My War Memoris: The White Scent of Salvation (Chapter 24.)

 

The White Scent of Salvation

The hours on the front line near Ivanovac do not flow like ordinary time. They stretch like cooling tar, sticky with sweat and the heavy weight of anticipation. Morning had already bitten deep into the day, and we crouched in those well-built trenches of ours, watching the horizon shudder under the weight of distant detonations.

I was a rookie, a recruit who had been promised a safe spot in the rear, yet here I was, staring at the raw edge of the world. But I soon learned that my position wasn't a mistake or a stroke of bad luck—it was part of a desperate, larger machinery. The entire brigade had been ordered to test the limits of the enemy. From every position along the line, units were pushing forward, attempting reconnaissance and looking for any crack that would allow a breakthrough.

The enemy’s response was swift and violent. Because we had poked the nest along the entire front, they unleashed everything they had. The ground didn't just shake; it groaned under the weight of a massive artillery counter-strike. We could hear the heavy, metallic growl of tank engines from the direction of Paulin Dvor—not just one or two, but a coordinated movement of steel. They were shifting their armor, digging in, and preparing to crush our attempt before it even began.

It was in this chaos of a failing breakthrough that our specific task was born. Commander Gajo, a man whose face was etched with exhaustion like a topographical map, knew we were blind. The brigade needed to know exactly where those shifting tanks were settling. When he announced he was going on a reconnaissance mission to a house on the rise just down the street, I volunteered too.

Looking back, I don’t know what possessed me. Perhaps it was that mad, rookie urge to prove I belonged among the wolves, even though I was still just a pup. Gajo measured me with that piercing gaze of his, looking for fear or reason in my eyes. He found only stubbornness. He nodded, and we moved out with two other soldiers and me.

That "hole in time"—those few minutes between salvos when the gunners are reloading their bloodthirsty barrels—was our window. We ran those hundred meters like hunted beasts. We burst into a house that served as a ghostly reminder of the peace we had lost. It was a new build, barely finished. Inside, I was hit by a scent that paralyzed me for a moment—the smell of fresh plaster and recently dried paint. Someone here, only a few months ago, had planned a family, chosen shades of white for the living room, and dreamed of Sunday lunches. This house didn’t smell of war; it smelled of a new beginning brutally interrupted.

We climbed to the attic, stepping softly as if not to wake the silence. We lifted a few tiles, just enough to create cracks in our hiding place. Through those slits, the world looked like a scale model of death. I saw them—the enemy soldiers. They looked just like us. Tired men in uniforms, stacking branches onto their tanks, trying to become invisible. I watched them through binoculars, my heart hammering against my ribs like a bird in a cage. Gajo whispered, noting the positions of every bunker, every mortar. It was a dance on the edge of a razor.

"Tank... there on the left," someone whispered. "The turret is turning."

I felt my stomach tighten. That metallic snout, cold and precise, was hunting us. "It’s impossible they’ve spotted us," Gajo said, but the certainty was gone from his voice.

"Run!"

We didn’t just use the stairs; we flew over them. Gravity was the only ally we had left. We were on the ground floor, lunging for the exit, when the world shattered into a thousand pieces. The detonation wasn't just a sound; it was a physical blow that punched the breath from my lungs. The first shell hit the floor above us, and that fresh plaster—that white paint someone had dreamed about—disintegrated in a second. It collapsed onto us in a thick, opaque cloud, burying us in a snow that didn't cool, but smothered.

As it turned out later, they hadn't necessarily seen our silhouettes behind the tiles. The truth was colder, more calculated: the enemy was simply sanitizing the battlefield. That house was too perfect, too strategically positioned to be left standing. They weren't firing at us specifically; they were firing at the possibility of us. They were leveling any structure that could serve as an observation post, systematically erasing every high vantage point that dared to overlook their positions. 

And in that very moment, as I burst onto the road covered in white powder, with death breathing down my neck, the most incredible thing happened. Instead of a scream, laughter erupted from me.

Because in that blinding whiteness, the smell of fresh plaster merged with the smell of flour from my childhood. I remembered my grandmother’s kitchen—the woman who taught me that food is love and cooking is a game. I remembered the day when, as a fourteen-year-old, clumsy and too fast for my own good, I knocked a bowl of flour off the table. I hit the floor, and a white cloud swallowed me whole. I was a white statue of sorrow, convinced I had ruined everything. But my grandmother... she didn’t get angry. Her laughter echoed through the kitchen like the most beautiful music. Seeing my misery, she did something magnificent: she scooped the flour from the floor, smeared it on her own face and neck, and lay down on the floor beside me. We rolled in that white dust, two happy fools who knew that any mess could be fixed with laughter.

Now, running from a tank, I was that boy again. I looked at Gajo and my other two comrades—they were total white ghosts from head to toe. Only their eyes shone out from those mad masks of plaster. Every time they took a frantic step, a cloud of white dust would rise from them, as if they were carrying their own private storms. We looked like four baker's apprentices who had lost their way onto a battlefield.

It was bizarre. It was surreal. It was the only thing that could save me from madness at that moment.

"What are you laughing at, you fool?" Gajo’s eyes seemed to say as we sprinted those fifty meters to safety. When we finally ducked behind a secure wall, we collapsed. The silence after the detonation was heavy, but my wheezing laughter broke it. Gajo looked at his own white hands, then at me, then at the third man. The tension—that terrible, deathly seriousness of the front—shattered like glass. All three of us began to choke with laughter, pointing fingers at one another, as white dust rose around us with every breath.

We returned to the trenches like apparitions. Our comrades looked at us in disbelief, and then, the laughter broke out there, too. It was the laughter of relief—the laughter of men who had cheated the gravedigger one more time.

As I sat in the trench hours later, shaking the remains of someone else’s dream off my uniform, I thought about my need to prove myself. My urge to be a hero, to push myself where I didn’t belong, had nothing to do with bravery. It was youth, not yet believing in its own end. But that white dust, that scent of plaster that brought me back to my grandmother, taught me something more important. It taught me that in every horror, there is a shard of memory that keeps us sane.

Eight more hours until evening. Eight more hours of sentry duty under the stars, and then, rest. But I was still smiling, feeling the fine dust under my fingernails, as if my grandmother were still there on the front line, holding my hand and telling me that everything would be alright. As long as we could laugh at ourselves.

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