Meanwhile the ward was in uproar.
‘Lieutenant Bach!’ said Gerne. ‘I take my hat off to you. That’s what I call successful work on the native population!’
Fresser waved his hands in the air, as though shaking off drops of water. ‘Call her in! The lieutenant’s got a good wide bed. We can marry them right now.’
‘Women are like dogs,’ said Krap. ‘They always follow their men.’
All of a sudden Bach felt indignant. What did she think she was doing? How could she come and visit him in hospital? German officers were forbidden to have relationships with Russian women. And what if there’d been relatives of his working in the hospital, or friends of the Forsters? Even a German woman would hardly have come to visit him after such a trivial affair . . .
The man who’d been seriously wounded seemed to be laughing contemptuously in his sleep.
‘Tell the woman I’m unable to come out to see her,’ he said grimly. Not wanting to take part in the general hilarity, he picked up his pencil and read over what he’d written so far.
‘The most extraordinary thing of all is that whereas for years I felt I was being suppressed by the State, I now understand that it alone can give expression to my soul. I don’t wish for an easy destiny. If necessary, I’ll break with my old friends. I realize those I am turning to will never consider me one of them. But I am ready to suffer for the sake of what is most important in me . . .’
The merriment in the ward continued.
‘Sh!’ said Gerne. ‘Don’t disturb him. He’s writing to his fiancée.’
Bach began to laugh himself. There were moments when his suppressed laughter sounded like sobs; he realized he could just as easily be crying.
12
Officers who only infrequently saw General Friedrich Paulus – the commander of the Sixth Army – were unaware of any change in his state of mind. His bearing, the style of his orders, the smile with which he listened both to important reports and to trivial points of detail, all seemed to indicate that he was still in control of events.
Only the two men closest to him – his adjutant, Colonel Adam, and his chief of staff, General Schmidt – realized how much he had changed since the beginning of the battle for Stalingrad.
He could still be arrogant, condescending or charmingly witty; he could still enter warmly and intimately into the lives of his officers; he still had the power to throw whole regiments and divisions into battle, to promote and demote his men, to sign orders for decorations. He still smoked his usual cigarettes . . . But deep down something was changing; and this change was on the point of becoming irrevocable.
General Paulus had lost the feeling of being in control of time and events. Until recently he had only cast a quick, unworried glance over the reports furnished by his intelligence section. What did he care about the movements of the Russian reserves? What did their latest plans matter to him?
Now, however, when he looked at the file of documents and reports placed on his desk every morning by Colonel Adam, the reports of Russian troop movements during the night were the first thing he studied. Colonel Adam had noticed this; one day he had changed the order in the file so that the intelligence reports were on top. Paulus had opened the file and looked at the first page; he had then raised his eyebrows and slammed the file shut.
Surprised by the rather pathetic look that had crossed Paulus’s face, Colonel Adam realized he had been tactless. A few days later, Paulus had looked through the documents and reports – now once again in their usual order – and smiled.
‘You’re evidently a very perceptive man, Herr innovator.’ It was a quiet autumn evening. General Schmidt was on his way to report to Paulus. He was feeling triumphant.
He walked down the silent, deserted street. In his head, beneath his heavy-peaked cap, were the plans for the most ruthless offensive yet to be launched in Stalingrad. That was how he described it when Paulus received him and asked him to sit down.
‘There have indeed, in German military history, been offensives for which we have mobilized far greater quantities of men and equipment. But I for one have never been asked to organize such a dense concentration of both air and ground forces in such a limited sector of the Front.’
Paulus’s attitude, as he listened to Schmidt, was not that of a commander-in-chief. His back was hunched and, as Schmidt’s finger pointed to columns of figures and sectors marked on maps, his head turned quickly and obediently from side to side. Paulus himself had conceived this offensive. He had defined its parameters. But now, as he listened to Schmidt – the most brilliant chief of staff he had worked with – he felt unable to recognize his original conception. It was as though Schmidt was imposing his will on him, as though he had planned an offensive that went against his commanding officer’s wishes.
