War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01]

by David Robbins

  “City boys,” Zaitsev agreed. “Farm boys.”

  He smiled at Viktor, as good a hunter as he, better in some respects. The Bear was fearless, an excellent night stalker. He was astonishingly silent on the move—even with his bulk—and patient and clever in the hunt. He could squeeze off two shots in five seconds, accurate to 350 meters. Zaitsev needed six seconds. But give me enough time to set up a shot, he thought, and I’ll nail a head shot ten out of ten at five hundred meters in the wind. Let’s see the Bear do that.

  We’ll put together a unit of snipers to do exactly what Batyuk wants. We’ll train them to make every Nazi in Stalingrad afraid for his life twenty-four hours a day, on the front line or deep in their rear. The Germans will be scared to lift their heads for fear of having them blown off. We’ll be the Red Army’s assassins. We’ll be everywhere.

  He took his sniper journal from his pack. He felt the booklet’s weight, sensing its contents.

  I’ll be everywhere.

  * * * *

  “EXCUSE ME, COMRADE. MAY I COME IN?”

  Zaitsev opened his eyes and checked his watch; 4:00 A.M. A hand pushed aside the blanket hanging in the bunker doorway. A lantern appeared, followed by a dark-eyed, jowly head. On top of the head sat a fur hat dotted with a red star medallion, the mark of a commissar.

  Zaitsev arranged his senses. He stood.

  “Did I wake you?” The commissar stepped into the bunker. He was short and thick. His greatcoat hung almost to the floor, to the tops of his shiny boots. The first shiny boots I’ve seen in a month, thought Zaitsev.

  “Come in, comrade.”

  “You are Vasily Gregorievich Zaitsev?”

  The commissar did not hesitate for a response. He reached his hand out to Zaitsev. “I am Captain Igor Semyonovich Danilov, a reporter with Red Star. Colonel Batyuk requested I speak with you.”

  Zaitsev shook the commissar’s hand. He motioned to the bare dirt floor.

  Danilov sat, his back against the wall. He took a pad and pencil from his coat pocket. Zaitsev settled on his bedroll.

  “Colonel Batyuk has given us both assignments. You are to begin a new sniper movement in the 284th. I have been asked by the colonel to be your political liaison. He has told me a great deal about you, Vasily Gregorievich.” The commissar made a note, then continued. “I know you are to be the leader of the new sniper school, comrade. I believe the recruiting for your school will be helped if it gets some coverage in Red Star.”

  Zaitsev shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t read it.”

  Danilov reached out to touch Zaitsev on the back of the hand. Zaitsev recoiled slightly at the familiarity.

  “You should. There is plenty of useful information in Red Star. Tales of courage. Hints, tips, instructions, announcements. Party news. Even the theater schedule in Moscow.”

  Zaitsev said nothing.

  “Vasily. You have killed more than forty Germans in ten days. You are a hero.”

  Something swelled and tightened in Zaitsev’s chest. He did not know if it was a good or bad sensation. He imagined a balloon expanding. Too big and it breaks. Enough and it is light, floating.

  Again Danilov did not wait. “You have established techniques in your own sniper activities that go beyond what the other snipers are doing. Your methods are very effective. They must be shared with the rest of the defenders. You have shown what can be done by one man and one bullet. Yours is a story that will be told. It must be told because it must be reenacted over and over throughout Stalingrad.”

  The commissar looked squarely at Zaitsev. “I speak frankly, comrade. I don’t care if you want to be a hero or not. It’s not my concern. I do care, however, that the rest of Russia knows we are holding out here. I care also that the soldiers in the ruins and trenches believe that heroes are kneeling next to them. You understand, every Red soldier is not a superman. The least we can do is let them know they are fighting at the side of supermen.”

  Zaitsev looked at Danilov’s gray grin, set in the thicket of a heavy beard line. It would be a mistake, he thought, if I interpret this chat to be a request for my cooperation. I haven’t been invited by this commissar to a banquet of choices. Yesterday I was a sniper doing my job. Today I’m what ... a hero?

