THEY STOPPED for the night in Verkhne-Pogromnoye. Major Berozkin and the lieutenant from military school were to sleep in a barn. Lieutenant Colonel Darensky was offered a bed in a peasant hut, and the driver and the supplies-section officer were to sleep in the truck, close to a slit trench in the yard.
It was stiflingly hot. They could hear artillery fire to the west and there were swirls of glowing smoke to the south. There was a constant rumble from downstream—as if the waters of the Volga were falling from a high cliff into some underworld—and the whole flat mass of the Transvolga steppe was trembling. The hut’s windows rang, the door creaked gently on its hinges, the hay rustled and small lumps of clay dropped from the ceiling. Somewhere nearby a cow was breathing heavily, getting to its feet and lying down again, disturbed by the noise, and by the smell of petrol and dust.
Infantry, guns and trucks were all moving down the main street. The blurred light of vehicle headlamps fell on the swaying backs of men on foot, on rifles glinting through clouds of dust, on the burnished barrels of anti-tank rifles, on mortars broad as samovar chimneys. Dust hung in the air and swirled around men’s feet. There seemed no end to the flow of people, all utterly silent. Sometimes a stray flicker fell on a head in an iron helmet, or on the thin face, almost black with dust but with gleaming teeth, of an exhausted, stumbling foot soldier. A moment later another vehicle’s headlamps would pick out a platoon of motor infantry in the back of a truck—helmets, rifles, dark faces and fluttering tarpaulins.
Powerful three-axle Studebakers growled past, towing seventy-six-millimetre guns with barrels still warm from the heat of the day.
Grass snakes and whip snakes, shaken by all the noise, tried to slip across the road and away into the steppe. Dozens of thin crushed bodies lay dark against the white sand.
The sky was equally full of noise. Junkers and Heinkels crept between the stars. U-2 “maize hoppers” rattled along just above the ground, soon to glide over the German lines and release their bombs.9 Tupolev TB-3 heavy bombers—four-engine mammoths—lumbered along at an invisible height.
For the men below, it was as if they were standing beneath a vast dark blue bridge painted with stars, as if thousands of iron wheels were rumbling past over their heads.
Smoothly rotating searchlights from steppe airfields marked out night-time landing strips. On the far horizon a shining kilometre-long pencil drew pale blue circles with silent but frenzied zeal.
There was no beginning or end to the columns of men and vehicles. Headlamps shone and were instantly extinguished, scared by angry shouts from the foot soldiers, “Lights off! Bombers!”
Black dust swirled over the road. High in the sky hung a shimmering glow—a glow that had now hung over Stalingrad, over the Volga and the surrounding steppe, for several nights.
The whole world had seen this glow. It fascinated and horrified those now moving towards it.
Blessèd the man who’s visited this world
At moments of great destiny.
Would Tyutchev have remembered these words of his, had he, on this August night, been marching towards the city on the Volga where the world’s fate was being decided?10
•
Meanwhile, soldiers from the Southwestern Front, defeated in the battles west of the Don, were plodding towards Stalingrad from the south, following dirt roads and small paths through the steppe. Some had dirty bandages around their left hands11 and were staring dispiritedly down at the ground. Some were feeling their way with sticks, as if blind. Some were crying out with pain, trying not to put any weight on bloody foot sores eaten away by sweat and filth. In their eyes could be seen all the horror of war—and their memories of a bridge over the Don, of half-dead men trying to run across slippery red planks. After the Don, these soldiers had crossed the Volga, some on boards, some on car tyres, some clinging to wrecked boats. They could still hear the howls of the wounded they had seen standing on the stairs or by the windows of burning hospitals. They could still hear the wild laughter of men who had lost their minds and were shaking their fists at a sky heavy with German bombers. Their cheeks still burned from incandescent air. Day and night, these soldiers walked on, driven by horror.
Further away in the steppe, under the warm August sky, lay refugees from Stalingrad: women and girls in felt boots, in fur coats or warm fur-trimmed jackets, in greatcoats snatched from cupboards as families abandoned their homes. Children lay asleep on bags and bundles. The smell of city mothballs mingled with the smell of steppe wormwood.
Still further away, in gullies and ravines hollowed out by spring floods, flickered the lights of small fires. Wanderers, deserters and members of workers’ battalions who had lost their units after an air raid were darning threadbare clothes or cooking pumpkins pilfered from kolkhoz gardens. Some were picking off lice, screwing up their eyes and concentrating as intently as if there were no more important task in the world. Every now and then they wiped their fingers over the dry ground.
•
The driver and the supplies officer were standing out in the yard with the mistress of the hut.
They gazed in silence at the troops hurrying towards Stalingrad in the middle of the night. There were moments when they seemed to be watching not columns of individual soldiers but a single huge creature with a huge iron heart and eyes fixed grimly on the road ahead.
A man in a helmet slipped away from his company and ran up to the gate.
“Mother!” he cried, holding out a slim pharmacy bottle. “Water! The dust’s killing me. My insides are burning.”
The old woman fetched a jug and began to pour water into the narrow throat of his bottle. The soldier stood and waited, looking first at the imposing supplies officer and then at his company, which had now passed by.
“You need a proper flask,” said the supplies officer. “Whoever heard of a soldier with no flask?”
“It was hard enough to get hold of this,” the soldier replied. “And someone’s already tried to steal it.”
He straightened his tarpaulin belt. His voice was somehow both thin and hoarse, like a fledgling’s as it cheeps for food. And his thin face, his sharp nose, his pitiful eyes peeping out from under a helmet too big for him—everything about him recalled a bird peeping out of a nest.
He corked up his bottle, drank down a mug of water and ran off again, in boots that were also too big. Muttering “One anti-tank unit, two with mortars—and then us,” he disappeared into the dark.
The supplies officer on his way to Stalingrad in search of vodka said, “That young fool won’t last long.”
“No,” said the driver. “Fighters like him don’t fight for long.”