‘Yes,’ said Paulus. ‘And this concentration of forces is all the more impressive when you compare it to the void on our left flank.’
‘But what can we do about that?’ said Schmidt. ‘Russia’s so vast. We simply don’t have enough men.’
‘I’m not alone in feeling worried,’ said Paulus. ‘Von Weichs said to me: “We didn’t strike with a fist. We struck with an open hand, our fingers stretching across the infinite spaces of the East.” And others are worried too. In fact there’s only one man who isn’t worried . . .’
He didn’t finish the sentence.
Everything was going as it should, and yet somehow failing to go as it should. It was as if the trifling uncertainties and chance misfortunes of the last weeks were beginning to reveal something quite new – the true face of war, the face of war in all its joylessness and hopelessness.
The intelligence section obstinately continued to report a build-up of Soviet forces in the North-West. Air-attacks seemed powerless to prevent this. Von Weichs had no German reserves to cover Paulus’s flanks. He was attempting to mislead the Russians by installing German radio-transmitters in zones occupied by Rumanian troops. But was this enough to turn the Rumanians into Germans?
The campaign in Africa had begun triumphantly. Fierce punishment had been meted out to the English at Dunkirk, in Norway and Greece – and yet the British Isles remained unoccupied. There had been magnificent victories in the East, they had marched thousands of miles to the Volga – and yet the Soviet armed forces had still not been smashed once and for all. It always seemed that what mattered had already been achieved; that only chance, only some trivial delay had prevented a victory from being decisive . . .
What did they matter, these few hundred metres that separated him from the Volga, these half-ruined factories, these burnt-out shells of buildings, compared to the vast spaces conquered during the summer offensive? But then only a few kilometres of desert had separated Rommel from his Egyptian oasis . . . And at Dunkirk they had been only a few kilometres, only a few hours, short of an absolute victory. It was always the same few kilometres . . . And there was always a lack of reserves, a gaping void in the rear of the victorious forces and at their flanks.
Summer 1942! Probably only once in a lifetime is a man allowed to live through days like those. He had felt the breath of India on his face. He had felt what an avalanche would feel – if it had feelings – as it smashes through forests and forces rivers out of their beds.
The idea had occurred to him that perhaps the German ear had grown accustomed to the name Friedrich. He had not really thought this seriously, but still . . . It was just then that a little grain of very hard sand had grated under his foot – or rather, against his teeth.
Headquarters had been full of a general sense of triumph and exultation. He was constantly receiving written reports, oral reports, radio reports, telephone reports, from the commanding officers of his different units. This hadn’t seemed like work at all; it had been simply a symbolic expression of German triumph. And then one day the telephone had rung: ‘Herr Commander-in-Chief . . .’ Somehow this matter-of-fact voice had immediately sounded out of harmony with the peals of triumph fil
ling the ether.
Weller, a divisional commander, had reported that in his sector the Russians had gone over to the offensive. An infantry detachment, equivalent in size to a reinforced battalion, had succeeded in breaking through to the railway station. It was with this seemingly insignificant incident that he had felt his first prickle of anxiety.
Schmidt read the plan of operations out loud. As he did so, he straightened his shoulders and raised his chin. He wanted to indicate that, in spite of the good personal relations between him and Paulus, he was aware of the formality of this meeting.
Quite unexpectedly, Paulus came out with some words that Schmidt found strange and upsetting. In a quiet voice – not that of a commander-in-chief, not that of a soldier at all – he said:
‘I believe in victory. But you know what? There’s something quite senseless and unnecessary about the whole struggle for this city.’
‘That comes a little unexpectedly from the commander-in-chief of the armies around Stalingrad.’
