These officers had indeed become human again, but not in the most admirable manner.
The driver was wearing a smart white sheepskin coat. Mikhailov told him to drive more slowly.
‘Certainly, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,’ he answered quietly.
The driver was very much looking forward to telling his comrades about Paulus, to going home at the end of the war and saying: ‘Now, when I was driving Field-Marshal Paulus . . .’ He was also determined to drive outstandingly well, to make Paulus say: ‘So that’s what a Soviet driver’s like! A true professional!’
It was hard for a soldier’s eye to take in this spectacle, to get used to seeing Russians and Germans in such close proximity. Cheerful squads of infantrymen were searching through cellars, climbing down into the mouths of sewers, herding the Germans up to the frozen surface.
On patches of wasteland and empty streets, with much prodding and shouting, these infantrymen then re-formed the German army, throwing men from quite different arms of the service into the same column.
The Germans trudged on, trying not to stumble, looking round now and again at the Russian soldiers and their guns. They were submissive not only because it would be so easy for the Russian soldiers to shoot them; they were submissive because of the hypnotic aura of power that surrounded them.
The field-marshal was being driven south; the columns of prisoners were being marched in the opposite direction. A powerful loudspeaker was roaring out a well-known song:
‘I left yesterday for distant lands,
My love waved her handkerchief beside the gate.’
A wounded prisoner was being carried along by two comrades; his pale, dirty arms hung round their necks. The heads of his two bearers drew closer together, his deathly pale face and burning eyes between them. Another wounded prisoner was being dragged out of a bunker on a blanket.
The snow was dotted with blue-grey stacks of weapons. They were like ricks of steel straw that had just been threshed.
A Russian soldier was being lowered into his tomb to a salute of gunfire. A few yards away lay heaps of dead Germans who had just been hauled up from the hospital cellars. A crowd of Rumanian soldiers went past, guffawing, waving their arms about, making fun of the Germans – both living and dead.
Prisoners were being herded along from the Nursery, from the Tsaritsa, from the House of Specialists . . . They walked with a very particular gait, the gait adopted by humans and animals who have lost their freedom. The lightly wounded and frostbitten were leaning on sticks or pieces of charred planks. On they marched; it seemed that all of them had the same greyish face, the same eyes, the same expression of suffering.
It was surprising how many of these men were very short, with large noses and low foreheads, with small hare-like mouths and bird-like heads. What a lot of Aryans there were whose dark skin was covered with freckles, boils and pimples.
They were weak, ugly men. None of them seemed to have strong chins, arrogant mouths, blonde hair, clear eyes or granite chests. How extraordinarily similar they were to the equally weak, ugly, unfortunate men who, in the autumn of 1941, had been prodded and beaten by the Germans towards prisoner-of-war camps in the West.
Now and then you could hear pistol-shots in the cellars and bunkers. The crowds of prisoners, still drifting along towards the Volga, understood the meaning of these shots only too well.
Lieutenant-Colonel Mikhailov continued to glance now and then at the Field-Marshal; meanwhile the driver studied his face in the mirror. Mikhailov could see a long, thin cheek; the driver could see his forehead, his eyes and his tight silent lips.
They drove past guns with barrels pointing up at the sky, past tanks painted with swastikas, past trucks whose tarpaulin covers were flapping about in the wind, past armoured troop-carriers and self-propelled guns.
The iron body, the muscles, of the 6th Army, were freezing solid, freezing into the ground. The men themselves were still marching slowly past; it seemed as if at any moment they too might come to a halt, might freeze into stillness.
Mikhailov, the driver and the armed guard were all waiting for Paulus to say something, to call out to someone or at least to look round. But he remained silent; they had no idea where his eyes were looking or what messages they were bringing him.
Was he afraid of being seen by his soldiers? Or was that the very thing he wanted? Suddenly Paulus turned to Mikhailov and asked:
‘Sagen Sie bitte, was ist es, Makhorka?’fn1
This unexpected question did not help Mikhailov to understand Paulus’s thoughts. In fact he was wondering anxiously whether or not he would have soup every day, whether he would have somewhere warm to sleep, whether he would be able to obtain tobacco.
Footnotes
fn1 ‘Tell me please, what is Makhorka?’ (Makhorka is a coarse Russian tobacco.)
48
Some German prisoners were carrying out Russian corpses from the cellar of a two-storey building that had once been the headquarters of the Gestapo.
In spite of the cold, a group of women, boys and old men were standing beside the sentry and watching the Germans lay out the corpses on the frozen earth.
Most of the prisoners wore an expression of complete indifference, they dragged their feet as they walked and breathed in the smell of death without flinching. There was just one, a young man in an officer’s greatcoat, who had tied a handkerchief round his mouth and nose and was shaking his head convulsively like a horse stung by gadflies. The expression of torment in his eyes seemed close to madness.
Sometimes the prisoners put a stretcher down on the ground and stood over it for a while: some of the corpses were missing an arm or leg and the prisoners were wondering which of the spare limbs belonged to which corpse. Most of the corpses were half-naked or in their underclothes; a few were wearing trousers. One was quite naked: his mouth was wide open in a last cry; his stomach had sunk right into his backbone; he had reddish pubic hair and pitifully thin legs.
