The tanks and infantry went into the attack at 8.50 a.m. The morale of the Soviet troops was exceptionally high. The 76th Division went into the attack to the strains of a march played by its brass band.
By the afternoon they had broken through the enemy front line. Fighting was taking place over an enormous area.
The 4th Rumanian Army Corps had been smashed. The 1st Rumanian Cavalry Division near Krainyaya had been isolated from the remaining units of the Army.
The 5th Tank Army advanced from the heights thirty kilometres to the south-west of Serafimovich and broke through the positions held by the 2nd Rumanian Army Corps. Moving quickly towards the south, it had taken the heights north of Perelasovskaya by midday. The Soviet Tank and Cavalry Corps then turned to the south-west; by evening they had reached Gusynka and Kalmykov, sixty kilometres to the rear of the 3rd Rumanian Army.
The forces concentrated to the south of Stalingrad, in the Kalmyk steppes, went into the attack twenty-four hours later, at dawn on 20 November.
8
Novikov woke up long before dawn. His excitement was so great he was no longer aware of it.
‘Do you want some tea, comrade Colonel?’ asked Vershkov solemnly.
‘Yes,’ said Novikov. ‘And you can tell the cook to do me some eggs.’
‘How would you like them, comrade Colonel?’
Novikov didn’t answer for a moment. Vershkov imagined he was lost in thought and hadn’t even heard the question.
‘Fried,’ said Novikov. He looked at his watch and added: ‘Go and see if Getmanov’s up yet. We’ll be starting in half an hour.’
He wasn’t thinking – or so at least it seemed to him – about the artillery barrage that would be starting in an hour and a half, about the bombers and ground-support aircraft that would be filling the sky with the roar of their engines, about the sappers who would creep forward to clear the barbed wire and the minefields, about the infantry who would soon be dragging their machine-guns up the misty hills he had looked at so often through his binoculars. He was no longer conscious of any link with Byelov, Makarov and Karpov. He seemed to have forgotten the tanks to the north-west of Stalingrad that had already penetrated the breach in the enemy front opened up by the infantry and artillery, that were already advancing rapidly towards Kalach; he seemed to have forgotten that soon his own tanks would advance from the south to meet them and surround Paulus’s army.
He wasn’t thinking about Yeremenko, about the fact that Stalin might cite his name in tomorrow’s order of the day. He seemed to have forgotten Yevgenia Nikolaevna, to have forgotten that dawn in Brest-Litovsk when he had run towards the airfield and seen the first flames of war in the sky.
He wasn’t thinking about any of these things, but they were all of them inside him.
He was thinking simply about whether he should wear his old boots or his new ones; that he mustn’t forget his cigarette-case; that his swine of an orderly had yet again given him cold tea. He sat there, eating his fried eggs and mopping up the butter still left in the pan with a piece of bread.
‘Your orders have been carried out,’ reported Vershkov. He went on in confiding disapproval: ‘I asked the soldier if the commissar was there and he said: “Where d’you think he is? He’s with that woman of his.’”
The soldier had used a more expressive word than ‘woman’, but Vershkov preferred not to repeat this to the corps commander’s face.
Novikov didn’t say anything; he went on gathering up the crumbs of bread on the table, squeezing them together with one finger.
Soon Getmanov arrived.
‘Tea?’ asked Novikov.
‘It’s time we were off, Pyotr Pavlovich,’ said Getmanov abruptly. ‘We’ve had enough tea and enough sugar. Now it’s time to deal with the Germans.’
‘Oh,’ Vershkov said to himself, ‘we are tough today!’
Novikov went into the part of the house that served as their headquarters, glanced at the map and had a word with Nyeudobnov about various matters of liaison.
The deceptive silence and darkness reminded Novikov of his childhood in the Donbass. Everything had seemed just as calm, just as sleepy, only a few minutes before the whistles and hooters started up and the men went out to the mines and factories. But Petya Novikov had known that hundreds of hands were already groping for foot-cloths and boots, that women were already walking about in bare feet, rattling pokers and crockery.
