Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  The siege of Leningrad is something of a bone in the throat of Soviet historians who want to see their work in print. Thus a magnificent Russian feat of heroism goes half-told in its grim and great truth.

  Lately, these historians have in gingerly fashion touched things that went wrong in the Great Patriotic War, including the total surprise of the Red Army in 1941, its near-collapse, and its failure for nearly three years to free half of Russia from the Germans, a much smaller people at war on other fronts as well. The explanation is that blunders were made by Stalin. Yet this too is a hazy business. As the years pass, and obscure shifts in high Soviet policy come and go, Stalin's stock as a wartime leader falls and rises again. He has yet to be blamed directly for what happened at Leningrad. The Party is by dogma blameless.

  What is undeniable is that the Germans of Army Group North, some four hundred thousand strong, drove to the outskirts of the city in a quick summer campaign, and cut it off by land from the "Great Earth," the unconquered Soviet mainland. Hitler decided against an immediate grand assault.

  His orders were to blockade the city into submission, starve the defenders or wipe them out, and level it stone by stone to an extinct waste.

  The people of Leningrad knew they could expect little more than that.

  Declaring it an open city like Paris, as showers of enemy leaflets kept urging, was out of the question.

  As winter drew on, the people started bringing in supplies under the German guns, across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga. The invaders tried to smash the ice with artillery shells, but ice seven feet thick is tough stuff. Convoys kept running on the ice road through the winter, through darkness, blizzards, and artillery barrages; and Leningrad did not fall.

  As food came in, useless mouths departed on the empty trucks. By the time the ice melted in the spring there was something like a balance between mouths and food.

  In January 1943, shortly before Victor Henry's visit,"Red Army units defending Leningrad pushed back the German lines a short distance, at terrible cost, and freed a key railroad junction. This broke the blockade. Under the invaders' artillery pounding, rail supply resumed along a strip of roadbed called the "corridor of death," cut by the German shelling over and over, and always reopened. Most cargoes and travellers got through safely, and that was how Victor Henry entered the city. General Yevlenko's- ski plane landed near the freed rail depot, where Pug saw immense stacks of food cartons, with U.S.A. stencillings; also arrays of American jeeps and Army trucks marked with red stars. They. took the train into Leningrad at night in an absolute blackout.

  Outside the train windows on the left, "German guns flared and muttered.

  The breakfast in the chilly barracks was black bread, powdered eggs, and reconstituted milk. Yevienko and Pug ate with a crowd of young soldiers at long metal tables.

  Gesturing at the eggs, Yevlenko said, "Lend-Lease."

  "I recognize the stuff." Pug had eaten a lot of it aboard the Northampton when the cold-storage eggs ran out.

  The artificial hand waved around at the soldiers. "Also the uniforms and boots of this battalion."

  "Do they know what they're wearing?"

  Yevienko asked the soldier beside him, "Is that a new uniform?"

  "Yes, General." Quick reply, the young ruddy face alert and serious.

  "American-made. Good material, good uniform, General."

  Yevlenko glanced at Pug, who nodded his satisfaction.

  "Russian body," observed Yevienko, eliciting a rueful laugh from Pug.

  Outside it was growing light. A Studebaker command car drove up, its massive tires showering snow, and the driver saluted. "Well, we will see what has happened to my hometown," said Yevlenko, turning up the collar of his long brown greatcoat and securing his fur cap.

  Victor Henry did not know what to expect: another dreary Moscow, perhaps, only burned, battered, and scarred like London. The reality struck him dumb.