‘You think so? But Stalingrad no longer exists as a centre of communications or heavy industry. What do we want it for? We can cover the north-eastern flank of our Caucasian armies along the line Astrakhan-Kalach. We don’t need Stalingrad for that . . . I’m confident of victory, Schmidt – we shall capture the Tractor Factory. But that won’t help us cover our flank. The Russians are going to attack – von Weichs is quite sure. None of our bluffing will stop that.’
‘The course of events changes their meaning,’ said Schmidt. ‘But the Führer has never yet withdrawn without first attaining an objective.’
Paulus himself believed that if the most brilliant victories had failed to bear the expected fruits, this was because they hadn’t been carried through with the necessary tenacity and decisiveness. At the same time, he felt that the ability to abandon an objective that had lost its meaning was a sign of strength.
He looked into Schmidt’s intelligent, piercing eyes.
‘It’s not for us to impose our will on a great strategist.’
He picked up the order of operations and signed it.
‘Four copies only, in view of its particular secrecy,’ said Schmidt.
13
After his visit to Army Headquarters, Darensky went to a unit deployed along the south-eastern flank of the Stalingrad Front, in the waterless sands around the Caspian Sea.
The steppes, with their small rivers and lakes, now seemed like an earthly paradise. Feather-grass grew there, there were horses, an occasional tree . . .
Thousands of men – all of them used to morning dew, the rustle of hay, and humid air – had now taken up quarters in these sandy wastes. The sand cut their skin, got into their ears, found its way into their bread and gruel, grated in the mechanisms of their watches and the bolts of their rifles, penetrated their dreams . . . These were harsh conditions for a human body, for human throats and nostrils, for human calves and thighs. It was as though the human body were a cart that had left the road and was now creaking its way across rough ground.
All day long Darensky visited artillery positions, had discussions, jotted down notes, made sketches, inspected equipment and ammunition dumps. By evening he was exhausted; his ears buzzed and his legs, unaccustomed to these shifting sands, were aching and throbbing.
Darensky had long ago noticed that, during a retreat, generals become particularly sensitive to the needs of their subordinates; commanding officers and Members of the Military Soviet suddenly reveal themselves to be modest, self-critical and full of scepticism. Never does an army prove to be so full of intelligent, all-understanding men as during a forced retreat, when the General Staff are searching for culprits.
But here in the desert people were simply apathetic and lethargic. It was as though the officers were convinced there was nothing for them to do, nothing for them to be concerned about – after all, these sands would be exactly the same tomorrow, the following day, in a year’s time . . .
The chief of staff of an artillery regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Bova, invited Darensky to stay the night with him. Bova was stoop-shouldered, bald and hard of hearing in one ear. His quarters were in a shack made from boards smeared with clay and manure; the floor was covered with ragged sheets of tarred roofing paper. The shack was identical in every detail to those where the other officers were quartered.
‘Greetings!’ said Bova, shaking Darensky energetically by the hand. ‘How’s this then?’ he asked, gesturing at the walls. ‘It looks like I’ll be spending the winter in a dog-kennel smeared with shit.’
‘I’ve seen worse lodgings,’ said Darensky, surprised at the transformation of the usually quiet Bova.
Bova sat Darensky down on a crate that had once contained cans of food from America, poured out some vodka into a large dirty glass whose rim was smeared with dried toothpaste, and handed him a green pickled tomato on a piece of damp newspaper.
‘Make yourself at home, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!’ he insisted. ‘We’ve got vodka and we’ve got fruit.’
Darensky, who seldom drank, took a small, cautious sip and pushed his glass away. He asked Bova about the state of his troops. Bova, however, didn’t want to talk shop.
‘Yes, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of work. In the old days I never took a moment off – not even when there were all those splendid women around in Kuban and the Ukraine. Heavens! And they weren’t shy either – believe me! You only had to wink at them. But I just sat on my arse in the Operations Section. I didn’t know what I’d missed till I was out here in the desert.’
