Hoxa’s Final Bombardment is the episode in which Captain Hoxa vanished from his position during an artillery barrage on the Cherna River front. Recalled by Vasili Arda, it turns a desperate military action into an unresolved disappearance: the guns fall silent, the search finds no trace of their commander, and the absence outlasts the battle as a legend.

A position with no retreat

The bombardment unfolded as French infantry approached and the Cherna River rose, closing off the possibility of retreat. Hoxa continued directing the artillery, raising the guns’ angle as the incoming shells landed progressively nearer. At their maximum elevation, the guns sent shells high into the air, but those shells still fell only about three hundred yards from the position. The account presents the artillery crew as trapped between an advancing enemy and fire increasingly close to their own camp.

A flash struck the number three barrel behind Hoxa, followed immediately by thunder. Vasili Arda watched the captain closely in that instant, registering his expression as he mouthed the command to fire. The interruption did not end the barrage. Hoxa ordered the men to reload and fire at will, then returned to watching the shells through his field glasses, urging the crew to hurry as the situation tightened.

Hoxa leaves the guns

For several minutes, the explosions remained about three hundred yards away while neighboring companies brought their guns to bear on the ground between the artillery position and the French camp. As Hoxa scanned the horizon, his attention fixed on something Vasili Arda could not identify. The captain dropped his binoculars, drew his pistol, and ran toward the curtain of fire. He was shouting and aiming as he went. Vasili Arda alone noticed his departure; the others continued loading and firing, absorbed in the work of the guns.

The storm eased at dawn. Exhaustion slowed the rate of fire until it stopped, and the survivors began surveying the camp and its surroundings. Only after several quiet minutes did a soldier ask where the captain was. Vasili Arda said that he had seen Hoxa run toward the blasted ground about an hour earlier. A corporal then selected Vasili Arda and three others to search for him.

The search and withdrawal

The five men spread out through wet grass and bushes, with Vasili Arda retracing Hoxa’s route as closely as he could. Beyond the position, the ground changed: grass was flattened or scorched, craters marked the terrain, and mud made it impossible to continue on foot toward the French camp. The searchers found no sign of Hoxa. The account’s emphasis is on a landscape so thoroughly altered by bombardment that finding one missing man there became difficult, not on a confirmed account of what happened to him.

Vasili Arda turned back while the other four continued looking. At the base of the rise beneath the guns, he found Hoxa’s discarded binoculars, wiped mud from their lenses, and put them around his neck. The object offered a tangible remnant of the captain’s presence, but it did not resolve his disappearance. The four searchers later returned covered in mud after spending more than an hour on the plain, still without finding him.

The company withdrew on foot that morning. Its draft horses, which had been tied near the river, were gone, so the soldiers left their equipment behind and joined the first company. News of the armistice reached them later the same day. The retreat and the end of the fighting closed the immediate episode without closing the question of Hoxa’s fate.

From disappearance to legend

No trace of Hoxa was found, and the account does not establish whether he survived the bombardment. Instead, it records the consequence of that uncertainty: Hoxa became a legend, with stories about his ghost persisting into the Second World War. When Vasili Arda recounts the episode, Ramsay interrupts to say that he already knows the stories surrounding Captain Hoxa. The interruption shows that the disappearance has outgrown the private memory of the men who searched; it has entered a shared body of wartime lore.

The episode’s decisive reversal is stark. Hoxa begins as the commander controlling the guns, issuing orders while his men continue to fire; he ends as the missing person for whom the survivors search. Vasili Arda’s recovery of the binoculars preserves a link to the captain but supplies no answer. The legend grows precisely in that gap between the observed fact of Hoxa running into the fire and the absence of any confirmed account of what followed.