A Writer at War (20 page)

This was the account which Grossman took down from Vassily Georgevich Kuliev, a twenty-eight-year-old military correspondent and former Komsomol head of Young Pioneers, who appointed himself commissar of the group.

‘
We were retreating from the battle
under fire from mortars and machine guns. At the Markovsky farmstead, we squatted in a trench, under a terrible fire, and then slipped through the encirclement. I appointed myself the commissar of a group of eighteen men. We lay down in [a field of] wheat. Germans appeared. A red-haired one shouted: “
Rus, uk vekh!
”
²
We fired bursts from our sub-machine guns and knocked four Germans off their horses. We broke through, shooting with a sub-machine gun and a machine gun. There were about twenty-five Germans. Sixteen of us were left out of the eighteen.

‘At night, we walked through the wheat. It was overripe and rustled and Germans fired at us with a machine gun . . . Then I assembled the sixteen men again and took a compass bearing to avoid roads and villages on our way. We spent the night lying on the high bank of the Don.
³
We tied groundsheets together into a rope in order to haul the wounded men across the river, but it wasn’t long enough. I suggested we swim the river. We put all our documents inside our forage caps and ammunition into a bag. I got tired halfway across the river and dropped the bag into the water. I kept my notepads in the forage cap.’

Once the Germans had finally cleared the west bank of the Don of Soviet troops, General Paulus redeployed his formations ready for the next leap forward. In the early hours of 21 August, German infantry in assault boats crossed the Don and seized bridgeheads on the east bank. Engineers went rapidly to work, and by the middle of the next day, a series of tank-bearing pontoon bridges were in place across the ‘Quiet Don’. Armoured units rapidly filled the bridgehead.

On Sunday 23 August 1942, the 16th Panzer Division led the charge across the steppe to reach the Volga just north of Stalingrad, late that
same afternoon. Overhead, the bombers of General Wolfram von Richthofen’s Fourth Air Fleet waggled their wings in encouragement to the ground forces. Behind them lay the ruins of Stalingrad which they had carpet-bombed in relays. During that day and over the course of the next three, some 40,000 civilians are said to have died in the burning city.

It was also the day that Grossman, on Ortenberg’s orders, left the Soviet capital for Stalingrad to report on the approaching battle.

We left Moscow in the vehicle on 23 August. The chief fitters at the editorial board garage had spent time preparing our vehicle for the thousand-kilometre race from Moscow to Stalingrad. However, we suddenly came to a halt three kilometres outside Moscow. We had flat tyres on all four wheels at the same time. While Burakov, the driver, expressed his surprise at this incident and then started repairing the tyres in a leisurely fashion, we, the correspondents, began interviewing the population of the Moscow area, [in fact] a girl beside the main road. She had a tanned face, aquiline nose and cheeky blue eyes.

‘Do you like colonels?’

‘Why should I like them?’

‘And
what about lieutenants with their cubes
?’

‘Lieutenants get on my nerves. I like soldiers.’

Despite the urgency of their journey south, Grossman could not forgo a visit to Leo Tolstoy’s estate, which he had last seen just before it was occupied by General Guderian the previous October.

Yasnaya Polyana. Eighty-three Germans were buried next to Tolstoy. They were dug up and reburied in a crater made by a German bomb. The flowers in front of the house are magnificent. It’s a good summer. Life seems to be filled with honey and calm.

Tolstoy’s grave. Flowers again, and bees are crawling in them. Little wasps are hovering above the grave. And in Yasnaya Polyana, a big orchard has died from the frost. All the trees are dead, dry apple trees stand grey, dull, dead like crosses on graves.

The blue, ash-grey main road. Villages have become the kingdom of women. They drive tractors, guard warehouses and stables, queue for vodka. Tipsy girls are out singing – they are seeing a girlfriend off to the army. Women are carrying on their shoulders the great burden
of work. Women dominate. They are coping with an enormous amount of work and send bread, aircraft, weapons and ammunition to the front. They feed us and arm us now. And we, men, do the second part of the job. We do the fighting. And we don’t fight well. We have retreated to the Volga. Women look and say nothing. There’s no reproach in [their eyes], not a bitter word. Are they nursing a grievance? Or do they understand what a terrible burden a war is, even an unsuccessful one?

