‘Don’t piss into the wind!’ someone shouts jocularly, and yet again I am troubled by a sense of woman’s less than perfect physiological adaptation to the vexing exigencies of army life. It is only for a moment. Chided by my soul, I speed incorporeally on.
Kaluga is a district centre and lies on the River Oka. It had been under occupation for two and a half months and suffered the usual fate of front-line towns. The last battles to retake it were particularly bitter. On 13 December our troops broke into the outskirts but were cut off and surrounded. There was desperate street fighting. On 30 December Kaluga was recaptured.
The entry in my diary reads:
Kaluga. January 1942. On the railway track there is a sign: an arrow plus the French word ‘Latrine’, written in charcoal by a German hand. In the wrecked latrine, a privy of long standing, a mountain of frozen mixed German and Russian muck. It is cold. A train on the tracks, ‘Nach Plechanovo’ chalked on the wagons. If writing isn’t in the Russian alphabet it doesn’t count.
By the central station there is a pile of enemy vehicles. The station building has been smashed: shell holes in the walls, collapsed ceilings, wiring ripped out. And so cold! Nowhere to warm up. On the first floor – no floor, only bare joists. A door, still supported by a single naiclass="underline" the political lectures room. We open the door slightly. What is this, a sickbay? Then why is everyone wearing white? They are preparing for take-off. These are the paratroopers, in white camouflage.
There is a floor here but no space, nowhere to put a foot down. Heating! A metal keg, a chimney formed from a piece of pipe and tin cans. The fumes go out the window via a frame with no glass in it. They let Lyudmila and me go under the table but won’t let the boys in. There’s no room. They go off to look for brigade headquarters.
The table is massive. No drawers – they’ve been burned for fuel. We sleep under it, others on ammunition boxes or on the floor. Everyone is asleep, some standing, leaning against the wall, sliding down on top of each other. They wake up, shove each other, pull a shoulder free, stir their neighbours up and extract their legs from underneath them. Cross, sleepy swearing before they fall asleep again. What plaster remains on the walls thaws out, crumbles, trickles dirty stripes over their white camouflage smocks. They are tired after seven days on the road and this is not much of a rest, but they have their orders. They will fly out on their mission tonight, after giving their smocks a good shake and drinking the entire alcohol ration allocated for the journey.
What happened after that I noted shortly afterwards:
Hunched up under the table, warming up, I look at the crushed, crumpled figures of the paratroopers, with their sheath knives on their belts and the flask of vodka they have been issued at the side, cursing and swearing in their sleep. What on earth use am I supposed to be to them? They do not know me. I will be in the way. None of them will take any notice of me. They will dump me.
A young lieutenant squeezes his way through to us over the legs and heads of his subordinates. Perhaps he really has previous experience, or is he just putting on a show? The ordinary soldiers clearly have no experience at all. He mentions ‘the azimuth’. After we have parachuted down, we will all need to take our bearings and come together. How do we do that? How are we supposed to fold and bury our parachutes so as not to betray our presence to the Germans? On the way back, he says, we will have to ski 300 km to the front line and then, when we find somewhere not well guarded, we’ll be able to slip back across to our own side.
So simple, so straightforward, so implausible. In fact, so totally absurd. What bearings! What 300 km? It is brainless. We are obviously going to be separated, with one interpreter to each battalion and each battalion acting in isolation. We will have no chance of supporting each other, when that is the whole point, crucial to success.
My mind is taking everything in clearly and I am not overwhelmed by fear; in fact I feel no emotion. Lyudmila is dozing but I am just feeling resigned. I do, however, write a letter home to Moscow, to my friend, with my most important last wishes.
The door opened slightly. The boys had returned and called me and Lyudmila to come out. They had found the headquarters of 8th Airborne Brigade in a little wooden hut that was still standing but the commanding officer, General Levashov, was not there. They waited for him, warming up in the well-heated room. One of the boys said he was thirsty and was pointed in the direction of various full carafes and a teapot. He poured himself a glass, and found it was vodka.
The brigade commander returned, the boys jumped up, introduced themselves and presented our joint warrant. ‘How many training jumps?’ the general demanded, coming over to the table. Hearing we had never undergone any training jumps, he placed the warrant on the table, angrily crossed it through, and wrote, ‘Send me no more untrained personnel. This is the front line. I have no facilities and no time to train people.’ ‘We are flying out tonight,’ he said. Our leader objected that the soldiers too had never had any training jumps: they had told us so. To this the general replied, ‘They are ordinary soldiers, but you have had money spent on you.’ He pointed to the boy’s collar tabs. That made all the difference. We had two lieutenant’s pips on our collars.
We returned to General Headquarters. There had evidently been some changes in the Airborne Forces Directorate: either the plan to provide the parachute units with interpreters had now been fulfilled, or General Levashov’s obstruction had made an impression. At all events, the boys were sent to a training brigade for paratroopers near Moscow, and Lyudmila and I were sent back to the infantry. I was temporarily seconded to the Intelligence Directorate.
There was a report shortly afterwards that Major General Levashov had died doing his duty. He had saved our lives, but had himself been doomed to die leading his untrained parachutists on the mission they had so blithely been assigned.
Recalling my sojourn under that table in Kaluga, I realized just how much idiocy there is in war. Working at GHQ, where they already had more than enough translators without me and seemed to have rather few captured documents to translate, began to rankle, and the thought that this might be how, day after day, my life would drag pointlessly on until the war ended, provoked me to rebellion. I went to the personnel department and asked to be sent to the front with ground troops. They brushed that aside, and my temporary situation showed every sign of becoming permanent, not least because at that very moment, by order of Stalin, all the directorates at General Headquarters were reclassified as main directorates. An order to this effect, in respect also of the Intelligence Directorate, was duly pinned up with a list of the established personnel. It included my name, as an interpreter; it was the last on the list, the only name below it being the signature of Stalin. Just then, however, a major arrived at GHQ from the front with instructions from General Lelyushenko not to come back without an interpreter. They could hardly refuse the general, who had covered himself in glory during the December offensive, and unloaded me on to him, evidently unaware that Lelyushenko could not stand women in the army.
2
The Paths of War: Russia, 1942–3
Thank God there was a blizzard, concealing us from aircraft, but the field we had to cross seemed endless. The distant grey dots of huts disappeared in the darkness even as we were moving towards them. By now, though, they must be nearby, those havens, not burned down, remote beacons among the hummocks of snow.