Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  Then Sarkisyan glimpsed intermittent flashes on the far side of the gully, among the tall grass and bushes. He heard the staccato of machine-gun fire. He caught sight of Generalov again. Flinging his hands in the air, the sergeant disappeared into the gully. A minute later, he was running back towards the mortars, bending down, swerving, falling to the ground and leaping to his feet again. Stopping for a second, he yelled, “F-r-r-r-itzes!”

  But it was already only too clear, from his every movement, that the approaching tanks were German panzers.

  And Sarkisyan, small and majestic, standing erect on his moss-covered roof, saluted his stern fate. His voice both hoarse and exultant, he bellowed out a command not to be found in any military textbook: “Open fire on the fascist fuckers!”

  So ended the unit’s brief period of rest in the quiet of the rear.

  The Germans had at that moment been looking for a way across the gully. The sudden salvo from the mortars, along with rifle and machine-gun fire from the factory militia, brought their advance to an abrupt halt. The first line of the Soviet defences on the northern sector of the Stalingrad Front was holding.

  •

  Krymov was writing to his brother, lost in thought as he tried to imagine life in the Urals, which he had never visited. Everything he had ever read or heard about the region came together to form a strange, composite picture. This picture included granite mountain slopes covered in birches whose leaves were now turning; quiet lakes surrounded by age-old pines; the light-flooded workshops of giant machine-building plants; asphalted streets in Sverdlovsk; and caves where, amid dark masses of rock, semi-precious stones gleamed with all the colours of the rainbow. His brother’s little house—located in this place where lakes, mountain caves, asphalt streets, and huge factory workshops existed side by side—was somewhere unusually good, quiet and calm.

  A political instructor burst in, calling out, “Comrade Commissar, the enemy!” Krymov’s little room, which his orderly had tried so hard to make nice and comfortable, and his thoughts about his brother, about the Urals and its lakes and forests—everything evaporated at once, like drops of water falling onto a burning-hot iron.

  Returning to the war felt as simple and natural as waking up in the morning.

  A few minutes later, Krymov was out in the wasteland, where Sarkisyan’s mortars were firing on the German tanks.

  “Report!” he shouted grimly.

  Red-faced, excited by his successes, Sarkisyan replied, “Comrade Commissar, an enemy armoured column is approaching. I’ve just taken out two heavy tanks!”

  It would be a good thing, he thought, to get a certificate from the brigade’s adjutant to the effect that this had indeed been the work of his mortar unit. There had been an incident on the Don when Sarkisyan had knocked out an enemy self-propelled gun and it had been his neighbour, the commander of an artillery battery, who had been mentioned in despatches.

  But one glance at Krymov was enough to make Sarkisyan forget such petty concerns. Never, even in the most critical moments, had he seen such a look on Krymov’s face.

  The Germans had reached the bank of the Volga, the outskirts of Stalingrad. They had broken through to the giant factories. There were German aircraft all over the sky. Their hum filled all space, and there was a vicious link between this menacing hum and the tanks grinding their way across the earth. Enemies in the air, enemies on the ground—and the link between them was strengthening. It was growing broader and deeper. The Germans had to be stopped. This link had to be broken. Nothing else mattered.

  Krymov was in a state of supreme tension akin to inspiration. He was able to summon all his mental powers.

  “Telephone cable to that house!” he ordered the deputy chief of staff. Turning to Sarkisyan, he asked, “Your ammo supplies?”

  After hearing Sarkisyan’s reply, he said, “Good. It’s a long way to the ammo dump. We won’t be retreating, so we must take all our ammo forward, to the fire positions.”

  With a quick glance at Krymov, a soldier said, “Well said, comrade Commissar!” Gesturing towards the Volga, he added, “Anyway, where’s there to retreat to?”

  Quick glances and brief words were all that was needed. The commissar and the mortarmen understood one another immediately.

  Krymov turned to the brigade commander’s adjutant, who had just run up to him, and said, “All HQ staff and admin workers to ammunition transport! There aren’t enough bearers.”

