Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  “He just wanted to warm up a bit. He gets cold at night, all naked like that,” said Polyakov, yawning.

  It soon became clear that a great many empty dugouts had been settled by whip snakes—and these snakes had no intention of leaving their new homes.

  There they were, behind the board walls—rustling, whispering, slithering about.

  The city dwellers were scared stiff of them. Some were frightened to sleep in the dugouts, even though these whip snakes were entirely harmless, like ordinary grass snakes. The tiny steppe mice were a more serious problem. They tried to get to the soldiers’ dried bread; they gnawed holes in sacks; they found their way to the sugar lumps packed in small white bags. The doctor told the soldiers that these mice could infect them with a serious liver disease called tularemia.

  During the war, the mice bred in great numbers; in combat zones the grain was often left unharvested in the fields and so the mice took charge of the harvest themselves.

  Early one morning the soldiers witnessed a mouse hunt. The whip snake lay motionless for a long time, while a mouse scampered about ever closer, then set to work on Chentsov’s knapsack. Suddenly the snake struck. The mouse let out a terrible squeal, gathering into that squeal all the horror of imminent death, and the snake rustled back with the mouse to its home behind the boards.

  “He can be our steppe cat,” said Polyakov. “He can live with us and catch mice. Don’t go stabbing him with your bayonets. He truly won’t harm us—he’s a serpent in name only.”

  The whip snake understood Polyakov’s words and stopped hiding away. Trusting him and the other men, it came and went, slithered about its business and, when it was tired, lay down by the wall, behind Polyakov’s belongings.

  One evening, as the late sun penetrated the dugout, catching the drops of amber resin exuded from the board walls and illuminating the earthen half-dark with dusty columns of oblique light, the soldiers saw something extraordinary.

  Seryozha had been rereading the letter about his mother for the hundredth time. Polyakov touched him gently on the arm and whispered, “Look!”

  Seryozha looked up distractedly. He did not even wipe away his tears, since he knew that in the half-dark no one would see them.

  A helmet hanging up in a corner was swaying and ringing, lit by a dense, compressed column of light. It took Seryozha a moment to realize that the helmet was being rocked by the snake. In the evening light the snake was the colour of copper. Looking more carefully, Seryozha realized that the snake was very slowly, with great effort, slipping out of its skin. The new skin looked bright and glistening, almost sweaty, like a young chestnut. Everyone in the dugout was holding their breath. Any moment now, it seemed, the snake would groan, or let out some complaint; getting out of its stiff, dead casing was obviously hard work.

  Quiet half-darkness, pierced by a brilliant light, and something none of them had ever seen—a snake, trustfully shedding its skin in the presence of human beings. The men sat there enthralled. It was as if the evening light had entered inside them. Everything round about seemed equally quiet and thoughtful. And then came a wild yell from the sentry: “Sergeant, the Germans!”

  This was followed by two loud thumps. The dugout trembled, gasped and filled with grey dust.

  The German long-range artillery, now positioned on the east bank of the Don, was ranging in on them.

  22

  ON A HOT, dusty August night General Weller, commander of a German grenadier division, a thin-lipped man with a long bony face, was sitting behind a large desk in a spacious village schoolroom.

  He was looking through the papers in front of him, making notes on the operations map and tossing the reports he had already read onto a corner of the desk.

  The main part of his work, he believed, was already accomplished. What remained were only minor details, of no real consequence to the future course of events.

  The general was exhausted; he had put a great deal of time into planning the forthcoming operation. Now that the plans were complete, his thoughts kept returning to the summer campaign as a whole. It was as if he were preparing to write his memoirs, or to summarize his thoughts for some military textbook.

  The last act of this drama—this epic drama being performed by grenadiers, tank crews and motor infantry on the huge stage of the steppe—would soon be concluded on the banks of the Volga. There was no precedent for this campaign in all the annals of warfare and the thought of its imminent conclusion was profoundly exciting. The general could sense the edge of the Russian lands; beyond the Volga lay Asia.

