Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  PART THREE

  1

  ON 25 AUGUST, the Germans began to advance on Stalingrad from the west, from Kalach. To the south, German tanks and infantry had already broken through the Soviet front near Abganerovo and advanced as far as the Dubovy ravine, beyond Lake Sarp.

  To the north, German troops now occupied the village of Rynok, near the Tractor Factory. Stalingrad was thus under threat from north, south and west.

  On 31 August, the Germans launched a new assault on Bassargino-Varaponovo; units of the 62nd Army were forced to retreat to the second of the city’s three rings of defences. By 2 September, however, further German attacks had forced these heavily depleted units to withdraw to the innermost ring of defence, an arc passing through workers’ settlements known to everyone in the city: Orlovka, Gumrak and Peschanka.

  These attacks—eight German divisions, advancing on a narrow front—were supported by a thousand aircraft and the firepower of 500 tanks. In the open steppe, our troops were especially vulnerable to attacks from the air.

  The German artillery was favourably positioned on the higher ground to the west; their observers had an unimpeded view not only of the Soviet front line but also of supporting units further back. They were able to direct accurate fire onto almost all the approaches to the Soviet combat positions.

  The terrain was equally favourable to the German infantry regiments. The many gullies and ravines stretching down to the Volga, the riverbeds—including those of the Mechetka and the Tsarina, which went dry in summer—all provided excellent cover for their advance.

  Not only all that remained of the 62nd Army, but also all the reserves at the Front commander’s disposal were thrown into the battle.

  Fighting beside them were people’s militia units—factory and office workers now transformed into machine-gunners, tank men, mortarmen and artillerymen.

  For all the stubbornness of the defenders, the Germans continued to advance. Their numerical superiority was simply too great. There were three German soldiers for every Russian soldier, two German guns for every Russian gun.

  The 5th of September saw the beginning of a major offensive by the Soviet armies positioned to the north and north-west of Stalingrad.

  The fighting was bitter. Advancing through open steppe, the Soviet forces suffered considerable losses. From morning until night German aircraft hung over the Soviet infantry like a dark cloud; Soviet artillery and tank concentrations were bombed even more heavily.

  The offensive appeared to have been a failure: the Soviet forces failed to break through the corridor the Germans had established between the Don and the Volga. Fierce battles for a number of commanding heights brought no decisive success. Minor territorial gains, for which the Soviets paid a high price, were erased by counter-attacks from German tanks and dive-bombers. Nevertheless, the offensive compelled the Germans to divert a significant part of their forces to the north, away from their main objective. In this respect, it succeeded.

  The offensive was a success in one other respect, unrecognized by most of those who took part in it: it won time, helping the city’s defenders to hold out until the arrival of reinforcements.

  Time is always the enemy of opportunists and a friend to those who stand on the side of history. It exposes false strength and rewards true strength.

  But time’s precious power is revealed only when people see it not as a generous gift of fate, but as an ally who makes stern demands.

  The Red Army’s reserves, aware of the importance of every hour and making no distinction between day and night, were moving swiftly towards Stalingrad.

  Among the units that saw their baptism of fire during the 5 September offensive, on the high western bank of the Volga, near the village of Okatovka, was the division in which Lieutenant Shaposhnikov now served as a gunner. And among the units marching along the Volga’s low eastern bank, towards Stalingrad, was Major General Rodimtsev’s infantry division; Pyotr Vavilov was one of his foot soldiers and Lieutenant Kovalyov was one of his company commanders. The Stavka had ordered Rodimtsev’s division to be the first to enter the besieged city. The division’s name and fame would remain inseparable forever from the name of Stalingrad.

  2

  BARELY had they dragged their guns to the top of a vine-covered hill when a messenger ran up and ordered everyone to their fire positions; concentrations of German forces had appeared in the gardens and vineyards of the surrounding hills.

  Tolya Shaposhnikov was covered in dust and sweat after helping to drag the guns up the steep clay scree. His new orders were to supervise the ammunition supply.

