The Stalingrad army

THE STALINGRAD
ARMY
THE ROAD to the Battalion runs along a railway line crowded with
freight cars standing in the newly-fallen
snow. We are walking
over a vacant lot pitted with bomb and shell craters. Ahead of us,
on the hilI, looms the water towers where the Germans are ensconced.
The area is in full view of the German snipers and observers. But
the slim Red Army man in the long greatcoat walking unhurriedly
beside me is quite at his ease.
"They can see us all right," he drawls. "There was a time when
we used to crawl along here, at night, but things are different now:
they're sparing their cartridges and bombs."
Changing the subject suddenly he asks me whether I play chess,
and goes on to explain that he is a first category chess-player and was
about to have received the title of maestro when the war broke out.
Never before had I discussed this abstract and noble game with the
feeling that Germans were watching me and counting their bullets. I
reply rather absently for I am too busy wondering whether the Germans sheltered in the concrete towers will really spare their ammunition. But the closer we come to the towers the less visible they become
until finally they dip out of sight behind the crest of the hill.
The path leads us through one of the wrecked shops of a huge Stalingrad plant. We pass great mounds of rusty scrap iron, huge ladles
for pouring steel, steel plates and shattered walls. The Red Army men
are so accustomed to the devastation here that they do not pay the
slightest attention to it. On the contrary, their interest is more likely
to be roused by a window that has survived in a wrecked works' office,
by a tall chimney undamaged by shells, or by a little wooden house
that by some miracle has escaped destruction.
"Look at that house! It's still alive and kicking," they say with a
smile as.they pass.
And indeed these rare evidences of a life of peace are strangely
moving in this kingdom of destruction and death.
Battalion Headquarters are located in the basement of a large
four-storey building, part of a huge industrial plant. This is the westernmost point of our Stalingrad front. Like a promontory it juts
into the midst of houses and structures occupied by the Germans. In
spite of the enemy's nearness the Red Army men go about their business calmly and leisurely. Two men are sawing wood, while a third is
splitting logs. A couple of Red Army men pass with thermos containers. Another is sitting in the shadow of a half-wrecked wall, industriously fixing a damaged mortar and humming a tune: Like a skilled
craftsman at his bench he pauses now and then to ponder some detail of his work, then takes up the tool and goes at it again, humming
under his breath.
T.he building bears traces of the frightful havoc wrought by the
Germans. All around it are huge pits gouged out by German "halftonners." Concrete walls and ceiling have been smashed by direct
hits of aerial bombs. The iron fixtures, wrenched by the force of the
blasts, hang and sag like a flimsy fishing net gnawed by the teeth of a
giant sturgeon. The western wall has been knocked to atoms by longrange guns; the northern wall succumhed to a sextuple mortar. Light
shells and mortar bombs have nibbled pieces out of the other walls.
Nevertheless, out of the metal and stone pulverized by the German fire,
the Red Army men have erected new walls with long, narrow embrasures. This ruined fortress has not surrendered. If has remained the
outpost of our defences and is now supporting our offensive with its
fire.
Today, as yesterday, fierce fighting rages here. In several spots
the Battalion trenches are no more than twenty yards from the enemy.
The sentry can hear the Germans walking about in their trenches,
the cursing when the rations are issued, and all night long the tramp
of the German sentry's feet, as he paces back and forth in his tattered
boots. Everything here is under fire, and every stone is a target. The
place is teeming with snipers and in these deep, narrow trenches
where the men have built themselves dugouts, installed stoves with
flues made of cartridge cases, where they swear roundly at the comrade who is shirking his share of wood chopping, where they smack
their lips as they dip their wooden spoons into the soup that has
been brought up in thermos containers through communication trenches-here,
the tension of this battle to the death never abates day or
night.
The Germans are fully aware of the importance of this sector in
their system of defences. If one raises one's head even the fraction of
an inch above the edge of the trench, the shot of a German sniper
cracks out. They are not sparing with their cartridges here.
