The "Grass" was no longer the gentle wheat of Wieliczka or the chalk downs of Kent. It had become the vast, unforgiving steppe of the Soviet Union—an endless, flat expanse of black earth, birch groves, and frozen rivers that stretched from horizon to horizon under a merciless sky. In winter, the steppe turned white and lethal; temperatures plunged to -40°C, snow drifted chest-high, and the wind cut like glass.
