A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  How could a dead horse have got into the cellar? It’s impossible to understand! In the same cellar there’s a broken barrel of [soured] cabbage. Soldiers are gobbling it up greedily. ‘It’s all right, it isn’t poisoned.’ In the same cellar someone is bandaging a wounded photo-correspondent leaning against the horse’s corpse.

  ‘Then our aircraft raided the place and bombed us [said a member of the motorised battalion]. The battalion commander Kozlov withstood an attack of tanks. He was on great form and completely drunk. The tanks were thrown back in a dashing fashion.’

  III Guards Cossack Corps is leaving for the front. Men are putting the headquarters equipment on a truck, reeling in signal wire. The frosty evening is full of inexplicable beauty. It’s quiet and clear. Firewood is crackling in the field kitchens. Cavalrymen are leading horses. In the middle of the street, a girl is kissing a Cossack and crying. He has become her family over the last three days. For this girl from the village of Pogorelovo near Kursk, he has become her very own.

  A wonderful gun-layer at the battery, who had been fighting from the first day of the war, was killed by a fragment of shell while he was laughing. And there he lay laughing, dead. He lay there for a day, and then another day. No one wanted to bury him. They are all lazy. The earth is as hard as granite from the cold. He had bad comrades. They don’t bury the corpses! They leave the killed men behind and go away. There are no burial detatchments. No one cares. I informed front headquarters about it with a coded message. What mad Asiatic heartlessness! How often one can see the reserves reaching the front line and reinforcements sent to the sites of recent battles, walking among unburied dead soldiers. Who can read what is going on in the souls of these men advancing to replace those lying around in the snow?

  Execution of a traitor. While the sentence was being announced, sappers were digging a grave for him with picks. He said suddenly: ‘Step aside, comrades, a stray bullet may get you.’

  ‘Take off your boots,’ they told him. He took off one boot very deftly, with the toe of the other foot. The other boot took some time, he was jumping on one leg for a while.

  The Kursk magnetic anomaly is a problem for rocket detachments and artillerists – it confuses compasses and other equipment. The magnetic anomaly has played a joke on the Katyusha batteries, and the Katyushas played a trick on our infantry. They hit our front line.

  In the morning, they put a table covered with red cloth in the snow-covered village street. Tankists from the Khasin Brigade were lined up, and the distribution of medals began. All the men awarded with medals have been fighting constantly for a long time. The queue of them looks like a line of workers from a hot workshop: they are wearing torn overalls, clothes glossy from oil, they have black working hands, and faces typical of workers. They walk to the table to get the medals in the deep snow, they walk heavily, waddling. ‘I congratulate you on receiving this high governmental award!’

  ‘I serve the Soviet Union!’ they answer in the hoarse voices of Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars, Georgians. It’s the Workers’ International at war.

  That night we were talking, not very soberly, with Kozlov, the commander of the motorised rifle battalion. He told me that the hero who received two medals that morning and whom I had eyed with admiration, the reconnaissance chief of the brigade, is no hero at all. This shocked me because I couldn’t imagine a truer hero than the one I had seen that morning in the village street.

  Kozlov gave me a metal cross which he had taken from a dead [German] officer. The officer had been lying there, Kozlov told me, heavily wounded, drunk, with a hundred sub-machine-gun cartridge cases around him. The soldiers shot him. They found a pornographic postcard in his pocket.

  In the morning, Kozlov and Bukovsky decided to have a revolver-shooting competition. They went behind some sheds and fastened a target to an old pear tree. They looked at me with pity and indulgence – a civilian who has no experience at all. Perhaps entirely by accident, all my bullets hit the bull’s-eye. The veterans – Kozlov and Bukovsky – didn’t hit the target even once. This, I think, was no accident.

  In the izba, surrounded by his staff, stands Khasin, with his bulging dark eyes, crooked nose and cheeks blue from recent shaving. He looks Persian. His hand moving on the map looks like the claw of a huge carnivorous bird. He is explaining to me about the recent raid carried out by the tank brigade. He likes the word ‘roundabout’ very much and uses it all the time: ‘Tanks were moving in a roundabout way.’

