by Herman Wouk
Pamela’s hand sought his. She was crouched behind him, against the dome.
“Just lie low, this will be over soon.” As Pug said this he saw one of the Stukas separating from the others and diving straight for the belfry. He shouted to the spotter, but the airplane noise, the chatter of A.A. guns, the clamor and cries from the town below, and the roar of the wind, quite drowned his voice. Tracers made a red dotted line to the belfry across the gray sky. The tin dome began to sing to rhythmically striking bullets. Victor Henry roughly pushed Pamela flat and threw himself on top of her. The plane stretched into a sizable black machine approaching through the air. Watching over his shoulder to the last, Victor Henry saw the pilot dimly behind his plexiglass, an unhelmeted young blond fellow with a toothy grin. He thought the youngster was going to crash into the dome, and as he winced, he felt something rip at his left shoulder. The airplane scream and roar and whiz mounted, went past, and diminished. The zinging and rattling of bullets stopped.
Pug stood, feeling his shoulder. His sleeve was torn open at the very top and the shoulder board was dangling, but there was no blood. The spotter was lying on the bricks beside the overturned binoculars. Bombs were exploding below; the other two planes were still whistling and roaring over the town; one plane was smoking badly. Blood was pooling under the spotter’s head, and with horror Pug perceived white broken bone of the skull showing through the torn shot-away cap, under blond hair and thick-moving red and gray ooze. Pug went to the spotter and cautiously moved his goggles. The blue eyes were open, fixed and empty. The head wound was catastrophic. Picking up the telephone, Pug jiggled the hook till somebody answered. He shouted in Russian, “I am the American visitor up here. You understand?”
He saw the smoking plane, which was trying to climb, burst into flames and fall. “Da! Where is Konstantin?” The voice sounded exhilarated.
“Airplane killed him.”
“All right. Somebody else will come.”
Pamela had crawled beside the spotter and was looking at the dead face and smashed head. “Oh, my God, my God,” she sobbed, head in hand.
The two surviving planes were climbing out of sight. Smoke rose from fires in the town, smelling of burning hay. To the east, the two tank unit tracks had almost joined in a black V, miles long, across the plain. Pug righted the binoculars. Through smoke billowing in the line of vision, he saw the tanks milling in a wild little yellow-flashing vortex on the broad white plain. Five of the KV monsters bulged among lighter Russian tanks. Several German tanks were on fire and their crewmen were running here and there in the snow like ants. Some German tanks and trucks were heading back to the woods. Pug saw only one light Russian tank giving off black smoke. But even as he watched, a KV burst into violent, beautiful purple-orange flame, casting a vivid pool of color on the snow. Meantime the rest of the German tanks began turning away.
“Kitty! Oh, Christ, Christ, no, stop it!”
Pam snatched up the cat, which was crouching over the dead man. She came to Pug, her tearstained face gaunt and stunned, holding the creature in her arms. Its nose and whiskers were bloody and its tongue flickered. “It’s not the animal’s fault,” she choked.
“The Russians are winning out there,” Victor Henry said.
She was staring at him with blank shocked round eyes, clutching the black cat close to her. Her hand went to the rip at his shoulder. “Dearest, are you hurt?”
“No. Not at all. It went right on through.”
“Thank God! Thank God!”
The ladder jumped and rapped, and Colonel Amphiteatrov’s face, excited and red, showed at the top. “Well, you’re all right. Well, I’m glad. That was best to stay right here. The bombing was bad in the town. Many people killed. Quick! Both of you. Come along, please.” Then his eye fell on the body lying in blood. “Agh!”
“We were strafed,” Pug said. “He’s dead.”
The colonel shook his head and sank out of sight, saying, “Well, please, come quickly.”
“Go first, Pam.”
Pamela looked at the dead spotter lying on the bricks in snow and blood, and then at the tin dome, and out at the tank fight, and the black V gouged in the landscape. “It seems I’ve been up here for a week. I can’t get down the ladder with the cat. We mustn’t leave it here.”
“Give the cat to me.”
