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On one occasion Krymov saw dozens of enemy tanks move onto a plain crowded with families from Kiev fleeing east on foot. On the lead tank sat a German officer, waving a branch of orange autumn leaves in the air. Some of the tanks tore, at speed, into the midst of the women and children.
On another occasion a German tank passed slowly by only ten metres away from Krymov. It looked like some ferocious beast with bloodstained jaws. Now, Krymov felt that he had fully taken in the meaning of the words “ground supremacy.”
Day and night Krymov walked east. He heard about the death of Colonel General Kirponos.106 He read German propaganda leaflets making out that Moscow and Leningrad had already fallen and that the Soviet government had fled by plane to the Urals. He saw men who had buried their medals and Party membership cards; he saw betrayal and steely loyalty, despair and unwavering faith.
With him, under his leadership, were 200 soldiers and commanders whom he had met on his way. It was a motley squad, made up of Red Army soldiers, sailors from the Dnieper flotilla, village policemen, district Party committee workers, a few elderly Kiev factory workers, cavalrymen without horses and pilots who had lost their planes.
There were moments afterwards when Krymov felt he must have dreamed this entire journey—it was so full of extraordinary events and experiences. He remembered night-time bonfires in the forest, swimming across swollen autumn rivers under icy rain, long days of hunger, brief feasts in villages where they had eliminated detachments of Germans. Sometimes he had to judge village elders and polizei;107 this did not take him long. He remembered the look in the eyes of these traitors just before they were shot. He remembered a peasant woman who, with tears in her eyes, had begged him to give her a rifle and allow her and her two children to join his men on their journey east. He remembered the cruel execution of the mistress of the commander of a German punitive detachment. He remembered an old woman who, one night, had burned down her own house and the drunken polizei—one of them her son-in-law—who were asleep inside. And he remembered giving a lecture in a forest, immediately after a brief battle with a detachment of polizei, about the principles of the construction of a Communist society.
More than anything, he remembered the sense of togetherness that came into being between his men.108 Everyone had spoken openly about their whole lives, from their earliest childhood, and everyone’s path through life had seemed clearly marked out; people’s characters, their strengths and weaknesses—everything about them became manifest, in word and deed.
Sometimes Krymov had felt bewildered, unable to understand where he and his comrades were finding the strength to endure these long weeks of hunger and deprivation.
And the earth was so heavy, so difficult. To pull one boot out of the mud, to lift one foot and take one step, to lift the other foot—this alone was an immense labour. There was nothing during those autumn days that wasn’t difficult. Day and night it went on drizzling—and the cold drizzle was as heavy as mercury. Impregnated with this drizzle, a cloth side cap seemed heavier than a metal helmet; greatcoats became so sodden that they dragged you towards the ground; tunics and torn shirts were like clamps, clinging so tight to your chest that it was hard to breathe. Everything was a struggle.
The branches they gathered for the fire could have been made of stone. The dense, damp smoke merged with the equally dense grey mist and lay heavily on the ground.
Day and night the men’s aching shoulders felt like great weights; day and night the cold and dirt penetrated their torn boots. They would fall asleep on wet ground, under rough rain-heavy branches of hazel. At dawn, they awoke in the rain, feeling as if they had not slept at all.
In areas of German troop concentration there was ceaseless activity on the roads: columns of trucks, artillery and motor infantry. German soldiers were quartered in almost every village, and there were always sentries. In these areas Krymov and his men could move only at night.
It was their own land they were walking across, but they had to take cover in woods, to hurry across railways, to avoid asphalt roads where the sound of their footsteps might give them away. Black German cars swept past in the rain; self-propelled artillery drove past more slowly; tanks exchanged signals in metallic voices. Sometimes Krymov’s men heard strange, jarring sounds, carried by the wind from tarpaulin-covered trucks: snatches of German songs and the strains of an accordion. They saw bright headlights and heard the laboured, submissive breathing of locomotives at the head of trains carrying German troops further east. They saw peaceful lights in the windows of houses and friendly smoke rising up from chimneys—yet they had to hide away in deserted forest ravines.
Nothing during this difficult time was more precious than faith in the justice of the people’s cause, faith in the future. This made the rumours spread by the enemy—vague, grey, penetrating as the autumn mist—still harder to bear.
In some strange way, alongside his exhaustion, Krymov felt something very different—a sense of confidence and ardent strength. A sense of passion, of revolutionary faith; a sense of his own responsibility for the men trudging along beside him, for their lives and spiritual strength, for all that was happening on this cold autumn earth.
There was probably no heavier responsibility in the world, yet this sense of responsibility was the source of Krymov’s strength.
Dozens, hundreds of times every day men turned to him with the words “Comrade Commissar!”
In these two words Krymov sensed a particular warmth, a warmth that came from the heart. The men walking beside him knew of Hitler’s decree about the summary execution of all commissars and political instructors. These two words contained much that was good and pure.
It felt entirely natural and inevitable that Krymov should be leading this ad hoc detachment.
“Comrade Commissar,” Svetilnikov, his chief of staff, would ask, “what route will we be taking tomorrow?”
“Comrade Commissar, where should we send our scouts?”