  I was told back at the front headquarters that Khasin’s family had all been killed in Kerch by Germans carrying out a mass execution of civilians. Purely by chance, Khasin saw photographs of the dead people in a ditch and recognised his wife and children. I was thinking, what does he feel when he leads his tanks into the fighting? It is very hard to have a clear impression of this man, because there is a young woman, a doctor, in the staff izba, who is ordering him about in a vulgar and impertinent manner. People say that she not only controls the colonel, but also his tank brigade. She interferes with all orders, and even amends lists of people put forward for decorations.

  Interviews with soldiers from a motorised infantry battalion:

  Mikhail Vasilievich Steklenkov, thin, blond, born 1913. He ran away from school when he was in the fifth form, and started to work.

  ‘We never feel bored, we sit down and start to sing. There isn’t time to feel bored! One forgets oneself when one thinks about home. Germans poisoned my father with gas during the Imperialist War. I was sent to the Military-Political school in Ivanovo on 23 July. The alarm was sounded, the cadets were lined up and we were given what we were supposed to have, and we went.

  ‘They ask me: “Why are you so happy all the time?” And why should I be sad? My landlady asks: “Why do you sing songs? We’re at war now!” I answer: “But now is the best time to sing songs.”

  ‘I had such a brave crew, they would never leave the gun. I lie and watch out for bombs. I’ll manage to crawl away if needed . . . Only we’d run out of tobacco . . . [I man] a 45mm [anti-tank] gun. It’s interesting to fire point-blank from this gun . . .

  With Khasin’s tank brigade. Grossman talks to an old peasant decorated in the First World War with the St. George Cross.

  ‘What is there to live for after the war? If I survive, I’ll return home, and if not, well, what’s so special about that? I didn’t have time to get married before the war began. I can’t live without the war now. When we’re out of the fighting, I begin to feel bored.’ He had frostbite in a hand and a foot, but had not reported sick.

  ‘I am not afraid of a bullet – to hell with it – even if it kills me. We fire, and I feel good.’

  Ivan Semyonovich Kanaev, born 1905 in Ryazan, married with four children.

  ‘I was drafted on 3 July. I was chopping wood [at the time when the postman brought my call-up order]. We sang songs, drank wine and didn’t give a damn. I trained in Dashki to be a driver. My mother and wife came to see me there. Commanders were very kind and allowed me to go on leave. I had six home leaves.

  ‘When we were brought close to the front, it was frightening. I felt better once the fighting began. I go to fight like one goes to work, to a factory. It was terrifying at first, but now I am not afraid of bullets. It’s only mortar bombs that upset me. I’ve taken part in a bayonet attack, too, but the Germans didn’t wait to receive it. We shouted “Ura!”, and they got up and ran.

  ‘It’s good if there’s an amusing fellow, who starts to tell or sing something funny.

  ‘The rifle is my personal weapon, it never lets me down. I dropped it in the mud in Bogdukhanovka. I thought it would be wrecked, but no, thank God, it still worked.

  ‘I feel less homesick now, only I want to see the kids, especially the youngest one. I’ve never seen him yet. And actually, I do miss home. I’ve got one friend, Selidov, we’ve been together from the first day.

  ‘We marched fifty kilometres during the day. It isn’t so difficult when one’s feet are
all right.

  ‘My bag for personal kit: first of all, some bread to eat, a notebook, a set of underwear, extra foot bandages. We took “trophies” in Petrishchevo. There was enough stuff even for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but I took nothing. What do I need it for? I’ll be killed anyway. I could have collected a dozen watches. It may be my nature, but I feel it’s disgusting to touch [the enemy and his belongings]. My comrades are prepared to touch them, but I, personally, am afraid to handle them.

  ‘Tanks? Why, of course I’ve seen them.

  ‘Face to face [fighting]. [A German] wounded me, and I killed him. He sprang out, and I thought I wanted to take him alive. “Halt!” He fired a burst at me and wounded me in the hand. I took aim, he fell. A woman brought out an earthenware pot of milk for me. I used up my bandage on a wounded boy. I bandaged his shoulder.

  ‘Never run back under mortar fire. If you go back, that’ll be the end of you! When [the enemy] fires [at you] with a machine gun, he isn’t very accurate either. You can lie down and then run to another place. When he stops, run forward! Because if you run back he’ll get you!