  But I can do this. I can be this. This hero.

  Danilov touched his pencil to his pad. He began. “You are from the Urals, I understand.”

  Zaitsev nodded. “Yes. I am a hunter.”

  * * * *

  FOUR

  IN 1937, WHILE JAPAN AND GERMANY RATTLED SWORDS at the world, twenty-two-year-old Vasily Zaitsev enlisted in the Red Navy. Born in Siberia, he’d never seen an ocean, and the idea seemed a romantic one. He was stationed in Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast. For five years he kept accounting records and waited for Japan, only seven hundred kilometers away, to attack.

  Zaitsev read reports on the German siege of Leningrad, the occupation of the Ukraine, and the battle for Moscow. He listened to Party speeches and read articles about the inconceivable Nazi plan to capture the western third of the Soviet Union. The vast territory was to become a slave colony of farms and forced labor to feed the growing Aryan empire.

  Off duty, Zaitsev hunted in the forests above the naval base. Lying in the leaves and rich humus, he trained his rifle on rabbits and deer, pretending they were Nazis. He was at home in the woods. He’d spent much of his boyhood hunting in the taiga, the white-barked birch forests near his home in Ellininski in the Ural foothills of western Siberia. His grandfather Andrei was one of a long line of woodsmen. The old man, lanky and bone white, like the birch forest itself, taught Vasha about the taiga while the boy was barely old enough to chew the meat of the animals they killed. When Vasha was eight, Andrei gave him a bow. Because he had to chase the arrows he shot or else fashion new ones, he studied ways to ration his ammunition, to shoot only when certain. Vasha learned to read tracks and lie in silent ambush, keeping his breathing shallow and his concentration deep.

  In the summer of 1927, Andrei took twelve-year-old Vasha to hunt a wolf that was preying on their cows. Several kilometers from home, in a copse of trees, the wolf sprang at them. Andrei whirled and killed it with the sharpened end of his walking staff. This, said Andrei, ramming the spear again into the shuddering wolf s heart, was a lesson in courage for the boy. Never forget how easy it is to kill. Never be afraid to kill when you must. Andrei wiped a warm streak of blood across the boy’s cheek. He watched Vasha skin the wolf. Then he presented his grandson with the old rifle he carried. On his way back to the village, Vasha shot two hares and a wild goat. He was a hunter now, with his own gun and three hides he could throw on the pile at the hunters’ lodge.

  Vasha often spent more time in the forest than with people. Sometimes he smeared bear fat over his body and gun to hide his scent; often his mother refused to let him in the house because of the smell. On these evenings he slept gladly with his dogs.

  Grandmother Dunia taught him to read and write. Zaitsev believed it was his babushka’s breadth of spirit and broad-hipped will that held his family together. His sisters, parents, cousins, and even the dogs obeyed her smartly swung birch switch with only the occasional grumble.

  Dunia was a spiritual old woman. She fought with Andrei over God, determined to keep religious holidays in her home. Though Andrei did not accept Duma’s saints, he would not insult them, perhaps in deference to Dunia’s God or more likely the whip of her stick.

  Once, Zaitsev asked his grandfather about his beliefs.

  “Grandmother says the soul leaves the body and goes to heaven after we die, Grandpapa. Is that true for animals, too?”

  Andrei cuffed him on the side of the head. “Neither man nor beast lives twice,” he snorted. “Come here.”

  The old man walked Vasha to a side of venison hanging in the smokehouse. “This dawn, you killed that animal.” He pointed with a hand sharp as his spear. “If I see you killing it again, I’ll shoot you!”

  The old man motioned outs
ide to the deerskin tacked to the side of the shed. “The hide is drying. The flesh is on the table, and the guts we throw to the dogs. Remember, Vasha, soul is shit. God is about fear, a way to make you afraid and obey. The man of the forest is without fear.”

