A Writer at War (16 page)

A damaged plane was drawn away by oxen. Soldiers carried their wounded commander Muratov for twelve kilometres.

Red Army soldier Petrov says: ‘At the front we have bad leadership.’

A reconnaissance party of six men headed by Junior Lieutenant Drozd didn’t return from their mission. Drozd was found afterwards with two bayonet wounds. He was dead and his revolver was missing, but documents and money were on him. The soldiers weren’t found.
³

Turilin and Likhatov tore up their [Communist] Party membership cards.
⁴
Gulyaev declared: ‘Why dig trenches, they are useless.’

Red Army soldier Tikhy
⁵
tried to rape the owner of the house where he stayed for the night. Fearing retribution, Tikhy darted out of the house, took a rifle, jumped on a horse and left in an unknown direction. The search for Tikhy has still brought no positive results.

Mass complaints from soldiers about the complete absence of letters.

A handwritten leaflet was dropped from a plane on the town of Yampol: ‘During a morning service in the city of Jerusalem, the Saviour’s voice was heard. Those who pray, even just once, will be saved.’

Junior Lieutenant Churelko shouted at his soldiers: ‘You swine! You don’t like me because I’m a Gypsy!’ After that, he jumped on his horse and wanted to go to the front line. They stopped him, and he wanted to shoot himself.

Red Army soldier Duvansky was driving his ox and was hitting the ox with a rifle butt. The butt broke when he hit the ox, and the rifle went off wounding Duvansky. He was sent to hospital and brought to trial.

Communist Evseev lost his notepad. Some Red Army soldiers found this notepad. In it he kept a hand-copied prayer.

Reconnaissance men Kapitonov and Deiga [presumably on a scouting mission behind enemy lines] changed into civilian clothes and visited a meeting where Germans were holding the election of a starosta [village leader in German-occupied territory].
⁶
Germans shouted: ‘Those who aren’t locals, stand up!’ They stood up and were arrested.

Menu of a German field kitchen. In the morning – breakfast: coffee, usually without sugar, and bread spread with dripping (pig fat). Dinner consists of one course: borscht or soup (meat soup). Supper: coffee and bread. Second course with meat is given to them once a week.

In response to Comrade Stalin’s report, Nurse Rud donated 250 cubic centimetres of her blood, and Nurse Tarabrina 350 cubic centimetres.

During breakfast at the headquarters battery, a frog was found in the soup.

Soldier Nazarenko carried two heavily wounded men out of the line of fire and after that he killed ten fascist soldiers, one corporal and one officer. When someone said to him: ‘You’re a hero,’ he answered: ‘Is this heroism? To reach Berlin – that’s heroism!’ He
added: ‘One would be all right with
Politruk
Chernyshev in combat! He crawled up to me in the heat of the battle, laughed and cheered me up.’

Three German sub-machine-gunners were surrounded in a field by some haystacks. This was at night. ‘Surrender!’ [the Soviet soldiers shouted]. There was no reply. It turned out that they were standing there dead, leant against a haystack, frozen solid. Apparently, practical jokers had placed them there during the day.

Grossman, as well as gleaning what he could from official reports, carried on noting down vignettes and snippets of conversation from military life.

Divisional commanders: ‘I am at . . .’ ‘I am on the line.’ The inevitable phrase: ‘My neighbour on the left is letting me down.’ ‘Oh, neighbour, neighbour.’ ‘This booty is mine.’ ‘It was my anti-aircraft men who shot down that German, but he came down in the neighbour’s sector, and the neighbours claimed that they had shot him down.’ ‘One is always having trouble with one’s neighbours.’

If a division has managed to break through, its commander says: ‘My neighbour is holding me back.’ And the commander who is left behind, says: ‘It’s easy for them to say that. While I received the main brunt of the battle, of course it was easy for them to push on.’

On a clear frosty morning,
izbas
produce smoke like battleships in harbour. There is no wind. Not a breeze, and several dozen smoke pillars stand like props between the snowy white of the ground and the sky of cruel blue.

Immediately after the battle ended, a crowd of women rushed out into the field, to German trenches, to get back their quilts and pillows.

In a Ukrainian village, the
khata
houses are being whitewashed after the departure of the Germans, as if after a dangerous, infectious disease which devastated the village.

