposition they both agreed made sense. Hermione leaned back into the cold wall of the command track, feeling it rumbling and rattling below her. She could, in her mind's eye, see the tanks spreading out from column on the road into battle formation and pressing through the village, and then the woods. She could, because she had been in that place herself before, feel the fear of those among them, who wondered just how powerful the enemy they were about to face would be.
Of course, she had spent the last few years despising the Janissaries as money-loving traitors who would serve, willingly, the Death Eaters who hated them, and used them as crack troops. The national governments of regions in Europe which wanted independence—these, Voldemort had replaced with cronies, who made false promises of independence, who played them up into providing troops—Hermione could at least understand them. She had thought she had hated the Janissaries. But it turned out they were actually just men, too, capable of overcoming the situations they had found themselves in.
She unfolded another map covering the area to the south, and tried to keep thinking on her feet. The VDV, with their lighter vehicles, had been coming up behind the heavier Janissary divisions. But they were elite troops, and fast, and right near the command element with Hermione and Bellatrix were engineering detachments. "Bella," she began innocently, slipping in the moment.
Bellatrix shot her a look, but then just nodded.
"Let's have the VDV," Hermione continued, though with a tight smile now, "go with our engineering detachments to try and cross at Proskury. They've certainly blown the bridge, but if the engineers can get them across the ice… Attack at more points in the line to find a weakness, basically. If they get across they're fast enough to make up time to the north. "
"I'll need to rely on the 10th Regular Division to defend against an attack from the direction of Karlovka, then," Bellatrix shrugged. "But of course you're right, Granger. Let's get on it." She reached for the radio again, and began to issue the orders, while a gloved finger struck the map, illustrating a position on the topography. " And get us there, Granger. I want to see this."
The position marked was a low rise about eleven and a half klicks southeast of Lisne. It reached an altitude of 90 metres, whereas most of the land between them and the fighting was bottom-lands at 68 metres, and the fighting itself was on the low ridge fronting the current course of the river, at around 75 metres.
"Alright, I will get us into position, Madame Black." Hermione grinned and turned away to issue her own orders to the command group, turning them to the north along country roads through farmland covered in blowing snow. For the moment, it felt like they were a team, working together for a common goal. It was a rather nice feeling.
About twenty minutes later, they were in position on the ridge. By this point, the attack by the 17th Armoured Brigade had developed around Haiove. With the Army's own 155's engaging the enemy battalion in counter-battery fire to suppress them, a detachment of MLRS had laid down covering fires across the woods south of Haiove, then the tanks had advanced through them, with several detachments of wizards apparating into position two klicks east by the road junction with the P52 highway. There, they covered along the highway embankment to shield the tanks advancing into Haiove and attack the defenders.
The rippling explosions blasting through the trees that otherwise would have become homes, or paper, in some forgotten world of peace, illustrated the lines of the advancing tanks. The strange glows in green, red, blue, yellow of combat magic, the rippling effect in the air and the abrupt walls of snow created by shields interrupting the flow of the drifting snow across the ground, all of this, Hermione could see. She raised her wand and cast far-sight, giving herself an up-close image of the big Chally II tanks slamming their way over trees and any other obstacles unstoppable force.
Well, except for the ones caught by magic or shell, smashed to pieces or burning, visible in glimpses through the wood. Each time another died, with it men. The whole of the village was burning, too, and with it, whatever was left of the hopes and dreams of those there. Hermione hoped they had fled, fast and far, or at least to a wood further from the combat than the one their own forces now attacked through.
Around her, the command staff was quickly setting up a forward position. Command tracks were not meant for the commander of an Army. It was only with magic and the Telecaster and a lot of bravado that Bellatrix made her forward command style actually work. She had a large group of them with a recon element and a large contingent of wizards, some of the most junior of whom had been simply apparating around with messages, except they had all been sent forward to reinforce the lines by now, making the command situation for C3 even worse.
Somehow, they were still moving forward. The Janissaries and the VDV were both highly motivated, and Bellatrix's command style lent itself naturally toward letting the units under her command execute Auftragstaktik, what in Hermione's staff education had been called 'Printsip direktivnogo upravleniya', the Principle of Directive Control. Bellatrix had not issued orders to the artillery or the MLRS units to support the attack on Haiove, the fire support had been requested by the 17 th brigade, which was told only to occupy the position of the village from the south; they had also chosen their own dispositions for their supporting wizards and witches, because Bellatrix had given her muggle subordinate commanders the freedom to execute exactly as they pleased, precisely because she didn't really care.
