“Enough,” said Samsonov. He added, “My radio operator heard that we’re now being attacked by Finland, Romania and Italy. All of them—but I shall keep shooting. I won’t retreat!”
Novikov went to look at the nearest battery. Despite the roar of the guns, and the intent seriousness of the gunners’ faces, there was a sense of calm. All the regiment’s controlled power was now trained on the crossing, focused on destroying the German tanks and motor infantry gathering on the far bank.
One of the loaders came out with almost the same words as Samsonov. Turning towards Novikov, his face tanned and sweaty, he said with grim calm, “We’ll shoot till we’ve no more shells. Then we’ll decide what to do next.” It was as if, after due consideration, he himself had taken the decision not to retreat.
Surprisingly, it was here, with a regiment he thought doomed, that Novikov for the first time that day felt a sense of calm. Battle had been joined; the Germans were being met with Russian fire.
The gunners quietly carried on with their work.
“Well, comrade Colonel, it’s started now!” said a gun-layer. It was as if he had known all along what this morning would bring.
“Hard to get used to, isn’t it?” said Novikov.
The gun-layer smiled. “Will we ever get used to it? It’ll be the same in a year’s time as it is today. The mere sight of their planes makes me feel sick.”
Soon afterwards Novikov drove off, thinking he would never see any of these men again.
That winter, on the Donets, near Protopopovka, Novikov happened to meet a senior artillery commander he knew, and this man told him that the regiment had fallen back to the Berezina almost without casualties—and fighting all the way. Samsonov had prevented the Germans from crossing the Bug on 22 June, destroying a large amount of German equipment and inflicting considerable casualties. He had died only that autumn, on the Dnieper.
The war did indeed have a logic all of its own.
Novikov saw a great deal on that first day of the war. Though he saw much that was sad and painful, though he saw confusion, cowardice and cynicism, this most difficult day in the history of his people filled his heart with faith and pride. What impressed him most deeply of all were the calm, serious eyes of the gunners—and the spirit of strength and endurance that he glimpsed in them. The roar of the Soviet guns also stayed with him, as did the distant rumble of the heavy artillery in the vast concrete pillboxes of the Brest fortress. Even many days later, as the German avalanche approached the Dnieper, the Soviet soldiers there would still be keeping up their brave fight.
Towards evening, after a roundabout journey on back roads through villages, Novikov came out onto the main highway. Only then did he begin to grasp the scale of the day’s disaster.
Vast numbers of people were making their way east. The roads were full of trucks carrying men, women and children—many of the children still half-naked. All these people were doing the same thing—constantly looking back, and then up at the sky. There were tankers, covered trucks and ordinary cars, all moving as fast as they could. Walking along the verges, and through the fields on either side of the road, were more people; some, near the end of their strength, would collapse onto the ground for a while, then get up again and walk on. There were men and women of every age, some pushing prams and carts, some carrying bundles and suitcases. Soon Novikov ceased to distinguish the looks on people’s faces. His memory registered only a few of the more unusual pictures: a grey-bearded old man with a small child in his arms, sitting by the road with his feet in a ditch and watching the passing vehicles with meek resignation; a crocodile of small boys and girls, in sailor suits and red ties—evidently a pioneer summer camp; a long line of blind men and women, tied to one another by towels and following their guide, an elderly woman with round spectacles and tousled grey hair.
When they stopped at a petrol pump and his driver was refilling the tank, Novikov heard any number of outlandish stories: Slutsk had supposedly been captured by parachute troops; Hitler, at dawn, had come out with some frenzied and mendacious speech; and there were absurd rumours about how Moscow, that same dawn, had been destroyed by a German air raid.
Novikov stopped at the HQ of a tank corps, not far from Kobrin, in which he had served until autumn 1940.
“You’ve just come from there?” people asked. “Is it true the Germans will soon be on the main highway?”