When Germans entered a house, the cat left and stayed away for three months. (Stories like this circulate in all the villages.) Presumably the cats sense strangers, or know the smell of Germans.

Reading between the lines of Grossman’s account, villagers who had been under German occupation were nervous about how they might be treated by the Soviet authorities. Many of them had destroyed their identity documents and needed to be reassured that they would not be punished.

In the morning, Kuzma Ogloblin came back to the village which had just been liberated. He was the chairman of the village soviet and had been with the partisans. He is dark and solid like cast iron, wearing a black sheepskin coat and armed with a rifle. The
izba
became crowded with people. Ogloblin said: ‘Don’t be afraid of anything. Just get on with life. You should hand in any German boots. I myself, for example, hit a vehicle with a grenade. It had three hundred pairs of boots in it, and although I needed boots, I didn’t even take a single pair. What do you want documents for? We all know each other. Don’t be afraid, live! The Germans are done for. They won’t be back.’

Return to Voronezh. Night in a field hospital. We meet a woman doctor. It is dark. There is only a weak light from the coals in the stove. The doctor becomes talkative, she recites poetry and philosophises. ‘Excuse me, are you, er, blonde?’ Rozenfeld asks. ‘No, my hair is completely white,’ she replies. An embarrassed silence.

A wounded man: ‘Comrade Major, we are having a furious argument here. May I speak to you?’

‘What, what?’ The major is alarmed.

‘Well, we were discussing whether Germany will exist after the war?’

The wounded men demand newpapers and snatch them from medical orderlies: they want to smoke.

A hospital train is standing on the track. There are military trains all around. Whenever Ulyana, Galya or Lena want to climb into a heated freight [
teplushka
] wagon, soldiers appear at once out of nowhere ‘helping’ nurses into the wagon. Screams and laughter are heard all over the station.

We said goodbye to the field hospital. I remembered again how on my way to the front I had dropped in to see the commandant. I was hungry and they put a plate of wonderful home-made Ukrainian borscht in front of me. Just when I was raising the first spoonful to my mouth Bukovsky stormed in shouting: ‘Hurry up! Let’s run. The train is moving already.’ I rushed out after him. That borscht haunted me for weeks.

We change on to an ordinary [civilian] train. It is very crowded. The inspector says to a man in a black coat: ‘Give these soldiers your seat, they are here on the train today, and tomorrow they will perhaps be dead.’ A soldier, an Uzbek, is singing loudly in Uzbekian. The whole carriage can hear him. The sounds seem absurd to our ears, and the words are unfamiliar. Red Army soldiers are listening to him attentively, with a caring and embarrassed expression. There isn’t a single grin or smile.

Grossman once again heard stories from the enemy-occupied territories.

An old man was waiting for the Germans to arrive. He put a tablecloth on the table, and laid it with different delicacies. The Germans came and robbed and looted the house. The old man hanged himself.

Regimental commander Kramer. He beats Germans devilishly. When he became ill during a battle and had a forty-degree temperature, they poured some boiling water into a barrel, this fat man climbed into the barrel and recovered.

The January general offensive, launched on Stalin’s insistence and against Zhukov’s advice, had proved unsustainable, as the realists had feared. The German Army was not on the point of collapse, as Stalin had claimed after the successful counter-attacks near Moscow in December. Grossman came across some reports from the fighting in the First World War which had an uncomfortably familiar tone. Such implicit criticisms of the handling of the offensive in his notebook was almost as dangerous as copying down negative comments and ‘extraordinary events’.

From the order by General of Artillery Ivanov to the commanders of the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th Armies: ‘26 January 1916. Almost all
our attacks in the recent battles possessed the same characteristic pattern: the troops broke through a sector of the enemy’s line, forced the remains of the enemy’s front-line troops to abandon trenches and fortifications, followed them uncontrollably and then, attacked in their turn by enemy neighbouring units or reserves, retreated not only back to the captured line, but, having found no support in them as they had just been taken, often back to the positions before the attack, usually having suffered great losses . . . A tactical victory without strategic results is an expensive and beautiful but useless toy.’ These observations made by generals then and those made in the Zaliman area this winter are stunningly similar.