But the frozen, stony soil into which the Germans have dug themselves deep cannot save them. Pickaxes and spades ring day and
night as our men press forward step by step, breasting the earth,
drawing closer and closer to the comma:nding height. And the Germans feel that the hour is near when neither sniper nor machine-gun.
ner will avail them. And this sound of the pickaxe-strikes terror into
their hearts, and they long for it to stop, if only for a minute.
"Russ, have a smoke!'.' they shout.
But the Russians do not reply. Suddenly the clatter of pickaxes
and spades vanishes in the thunder of explosions: the Germans are
trying to drown out the sound of the relentless labour of the Russians
in the blast of bursting grenades. In reply, grenades fly from our
trenches as well. But scarcely does the smoke disperse and the thunder
die down than the ringing of spades and picks smites the ears of the
Germans again. No, this soil will not safeguard them against death.
This soil is their death. The Russians are coming closer and closet
every hour, every minute, cutting their way through the flinty hardness
of the wintry soil.
... Again we are in Battalion Headquarters. Through a wrecked
wan on which still hangs the sign: "Please close the door. Fight against
flies," we pass into the deep basement. On a table stands a shiny brass
samovar. Red' Army men and commanders are resting on spring mattresses which they have hauled over from gutted homes in the neighbourhood.
Captain Ilgachkin, the Battalion Commander, is a tall, thin young
man with black eyes and a high, dark forehead. He is a Chuvash by
nationality. In his face, in his fiery eyes arid sunken cheeks, in his
speech one feels the dogged Stalingrad determination. He himself
says:
_
"I have been here since September. And now I think of nothing
but that hill: from the moment I get up in the morning until night.
And even when I'm asleep, 1 see it in DIy dreams." Excitedly he bangs
his fist on the table and 'says: "And I'll take it, by heavens, I'll take it!
The plan is flawless. There can be no mistake."
In October he and Private Repa were fired by another idea : to
bring down a Junkers-B? with an anti-tank rifle. Ilgachkin made a
number of fairly complicated calculations, taking into account the
muzzle velocity of a bullet and the average speed of an aeroplane and
drew up an aim correction table. An amazingly ingenious and simple
"anti- aircraft installation" was set up. They drove a 'stake into the
ground and fixed a cart-wheel on it. Then they attached an anti-tank
rifle to the spokes of the wheel by its supports with the barrel lying
between the spokes. With this contraption Repa, gaunt and melancholy
as ever, brought down three Junkers-87 dive 'bombers.
Now Vassili Zaitsev, the famous Stalingrad
sniper, has taken
an interest in the anti-tank gun. He has fitted it with a telescopic sight
from a sniper's rifle. He aims to knock out German machine-gun nests
by planting bullets square in the loopholes. And 1 am sure that he
.will do it. Zaitsev himself is a man of few words. "Our Zaitsev,"
they say in the Division, "is well-bred and modest; he's already done
for two hundred and twenty-five Germans." He is very mu~h respected
in the city. They call the young snipers whom he has trained "Zaichata" [Zaitsev is derived from zayats which means "rabbit" in Russian.
Zaichata-"bunnies"]
and when he addresses them and asks: "Am I
right?" they all answer in chorus, "Quite right, Vassili Ivanovich,
quite right." Just now Zaitsev is consulting with the engineers, making
drawings, and .jotting down figures.
Here in Stalingrad one frequently comes across people who not
only put all their heart and soul into the war but all the force of their
intellect as well. I bave met any number of colonels, N.C.O.'s, rankand- filers all busily engaged day and night figuring, estimating, making working drawings, just as if they felt in duty bound not only
to defend the city with their lives, but to devise some invention, to
engage in research work here in these cellars of the city in the spacious
laboratories of whose institutes and factories brilliant professors and
engineers recently worked.
