THE STALINGRAD ARMY

THE ROAD to the Battalion runs along a railway line crowded withfreight cars standing in the newly-fallen snow. We are walkingover a vacant lot pitted with bomb and shell craters. Ahead of us,on the hilI, looms the water towers where the Germans are ensconced.The area is in full view of the German snipers and observers. Butthe slim Red Army man in the long greatcoat walking unhurriedlybeside me is quite at his ease.

"They can see us all right," he drawls. "There was a time whenwe used to crawl along here, at night, but things are different now:they're sparing their cartridges and bombs."

Changing the subject suddenly he asks me whether I play chess,and goes on to explain that he is a first category chess-player and wasabout to have received the title of maestro when the war broke out.Never before had I discussed this abstract and noble game with thefeeling that Germans were watching me and counting their bullets. Ireply rather absently for I am too busy wondering whether the Ger-mans sheltered in the concrete towers will really spare their ammuni-tion. But the closer we come to the towers the less visible they becomeuntil finally they dip out of sight behind the crest of the hill.

The path leads us through one of the wrecked shops of a huge Sta-lingrad plant. We pass great mounds of rusty scrap iron, huge ladlesfor pouring steel, steel plates and shattered walls. The Red Army menare so accustomed to the devastation here that they do not pay theslightest attention to it. On the contrary, their interest is more likelyto be roused by a window that has survived in a wrecked works' office,by a tall chimney undamaged by shells, or by a little wooden housethat by some miracle has escaped destruction.

"Look at that house! It's still alive and kicking," they say with asmile as.they pass.

And indeed these rare evidences of a life of peace are strangelymoving in this kingdom of destruction and death.

Battalion Headquarters are located in the basement of a largefour-storey building, part of a huge industrial plant. This is the west-ernmost point of our Stalingrad front. Like a promontory it jutsinto the midst of houses and structures occupied by the Germans. Inspite of the enemy's nearness the Red Army men go about their busi-ness calmly and leisurely. Two men are sawing wood, while a third is.. ".•.

splitting logs. A couple of Red Army men pass with thermos contain-ers. Another is sitting in the shadow of a half-wrecked wall, indus-triously fixing a damaged mortar and humming a tune: Like a skilledcraftsman at his bench he pauses now and then to ponder some de-tail of his work, then takes up the tool and goes at it again, hummingunder his breath.

T.he building bears traces of the frightful havoc wrought by theGermans. All around it are huge pits gouged out by German "half-tonners." Concrete walls and ceiling have been smashed by directhits of aerial bombs. The iron fixtures, wrenched by the force of theblasts, hang and sag like a flimsy fishing net gnawed by the teeth of agiant sturgeon. The western wall has been knocked to atoms by long-range guns; the northern wall succumhed to a sextuple mortar. Lightshells and mortar bombs have nibbled pieces out of the other walls.Nevertheless, out of the metal and stone pulverized by the German fire,the Red Army men have erected new walls with long, narrow embra-sures. This ruined fortress has not surrendered. If has remained theoutpost of our defences and is now supporting our offensive with itsfire.

Today, as yesterday, fierce fighting rages here. In several spotsthe Battalion trenches are no more than twenty yards from the enemy.The sentry can hear the Germans walking about in their trenches,the cursing when the rations are issued, and all night long the trampof the German sentry's feet, as he paces back and forth in his tatteredboots. Everything here is under fire, and every stone is a target. Theplace is teeming with snipers and in these deep, narrow trencheswhere the men have built themselves dugouts, installed stoves withflues made of cartridge cases, where they swear roundly at the com-rade who is shirking his share of wood chopping, where they smacktheir lips as they dip their wooden spoons into the soup that hasbeen brought up in thermos containers through communication trench-es-here, the tension of this battle to the death never abates day ornight.

The Germans are fully aware of the importance of this sector intheir system of defences. If one raises one's head even the fraction ofan inch above the edge of the trench, the shot of a German snipercracks out. They are not sparing with their cartridges here.

