I walk along the roadside on my way back to Staff Headquarters.
Muffled thunder in the silence, like the distant echo of a cannonade from the day before. The squelching of boots stumbling through the morass.
‘Hey, sister!’ an old timer detaches himself from the column. ‘Got a smoke?’
‘Sorry.’
He trudges on, out of luck, an old timer I will not forget.
Protected by a leaden sky lit up occasionally by a blinding enemy flare, the soldiers shamble on into the dank, inhospitable night towards the coming morning’s battle.
I cannot explain even to myself why, down all the years and again today, that question gives me no peace, and why the memory of it so jars me and moves me to tears.
‘Hey, sister! Got a smoke?’
They brought in a squealer, snatched from a forward lookout trench. He was perishing with the cold, swaddled in a woman’s woollen shawl, a forage cap perched on his head. On his feet were thin leather boots no match for the frost, inserted in an apology for overshoes woven from straw. The scout escorting him was very publicly prodding the German in the back with the barrel of his rifle, encouraging him to look lively. In his straw overshoes he could barely drag himself along the slippery, churned-up road. Onlookers –two or three soldiers and a similar number of villagers – brought up the rear, curious to see what was going to happen. They halted at headquarters and the scout, leaving the soldiers to guard his prisoner, went into the hut to report.
Everyone surrounded the German, nobody speaking. An ill-defined tension. From autumn until December the village had been occupied by Germans, but they had looked nothing like this one. The villagers glanced awkwardly, furtively at him.
‘War’s over for you, Fritz,’ remarked one battle-hardened soldier. ‘You’ll live, you scumbag.’
The German’s eyes peered dimly out of the slits between frost-covered eyelashes, as dull and inanimate as the eyes of a water-sprite. He was not a happy Fritz and nobody else was sure quite how to behave, but a young soldier who had never seen a German before could not contain himself and burst out laughing. The German had icicles coming out of his nose and even out of his mouth, above the frost-covered shawl. They looked like a beard. You could hardly feel too hostile towards someone who looked so comical; besides, it was flattering to see the enemy reduced to such a state.
‘You wouldn’t even make much of a scarecrow,’ the battle-hardened soldier said, and patted the German patronizingly on the shoulder. The young one joined in, tugging at one of the icicles for fun. It did not break off, and he, too, laid a mitt on the prisoner’s shoulder.
The German, realizing what a sight he was, covered in icicles, and that this might be the saving of him, that he might not after all be killed, stretched his hands out of the long sleeves of his greatcoat and raised them to reveal a pair of thick socks pulled absurdly over them. He was rewarded with approving laughter.
The scout returned to take him in. On the porch, the German hastily took off his sock-gloves and stuffed them in his greatcoat pockets, shed the straw overshoes, and went inside. He clicked his heels, stood to attention, and gasped with the heat. It was very warm in the hut. He noticed that the commanding officer, looking him over, could barely conceal a smile. Name? Unit? Rank? The frozen German soldier pulled the shawl away from his wooden lips and replied, hardly aware of what he was saying, gulping the heat in greedily and, suddenly fearful, started to claw at his face.
Remembering himself, he put his arms back down smartly at his sides. Icicles slid down his face, over the shawl and greatcoat, and clattered to the floor.
A seasoned soldier remembers an incident last year:
I was given a mission to tow fake tanks to near Bely and Kholm. The sappers had knocked dummies together out of plywood and timber. I had six of them attached by tow-rope to my tank and I pulled them thirty or forty kilometres along main roads. I got fired at by one of the Germans’ ‘frame’ spotter planes, which was furiously taking photographs.
The next day the roads were littered with leaflets reading, ‘Russe, you tow plywood! Guderian’s tanks are before Moscow.’
Roads. Engines labour and strain, wheels get stuck in deep ruts. Tanks, trucks on the move, horse-drawn artillery.
A column of infantry. A rucksack on someone’s back with a swaying, sooty billy-can attached. A face, young or old, ear flaps lowered and tied tightly under the chin. A horse quivering with the strain. A hut emerges suddenly out of the screen of snow. A peasant woman, a shawl pulled down to her eyes, watches us pass, her gaze intent, thoughtful. I feel such a heartrending sense of involvement with everything and everyone there, which, at that time, it would have been difficult, odd, impossible to put into words.
A fork in the road, and a girl from Yelnya disappearing inside her huge sheepskin coat, a rifle on her back, waving a flag with one hand while holding a hurricane lamp in the other. She stops the vehicles and meticulously checks their documentation and what they are carrying. She arranges a lift for a wounded soldier trying to get to the field hospital. Some drivers joke with her, others curse her roundly. They drive on.
It is snowing. Mist shrouds the fields and the road. There is gunfire nearby. The front line is overextended, the line of defence compromised. You imagine you see Germans. The girl stands at her checkpoint and all the roughness, the daring, the hopes, the elation and anguish of the war flow past her.
From the diary of Lieutenant Kurt Grumann of the 185th Infantry Regiment of 87th Division:
Our regiment greeted the morning of 22 June on the front lines. At 03:05 our first grenades were hurled across the border.
After the first battles all the way to Bialystok I was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. After that we languished in the rear. We think back now nostalgically to those carefree days in the territory of former Poland and remember the varied dishes on the Polish field menu. It was then I received the momentous news of my brother Hans’ heroic death.
Sorting through my archive from the war, I came across this diary, and could not immediately think why I had kept it when I was ridding myself of so many materials, trying to retain only what was most important. As I browsed through the diary, though, I found it mentioned Rzhev and could see what had saved it.
Grumann’s diary begins with the German Army already at the gates of Moscow. The fate of the beleaguered capital was closely linked to the cruel drama of the long, self-sacrificing struggle of the defenders on its near approaches, the bridgehead of Rzhev. Rzhev was to play a big part in my own destiny.
Five months of terrible bloodshed were coming to an end. Marshal Zhukov considered November 1941 the most threatening and critical month for Moscow, when its fate was decided in battle. Grumann’s diary covers the way events then unfolded, when in December the apparently crushed Red Army went on the offensive and, for the first time in the war, the Germans suffered a devastating defeat. Grumann describes the confusion, the abandoned armaments, and chaos the like of which he had seen before only when French troops were in retreat. These honestly described scenes give us a rare opportunity to see the situation through enemy eyes at a time when victory seemed to be within the grasp of the Germans, but which ended in their precipitate withdrawal.
17 November 1941. I would like to go back in my mind to a time of which I have only the best of memories – the fruitful period of my training, the beauty of the countryside in Versailles. I so enjoy thinking back to those comradely evenings in the officers’ mess with its deep armchairs, drinking a glass of sparkling absinthe or a bottle with those renowned labels: Martell, Hennessy or Monmousseau. My commissioning as an officer fulfilled a long-standing dream of my youth. The next outstanding event was my visit to a Paris awakened to new life, whose intoxicating brilliance it was my privilege to see. Then began the rumble and clattering of railway trains, and I, too, found myself on a train speeding us on, the officers of a newly formed company of bicycle troops.