The woman owner of the house where we spend the night is mischievous. She loves silly jokes. ‘Ah, it’s war now,’ she says. ‘The war will write everything off.’ She looks at Burakov intently, squinting. He is a handsome, good-looking guy. Burakov frowns, he is embarrassed. And she laughs, and begins ‘household talk’. She wouldn’t mind swapping some butter for a shirt or to buy half a litre [of vodka] from the military.

The woman owner of the house where we spend the next night is cleanliness itself. She rebuffs any dirty talk. At night, in the darkness she tells us trustingly about the household and about her work. She brings chickens and shows them to us, laughs, speaks of children, husband, the war. And everyone submits to her clear, simple soul.

That’s how the life of women is going, in the rear and at the front – two currents, one that is clear and bright, and the other a dark, military one. ‘Ah, it’s war now,’ [people say]. But the PPZh is our great sin.

The PPZh was the slang term for a ‘campaign wife’, because the full term,
pokhodno-polevaya zhena
, was similar to PPSh, the standard Red Army sub-machine gun. Campaign wives were young nurses and women soldiers from a headquarters – such as signallers and clerks – who usually wore a beret on the back of the head rather than the fore-and-aft
pilotka
cap. They found themselves virtually forced to become the concubines of senior officers. Grossman also scribbled down some bitter notes on the subject, perhaps for use in a story later.

Women – PPZh. Note about Nachakho, chief of administrative supplies department. She cried for a week, and then went to him.

‘Who’s that?’

‘The general’s PPZh.’

‘And the commissar hasn’t got one.’

Before the attack. Three o’clock in the morning.

‘Where’s the general?’ [someone asks].

‘Sleeping with his whore,’ the sentry murmurs.

And these girls had once wanted to be ‘Tanya’, or Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.
⁴

‘Whose PPZh is she?’

‘A member of the Military Council’s.’

Yet all around them tens of thousands of girls in military uniforms are working hard and with dignity.

Story about a general who escaped from an encirclement leading a goat on a rope. Some officers recognised him. ‘Where are you going, Comrade General?’ [they asked]. ‘Which way will you take?’ The general (Efimov) grinned sardonically. ‘The goat will show me the way.’

Krasivaya Mecha – the inexpressible beauty of this place. Lamentation over a cow during the night, in the blue light of a yellow moon. The cow had fallen into an anti-tank ditch. Women are wailing: ‘There are four children left.’
⁵
In the blue moonlight, a man with a knife is running to bleed the cow. In the morning, the cauldron is boiling. Everyone has replete faces, red eyes and swollen eyelids.

Thin women and girls wearing shawls on their heads are working on the road, loading earth on wooden handbarrows, levelling uneven places using picks and spades.

‘Where are you from?’ [we ask]

‘We are from Gomel.’

‘We were in the fighting near Gomel.’

We look at each other and say nothing. We drive on. It was a
bit alarming, this encounter near the village of Mokraya Olkhovka, just forty kilometres from the Volga.
⁶

Women in the village. The whole heavy burden of work now rests entirely on them. Nyushka – as if made of cast iron, mischievous and whorelike. ‘Ah, it’s war now,’ she says. ‘I’ve already served eighteen [men] since my husband left. We have a cow between three women, but she lets only me milk her. She won’t have anything to do with the other two.’ She laughs. ‘Now it’s easier to persuade a woman than a cow.’ She grins, offering us her love in a simple and kind-hearted way.

The vastness of our Motherland. We’ve been driving for four days. The time zone has changed – we are now one hour ahead. The steppe is different. The birds are different: kites, owls, little hawks. Watermelons and melons have appeared. But the pain we see here is still the same.

The village of Lebyazhye. The tall village houses have rooms painted with oil paint. We woke up, it was quiet, the sky was overcast in the morning, it was raining. The distance to the Volga is fifteen kilometres. The deceptive calm and quiet of the village was terrifying.