The Stalingrad army is fighting in the city and III factories. And
just as the directors of the huge Stalingrad plants and the secretaries
of the District Party Committees once took pride in the fact that
it was in their particular establishment or district rather than in some
other that this or that famous Stakhanovite was working, so, now,
the divisional commanders are proud of their outstanding fighters.
Laughingly Batyuk checks them off on his fingers:
. "The best sniper, Zaitsev, is with me; the best mortar-gunner, Bezdidko, is with me; the best gunner in Stalingrad, Shuklin, is' also in
my unit."
And just as every district of the city once had its own traditions,
its own character, its own peculiar features, so, now, the various
Stalingrad divisions, all equal in glory and services rendered, differ
from. one another in many peculiar features and characteristic details.
We have already described the traditions of Rodimtsev's and Gurtiev's
Divisions. In Batyuk's gallant Division there is an air of kindly
Ukrainian hospitality, of good-natured chaff. They like to tell here of
how Batyuk was standing near a dugout while German mortar bombs'
were whizzing by one after another into a gully near the Chief of
Artillery, who was trying to get out of his underground quarters, and
how he jokingly corrected the aim:
"Two yards to the right. One yard to the left! Hey, Chief, look
out! "
They also like to poke fun at Bezdidko, the famous virtuoso on
the heavy mortar. And Bezdidko, who doesn't know what it means to
miss and who places every bomb within an inch of its mark, laughs
and fumes. And Bezdidko himself, a man with a soft, lilting tenor and
a shrewd Ukrainian smile, with 1,305 Germans to his credit, goodnaturedly rags Battery Commander Shuklin, who with a single gun
crippled fourteen tanks in the course of one day:
"The only reason he fired from one gun is that he only had one
gun to fire from!"
Here, in the Battalion, they like to joke, to tell funny stories
about one another. They tell about sudden night encounters with the
Germans; how they catch German grenades on the fly and throw
them back into the German trenches; 'tell how they "played tunes" on
- their six-barrelled mortar, landing all six bombs square in the
German bunkers; tell how a huge fragment of a ton bomb, which
could easily have killed an elephant, flew by and cut like a razor
through the greatcoat, quilted jacket, tunic and undershirt of a
Red Army man without even scratching him. And in telling these
stories the men laugh so heartily that you find yourself laughing with
them.
The company trench mortars are in an adljoining sector of the factory basement, From here they fire, from here keep watch on the enemy; here they sing, eat and listen to the gramophone.
A slender sunbeam penetrated through the shutter over the basement window. Slowly the beam crept over the foot of. a bed, skimmed
ever the boot of the man lying there, played on a metal button of his
greatcoat, crawled on to the table and cautiously, as if fearing an
explosion, brushed past the hand-grenade lying beside the samovar,
It crept higher and higher, which meant that the sun was setting and
the winter night setting in.
Usually they say: "Quiet night." But this night could not have
been called quiet. First there was a long-drawn-out howl, and then
came the sound of heavy and frequent explosions, at which the men in
the cellar remarked: "The sextuple's on the war path again." This"
was followed by equally heavy explosions and then a protracted and
distant boom. Several seconds later came a single blast. "That's our
long. range gun from the opposite bank," someone said. And even
though the firing kept up all the time and the onset of evening in the
dark cold cellar could be observed only by the fact that the sunbeam
had crept high up and was already passing over the sooty ceiling, this
was really a quiet evening.
A Red Army man wound up the gramophone.
"What shall I put on?" he asked.
Immediately several voices answered:
"Put on our record, you know."
And here a strange thing occurred. While the Red Army man was
looking for the record, I thought to myself: "How nice it would be
to hear my favourite 'Irish Drinking Song' in this gloomy, half-ruined
basement." Picture my surprise and pleasure when a moment later
the' strains of Beethoven's song flowed from the gramophone.
Evidently, this song was a favourite among the men, too, for
"they eneored it at least ten times."