  Except for silvery barrage balloons serenely floating in the still air, Leningrad scarcely seemed to be inhabited. Clean untracked snow covered the avenues lined with imposing old buildings. No people and no vehicles were moving. It was like Sunday morning back home, but in his life Pug had never seen a Sabbath peace like this. An eerie blue silence reigned; blue rather than white, the blue of the brightening sky caught and reflected by the pristine snow. Pug had not known of the charming canals and bridges; he had not imagined magnificent cathedrals, or splendid wide thoroughfares rivalling the Champs-Elysees, white-mantled in.crystalline air; or noble houses ranged along granite embankments of a frozen river grander than the Seine. All the breadth, strength, history and glory of Russia seemed to burst on him at a glance when the command car drove out on the stupendous square before the facade of the Winter Palace, a sight more extravagantly majestic than Versailles. Pug remembered this square from films of the revolution, roaring with mobs and czarist horse guards. It was deserted. There was not one track in the acres of snow.

  The car halted.

  "Quiet," said Yevienko, speaking for the first time in a quarter of an hour.

  "This is the m(*t beautiful city I have ever seen," said Pug.

  "Paris is more beautiful, they say. And Washington."

  "No place is more beautiful." Impulsively Pug added, "Moscow is a village."

  Yevienko gave him a very peculiar look.

  "Is that an offensive remark? I just said what I think."

  "Very undiplomatic," Yevlenko growled. The growl came out rather like a puff.

  As the day went on Pug saw much shell damage: broken buildings barricaded streets, hundreds of windows patched with scrap wood. The sun rose, making a blinding dazzle of the thoroughfares. The city came to life, especially in the southern sector nearer the German lines, where the factories were. Here the artillery scars were worse; whole blocks were burned out. Pedestrians trudged in the cleared streets, an occasional trolley car bumped by, and there was heavy traffic of army trucks and personnel vehicles. Pug heard the intermittent thump of German guns, and saw stencilled on buildings, CMZENS! DURING ARTILLERY SHELLING, THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS MORE DANGEROus. Yet the sense of an almost empty, almost peaceful great city persisted even here; and these later and more mundane impressions did not erase-nothing ever erased-Pug Henry's vivid morning vision of wartime Leningrad as a sleeping beauty, an enchanted blue frosty metropolis of the dead.

  Even the Kirov Works, which Yevlenko said would be very busy, had a desolate air. In one big bombed-out building, half-assembled tanks stood in rows under the burned rubble from the cave-in, and dozens of shawled women were patiently clearing away the debris. One place was very busy: an immense open-air depot of trucks under an elaborate camouflage netting that stretched for blocks. Here maintenance. work was proceeding at a hot pace in a tumult of clanking tools and shouting workmen, and here was LendLease come to life: an outpouring from Detroit, seven thousand miles away beyond the U-boat gauntlet; uncountable American trucks showing heavy wear. Yevlenko said most of these had been running on the ice road through the winter.

  Now the ice was getting soft, the rail line was open, and that route was probably finished. After reconditioning, the trucks would go to the central and southern fronts, where great counterattacks were beating back the Germans. Yevlenko then took him to an airdrome ringed with antiaircraft batteries that looked like U.S.

  Navy stuff. Russian Yak fighters and Russian-marked Aircobras were dispersed under camouflage all over the bombplowed field.

  "My son flies this airplane," said Yevlenko, slapping the cowl of an Aircobra. "It is a good airplane. You will meet him when we go to Kharkov."

  Near sundown they picked up Yevienko's daughter-in-law, a volunteer nurse coming off duty at a hospital. The car wound through silent streets that looked as though a tornado had swept them clean of houses, leaving block after block of shallow foundations and no rubble.

  All the wooden houses here, Yevlenko explained, had been pulled down and burned as fuel. At a flat waste where
rows of tombstones stuck out of the snow, the car stopped. Much of the graveyard was randomly marked with bits of debris-a piece of broken pipe, a stick, a slat from a chair -or crude crosses of wood or tin. Yevienko and his daughter-in-law left the car, and searched among the crosses. Far off, the general knelt in the snow.

  "Well, she was almost eighty," he said to Pug, as the car drove away from the cemetery. His face was calm, his mouth a bitter line.