At first Darensky was annoyed by Bova’s reluctance to discuss the average density of troops per square kilometre of front, or to give his opinion on the possible advantages of mortars over artillery in desert conditions. Nevertheless, he was not uninterested by the new turn the conversation had taken.
‘You can say that again!’ he exclaimed. ‘There are some magnificent women in the Ukraine! There’s one I used to visit in 1941, when we had our HQ in Kiev . . . She was a real beauty – the wife of someone in the public prosecutor’s office . . . And I’m not going to argue about Kuban either. Yes, I rate Kuban very highly indeed – the number of beautiful women there is quite remarkable.’
Darensky’s words had an extraordinary effect on Bova; he started to curse and then gave a cry of despair: ‘And now we have to make do with Kalmyks!’
‘Wrong!’ said Darensky emphatically. He then became surprisingly eloquent about the charm of these swarthy and high-cheekboned women who smelt of wormwood and the smoke of the steppes. Remembering Alla Sergeyevna, he concluded: ‘You’re wrong. There are women everywhere. There may be no water in the desert, but there are always women.’
Bova didn’t respond – he was asleep. Only then did Darensky realize that his host was drunk.
Bova’s head was hanging off the edge of the camp-bed and his snores were like the groans of a dying man. Darensky, with the special tenderness and patience that a Russian feels towards a drunkard, placed a pillow under his head and some sheets of newspaper under his legs. He then wiped the saliva off Bova’s lip and began looking round for somewhere to lie down himself.
He laid his host’s greatcoat on the floor, threw his own on top and put his knapsack down to serve as a pillow. When he was out on a mission, this knapsack served as his office, his food store and as a container for his washing kit.
He went outside, drank in the cold night air, and gasped as he gazed at the unearthly flames in the black Asiatic sky. He urinated, still looking at the stars, thought, ‘Yes, yes, the cosmos!’ and went back in.
He lay down on his host’s greatcoat and covered himself with his own. Then, instead of closing his eyes, he gazed pensively and gloomily into the darkness.
What poverty he was surrounded by! Here he was, lying on the floor looking at some left-over marinated tomatoes and a cardboard suitcase that no doubt contained only a skimpy towel with a black stamp on it, some crumpled collars for a soldier’s tunic
, an empty holster for a revolver and a squashed soap-box.
The hut in Verkhniy-Pogromniy where he had spent the night last autumn now seemed luxurious. And in a year’s time, perhaps, this present hut would seem equally luxurious; he would look back on it longingly as he went to sleep at the bottom of some empty pit.
Darensky had changed during his months on the artillery staff. His need for work – something that had once seemed as powerful as his need for food – was now satisfied. His work no longer gave him any particular satisfaction – any more than eating affords any particular satisfaction to someone well-fed.
Darensky was highly regarded by his superior officers. At first this had been a great joy to him – over the years he had become all too used to the opposite. He was probably valued even more highly on the staff of the Stalingrad Front than Novikov had been during his time on the staff of the South-Eastern Front. He had heard that whole pages of his reports were transcribed verbatim in reports addressed by important people in Moscow to still more important people. At a critical period his intelligence and his work had been discovered to be of real use and importance. Five years before the war, however, his wife had left him, considering him to be an enemy of the people who had succeeded in hiding from her the flabbiness and hypocrisy that was his true nature. He had often been turned down for jobs because of his background – he came from an aristocratic family, both on his mother’s side and on his father’s side. To begin with, he had been upset to learn that someone particularly stupid or ignorant had been appointed instead of him. Then he had begun to feel he really couldn’t be trusted with a position of executive responsibility. His spell in camp had made him certain of his inadequacy. And now this terrible war had proved how far this was from the truth.
Darensky pulled his coat up over his shoulders, exposing his feet to the cold draught from the door. He wondered why it was that, at a time when his knowledge and abilities had finally been recognized, he should be lying on the floor in a hen-coop, listening to the piercing screams of camels, dreaming not of dachas and rest-homes but of a clean pair of pants and a decent piece of soap.