‘Vershkov,’ he said, ‘you can take my tank to the observation post. I’ll be needing it today.’
‘Yes, comrade Colonel, said Vershkov. ‘And I’ll put your gear in – and the commissar’s.’
‘Don’t forget the cocoa,’ said Getmanov.
Nyeudobnov came out onto the porch, his greatcoat thrown over his shoulders.
‘Lieutenant-General Tolbukhin just phoned. He wanted to know whether the corps commander had set off for the observation post yet.’
Novikov nodded, tapped his driver on the shoulder and said: ‘Let’s be off, Kharitonov.’
The road left the last house behind, turned sharply to the right, to the left and then ran due west, between patches of snow and dry grass.
They passed the dip in the ground where the 1st Brigade was waiting. Novikov suddenly told Kharitonov to stop, jumped out and walked towards the tanks. They showed up as black shapes surrounded by semi-darkness. Novikov looked at the men’s faces as he passed by, but he didn’t say a word to anyone.
He remembered the young recruits he had seen the other day on the village square. They really were just children, and the whole world had conspired to expose these children to enemy fire: the plans of the General Staff, the orders given by Yeremenko, the order he himself would give to his brigade commanders in an hour’s time, what they heard from their political instructors, what they read in poems and articles in the newspapers. Into battle! Into battle! And to the west men were waiting to blow them up, to cut them apart, to crush them under the treads of their tanks.
‘Yes, there is going to be a wedding!’ he thought. But with no harmonicas, no sweet port wine. Novikov would shout ‘Bitter! Bitter!’fn1 – and the nineteen-year-old bridegrooms would dutifully kiss their brides.
Novikov felt as though he were walking among his own brothers and nephews, among the sons of his own neighbours, and that thousands of invisible girls and women were watching him.
Mothers contest a man’s right to send another man to his death. But, even in war, you find men who join the mothers’ clandestine resistance. Men who say, ‘Stay here a moment. Can’t you hear the firing outside? They can wait for my report. You just put the kettle on.’ Men who say on the telephone to their superior officer, ‘Yes, Colonel, we’re to advance the machine-gun,’ but then hang up and say, ‘There’s no point in moving it forward, and it will just mean the death of a good soldier.’
Novikov strode back to his jeep. His face looked harsh and grim, as though it had absorbed some of the raw darkness of this November dawn. The jeep started up again. Getmanov looked sympathetically at Novikov.
‘You know what I want to say to you right now, Pyotr Pavlovich? I love you, yes, and I believe in you.’
Footnotes
fn1 A traditional custom: if guests at a wedding party shout, ‘Bitter’, then the bride and groom have to kiss.
9
The silence was dense and unbroken; it was as though there were no steppe, no mist, no Volga, nothing in the world but silence. And then the clouds grew lighter, the grey mist began to turn crimson – and the earth and sky suddenly filled with thunder.
The nearby guns joined those in the distance; the echoes reinforced this link, and the whole battlefield was covered by a dense pattern of sound.
In the steppe villages the mud walls of the houses began to shake; pieces of clay fell silently to the floor and doors started to open and close of their own accord. The thin ice on the lakes began to crack.
A fox took flight, waving its thick silky tail in the air; a hare for once r
an after it rather than away from it. Birds of prey of both day and night flew heavily up into the sky, brought together for the first time. A few field mice leapt sleepily out of their holes – like startled, dishevelled old men running out of a hut that had just caught fire.
The damp morning air over the artillery batteries probably grew a degree or two warmer from the hundreds of burning-hot gun barrels.
You could see the shell-bursts very clearly from the observation post, together with the oily black and yellow smoke twisting into the air, the fountains of earth and muddy snow and the milky whiteness of steely fire.
The artillery fell silent. The clouds of hot smoke slowly mingled with the cold, clammy mist.