  Krymov smiled at another of the mortarmen and said, “So, Sazonov, this time you look ready to stay at your post.”

  “I certainly am, comrade Commissar. Back there by the Don things were different.”

  “I understand,” Krymov replied.

  The soldier said something else, but in the chaos of rifle shots, shell bursts and exploding bombs Krymov was unable to hear.

  Krymov ordered a messenger to take a note to the commander of the anti-aircraft regiment. German panzers, he wrote, had appeared in the immediate vicinity; he was to establish communications with the anti-tank brigade and engage with these panzers immediately. But before the messenger even reached the commander, Krymov heard the sound of rapid, powerful gunfire. The anti-aircraft gunners had already opened fire on the panzers.

  Dozens of men saw the commissar move from one mortar crew to another. Hundreds of eyes met Krymov’s—fleetingly, slowly, excitedly, calmly, boldly.

  Gun-layers glanced at him after a successful shot. Ammunition-bearers looked up at him before they’d even straightened their backs and wiped the sweat off their foreheads. Crew commanders saluted hurriedly before replying to a brisk question. Signallers held out their telephone receivers.

  As they fought outside the Tractor Factory, the mortarmen felt all the tension and terror of combat. They were pleased with the speed and accuracy of their fire. They were aware both of the planes above and of the artillery now shelling their fire positions. They were troubled by their own occasional mistakes and by the shallowness of the slit trenches they had dug only a few hours earlier. They did not look ahead or think about the future: should a German shell fall nearby, there’d be time enough to drop to the ground before it exploded. But there was something new about this unexpected battle, something that distinguished it from earlier steppe battles. This was not simply the anger felt by men who had been longing for even the briefest of rests but were now being forced to fight yet again. It was more a matter of their realization that they had been driven back to the banks of the Volga. They were fighting on the border of the Kazakh steppes—and this filled them with a sense of grief and anguish.

  Krymov sensed the strength of the link between everyone involved in these first few hours of the Battle of Stalingrad. The underlying intention of all his orders, of every word he spoke, was not only to establish reliable communications between the gunners and their commanders, between HQ and the various sub-units, between the brigade, the anti-aircraft regiment, the factory militia and Front HQ, but also to bring about the deeper human connections that are just as essential and without which victory is impossible. Krymov had learned a great deal during the long Soviet retreat—both from the moments of success and from the many defeats.

  Very soon, at Krymov’s instigation, telephone cables had been laid between Brigade HQ and the anti-aircraft-regiment HQ—and also to the factory-militia HQ and a nearby tank battalion that was still undergoing training.

  Time and again the telephonist passed Krymov the receiver, and gunners, mortarmen and tank crew all heard the commissar’s calm, clear voice.

  “Comrade Commissar!” said Volkov, the commander of a machine-gun platoon, as he ran into Brigade HQ. “We’re almost out of cartridge ribbons. I thought we were safe in the rear. I never dreamed we’d be fighting again so soon.”

  “Send some men to militia-regiment HQ. I’ve already spoken to the commander—he’ll sort you out.”

  The phone rang again. Krymov said into the receiver, “The trenches need to be good and deep. Not temporary shelter
s. We must dig in—we’ll be here for some time.”

  The simultaneous ground and air attack had been intended to cripple Soviet communications. It had not succeeded.

  •

  The sight of German tanks nearing the Volga was appalling. The German tank men had been confident that their sudden appearance at river crossings and at a factory on the outskirts of the blazing city would sow confusion and panic, but in the event it was they who were taken by surprise; they had not expected to be met by such powerful and concerted fire. When, after direct hits, two tanks went up in flames, the officer in command concluded that the Soviet forces had not been caught unawares. They must have known of the German plans, guessed the route the tanks would follow to the Tractor Factory and the northern river crossings, and prepared their defence.

  The officer radioed his HQ, saying he had ordered a halt. His tanks and motor infantry were preparing for a protracted exchange of fire.

