There was a heart of darkness, accentuated by the highlights of bright, deep snow drifts and the flickers of sporadic fires. The buran howled indiscriminately around the bodies, destruction and wreckage that had been laid to waste by human beings. One side defending, one side fiercely attacking, all in the name of patriotism. But nature would reclaim and re-balance.

Olga Tyshbir huddled over her stove stirring, her hands bitterly cold from her labours outside during the day. She gripped the wooden spoon with determination and steadiness as she stirred. Her husband Yuri, casually sat on a small stool pretending to not concentrate on the scene outside of their farmstead. The Winter had come with it’s usual Eastern bitterness, but the last month or so had been especially endless and draining.

‘How many did you see today my love’?

Yuri had turned his ancient head towards his wife like a tortoise and had raised his hairy, white eyebrow in his questioning. His forehead neatly lined in deep crevasses and folded skin.

‘Many many more! They’re fools and surrounded, but it’s not our comrades that will take them, God is on our side’.

Olga continued to concentrate on her meagre cooking. This soup was as precious as the most valuable diamond and enough to keep them alive and warm. She didn’t know how much longer the situation would remain this way, it had been months, but the elements seemed to be having a final fateful say.

Yuri calmly ran his fingers through his white beard as if deep in thought.

Olga stopped stirring suddenly and turned to look at her husband.

‘I hate them’.

Yuri stopped contemplating suddenly and firmly put his gnarled hands on his boney knees.

‘To hate in much the same mindlessness as them is to not be a human being. In all our years on this planet have we not learnt that we all have light and dark inside us’

The old man paused.

‘I will not be one of them and if that means fighting for good in this world, even at the ends of the hell we are living, so be it’.

Olga grunted in her disagreement but her heart knew her husband was a wise man, and she respected him above all others. She started to serve her steaming soup into two wooden bowls.

He’d been sat for so long in the sub zero temperatures that when Yuri attempted to stand, he lurched forward before righting himself. An inferno of fire would make little warmth in the building they called home. Gaping holes in the masonry were barely keeping the framework together let alone keeping the buran blizzards out.

There was a knock at the door. Frantic and disordered in it’s rap. The knuckles of a frozen, frost bitten hand.

Yuri shuffled forwards and eventually unblocked the makeshift door.

There on the doorstep stood a man.

If you could call him that. His uniform hung from his body and it was clear that this young man was soon to meet his maker. His black finger tips peeped briefly above badly damaged gloves and bandages.

‘We need to take your home for firewood to burn in the morning’. The young man rasped in broken Russian with strong accents of Prussian.

It was clear to Yuri that this man wouldn’t make the morning. This was the moment where two fiercely patriotic parties met one another in a small act of humanity and the old man had his morality tested to the hilt. Despite losing everything, Yuri’s brown eyes met the glass blue ones of his visitor.

The silence was short but telling.

Olga was petrified, she stood frozen at the table grasping her wooden spoon in one hand and wondering if she should grab a weapon with the other.

The Visitor had much the same thoughts as the old couple. He was hated for killing and maiming in a foreign land and he understood that he was here under very dangerous circumstances. Die or be killed.

Yuri could feel the tension rising between the soldier and his wife, but made a vow to himself to not antagonise the situation and act with kindness. He could see the man in front of him was dying of cold and was starving.

‘Here, have this’ Yuri nodded towards one of the two bowls of soup.

The widening of eyes between Olga and the man didn’t need words. There was disbelief, discomfort, rage, gratitude and respect all rolled into this one act. The act of positively rising above a situation in the name of humanity and not into one of hate.