More about poverty. The sad but beautiful poverty of our people. Wounded men are treated to a piece of herring and fifty grams of vodka if seriously wounded. Sheets. Fighter pilots who are now performing great deeds – their drinking glasses are made from bottles with the necks crudely broken off. Their [
unty
] sheepskin boots have no heels. A political officer [tells a quartermaster corporal]: ‘[This pilot] should be given another pair, his feet get cold.’

The corporal shakes his head. ‘We haven’t got any.’

‘That’s all right,’ says the pilot. ‘I’m warm enough.’

The shortage of equipment was largely a consequence of the disastrous retreats of 1941 when so much kit and so many stores had been abandoned in the retreat. The only way to obtain replacements was to bribe a quartermaster with vodka, a solution which angered many soldiers.

1
Chapaev, Vassili Ivanovich (1887–1919), was a Red hero of the Russian civil war, famous for having defended the line of the River Ural, but he drowned in it when swimming for the shore with a bullet in his shoulder.

2
The Red Army, like the Tsarist Army, did not believe in socks. Soldiers wore foot bandages a little like puttees, inside their boots. There was a strong belief that foot bandages were far more effective in preventing frostbite.

3
Evidently, the soldiers were suspected either of killing the officer themselves, or of having abandoned him.

4
The most frequent reason for tearing up a Communist Party membership card was a fear of execution if it was found by the Germans.

5
Tikhy means ‘quiet’ in Russian.

6
The term ‘reconnaissance’ in the Red Army covered both the usual sense of the word and military intelligence on a local level. It would appear that these spies were untrained and unimaginative.

After the Soviet general offensive of January 1942 had petered out disastrously, Grossman began to reflect on the Russian roller coaster of emotions. They had gone from despairing disbelief in the terrible summer of 1941, to panic in the autumn as the Germans approached Moscow, then wild optimism in the great counter-attack around the capital, and now depression again.

A Russian man has to work very hard, and his life is hard too, but in his soul he does not realise the inevitability of this hard work and hard life. At war, I have seen only two kinds of reaction to the things happening around one: either extreme optimism, or complete gloom. Transition from one to the other is quick and sudden, and easy. There is nothing in between. No one lives with the thought that the war is going to be long, that only hard work, month after month, could lead to victory. Even those who say so don’t believe it. There are only two feelings: the first one – the enemy is defeated; the other one – the enemy cannot be defeated.

Grossman was so deeply affected by the genuine spirit of sacrifice among ordinary soldiers and front-line officers that he became quite emotional on the subject.

At war, a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint. At the front [there is] a purity of thought and soul, a kind of monastic austerity.

The rear [the civilian part of the country] lives by different laws and it would never be able to merge morally with the front. Its law is life, and the struggle for survival. We Russians don’t know how to live like saints, we only know how to die like saints. The front [represents] the holiness of Russian death, the rear is the sin of Russian life.

At the front, there is patience and resignation, submission to
unthinkable hardships. This is the patience of a strong people. This is the patience of a great army. The greatness of the Russian soul is incredible.

On the other hand, Grossman was extremely impatient with much of the propaganda that tried to conceal the incompetence of Soviet military leadership during the previous six months.

The Kutuzov myth about the strategy of 1812. The blood-soaked body of war is being dressed in snow-white robes of ideological, strategic and artistic convention. There are those who saw the retreat and those who dressed it. The myth of the First and the Second Great Patriotic War.

Still on the Southern Front, with the 37th Army, Grossman visited a tank brigade commanded by Colonel Khasin. There he spent quite some time with Captain Kozlov, a Jewish officer.

At Khasin’s tank brigade, Captain Kozlov, the commander of the motorised rifle battalion, was philosophising about life and death while talking to me at night. He is a young man with a small beard. Before the war he was studying music at the Moscow Conservatoire. ‘I have told myself that I will be killed whatever happens, today or tomorrow. And once I realised this, it became so easy for me to live, so simple, and even somehow so clear and pure. My soul is very calm. I go into battle without any fear, because I have no expectations. I am absolutely convinced that a man commanding a motorised rifle batallion will be killed, that he cannot survive. If I didn’t have this belief in the inevitability of death, I would be feeling bad and, probably, I wouldn’t be able to be so happy, calm and brave in the fighting.’