It was a little bit of the height of absurdism, but it had worked, and it had created the bonds of loyalty which had led these men to defect. Now, with the opening moves all well in play, the command tracks around them were forming a block against the snow and wind. With the command tracks in a laager, both as protection and as a block against the bone-shattering cold, they could set their tents up within the laager to have enough space to properly manage the battle from. The command staff spilled out into the bitter cold as the diesel heaters were fired up, pumping hot air into the tents as they were erected as fast as possible. Hermione finished supervising the set-up, the roar of the artillery and rockets in the distance serving as an aural cacophony which was unending, a rumbling declaration that the battle was joined.
As Hermione turned back to the view from the ridge, Bellatrix joined her. Behind them, as a last grand gesture, a temporary aluminium flag pole was hoisted into position, and the Black Family Standard was run up on it. Hermione hastily finished her cigarette and tossed the butt to the wind. Bellatrix was (by her standards, so not very) subtly discouraging of the habit, which made Hermione rather embarrassed for it.
"Alright Granger, what have we got?"
"The Seventeenth is fully committed now, and they're advancing into Haiove as we speak," Hermione answered. Then she turned her attention to the VDV.
Bellatrix cast her own far-sight spell, pointing her wand toward Haiove for a moment to magnify the scene, and then turned to the southwest with Hermione. She could see the engineers' bridging equipment already going up, as the CIS troops deployed to cover them. Small groups of wizards and teams of Wizard Protection forces had crossed the river to set up forward pickets, and come under fire from a force of defenders. The VDV Division commander already had their number, though; the 2S9 Nona and ASU-85 mortar and artillery systems had already opened up to support them as the Black Guards engineers crossed over behind the wizards, to beginning setting up the bridge.
The VDV troops dismounted from their armoured vehicles, arranged in a rough half-moon position around the crossing, and began to send infantry across the frozen river. Though this risked the ice breaking, especially when the advancing infantry came under fire from the defenders, it was a risk they simply had to bear as they forced the crossing.
Their shared instincts had been right, then. The positions here were not strong enough to hold off a crossing. But the enemy was clever, too. By adopting a forward position in Haiove they had given themselves an actual chance to defend Kobelyaki, but there was no comparable position around Proskury on the east bank.
The wind carried away the clouds of smoke from the artillery, and mingled it with the snow. Bellatrix watched silently for a minute in the bitter cold, while the men advanced in perilous conditions across the ice, and exploding mortar rounds sometimes did not crack the thick sheet, and sometimes, terribly, split it open, with a drenching column of icy water rising into the air, and men slipped under never to be seen again.
They pressed on.
She had thought it was reckless and dangerous before, but Hermione had to admit that Bellatrix's habit of leading from the front and still involving herself directly in combat was understandable now that she herself was trapped in a staff position. Hermione had always been at the front, before. Now it was a little embarrassing to be out of the direct combat, knowing that her spells could save lives and drive back the enemy. But, of course, it might well be that her mind had saved even more on this day. She could hope so.
Bellatrix had seen enough. It was so bitterly cold, anyway, that her exposed face in a war between the warming spell and the savage wind. So she turned back, and entered the newly erected main command tent, with Hermione on her heel. There was hot tea waiting, boiled on the manifold of one of the diesel heaters. Side by side, the two witches worked as their forces drove forward across snow and ice, guns roaring in the swirl of snow and smoke. Men fought and died under the cracks and booms of guns and magic alike, and the positions of the Morsmordre were assaulted by the men who only weeks before had served as their comrades, now fighting alongside of Russian troops, fighting both in the south and the north in great numbers. All around Poltava, the swirl of combat descended like a storm from the heavens.
And, through the swirl of burning tanks and vehicles and the bodies of dead men laid out with their blood pooling on the snow, mixed with clods of frozen dirt churned up from below, the 17th pushed its way through Haiove. The enemy, rather than retreating, was destroyed outright where they stood. A second brigade converted with them from Lisne; the enemy blew up the bridge to Kobelyaki, but north of the bridge where the ice was intact, infantry dismounted and crossed through the fire to establish a foothold, while the 120mm mortars thundered to drive back the defenders, and the combat engineers came up with more bridging gear.
In the south, the swirl of battle resolved around the first of the bridges in place. The VDV's Tula Division, with its augmented CIS units, swept across with increasing strength and power as the infantry, under the artillery fire that could range across the river, dislodged the enemy mortars, capturing several. The ensorcelled troops defending the position began to retreat in disorder.
They were cracking the front open. The race to pocket the enemy in the Poltava 'cauldron' had begun.