  ‘Aircraft, well, what can you do? We all scatter. But the mortar, I find it terrible. It’s their most effective weapon.

  ‘I used to be scared even of squeaking of gates at home, and now I fear nothing. In Petrishchevo, I knocked a machine-gunner off a roof. We approached and lay down. I got very cold and jumped up to my feet. Aiiee, aiiee, I was frozen. I took aim with my rifle. He shut up immediately. I checked later, the bullet had hit him in the eyebrow. I killed about fifteen of their men.

  ‘It was really good advancing to the battle in Morozovka. They were retreating, and we were pursuing. Was it I who came to attack them? We are fighting on our land.

  ‘One hears so much from the locals, such meanness, how can one forgive them? A woman pleaded with me, and I gave her my needle. During a battle, I lost the strap on my greatcoat, I got hold of one, but there was nothing to sew it on with. But as for buttons, my pockets are always full of them.

  ‘My conclusion is that we’ve got to come out the winner. Only I don’t know how. Weren’t they winning in the summer? They are great fighters, but cowards.

  ‘I was wounded, you know, in an embarrassing place, and I was afraid there would be nothing left to go back to my wife with. The doctor examined me and said: “Lucky bastard! Everything’s all right.”

  ‘It’s good to fight at dawn. It’s as if you were going to work. It’s a bit dark and one can see all their points well because of tracer bullets, and when we break into a village, it is already light.

  ‘I’ve lost my desire for women. Ah, I’d love to see the kids, if only for one day, and then I would fight again, till the end.

  ‘In the village, we sometimes had to work harder than here. As for hardships, life is harder in the village. I’ve become used to noise here. One sleeps through artillery and mortar fire. One snores out in the middle of a field. I’ve suffered a lot of cold, this winter.’

  ‘There are moral obligations for a soldier: one has to drag out not only the wounded, but also those killed in the fighting. When I was deafened during a battle, a soldier, my comrade, came to help me and led me out of the battle.’

  ‘Bullets don’t hit brave men,’ says Kanaev. Everyone else is lying down, but he is standing up. ‘Soldiers, follow me!’ Near Bogodukhov he led the squad into attack. He isn’t a coward. ‘Don’t worry, Comrade politruk!’ [he shouted.] ‘We won’t get wounded.’

  From the reflections of Captain Kozlov:

  ‘One needs a lot of courage to take an aimed shot during a battle. Sixty per cent of our soldiers haven’t fired a single shot during the war at all.5 We are fighting thanks to heavy machine guns, battalion mortars and the courage of some individuals. I suggest that rifles should be cleaned before a battle and checked afterwards. If any man doesn’t fire – then he’s a deserter.

  ‘I am not afraid of saying that we haven’t carried out a single bayonet attack. Just look, we haven’t even got bayonets. Actually, I am afraid of spring. The Germans might start pushing us again when it gets warmer.’

  Captain Kozlov’s fears were well grounded. Hitler was preparing a major offensive in the south to seize the oilfields of the Caucasus, whereas Stalin was convinced that the Wehrmacht would strike at Moscow again. The German summer offensive of 1942 was, through Hitler’s blind obstinacy, to lead to the battle of Stalingrad.

  1 A sovkhoz was a sovetskoe khozyaistvo (Soviet farm), a large collection of buildings, usually with two-storey houses, while a kolkhoz was a collective farm based on a small village or settlement.

  2 This euphemism refers to the cover being placed on a coffin and sealed.

  3 This became a common saying, and was used by Germans as well as Red Army soldiers.

  4 These parallel ‘bars’ or ‘railway sleepers’, as they were known, were badges of rank. Junior officers had square insignia, known as ‘cubes’.

  5 Kozlov’s belief that a majority of soldiers did not fire at the enemy in battle is similar to Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall’s controversial ‘ratio of fire’ theory expounded in Men Against Fire (1947). Marshall claimed that between 75 per cent and 85 per cent of men in combat did not fire their weapons at the enemy. The validity of Marshall’s research was challenged in the winter of 1988 by Professor Roger Spiller in the RUSI Journal, but the basic theory may well be true.