  "She had a hard life. Before the revolution she was a parlor maid.

  She was not very educated. Still, she wrote poetry, nice poetry.

  Vera has some poems she wrote just before she died. We can go back to the barracks now, but Vera invites us oh her apartment. What do you say?

  The food will be better at the barracks. The soldiers get the best we have.

  "The food doesn't matter," said Pug. An invitation to a Russian home was an extraordinary thing.

  "Well, then, you'll see how a Leningrader lives nowadays."

  Vera smiled at Pug, and despite poor teeth she all at once seemed less ugly' Her eyes were a pretty green-blue, and charming warmth brightened her face, which might once have been plump. The skin hung in folds, the nose was very sharp, and the eye sockets were dark holes.

  In an almost undamaged neighborhood they entered a gloomy hallway smelling of clogged toilets and frying oil and went up four narrow flights of a black-dark staircase' A key grated in a lock. Vera lit an oil lamp, and by the greenish glow, Pug saw one tiny room jammed with a bed, a table, two chairs, and a pile of broken wood around a tiled stove, with a tin flue wandering to a boarded-up window. it was colder here than outside, where the sun had just gone down. Vera lit the stove, broke a skin of ice in a parl, -and poured water into a kettle.

  The general set out a bottle of vodka from a canvas bag he had carried up the stairs. Frozen through, despite heavy underwear and bulky boots, gloves, and a sweater, Pug was glad to toss off several glassfuls with the general.

  Yevlenko pointed to the bed where he sat. "Here she died, and lay for two weeks. Vera couldn't get her a coffin. There were no coffim.

  No wood. Vera would not put her in the ground like a dog. It was very cold, much below zero, so it was not a health problem. Still, you would think it was horrible. But Vera says she just looked asleep and peaceful all that long time. Naturally the old people went first, they didn't have the stamina."

  The room was rapidly warming. Frying pancakes at the stove, Vera took off her shawl and fur coat, disclosing a ragged sweater, and a skirt over thick leggings and boots.

  "People ate strange things," she said calmly. "Leather straps.

  Glue off the wallpaper. Even dogs and cats, and rats and mice and sparrows. Not me, none of that. But I heard of such things. In the hospital we heard awful stories." She pointed at the pancakes starting to sizzle on the stove. "I've made these with sawdust and petroleum jelly. Terrible, you got very sick, but it filled your stomach. There was a small ration of bread. I gave it all to Mama, but after a while she stopped eating.

  Apathetic.

  "Tell him about the coffin," said Yevlenko.

  "A poet lives downstairs," Vera said, -turning the sputtering cakes. "Lyzukov, very well-known in Leningrad. He broke up his desk and made Mama a coffin. He still has no desk."

  "And about the cleanup," said the general.

  The daughter-in-law snapped with sudden peevishness, "Captain Henry doesn't want to hear of these sad things."

  Pug said haltingly, "If it makes you sad, that's different, but I am interested."

  "Well, later, maybe. Now let us eat."

  She began setting the table. Yevlenko took from the wall a photograph of a young man in uniform. "This is my son."

  The lamplight showed a good Slavic face: curly hair, broad brow, high cheekbones, a naive clever expression. Pug said, "Handsome."

  "I believe you told me you have an aviator son."

  "I had. He was killed in the Battle of Midway."

  Yevlenko stared, then gripped Pug's shoulder with his good hand.

  Vera was setting a bottle of red wine on the table from the canvas bag.

  Yevlenko uncorked the bottle. "His name?"

  "Warren.

  The general got to his feet, filling three glasses. Pug stood up, too. "Varren Viktorovich Henry, " said Yevienko. As Pug drank down the thin sour wine, in this wretched lamplit room growing stuffy from the stove heat, he felt - for the first time - something about Warren's death that was not pure agony. However briefly, the death bridged a gulf between alien worlds. Yevienko set down his drained glass. "We know about the Battle of Midway. It was an important United States Navy victory which reversed the tide in the Pacific."

