They were constantly on the move. Some nights there were searchlights and explosions. One day, Lyudmila remembers, she and other children travelled in a heavy peasant cart, with each child holding a branch to camouflage them from the aeroplanes which buzzed overhead. The horse was a huge lumbering thing, and its harness was also covered in branches. This is the image which has lodged, for some reason, most vividly in my mind’s eye – my mother, sitting in the bed of the cart among other children, hopefully clutching a branch like a talisman against the German planes, a small crippled child alone and frightened, trundling eastwards into the emptiness of the Volga steppes.
The children were evacuated in stages, deeper and deeper into the hinterland of Russia, spending a few days or weeks wherever their transport ran out, waiting for someone to take charge of them, to pass them to safety. Somewhere to the west of Stalingrad they got stuck, washed up by the stream of men and machines which filled the steppes. Lyudmila spent the harshest winter months billeted in a snowbound village, chewing dry ears of corn filched from the barns and fighting with the local children for food. In the early spring of 1942, someone remembered the beleaguered little party and moved them to a collective farm closer to the Volga. Mila remembers scavenging for berries in the quiet, cold woods and helping peasant women scrub floors in exchange for crusts of bread.
Somehow, in a small miracle of war, just as the German Sixth Army began its advance on Stalingrad, somebody managed to find the children places on a big American Studebaker truck, the luxury of luxuries. It drove them to the city, reaching the Volga just days ahead of the Germans. The date must have been shortly after 23 August 1942, the day Red Army sappers blew the bridges, because Lyudmila remembers crossing the Volga with the other orphanage children on a steel barge, packed to the gunwales with refugees. She saw the girders of the blown-up bridges dipping into the river at a crazy angle. The windows of all the schools and public buildings in the city were filled with wounded soldiers swathed in bandages. That image became one of Lyudmila’s most vivid memories of that time – ‘They stood there, all wrapped in bandages, so many of them, by every window.’
On the other side of the river, Lyudmila and the other children found themselves stranded once again. In the scramble to reinforce the city before the arrival of the Germans, and during the first, chaotic weeks of the battle, every available form of transport was needed to ferry men and supplies to the stricken city, and to bring back casualties.
The orphans were billeted in villages near the river. Lyudmila remembers crowds of refugees passing through her village on foot, sleeping in the fields when their strength failed, packing into barns and peasant huts so tightly that they couldn’t close the door. Their snoring made an eerie rumbling noise in the darkness, as though the earth itself was trembling. There were air raids at night, and Mila remembers running for safety into the tall grass of the steppe as the black bombs tumbled slowly out of the sky.
Day and night, horse carts trundled through the village full of horribly injured soldiers, covered in blood, some missing limbs. At night the river glowed red from the burning city, and when the wind blew eastwards it carried the heat and smoke of the great battle. She saw bodies and parts of bodies floating past in the water.
Food was the only thing Mila thought about. The children ran wild, fending for themselves, begging for scraps from the streams of refugees, hunting in packs for wheat and barley stalks. Mila and the other children would gather up dry leaves and crumble them with the tobacco of cigarette butts they would find by the roadside. They would sell the mixture as makhorka, rough soldiers’ tobacco, to the lines of troops who passed every day, exchanging it for sugar cubes or lumps of bread. Many of the soldiers had flat, Mongolian faces. They had come all the way from Siberia, marching days from the nearest railhead and sleeping on the roadsides before moving in inexorable human waves into the city.
Half a century later, I witnessed the Russian Army in action myself. I stood on the Russian front lines in the northern outskirts of Grozny, Chechnya, as a mighty firestorm of artillery roared overhead and the rebel city burned around us. The city centre was obscured by a drifting pall of bittertasting gun smoke. All around were the jagged husks of buildings, nibbled by gunfire and then shelled and shelled again. Sukhoi fighter bombers screamed in fast and low every minute to deliver half-ton bombs, which fell with terrible grace towards their targets before exploding with a boom which seemed powerful enough to fell the whole city. The bombardment was so overwhelming it felt like a physical presence; it thundered under my feet like giant doors slamming deep in the earth.
I spent days with Russian soldiers in trenches dug out of the sandy soil, and slept side by side with snoring conscripts in bivouacs they’d made in the ruined houses. Their faces were filthy with smoke and dirt, and they swore and spat and laughed uproariously at the slightest joke. One evening as we ate bully beef from tins one young sergeant tossed a grenade to me across the room by the light of a hissing kerosene pressure lamp. The pin was out and the safety handle gone – for a moment I stared at the little steel egg in incomprehension before the room cracked up. It was a dummy.
They were just kids, delirious from danger and war. But when we went out on patrols, crunching house to house through broken glass and piles of bricks, they went silent and tense, as all infantrymen do in battle. Their technique was to move forward until they came under fire, then locate the shooter and call in artillery before scrambling back to their forward base as fast as they could move, praying that the Russian gunners weren’t drunk or ranged their rounds short. It was a tactic little changed since the street fighting of Stalingrad. As we settled in for the night the young soldiers would kick off their high pigskin boots and unwind the foot cloths which Russian soldiers wear instead of socks before plumping their fur hats into makeshift pillows. Outside, some other unit was coming under fire, and we could feel the roaring rip-riprip of multiple rocket launchers resonating through the concrete floor. The scene, down to the candle stubs and wooden matchboxes the kids carried in their top pockets and used to light their cardboard-filtered papiros cigarettes, could have been from their grandfathers’ war.
Today, the steppe country around Stalingrad is empty and silent. The collective farm fields stretch as far as the eye can see, ploughed with crooked furrows and punctuated by halfruined log cabins and long concrete barns. The far bank of the huge river is lost in the mist, and the slow grey water swells and falls as it laps the banks. It seems as though the giant fields and swaying trees are brooding on the strange convulsion which brought so many humans here, half a century ago, to spill their blood on the sandy soil.
I visited Volgograd, as Stalingrad has become, in the winter of 1999. A heavy, soul-sapping blandness covered the city like a dirty snowfall, oppressive as the winter sky which hung low over the landscape. It was depressingly similar to other provincial backwaters, a place where the bitter concentrate of reality withered the spirit like a pickle in a jar of brine.