Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  For a long time Zhukov sat very still. Only when the plane approached the Volga, which looked like a long blue shawl with torn edges, did he turn to the man behind him and ask, “So, will you be treating me to some sterlet?”

  “Of course, comrade Army General,” the general replied, getting quickly to his feet. “And it’ll be the very best. Malinovsky’s 66th Army has been doing some fine fishing!”

  Zhukov went back to looking out of the window. He had often had occasion to look down at the world and observe its contours. The world he saw now—the thin threads of tracks and roads, villages and small towns divided into square or rectangular blocks, the copper rectangles of harvested fields and the green rectangles of winter crops, the Volga flowing between patches of sand, pale blue backwaters and long green smears of rushes—the startlingly geometric world he saw now was as familiar to him as the day-to-day world of the earth’s surface, with its cows, sheep and birds, with its snot-nosed little boys, with its dust and smoke, with its grasses and its crooked willows, with its multitude of unexpected features that so often hindered the orderly deployment of troops.

  Below him now lay long beds of rushes. What a place to go shooting—it must be home to thousands of ducks!

  The Douglas began to descend. The fighter escort, which they had picked up in Balashov, alternated between banking up steeply and descending in slow, sweeping curves. Then the Douglas was flying low over the Volga. In the middle of the river was a huge barge packed with trucks. Foot soldiers were moving slowly along the shore, many of them looking up at the plane. A long queue of trucks was waiting to cross.

  Provisioning the troops deployed on the west bank, inside Stalingrad, was going to be painfully difficult.

  Zhukov remembered discussions in the General Staff about preparations for the Soviet counter-attack. He closed his eyes and saw two fiery arrows on a map—one pointing down from the north, one curving up from the south.

  Then he sighed loudly, imagining Field Marshal Bock looking at his own map and marking in where the Germans had broken through to the Volga.

  He turned again to the major general sitting behind him, spat out the words, “So you think you can fry sterlet on the Volga while you abandon tanks and guns on the Don!”8 and swore furiously.

  The soldiers on the barge saw a twin-engine plane flying low over the river, escorted by several fighters. The fighters already patrolling the area moved higher or to either side, with a swiftness that made the Douglas seem slow and lumbering.

  “Look, Vavilov!” cried a young man, pointing to the Douglas. “Must be someone important. Who do you think it is?”

  And another soldier, looking up at the fighters, listening to a din which testified that the power of their engines truly was equal to that of a herd of 15,000 neighing and stamping horses, said coolly, “Must be the corporal we left behind yesterday at the supply depot.”

  9

  THEY STOPPED for the night in Verkhne-Pogromnoye. Major Berozkin and the lieutenant from military school were to sleep in a barn. Lieutenant Colonel Darensky was offered a bed in a peasant hut, and the driver and the supplies-section officer were to sleep in the truck, close to a slit trench in the yard.

  It was stiflingly hot. They could hear artillery fire to the west and there were swirls of glowing smoke to the south. There was a constant rumble from downstream—as if the waters of the Volga were falling from a high cliff into some underworld—and the whole flat mass of the Transvolga steppe was trembling. The hut’s windows rang, the door creaked gently on its hinges, the hay rustled and small lumps of clay dropped from the ceiling. Somewhere nearby a cow was breathing heavily, getting to its feet and lying down again, disturbed by the noise, and by the smell of petrol and dust.

  Infantry, guns and trucks were all moving down the main street. The blurred light of vehicle headlamps fell on the swaying backs of men on foot, on rifles glinting through clouds of dust, on the burnished barrels of anti-tank rifles, on mortars broad as samovar chimneys. Dust hung in the air and swirled around men’s feet. There seemed no end to the flow of people, all utterly silent. Sometimes a stray flicker fell on a head in an iron helmet, or on the thin face, almost black with dust but with gleaming teeth, of an exhausted, stumbling foot soldier. A moment later another vehicle’s headlamps would pick out a platoon of motor infantry in the back of a truck—helmets, rifles, dark faces and fluttering tarpaulins.

  Powerful three-axle Studebakers growled past, towing seventy-six-millimetre guns with barrels still warm from the heat of the day.

