What lies ahead? The lack of fear is almost puzzling. The unprecedented nature of everything grips you and roils your stomach. You have set out and already there is no turning back. Already that vista, the snow, and those burnt-out remains like black, uprooted trees are doing something to you, drawing you into their world. Already you are committed to that far distance, as if you have already drowned and dissolved in its boundlessness. For some reason you feel a little sad, but also touched.
Only it is so cold. Today, as I write, I can check that with what our German lieutenant had to say:
14 December 1942. –21º.
20 January 1942. Temperature fallen to –40º. Impossible to describe how wooden your face becomes from the cold. Frost even penetrates your greatcoat.
Well, it is no easier for us. Admittedly, I have felt boots. In Stavropol, when I was issued a greatcoat, I sold my civilian coat and bought a pair of second-hand, mended felt boots at the bazaar with the money. Under my greatcoat I have a sleeveless flannelette pullover. My face suffers most, like the German’s, and there is the danger of frostbite in your hands. Is it really only a few days since we were sliding in our sledges down from the bank onto the Volga at Stavropol? ‘Ey, hey! Mother Volga!’ I can’t believe it.
We bypassed a blown-up bridge and got on to the Moscow–Tula–Kaluga highway. There was almost no traffic; trucks hooted occasionally as they passed. To either side of the highway were abandoned tanks and pieces of enemy hardware covered in snow. There had been a bloody battle on the highway a few days earlier. The all-conquering Second Panzer Army of General Guderian, the father of tank warfare and ideologist of Blitzkrieg who had never known defeat, had been tearing towards Moscow, before being stopped. And defeated.
GHQ sent a captured book by Guderian to us in Stavropol to learn specialized military terminology and the technical specifications of the enemy’s tanks. The book’s jubilant title, Achtung – Panzer! and the spirit in which it was written proclaimed that conquered lands would soon be squirming beneath the caterpillar tracks of his tanks.
‘Our hopes rest on Guderian’s tanks, which have punched through towards Moscow from the south-west,’ Lieutenant Kurt Grumann had written in late November. But Colonel General Guderian, who had crushed the rest of Europe beneath the tracks of his tanks, had met his first defeat. It had been here, so close to Moscow, the capital which he was in such a hurry to ‘punch through’ to. It was here, too, that he had taken the decision, on his own initiative, to retreat, which was unheard of! An enraged Hitler retaliated by dismissing him and leaving him to languish in disgrace for many months. He was rehabilitated only in 1943 when he was appointed inspector general of armoured troops to rebuild the shattered tank forces after the defeat at Stalingrad, and in 1944 he was appointed chief of staff of the German Army. But once again, in spring 1945, he was dismissed when a battle on the Oder, against my 3rd Shock Army and others, was lost. He was relieved of all duties by Hitler and sent off on ‘sick leave’. This mitigated his fate after the war when the Allies came to dealing with Hitler’s generals.
But all that was later. Right then, on that highway, moving over to the shoulder, you wanted to sweep the snow off a tank lying on its side and, just for a moment, so as not to freeze to it, touch its armour with your mittened hand. In far-off Stavropol we had so feared for Moscow, knowing that these tanks of Guderian’s were already on the approaches to the capital.
The cold kept us moving. We left the highway and turned onto a sledge track. Towards us came low sledges transporting the wounded, covered with straw to give them some warmth. A lanky soldier came running in their wake. He was wearing a short coat whose broad flaps slapped against his thighs as he ran by, pressing a bandaged hand to his chest. From beneath a grey helmet, exhausted child-like blue eyes looked out at us, but only for a moment, and then he was past and all we could see were his legs in their black wrappings, as stiff as the legs of a compass.
We walked on in silence, not talking, numb with cold. The entry in my diary about those hours of our journey is almost delirious. That is sometimes true of Kurt Grumann’s diary, too. I volunteer this unedited excerpt from my diary:
January 1942. From Ryurikovo to Alexino is about 12 km. Roads destroyed. Route through open country. Treading in the footsteps of war. Dead chimneys sticking out of the snow, nothing else. Nowhere to live. Scarf breathed over, burns face with ice. My God, Russia is so big. Hands so painfully cold you could cry. Start of Alexino there somewhere. A little further, further…
Evening. We arrived. There was no smoke anywhere. Only chimneys, no houses. How come? There was supposed to be a station somewhere, a proper station. Okay, no station, but there should be a commandant. We bumped into each other in the dark, wandered apart. There was a small hut. I felt a door and pushed it. It opened from the street outside straight into a room. A woman was leaning protectively over a table which had children on it.
‘Let no one in without firewood!’ she shouted. ‘It’s a woman,’ someone replied. She turned round. ‘Hello.’ I could barely move my lips and with wooden fingers could not pull the prickly scarf away from my face. ‘Let no one in without firewood! I’ve got sick children here!’
The window was curtained with German packaging material, hessian with a huge black swastika in the middle. It was the first time I had seen a swastika.
Later, having found the commandant, we say, ’We are looking for staff headquarters and have to report to Major General Levashov.’ ‘Yes, yes, sit down. He passed through only yesterday.’
The commandant gets us a place in a heated cattle truck which, we discover, belongs to staff headquarters and is the battalion’s command post. A Siberian division has arrived at the front. Lieutenant Kurt Grumann dated his ‘first acquaintance with Siberian divisions’ from November. For us, too, it is all new: the white half-length fur coats, the submachine guns and short skis. We sit by an iron stove in the middle of the wagon, supping hot buckwheat gruel with pork fat and listening to tales about Siberia and Siberian girls. For these lieutenants, as for Kurt Grumann, the war means separation from their sweethearts. Grumann wrote about that in his diary also.
The young battalion commander, the same age as us, is giving orders by telephone, and his voice is relayed by wires the length of the train. The clerk licks his pencil and writes pensively in a notebook headed History of the Battalion about their combat-readiness. I, too, when the stove has thawed me out, am moved to get out my diary and write about this headquarters on wheels, the hot gruel with fat, the soldier in his ankle boots and black leg wrappings running after the sledges, pressing his wounded arm to his chest, and about that huge black swastika.
Everything is in a state of readiness here in the wagon, and yet at the same time the atmosphere is straightforward, calm and hospitable, as if this were a scheduled train in peacetime rather than one heading to battle. Yet tomorrow these young lieutenants will perhaps be fighting the Germans.
At a junction we say goodbye and get out. Dark, unfathomable night. We walk for a while along the track and then, for the last stretch of our journey to Kaluga, travel in a train crammed with Red Army soldiers. For what remains of the night in our wagon, the bolt is being pulled back, the sliding door clattering, the cold blowing in until, in the opening, above the dark back of a soldier, a subdued light glimmers as morning approaches.