  The ammunition trucks were still down by the Volga, unable to manage the steep climb.

  Tolya raced down a mossy grass-covered slope, the warm wind whistling in his ears. Without slowing, in a cloud of red dust, he continued down the steep cliff to the water.

  Up on the hill, the sun had been dazzling; in the shadow cast by the cliff it seemed to be already evening. Further out, away from the cliff’s shadow, the Volga sparkled like mercury, alive and resilient.

  After positioning a chain of soldiers to pass the shells up the slope, Tolya got onto the truck and began to help unload. “I don’t want anyone thinking that all I can do is give orders,” he muttered, as he moved crates of shells towards the side of the truck.

  He felt he had done the wrong thing by going to artillery school; he would have found it easier to serve as a rank-and-file soldier. With his strong build and surly face, he looked tough and ungiving, but both his superiors and his subordinates had quickly understood that Tolya was, in fact, unusually shy and good-natured. When it came to issuing orders, he grew confused and indecisive. He would stammer and stumble through long strings of “Please . . . could you possibly. . . ,” then rattle out the important words so fast that no one could understand a thing. Feeling both sorry for Tolya and irritated with him, his battery commander, Vlasyuk, had done his best to be encouraging: “Shaposhnikov! Stop mumbling and muttering! You’re an artillery-man—and the artillery is the god of war! Speak with authority!”

  Tolya was only too glad to do small favours for his comrades and superiors—copying a report, fetching the post, filling in as duty officer.

  His comrades would joke: “A shame Shaposhnikov isn’t here. You could have asked him to take your place at HQ. That would have made his day!” Or: “Ask Shaposhnikov, he’ll be here any moment.” And then, with a smile, “He loves a spell on duty—and a nice walk to HQ in the heat of the day.”

  At the same time, they appreciated his gifts. Everyone—and his fellow gunners above all—valued his outstanding mathematical and technical ability. He could quickly sort out any problems they had with their equipment. He could make complex and abstract physical laws comprehensible to the stupidest of men. With the help of the simple little diagrams he drew, even those who had always relied entirely on rote learning quickly came to a true understanding of how best to calculate the correct aim—taking into account distance, wind speed and wind direction—when firing at a moving target.

  All the same, it was hard not to laugh at Tolya. The moment anyone began to talk about girls, he would start to cough and blush. Nurses from the medical battalion, who looked on the artillery commanders as the best educated in the division, would ask his fellow lieutenants, “Why’s your friend so stand-offish? He never says a word to any of us. If he sees us coming, he steps to one side. If we ask him anything, he gives us a one-word answer and hurries away.”

  On one occasion Shaposhnikov said to Vlasyuk, “A young person from the opposite sex was asking about you at HQ.”

  After that, his comrades nicknamed him “Young Person from the Opposite Sex.”

  To the rank-and-file soldiers, however, he was known as “Lieutenant Could You Possibly?”

  •

  Everything looked grand and majestic. The vast, empty river glimmered in the sun. One might have expected an eternal silence over its timeless waters, but there was noise everywhere.
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  Pushing loose pieces of sandstone aside, road tractors were dragging guns and ammunition trailers along the narrow strip of land between the high cliffs and the water. Machine-gunners and foot soldiers with anti-tank rifles were clambering up the slope, away from this confined space and towards the open steppe. Other companies and battalions followed at their heels.

  The sky, usually so blue, silent and splendid, was torn apart by the din of aerial combat. Engines howled among the fluffy white clouds; there was the clatter of machine guns and the crack of quick-firing cannon. Sometimes planes swept low over the water before climbing up into the sky again; battles were being fought at every level.

  From the steppe came the sound of terrestrial combat—the counterattack launched by the Red Army’s reserve regiments against Paulus’s most northern units.

  To the men down by the river, in ominous shadow, it felt strange that the warm steppe, where the sun shone so bright and carefree, should be seeing such bloody fighting.