  Had the general been a psychologist and a philosopher, he might have suspected that what for him was a source of joy and excitement must, inevitably, give rise to very different, dangerously powerful feelings in the hearts of the Russians. But he was not a philosopher—he was a general. And today he was giving free rein to a particular sweet thought he had long treasured. Fulfilment, for him, was nothing to do with rewards and honours. Fulfilment, he believed, lay in the union of two poles—power and subordination, military success and the meek execution of orders. In this play of omnipotence and obedience, this synthesis of power and subordination, he found spiritual comfort—a bittersweet joy.

  Weller had toured the river crossings and seen burnt-out Soviet trucks, overturned tanks and guns smashed by shells and bombs. He had seen HQ documents being blown about the steppe, while horses ran wild, dragging their broken harnesses behind them. He had seen wrecked Soviet planes, their engines and broken-off, red-starred wings half-buried in the ground. To him, the dead, twisted Russian metal seemed still to bear traces of the horror that had gripped Timoshenko’s troops as they retreated towards the Volga. The previous day, a bulletin from Supreme Command had announced that “The 62nd Soviet Army has been encircled in the Great Bend of the Don and destroyed once and for all.”

  During the night of 18 August, Weller reported to Army HQ that in the north-eastern loop of the Great Bend of the Don, to the northwest of Stalingrad, his advance units had forced a crossing and established a bridgehead on the east bank, in the Tryokhostrovskaya and Akimovsky districts.

  The next stage of the plan, about which Paulus had informed him a few days before, was not complicated. After concentrating tanks and other motorized units on this bridgehead, they were to advance swiftly as far as the Volga, occupying the factory district in the north and cutting off the rest of Stalingrad from the river. The distance to be covered was extremely short; at this latitude, the Don and the Volga were not more than seventy kilometres apart. Hoth’s panzer divisions, advancing along the railway line from Plodovitoye, were to launch a simultaneous attack from the south. And Richthofen would carry out huge air raids shortly before the two ground attacks.

  Now and then, looking at the map, Weller wondered if there might be something paradoxical about this whole operation: to the north, the German army lay exposed to the whole immensity of Russia. Paulus’s left flank could be crushed by a vast weight—by millions of tons of earth and a seemingly infinite mass of people.

  At a time when the German armies were reporting success after success, Soviet forces had once, unexpectedly, crossed the Don and crushed the Italian division whose role was to cover the Germans’ extended left flank.

  But the Soviets appeared to have attached little importance to this sortie across the Don. Their newspapers did not even devote much attention to the capture of the Italian division’s artillery and the fact that, as they withdrew to the east bank, they had taken 2,000 Italian prisoners with them. In the Serafimovich and Kletskaya sectors the Soviets were, admittedly, defending their bridgeheads on the west bank of the Don with an obstinacy beyond comprehension. But this too was strategically irrelevant: many important German operations had been effected with unprotected flanks.

  Weller noticed a prisoner—probably a Georgian or an Armenian—being marched past outside; there was a light-coloured patch on his sleeve where a commissar’s star had been ripped off. The man was barefoot and filthy
. His face was covered with black stubble and he walked with a limp, a rag twisted around his wounded leg. The look on his face did not even seem human; it was blank, exhausted and indifferent. Then he looked up. For a moment his eyes met Weller’s—and all Weller could see in them, rather than a plea for mercy, was a dark weight of hatred.

  Weller quickly looked back at his desk, at the operations map showing the movement of German divisions. The key to the war, he believed, lay in this map—not in the hate-filled eyes of a captured commissar.

  In much the same way, an axe, used to slicing effortlessly through smooth, even logs, might overestimate its own weight and sharpness and underestimate the force of cohesion in a stubborn, gnarled tree trunk. And then, after plunging through the trunk’s outer rings, it will come to a sudden stop, gripped fast by the tree’s tight, knotted strength. And it seems at this point that the black earth herself, beaten by rains and burnt by fires—an earth that has endured harsh frosts, the anguish of spring and terrible July storms—is lending her strength to this stubborn tree whose twisting roots have pierced into her depths.

  Weller paced up and down the room. A floorboard close to the door creaked each time he stepped on it.

  An orderly came in and placed some reports on the desk.

  “This floorboard creaks,” said Weller. “We need a carpet in here.”

  The orderly hurried out. The floorboard creaked once again.