  Grass snakes and whip snakes, shaken by all the noise, tried to slip across the road and away into the steppe. Dozens of thin crushed bodies lay dark against the white sand.

  The sky was equally full of noise. Junkers and Heinkels crept between the stars. U-2 “maize hoppers” rattled along just above the ground, soon to glide over the German lines and release their bombs.9 Tupolev TB-3 heavy bombers—four-engine mammoths—lumbered along at an invisible height.

  For the men below, it was as if they were standing beneath a vast dark blue bridge painted with stars, as if thousands of iron wheels were rumbling past over their heads.

  Smoothly rotating searchlights from steppe airfields marked out night-time landing strips. On the far horizon a shining kilometre-long pencil drew pale blue circles with silent but frenzied zeal.

  There was no beginning or end to the columns of men and vehicles. Headlamps shone and were instantly extinguished, scared by angry shouts from the foot soldiers, “Lights off! Bombers!”

  Black dust swirled over the road. High in the sky hung a shimmering glow—a glow that had now hung over Stalingrad, over the Volga and the surrounding steppe, for several nights.

  The whole world had seen this glow. It fascinated and horrified those now moving towards it.

  Blessèd the man who’s visited this world

  At moments of great destiny.

  Would Tyutchev have remembered these words of his, had he, on this August night, been marching towards the city on the Volga where the world’s fate was being decided?10

  •

  Meanwhile, soldiers from the Southwestern Front, defeated in the battles west of the Don, were plodding towards Stalingrad from the south, following dirt roads and small paths through the steppe. Some had dirty bandages around their left hands11 and were staring dispiritedly down at the ground. Some were feeling their way with sticks, as if blind. Some were crying out with pain, trying not to put any weight on bloody foot sores eaten away by sweat and filth. In their eyes could be seen all the horror of war—and their memories of a bridge over the Don, of half-dead men trying to run across slippery red planks. After the Don, these soldiers had crossed the Volga, some on boards, some on car tyres, some clinging to wrecked boats. They could still hear the howls of the wounded they had seen standing on the stairs or by the windows of burning hospitals. They could still hear the wild laughter of men who had lost their minds and were shaking their fists at a sky heavy with German bombers. Their cheeks still burned from incandescent air. Day and night, these soldiers walked on, driven by horror.

  Further away in the steppe, under the warm August sky, lay refugees from Stalingrad: women and girls in felt boots, in fur coats or warm fur-trimmed jackets, in greatcoats snatched from cupboards as families abandoned their homes. Children lay asleep on bags and bundles. The smell of city mothballs mingled with the smell of steppe wormwood.

  Still further away, in gullies and ravines hollowed out by spring floods, flickered the lights of small fires. Wanderers, deserters and members of workers’ battalions who had lost their units after an air raid were darning threadbare clothes or cooking pumpkins pilfered from kolkhoz gardens. Some were picking off lice, screwing up their eyes and concentrating as intently as if there were no more important task in the world. Every now and then they wiped their fingers over the dry ground.

  •

  The driver and the supplies officer were standing out in the yard with the mistress of the hut.


  They gazed in silence at the troops hurrying towards Stalingrad in the middle of the night. There were moments when they seemed to be watching not columns of individual soldiers but a single huge creature with a huge iron heart and eyes fixed grimly on the road ahead.

  A man in a helmet slipped away from his company and ran up to the gate.

  “Mother!” he cried, holding out a slim pharmacy bottle. “Water! The dust’s killing me. My insides are burning.”

  The old woman fetched a jug and began to pour water into the narrow throat of his bottle. The soldier stood and waited, looking first at the imposing supplies officer and then at his company, which had now passed by.

  “You need a proper flask,” said the supplies officer. “Whoever heard of a soldier with no flask?”

  “It was hard enough to get hold of this,” the soldier replied. “And someone’s already tried to steal it.”

  He straightened his tarpaulin belt. His voice was somehow both thin and hoarse, like a fledgling’s as it cheeps for food. And his thin face, his sharp nose, his pitiful eyes peeping out from under a helmet too big for him—everything about him recalled a bird peeping out of a nest.