Then the sky filled with another sound, a broad, rumbling sound. Soviet planes were flying towards the West. The hum and roar of the planes made tangible the true height of the sky: the fighters and ground-support aircraft flew beneath the low clouds, almost at ground level, while in and above the clouds you could hear the bass note of the invisible bombers.
The Germans in the sky over Brest-Litovsk, the Russians over the steppe . . . Novikov didn’t make this comparison. What he felt then went deeper than any thoughts, memories or comparisons.
The silence returned. The silence was quite suffocating, both for the men who had been waiting to launch the attack on the Rumanian lines and for the men who were to make that attack.
This silence was like the mute, turbid, primeval sea . . . How joyful, how splendid, to fight in a battle that would decide the fate of your motherland. How appalling, how terrifying, to stand up and face death, to run towards death rather than away from it. How terrible to die young . . . You want to stay alive. There is nothing stronger in the world than the desire to preserve a young life, a life that has lived so little. This desire is stronger than any thought; it lies in the breath, in the nostrils, in the eyes, in the muscles, in the haemoglobin and its greed for oxygen. This desire is so vast that nothing can be compared to it; it cannot be measured . . . It’s terrible. The moment before an attack is terrible.
Getmanov gave a loud, deep sigh. He looked in turn at Novikov, at the telephone and at the radio.
He was surprised at the expression on Novikov’s face. During the last months he had seen it take on many different expressions – anger, worry, anxiety, gaiety, sullenness – but it had never looked anything like this.
One by one, the Rumanian batteries that hadn’t yet been neutralized returned to life. From their emplacements in the rear, they were firing on the Russian front line. The powerful anti-aircraft guns were now being used against targets on the ground.
‘Pyotr Pavlovich!’ said Getmanov anxiously. ‘It’s time! You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’
To him, the necessity of sacrificing men to the cause had always seemed natural and incontestible – in peace as well as in war.
But Novikov held back. He ordered his telephonist to get Lopatin, the commander of the heavy artillery regiment that had been clearing the path for his tanks.
‘Take care, Pyotr Pavlovich!’ said Getmanov, looking at his watch. ‘Tolbukhin will eat you alive.’
Novikov was reluctant to admit his deepest feelings even to himself, let alone to Getmanov; they were ridiculous, almost shameful.
‘I’m worried about the tanks,’ he said. ‘We could lose a large number of them. It’s only a matter of a few minutes and the T-34s are such splendid machines. We’ve got those anti-tank and anti-aircraft batteries in the palm of our hand.’
The steppe was still smoking. The men beside him in the observation post were staring at him, wide-eyed. The brigade commanders were waiting for their orders over the radio.
He was a colonel and a true craftsman; he was in the grip of his passion for war. But Getmanov was pushing him on, he was afraid of his superiors, and his pride and ambition were at stake. He knew very well that the words he had said to Lopatin would never be studied by the General Staff or enter the history books. No, they wouldn’t win him any words of praise from Zhukov or Stalin; they wouldn’t bring any nearer the Order of Suvorov he coveted.
There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their death without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death. Novikov carried out this responsibility to the full.
10
In the Kremlin Stalin was waiting for a report from Yeremenko. He looked at his watch; the artillery barrage had just finished, the infantry had gone forward and the mobile units were about to enter the breach cleared by the artillery. The aeroplanes would now be bombing the German rear, the roads and airfields.
Ten minutes before, he had spoken to Vatutin. The tank and cavalry units to the north of Stalingrad were advancing even more rapidly than planned.
He picked up his pencil and glanced at the silent telephone. He wanted very much to mark the movement of the southern claw of the pincer on his map. But a superstitious anxiety made him put down the pencil. At that moment he could feel very clearly that Hitler – conscious of Stalin’s thoughts – was thinking about him.