In Kobrin he was no longer surprised by the crowds of people with bundles, the weeping mothers who had lost their children in the general chaos, or the exhausted look in the eyes of the older women. What struck him now were the smart little houses with their red tiles, curtained windows and neat lawns and flower beds. He was already, he realized, seeing the world through the eyes of war.
The further east they drove, the less clearly anything imprinted itself on his memory. Faces and events blurred together. Novikov had no subsequent recollection of where he had nearly been burnt alive during a night-time air raid or where he had seen two dead Red Army soldiers, their throats cut by saboteurs while they lay asleep in a chapel. Kobrin? Beroza-Kartuskaya?
But he did remember a night he had spent in a small town near Minsk. It was dark when they got there. The town was full of cars and trucks. Novikov was exhausted. He let his driver go off on his own while he himself went to sleep in the car, in the middle of a noisy, crowded square. And then, later that night, he woke to discover that his car was alone in the middle of a square that now seemed vast and deserted. All around him houses were quietly burning. The town was in flames.
He had grown so tired, so used to the deafening thunder of war, that he had slept through an air raid. What woke him was the silence that followed.
What remained from those days was one lasting image. He had seen hundreds of fires. Red, smoky flames had swallowed up the schools, factories and tall apartment blocks of Minsk; barns, sheds and thatched peasant huts had burned with pale, light flames; clouds of blue smoke had drifted over burning pine forests.
In Novikov’s mind these fused into a single blaze.
His country seemed to him like a single huge house, and everything in this house was infinitely dear to him: small whitewashed rooms in villages; rooms in towns and cities, with colourful lampshades; quiet reading rooms; brightly lit halls; the Red Corners of army barracks.50
Everything he loved was in flames. The Russian earth was on fire; the Russian sky was cloaked in smoke.
22
IN THE morning Zhenya introduced Novikov to her mother, her sister and her niece.
Spiridonov had left at six o’clock, and Sofya Osipovna had set off for the hospital still earlier, while it was still dark.
Everything went easily and straightforwardly. Novikov very much liked the women sitting at the table with him: swarthy Marusya, with her greying hair; rosy-cheeked Vera, gazing at him with round clear eyes that somehow seemed both gay and cross; and especially Alexandra Vladimirovna, whom Zhenya resembled. He looked at Zhenya’s broad pale forehead, at her alert eyes, at her pink lips, at her casual, “first thing in the morning” plaits—and the word “wife,” which he must have pronounced thousands of times in his life, suddenly took on a new meaning for him. As never before, he sensed his own loneliness. He understood that it was to her, and to her alone, that he needed to recount all he had lived through, all he had thought about during this last difficult year; he realized that he had been looking for her, and thinking about her at painful moments, because he longed for real closeness, for an end to his loneliness. And he also had a feeling as pleasant as it was awkward; it was as if he had made a proposal of marriage and was now being scrutinized by members of the family he was hoping to enter.
“The war has been unable to break up your family,” he said to Alexandra.
“Maybe,” she replied with a sigh. “But the war can certainly kill a family. It can kill a great many families.”
Noticing that Novikov was looking at the paintings on the wall, Marusya said, “The one by t
he mirror. Pink earth. Dawn in a burnt-out village. That’s Zhenya’s work. Do you like it?”
Novikov was embarrassed. “It’s difficult for someone who isn’t an expert.”
To which Zhenya replied, “Last night, I’ve heard, you were more forthcoming with your judgements.”
Novikov realized that Seryozha must have reported to the appropriate authorities his words about the man who had turned green from old age.
“But anyone can enjoy Repin and Surikov,” said Marusya. “You don’t have to be an expert to admire painters like them. I keep telling Zhenya that she ought to paint posters for factories, for Red Corners and hospitals.”
“Well, I like Zhenya’s paintings,” said Alexandra, “even if I am an old woman who probably knows less about these things than any of you.”
Novikov asked if he could come back again in the evening—but he did not return either then or during the following day.