  He corked up his bottle, drank down a mug of water and ran off again, in boots that were also too big. Muttering “One anti-tank unit, two with mortars—and then us,” he disappeared into the dark.

  The supplies officer on his way to Stalingrad in search of vodka said, “That young fool won’t last long.”

  “No,” said the driver. “Fighters like him don’t fight for long.”

  10

  LIEUTENANT Colonel Darensky went into the hut and told them to move his bedding. He would sleep not on the bed but on the bench, his head to the icons and his feet to the door.

  A young woman, the mistress’s daughter-in-law, said impassively, “The bench, comrade Commander, is very hard.”

  “I’m scared of fleas,” said Darensky.

  “We don’t have fleas,” retorted a ragged old man sitting by the door. He looked like some wanderer taken in for the night, but he must have been the owner of the hut. “Though we do meet the occasional louse,” he added.

  Darensky looked around. The dim light of an oil lamp with no glass made everything seem still more poor and austere. “And yet there’s someone in a front-line trench,” he said to himself, “who remembers this stifling hut. He keeps thinking about this old man, this scrawny woman, these small windows and the black boards of this ceiling. To him there’s nowhere more precious in the world.”

  Darensky was too overexcited to sleep; the glow in the sky, the constant hum and drone of planes, the mighty flow of troops through the night had made too deep an impression on him. He felt ever more conscious of the importance of the impending battle—just now he had wanted to share his thoughts with his chance companion, this quiet major. But Darensky was deeply reserved; a frank, serious conversation with someone he hardly knew always left him disturbed. There was, moreover, something about this major he found particularly irritating, though he couldn’t quite say what it was. It was to avoid talking to him that he had gone inside the hut.

  Darensky paced about between the stove and the door, then looked with sudden curiosity at an armchair standing against the wall. It had a black oilskin cover and a metal armrest. It was, obviously, from a bus. Then he remembered seeing the old woman pouring water for the goat into a strange vessel out in the yard. It had been a cast-iron lavatory cistern, dug into the ground. “Yes,” he said to himself. “There’s been a powerful centrifugal force at work in the country. It takes quite a whirlwind to transport a bus seat to a village hut in the Transvolga steppe. And as for goats and camels drinking from something so urban as a lavatory cistern . . .”

  The young woman sorted out the bedding, then went outside.

  “Where’s your old woman gone?” Darensky asked the owner of the hut.

  “She’s down in the trench,” he replied. “Women are afraid of sleeping inside. Once the bombs start, she’s like a ground squirrel. She peeps out, hides away, then peeps out again.”

  “And you? Aren’t you afraid of bombs?”

  “What’s there to be afraid of?” said the old man. “I fought against the Japanese, and then I fought against the Germans. This time I’ve sent twelve men to the Red Army—four sons and nine grandsons. What’s the good of hiding in trenches? Two of my sons are full colonels—I’m not joking. But soldiers come by and dig up all our potatoes. They’ve gone off with our last pumpkin. Yesterday two of them came to barter a tin of meat and stole a new kerchief. And my old woman gives away everything we have—she can’t refuse the wounded anything. There was one son of a bitch who nicked my box of matches—and she’d already given him the milk and pumpkin porridge meant for our supper. She’d wept at the mere sight of him. Yes, that’s the way she is—she looks on every last soldier as her own son. And one of those Asiatics stole a sheep from our neighbours and slaughtered it. What do you think of that, comrade Commander, is that right? And cattle are being ferried across the Volga to our steppe, and kolkhoz chairmen are bartering calves for bottles of moonshine. They slaughter calves every day. Is that right, comrade Commander, when a cow is worth 40,000? Men are dying every day, but some people are doing very well out of this war. Well, comrade Commander? Answer me that!”

  “I need to sleep,” said Darensky. “We’re leaving for Stalingrad at dawn.”

  Just then there was a powerful explosion—a bomb close by on the road. The hut shuddered. The old man got to his feet and picked up his sheepskin coat.

  “Where are you off to?” asked Darensky, laughing.

  “Where? To the trench. Didn’t you hear?” Bent almost double, the old man ran out of the hut.

