But Petrovsky had reached only the first level of the roofs—halfway up, at mark +30—when he saw Lieutenant Pravik and the men from the Pripyat brigade coming down toward him. Something terrible had clearly happened to them: staggering and incoherent, the half dozen men were pulling and dragging one another down the staircase, vomiting as they came. Petrovsky told one of his men to get them safely to the ground, while he continued upward with Ivan Shavrey—one of the two Belarusian brothers on the third watch. In his haste to reach the top and help the comrades they imagined still fighting the
...more