Hermione didn't sleep for the next forty hours. She lived on spells and potions to keep her awake, on caffeine and cigarettes. By the second day, the particularly savage cold spell had lessened, but it was st ill -20C. The enemy position, though, had collapsed. They charged north toward Reshetylivka while the ground was swept with artillery fire and magical combat alike. At Butenky the enemy rallied and fought with their tanks hulldown behind the railway embankment. It was the last attempt to stop them. When they drove through the ruined railway track on the assault, the enemy's forces broke completely, and they had an easy run north toward their objective.
The aircraft came up, and began to attack those of the enemy who were now fleeing west, toward Kiev, with all other routes of escape having been cut off. This meant 273 km of retreating on the wrong bank of the river, under full attack from the Russian Air Force. Wizards and Witches were used too, apparating to forward positions to use magic to ambush retreating columns of the enemy troops and wrecking as many vehicles as possible, destroying and damaging the roads, and then disapparating away before a sustained battle could develop.
In this way, forty sleepless hours were passed conducting the operations necessary to utterly annihilate an enemy and trap twenty enemy divisions within a series of cauldrons across the southeast. The fighting had been relentless, but from the moment of Bellatrix's defection and the successful flipping of the Army in the Crimean, the outcome had unfolded with a terrible, methodical certainty. They had smashed Voldemort's Army in the Russian and Ukrainian lands.
It was when they reached Zhovtneve on the rail line toward Kiev from Poltava, about nine klicks from the Reshetylivka city centre, that Hermione saw it, or rather, she heard it before she saw it. As the command element slowed down, she pulled her balaclava down over her face and popped up out of the hatch.
In front of them was one of their mechanized brigades, with the men being greeted by Russian troops. The Russian soldiers, their equipment, it was all there, just like it had been before Hermione launched her desperation mission. Just before she had chained herself irrevocably to Bellatrix precisely to enable the victory that they had now clearly won. It was a perfectly overwhelming feeling. There, just west of the train station and the associated freight depot to the north, they had linked up with the Russian Army. They had completed the encirclement.
Bellatrix had kept her promise, honoured her agreement, delivered the left bank of the Dnepr to the CIS. Hermione stared at the cheering, celebrating men. The Black Guards were more subdued. Their future was uncertain, they had abandoned their families to follow this course, for some vague hope of a future of liberty. For the forces of the CIS, however, there was no doubt or hesitation. This was the moment the war turned. This was the moment that the forces of the enemy were no longer on the offensive. This was the moment that with their full strength mustered, they had wrecked them, defeated them utterly, liberated tens of millions of people and the whole swathe of the southeast. It was an hour of unmitigated joy. Hermione dimly knew that soon enough, the church bells would be ringing in the free cities of Russia, and now also the Ukraine. A grim, bitter winter would grow a bit brighter. The women watching the children—Teddy included—by Andromeda Tonks' apartment in Nizhniy Novgorod would at least have something to smile about, if only a little. The workers in the factories would feel like they had, in fact, accomplished something.
They had handed the enemy a defeat worthy of those blows which in '44 and '45 their grandfathers had delivered to the Nazi power.
Hermione grinned, dropped back into the command track with the slam of the hatch, and pulled her balaclava off. Exhausted men with sunglasses against the burning blindness of the snow and stubble on their chins could, at last, rest.
And so could she.
And so could Bella. "Bellatrix, we've joined up with the Russian Army. We've encircled Poltava."
Bella looked up from her map, and stared at Hermione over a steaming mug of tea.
She looked, in that moment, fragile, vulnerable, and perfectly lost, like she had never actually expected to get here, and see the sun dawn on the day when she had succeeded. Then she began to laugh, her cackling, manic laugh.
But whether it was from the tiredness, or from how much things had changed, it no longer grated on Hermione's nerves.
About two hours later, after meetings and salutes and drawing lines of sectors of control on maps with equally exhausted Russian officers, they found themselves in the station master's office of the railway station, where cots had been laid out. Hermione was asleep in minutes. The offensive was over.
But for the war, it was only the end of the beginning.
Notes:
Ukrainian/Russian names-there are usually slight differences. The Russian maps would use Russian, and the English maps would use transliterations of the Ukrainian, thus this light-hearted debate.
ASU-85 - an airborne self-propelled gun vehicle.
2S9 Nona - self-propelled 120mm mortar armed vehicle.
155 - would be shorthand for a 155mm artillery piece, standard general purpose artillery in most of the armies in the world.
laager - a circular defensive position with the outer lines reinforced with vehicles.
hulldown - the hull of the tank is concealed by terrain so only the turret is visible while fighting defensively. The tank can engage the enemy, but the enemy can only fire at the turret, which generally is better protected.
commo - English language military slang for "comms officer".