Krymov would unfold the map, now wind-damaged, yellow and faded from the sun and rain, half-erased by the touch of many hands. Krymov understood that the route he chose might determine the fate of 200 men. And Air Force Major Svetilnikov knew this too; his yellow-brown eyes, usually bright and mischievous, would turn serious and his ginger eyebrows would meet in a frown.
Their choice of route depended not only on the map and the reports of their scouts. Everything was important: car and cart tracks at a fork in the road, a chance word from an old man they happened upon in the forest, the height of the bushes on a particular hillside, and the state of the unharvested wheat: Had it been beaten to the ground or was it standing up like a wall?
“Comrade Commissar—Germans!” Sizov, their chief scout—a man with a long face who seemed to know no fear of death—was a little out of breath. “On foot, not more than a company, behind that little wood over there, heading north-west.”
And Sizov, who had been close to death more often than any of them, looked into Krymov’s eyes, hoping to read there the order “Attack immediately!” He knew that Krymov was always eager to attack, whenever an opportunity arose.
These short fierce clashes brought about sudden transformations. Rather than exhausting the men, combat lent them more strength, enabled them to stand straighter.
“Comrade Commissar, what will we be eating tomorrow?” Skoropad, their provisions manager, would ask. He knew that Krymov had to take many different factors into account. One day they would have only burnt, half-cooked wheat that smelled of kerosene; another day, foreseeing a particularly difficult march, he would say, “Goose and tinned meat—one tin for every four men.”
“Comrade Commissar, what are we to do with the severely wounded? Today we’ve got eight of them,” Petrov would ask in his hoarse voice. A military doctor, Petrov suffered from asthmatic bronchitis and his lips always looked pale and anaemic. He would wait intently for Krymov’s reply, staring at him through bloodshot eyes. He knew that Krymov would neve
r agree to leave the wounded behind, even in the care of the most loyal and dependable of villagers, but Krymov’s reply always brought joy to his heart. A little colour would return to his cheeks.
It was not that Krymov could read a map better than his chief of staff, or that he understood more about military operations than the regular soldiers. Nor did he know more about provisioning than the wise Skoropad or have a clearer idea than Petrov about how best to treat the wounded. The men who asked him these questions had a sense of their own worth; they knew the value of their own expertise, combat experience and knowledge of life. They knew that Krymov was sometimes wrong, that he might not be able to answer their questions. But they all understood that Krymov made no mistakes when it came to the single most important struggle of all—the struggle to preserve what was most essential and precious in a human being, to protect this central core at a time when it was all too easy to lose not only your life but also all sense of conscience and honour.
During this period Krymov grew accustomed to answering the most unexpected questions. During a night march through the forest, a former tractor driver, now a tank driver with no tank, would suddenly ask, “What do you think, comrade Commissar? Do the stars have Black Earth regions too?”109 Or a fierce argument would flare up around the fire: When Communism was established, would both bread and boots be distributed to everyone free of charge? A little out of breath, the soldier delegated by the debaters would go up to Krymov and say, “Comrade Commissar, are you still awake? The lads have got in rather a muddle. They need you to sort things out for them.” Or a sullen, taciturn old greybeard would pour out his soul to Krymov, telling him about his wife and children, about what he had done right in his dealings with others—everyone from close family to distant acquaintances—and where he had gone wrong.
Once, two of his men decided to go to ground. One pretended to be ill and the second shot himself in the calf; both intended to stay behind in a village, making out to the Germans that they had married into peasant families. Krymov had to judge them. And there were also moments of comedy, moments that everyone—even the sick and wounded—could laugh about together. In one village a soldier, without saying a word to the elderly mistress of the house, took five eggs and hid them inside his hat; a little later, he went and sat on this hat. The old woman shrieked abuse at him, then brought him some hot water and a cloth and helped him to regain his military dignity.
Krymov noticed that people liked telling him funny stories—as if they wanted even their commissar to be able to enjoy a little fun and laughter. During this autumn he seemed to be reliving all the hardest days of his life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik. He was being tested—just as he had been tested during his time in the political underground, and during the Civil War. Krymov could feel on his cheeks the fresh breeze of his youth—and this was something so splendid that no difficulties, no ordeals could make him lose heart. There was no one who did not sense his strength.
Just as progressive workers had followed revolutionary fighters in the days of the tsars, in spite of prison sentences and forced labour, in spite of the whips of the Cossack soldiers, so now men brought up and educated by the Revolution were following their commissar through field and forest, regardless of hunger, suffering of all kinds and the ever-present danger of death.
Most of these men were young. They had learned to read and write from Soviet textbooks and had been taught by Soviet teachers. Before the war they had worked in Soviet factories and kolkhozes; they had read Soviet books and spent their holidays in Soviet houses of recreation. They had never seen a private landowner or factory owner; they could not even conceive of buying bread in a private bakery, being treated in a private hospital, or working on some landowner’s estate or in factories that belonged to some businessman.
Krymov could see that the pre-revolutionary order was simply incomprehensible to these young men. And now they found themselves on land occupied by German invaders, and these invaders were preparing to bring back those strange ways, to reintroduce the old order on Soviet soil.