But the frozen, stony soil into which the Germans have dug them-selves deep cannot save them. Pickaxes and spades ring day and

night as our men press forward step by step, breasting the earth,drawing closer and closer to the comma:nding height. And the Ger-mans feel that the hour is near when neither sniper nor machine-gun.ner will avail them. And this sound of the pickaxe-strikes terror intotheir hearts, and they long for it to stop, if only for a minute.

"Russ, have a smoke!'.' they shout.But the Russians do not reply. Suddenly the clatter of pickaxes

and spades vanishes in the thunder of explosions: the Germans aretrying to drown out the sound of the relentless labour of the Russiansin the blast of bursting grenades. In reply, grenades fly from ourtrenches as well. But scarcely does the smoke disperse and the thunderdie down than the ringing of spades and picks smites the ears of theGermans again. No, this soil will not safeguard them against death.This soil is their death. The Russians are coming closer and closetevery hour, every minute, cutting their way through the flinty hardnessof the wintry soil.

... Again we are in Battalion Headquarters. Through a wreckedwan on which still hangs the sign: "Please close the door. Fight againstflies," we pass into the deep basement. On a table stands a shiny brasssamovar. Red' Army men and commanders are resting on spring mat-tresses which they have hauled over from gutted homes in the neigh-bourhood.

Captain Ilgachkin, the Battalion Commander, is a tall, thin youngman with black eyes and a high, dark forehead. He is a Chuvash bynationality. In his face, in his fiery eyes arid sunken cheeks, in hisspeech one feels the dogged Stalingrad determination. He himselfsays: _

"I have been here since September. And now I think of nothingbut that hill: from the moment I get up in the morning until night.And even when I'm asleep, 1 see it in DIy dreams." Excitedly he bangshis fist on the table and 'says: "And I'll take it, by heavens, I'll take it!The plan is flawless. There can be no mistake."

In October he and Private Repa were fired by another idea : tobring down a Junkers-B? with an anti-tank rifle. Ilgachkin made anumber of fairly complicated calculations, taking into account themuzzle velocity of a bullet and the average speed of an aeroplane anddrew up an aim correction table. An amazingly ingenious and simple"anti- aircraft installation" was set up. They drove a 'stake into theground and fixed a cart-wheel on it. Then they attached an anti-tank

rifle to the spokes of the wheel by its supports with the barrel lyingbetween the spokes. With this contraption Repa, gaunt and melancholyas ever, brought down three Junkers-87 dive 'bombers.

Now Vassili Zaitsev, the famous Stalingrad sniper, has takenan interest in the anti-tank gun. He has fitted it with a telescopic sightfrom a sniper's rifle. He aims to knock out German machine-gun nestsby planting bullets square in the loopholes. And 1 am sure that he.will do it. Zaitsev himself is a man of few words. "Our Zaitsev,"they say in the Division, "is well-bred and modest; he's already donefor two hundred and twenty-five Germans." He is very mu~h respectedin the city. They call the young snipers whom he has trained "Zaicha-ta" [Zaitsev is derived from zayats which means "rabbit" in Russian.Zaichata-"bunnies"] and when he addresses them and asks: "Am Iright?" they all answer in chorus, "Quite right, Vassili Ivanovich,quite right." Just now Zaitsev is consulting with the engineers, makingdrawings, and .jotting down figures.

Here in Stalingrad one frequently comes across people who notonly put all their heart and soul into the war but all the force of theirintellect as well. I bave met any number of colonels, N.C.O.'s, rank-and- filers all busily engaged day and night figuring, estimating, mak-ing working drawings, just as if they felt in duty bound not onlyto defend the city with their lives, but to devise some invention, toengage in research work here in these cellars of the city in the spaciouslaboratories of whose institutes and factories brilliant professors andengineers recently worked.