  “Was hat der Führer gesagt?”26 Weller asked another young orderly, who appeared a few minutes later. Somewhat out of breath, he was carrying a large, rolled-up rug.

  The orderly looked searchingly at Weller’s stern face. Somehow he guessed what the general wanted to hear.

  “Der Führer hat gesagt: Stalingrad muss fallen!”27 he said confidently.

  Weller laughed. He walked across the soft carpet. Once again the floorboard let out an angry, obstinate creak.

  23

  ON THE same hot and dusty evening, Colonel General Paulus, commander of the German 6th Army, was sitting in his office at Army HQ. He too was thinking about the imminent capture of Stalingrad.

  The windows, which faced west, were hung with heavy dark blinds. Only tiny pinpricks of light in the dense fabric bore witness to the now setting sun.

  Paulus’s adjutant, Colonel Adam, tall and heavy-footed but with the chubby cheeks of a young boy, came in to report that General Richthofen would arrive in forty minutes.

  The two generals would be discussing their joint air and ground operation. Its vast scale was a matter of concern to Paulus.

  Paulus believed that in the fifty-day battle he had begun on 28 June with the 6th Army’s sudden thrust into the area between Belgorod and Kharkov he had already achieved a decisive victory; his three army corps, composed of twelve infantry divisions, two panzer and two motor infantry divisions, had crossed the steppe and reached the west bank of the Don. They were close to Kletskaya and Sirotinskaya; they had taken Kalach and would soon take Kremenskaya.

  Army Group Command considered that—after Paulus had taken 57,000 prisoners of war and captured 1,000 tanks and 750 pieces of artillery (figures published by Supreme Command, somewhat to the surprise, admittedly, of some of Paulus’s staff)—the Soviet defences had been entirely smashed. And Paulus knew that he was the architect of this great German victory. During this long summer Paulus had been granted an extraordinary degree of all-encompassing success.

  He knew that a number of men in Berlin—men whose opinion mattered to him—were waiting impatiently for what would come next. His eyes half-closed, he imagined his coming triumph: back in Berlin after the glorious conclusion of this eastern campaign, he would step out of his car, climb some steps, walk through to the lobby and in his simple, soldier’s uniform, walk past a crowd of the high and mighty, of important officials and generals on the Berlin staff.

  There was just one thing that still troubled him. He needed another five days—five days at the most—but he was being ordered to begin the operation in two days’ time.

  Then Paulus’s thoughts turned to Richthofen and his extraordinary belief that ground forces, during an attack, should be subordinate to air forces. The man’s arrogance was unbelievable.

  Richthofen’s easy victories in Yugoslavia and Africa must have gone to his head.28 And as for his insistence on wearing a soldier’s side cap and his plebeian habit of relighting an extinguished cigarette instead of lighting a new one . . . Not to mention his voice, and the way he could never let a colleague finish what he had to say, and his love of offering explanations when he should, rather, be listening to explanations given by others . . . It seemed that Richthofen had much in common with the ever-fortunate Rommel, that lucky dog whose popularity was inversely proportional to his knowledge, his capacity for thought and his understanding of military culture. And then, most galling of all, there was Richthofen’s free and easy way, a habit he seemed to have made into a principle, of ascribing to his 4th Air Fleet successes achieved by the laborious work of the infantry.

  Rommel, Sepp Dietrich and now this Richthofen—all of them upstarts, ignoramuses, heroes of the day, posers corrupted by successes that had come all too easily to them. Men who certainly knew how to advance their own political careers but who knew little else. Men who had not even begun to think about military matters when he himself was already graduating from the academy.29

  And Paulus went on looking at his map, which showed the vast mass of Russia pressing down on him, threatening the left flank of his 6th Army.

  Richthofen arrived, looking preoccupied. There was dust all over him—under his eyes, on his temples and around his nostrils; it was as if his face were covered in grey lichen. On his way to Paulus’s HQ he had met a tank column, evidently moving towards the assembly area. The tanks were going at full speed, the air was full of their grinding and clanking, and the dust they raised was so dense and impenetrable that they might have been huge ploughshares, lifting the earth itself into the air. Billowing around them was a dense reddish-brown sea, and only their turrets and gun barrels were visible. The tank men looked exhausted—somewhat hunched, peering sullenly out of their hatches, gripping their metal edges to steady themselves. Rather than wait for this steel column to pass by, Richthofen had ordered his driver to pull off the road and continue across the open steppe. On arriving at Paulus’s HQ, he had gone straight to his office, without even washing.

