Wiping the sweat from his face and scratching at his left ear, which had been damaged by a shell burst, he was writing a report on lined office paper to Yelin, his regimental commander. He was overjoyed by his success—taking the main railway station was no small matter—but frustrated that the other battalions were so far behind. With his flanks unprotected, he could not advance further.
Shvedkov, the battalion commissar—until recently a raikom instructor in the province of Ivanovo—was overexcited by his first taste of combat. “Why are we stopping?” he asked in a loud voice. “We must build on our success. Our men are straining at the leash. They want to advance further!”
“Where to? We’ve advanced further than anyone else as it is!” replied Filyashkin, jabbing one finger at his plan of the city. “Do you want us to head for Kharkov? Or straight for Bérlin?”
He pronounced Berlin with a strong stress on the first syllable.
Lieutenant Kovalyov, commander of the third company, came in. His side cap had slipped onto one ear and a lock of hair poked out from beneath it. Each time he turned his head at all sharply, this forelock jumped about, like a metal spring.
“How’s it gone?” asked Filyashkin.
“Not at all badly,” said Kovalyov, trying to keep his voice deep and hoarse. “I despatched nine of the buggers myself.” And he smiled with his eyes, his teeth, his whole being, as only children usually smile.
He had killed three Germans. Two more had fallen to the ground, but he did not know whether or not they had died. He wondered why he had said nine. He must have just wanted Filyashkin to know what a daring young fellow he was. That Lena Gnatyuk had spent the night with Filyashkin was neither here nor there.
Kovalyov then reported that Politinstructor Kotlov, whose personal courage had been an inspiration to all of them, had been wounded and taken back to the rear.
Lieutenant Igumnov, the grey-haired battalion chief of staff, was looking silently at the map. Before the war he had worked in a district Osoaviakhim soviet.21 He looked down on the younger commanders, whom he thought frivolous and boastful. He considered Filyashkin too much of a womanizer and he disliked being subordinate to a battalion commander no older than his eldest son.
Then Konanykin—Long-Limbs—appeared. He was dark-haired, like a gypsy. His movements and gestures were quick and abrupt. One of the squares on his collar tabs had been cut from a piece of red rubber; another had simply been drawn with indelible ink.
“There are Germans all around us,” Igumnov muttered crossly. “This isn’t a social club.”
“Report, comrade Konanykin!” said Filyashkin.
Konanykin reported his company’s successes and the number of casualties sustained. He also handed over a written report, in large handwriting.
“Well, I’ve certainly given the Fritzes something to think about,” said Filyashkin. He turned to Igumnov and said, “Come on, let’s have a bite to eat!”
Pointing towards silent buildings now occupied by the Germans, Kovalyov said, “I passed through Stalingrad in the summer. I was with a friend, another lieutenant. We stayed with his family—and we had quite a time of it. I can confess now, comrade Senior Lieutenant: we stayed an extra day without leave. There was a girl I really fancied—my friend’s sister. About twenty-five. Unmarried, a real beauty. Never seen a girl like her. Gorgeous, cultured.”
“I’m glad she was cultured!” said Konanykin. “But did your advances meet with tactical success? Did you give her what for?”
“Oh yes,” said Kovalyov. “I certainly did!” This, of course, was a lie—his way of making out to Filyashkin that he wasn’t really so very interested in medical instructor Lena Gnatyuk. He’d gone for walks in the steppe with her and he’d given her his photograph—but that was simply because they’d been in reserve and there hadn’t been much to do.
Filyashkin yawned and said, “Why do you think I want to hear about Stalingrad? I’ve been here too, after finishing military school. I didn’t see anything so special about the place. And as for the winds they get in winter . . . I almost got blown off my feet.”
He handed Kovalyov a mug.
“Thank you, comrade Senior Lieutenant, but I won’t,” said Kovalyov.