Krymov had understood from the first days of the war that the German fascists were not only behaving with extraordinary cruelty, they also, in their blind arrogance, looked down on the Soviet people. Their attitude was one of mockery and contempt.
Old men and women, schoolgirls, young boys—everyone in the Soviet villages had been shocked by this colonialist arrogance. People brought up to believe in internationalism, in the equality of all workers, were not used to feeling themselves to be an object of scorn.
What Krymov’s men needed more than anything was certainty. So strong was their desire to overcome all doubt that they often chose to devote their short, precious hours of rest to serious discussion rather than to sleep.
There was one day when their position seemed hopeless; they were caught in a forest, encircled by a German infantry regiment. Even the bravest men were saying to Krymov that there was nothing for it but to scatter; each would have to try to make his own escape.
Krymov gathered his men in a forest clearing, stood on the trunk of a fallen pine and said, “Our strength comes from being together. The aim of the Germans is to separate us. We’re not an isolated particle, forgotten in a forest far behind German lines. Two hundred million hearts beat with us—the hearts of our two hundred million brothers and sisters. We will fight our way through, comrades!” Holding his Party membership card high above his head, he shouted, “Comrades, I swear to you that we will get through!”
And so they did—and continued on their way east.
And so they marched on—ragged, with swollen feet, suffering from bloody dysentery, but still carrying rifles and grenades, dragging along their four machine guns.
One starry autumn night, they fought their way across the German front line. When Krymov looked around at his troops, staggering from weakness yet still a force to be reckoned with, he felt both pride and joy. These men had walked hundreds of miles with him; he loved them with a tenderness beyond words.
49
THEY CROSSED the front line to the north of Bryansk, near the large village of Zhukovka, on the River Desna. Krymov said goodbye to his comrades, who were assigned straightaway to different regiments.
He went first to a Division HQ, and from there, by horse, to a small farm in the forest where he was told he would find the army commander.
There, in the HQ of the 50th Army, Krymov learned what had happened during the days of his wanderings.
Krymov was called to see Brigade Commissar Shlyapin,110 the
member of the army military soviet, a stout, enormously tall man who moved very slowly. He received Krymov in a wooden barn where there was a small table and two chairs, and piles of hay by the wall.
Shlyapin rearranged the hay, told Krymov to sit down and then lay down beside him, grunting and wheezing. He said that he too had been in encirclement that July; together with General Boldin, he had broken through the German front line and joined the forces under the command of General Konev.
There was a calm and simple strength in Shlyapin’s unhurried speech, in his pleasant smile and his humorous, good-natured eyes. A cook in a white apron brought them two plates of mutton with potatoes and warm rye bread. Seeing the look on Krymov’s face, Shlyapin smiled and said, “Russian soul, Russian smells.”111
The smell of hay and warm bread seemed somehow connected to this huge, unhurried man.
Soon after this, they were joined by Major General Petrov, the army commander. He was a small, red-haired man who was starting to go bald. On his worn general’s jacket was the gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.
“No, no,” he said, “don’t go getting up. I’ll sit down beside you—I’ve only just come from Division HQ.”
His bulging, pale blue eyes were alert and penetrating, his manner of speaking quick and staccato.
With him, he brought all the tension of war into the calm halfdark of this fragrant barn. Messengers kept coming and going. An elderl
y major came in twice to report. The silent telephone came to life.
An adjutant reported that the tribunal chairman had arrived from HQ to confirm the sentences passed by the military soviet. Petrov had him called in. When he appeared, Petrov offered him some tea, which he refused, and then asked, “Are there many?”
“Six,” the chairman replied, and opened a folder.
Petrov and Shlyapin listened to a report about the six traitors and deserters. In capital letters, and using a child’s green pencil, Petrov wrote CONFIRMED, then handed the pencil to Shlyapin.
“And this?” asked Petrov, raising his eyebrows. The chairman explained that an elderly woman from the town of Pochep had been distributing German propaganda among the troops and the general population. He added that she was an old maid and a nun.
Petrov pursed his lips and said in a serious tone, “An old maid? Well, perhaps we should show leniency.” And he began to write.
“Sure you’re not being overindulgent?” asked the good-natured Shlyapin. Petrov returned the folder to the chairman and said, “You may leave, comrade. There’s someone I need to talk to, so I won’t invite you to dinner. And next time you’re at HQ, tell them to send us some cherry jam.”
Petrov then turned to Krymov, “I know you, comrade Krymov—and maybe you remember me too.”
“I’ve forgotten, comrade Army Commander,” Krymov replied.
“Do you remember a cavalry platoon commander whom you accepted as a Party member in 1920, when you were with the 10th Cavalry Regiment?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Krymov. Looking at Petrov’s uniform, and his general’s green stars, he added, “Time flies.”
Shlyapin laughed, “Yes, Battalion Commissar, it’s hard to outrun it.”
“Are the enemy getting short of tanks?” asked Petrov.
“They have a great many tanks,” said Krymov. “Only two days ago, I heard from some peasants that transport trains had arrived in the Glukhov district and delivered around 500 tanks.”
Stalingrad Page 33