  Paulus, who had the thin hook-nosed face of a thoughtful hawk, got up to greet him. After a few words about the heat, the dust, the congestion on the roads and the diuretic properties of Russian watermelons, Paulus handed Richthofen a telegram from Hitler. In practical terms the telegram was relatively unimportant, but Paulus was secretly smiling to himself. Richthofen leaned forward a little, resting his hands on the table, and carefully read the telegram through; he was, no doubt, thinking not about its literal meaning but about its deeper implications. Hitler had chosen to discuss with Paulus, the general commanding the 6th Army, questions relating to the deployment of reserves that, in principle, were subordinate to Weichs, Paulus’s immediate superior. One phrase indicated a certain dissatisfaction with Hoth, commander of the 4th Panzer Army deployed to the south of Stalingrad; Hitler clearly shared Paulus’s view that Hoth was moving too slowly and incurring losses as a result of his excessive caution. And then came a few lines that Richthofen was sure to find very annoying indeed: since the 6th Army were to play the main role in the coming operation, Richthofen’s air fleet was to be under Paulus’s command, not that of Reichsmarschall Göring and his Luftwaffe.

  After reading the telegram, Richthofen carefully placed it in the middle of the desk, as if to say that such documents are not subject to debate or criticism but must be acted upon without further discussion. “The Führer does not only determine the general course of the war,” he said. “He even finds time to manage the deployment of individual divisions.”

  “Yes, it’s astonishing,” said Paulus, who had heard more than a few complaints from co
lleagues about the Führer stripping them of all initiative, making it impossible for them even to change the sentry outside an infantry battalion command post without his personal authorization.

  They spoke about the successful crossing of the Don near Tryokhostrovskaya. Richthofen praised the work of the artillery and heavy mortars and the courage of the soldiers of the 384th Division, first to set foot on the east bank of the Don. This crossing had created a bridgehead for the impending advance on Stalingrad of one panzer division and two motor infantry divisions. By dawn all these divisions would be in position; it was their movement north that had delayed Richthofen.

  “I could have done all that a couple of days ago, but I didn’t want to alert the Russians,” said Paulus. He smiled and added, “They’re expecting an attack from the south, from Hoth.”

  “Yes,” said Richthofen. “But I think they can wait a few more days.”

  “I need five days,” said Paulus. “What about you?”

  “My preparations are more complex, I shall ask for a week. After all, this will be the knockout blow,” said Richthofen. “Weichs keeps hurrying us on. He wants to impress, to win further promotions. But we’re the ones who’ll be taking the risks.”

  He bent forward over a plan of Stalingrad and, running his finger over the neatly drawn squares, explained just how the city was to be set on fire, how much time would elapse between successive waves of destruction, what bombs he would drop on residential areas, river crossings, the harbour and the factories, and how best he could prepare the key area—the northern suburbs where, at a predetermined hour, Paulus’s heavy tanks and motor infantry were to surprise the Russians. He asked Paulus to give him as precise a timing as possible.

  So far, the discussion between the two generals had been constructive and detailed, and neither had so much as raised his voice. But Richthofen went on, sometimes with a degree of detail that Paulus found infuriating, to speak about the logistic complexities of the impending air raid; he spoke at extraordinary length about the methodology for co-ordinating a convergent attack from dozens of airfields located at different distances from the target. Not only did the flight paths and flight times of hundreds of aircraft of different designs and speeds have to be synchronized with one another, but they also had to be co-ordinated with the progress of heavy and lumbering tanks. All this was an attempt on Richthofen’s part to score a point in the long-running covert rivalry between the two generals. They did not disagree openly, but each was well aware how he constantly irritated the other. The problem, as Paulus saw it, arose from Richthofen’s unshakable belief that it was to the air force that Germany owed her remarkable victories and that the role of ground forces had been merely to consolidate this success.