  Armed men continued to climb the slope. Every face bore the same expression of agitation and resolve, a paradoxical combination of the fear felt by a soldier going into battle for the first time and the fear of falling behind your comrades—a fear that compels you to quicken your step as you near the front line.

  This was the most important day of Tolya’s life.

  An hour earlier, his unit had passed through Dubovka, beside the Volga. Here for the first time he had heard the whistle and thunder of falling bombs. He had seen smashed houses and streets covered in broken glass. A cart had passed, bearing a woman in a yellow dress. She was lying down and her blood was dripping swiftly onto the sand. An elderly man with no jacket was walking along with one hand on the side of the cart, sobbing loudly. Away from the road, behind fences, dozens of well-poles swayed and creaked in the wind; they looked like the masts of crazed little boats.

  Early that morning he had drunk milk in the quiet little village of Olkhovka and had seen young geese grazing in a broad, damp field of bright green grass.

  During a brief halt in the night, he had walked thirty or forty metres from the road, the dry wormwood rustling beneath his boots, lain down on his back and looked up at the starry sky. He had heard the soldiers talking to one another but had carried on gazing at the flickering stellar dust.

  Yesterday afternoon there had been the stuffy fume-laden heat of the cab of a large truck, a hot dust-covered windscreen, and the rumble of the engine. A year ago: a small oilcloth-covered writing table in Kazan, a school exercise book he used for a diary, the book he was reading, and his mother’s warm palm on his forehead as she said, “Go to bed now!”

  Two years before that: skinny little Nadya, wearing only her knickers, running barefoot up the steps of the dacha terrace and yelling, “Tolya’s a fool, and he’s stolen my volleyball.” And further back still: a child’s model-aircraft kit; tea with milk and a candy before going to bed; a sledge with a hard seat, covered by a cloth with a fringe; and a fir tree on New Year’s Eve. Viktor Pavlovich’s grey-haired mother had held Tolya on her lap and, very softly, sung, “A fir tree was born in a forest”—and, in his thin little voice, he had joined in, “There in the forest, the fir grew tall.”

  All this was compressed into a tiny, compact lump, like a hazelnut. Had any of it ever existed at all?

  The only reality now was the thunder of battle, still some distance away, but drawing nearer and growing louder.

  Tolya felt confused. It was not that he was afraid of death or suffering; it was more that he was afraid of the test to which he would soon be subjected. Would he pass this test? Some of his fears were childish, others more adult. Would he be able to give orders in the heat of battle? Or would his voice crack? Would he let out little squeaks like a baby hare? Would his commander call out, “What a mummy’s boy!”? Would he suddenly flinch for no reason at all, while his gunners watched condescendingly? He didn’t, at least, need to worry about his guns. He knew his guns all right—what concerned him was whether or not he knew himself.

  Now and then he thought about his mother, but, rather than feeling homesick, he felt angry and resentful. Could she not have foreseen that he would be put to this test? Why had she always indulged him, protecting him from the cold, the rain and any hard labour? Why all those candies, cookies and New Year trees? She should have started to make a man of him from the very start. She should have imposed a regime of cold baths, coarse, simple food, factory work, long hikes in the mountains, and so on. And he should have learned to smoke.

  And he kept looking up towards the top of the cliff, to the source of all these explosions and rumbles, to where the sun shone with such crazy brightness. He was so timid. He was always losing his voice. How could he command strong men who had already seen combat?

  Tolya knocked on the roof of the cab and the driver poked his head out of the window. “Comrade driver,” Tolya called out, “move to one side now. We need to start on the next truck.”

  Tolya was just getting down from the truck, telling himself that the unloading and delivery of shells was an important, responsible job, when he saw a sergeant from the command post running, sometimes leaping, down the slope. He was yelling to the soldiers handling the shells, “Where’s the lieutenant?”

  A minute later he was standing in front of Tolya, saying, “Comrade Lieutenant, the battery commander has been wounded by machine-gun fire from a plane. The comrade major orders you to take command of the battery.”