The effect of the words and of this simple yet brilliant piece of
music was inexpressibly powerful here. A man on active service
experiences many emotions, passionate, joyful and bitter; he knows
hatred and longing, knows sorrow and fear, love, pity, vengeance.
But I have" seldom seen wistfulness among men at war. Yet in these
words, in this music of a grieving heart, in this humble, half-humourous request, there was an expression of profound and inexpressibly
moving wistfulness.
And here, as never before, I delighted in the great power of true
art, in the fact that soldiers who had been face to face with death
for three months in this devastated, ravaged butunsurrendering
building were listening to a Beethoven song as solemnly as if they were
attending a church service.
"
The strains of this song in the gloom of the cellar evoked solemn
and vivid recollections of scores of men who were defending Stalin-
grad, men who personified the grandeur of the people's 'spirit. I recalled Sergeant Vlassov, grim and unrelenting, holding the crossing.
I recalled sapper Brysin, handsome, swarthy, fearless and bold, fighting one against twenty in an empty two-storey house. I recalled Podkhanov who refused to be sent back across the Volga when he had
been wourided. When the fighting began, he had crawled out from
underground where the ambulance company was quartered, had crept
up to the frontline and opened fire. I recalled how Sergeant Vyruchkin,
under raking enemy fire, had dug into the debris under which Divisional Headquarters-at
the Tractor Plant-was
buried. He had dug
away with such passionate fury that he had actually foamed at the
mouth and he had to be dragged away for fear that he would drop
dead from the superhuman effort. I recalled how several hours earlier,
this same Vyruchkin had jumped into a burning truck loaded with
ammunition and extinguished the flames, And I remembered
that
General Zholudev, the Divisional Commander, had been unable to express his gratitude to Vyruchkin because the brave Sergeant had been
killed by a German mortar bomb. Perhaps he had inherited the noble
.tradition of his ancestors to rush, heedless of danger, to the rescue of
those in distress. Perhaps that is why his family bore the name of
Vyruchkin [from the Russian verb vyruchat, meaning "to rescue"].
I thought of Volkov of the Pontoon Battalion. With a smashed
collarbone, he had made his way thirty kilometres from the hospital
to the river crossing, crawling "most of the way and with an occasional lift from a passing car. I remember how he wept when they
sent him back to the hospital. I thought of the men who had been
burned to death in one of the Tractor Plant houses; they had refused
to leave the burning building and had kept up their fire to the last
round. I thought of the men who had fought for the Barricades Plant
and for Mamayev Hill, the men who had lived through the German
panzer attack in the "Sculpture Gardens," recalled the battalion which
. had perished to a man, from the commander to the very last private, in
defence of the StaJingrad railway station. I recalled the broad beaten
track leading to the fishermen's settlement on the bank of the Volga
-a road of glory and death; thought of the silent columns marching
along it in the stifling dust of August, in the moonlit nights of September, in the drizaling rains of October, in the snow of November.
They had marched with a heavy step-anti-tank
men, tommy-gunners, infantrymen, machine-gunners-had
marched in grim and ;olemn
silence, and the only sound that had come from them was the clank
of their weapons and the ringing of the ground under their measured
tread.
And suddenly I recalled a letter written in a childish hand, a:
letter lying beside a Red Army man who had been killed in a blockhouse. "Good morning, or maybe I should say good evening. How are
you, Daddy? I'm terribly lonesome without you. Home is not home
without you. Do come and visit us even if it's only for an hour. I'm
writing and my tears are just pouring down. This is your daughter
Nina writing."
And I recalled this fallen Daddy. Maybe he had been reading the
letter as he felt death approaching, and the crumpled sheet had remained there beside his head ....
How can I convey the emotion I felt in that hour in the dark
basement of the plant that had not surrendered to the enemy, as, I sat
there listening to the solemn and melancholy song and gazed at the
stern and pensive faces of the men in· Red Army greatcoats!
January 1, 1943
Stalingrad