Tucking the animal inside his bridge coat, steadying it with one arm, Victor Henry awkwardly followed her down the ladder and the spiral stairs. Once the cat squirmed, bit, and scratched, and he almost fell. He turned the cat loose outside the church, but the clanking vehicles or the rolling smoke alarmed the animal and it ran back in and vanished among the wounded.
Through the open door of the black automobile Tudsbury waved his cane at them. “Hello! There’s a monstrous tank battle going on just outside the town! They say there’s at least a hundred tanks swirling around, an utter inferno, happening right this minute! Hello, you’ve torn your coat, do you know that?”
“Yes, I know.” Though drained of spirit, Victor Henry was able to smile at the gap between journalism and war, as he detached his shoulder board and dropped it in his pocket. The reality of the two small groups of tanks banging away out there on the snowy plain seemed so pale and small-scale compared to Tudsbury’s description.
“We had a view of it,” he said. Pamela got into the car and sank into a corner of the back seat, closing her eyes.
“Did you? Well, Pam ought to be a help on this story! I say, Pam, you’re all right, aren’t you?”
“I’m splendid, Talky, thank you,” Pam said, faintly but clearly.
Pug said to the colonel, “We saw the Germans starting to run.”
“Good. Well, Kaplan’s battalion got the word from down south. That is a good battalion.” Amphiteatrov slammed the car door. “Make yourselves comfortable please. We are going to drive straight back to Moscow now.”
“Oh no!” Tudsbury’s fat face wrinkled up like an infant’s. “I want to have a look when the fight’s over. I want to interview the tank crews.”
Amphiteatrov turned and faced them, and showed his gums and teeth without smiling. Behind him through the frosted windshield they could vaguely see on the main street of the town smoke, fire, a plunging horse, soldiers running, and green army trucks in a slow-moving jam. “Well, there has been a very big breakthrough in the north. Moscow is in danger. Well, all foreign missions will be evacuated to the Caucasus. We must skeddadle.” He brought out the awkward slang word humorlessly, and turned to the driver. “Nu, skoro!”
Under the blanket stretched across the passengers’ legs, Pamela Tudsbury’s gloved hand groped to Victor Henry’s hand. She pulled off her glove, twined her cold fingers in his, and pressed her face against the torn shoulder of his bridge coat. His chapped hand tightened on hers.
56
LESLIE SLOTE heard footfalls in the dark, as he sat in an overcoat and fur hat, working by the light of a kerosene lamp. His desk overflowing with papers and reports stood directly under the grand unlit chandelier in the marble-pillared great hall of Spaso House, the ambassador’s Moscow residence.
“Who’s there?” The nervous strident words reverberated in the empty halls. He recognized the white Navy cap, white scarf, and brass buttons, before he could make out the face. “Ye gods, Captain Henry, why didn’t they take you straight to the Kazan Station? Maybe you can still make it. You’ve got to get out of Moscow tonight!”
“I’ve been to the station. The train to Kuibyshev had left.” Pug brushed snow from his shoulders. “The air raid held us up outside the city.”
Slote looked at his wristwatch in great agitation. “But—that’s terrible! God knows when there’ll be another train to Kuibyshev—if ever. Don’t you know that one German armored column’s already passed by to the north and is cutting down behind the city? And they say another pincer is heading up from Kaluga. One doesn’t know what to believe any more, but it’s at least conceivable that in the next twenty-four hours we may b
e entirely surrounded. It begins to smell like Warsaw all over again.” Slote gaily laughed. “Sorry there are no chairs, a party of mad Georgian workmen came in and covered and stacked all the furniture—oh, there’s a stool after all, do sit down—”
Pug said, “That’s more than I know, about the German pincers, and I’ve just come from the Narkomindel.” He sat down without opening his coat. It was almost as cold and dark in Spaso House as in the snowstorm outside.
“Did you suppose they’d tell you anything? I got this straight from the Swedish ambassador, I assure you, at nine o’clock tonight in the dining room at the Kazan Station, when I was seeing off the staff. My God, that station was a spectacle to remember! One bomb hit would have wiped out all the foreign correspondents and nine-tenths of the diplomats in Russia—and a healthy chunk of the Soviet bureaucracy too.”