The Volga. Crossing. A bright day. The enormous size of the river, its slowness, greatness. In short, the Volga. There were vehicles on the barge loaded with aircraft bombs. [Enemy] aircraft are attacking. There is the crackle of machine-gun bursts. And the Volga remains slow and carefree. Boys are fishing from this fire-spitting barge.

There were several airfields in the area, which became important in the battle for Stalingrad. One of them was a melon field next to an open-air market which remained open for business, despite the strafing of German aircraft. The Soviet Union was already receiving a large quantity of Lend-Lease war material from the USA, including Willys Jeeps and the Douglas DC-3 ‘Dakota’, which Russians called the ‘Duglas’.

Arrival. Roar of engines, chaos. Cobras, Yaks, Hurricanes. A large Duglas appears, flying effortlessly and smoothly. Fighters are in a
frenzy. They are sniffing, running after it in its trace. The Duglas is looking for a place to land, and they are dancing in all directions. The Duglas has landed, with fighters above and around it. This sight is majestic, almost like a movie (with the steppe and the Volga).

Red Army soldiers were watching the scene and discussing it. One of them said: ‘Just like bees. Why are they rushing about?’

‘Guarding a melon field, apparently.’

The third one, looking at the Duglas which had just appeared: ‘Must be the corporal from our company catching up with us.’

The passenger on board would of course have been rather more important. It may even have been General Georgi Zhukov, who flew down on 28 August on Stalin’s orders to supervise the defence of the city.
⁷
‘What’s the matter with them?’ Stalin exploded on the telephone to General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the first
Stavka
representative to reach Stalingrad.
⁸
He was furious with the local military commanders. ‘Don’t they realise that this is not only a catastrophe for Stalingrad? We would lose our main waterway and soon our oil too!’

Grossman spent at least one night in Zavolzhye.

Spent the night in the house of the RAIKOM chairman. He talks about collective farms, and about the chairmen of collective farms who take their livestock far into the steppe and live like kings there, slaughtering heifers, drinking milk, buying and selling. (And a cow now costs 40,000 roubles.)

Women talking in the kitchen of the RAIKOM canteen: ‘Oh this Hitler, he’s a real Satan! And we used to say that communists were Satans.’
⁹

Land beyond the Volga [i.e. the east bank]. Dust, brown steppe, miserable autumn feather grass, tall weeds, sagebrush. Grass snakes crushed on the roads. Linnets. Camels. Camels’ cries. The sun is rising in a pale misty haze. Half the sky is covered with smoke, the smoke of Stalingrad.

The bombing of Stalingrad on 23 August had set the oil storage tanks on fire, and the columns of black smoke, which continued to burn for days, could be seen from far around.

‘A German’s flying towards us!’ [somebody shouts]. Everyone remains sitting.

‘He’s turning round!’ Everyone rushes out from the
izba
and looks up.

Old man, the owner of the
izba
: ‘I’ve got four sons at the war, four sons-in-law, and four grandsons. One son has been done for. They’ve sent me a notice.’

The kind-heartedness of our people. I don’t know if any population could be strong enough to carry this terrible burden. The tragic emptiness of the villages. Girls are driven away in vehicles. They are crying, and their mothers are crying, because their daughters are being taken away to the army.

An old woman goes at night to guard barns at the collective farm. She is armed with a detachable pan handle. When someone approaches her, she shouts: ‘Stop! Who’s there? I’ll shoot!’

Once again, looking across the Volga steppe towards Kazakhstan, Grossman is amazed at the vastness of the country. Yet the very size and depth of the Soviet Union no longer seems to be the defence that it once felt.

This war on the border of Kazakhstan, on the lower reaches of the Volga, gives one a terrifying feeling of a knife driven deep. General Gordov had fought in western Belorussia.
¹⁰
Now he is commanding troops on the Volga. The war has reached the Volga.

Grossman finally reached his destination as the German Sixth Army and part of the Fourth Panzer Army approached the northern, the western and the southern suburbs.