A Writer at War (29 page)

Mikhalyev, Barkovsky, Chief of Staff Mirokhin have all been killed. They all received posthumous awards . . . Sub-machine-gunner Kolosov was buried up to his chest in earth. He was stuck there laughing: ‘This makes me mad!’ The signals platoon commander, Khamitsky, was sitting by the entrance of his bunker reading a book during a heavy bombing raid. Gurtyev [the divisional commander] became angry.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘I’ve nothing else to do. He’s bombing and I read a book.’

Mikhalyev was very much loved. When someone now asks: ‘How are things?’ ‘Well, what can I say?’ [comes the answer]. ‘It’s as if we’d lost a father. He had pity for his men. He spared them.’

Liaison Officer Batrakov, a chemist, black-haired and wearing spectacles, walked ten to fifteen kilometres every day. He would come in to headquarters, clean his glasses, report on the situation and go back. He arrived at exactly the same time every day.

‘It was quiet on the 12th and 13th [October], but we understood what this quietness meant. On the 14th, [the enemy] began firing at the divisional command post with a
Vanyusha
.
⁷
[The bunker] became blocked up with earth, but we got out. We lost thirteen or fourteen men at the command post. A thermite shell makes a hollow noise. It hits one’s ears. At first, there’s a creaking noise: “Aha! Hitler’s started playing [his violin],” and one has time to hide. Vladimirsky was dying to go to the toilet, he suffered so much until nightfall. He wanted to take a mess tin from a soldier.’

Workshop No. 14 started to burn from the inside. When Andryushenko was killed, the regimental commissar (holder of four medals, Lieutenant Colonel Kolobovnikov, a man with a face of stone) telephoned the command post and started to speak: ‘Comrade Major-General, may I report?’ He stopped, then said, sobbing: ‘Vanya is dead,’ and hung up.

A ‘hired’ tankist [i.e. the commander of a tank attached to the infantry]: they gave him chocolate, vodka, and collected his ammunition for him. And he worked like an ox. They thought the world of him in the regiment.

‘We had grenades, sub-machine guns, and 45mm [anti-tank] guns. Thirty tanks attacked. We were scared. This was the first time it happened to us! But no one ran away. We started firing at the armour. The tanks were crawling over deep slits. A Red Army soldier would take a look and laugh: “Dig deeper!”’

Postmen: Makarevich, with a little beard, a peasant, with his little bag, with little envelopes, postcards, letters, newpapers. Karnaukhov has been injured. There are three wounded and one killed . . . When he was wounded, Kosichenko tore the pin from the grenade with his teeth.

Grossman wrote up the the story of the attack on the 308th Rifle Division for
Krasnaya Zvezda
and it was published just over a month later under the title ‘Axis of the Main Attack’. Ortenberg wrote a little later about Grossman’s interviewing technique. ‘
All the correspondents
attached to the Stalingrad Front were amazed how Grossman had made the divisional commander, General Gurtiev, a silent and reserved Siberian, talk to him for six hours without a break, telling him all that he wanted to know, at one of the hardest moments [of the battle].’

Grossman may have been influenced by the superstitions of the
frontoviki
, the result of living constantly with death in its most unpredictable form, but he also had his own as a writer. His editor was entertained to find that Grossman believed it was bad luck to seal up your own letters and packages. ‘
When he wrote
another of his essays, he would ask Gekhman, who often accompanied him on trips to the front: “Efim, you’ve got a light hand. Could you take my material, seal the envelope with your own hands and send it to Moscow?”’

Ortenberg, a hardened Party journalist, was also amused by how carefully Grossman checked the final printed version of his articles. ‘I remember how he would change when a newspaper with his essay in it arrived. He was so happy. He would reread his essay, checking how one or another phrase sounded. He, an experienced writer, simply worshipped the printed word.’ Ortenberg may well have been a little disingenuous in this description. Grossman was often furious at the way his articles were rewritten and chopped about. He wrote in a letter to his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, on 22 October:

I’ve written an angry letter to the editor
and now await his reply not without interest. I wrote about a bureaucratic attitude and officials’ tricks on the editorial board.

In fact, Grossman’s prose was probably interfered with less than that of most other journalists’. Ortenberg openly acknowledged that much of the newspaper’s popularity was due to Grossman. Even the Party hacks in Moscow were well aware of the determination which his prose
gave to the soldiers of the Red Army, to say nothing of the whole population. It had far more effect than the most impassioned Stalinist clichés.