  Darensky lay down on the bench and quickly fell asleep.

  11

  ALL THROUGH the night, between trembling searchlights, accompanied by the rumble of distant artillery, the troops marched on towards the glow of the blazing city. To their right lay the Volga; to their left—the steppes and salt deserts of Kazakhstan.

  The mood of the marching columns was grim and grave—as if the men no longer felt thirst or exhaustion or feared for their lives.

  Here, on the edge of the Kazakh steppe, the fate of a nation was being decided. The steppe, the sky and the stars, which tracer bullets were endlessly climbing towards—all seemed to understand this.

  The bronze monuments of Lvov, Odessa’s seaside promenade, Yalta’s palms, Kiev’s chestnuts and poplars, the stations, parks, squares and streets of Novgorod, Minsk, Simferopol, Kharkov, Smolensk and Rostov, Ukraine’s white peasant huts and fields of sunflowers, the vineyards of Moldavia, the cherry orchards around Poltava, the waters of the Danube and the Dnieper, the apple trees of Belorussia, the wheat fields of the Kuban—all Russia and Ukraine now seemed to these Soviet soldiers like a haunting vision, an unforgettable memory.

  Camels harnessed to peasant carts half-closed their eyes and slowly chewed their long lips as they watched the endless flow of human beings. Owls, blinded by headlamps, flew about wildly, beating their dark wings against the beams of light.

  There was no need for political instructors and commissars to give speeches. Gunners, soldiers with anti-tank rifles and machine guns on their backs, kolkhoz workers and factory workers—everyone understood that the war had now reached the Volga and that behind them lay only the Kazakh steppe. Like all truths of great importance, this truth was very simple; there was no one who didn’t understand it.

  It was no longer possible to march along the hilly west bank of the Volga; the Germans had advanced all the way to the shore. On the east bank, the Soviet soldiers could see only saline steppe and camels chewing thistles. And a vast expanse of water now separated them from the west bank, from its willows and oaks, from the villages of Okatovka, Yerzovka and Orlovka. And this expanse was widening; the groves of trees, the villages, the kolkhozes, the fishermen, the boys now living under German occupation, the spaces of the Don and the Ku
ban were moving ever further away.

  From the low-lying east bank, Ukraine seemed unreachable. And there was nothing to greet them here but the rumble of guns and the flames of the burning city—a greeting that pierced the soldiers’ hearts.

  12

  DARENSKY woke shortly before dawn. He listened for a moment—the rumble of guns and the hum of planes had not stopped. Usually the hour before dawn is war’s quiet hour—the time when night’s darkness and fear draw to an end, when sentries doze off, when the severely wounded stop screaming and at last close their eyes. It is the time when fever subsides and sweat comes out on the skin, when birds begin to stir, when sleeping babies stretch towards the breasts of their sleeping mothers. It is the last hour of sleep, when soldiers cease to feel the hard, lumpy ground beneath them and pull their greatcoats over their heads, unaware of the white film of frost now covering their buttons and belt buckles.

  But there was no longer any such thing as a quiet hour. In the darkness before dawn planes were still humming and troops still passing by. There was the rumble of heavy vehicles and the sound of artillery fire and exploding bombs in the distance.

  Unsettled by all this, Darensky got ready to go on his way. By the time he had shaved, washed, brushed his teeth and filed his nails, it was already light.

  He went out into the yard. The driver was still asleep, his head on the corner of the seat and his bare feet poking out of the window. Darensky knocked on the windscreen. The driver did not wake up, so Darensky sounded the horn.

  “Time we were off,” he said, as his numb driver began to stir. “Get the pickup out on the road.”

  Darensky walked past the slit trench, where the old man and his family were sleeping on straw, covered by sheepskin coats. He went on into the vegetable garden.

  In the distance, through a lattice of yellowing leaves, he could see the gleam of the Volga. The rays of the rising sun, now just clear of the horizon, ran almost parallel to the ground. The clouds had turned pink. Only a few—not yet caught by the sun—remained a cold ashy grey. The high cliffs of the west bank had emerged from the dark, and the patches of limestone shone like fresh snow.