Filyashkin and Konanykin drank their regulation hundred grams22 and then recalled an incident when they were billeted in a village hut. A lieutenant, a very quiet, shy young man, had drunk some moonshine—for Dutch courage—and then climbed up onto the stove.23 But instead of the young mistress he thought was expecting him, he had found her elderly mother-in-law. And she really had “given him what for.” He had tumbled onto the floor and ended up with a black eye. All this had desperately embarrassed him. During the rest of their stay in the village, he had done his best to hide away in the kitchen garden.
The two commanders had been in Stalingrad only a few hours—they had no shared memories of the city. All they had to reminisce about was their months spent in reserve, in the Transvolga steppe. And for them and for many who followed them, Stalingrad never did have time to become a memory; it became, instead, the highest and last reality, a today with no tomorrow.
A messenger returned with a note from the regimental commander. They were to strengthen their defences. There were signs that the enemy was preparing to counter-attack.
“But what about food? We’ve only got two days’ rations,” Shvedkov and Igumnov said with one voice.
Konanykin looked at Filyashkin and smiled. His smile was so clear and carefree; it conveyed such a readiness to meet fate, such an understanding of the simplicity of his fate, that Igumnov’s heart missed a beat: he might have grey hair, but in the presence of this lieutenant he was a mere boy.
Filyashkin marked out on his map the sectors each company was to defend. The company commanders copied these to their own maps and noted Filyashkin’s other instructions.
“May I be dismissed?” asked Kovalyov, standing to attention.
“Dismissed!” Filyashkin answered briskly.
Kovalyov clicked his heels and did a sharp about-turn, saluting at the same time.
The ground beneath him was littered with pieces of broken plaster and brick. He stumbled and almost fell. Embarrassed, he did a little jump and began to run, as if, rather than stumbling, he had been hurrying to obey orders.
“Call that an about-turn?” Filyashkin shouted crossly.
Such sudden transitions from straightforward friendliness to an exaggerated severity are perhaps less surprising than they first seem. The relations between these young commanders of different rank were complex. On the one hand, they faced danger together, sang songs together and even read family letters together; on the other hand, a superior enjoys being able to pull rank on a subordinate. Sometimes this severity stems from fear of seeming a mere boy, not yet mature enough to be a commander. In someone young, and democratically inclined, such a fear is only too natural.
It is only after many years of experience that men acquire the ability to be indulgent towards a subordinate, to behave gently while in a position of power. And most men only acquire this ability after coming to believe that the exercise of power is their natural and inevitable right—and that subordination is the inevitable lot of most other men.
Filyashkin adjusted the binoculars hanging from his neck and said, “One of us must go to the regimental command post. Our belongings are still there. And the commander’s incorporated one of my companies into his reserve. If we don’t do something soon, it’ll get dispersed.”
He looked at Igumnov and Shvedkov. They understood that he was wondering which of them to send.
Their faces changed. A word or two from Filyashkin would decide their fate.
The silence outside was ominous; the apparent peace foretold death. Their regimental command post now seemed like a haven of safety, as if it were located way back in the rear.
“Send me—I’m an old man,” Igumnov wanted to say, as if in jest. Sensing with disgust how false this would sound, he frowned and b
ent down impassively over his map.
As for Shvedkov, he was already well aware that the battalion was doomed. His suggestion that they should advance further had been preposterous. Their initial success had left them in an impossible position.
But he too, of course, remained silent, examining his pistol.
Filyashkin was generally mistrustful of people, and he had taken a particular dislike to Shvedkov; he had little time for former reservists who had gone straight into active service. Shvedkov had been appointed a senior political instructor the day he enlisted, while he himself had served three hard years before being promoted to senior lieutenant. Filyashkin was equally critical of his chief of staff, whom he saw as a tedious old man. He had more respect for Konanykin, who had just been to a three-year village school and then done active service as a rank-and-file soldier. Konanykin, however, kept challenging his authority, which irritated him.
“Watch it, Konanykin!” Filyashkin had once snapped at him.
“Watch what?” Konanykin had snapped back. “I’m not frightened and I’m not watching out for anything. I’ll be killed soon anyway. Do you think it’s any easier to lead convicts into battle than to be in a penal battalion oneself? Do as you like—I don’t care!”