  Pug could not speak. He nodded.

  With the pancakes there were sausages and American canned fruit salad from the general's bag. They rapidly emptied the bottle of wine and opened another. Vera began to talk about the siege. The worst thing, she said, had been when the snow had started to melt last spring, late in March.

  Bodies had begun to appear everywhere, bodies frozen and unburied for months, people who had just fallen down in the streets and died.

  The garbage, the rubble, and the wreckage, emerging with the thousands of bodies, had created a ghastly situation, a sickening smell everywhere, a big threat of an epidemic. But the authorities had severely organized the people, and a gigantic cleanup had saved the city. Bodies had been dumped in enormous mass graves, some identified, many not.

  "You see, whole families had starved," Vera said. "Or only one would be left, sick or apathetic. People wouldn't be missed.

  Oh, you could tell when a person was getting ready to die. It was the apathy. If you could get them to a hospital, or put them to bed and try to feed them, it might help. But they would say they were all right, and insist on going out to work.

  Then they would sit or lie down on the sidewalk, and die in the snow." She glanced at Yevlenko and her voice dropped.

  "And often their ration cards would be stolen. Some people became like wolves."

  Yevienko drank wine and thudded his glass on the table.

  "Well, enough about it. Big blunders were made. Crude stupid unforgivable blunders."

  They had been drinking enough so that Pug was emboldened to say, "By whom?"

  Immediately he thought he had committed a fatal offense.

  General Yevlenko gave him a nasty glare, showing his big yellow teeth. "A million old people, children, and others who weren't able-bodied should have been evacuated. With the Germans a hundred miles away, and bombers coming around the clock, food stores shouldn't have been left in old wooden warehouses. Six month's rations for the whole city burned up in one night. Tons of sugar melted and ran into the ground.

  The people ate that dirt."

  "I ate it," said Vera. "I paid a good price for it."

  "People ate worse than that." Yevlenko stood up. "But the Germans did not take Leningrad, and they will not. Moscow gave the orders, but Leningrad saved itself." His speech was growing muffled and he was putting on his greatcoat with his back to Pug, who thought he heard him add, "Despite the orders." He turned around and , "Well, starting tomorrow, Kapitan, you will see some places that the Germans took."

  Yevlenko travelled at a grueling pace. Place names melted into each other-Tikhvin, Rzhev, Mozhaisk, Vyazma, Tula, Livny-like American midwestern cities, they were all settlements on a broad flat plain under a big sky, one much resembling another; not in peaceful and banal sameness, as in the American repetition of filling stations, diners, and motels, but in horror. As they flew on and on for hundreds of miles, descending to visit an army in the field, or a headquarters in a village, or a depot of tanks and motor transport, or an operating airfield, Pug got a picture of the Russian front colossal in scale and numbing in wreckage and death.

  The retreating Germans had executed a scorched-earth policy in reverse. Whatever was worth stealing, they had carried off; what would burn, they had burned; what would not, they had dy
namited. For thousands and thousands of square miles they had ravaged the land like locusts.

  Where they had been gone for a while, buildings were rising again.

  Where they had recently been pushed out, shabby haggard Russians with shocked eyes were poking in the ruins or burying their dead; or they were being fed by army field kitchens in queues, under the open sky on the flat snowy plain.

  Here was the problem of a separate peace, written plain across the devastated land. -That the Russians loathed and despised the Germans as a form of invading vermin was obvious. Each village or city had its horror stories, its dossier of atrocity photographs of beatings, of shootings, of rapes, of heaps of bodies. The pictures numbed and bored by their grisly repetition. That the Russians wanted vengeance was equally obvious. But if after a few more bloody defeats like Stalingrad, the hated invaders would agree to leave the Soviet earth, stop torturing these people, and pay for the damage they had wrought, could the Russians be blamed for making peace?