It was impossible to imagine that these corpses with their sunken mouths and eye-sockets had, until not long ago, been living beings with names and homes; that they had smoked cigarettes, longed for a mug of beer and said: ‘My darling, my beautiful, give me a kiss – and don’t forget me!’
The officer with the handkerchief round his mouth seemed to be the only person able to imagine all this. But for some reason he was the one who appeared to attract the anger of the women standing beside the entrance; they kept their eyes fixed on him and ignored the remaining prisoners – despite the fact that two of them had light patches on their overcoats where their SS insignia had once been.
‘So you’re trying to look away, are you?’ muttered a squat woman who was holding a little boy by the hand.
The officer could sense the weight of emotion in the woman’s slow, penetrating look. The air was full of a hatred that needed to be discharged; it was like the electrical energy in a storm-cloud that strikes blindly and with consuming power at one of the trees in a forest.
The officer’s fellow-worker was a short soldier with a thin towel round his neck and some sacking tied with telephone cable round his legs.
The Russians standing in silence by the door looked so hostile that the prisoners felt relieved to go back down again into the dark cellar. They stayed there as long as they could, preferring the stench and darkness to the fresh air and daylight.
The prisoners were on their way back to the cellar with empty stretchers when they heard the familiar sound of Russian swearwords. They carried on at the same pace, sensing instinctively that one sudden movement would be enough to make the crowd turn on them.
The officer suddenly let out a cry and the guard said irritably: ‘Hey, you brat! What’s the use of throwing stones? Are you going to take over if the Fritz comes a cropper?’
Back down in the cellar the prisoners had a few words together.
‘For the time being, they’ve only got it in for the lieutenant.’
‘Did you see the
way that woman looked at him?’
‘You stay in the cellar this time, Lieutenant,’ said a voice out of the darkness. ‘If they start on you, then we’ll be next.’
‘No, no, it’s no good hiding,’ the officer murmured sleepily. ‘This is the day of judgment.’ He turned to his fellow-worker. ‘Come on now, let’s be off!’
This time their burden was lighter and they walked faster than usual as they came out of the cellar. On the stretcher lay the corpse of an adolescent girl. Her body was shrivelled and dried up; only her blonde hair still kept its warm life and colour, falling in disorder round the terrible, blackened face of a dead bird. The crowd gave a quiet gasp.
The squat woman let out a shrill cry. Her voice cut through the cold air like a blade. ‘My child! My child! My golden child!’
The crowd was shaken by the way the woman had cried out for a child who wasn’t even her own. The woman began tidying the girl’s hair; it looked as though it had only recently been curled. She gazed at her face, at her forever twisted mouth, at her terrible features; in them she could see what only a mother could have seen – the adorable face of the baby who had once smiled at her out of its swaddling clothes.
The woman got to her feet and strode towards the officer. Everyone was struck by the way she kept her eyes fixed on him and yet at the same time managed to find a brick that wasn’t part of a great frozen heap – a brick that even her poor hand could pick up, her poor weak hand that had been deformed by years of labour, that had been scalded by boiling water, icy water and lye.
The guard sensed what was about to happen and knew there was nothing he could do to stop the woman; she was stronger than his tommy-gun. The prisoners couldn’t take their eyes off her; the children watched her avidly and impatiently.
The woman could no longer see anything at all except the face of the German with the handkerchief round his mouth. Not understanding what was happening to her, governed by a power she had just now seemed to control, she felt in the pocket of her jacket for a piece of bread that had been given to her the evening before by a soldier. She held it out to the German officer and said: ‘There, have something to eat.’
Afterwards, she was unable to understand what had happened to her, why she had done this. Her life was to be full of moments of humiliation, helplessness and anger, full of petty cruelties that made her lie awake at night, full of brooding resentment. There was the time she quarrelled with her neighbour who had accused her of stealing a bottle of oil; the time the chairman of the district soviet, not interested in her complaints about life in a communal flat, had her thrown out of his office; the time when her son began manoeuvring to get her out of the room they shared, when his pregnant wife called her an old whore . . . At one such moment, lying on her bed, full of bitterness, she was to remember that winter morning outside the cellar and think: ‘I was a fool then, and I’m still a fool now.’
49
Alarming reports were reaching Novikov’s headquarters from his brigade commanders. Their scouts had located German tank and artillery units that hadn’t yet taken part in the fighting. The enemy was evidently bringing up his reserves.
Novikov found this information very disturbing: his forward units were advancing without securing their flanks; if the enemy should succeed in cutting the small number of passable roads, his tanks would be left with no infantry support and no fuel.
Novikov discussed the situation with Getmanov; he considered it essential to call a temporary halt to the tanks’ advance and allow the forces in the rear to catch up. Getmanov was still obsessed by the idea that their corps must be the first to enter the Ukraine. In the end they agreed that Getmanov should bring up the rear while Novikov investigated the situation to the west.
Before setting off for the brigades, Novikov phoned Yeremenko’s second-in-command and informed him of the situation. He knew in advance what answer he would receive; the second-in-command would never take the responsibility either of calling a halt to their advance, or of ordering them to continue.