In the end, Filyashkin said, “Shvedkov, why don’t you go?” With a little smile, he added, “Otherwise you’ll die, and then you’ll receive a reprimand from the political section for failing to report!”
He had settled on Shvedkov, since he had not seen Lena Gnatyuk since the long march and Shvedkov might get in the way of him seeing her today.
Filyashkin then returned to his more immediate tasks. He picked up a sub-machine gun and, so as not to attract the attention of an enemy sniper, slipped a greatcoat over his map case. Then he said to Igumnov, “I’ll go and check our positions.”
Unnerved by the silence outside, Igumnov replied in a loud voice, “Comrade Battalion Commander, there’s a deep cellar under the station building—just right for an ammo dump. The company commanders can send men there when they run short.”
“No,” said Filyashkin, with a shake of the head. “That’s the last thing we need. Ensure that all hand grenades and cartridges are distributed to the men straightaway.”
The Germans were still not shooting, and this made the sullen, distant rumble to the north all the more frightening. Like any experienced soldier, Filyashkin was afraid of silence. He remembered the silence around Chernovtsy on the night of 21 June 1941. The regimental HQ building felt stifling and he had gone outside for a smoke. It was very quiet indeed and the windows shone in the calm moonlight. He was duty officer for the night. His relief was supposed to take over at six o’clock, but now Filyashkin felt as if no relief had ever shown up and he’d had to stay on duty for the last fifteen months.
The empty, slate-grey Stalingrad square; the bent, twisted poles and dangling wires; the gleaming rails without the least hint of rust; the silent sidings; this proletarian earth, gleaming with black oil, trodden down by railway workers as they checked couplings and greased pistons and axles; this earth that had trembled for so long beneath the weight of huge freight trains—all this was silent, as if everything here had been calm and sleepy since the beginning of time. Even the air itself, usually gashed by conductors’ whistles and the hooting of locomotives, seemed strangely intact and spacious. Everything about this quiet day reminded Filyashkin both of the last hours of peace and of his childhood home. Aged seven and the son of a track inspector, he had loved nothing more than to escape his mother’s watchful eye and wander about the tracks.
Crouching beside the station wall, he opened his map case and found the note from Yelin. Without removing it from its yellowish celluloid envelope, he reread it. It brought him no comfort; Yelin, too, understood that the present calm was deceptive.
Everything, it seemed, would be the same as on that moonlit night in June 1941; the silence would be ripped apart, yielding to fire and the roar of planes. But no—what happened then would not be repeated. Today, Filyashkin would not be caught off guard. Today he was on the alert; he was different from the man he had been fifteen months ago. And maybe that young lieutenant hadn’t even been him at all—maybe it had been somebody else out there in the moonlight. He was now strong and capable. He knew what was what; the sound of a shell burst was enough to tell him the calibre of a gun. He didn’t need to read reports or speak on the phone to his company commanders—he always already knew where the Germans were targeting their mortars and machine guns and which of his companies was under the most pressure.
He felt cross with himself for feeling so anxious.
“There’s nothing worse,” he said to the orderly walking beside him, “than being moved forward from the reserves to the front line. If you’ve got to fight, it’s better to just keep on fighting without a break.”
30
THE BATTALION prepared a perimeter defence.
Premonitions are often deceptive. People with real experience of war treat them warily. Someone wakes in the night, certain they are about to die; they have seen the book of their fate and everything has been spelled out to them. Sad or embittered, or perhaps reconciled to their lot, they write a last letter, look at the faces of comrades, or at the earth beneath their feet, and slowly go through the few personal belongings in their knapsack.
And the day passes quietly by, with no shelling, with not a single German plane in the sky.
Or someone begins the day calm and hopeful, thinking about what they will do when the war is over—and by noon they are choking in blood, half-buried under stone and rubble.
After occupying the main railway station, Filyashkin’s men were cheerful and confident. “Now we can go back home,” said one of them, looking at a cold locomotive. “We just need to get up a head of steam. I’ll be the driver. Get the commandant to reserve you a seat.”