  TWELVE

  ‘The Ruthless Truth of War’

  Vasily Grossman wrote to his father early in March about the disorientating effects of that winter of war.

  Sometimes it feels that I’ve spent [so much time] travelling around in trucks, sleeping in sheds and half-burned houses, it’s as if I’ve never really lived any other sort of life. Or was that other life only a dream? I have kept moving all through the winter. I’ve seen so much it would be enough for anyone. I’ve become a real soldier, I am sure, my voice has become hoarse from makhorka and the cold, and for some reason the hair on my right temple has gone white.

  The following day he wrote again.

  Winter has come back to where we are now, the cold is severe . . . And I am longing to warm myself in the sun. I am tired of grabbing my nose the whole time and then my ears – to check whether they are still there, or have fallen off. By the way, I’ve lost sixteen kilos, and this is very good. Do you remember my fat tummy?

  On his return to Moscow at the beginning of April, Grossman went to see Ortenberg, who wrote about their conversation soon afterwards. ‘Vasily Grossman came to see me and said without any preamble: “I want to write a novel.” He warned me immediately, before I had a chance to reply: “I will need two months’ leave to write it.” I was not alarmed by this request, as he had obviously expected. There was a relative lull at the front at that moment and I gave my permission.’ Grossman wrote to his father immediately.

  I’ve been given leave for two months’ creative work, from 10 April until 10 June. I am overjoyed, I feel just like a schoolboy. Reaching Moscow made a deep impression on me – the city, the streets and boulevards, they are all like the faces of my dear ones.

  I have managed to do something to improve my financial affairs: I’ve signed a contract for the publication of a small book of my front essays and stories. I will send you some money today . . . It is very cold in our flat. Zhenni Genrikhovna has become so weak.

  I haven’t been anywhere during my stay here. The editor piled lots of work upon me, and I sat working day and night. Actually, this was not so bad, as it is relatively warm in the editorial office, and they’ve been feeding me with kasha there. I’ve become so spoilt by the food at the front.

  I will be writing a novel during my stay in Chistopol. I am not so well physically. I am overtired and cough a lot. My insides were frozen when I flew over the front in an open aircraft.

  Grossman wasted no time in setting off for Chistopol. There, living again with his wife, he worked long hours on his novel about the disasters of 19
41, which he decided to call The People Immortal. This book, drawing heavily on his notes taken at the front, became a huge success among the soldiers of the Red Army. Grossman, a Jewish intellectual from another world, had not just proved his courage at the front, but above all the accuracy and human sympathy of his observation. Yet despite all his hard work, Grossman also yearned to be back at the front. In fact, he wrote to his father from Chistopol on 15 May that he would leave in the first week of June.

  Action has started at the front, and I am listening to the radio greedily. There [at the front] lies the answer to all questions and to all fates.

  Three days before, Marshal Timoshenko had attacked with 640,000 men south of Kharkov from the Barvenkovo salient. It was to prove a terrible disaster. The Wehrmacht’s Army Group South had been about to launch Operation Fridericus, the preparatory stage before its major summer offensive, Operation Blue, which was to take it to Stalingrad and into the Caucasus. As a result the uninspired Soviet assault found itself surprised between the hammer of Kleist’s First Panzer Army and the anvil of General Paulus’s Sixth Army. Two Soviet armies were surrounded and virtually annihilated in a little over a week. The Germans took nearly a quarter of a million prisoners. Grossman’s enthusiasm for the front appears rapidly to have dissolved, and he returned to work on his novel.

  I am doing a great deal of work here [he wrote to his father on 31 May]. It seems to me I’ve never worked so hard in my life . . . The day before yesterday I was reading out to Aseev what I’ve written, and he liked it a great deal.

  The sort of Red Army soldier whose courage and resilience Grossman evoked in his novel The People Immortal.

  Unfortunately, my leave is running out, and I am very tired. I’ve exhausted myself by writing. However, I’ve received, completely unexpectedly, a super-liberal telegram from my fierce editor, who wrote that he did not mind me extending my leave to continue my work in Chistopol. So probably with his permission I will stay here for an extra seven or ten days. I am writing about the war during the summer and autumn of 1941.