  It goes without saying that many important events contain an element of chance, sometimes fortunate, sometimes not. An event’s true meaning, however, cannot be understood in isolation—only in relation to the spirit of the time. Chance details are of only secondary importance; they do not alter the course of history.

  The time was coming when the laws of life and war would cease to transform millions of individual German actions into an invincible, crushing force. From now on, even favourable chances would dissipate like smoke, bringing the Germans no real benefit, while even the very slightest instances of bad luck, the least important of mischances, would have serious, irreversible consequences.

  43

  AFTER the huge air raid, everything about the city seemed strange. Everything that had changed seemed strange, and everything that had not changed seemed strange. It was strange to see families eating out on the street, sitting on boxes and bundles beside the ruins of their homes, and it was no less strange to see an old woman doing her knitting by the open window of a still-intact room, next to a rubber plant and a sleeping long-haired Siberian cat. What had happened was unthinkable.

  Piers had disappeared. Trams no longer ran and telephones were no longer ringing. Many important institutions were no longer functioning.

  Cobblers and tailors had disappeared, as had outpatient clinics, pharmacies, schools, watchmakers and libraries. Radio loudspeakers on the streets had fallen silent. There was no theatre or cinema, no shops, markets, laundries, bathhouses, seltzer-water kiosks or beer halls.

  The smell of burning hung in the air, and the walls of buildings that had burnt down had not yet cooled. They gave off a hot breath, like ovens.

  The sound of artillery fire and the explosions of German shells drew ever closer. At night there was the sound of machine-gun fire to the north, around the Tractor Factory, and the dry crack of small-calibre mortars. It was no longer clear what was normal: a yardman sweeping the street while an orderly queue formed at a bread shop or a crazed woman with blood on her manicured fingernails, tossing aside bricks and sheets of clattering corrugated iron as she diligently dug her way down towards the body of her dead child. Everyone knew that the city’s northern outskirts had been taken by German troops. More terrible surprises were expected. It seemed impossible for the present day to be like the previous day, for any day to turn out like the day before. Stability was unimaginable.

  The only thing that did not change was the life of Front HQ, which only a few days earlier had seemed so provisional, so out of place in the city. Soldiers from the HQ guard battalion still rattled their mess tins as they ran to the kitchen. Signals officers still tore down the streets on motorcycles, and Emkas covered in dust and mud, with crumpled sides and star-shaped cracks on their windscreens, came to a halt in city squares, in front of traffic policemen holding red and yellow flags.

  And every day saw a new city growing up amid the ruins of the old peacetime city. This new city—a city of war—was being built by sappers, signalmen, infantrymen, artillerymen and people’s militia. Brick, it turned out, was the material from which one builds barricades. Streets existed not to allow the free movement of traffic but to prevent it; they were laid with mines, and trenches were dug straight across them. The right thing to put in the window of a house was not a pot of flowers but a machine gun. Gateways and inner yards were intended for artillery pieces and tank ambushes; and the little nooks and crannies between buildings were designed to be sniper nests, hiding places for grenade throwers and sub-machine-gunners.

  44

  DURING the evening of the fifth day after the air raid, Mostovskoy happened upon Sofya Osipovna, not far from his home.

  In a greatcoat with a charred hem, her face now pale and thin, she looked very different from the stout, jolly woman with the loud voice whom Mostovskoy had sat next to on Alexandra Vladimirovna’s birthday.

  Mostovskoy did not immediately recognize her. The sharp, mocking eyes he so clearly remembered were now flitting about, glancing at him distractedly, then turning to the grey smoke still creeping about the ruins.

  A woman in a colourful bathrobe, tied with a soldier’s belt, and an elderly man wearing a white cloak and a battered soldier’s side cap walked past the gate, pushing a handcart full of household belongings.

  The man and woman with the cart looked at Sofya and Mostovskoy. At any other time, they would have appeared extraordinary. But now it was probably the elderly Mostovskoy, with his usual calm attentiveness to everything around him, who seemed out of place.

  Much has been written about the smells of meadows and forests, of autumn leaves, of young grass and fresh hay, of sea and river water, of hot dust and living bodies.