23
DURING the summer of 1942, after a relatively calm winter in Voronezh, Southwestern Front HQ had been constantly on the move, in the state of frenzied activity that is often as ineffectual as complete idleness; no matter what orders HQ commanders issued to their front-line units, the retreat continued.
In the spring of 1942, after receiving reinforcements, they had launched the Kharkov offensive. Gorodnyansky’s army crossed the Donets and, moving through the narrow corridor between Izyum and Balakleya, advanced swiftly in the direction of Protopopovka, Chepel and Lozovaya.
In response, the Germans deployed a large concentration of troops and attacked both flanks of the Soviet army that had advanced so recklessly through the breach in their lines. The gate that Marshal Timoshenko had edged open as he advanced on Kharkov was slammed shut. Gorodnyansky’s army was encircled and destroyed.51 And once again, through dust, smoke and flame, Soviet forces were on the retreat. To the previous year’s list of lost towns and cities were added new names: Valuiki, Kupyansk, Rossosh, Millerovo. To the grief of losing Ukraine was added a new grief: Southwestern Front HQ was now located on the Volga. Any further retreat—and it would be in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
The quartermasters were still assigning the commanders their new billets, but in the operations department telephones were ringing, typewriters were clattering and maps had already been spread out on the table.
Everyone in the department was going about their work as if they had been living in the city for months. Pale from lack of sleep, they hurried around abstractedly, hardly noticing Stalingrad itself. To them it made no difference whether HQ was located in a forest dugout, with amber-coloured resin dripping onto the table from a pine-log ceiling; in a village hut, with a cockroach scuttling across the map and geese following the signals officers indoors as they searched timidly for their mistress; or in a small house in some district town, with rubber plants in the windows and a smell of mothballs and wheat muffins. No matter where they were billeted, the staff officers’ reality was unchanging: a dozen telephone numbers, some signals-corps pilots and motorcyclists, a signals office, a teleprinter, a message despatch point, a radio and—laid out on the table—a map of the war, densely covered with blue and red pencil marks.
During the summer of 1942 the demands on the staff had been greater than ever. Positions were changing from one hour to the next. In a hut that only two days before had seen a meeting of the military soviet, where a staid, pink-cheeked secretary, sitting at a table covered in red felt, had conscientiously minuted decisions never to be put into effect, since German bombers and tank columns took little account of them—in this same hut a battalion commander would be yelling into the receiver, “Comrade One, the enemy is breaking through,” while scouts in camouflage overalls slowly finished their tinned food and urgently reloaded their sub-machine guns.
The speed of the retreat meant that they kept having to change from one 1:100,000 map to another. To Novikov it sometimes felt as if he were a cinema operator furiously, day and night, turning the handle of a portable film projector while a kaleidoscope of images sped past his inflamed eyes. He suggested to his exhausted staff that they should change to 1:1,000,000 maps.
The information on the intelligence-section maps seldom fitted with the information provided by the operations section, while the artillery-HQ maps always provided the most optimistic view of the situation. The air-force data, on the other hand, always provided the most “eastern” view of the front line—and it was their data that Novikov found of most practical use. Air reconnaissance was usually more accurate, quicker to reassess a constantly changing military position.
On the air-force maps, the symbols for Soviet bomber airfields were swiftly replaced by the symbols for front-line fighter and ground-attack airfields, just as the infantry’s symbols for corps and divisional HQs were replaced by those for regimental and company command posts. And only a few days later these same airfields, now bases for German planes, would be marked as targets for Soviet bombers.
Novikov’s daily task of marking in the front line was extremely difficult. Novikov loved precision and he had no doubt that inaccurate information was one of the reasons for the many Soviet defeats. He found it painful to see in front of him the contradictory data received from Army HQ, Front HQ reconnaissance section and Air Force HQ. Often his most accurate source about troop positions would be a commander who had come to HQ on some business of his own and whom he happened to have a word with at breakfast. Correlating these different sources and distinguishing truth from falsehood required enormous mental effort. Deep down, even he himself was surprised by his ability to make sense of a chaos that often seemed beyond understanding.
