IN THE second half of August, units of the Stalingrad people’s militia, drawn from clerks and factory workers, Volga sailors and dock workers, took up defensive positions on the city’s outskirts. A regular division of internal troops also received orders to prepare for combat.21
This regular division had no combat experience, but it was full strength, well armed and well trained; soldiers and commanders alike were professionals, not volunteers or recent conscripts.
As the militia regiments moved towards the city’s western outskirts, units from the front were retreating towards them. These battered units, exhausted by constant fighting and a long, difficult retreat, were what remained of two infantry armies—the 62nd, to the west, and the 64th, further south. They were now positioned on the east bank of the Don, on the defensive line constructed by the towns-people of Stalingrad.
Before crossing the Don, these units had been some distance apart from one another, linked only tenuously. Now they stood close together, ready to fight side by side.
The German forces, however, were also drawing together as they approached Stalingrad. As before, they outnumbered the Russians and were better equipped, both in the air and on the ground.
Seryozha Shaposhnikov had by then completed one month of military training in a militia battalion just outside the city, in Beketovka. One morning his company was woken early and ordered to march west, bringing up the rear of their regiment. By noon, they had reached a gully to the west of the factory settlement of Rynok. Their dugouts and trenches were in a low-lying part of the steppe; Stalingrad itself was no longer visible. In the distance they could see only the small grey houses and grey fences of the village of Okatovka and a little-used back road running towards the Volga.
After marching thirty kilometres under the hot steppe sun, through long, coarse, dust-covered grass that clung to their legs like strands of wire, Seryozha and his comrades, still unused to army life, were exhausted. The march had seemed endless and every stride had required effort. All a man can think of during a march like that is whether or not he has the strength to reach the next telegraph pole, and the steppe had appeared infinite—certainly too vast to be measured by the gaps between telegraph poles.
Nevertheless, the regiment reached its assigned position. Sighing with relief and pleasure, the men slid down into the trenches and dugouts constructed several months earlier. They took off their boots and stretched out on the dirt floor, in a dusty golden half-darkness that shielded them from the sun.
Lying with his eyes shut beside a log wall, Seryozha experienced a sweet sense of peace and exhaustion. He had no thoughts at all; his bodily sensations were too strong, and there were too many of them. His back was aching, the soles of his feet were inflamed, the blood was hammering against his temples, and his cheeks had been burnt by the fierce sun. His whole body felt heavy, as if cast from metal, yet at the same time so light as to be almost weightless—a fusion of opposites possible only at moments of extreme fatigue. And this acute sense of exhaustion engendered in him a certain boyish sense of self-respect. He was proud not to have fallen behind, not to have complained or begun to limp, not to have begged for a place on the cart. He had been at the very end of the column, next to an elderly carpenter by the name of Polyakov. As they marched through the Sculpture Garden and the factory district, women had shaken their heads and said, “A grandad and a child—those two will never make it to the front line.”
Polyakov had grey hair and his face was all wrinkles and dense grey stubble. Beside him, skinny little Seryozha with his sharp nose and narrow shoulders did indeed look like a fledgling.
Both the child and the grandad, however, showed endurance and determination, and they finished the day in better shape than many of their comrades. Neither developed blisters.
Polyakov had drawn strength from pride, from the need of an aging man to prove that he is still young. Seryozha had drawn strength and perseverance from the eternal quest of the young and inexperienced to appear strong and mature.
It was calm and quiet in the dugout. The only sounds were the men’s heavy breathing and the occasional rustle of a clod of dry earth sliding down the wooden wall.
Then came the sound of a familiar voice. Kryakin, their company commander, was bellowing out commands. He was drawing nearer.
“Already, come to torment us again!” exclaimed Gradusov, one of the other militiamen. “He was marching alongside us. I’d thought he’d want some rest too, that he’d leave us alone for a while.” He went on, almost tearfully, “But I’m not getting up—no, not even if the man threatens to shoot me.”
“You’ll get up all right!” said Chentsov, another of the men lying nearby. He appeared to take pleasure in saying this, as if he himself would be allowed to stay where he was.
Gradusov sat up. He looked at his comrades, all still lying down, and said, “Yes, we’ve been burnt by the sun, well and truly.”22
Gradusov’s plump neck and freckled arms had gone scarlet rather than brown, and he looked as if he had been scalded. His large, freckled face had also gone scarlet. He was clearly in pain.
Kryakin was now just above them. “On with your boots!” he called out. “And fall into line!”
Polyakov had appeared to be asleep, but he quickly got up and began putting on his foot cloths. Chentsov and Gradusov were already pulling on their boots, groaning repeatedly. Their feet were badly blistered and their foot cloths rigid from dried sweat.
Only a moment ago Seryozha had been thinking that no power in the world could prompt him to move; he would sooner die of thirst, he had said to himself, than get up and try to find water. But now, quickly and silently, he too began putting on his foot cloths and boots.
