Both his voice and eyes had the burning cold of alcohol. His strength no longer lay in his military experience or his knowledge of the map, but in his harsh, wild, impetuous soul.
A few minutes later, staff officers, clerks, signallers and telephonists were pushing and shoving each other as they streamed out of the conduit. Following the light-footed Rodimtsev, they ran towards the ravine. It was full of the sound of shots and explosions, of shouting and cursing.
Krymov was one of the first to reach the ravine. As he looked down, breathing heavily, his heart gave a shudder of mingled disgust, fear and hatred. Dim figures appeared out of the darkness, rifles flashed, red and green eyes gleamed momentarily, and the air was full of the whistle of iron. He seemed to be looking into a vast pit full of hundreds of poisonous snakes that were slithering about in confusion, hissing and rustling through the dry grass.
With a feeling of revulsion and fury, Krymov began firing at the flashes below and the quick shadows creeping their way up the slope.
Thirty or forty yards away a group of Germans appeared on the crest. They were making for the mouth of the conduit. The rumble of exploding grenades shook both the air and the earth.
It was as though a huge black cauldron were boiling and Krymov were immersed, body and soul, in its gurgling, bubbling waters. He could no longer think or feel as he had ever thought or felt before. For a moment he seemed to be in control of the whirlpool that had seized hold of him; then a thick black pitch seemed to pour into his eyes and nostrils – there was no air left to breathe, no stars over his head, nothing but this darkness, this ravine and these strange creatures rustling through the dry grass.
And yet, in spite of the confusion around him, he retained a clear sense both of his own strength and of the strength of the men beside him; he felt an almost palpable sense of solidarity with them, and a sense of joy that Rodimtsev was somewhere nearby.
This strange clarity, which arose at a moment when it was impossible to tell whether a man three yards away was a friend or an enemy, was linked to an equally clear and inexplicable sense of the general course of the fighting, the sense that allows a soldier to judge the true correlation of forces in a battle and to predict its outcome.
11
The intuition of a deafened and isolated soldier often turns out to be nearer the truth than judgements delivered by staff officers as they study the map.
An extraordinary change takes place at the turning-point in a battle: a soldier looks round, after apparently gaining his objective, and suddenly finds he has lost sight of his comrades; while the enemy, who had seemed so weak, scattered and stupid, is now united and therefore invincible. A deep change in perception takes place at this mysterious turning-point: a gallant, intelligent 'We' becomes a frail, timid 'I', while the enemy changes from a hunted, isolated prey to a terrible, threatening 'Them'.
As he overcame the enemy resistance, the advancing soldier had perceived everything separately: a shell-burst here, a rattle of machine-gun fire there, an enemy soldier there, hiding behind that shelter and about to run…He can't not run – he's cut off from that isolated piece of artillery, that isolated machine-gun, that isolated soldier blazing away beside him. But I – I am we, I am the mass of infantry going into the attack, I am the supporting tanks and artillery, I am the flare lighting up our common cause. And then suddenly I am alone – and everything that was isolated and weak has fused into a solid roar of enemy rifle-fire, machine-gun fire and artillery fire. This united enemy is now invincible; the only safety lies in my flight, in hiding my head, in covering my shoulders, my forehead, my jaw…
Often, it is the understanding of this transition that gives warfare the right to be called an art. This alternating sense of singularity and plurality is a key not only to the success of night-attacks by companies and battalions, but to the military success and failure of entire armies and peoples.
One sense almost entirely lost during combat is that of time.
After dancing all night at a New Year's ball, a girl will be unable to say whether the time passed quickly or slowly. Similarly, a man who has done twenty-five years in the Schlüsselburg Prison will say: 'I seem to have been a whole eternity in this fortress, and at the same time I only seem to have been here a few weeks.'
The night at the ball is full of looks, smiles, caresses, snatches of music, each of which takes place so swiftly as to leave no sense of duration in the girl's consciousness. Taken together, however, these moments engender the sense of a long interval of time that contains all the joys of human existence.
For the prisoner it is the exact opposite: his twenty-five years are composed of discrete intervals of time – from morning roll-call to evening roll-call, from breakfast to lunchtime – each of which seems unbearably long. But the twilight monotony of the months and years engenders a sense that time itself has contracted, has shrunk. And all this gives rise to the same sense of simultaneous quickness and endlessness felt by the girl at the ball.
The distortion of the sense of time during combat is something still more complex. Here there is a distortion even in the individual, primary sensations. One second can stretch out for eternity, and long hours can crumple together.
The sense of duration is linked to such fleeting events as the whistle of shells and bombs, the flashes of shots and explosions. The sense of quickness, on the other hand, is linked to protracted events: crossing a ploughed field under fire, crawling from one shelter to another. And as for hand-to-hand fighting – that takes place quite outside time.
In this chaos of blinding light and blinding darkness, of shots, explosions and machine-gun fire, in this chaos that tore into shreds any sense of the passing of time, Krymov could see with absolute clarity that the German storming-party had been routed.
12
It was morning. The bodies of the dead were lying in the burnt grass. The river lapped heavily and joylessly against its banks. Looking at the ploughed-up earth and the empty shells of buildings, one wanted to weep.
A new day was beginning and the war was about to fill it to the brim with smoke, rubble, iron and bloodstained bandages. Every day was the same. There was nothing left in the world but this battered earth and this blazing sky.
Krymov, perched on a crate, his head propped against the stone facing of the conduit, was dozing. He could hear voices and the clinking of cups; the commissar and the chief of staff were exchanging a few sleepy words as they drank their tea. Apparently yesterday's prisoner was a sapper; his battalion had been flown in from Magdeburg only a few days ago. Krymov suddenly remembered a picture from a school textbook: two vast cart-horses, whipped on by drivers in pointed caps, were trying to separate two empty hemispheres containing a vacuum. This image made him feel as bored now as it had when he was a child.
'That's a good sign,' said Belsky. 'They're bringing up their reserves.'
'A very good sign,' said the commissar, 'especially with the divisional staff having to take part in a counter-attack.' Then Krymov heard Rodimtsev's low voice:
'There'll be flowers, there'll be flowers, There'll be berries in the factories.'
The night attack had exhausted Krymov. He would have to turn his head to look at Rodimtsev – and he was too tired. 'This is what a well must feel like after being drained,' he thought to himself. He dozed off again; the low voices fused with the sounds of explosions and gunfire into a monotone hum.
Then something new entered Krymov's consciousness: he dreamed he was lying in a room with closed blinds, watching a patch of morning sunlight on the wallpaper. This patch crept to the edge of the mirror and then expanded into a rainbow. The boy's heart trembled; the man with greying temples, the man with a heavy pistol hanging at his waist, opened his eyes and looked round.