“Have all the typewriters been stowed? I have to write a report.”
“There are typewriters in Colonel Yeaton’s office. I have a skeleton staff, and we’re to keep things going somehow until the chargé gets organized in Kuibyshev.” Slote gave this answer with absentminded calm, then jumped at a muffled sound from outside. “Was that a bomb? You have no time to write reports, Captain. It’s really my responsibility to see that you leave Moscow at once, and I must insist that somehow—”
Pug held up a hand. “The Nark’s making arrangements. There are other stragglers like me. I have to check back in at eleven in the morning.”
“Oh! Well, if the Narkomindel’s assumed responsibility, that’s that,” Slote giggled.
Victor Henry looked narrowly at him. “How come you got stuck with this duty again? It seems kind of thick, after Warsaw.”
“I volunteered. You look skeptical. I truly did. After all, I’ve been through the drill. I wasn’t too proud of the job I did in Warsaw and I thought perhaps I could redeem myself this time.”
“Why, Byron told me you did a helluva job in Warsaw, Leslie.”
“Did he? Byron’s a gentleman. A knight, almost. Which reminds me, an enormous pouch came in from Stockholm the day you left. There was stuff from Rome. Would you like to see a picture of your new grandson?” Fussing through papers on his desk, he pulled a photograph from a wrinkled envelope. “There he is. Don’t you think he’s handsome?”
The lamplight carved deep black marks in the naval officer’s face as he read the writing on the back of the snapshot, For old Slote—Louis Henry, aged 11 days, with circus fat lady, then contemplated the photograph. A plump, hollow-eyed Natalie in a loose robe held a baby that looked startlingly like Byron as an infant. The triangular face, the large serious eyes, the comically determined look, the fine blond hair—they were the same; Louis was another print of the template that had molded his son. He was much more of a Henry than Janice’s boy. Victor Henry cleared his choked-up throat. “Not bad. Natalie’s right, she’s gotten fat.”
“Hasn’t she though? Too much bed rest, she says. I’ll bet the baby will be as clever as it’s handsome. It looks clever.” Victor Henry sat staring at the snapshot. Slote added, “Would you care to keep that?”
Henry at once extended it to him. “No, certainly not. She sent it to you.”
“I’ll only lose it, Captain Henry. I have a better picture of Natalie.”
“Are you sure? All right.” Victor Henry tried to express in an awkward smile the gratitude for which he could find no words. Carefully he put the print in an inner pocket.
“What about the Tudsburys?” Slote asked. “Are they stuck in Moscow too?”
“I left Talky trying to wangle a ride to Archangel for himself and Pam. The Russians are flying out some RAF pilot instructors. I’m sure he’ll get on that plane.”
“Good. Did you run into any trouble at the front? What an idiocy, dragging a girl out there!”
“Well, we heard some firing, and saw some Germans. I’d better get at this report. If Talky does fly out, I want to give him a copy to forward via London.”
“Let me have a copy too, won’t you? And another to go in the next pouch. If there is one.”
“You’re a pessimist, Slote.”
“I’m a realist. I was in Warsaw. I know what the Germans can do.”
“Do you know what the Russians can do?”
“I thought I did. I was the Red Army’s biggest booster in the embassy, until—” Slote shrugged and turned to his desk, blowing his nose. “The only thing that really gets me is this stink of burning paper. My God, how it brings back Warsaw! The embassy absolutely reeks. We were burning and burning today, until the minute they all left. And there’s still a ton that I’ve somehow got to get burned in the morning.”
“All Moscow stinks of it,” Pug said. “It’s the damnedest thing to drive through a snowstorm and smell burned paper. The city’s one unholy mess, Slote. Have you seen all the barbed wire and tangled steel girders blocking the bridges? And good Lord, the mob at that railway station! The traffic jams heading east with headlights blazing, blackout be damned! I didn’t know there were that many trucks and cars in the whole Soviet Union. All piled with mattresses and old people and babies and what-all. And with those blue A.A. searchlights still swinging overhead—God knows why—and the snow and the wind, I tell you it’s a real end-of-the-world feeling.”