“We certainly won’t run out of coal. There’s enough to get me back to Tambov,” said a second man. “Let’s go buy some pies for the journey!”
After cutting embrasures in the walls with axes and crowbars, they did what they could to make themselves comfortable. One man regretted the absence of hay or straw. Someone very house-proud and organized put up a shelf so he had somewhere to keep his knapsack and mess tin. Two others were examining a tin mug crushed by a brick, wondering if it was worth removing the small chain attached to it.
“You take the chain,” said one of them, “and I’ll have the mug.”
“You’re very generous,” said the second man, “but why not take the chain too?”
Someone else found a convenient windowsill, took out a small mirror and began to shave. His dust-covered beard squeaked beneath his razor.
“Give me a little soap!” said someone else. “I need a shave too.”
“There’s hardly any left. Look!” Seeing the hurt look on his comrade’s face, the man went on. “Oh, all right, here you are—but save me one last sliver!”
The men in the penal unit attached to Konanykin’s company were equally calm and good-tempered. Expecting to be staying in the station for some time, they set about their tasks with care.
One man, though, looked at the smashed ceiling and the collapsing partition walls and said resignedly, “The Guards companies get the first-class waiting room. The Guards companies get the room for mothers with small children—and all we get is this!”
Another man, with narrow shoulders, curly hair and a surprisingly pale face, had just set up his anti-tank rifle. He squinted, took aim and, with a tired smile, said to his number two, “Out of the way, Zhora—you’re in my line of fire. We don’t want any accidents!”
Kovalyov’s company was also hard at work, smashing holes in the brickwork and digging trenches in the heavy Stalingrad ground—a mixture of earth, crumbled brick, white tiles and decomposing pieces of tin that looked almost like lace.
Waist-deep in a trench, Usurov asked, “Vavilov, why aren’t you eating your chocolate? It’s really tasty.
How about a swap? Your chocolate for half a packet of baccy?”
“No,” said Vavilov, “I’m keeping it for my children. My little Nastya’s never seen chocolate like this.”
“It’ll go mouldy before you get to see her again.”
“I might not get killed. I might just get wounded. Then I’ll be sent home for a while—and Nastya won’t mind if it’s gone a bit off.”
“Well, say if you change your mind.”
Usurov smiled. He remembered how, long ago, his father had tried to get him to chop wood and he had run away and hidden. Now, watching Vavilov’s big hands and calm movements, observing the strong, carefully placed blows to which the stone quickly yielded, as if in collusion with Vavilov, Usurov forgot their previous differences and felt a sudden affection for this tall, severe man who reminded him of his own father.
“I love working with my hands,” he said, even though he hated manual labour and had never taken much interest in anything except his pay.
While they were still on the east bank, the sight of the red glow over Stalingrad had appalled the men; it had seemed impossible for anyone to survive in the city for even an hour. Now, though, they felt reassured. They were digging trenches and they had thick stone walls to shelter behind. And there was silence, and the earth itself, and the sun in the sky. Everyone felt calmer, happier, confident that all would go well for them.
Lieutenant Kovalyov’s nose was peeling; in places it looked pink and tender. “How are you doing, my eagles?” he called out. “No slacking—the enemy’s close by.”
Kovalyov felt confident in his men. He had just accompanied Filyashkin on a tour of the company’s sector. The two men had inspected the trenches, the machine-gun nests and the forward outposts. As he left, Filyashkin had said, “You’ve constructed your defences well.”
Kovalyov felt no less confident in his own strength and experience. He went to his command post, a cave dug out beneath the half-collapsed wall of a freight warehouse and located deep in the company’s rear, a good fifteen to twenty metres from the front line. Their preparations were now almost complete. Everyone had been issued cartridges, hand grenades and Molotov cocktails. The anti-tank guns were in place; the machine guns had been checked and their ammunition belts loaded. Everyone had received their ration of sausage and dried rusks. The telephone cable to the battalion command post was protected by rubble and debris. The platoon commanders knew their instructions. Senior Sergeant Dodonov, who had made out he was ill and asked permission to go to the regimental medical unit, had been given a severe reprimand.
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