The second-in-command said that he would alert Yeremenko and that he would request information from the intelligence service at Front HQ.
Novikov then phoned Molokov, the commander of the infantry corps next door. Molokov was a difficult, bad-tempered man who constantly suspected his neighbours of making unfavourable reports about him to Yeremenko. He and Novikov ended up arguing and even exchanging curses – not, admittedly, directed at each other, but at the widening gap opening up between the tanks and the infantry.
After that, Novikov phoned his neighbour on the left, the commander of an artillery division. He said he didn’t intend to advance any further unless he received orders from Front Headquarters. Novikov could understand his point of view: he didn’t want merely to play a supporting role to the tanks.
As Novikov was hanging up, Nyeudobnov came in. Novikov had never seen him looking so flustered and anxious.
‘Comrade Colonel,’ he said, ‘I’ve just had a call from the chief of staff of the air army. They’re about to transfer our support aircraft to the left flank.’
‘What do you mean?’ shouted Novikov. ‘They must be out of their minds!’
‘There’s no mystery about it,’ said Nyeudobnov. ‘Some people would prefer us not to be the first to enter the Ukraine. There are more than enough men who’ve got their eyes on the Orders of Suvorov and Bogdan Khmelnitsky. Without air support we have no choice but to call a halt.’
‘I’ll phone Yeremenko straight away.’
Yeremenko, however, had left for Tolbukhin’s army. His second-in-command, whom Novikov had only just phoned, again preferred not to take any decision. He merely expressed surprise that Novikov hadn’t yet moved up to his brigades.
‘Comrade Lieutenant-General,’ said Novikov, ‘I fail to understand how you can possibly, without warning, remove all air cover from the corps that has advanced furthest towards the West.’
‘Your superiors are better placed than you to decide how best to make use of the support aircraft,’ came the angry reply. ‘Yours isn’t the only corps taking part in this offensive.’
‘What am I going to say to my soldiers when the Germans start pounding them?’ demanded Novikov. ‘How am I going to cover them? With your instructions?’
Instead of losing his temper, the second-in-command adopted a conciliatory tone.
‘I’ll report the situation to the commander. You set off for your brigades.’
Then Getmanov came in; he had already put on his cap and overcoat. When he saw Novikov, he threw up his hands in astonishment. ‘Pyotr Pavlovich, I thought you’d already left.’
His next words were more gentle. ‘You say the rear’s lagging behind. Well, the officer responsible says we shouldn’t be wasting trucks and precious petrol on wounded Germans.’ He gave Novikov a meaningful look. ‘After all, we’re not a section of the Comintern. We’re a fighting unit.’
‘What on earth’s the Comintern got to do with it?’
‘Comrade Colonel,’ said Nyeudobnov entreatingly, ‘it’s time you left. Every moment’s precious. I’ll do everything in my power to sort things out with Headquarters.’
Since his conversation with Darensky, Novikov had been watching Nyeudobnov constantly, following his every movement. ‘Not with that very hand? I can’t believe it!’ he would think to himself as Nyeudobnov took hold of a spoon, speared a piece of pickled cucumber on a fork or picked up the telephone.
Now, though, Novikov had forgotten about all that. He had never seen Nyeudobnov so friendly, so concerned – so likeable even.
Getmanov and Nyeudobnov were ready to sell their souls to the devil if only they could be the first to enter the Ukraine, if only the brigades could continue their advance without delay. But there was one risk they wouldn’t run: that of taking responsibility themselves for an action that might lead to a setback.
In spite of himself, Novikov had succumbed to this fever. He too wanted to be able to radio to HQ that his advance u
nits had been the first to cross the frontier. In military terms this meant very little and certainly would not occasion the enemy any particular harm. But Novikov wanted it none the less – for the glory of it, for the Order of Suvorov, for the rank of general it would certainly assure him. He wanted to be thanked by Yeremenko, to be praised by Vasilevsky, to hear his name over the radio on Stalin’s order of the day. He even wanted his neighbours to be jealous of him. Such thoughts and feelings had never governed his acts before; it was perhaps for this very reason that they were now so intense.
There was nothing reprehensible in this ambition of his . . . Everything was the same as in Stalingrad and during 1941: the cold was just as pitiless, the soldiers were still half-dead with exhaustion, death was still as terrifying. And yet the whole spirit of the war was changing.
And Novikov, who hadn’t yet understood this, was surprised to find himself in agreement for once with Getmanov and Nyeudobnov. He no longer felt irritated or resentful; he seemed quite naturally to want the same things as they did.
If his tanks advanced faster, the invaders would indeed be driven out of a few Ukrainian villages a few hours sooner. It would make him happy to see the joy on the faces of the children and old men. Some old peasant woman would fling her arms round him as though he were her own son; his eyes would fill with tears.
But, at the same time, new passions were ripening; the spirit of the war was changing. What had been crucial in Stalingrad and during 1941 was coming to be of merely secondary importance. The first person to understand this change was the man who on 3 June, 1941, had said: ‘My brothers and sisters, my friends . . .’