  The family’s interest in Vasily’s hunting exploits gradually waned. On his fourteenth birthday he returned in the morning with several wolf and lynx hides strapped to his back. He received no notice. That evening Andrei told him to always come back to the village from a good hunt before dawn or at night so that no one would see the number and quality of hides he brought home. Pride is good in a hunter, Andrei explained, but boastfulness is not. Vasily knew he was now considered an adult. He was expected to perform like a man of the taiga. Now his rewards were a glass of vodka, some peace and quiet from his sisters, perhaps even some respect, and a seat in the men’s place, the hunters’ lodge.

  At sixteen Vasily was sent three hundred kilometers away to Magnitogorsk to attend technical school at Russia’s largest ore processing plant. In the workers’ settlement he finished primary school and began bookkeeping courses. Numbers came easily to him. In his free time he hunted in the hills around town.

  After six years learning the trade of a clerk and another five years filing papers in the navy, the twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev wanted to fight Germans. The Nazis had invaded Russia. Japan would keep.

  Hitler had taken the city of Rostov in a bloody July campaign to cauterize his right flank on his thrust to the Caucasus. Before the Germans could continue south, their left flank also had to be secured. In the middle of that flank stood the manufacturing center of Stalingrad on a bend of the Volga.

  A fierce battle was shaping up on the steppe west of the city. Throughout the summer the Red Army lumbered out to meet the Germans to fight intense tank battles across immense fields and steep ravines. At first the Russians proved no match for the rolling blitzkrieg. They retreated east over the Don River to lick their wounds. On the land bridge between the Don and Volga Rivers, the Red Army regrouped.

  In the first week of September 1942, Zaitsev and two hundred other Siberian sailors in Vladivostok were mustered as marines into the 284th Rifle Division of the Sixty-second Army. They were assigned to the western front and the battle that Winston Churchill called “the hinge of fate.”

  They were sent to Stalingrad.

  * * * *

  THE TRAIN CLATTERED DAY AND NIGHT, RESTING ONLY in the afternoons to take on fuel and food. The villages where they stopped seemed asleep, moving at the heavy pace of age, of exhaustion. Children chased through the alleys playing army, ducks-on-the-pond, or October revolution, but even their laughter did not enliven the pall over the tile rooftops and dull, smokeless mills. There were no young men left in the towns. They were all gone to war.

  The townspeople approached the halted troop train, tears welling in their eyes, hands lifted with bread, vegetables, vodka, clothes, and photos of Stalin and Lenin. The fleshy girls handed up letters to the uniformed arms reaching from the windows; the envelopes were often addressed to “Brave Young Man.”

  On the fifth day the train stopped in a treeless vista of quivering wheat. The sailors set up tents. They were addressed by Batyuk and ordered to spend three more days on the steppe preparing for battle while waiting for the trucks to carry them onward.

  Dusk settled over the flat, featureless land; a trembling orb of orange appeared low in the western sky. Silence blew like a fog through the men. Standing beside the train and their tents, one by one, they held up hands to quiet each other and listen. In the gloaming, a barely audible boom and howl came from the flashing dome of light in the west, its source still well below the horizon. Zaitsev heard the sailors around him, and himself, breathe the word: Stalingrad.

  For three days and nights the company practiced street-fighting skills. The men learned to crawl and run, to kill with bayonets and rifles, knives, shovels, and fists. Grenades with pins pulled to make them live were tossed and caught, then thrown into trenches to explode. Straw dummies were sliced or blown open, and many real noses were bloodied.

  The morning of September 20, a dust plume rose out on the dirt road. A staff car came and stopped beside the train. Out stepped Division Commander Konstantinovich Zhukov. He’d ridden from Stalingrad to watch the sailors of the 284th pursue their drills.