It is only here that people know
what a kilometre is. A kilometre is one thousand metres. It is one hundred thousand centimetres. Drunken [German] sub-machine-gunners pushed on with a lunatic stubbornness. There is no one now who can tell how Markelov’s regiment fought . . . Yes, they were simply mortals and none of them came back.

Several times during the day, German artillery and mortars would suddenly fall silent, and the squadrons of dive-bombers would disappear. An incomprehensible quietness would ensue. It was then that the lookouts would shout: ‘Watch out!’ and those in forward positions would grip their Molotov cocktails, men in anti-tank units would open their canvas ammunition bags and sub-machine-gunners would wipe their PPSh with the palms of their hands. This brief quietness preceded an attack.

It wasn’t long before the clang of hundreds of caterpillars and the low humming of motors would announce the movement of tanks. A lieutenant shouted: ‘Watch out, comrades! Sub-machine-gunners are infiltrating on the left!’ Sometimes the Germans got so close that the Siberians saw their dirty faces and torn greatcoats, and heard their guttural shouts . . .

Looking back now, one can see that heroism was present during every moment of daily life for people in the division. There was the commander of a signals platoon, Khamitsky, who was sitting peacefully on a hillock reading a novel while a dozen German Stukas dived down roaring, as if about to attack the earth itself. And there was liaison officer Batrakov, who would carefully clean his glasses, put reports into his field bag, and set out on a twenty-kilometre walk through the ‘death ravine’ as if it were a Sunday walk in the park.
⁸
There was the sub-machine-gunner Kolosov who, when an explosion buried him in a bunker up to his neck, turned his face to Deputy Commander Spirin and laughed. There was a typist at the headquarters, Klava Kopylova, a fat red-cheeked girl from Siberia, who had begun typing a battle order at the headquarters and was
buried by an explosion. They dug her out and she went to type in another bunker. She was buried again and dug out again. She finally finished typing the order in the third bunker and brought it to the divisional commander to sign. These were the people fighting on the axis of the main attack.

The
balkas
, or ravines, many of them running at right angles to the Volga river bank, provided shelter as well as danger if the enemy managed to slip into them unnoticed.

The
balka
has a great influence, particularly here in Stalingrad. [It provides] good approaches, [being] narrow and deep. Command posts or mortar units use it. It is always under fire. Many people have been killed here. Wires go through it, ammunition is carried through it. Aircraft and mortars have levelled it with the surrounding area. Chamov was buried there, too [by an explosion]. They had to dig him out. Spies have walked through it.

Grossman observed life at Gurtiev’s command post.

Reports [written] on forms, scraps of sheets from plant, party papers, etc. The return of Zoya Kalganova. She had been wounded twice. The divisional commander [greeted her]: ‘Hello, my dear girl.’

The courage of the young women medical orderlies was respected by everyone. Most of those in the 62nd Army’s Sanitary Company were Stalingrad high school students or graduates, but the 308th Rifle Division had brought some of their own female medics, clerks and signallers all the way from Siberia. The medical orderlies went out under heavy fire to collect the wounded and carry or drag them to safety. They would also take rations forward.

Our girls, with thermos flasks on their shoulders, bring us breakfast. Soldiers speak of them with so much love. These girls have not dug themselves any slit-trenches.

One of the young women later provided an improvised casualty list for him of those who had come with her from Siberia.

‘Lyolya Novikova, a cheerful nurse afraid of nothing, was hit by two bullets in the head. Lysorchuk, Nina, wounded. Borodina, Katya, her right hand was smashed. Yegorova, Antonina, she was killed. She went into an attack with her platoon. She was a junior nurse. A sub-machine-gunner shot her through both legs and she died from loss of blood. Arkanova, Tonya, accompanied wounded soldiers and was posted missing. Kanysheva, Galya, killed by a direct hit from a bomb. And there are just two of us left: Zoya and I . . . I was wounded by a mortar-bomb fragment near the bunker, and then by a shell splinter near the Volga crossing.

‘We studied at School No. 13 in Tobolsk. Mothers were crying: “How come you’re going [to the front]? There are only men there.” We imagined war very differently to how it’s turned out. Our battalion was in the advance guard of the regiment. It went into battle at ten in the morning. Although it was frightening, it was very interesting for us. Thirteen girls survived out of eighteen.