Soon the company had formed up, and Kryakin was walking down the line, calling the roll. He was a short man with high cheekbones, a wide mouth and large nose, and bronze-coloured eyes that seemed fixed in position; if he needed to look to one side, he turned his whole head and torso. Before the war he had been a district inspector for the fire brigade, and some of the soldiers had come across him in the course of their previous jobs. They remembered him as rather quiet, even shy, always smiling and ready to oblige; he had usually gone about in a green tunic worn with a thin belt, and black trousers tucked into his boots. Now, though, he was a company commander—and all his traits and quirks, all his particular understandings of the world, which had formerly hardly mattered to anyone, were now of immense importance to dozens of men, both young and old. He did his best to seem like a man used to ordering others about—but, being weak and unsure of himself, he could only do this by being harsh and brutal. Seryozha had once heard him say to Bryushkov, one of the platoon commanders, “You must learn how to speak to your men. I heard you say to one of them, ‘Why is one of your buttons missing?’ That’s not good—you should never use the word why. The man will immediately come out with some reason: He’s lost his needle, there’s no thread and he’s already reported this to the sergeant . . . You should address them like this.” And he bellowed out, “Replace button!”
Kryakin’s bellow was like a blow to the chest.
Although barely able to stand upright himself, Kryakin had ordered his men to line up. He berated some for standing out of line and others for their poor articulation during roll call. Next, he checked their weapons and found that Ilushkin appeared to have lost his bayonet.
Ilushkin, tall and sullen-looking, stepped hesitantly forward. Kryakin addressed him: “What am I to reply if asked by higher command, ‘Commander of the 3rd Company, where is the bayonet, entrusted to your safekeeping, from rifle number 612192?’”
Ilushkin tried to glance out of the corner of his eye at the men behind him. Not knowing how to reply, he remained silent. Kryakin questioned Ilushkin’s platoon commander and learned that during a brief halt Ilushkin had used his bayonet to hack down some branches; he had wanted to keep off the sun off his face as he lay on the ground. Ilushkin then remembered: Yes, he must indeed have forgotten to replace his bayonet at the end of the halt.
Kryakin ordered him to go back and retrieve his bayonet. Rather slowly, Ilushkin set off towards the city. Quietly but gravely, Kryakin called out after him, “Step to it, Ilushkin, step to it!”
In Kryakin’s eyes there was a look of sober, severe inspiration. By keeping his exhausted company standing in the full heat of the sun, he believed he was making both them and himself into better men.
“Gradusov,” he said, “take this report to the battalion commander. He’s in that ravine over there, 450 metres distant.” And he opened his orange map case, took out a sheet of paper folded in four and handed it to Gradusov.
Gradusov returned twenty minutes later, at a brisk pace, and cheerfully handed Kryakin a small grey envelope. After dropping down into the dugout, Gradusov told his comrades that the battalion commander, after reading the report, had said to his chief of staff, “What the hell does that oaf think he’s up to? Reviewing his men in the open steppe—does he want to call up enemy planes? I’ll write him a note—his last warning.”
During that first day, life in the open steppe had seemed impossible; there was no water, no kitchen, no glass windows, no streets, no pavements—only purposeless bustle, secret despair and the shouting of orders. There were no mortars where there were mortar bombs, and no mortar bombs where there were mortars. It had seemed that no one was giving any thought to the company, that they would remain in the steppe forever, forgotten by everyone. But then, come evening, barefoot young lads and girls in white headscarves had appeared from Okatovka. There was singing, laughter and the strains of a concertina. Soon the tall feathergrass was littered with white pumpkin seed husks. And suddenly the steppe became habitable. There in the gully, among the bushes, was a rich and pure spring of water; someone brought buckets and then a used petrol barrel. The briar roses on the gully’s steep slopes and the rough, twisted branches of the low-growing steppe pears and cherries were quickly festooned with calico shirts and foot cloths. Watermelons, tomatoes and cucumbers appeared. Snaking its way through the grass, connecting them to the city they had left behind, was a black signals cable. And on the second night some three-tonners drew up, bringing Molotov cocktails, mortars and mortar bombs, and machine guns and cartridges, all straight from the factory workshops. Field kitchens arrived—and, an hour later, two artillery batteries. There was something moving about this sudden appearance, in the night steppe, of bread from the main Stalingrad bakery and weapons produced by Stalingrad factories. The weapons felt friendly. Only a few weeks ago, many of the militiamen had themselves been working at the Tractor Factory, the Barricades and Red October. When they put their hands on the gun barrels, the deadly steel seemed to be bringing them greetings from their wives, neighbours and comrades, from their workshops, streets, bars, flower beds and kitchen gardens, from a life that now lay far behind them. And the bread, covered by sheets of tarpaulin, was as warm as a living body.
That night, the political instructors began distributing copies of Stalingrad Pravda.
By the end of the second day the men had settled into their trenches and dugouts, trodden paths to the nearby spring and discovered for themselves what was good and what was bad about life in the steppe. At times they almost forgot that the enemy was approaching; life might go on like this forever, in quiet steppe that was grey, white and dusty in daytime, and a deep blue in the evenings. But in the night sky they could see two distinct areas of light—one from the giant Stalingrad factories, the other from fires now blazing in the west—and they could hear not only the factories’ distant rumble but also the explosions of bombs and shells near the banks of the Don.