“Comrade!” I called out to the man, but still, he did not call back. 

“Maybe he’s deaf,” Dmitri muttered. 

This was not uncommon among soldiers over the last few months; exploding shells had ruptured thousands of eardrums.

“Is he partisan?” I asked Dmitri. 

“Niet, regular army,” he responded. 

We kept slowly approaching the man, hoping he wouldn’t shoot us if we snuck up on him. I wondered if we had taken Berezovka back, because that was the only way a Russian soldier would be all the way out here. We both called out again, but still no response. He was far too still. No living man could pose like a statue in a cold this bitter. We walked up to the sentry. He must have been a brute in his prime, with his bulging brow and his wrists as thick as a Tokarev rifle. A neat little bullet hole, crusted with frozen blood, pierced through his cheek just below his right eye. The man had been dead for days, rooted to the ground in the freezing cold.