‘I had long been afraid of dead men, but one night, I had to hide behind a corpse when a sub-machine-gunner blazed away. And I lay behind this corpse. I was so afraid of blood on that first day that I didn’t want to eat anything, and I saw blood when I closed my eyes.

‘We had marched for eight days, 120 kilometres, without sleep and without food. I had been imagining what war was like – everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it really turned out to be like that, only more terrible.

‘I was peeling potatoes with the cook. We were engrossed in a conversation about soldiers. Suddenly, smoke covered everything, and the cook was killed, and a few minutes later, when the lieutenant came, a mortar bomb exploded and we were both wounded.

‘It’s particularly frightening to move during the night when Germans are shouting not far away, and everything is burning all around. It’s very hard to carry the wounded. We made soldiers carry them.

‘I cried when I was wounded. We didn’t collect the wounded in the daytime. Only once, when Kazantseva was carrying Kanysheva, but a sub-machine-gunner shot her in the head. In the daytime, we put them into a shelter, and collected them in the evenings, helped by soldiers.

‘There were moments sometimes when I regretted having
volunteered, but I consoled myself saying to myself that I was not the first one, and not the last. And Klava said: “Such wonderful people get killed, what difference would my death make?” We received letters from our teachers. They were proud of having brought up such daughters. Our friends are jealous of us, that we have the chance to bandage wounds. Papa writes: “Serve with honesty. Come back home with victory.” And Mama writes . . . Well, when I read what she writes to me, tears start streaming.’

Klava Kopylova, clerk: ‘I was buried in the bunker while I was typing an order. The lieutenant shouted to us: “Are you alive?” They dug me out. I moved to a bunker next door, and was buried there once again. They dug me out again, and I started typing again, and typed the document to the end. I will never forget it if I manage to stay alive. There was a bombardment that night. Everything was on fire. They woke me up. All were Party members in the bunker. They congratulated me so warmly, so nicely. On 7 November, I was given my Party card. They tried to photograph me several times for the Party identity card, but shells and mortar bombs were falling all the time. On quiet days, we tap dance and sing “The Little Blue Shawl”.
⁹
I read
Anna Karenina
and
Resurrection
.’

Lyolya Novikova, junior nurse: ‘Galya Titova’s friends told me that once when she was bandaging someone, there was heavy firing, the soldier was killed, and she was wounded. She stood up straight and said: “Goodbye, girls,” and fell. We buried her . . . The wounded soldiers write mostly to their commissars . . .
¹⁰
Although I speak German, I never speak to the prisoners, I don’t want even to speak to them.

‘My favourite subject was algebra. I had wanted to study at the Machine Manufacturing Institute . . . There are just three of us left, out of eighteen girls . . . We buried Tonya Yegorova. After the
first battle, we lost two girls. We saw the corporal who said that Tonya had died in his arms. She had said to him: “Ay, I am dying. I am in such pain, I don’t know whether these legs are mine, or not.” He said: “They are yours.” It was impossible to get close to the tank for two days. When we finally got there, we found her lying in the trench. We dressed her, put a handkerchief there, covered her face with a blouse. We were crying. There was myself, Galya Kanysheva and Klava Vasilyeva. They are both dead now. In reserve, we didn’t get on well with the soldiers. We checked them for lice and quarrelled with them all the time. And now the soldiers are saying: “We are very grateful to our girls.”

‘We have gone into the attack with our platoon, and crawled side by side with them. We have fed soldiers, given them water, bandaged them under fire. We turned out to be more resilient than the soldiers, we even used to urge them on. Sometimes, trembling at night, we would think: “Oh, if I were at home right now.”’

Sergeant Ilya Mironovich Brysin: ‘In the evening we began to carry shells from the crossing. It was six kilometres, first along the bank, then through a
balka
, then the city, and then to the plant. We carried sixteen kilos each. We carried them in groundsheets, eight at a time. We had to walk along the bank under mortar fire. One didn’t look in front of one’s feet any longer. Everyone looked up into the sky. Bombs were falling about five metres from us. We would leave the wounded with someone to take care of them and carry on. In the ravine, sub-machine-gunners and mortars fired at us. We gave it a name, the Ravine of Death. It was about four hundred metres long. One would walk [only about] five steps and then have to get down. Twenty-two men brought two hundred shells. Ten were killed or wounded. When we reached a street, we somehow managed to move forward between the buildings. Once, we stockpiled three hundred rounds and the enemy blew them up with a direct hit. Oh, how infuriated we were, to have to start again from the beginning.