  But what about the smells of fire and smoke in wartime?

  Behind their apparent grim monotony lie many differences. The smoke from a burning pine forest—a light, scented mist, floating among the tall copper trunks like a pale blue veil. The damp, bitter smoke of a fire in a deciduous forest—cold and heavy, clinging to the ground. The fume-laden flames from a torched field of ripe wheat, heavy and hot, like the grief of a nation. The smell of fire racing across dry August steppe. Blazing stacks of straw. . . The dense, fat, rounded smoke of burning oil . . .

  That evening the city was still smouldering; its breath too felt heavy and hot. The air was dry, with heat still coming off the walls of the buildings. Lazy, sated flames flickered here and there, consuming the last remnants of everything flammable. Wisps of smoke were creeping out through gaping windows or the spaces where there had once been roofs.

  In the half-dark cellars red-hot piles of collapsed brick and plaster gave off a dark, uncertain glow. And the patches of sunlight on the walls, the rays of sun shining through gaps in the walls, the purple evening clouds—all seemed a part of the great fire, as if they too had been lit by man.

  The tumult of smells was disturbing. Among them were the smells of hot mortar and stone, of scorched feathers, of burning paint and of burning coal extinguished by buckets of water.

  A strange empty silence hung over the always noisy and talkative city, but the sky seemed somehow less distant, less separate from the earth than usual. It had drawn near to the streets and squares; it had drawn near to the city just as the evening sky draws near to open fields, to the steppe, the sea or the northern forest.

  Mostovskoy was overjoyed to see Sofya Osipovna. “You wouldn’t believe it!” he said. “The ceiling in my room is intact. There’s still glass in the windows—probably the last glass in Stalingrad. Come on over!”

  The door was opened by a pale old woman with eyes red from crying.

  “Agrippina Petrovna, the head of my household,” said Mostovskoy.

  They entered his room. Everything was clean and tidy, in contrast to the chaos elsewhere.

  “First, tell me about our friends,” said Mostovskoy, motioning Sofya to the armchair. “Marusya was killed during the first of the air raids. I heard from one of my neighbours, Zina Melnikova. But what about the rest of the family? Where’s Alexandra Vladimirovna? Their bui
lding’s been flattened—I’ve seen it myself—and no one’s been able to tell me anything at all.”

  “Yes, poor Marusya is dead,” said Sofya. And she went on to tell Mostovskoy that Zhenya and her mother had set off for Kazan, but that Vera had chosen to stay in Stalingrad. Vera didn’t want to leave her father on his own and she had moved in with him at Stalgres. She had suffered slight burns to her neck and forehead. There had been concern about one of her eyes, but it was now completely healed.

  “And that angry young man?” asked Mostovskoy. “Seryozha, I think.”

  “Would you believe it? I met him yesterday quite by chance, at the Tractor Factory. His unit was being marched somewhere—we couldn’t talk long. I just managed to tell him about his family. And he told me he’d been in combat for five days on end, that he was a mortar-man, and that his unit was now on its way back to resume the defence of the Tractor Factory.”

  With an agonized look, Sofya went on to tell Mostovskoy how during the last few days she had attended to more than 300 wounded civilians and soldiers, dressing their wounds or carrying out operations, and that a great many of the operations had been on children.

  She said that relatively few people had been wounded by shrapnel. Most of her patients had been struck by debris from collapsing buildings. Some had suffered injuries to their limbs; some to their skulls or ribcages.

  Her hospital had been evacuated across the Volga and was going to move to Saratov. She was staying behind for one more day. One of her tasks was to visit the factory district. Some of the hospital equipment was stored there. Now it had to be transported across the Volga, to Burkovsky Hamlet.

  And she had, in fact, been on her way to call on Mostovskoy. Alexandra Vladimirovna had insisted that she promise to pass on a message. She wanted him to come and live with her family in Kazan.

  “Thank you,” said Mostovskoy, “but I’m not intending to leave.”