The Stalingrad army is fighting in the city and III factories. Andjust as the directors of the huge Stalingrad plants and the secretariesof the District Party Committees once took pride in the fact thatit was in their particular establishment or district rather than in someother that this or that famous Stakhanovite was working, so, now,the divisional commanders are proud of their outstanding fighters.Laughingly Batyuk checks them off on his fingers:

. "The best sniper, Zaitsev, is with me; the best mortar-gunner, Bez-didko, is with me; the best gunner in Stalingrad, Shuklin, is' also inmy unit."

And just as every district of the city once had its own traditions,its own character, its own peculiar features, so, now, the variousStalingrad divisions, all equal in glory and services rendered, differfrom. one another in many peculiar features and characteristic details.

We have already described the traditions of Rodimtsev's and Gurtiev'sDivisions. In Batyuk's gallant Division there is an air of kindlyUkrainian hospitality, of good-natured chaff. They like to tell here ofhow Batyuk was standing near a dugout while German mortar bombs'were whizzing by one after another into a gully near the Chief ofArtillery, who was trying to get out of his underground quarters, andhow he jokingly corrected the aim:

"Two yards to the right. One yard to the left! Hey, Chief, lookout! "

They also like to poke fun at Bezdidko, the famous virtuoso onthe heavy mortar. And Bezdidko, who doesn't know what it means tomiss and who places every bomb within an inch of its mark, laughsand fumes. And Bezdidko himself, a man with a soft, lilting tenor anda shrewd Ukrainian smile, with 1,305 Germans to his credit, good-naturedly rags Battery Commander Shuklin, who with a single guncrippled fourteen tanks in the course of one day:

"The only reason he fired from one gun is that he only had onegun to fire from!"

Here, in the Battalion, they like to joke, to tell funny storiesabout one another. They tell about sudden night encounters with theGermans; how they catch German grenades on the fly and throwthem back into the German trenches; 'tell how they "played tunes" on

- their six-barrelled mortar, landing all six bombs square in theGerman bunkers; tell how a huge fragment of a ton bomb, whichcould easily have killed an elephant, flew by and cut like a razorthrough the greatcoat, quilted jacket, tunic and undershirt of aRed Army man without even scratching him. And in telling thesestories the men laugh so heartily that you find yourself laughing withthem.

The company trench mortars are in an adljoining sector of the fac-tory basement, From here they fire, from here keep watch on the ene-my; here they sing, eat and listen to the gramophone.

A slender sunbeam penetrated through the shutter over the base-ment window. Slowly the beam crept over the foot of. a bed, skimmedever the boot of the man lying there, played on a metal button of hisgreatcoat, crawled on to the table and cautiously, as if fearing anexplosion, brushed past the hand-grenade lying beside the samovar,

It crept higher and higher, which meant that the sun was setting andthe winter night setting in.

Usually they say: "Quiet night." But this night could not havebeen called quiet. First there was a long-drawn-out howl, and thencame the sound of heavy and frequent explosions, at which the men inthe cellar remarked: "The sextuple's on the war path again." This"was followed by equally heavy explosions and then a protracted anddistant boom. Several seconds later came a single blast. "That's ourlong. range gun from the opposite bank," someone said. And eventhough the firing kept up all the time and the onset of evening in thedark cold cellar could be observed only by the fact that the sunbeamhad crept high up and was already passing over the sooty ceiling, thiswas really a quiet evening.

A Red Army man wound up the gramophone."What shall I put on?" he asked.Immediately several voices answered:"Put on our record, you know."And here a strange thing occurred. While the Red Army man was

looking for the record, I thought to myself: "How nice it would beto hear my favourite 'Irish Drinking Song' in this gloomy, half-ruinedbasement." Picture my surprise and pleasure when a moment laterthe' strains of Beethoven's song flowed from the gramophone.

Evidently, this song was a favourite among the men, too, for"they eneored it at least ten times."