  The men threw themselves into their training, putting on their most ferocious show for the general. During a hand-to-hand exercise, one of the sailors tripped over his bell-bottom trouser legs. Zhukov slapped his thigh to stop the action.

  “Why aren’t you men in army uniforms?” he demanded.

  Lieutenant Bolshoshapov stepped forward and came to attention.

  “Commander, we are sailors and are proud to fight as sailors.” Bolshoshapov shouted the words over Zhukov’s head.

  “Have you been issued your army uniforms, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Change into them immediately. These damned things,” Zhukov said pointing at the billowing pants legs, “will get you killed. Where is your navy discipline?”

  Zhukov whirled to return to his staff car. Bolshoshapov called out, “Commander, sir. With your permission, we would like to remain in our navy shirts under our uniforms.”

  Zhukov turned back and saluted Bolshoshapov.

  “On behalf of the Red Army and the Party, I gladly consent. Of course, sailor. And fight bravely in your navy shirts.”

  The Siberians let out a cheer and stripped down to their skivvies and striped navy shirts. Orderlies ran to the train to fetch the drab green uniforms of the Soviet army.

  That evening dozens of American Studebaker trucks arrived to ferry the division to the Volga. For two hours the men bumped down the road in the open backs of the lorries. Every soldier watched the spreading glow in the west. The distant thumps of explosions swelled in their ears while the horizon rolled to them.

  The trucks stopped on the threshold of a forest, and the thousand-plus men of the 284th lined up on a path that disappeared into a thick stand of poplars. The soldiers marched two by two, burdened with rifles and packs. Zaitsev resisted the urge to look up through the leaves into the flaring sky. He focused instead on the back of the man in front of him. As he walked under the canopy of trees the sounds and lights grew muffled, as if the forest, ever his friend, were soothing him and his company, quieting the conflict for their restive ears.

  Along the road, posters and slogans were nailed to the poplar trunks. If you don’t stop the enemy in Stalingrad, he will enter your home and destroy your village! one read. The enemy must be crushed and destroyed at Stalingrad! and Soldier, your country will not forget your courage!

  Three kilometers into the forest, the march was stopped. Batyuk ordered the men off the path to darken their faces and hands with grease and dirt. While they handed around the greasepaint pots, a hundred wounded soldiers shuffled past on the road away from the battle.

  Every one of the bandaged and bloodied soldiers held on to another; the able-legged helped others limp along, the sighted led the blind. Those who had both hands carried stretchers. It seemed the searing heat of battle had melded these men together, so they moved and bled as one giant mangled creature.

  The Siberians gaped at the marching soldiers’ misery. They spotted a sailor among the wounded, still in his bell-bottoms. They beckoned him to the side of the road, where he saw the navy shirts showing at their necks beneath their Red Army tunics.

  “Comrade sailor! Come, sit down!” they called.

  The sailor, grimacing in pain, stepped off the path and was seated on a backpack. Several hands stretched out with cigarettes and matches. The weary man accepted a smoke. He asked to have it lit and held up his right arm. It was cut short, without a hand.

  A flask of vodka shot from the crowd.

  The sailor dragged heavily on the cigarette. He looked up into the camouflaged faces around him.

  “Na zdorovye,” he said, and threw bac
k a large gulp. Then he held up his truncated arm. “Don’t worry about this. I sold it for a very high price.” He looked at the heads around him. “Where are you from?”

  “We’re Siberians. We’ve come a long way to fight.”

  The man blinked. “So have the Germans.”

  His head sank to his chest. Hands shot out to catch him as if he might collapse.

  The sailor pulled himself to his feet. He turned to rejoin the shambling line of wounded. The men parted to let him through. They offered him more cigarettes.

  The sailor passed Zaitsev and stopped to look into the broad Siberian face. He tapped himself on the chest with the fingers that clutched the cigarette. Glowing ashes tumbled down his torn navy shirt. He put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and pressed his thumb against Zaitsev’s chest.

  “Do some killing.”