But in Ukraine they are also the most essential. Five hundred years later, infantrymen remain the most disposable of troops. The term “infantry” derives from “infant,” and was first applied to low-ranking foot soldiers in the sixteenth century. On the front, to talk about the future, or to imagine experiencing a reality distinct from the baleful present, smacked of naïveté or hubris. “I’ll give it to you as a gift after the war,” Syava said.Įverybody laughed. The others began mocking the knife as unsuitable for a modern industrial conflict.
One of them, called Syava, had a missing front tooth and wore a large combat knife on his belt. The soldiers climbed back into the light, found their shovels, and resumed working. The helicopter deployed several rockets somewhere up the tree line. As for the infantrymen, their mission was straightforward: not to leave and not to die. Russian forces had already pinpointed the position and seemed determined to eradicate it. Ukrainian soldiers often employ netting or other camouflage to evade drone surveillance, but here subterfuge would have been futile. To refortify the structure, new logs had been stacked over the burned ones. A direct hit from a mortar had charred the timber. At the sound of a Russian helicopter, everyone squeezed inside. A log-covered dugout, where the soldiers slept, was about five feet deep and not much wider.
A torn piece of a jacket, from a separate blast, hung on a branch high above us.
Eight infantrymen were rebuilding a machine-gun nest that Russian shelling had obliterated the previous week, killing one of their comrades. Artillery had churned up so much earth that you could no longer distinguish between craters and the natural topography. In mid-March, I arrived at a small Army position in the eastern region of the Donbas, where shock waves and shrapnel had reduced the surrounding trees to splintered canes. Soldiers on the front in Ukraine adhere to a maxim that grows more sacrosanct the longer they survive: If you want to live, dig.
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