Churchill and Roosevelt trusted him; but he knew that their trust was by no means unconditional. What annoyed him most was the way, although they were only too willing to confer with him, they always first discussed everything between themselves. They knew very well that wars came and went, but politics remained politics. They admired his logic, his knowledge, the clarity of his reasoning; but he knew they saw him as an Asiatic potentate, not as a European leader.
He suddenly remembered Trotsky’s piercing eyes, their merciless intelligence, the contempt in the narrowed lids. For the first time he regretted that Trotsky was no longer alive; he would have liked him to know of this day.
Stalin felt happy, full of strength; he no longer had that taste of lead in his mouth, that ache in his heart. To him, the sense of life itself was inseparable from a sense of strength. Since the first days of the war he had felt a constant weariness. It hadn’t left him even when he’d seen his marshals freeze with fear at his anger, even when thousands of people stood up to greet him as he entered the Bolshoy Theatre. He always had the impression that people were laughing at him behind his back, that they remembered his confusion during the summer of 1941.
Once, in Molotov’s presence, he had seized his head in his hands and muttered: ‘What can we do . . . what can we do?’ And during a meeting of the State Defence Committee his voice had suddenly broken; everyone had looked the other way. He had several times given absurd orders and realized that everyone was aware of their absurdity. On 3 July, he had nervously sipped mineral water as he gave his speech on the radio; his nervousness had gone out over the waves. Once, at the end of June, Zhukov had contradicted him to his face. He had felt quite taken aback; all he had been able to say was: ‘All right, do as you think best.’ Sometimes he wished he could yield his responsibilities to the men he had shot in 1937, that Rykov, Kamenev and Bukharin could take over the running of the army and the country.
Sometimes a strange and terrifying feeling came over him: that it wasn’t only his current enemy who had defeated him on the battlefield. Behind Hitler’s tanks, in a cloud of dust and smoke, he could see all those he thought he had brought low, chastised and destroyed. They were climbing out of the tundra, breaking through the layer of permafrost that had closed over them, forcing their way through the entanglements of barbed wire. Trainloads of the condemned, newly returned to life, were on their way from Kolyma and the Komi republic. Old peasant women and children were crawling out of the earth with terrifying, emaciated, sorrowful faces. They were coming towards him, looking for him; there was no anger in their eyes, only sadness. Yes, Stalin knew better than anyone that not only history condemns the defeated.
Beria’s presence was sometimes quite unbearable: he seemed to understand what Stalin was going through.
This weakness didn’t last long – just a few days, to return only at odd moments. But his feeling of depression was consta
nt. He was troubled by indigestion. He had an aching feeling at the back of his neck and there were moments when he felt dizzy.
He looked at the telephone again. By now Yeremenko should have reported that the tanks had gone into the attack.
This was his hour of strength. What was being decided now, what was at stake, was the fate of the State Lenin had founded: now the rational, centralized force of the Party would be able to realize itself in the construction of huge factories, atomic power stations, jetplanes, intercontinental missiles, space rockets, immense buildings and palaces of culture, new canals and seas, new roads and cities north of the Arctic Circle.
What was at stake was the fate of France, Belgium, Italy and the countries Hitler had occupied in Scandinavia and the Balkans. It was now that the death sentence was passed on Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the nine hundred other German labour camps and concentration camps.
What was at stake was the fate of the German prisoners-of-war who were to be sent to Siberia; what was at stake was the fate of the Soviet prisoners-of-war in Hitler’s camps who were also to be sent to Siberia.
What was at stake was the fate of the Kalmyks and Crimean Tartars, the Balkars and Chechens who were to be deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan, who were to lose the right to remember their history or teach their own children to speak their mother-tongue.
What was at stake was the fate of the actors Mikhoels and Zuskin, the writers Bergelson, Markish, Fefer, Kvitko and Nusinov, whose execution was to precede the sinister trial of Professor Vovsi and the Jewish doctors. What was at stake was the fate of the Jews saved by the Red Army: on the tenth anniversary of this victory Stalin was to raise over their heads the very sword of annihilation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler.
Life and Fate Page 77