Comrade Josef Novotny looked thoughtfully over the dead range of No One’s Land and saw, at least a little, to the enemy’s positions in the enemy trench. As usual, he stared through the fog of war at the partially visible silhouettes of the enemy soldiers standing.
In the fog, he always saw Them aim their machine guns and machine guns at their space just as their soldiers aimed, as if in some death throes, back at them.
Occasionally, someone on the home side couldn’t stand it, and it seemed to him that there, on the other side, someone had moved and was about to open fire, firing into enemy space first. But never, at least since Joseph had been stationed here, had anyone returned fire.
Yet the Politruci have repeatedly said, with Bolshevik harshness, that there, in the forbidden zone, are imperialist enemies, and they are targeting them, even before the planned attack, which so far, fanatically expected by them, has not come. Sometimes, in political training, they would shout, „Wake up, wake up, they’re there, and they’re waiting for the right moment to let you down in the line of duty.“ But the simple soldier felt differently.
The trenches were housed on both sides in the former foundations of planned, never-completed mansion blocks. There was supposed to be a housing estate full of people and children playing in about that well-meaning, war-free future, and so far there were only trenches and bunkers in the former foundations of mansion houses in the cruelly present Joseph reality.
He had been in the service for less than a year, a young boy of nineteen, and he was proud of what he had already accomplished here. In heat, cold, and gunfire, he simply served his socialist country to the full.
He knew exactly where he was as the military masters drove them into the trenches in the big military truck Tatras 148 VNM. From Ústí nad Labem he followed the entire route, sitting in the back of the truck to the edge. It was only in full view of the change of the former district, at the Land Boundary Stone between Malé Březno and Přerov.
This was where his personal frontier began, where he had once been at home before the war. He was fully immersed in the memories of the past as they drove through the evacuated and now empty village of Těchlovice.
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