Come into my Parlour (32 page)

“Records, too, have been practically eliminated. How long an officer or man has been in the Army is not of the slightest interest to us. It is what he does during his service that matters. Stalin himself, in consultation with the Marshals, nominates the senior commanders, but from Army Groups downwards it is left to the man on the spot. I pick my own subordinates down to Divisional Commanders. They pick their Colonels, and Colonels have authority to make officers, as
required, from the most promising men in their units. In this way the promotion of the best men is never blocked for long, and a really intelligent fellow can reach quite a high rank in a very short time. In addition this is achieved without waste of time, personnel or a single scrap of paper.”

“It is amazing,” Gregory murmured. “And, of course, there is no reason why it should not work. Still, I don't see how you manage to get on without supply services.”

“We have them, but in an immensely simplified form. As with pay, so with munitions. All types of arms and equipment are sent to senior commanders in bulk. They divide them up, and lower formations receive them as required. But no records are kept and no forms are used. There is a certain wastage, but that is more than counterbalanced by the swiftness with which the fighting units receive their urgent requirements.”

“How about rations?”

“There again everything is simplified. Nine-tenths of our men were born on the land, so they know how to live on it. Bread is, therefore, the only ration issued to the Soviet troops, apart from exceptional cases in which formations are fighting in areas which cannot possibly support them. As they retreat, meat, corn, oil, wine, root crops are all consumed so that none shall be left for the enemy. The supplies of bread are also issued in bulk and no record is kept of its disposal.”

“Such a method may serve while your army is retreating, but it could hardly do so if you launch a counter-offensive and it is successful.”

The Marshal nodded. “We may then have to send bulk supplies of meat with the bread trains, but, generally speaking, the principle will be adhered to. If a break-through occurs the Germans will not have time to destroy all their food dumps, and in any case our armoured formations are specially organised for just such a penetration. They will work in groups of five tanks, each group being independent and with orders to race ahead, entirely irrespective of what may be happening on its flanks, to the limit of its endurance. Every five fighting tanks will have a supply tank attached to them. This will be loaded to capacity with bread and petrol, and a girl——”

“A girl!” exclaimed Gregory.

“Why yes, a girl to cook whatever food the twenty-five men in the group may capture, and render them other services.”

Voroshilov's eyes were shining with excitement. He picked up his glass and, seeing that it was empty, got up and mixed himself another drink. It seemed to Gregory that his movements were a little uncoordinated, as though he were slightly drunk, but he was in tremendous
spirits and his mind seemed perfectly clear as he came back, and went on:

“You see everything—every conceivable thing—has been thought, out to save time and paper work, and prevent useful officers and men being wasted sitting about behind the lines in offices, or being employed in a non-fighting capacity. That even applies to training. The Germans, the British, the French, treat their new intakes as though they meant to make regular soldiers of them. They are given courses in this and lectures on that and months of rigorous drill on their barrack squares. Then they are made to participate in endless exercises, just as though they were a peacetime army. But in a war like this all that nonsense is entirely unnecessary. Now this is what happens to our new intakes.”

The Marshal sat forward eagerly and Gregory strove as he had never striven before to get the gist of his mongrel German interspersed with snatches of Russian, and Kuporovitch did all he could to interpret the sense of his old friend's rapid monologue.

“Our call-ups are entirely arbitrary. We don't bother about age groups and all that sort of thing, except locally. Every district commander behind the lines draws on the local population as required each week. Our only concern is that every one of them should keep his depot filled to capacity. The raw material is bathed, shaved, clothed and paraded. They are not taught to form fours or any such useless idiocy, but on their second day they are given a sub-machine gun apiece and taught how to clean, oil and use it. Their only training is in how best to take cover and what to do with a hand grenade. On average they get about three weeks of that; after which they are considered fit to fight in defence of their country.”

“Do you mean to say that you take men off the land and in less than a month send them into battle against the Germans?”

“Why not? A small percentage, who show more than average intelligence, are selected for the signal schools or sent for additional training in other specialised capacities, but for the great majority further training would be sheer waste of time. From their depots they are despatched direct to Army Group Pools, and from there they are issued in the same way as munitions and equipment—to any formation commander who is in need of replacements.”

“But when they reach the front they can hardly be more than a rabble, and they cannot have absorbed even the rudiments of discipline.”

Voroshilov laughed. “A rabble perhaps, but an armed rabble. As for discipline, they know that either disobedience or cowardice is punishable by death. But we very rarely have to resort to such
measures. Perhaps you have not realised,
Herr Baron
, that the one desire of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of these men is to get at and kill some of your countrymen.”

“All the same, I should have thought that it would have proved terribly difficult for the officers to handle such material effectively.”

“Not at all. If an advance is in progress all they are required to do is to go forward as far as their legs and such food as they can collect will carry them, shooting at any German they may see. If they are sent to a sector where a retreat is in progress they are told to find the best cover they can and that they are not to fall back until they have accounted for at least one of the enemy. Those who survive for a few weeks become better soldiers through their actual experience in battle than any we could make by keeping them for a year in schools and training camps.”

“Your casualties among these learners must be pretty heavy, though?”

“They are, but not exceptionally so; and the flow of replacements is unceasing. At the present rate of wastage we could go on filling the gaps for years without being seriously affected. And think of the enormous advantage we gain by this system. Instead of slaughtering fifty per cent of our best troops in the first few months of battle we have been able to conserve them for employment at a time of our own choosing; while we make the Germans pay for every yard of territory they gain by using our second strata troops reinforced by almost untrained man-power.”

