Mitka Avenge His Fallen Comrades

Mitka’s revenge is a secret sniper mission in which he leaves the Red Army camp with The unnamed boy narrator and shoots at people in a nearby village. The boy understands the attack as retaliation for Mitka’s fallen comrades: a personal act of justice that risks his standing in the regiment and as a Hero of the Soviet Union. The episode makes revenge at once a deliberate use of military skill and a challenge to the collective order Mitka serves.

Background and Decision

In the days before the mission, Mitka is unsettled. He whispers and mutters to himself, strikes his head with his fist, and lapses into silence. As the regiment resumes its ordinary routines, the men speak less often of the dead and return to singing and preparing for a field-theater visit. Mitka, however, is unwell, and another man takes over his training duties. The contrast sets his private grief against the regiment’s gradual return to normal.

Before dawn one night, Mitka wakes the boy and tells him to dress, offering no explanation. Together they prepare the equipment while the others sleep. Mitka takes his rifle from its brown case, then puts the empty case back and locks it so that it appears the weapon is still there. He also takes the telescope and tripod, checks his cartridge belt, and gives the boy field glasses to carry. The careful concealment makes clear that this is not an authorized exercise: Mitka is arranging to leave unnoticed and disguise the absence of his rifle.

The boy does not know their destination or purpose. He guesses that Mitka is acting independently and may lose his position in the Army and public esteem if discovered. Yet he feels proud to have been chosen as Mitka’s companion. His admiration shapes the scene: he accompanies the older soldier as an ally, though he is not told what the mission entails and cannot speak to ask.

The Hidden Position and the Shootings

They slip past the field kitchen and wait for the guards to march by before crossing a field and leaving the encampment. Mitka limps and struggles with the rifle as they hurry; the boy carries the binoculars, while Mitka carries the weapon and its equipment. They bypass a sleeping village and enter the forest in daylight. At the forest’s edge, Mitka chooses a tall, sturdy tree near the fields. He helps the boy climb first and passes up the rifle, binoculars, telescope, and tripod; the boy then helps Mitka upward. They make a concealed seat by bending, cutting, and tying branches to clear their view.

From the tree they can see buildings in the village. The boy briefly glimpses a man leaving a house, but Mitka takes the binoculars and studies the scene through the telescope, keeping the boy from looking. A shot rings out. The boy imagines the man falling at his doorway, but the account distinguishes his imagined view from what he can actually see: without the binoculars, the village remains distant. Mitka reloads, pockets the spent cartridge, and continues to observe.

Mitka then fires three times in quick succession. The boy closes his eyes and pictures three people falling; from that distance the villagers cannot hear the shots and scatter, unable to locate the sniper. Families hurry the bodies inside, others disappear into their houses, and shutters close. Mitka scans the village again. When he fires once more, the boy imagines a young man trying to move between houses and falling among wild rosebushes. The concealed position leaves the villagers unable to identify where the shots originate, while the boy’s partial view makes his account of the scene a mixture of observation and imagined consequences.

Revenge and Private Justice

After the shootings, Mitka rests against his rifle while no one dares come outside. The boy envies him and interprets the mission as revenge for the deaths of Mitka’s friends. In that understanding, Mitka acts without waiting for approval from others, accepting the risk to his military position and his honored title. His training as a sniper has given him the means to carry out this act; the boy sees the mission as a test of what that expertise and status mean to Mitka personally.

The boy connects the episode to the idea that each person carries an individual struggle and must answer for his own sense of justice. He also sees Mitka’s choice as an alternative to the organized movement of the working masses: there are, in the boy’s reflection, different routes to a summit, including one reached alone or with the help of a single companion. The image is literal as well as political. The two have climbed the tree together, but the decision to turn military training toward private revenge belongs to Mitka.

That interpretation comes through the boy’s admiring perspective rather than an explanation from Mitka. Mitka has not disclosed his plan beforehand, and the episode gives no statement from the villagers about the attack or their relation to the deaths that prompted it. The boy nevertheless treats the action as a reckoning Mitka must perform for himself, one that risks external honor in order to preserve his own judgment of who he is.

Withdrawal and Aftermath

The boy points toward a dog in the village, recalling Judas, and asks by gesture for Mitka to shoot it. Mitka refuses, first with surprise and then with disapproval. The refusal establishes a limit to the violence the boy wants him to extend: Mitka has undertaken his own mission of revenge, but he will not simply follow the boy’s request to kill another target.

They descend from the tree slowly, with Mitka struggling because of his pain. He buries the spent cartridges under moss and removes traces of their presence before they walk back toward camp. They return unnoticed. Later that afternoon, while the other men are on duty, Mitka cleans the rifle and sight and puts them back in their sheaths. The concealment that began with an empty rifle case ends with the weapon restored to its ordinary appearance and the evidence of the mission hidden.

That evening Mitka is mild and cheerful as before, singing ballads about Odessa and soldiers avenging mothers who lost sons in the war. Other soldiers join the chorus, while funeral bells sound faintly from the village. The contrast does not undo what happened: the camp resumes its songs, Mitka’s conduct appears unchanged, and the bells mark mourning beyond the hidden acts the narrator has just witnessed. The episode leaves the revenge privately accomplished but publicly concealed, with the boy carrying its meaning as a lesson in solitary justice.