  Tolya and the sergeant began to scramble up the slope. The sergeant, gasping for breath, told Tolya what had happened in his absence. The neighbouring division’s infantry had gone forward. Their battery had not been bombed, but it had been strafed by fighters; there were several wounded. The steppe was white from propaganda leaflets dropped by the Germans. It was now only four kilometres to the German front line.

  As he listened, Tolya gazed at the red dust once again swirling under his feet. He looked around: the Volga was now far below.

  They came to their hill. It was steep and slippery, covered in moss and small pebbles. The sergeant went in front, sometimes pressing his hands against his knees to help his balance. The sudden sunlight on Tolya’s face was harsh and dazzling.

  Tolya never came to understand why and at what point he turned calm and confident. Was it when he reached the guns and saw their powerful, merciless barrels, camouflaged by dry grass and vine twigs, trained on the heights occupied by the Germans? Was it when he saw his men’s joy and relief at the sight of their new commander? When he looked at the steppe, at the German leaflets now covering it like a white rash, and was struck by the clear and simple idea that everything he most hated, everything most hostile to his homeland, to his mother, sister and grandmother, to their freedom, happiness and life, lay there in front of him and that it was in his power to fight this enemy horde? Or when he received his battle orders and audaciously, almost merrily, decided to advance his guns far forward, to take up fire positions on the very crest of the slope. His guns, after all, were the Front’s left flank. His own flank was covered by nothing less than the Volga; he could not be outflanked.

  Never had Tolya felt as strong, as important to others, as he did now. Never had he known that he could act with such daring, that there could be such joy in taking a bold decision, or that his voice could sound so loud and confident.

  As the gunners were pushing their guns to the crest and Tolya was telling the sergeant major where to position them, a lieutenant colonel from Division HQ drove up in his jeep. He went straight to Tolya and asked, “Who ordered you to advance the guns so far forward?”

  “I gave the order myself,” Tolya replied.

  “There’s no one to cover you. Do you want to fall into the hands of the Germans?”

  “No, comrade Lieutenant Colonel. I want the Germans to fall into my hands.” And Tolya quickly explained the advantages of this forward position. The guns were sheltered by a small copse, protected to the east by the Volga and to the south b
y a steep cliff—and they commanded a large area of steppe that the German tanks would have to cross. “Their tanks are concentrated behind those orchards. They’re in our sights, comrade Lieutenant Colonel. No need for calculations—we can lay for direct fire!”

  The lieutenant colonel, narrowing his eyes, looked at the new fire positions, at the ravine snaking down to the Volga, and then at the steppe, where he could see groups of advancing Soviet infantry and small clouds from exploding mortar bombs.

  “All right,” he said, now sounding less like a senior commander. “I can see you’re no fool. Been fighting since the very beginning, have you?”

  “No, comrade Lieutenant Colonel, today’s my first day.”

  “Then you’re a born gunner!” said the lieutenant colonel. “So, don’t lose contact with HQ. I can’t see your telephone cable. Where is it?”

  “I said to place it over there, down the slope. It’s less likely to be damaged by shrapnel.”

  “Good man, good man!” said the lieutenant colonel, and returned to his jeep.

  Soon the major telephoned and ordered Tolya not to open fire until he received the order. He warned him that enemy tanks might appear to his right and that they must be held back at all cost. Should the tanks break through, there would be nothing between them and the ammunition and other equipment now being brought up to support the advancing Soviet infantry.

  Listening to Tolya’s replies, the major suddenly doubted whether he really was speaking to Lieutenant Shaposhnikov—he sounded uncharacteristically strong and bold. Had some German intercepted his call.”

  “Shaposhnikov, is that you on the line?”

  “Yes, comrade Major.”

  “Who have you taken over from?”

  “Senior Lieutenant Vlasyuk, comrade Major.”

  “Your name?”

  “Tolya, I mean Anatoly, comrade Major.”

  “Very good. Somehow I didn’t quite recognize your voice. That’s all for now.”