Mannerheim Line Welcomes You (14)
Nothing happened that night.
Around noon the next day, Simon found traces left by the Soviet unit in the snow. They appeared to have passed through a day earlier, numbering somewhere between one and two hundred men. There were also wagon tracks in the snow, which meant they were likely equipped with heavy machine guns.
The two pursued them on skis for an entire afternoon, finally closing in on their target before sunset.
This Soviet unit moved slowly. In snow half a meter deep, both men and horses struggled to travel, and sometimes soldiers even had to push the wagons. The terrible weather and the constant reports of casualties from the front had badly damaged the troops' morale. They had already exceeded the originally planned sixteen-day campaign. If Zhang Heng remembered correctly, quite a few Soviet units had been wiped out wholesale by guerrillas, while their own gains remained negligible.
Every unit sent to the front was now deeply uneasy. The morale of troops fighting across borders was usually lower than that of defenders fighting on their own soil. Although the Soviet Union had carried out some propaganda mobilization before the war, the results had been mediocre at best. Especially after the recent Great Purge, the experienced mid- and senior-ranking officers in the Soviet army had either been executed or exiled to Siberia to keep the polar bears company.
Many of the young officers promoted in haste had only recently graduated from military academies. Their loyalty was beyond question, but they only knew how to rigidly carry out orders from above. They had no trouble in easy victories, but when faced with a difficult situation like this, they were equally poor at calming their soldiers.
After taking two looks, Simon handed the binoculars to Zhang