My War Memoirs: The Geometry of Waiting (Chapter 15.)

 

My War Memoirs: The Geometry of Waiting

“Hey, are you sleeping?”

The whisper, barely thicker than the frost that should have coated the air, snapped me out of the hollow cavern of my mind. It was Jura, the commander, a shadow against the greater, shimmering blackness of the night. My heart gave a startled, reflexive thump against my ribs, an involuntary tribute to the silence that had become its own threat.

“No, I’m not sleeping,” I managed, my voice a dry, unused rasp. “Just bored. Lost in the weeds of thought.”

The starry night above was cruelly beautiful—a vast, indifferent canvas, illuminating the fatigue etched into Jura’s face and reflecting weakly in my own wide-open eyes. It was mid-winter, yet this year had delivered a cruel joke of a season: a mild, snowless stretch where the cold was wet and insidious rather than sharp and cleansing. It simply settled into the bones, a damp, miserable companion. I gripped the cool earth of the trench edge and stared into the profound, lightless void that was no-man’s-land. I had imagined this—the frontline—would be something cinematic, a blur of action. Instead, it was this: an exhaustive, aching stillness.

Our deployment had been swift and brutal in its efficiency. We’d spilled out of the truck near the second line of defense behind Čepin, instantly swallowed by the mouth of the connected trench—a muddy artery running for kilometers, punctuated every fifty meters, well-organized bunker. Jura and I claimed one for our small team of ten people. We dropped the weight of our military packs, and almost immediately, the rhythm of vigil was established. Five of us were assigned to this short, fifty-meter stretch of the trench line, while the other five nestled into the relative warmth of the bunker, draped in their sleeping bags. The rotation was two hours on, two hours in the cold respite of the bunker, a sleep that never truly came.

I had eagerly volunteered for the first rotation, a rookie’s misplaced enthusiasm. I craved instruction, a clear manual for survival. Jura’s orders were simple: listen. I was armed with the ghostly green gaze of the IR device and a pair of night vision binoculars. Any anomaly was to be reported not by shouting, which was forbidden, but by a silent, low crawl to the next comrade ten meters down the line.

We had relieved a crew visibly worn to the bone, their faces slack with the oppressive monotony of a twenty-four-hour watch. It was the depressing gaze into the distance that truly exhausted them, a constant, low-grade psychological burn. Because even when nothing happened, everything was happening inside us. Our cortisol was permanently elevated, a self-imposed tyranny of alertness. No one could afford to be the casualty of their own negligence; the potential cost was too steep. Just as our units had silent scouts, the enemy had theirs. Spotting them was difficult, but the noise of the wider war was not.

Eight kilometers away lay Ivanovac, the primary line. From there, the night was torn by the rough zipper sound of automatic rifle bursts and the sudden, concussive echoes of detonations. Tracer rounds—red, angry flies—stitched lines across the horizon, and every half hour, a slow-moving, flashing rocket would drift over the distant town, preceding the heavy, sickening thud of a mortar impact. Occasionally, a colossal tank shell, aimed at the unseen city of Osijek behind us, would scream high overhead, a mournful, accelerating sound that ended in the muffled, shattering echo of someone’s home collapsing. We existed in this strange, sterile buffer zone, safe only by distance.

The initial two hours of my watch vanished in a haze of raw adrenaline. I was a tight wire, moving a few meters back and forth, the IR scope pressed to my face, turning the mundane earth into a thermal landscape. A small field mouse, a startled fox, a stray cat—each movement triggered a momentary, electric spike of fear, a quick, cold rush that passed once the thermal signature revealed the shape of an animal, not a man. Even the nocturnal world, usually a blanket of sound, seemed stifled by the war. My comrades often noted how animals, like us, had grown strangely accustomed to the artillery’s rhythm, yet their movements were still cautious, diminished.

The second shift, from midnight to two a.m., was harder. The first wave of adrenaline was spent, replaced by a dull, tedious watchfulness. But the hours between four and six a.m. were the deepest well of misery. The cold finally began to penetrate, turning my feet into numb blocks, and the exhaustion dragged at my eyelids. This was the window of greatest vulnerability—the time when concentration failed, and the enemy often probed.

That was why Jura was here.

As he spoke, the night’s delicate equilibrium shattered. A deep, coughing roar erupted from the enemy line—tank fire. A few heavy seconds later, the first detonation hit, a deafening BAAM that echoed barely ten meters behind our  bunker, the ground kicking up violently.

There was no thought, only a primal, instantaneous physical reaction. Jura and I folded in unison, collapsing onto the frozen earth floor of the trench. A second shot, a third. Several tanks were firing in rapid sequence. The next detonations walked the line, one to the left, one to the right, perhaps fifty meters away. BAAM. The concussion rattled my teeth; huge, black clods of earth rose into the sky, falling back down in a soft, heavy rain around us. The trench vibrated like a plucked string. Three more shots followed, the sound of the impacts growing quieter as the shelling continued its random traverse farther down the line.

A ringing silence followed, heavier and more complete than before. I lifted my head, my senses reeling.

“Wait, Jura,” I gasped, the question clumsy and half-formed. “Do they… do they know about this line?”

Jura was already standing, dusting the earth from his coat with a practiced calm that seemed impossible. He gave me a look—a tired, knowing blend of pity and acceptance.

“Yeah. What did you think?” he said, his voice flat. “But they’re not aiming. Not exactly. They’re just shooting at random coordinates along the entire length. They’re ten kilometers away, the shells are too precise to be truly random, but too scattered to be targeted. Not only that, but they just… sometimes hit where they need to.”

That was it. The artillery barrage, the tremor that had emptied my lungs, was over. The louder gunfire had resumed from Ivanovac—a sustained, hysterical storm of automatic fire.

“Looks like they’re running a new attack on our boys out front,” Jura continued, glancing at the glowing dials of his watch. He paused, his gaze settling on me. The darkness felt suddenly charged with his judgment, his brutal honesty.

“Believe me, you don’t want to experience that, but it looks like you will soon,” he said, his words sinking in with cold finality. “This here with the tank shells? This is just an overture. A chamomile tea. You haven’t seen or experienced anything yet.” He clapped a hand hard on my shoulder, not in comfort, but in a strange, jarring confirmation of my new reality. “But it’s good to feel a bit of what it’s like when it hits near you. Good to know your body still works.”

He turned and slipped away down the trench line, his silhouette dissolving into the pre-dawn gloom to check on the others. His parting words, offered over his shoulder, hung in the cold, uncertain air.

“You fought a "good" fight last night.”