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Description
Bad winter. It's a bad winter... And it will be a bad winter. The cold of it has already reached me, deep down in my core... Squeezing all in its icy hold... Frozen lumps of flesh, the exact same as those rebels emerging from that bombed-out building... And my heart, disapppearing as they have, in a shriek quickly cut off by the shrapnel that slit their throat, sending the head at an awkward angle, nearly severed from the torso. The poor bastard still looks surprised...

Winter here is bad because it's alive, alive and cruel.

They say the devils take hold of the whole North-Eastern Europe, from October to early April.

These demons snarl, and they whirl around the soldiers marching painstakingly in the rubble. Around the armoured MBTs, those T-34 and T-72, hulking lumps of frozen metal, making them so cold that the gas, icing down, ruptures the fuel tanks, and that a bare hand will lose its skin if left for more than a fraction of a second on the metal plates that protects them from incoming fire, but not from merciless cold.

The snow, beautiful and deadly at the same time, as all the most beautiful of things, falls in heavy blankets and grasps around boots, tires and tracks. Like an irate woman, it has moods, changes heart at the speed of thought. It falls down, smooth and persistent, before joining forces with the enemy, the devils and the wind to block all of the men and most of the machines. Even the most brazen of soldiers, the young ones of seventeen or eighteen, who have not been here for long enough, know that the blizzard will kill them more surely than those few grams of lead, stings of heat against the frozen environment, that go past them, and more often than not through them. Most of the older, who've been there for years now, will welcome death... It has a warm embrace. One against which even those bloody Spetsnaz can't win.

The artillery hasn't left many buildings, but some, by an unknown miracle, still stand. No one is allowed in these silent husks... The rebels could send them crumbling on the soldiers, or vice versa. They watch over the town-battlefield, grey sentinels, ghosts raised against the sky, murmuring through the wind the long-lost litanies of some forgotten civilisation that was once ours.

In this unforgiving landscape, harsh, deadly by its mere existence, and with the devils, so furiously bent on punishing the intruders that dare to cause havoc in their world, even the weapons themselves give up. The cold hardens the metal down to the point where, fragile as glass, the only thing the soldier will heave from the ground is the wooden stock, leaving the hardened, trusty AK-47 or even PKK as a fragile sculpture of steel-crystal, utterly useless, shattered like a glass...

And more snow falls on the battlefield. More shells, too. The artillery has restarted. But it will never, ever match the patience, cunning and ferocity of that little devil that has spotted my unshaven, hollow-eyed face amongst those lines of yet more betrayed men.
Whichever side he's on, it's certainly not mine.

Description
Bad winter. It's a bad winter... And it will be a bad winter. The cold of it has already reached me, deep down in my core... Squeezing all in its icy hold... Frozen lumps of flesh, the exact same as those rebels emerging from that bombed-out building... And my heart, disapppearing as they have, in a shriek quickly cut off by the shrapnel that slit their throat, sending the head at an awkward angle, nearly severed from the torso. The poor bastard still looks surprised...

Winter here is bad because it's alive, alive and cruel.

They say the devils take hold of the whole North-Eastern Europe, from October to early April.

These demons snarl, and they whirl around the soldiers marching painstakingly in the rubble. Around the armoured MBTs, those T-34 and T-72, hulking lumps of frozen metal, making them so cold that the gas, icing down, ruptures the fuel tanks, and that a bare hand will lose its skin if left for more than a fraction of a second on the metal plates that protects them from incoming fire, but not from merciless cold.

The snow, beautiful and deadly at the same time, as all the most beautiful of things, falls in heavy blankets and grasps around boots, tires and tracks. Like an irate woman, it has moods, changes heart at the speed of thought. It falls down, smooth and persistent, before joining forces with the enemy, the devils and the wind to block all of the men and most of the machines. Even the most brazen of soldiers, the young ones of seventeen or eighteen, who have not been here for long enough, know that the blizzard will kill them more surely than those few grams of lead, stings of heat against the frozen environment, that go past them, and more often than not through them. Most of the older, who've been there for years now, will welcome death... It has a warm embrace. One against which even those bloody Spetsnaz can't win.

The artillery hasn't left many buildings, but some, by an unknown miracle, still stand. No one is allowed in these silent husks... The rebels could send them crumbling on the soldiers, or vice versa. They watch over the town-battlefield, grey sentinels, ghosts raised against the sky, murmuring through the wind the long-lost litanies of some forgotten civilisation that was once ours.

In this unforgiving landscape, harsh, deadly by its mere existence, and with the devils, so furiously bent on punishing the intruders that dare to cause havoc in their world, even the weapons themselves give up. The cold hardens the metal down to the point where, fragile as glass, the only thing the soldier will heave from the ground is the wooden stock, leaving the hardened, trusty AK-47 or even PKK as a fragile sculpture of steel-crystal, utterly useless, shattered like a glass...

And more snow falls on the battlefield. More shells, too. The artillery has restarted. But it will never, ever match the patience, cunning and ferocity of that little devil that has spotted my unshaven, hollow-eyed face amongst those lines of yet more betrayed men.
Whichever side he's on, it's certainly not mine.