Novikov had had to report to the chief of staff frequently. He had also been summoned to meetings of the military soviet and he had a clear and complete grasp of the details of the Soviet retreat, something most people understood only partially and through guesswork. He knew the intelligence map of the German front; he knew the precise positions of the flatirons that symbolized the German army groups. He knew the names of the generals and field marshals who commanded these army groups: Busch, Leeb, Rundstedt, Kluge, Bock, List. These alien names were now linked to the names of cities he loved: Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Rostov.
The elite divisions of the army groups commanded by Bock and List had moved onto the offensive.
The Southwestern Front had been torn open, and two German mobile armies—the 4th Panzer and the 6th Army—were heading towards the Don, widening the breach in the Soviet front line as they advanced. Out of the dust and smoke a new name came to the fore—that of Colonel General Paulus, commander of the 6th Army.
All over the map were small black numbers representing German tank divisions: the 9th, 11th, 3rd, 23rd, 22nd and 24th. During the previous summer the 9th and 11th divisions had been deployed on the Minsk and Smolensk axes; evidently they had been moved south to take part in the Stalingrad offensive.
Sometimes it seemed that all this was simply a continuation of the summer offensive with which the war had begun; the German divisions moving across the map still bore the same numbers. In reality, however, these were entirely new divisions, manned by soldiers from the reserves called up to replace the dead and the wounded.
Meanwhile Richthofen’s 4th Air Fleet was doing its work: massive air raids, terror on the roads, attacks against columns of vehicles and even against men on foot or on horseback.
And all this continual movement of vast armies, the bitter fighting, the repeated relocations of HQs, airstrips, maintenance and supply dumps, the abandoned fortified points, the sudden breakthroughs by German mobile units, this fire that had blazed across the steppe from Belgorod and Oskol as far as the Don—day after day every detail of this grim picture had been clearly presented on the map for which Novikov was responsible.
There was one question that perplexed Novikov: Why was this current German offensive so very different from that of the summer before? Even in the din and chaos of the first day of the war he had felt able, if m
ore through intuition than logic, to grasp the Germans’ overall strategy; it had been possible to understand a great deal simply from the flight paths of their planes. And Novikov’s reflections during the winter had, he believed, deepened his understanding. Studying the map, he had seen what care the Germans had always taken not to expose their flanks. The left flank of Rundstedt’s Army Group South had been covered by Bock, who was advancing on Moscow with their greatest concentration of forces; Bock’s left flank had been covered by Leeb, who was advancing on Leningrad; and Leeb’s left flank had been covered by the waters of the Baltic.
This year the Germans had adopted a very different strategy, advancing as swiftly as they could to the south-east, leaving their left flank exposed to the entire mass of Soviet Russia. This was hard to understand.
Why was it only in the south that the Germans had launched an offensive? Was this a sign of weakness? Or of strength? Or was it some kind of bluff?
These were questions Novikov was unable to answer. He needed to know more than can be read from an operations map.
Novikov had not yet realized that the Germans were simply no longer strong enough to advance simultaneously across the entire front; they had achieved their breakthrough in the south-east only at the price of enforced inaction on the Moscow and Leningrad axes. Nor could he know that even this one and only possible offensive had been launched without the necessary reserves. Several months later, when the fighting in Stalingrad reached its greatest intensity, the German High Command would find itself unable to transfer any forces at all from the Moscow and Leningrad axes; the Soviet armies in the centre and north-west posed too great a threat.
•
Novikov dreamed of something other than staff work. It was as a front-line commander, he believed, that he would be able to make best use of the experience he had accumulated in the course of a year of intensive thought and careful analysis of military operations that he himself had helped plan.
Stalingrad Page 17