Gregory was thinking that already, and he had been quick to realise that he now had a most definite answer to one part of the riddle he had set out to solve. This entirely new conception of using raw material to waste away the best forces of the enemy while keeping your own crack troops up your sleeve was positively staggering. He did not think it could possibly have worked anywhere except in a vast land like Russia, and with the special circumstances in which the Russian people had been nurtured for the past twenty years. But if they found it practical to put farm hands into the front line after only a month's training there could obviously be no question at all of the flow of replacements for the fighting units drying up.

In the meantime the Marshal was going on again. “You will appreciate too, the enormous advantage that our simplification of the supply system and virtual abolition of administrative departments gives us. You were contending just now that owing to the employment of great numbers of slave workers the Germans could put a higher proportion of their man-power into the field than we could, but our
elimination of non-combatant establishments more than cancels that out, so, in actual fact, the boot is on the other foot.”

“I certainly begin to understand now your unbounded confidence in ultimately defeating my country,” Gregory admitted. “But the question remains as to how long it will take you to do it. And, of course, a change of Government here might undermine the will to fight in your people, just as much as one in Germany would adversely affect the morale of our armies.”

“A change of Government!” exclaimed Voroshilov. “But such a thing is impossible here. The situations in Germany and in the Soviet Union are not comparable. The bulk of your General Staff apparently regard Hitler as a dangerous maniac, whereas the whole of ours looks up to Stalin as a wise and brilliant leader. If you are thinking of the Trotskyites, or the pro-Germans who conspired together under the leadership of Marshal Tukachevsky, forget them. All such traitors were liquidated by us years ago.”

“All the same, Marshal, a change might be forced upon you. I understand that for some years past Premier Stalin has been suffering from trouble with his heart. The very fact that from the highest to the lowest you have such faith in his leadership would make his loss all the more serious.”

Voroshilov put his hands to his sides, sat back in his chair and roared with laughter. When he had recovered a little, he gasped: “Forgive me,
Herr Baron
, but the joke was too much for me. Just to think that you highly-placed Germans should still believe that old story. It was nothing but a rumour deliberately put out by us during the months that the Tukachevsky conspiracy was being cleared up. We decided in the Polit-Bureau that until all who had been involved had been traced and liquidated we could not allow our beloved Comrade to make any public appearance, and so expose himself to possible assassination. The story that he was suffering from an affection of the heart was simply an excuse for his absence for a time from all important functions. No, you may rest easy on that score. Stalin is only two years older than myself, and as fit a man as I am.”

The second part of Gregory's secret questionnaire had now been answered in the same unequivocal manner as the first. He could only pray now that he would meet with equal good fortune regarding the third; yet he approached it with considerable trepidation, since, staggeringly frank as the Marshal had been on other matters, it still seemed almost unbelievable that he would be prepared to disclose Russia's future strategy to a man whom he believed to be a German officer shortly about to return to Germany, and for whose integrity he had only the word of his old friend Stefan Kuporovitch.

It was, however, now or never, so Gregory took the plunge and made a skilful lead in.

“All that concerns me, Marshal, is that we should work together to bring this war, which is wasting both our countries, to an end as speedily as possible. That can best be achieved by co-ordinating the time when I and my friends should strike at Hitler, with a major Russian victory, or at least a definite check to the advance of the German armies. Can you give me any indication when such an event is likely to occur?”

Voroshilov shook his head, then wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, as he was now perspiring slightly, before he replied. “No, it is almost impossible to forecast that at the present time. While the Germans continue to hold the initiative and we rely on a high percentage of practically untrained troops to maintain some sort of line, we are in no position to plan counter-offensives in advance.”

“But you have this magnificent reserve Army Group of first strata troops, which you can use at any time.”

“True; and we have used them to slow down the rate of the German advance in our centre, but we dare not gamble them in a full scale counter-offensive on any one sector while the rest of our front remains unstable. However, time will adjust that, in two ways. Firstly, every day that passes a few thousand of Germany's first line troops become casualties, and, secondly, ever greater numbers of our new levies are rapidly becoming old soldiers from their battle experience and qualifying themselves for transfer to artillery, engineer and tank units. The time must come, therefore, when the German advance will be held, and we can use our crack troops in a counter-offensive of real strategic importance.”

“You may have to use them before that,” Gregory hazarded. “Germany's campaigns in Poland, Norway, the Low Countries and the Balkans were so short and swift that her losses were almost negligible, and she has now had two years of war to train her reserves, so when the German Army marched into Russia it was more powerful than ever before. I am convinced that it will be able to campaign for many months yet without showing any perceptible loss of vigour.”

“I think you are probably right about that.”

“Well then, how much more territory can you afford to lose? You have already been deprived of Minsk, Smolensk, Novgorod, Pskov, Bryansk, Gomel, Zhitomir, Roslavel, Dnepropetrovsk, Cherkasy, Nikolaiev and Kherson, all valuable manufacturing towns, while Leningrad, Odessa and Kiev—three out of your seven biggest cities—are now surrounded and can no longer assist your war effort, except by holding out. I know that in recent years you have created great
armament plants behind the Urals, but a war cannot be fought on men and armament plants only. An innumerable variety of products are required to keep a great army in the field, your plants supplied and your munition workers fed, housed and clothed. With every town you lose, your command of certain war essentials lessens and, if the Germans continue to force you back, a time must come when you can no longer carry on the war from lack of vital necessities.”

“You are right again. Look! I will show you!” Voroshilov jumped up, lurched slightly, and fumbled among the maps on his table. Finding one that showed the whole of European Russia, with the approximate front marked on it, he spread it out while his visitors stood up and looked over his shoulder. Then, stubbing down the square tip of his forefinger on Baku, he went on, still speaking fast but a little thickly: