On Friday 5 December in the evening the Russian artillery thundered into action. Next morning at dawn, Volodya and his battalion moved off in a blizzard. Their orders were to take a small town on the far side of a canal.
Volodya ignored orders to attack the German defences frontally – that was the old-fashioned Russian tactic, and this was no moment to stick obstinately to wrong-headed ideas. With his company of a hundred men he went upstream and crossed the ice to the north of the town, then moved in on the Germans’ flank. He could hear the crash and roar of battle off to his left, so he knew he was behind the enemy’s front line.
Volodya was almost blinded by the blizzard. The occasional blaze of gunfire lit up the clouds for a moment, but at ground level visibility was only a few yards. However, he thought optimistically, that would help the Russians creep up on the Germans and take them by surprise.
It was viciously cold, down to minus 35 Centigrade in places; and while this was bad for both sides, it was worse for the Germans, who lacked cold-weather supplies.
Somewhat to his surprise Volodya found that the normally efficient Germans had not consolidated their line. There were no trenches, no anti-tank ditches, no dugouts. Their front was no more than a series of strongpoints. It was easy to slip through the gaps into the town and look for soft targets: barracks and canteens and ammunition dumps.
His men shot three sentries to take a soccer field in which were parked fifty tanks. Could it be so easy, Volodya wondered? Was the force that had conquered half Russia now depleted and spent?
The corpses of Soviet soldiers, killed in previous skirmishes and left to freeze where they had died, were without their boots and coats, which had presumably been taken by shivering Germans.
The streets of the town were littered with abandoned vehicles – empty trucks with open doors, snow-covered tanks with cold engines, and jeeps with their bonnet lids propped up as if to show that mechanics had tried to fix them but had given up in despair.
Crossing a main road, Volodya heard a car engine and made out, through the snowfall, a pair of headlights approaching on his left. At first he assumed it was a Soviet vehicle that had pushed through the German lines. Then he and his group were fired on, and he yelled at them to take cover. The car turned out to be a Kubelwagen, a Volkswagen jeep with the spare wheel on the hood in front. It had an air-cooled engine, which was why it had not frozen up. It rattled past them at top speed, the Germans firing from their seats.
Volodya was so surprised that he forgot to fire back. Why was a vehicle full of armed Germans driving away from the battle?
He took his company across the road. He had expected that by now they would be fighting their way from house to house, but they met little opposition. The buildings of the occupied town were locked up, shuttered, dark. Any Russians inside were hiding under their beds, if they had any sense.
More cars came along the road, and Volodya decided that officers must be fleeing the battlefield. He detailed a section with a Degtyarev DP-28 light machine gun to take cover in a cafe and fire on them. He did not want them to live to kill Russians tomorrow.
Just off the main road he spotted a low brick building with bright lights behind skimpy curtains. Creeping past a sentry who could not see far in the snowstorm, he was able to peer in and discern officers inside. He guessed he was looking at a battalion headquarters.
He gave whispered instructions to his sergeants. They shot out the windows then tossed grenades through. A few Germans came out with their hands on their heads. A minute later, Volodya had taken the building.
He heard a new noise. He listened, frowning in puzzlement. More than anything else, it sounded like a football crowd. He stepped out of the headquarters building. The sound was coming from the front line, and it was growing louder.
There was a rattle of machine-gun fire then, a hundred yards away on the main road, a truck slewed sideways and careered off the road into a brick wall, then burst into flames – hit, presumably, by the DP-28 Volodya had deployed. Two more vehicles followed immediately behind it and escaped.
Volodya ran to the cafe. The machine gun stood on its bipod on a dining table. This model was nicknamed Record Player because of the disc-shaped magazine that sat atop the barrel. The men were enjoying themselves. ‘It’s like shooting pigeons in the yard, sir!’ said a gunner. ‘Easy!’ One of the men had raided the kitchen and found a big canister of ice cream, miraculously unspoiled, and they were taking turns to scoff it.
Volodya looked out through the smashed window of the cafe. He saw another vehicle coming, a jeep he thought, and behind it some men running. As they got nearer he recognized German uniforms. More followed behind, dozens, perhaps hundreds. They were responsible for the football-crowd sound.
The gunner trained the barrel on the oncoming car, but Volodya put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Wait,’ he said.
He stared into the blizzard, making his eyes sting. All he could see was more vehicles and more running men, plus a few horses.
A soldier raised a rifle. ‘Don’t shoot,’ Volodya said. The crowd came closer. ‘We can’t stop this lot – we’d be overrun in a minute,’ he said. ‘Let them pass. Take cover.’ The men lay down. The gunner lifted the DP-28 off the table. Volodya sat on the floor and peered over the windowsill.
The noise rose to a roar. The leading men drew level with the cafe and passed. They were running, stumbling and limping. Some carried rifles, most seemed to have lost their weapons; some had coats and hats, others nothing but their uniform tunics. Many were wounded. Volodya saw a man with a bandaged head fall down, crawl a few yards, and collapse. No one took any notice. A cavalryman on horseback trampled an infantryman and galloped on, heedless. Jeeps and staff cars drove dangerously through the crowd, skidding on the ice, honking madly and scattering men to both sides.