The effect of the words and of this simple yet brilliant piece ofmusic was inexpressibly powerful here. A man on active serviceexperiences many emotions, passionate, joyful and bitter; he knowshatred and longing, knows sorrow and fear, love, pity, vengeance.But I have" seldom seen wistfulness among men at war. Yet in thesewords, in this music of a grieving heart, in this humble, half-humour-ous request, there was an expression of profound and inexpressiblymoving wistfulness.

And here, as never before, I delighted in the great power of trueart, in the fact that soldiers who had been face to face with deathfor three months in this devastated, ravaged butunsurrendering build-ing were listening to a Beethoven song as solemnly as if they wereattending a church service. "

The strains of this song in the gloom of the cellar evoked solemnand vivid recollections of scores of men who were defending Stalin-

grad, men who personified the grandeur of the people's 'spirit. I re-called Sergeant Vlassov, grim and unrelenting, holding the crossing.I recalled sapper Brysin, handsome, swarthy, fearless and bold, fight-ing one against twenty in an empty two-storey house. I recalled Pod-khanov who refused to be sent back across the Volga when he hadbeen wourided. When the fighting began, he had crawled out fromunderground where the ambulance company was quartered, had creptup to the frontline and opened fire. I recalled how Sergeant Vyruchkin,under raking enemy fire, had dug into the debris under which Divi-sional Headquarters-at the Tractor Plant-was buried. He had dugaway with such passionate fury that he had actually foamed at themouth and he had to be dragged away for fear that he would dropdead from the superhuman effort. I recalled how several hours earlier,this same Vyruchkin had jumped into a burning truck loaded withammunition and extinguished the flames, And I remembered thatGeneral Zholudev, the Divisional Commander, had been unable to ex-press his gratitude to Vyruchkin because the brave Sergeant had beenkilled by a German mortar bomb. Perhaps he had inherited the noble.tradition of his ancestors to rush, heedless of danger, to the rescue ofthose in distress. Perhaps that is why his family bore the name ofVyruchkin [from the Russian verb vyruchat, meaning "to rescue"].

I thought of Volkov of the Pontoon Battalion. With a smashedcollarbone, he had made his way thirty kilometres from the hospitalto the river crossing, crawling "most of the way and with an occa-sional lift from a passing car. I remember how he wept when theysent him back to the hospital. I thought of the men who had beenburned to death in one of the Tractor Plant houses; they had refusedto leave the burning building and had kept up their fire to the lastround. I thought of the men who had fought for the Barricades Plantand for Mamayev Hill, the men who had lived through the Germanpanzer attack in the "Sculpture Gardens," recalled the battalion which

. had perished to a man, from the commander to the very last private, indefence of the StaJingrad railway station. I recalled the broad beatentrack leading to the fishermen's settlement on the bank of the Volga-a road of glory and death; thought of the silent columns marchingalong it in the stifling dust of August, in the moonlit nights of Sep-tember, in the drizaling rains of October, in the snow of November.They had marched with a heavy step-anti-tank men, tommy-gun-ners, infantrymen, machine-gunners-had marched in grim and ;olemn

silence, and the only sound that had come from them was the clankof their weapons and the ringing of the ground under their measuredtread.

And suddenly I recalled a letter written in a childish hand, a:letter lying beside a Red Army man who had been killed in a block-house. "Good morning, or maybe I should say good evening. How areyou, Daddy? I'm terribly lonesome without you. Home is not homewithout you. Do come and visit us even if it's only for an hour. I'mwriting and my tears are just pouring down. This is your daughterNina writing."

And I recalled this fallen Daddy. Maybe he had been reading theletter as he felt death approaching, and the crumpled sheet had re-mained there beside his head ....

How can I convey the emotion I felt in that hour in the darkbasement of the plant that had not surrendered to the enemy, as, I satthere listening to the solemn and melancholy song and gazed at thestern and pensive faces of the men in· Red Army greatcoats!

January 1, 1943Stalingrad