Slote chuckled. “Yes, isn’t it? This exodus began the day you left. It’s been snowballing. A convoy of government big shots left yesterday in a line of honking black limousines. Gad, you should have seen the faces of the people along the streets! I’m sure that triggered this panic. However, I give Stalin credit. He’s staying on to the last, and that takes courage, because when Hitler catches Stalin he’ll just hang him like a dog in Red Square. And he’ll drag Lenin’s mummy out of the tomb too, and string it up alongside to crumble in the wind. Oh, there’ll be stirring things to see and record here, for whoever survives to tell it all.”
Victor Henry rose. “Do you know there’s no sentry at the door? I just walked in.”
“That’s impossible. We’re guarded night and day by a soldier assigned by the Narkomindel.”
“There’s nobody there.”
Slote opened and closed his mouth twice. “Are you positive? Why, we could be sacked by looters! It’s getting near the end when soldiers leave their posts. I must call the Narkomindel. If I can get the operator to answer!” He jumped up and disappeared into the gloom.
Victor Henry groped to the military attaché’s office. There he struck matches, and found and lit two kerosene lamps. In their bleak yellow-green glow he surveyed the office. Bits of black ash flecked the floor and every surface. BURN—URGENT was scrawled in red crayon on manila folders topping heaps of reports, files, and loose papers piled on the floor and in the leather armchair. Emptied drawers and files stood open; a swivel chair was overturned; the place looked as though it had been robbed. On the desk, on a typewriter with bunched tangled keys, a message was propped, printed in block letters on torn cardboard: IMPERATIVE—BURN TONIGHT CONTENTS SECOND BROWN LOCKED FILE. (L.SLOTE HAS COMBINATION.) Pug cleared the desk, untangled the typewriter keys and stodd the lamps on either side of the machine. He found paper, carbons, and onionskin paper in a drawer.
Spaso House
October 16, 1941
THE MOSCOW FRONT—EYEWITNESS REPORT
His cold stiff fingers struck wrong keys. Typing in a bridge coat was clumsy and difficult. The slow clicks of the machine echoed hollowly in the deserted embassy. One lamp began to smoke. He fiddled with the wick until it burned clear.
This report attempts a description of a visit to the fighting front west of Moscow, from which I have just returned.
Tonight, twenty miles outside the city, our car halted because of an air raid on Moscow. At a distance this was quite a spectacle: the fanning searchlights, the A.A. like an umbrella of colored fireworks over one patch of the horizon, blazing away for half an hour straight. Whatever the Russian deficiencies, they seem to have an infinite supply of A.A. ammunition, and when the Luft
waffe ventures over the capital, they blow it skyward in huge displays. This beats anything I saw in Berlin or London.
However, this brave show is not being matched on the ground in Moscow tonight. The town is getting ready for a siege. It has an abnormal look, and the fainthearted are fleeing in a heavy snow. The Communist government is either unable or unwilling to stop the panic. I am told there is already a slang name for this mass exodus—Bolshoi Drap, the Big Scram. The foreign diplomats and newspapermen have been sent to Kuibyshev on the Volga, five hundred miles further east, and many government agencies are departing for the same haven en masse. Heavy vehicular and foot traffic eastward gives an undeniable aspect of rats leaving a sinking ship. However, it is reported that Stalin is staying on.
I believe this panic is premature, that Moscow has a fair chance of holding, and that even if it falls, the war may not end. I bring back many impressions from the front, but the outstanding one is that the Russians, though they are back on about their nine-yard line, are not beaten. The American leadership must guess whether Russia will stand or fall, and lay its bets accordingly in Lend-Lease shipments. An eyewitness account of the front, however fragmentary, may therefore be pertinent.
The typewriter was clicking fast now. It was almost one o’clock. Victor Henry still had to return to the hotel and pack. He chewed another “polar bear,” the Russian chocolate candy, for energy, and began banging out the tale of his journey. Electricity all at once lit up the room, but he left the kerosene lamps burning and typed on. In about half an hour the lights flickered, burned orange, dimmed, and pulsed, and went out. Still he typed ahead. He was describing the interior of the KV tank when Slote came in, saying, “You’re really going at it.”
