the passionate cause, but rather a blood-slackening sight of the coldest chamber of the human heart.
9th November 1941
In Nikltkino I came across a scene from the Middle Ages. A Russian prisoner with a hammer was moving among the ranks of his dead comrades, breaking their fingers, which still clutched their weapons. None of them wore boots. They’d all been stolen. With the fingers and arms broken and the weapons removed, their furs and quilted jackets can be taken. I now look like the Wolf Man and have recently acquired a bearskin hat. The front is now extended to include Otonskii and Posad.
18th November 1941, Dubrovka
The Russians have counterattacked the limits of our new front. Posad hit with everything — mortar, anti-tank and artillery. We got it the next day, followed by a full charge from the Reds. They started with a resounding ‘Urrah!’ and something else which, when they got closer, we heard as: ‘Ispanskii kaput!’ Our artillery broke them up; we mowed down the rest like wheat — which was how the Russians charged, standing upright, never crouched. Perhaps they thought it unmanly. They regrouped and hit us again at night and we met them on the snow-covered plain under the slow-falling flares, the woods black behind them. Unreal. The night so silent before the mayhem. We threw grenades and followed up with a bayonet charge. The Reds dispersed. As they merged back into the woods we heard our new recruits, who’d just experienced their first charge, shout after them: ‘Otro toro! Otro toro!’
5th December 1941
I am back at the front after a flesh wound sent me to the field hospital. I never want to see that place again. Not even the cold could suppress the stench; rather it has frozen it into my nostrils permanently.
The cold has reached a new dimension: -35°C. When men die from heat they go mad, they start jabbering, their brain in a rage. In the cold a man just drifts away. One moment he is there, perhaps even drawing on a cigarette and the next he is gone. Men are dying from the cerebral fluid freezing in their heads under their steel helmets. I’m glad of my fur hat. With the drop in temperature the Russians have started talking to us in Spanish, using Republicans to translate. They promise warmth, food and entertainment. We tell them to fuck their whore mothers.
28th December 1941
Christmas Eve in profound cold. The men recite poetry and sing about Spain — the heat, the pine trees, mother’s cooking and women. The Russians are ruthless and attack on Christmas Day. The numbers they throw at us are appalling. We’ve heard of their punishment battalions. Political undesirables are sent to run at our guns. They fall three or four deep and the real soldiers come running over the top of them, using the bodies as a ramp. We are in the most Godless place on earth with barely any daylight and death all around. Atrocity reported in Udarnik in the north of our sector — guripas found nailed to the ground by icepicks. Our rage peters out with the cold and hunger.
18th January 1942, Novgorod
The Russians smell our weakness and, just when we think it is so cold that we’ll never move again, they attack. We’re sent to Teremets to help the Germans. We try to dissuade the endless waves of Russians by using some of our old African tricks. We strip prisoners of all useful clothing, cut off their trigger fingers, split their noses, cut off an ear and send them back. It has no effect. The next day they ‘re running at us again with clubs and bayonets. I was lucky to get out of Teremets alive and only made it back because I was sent to the rear with a broken leg.
17th June 1942, Riga
Complications set in with the leg after a bout of pneumonia. I was too weak to move and missed the return battalion in the spring. They reset the leg. I caught typhus. The wound wouldn’t heal. I hardly knew what was happening to me for five months. I had a visit from the new commander of 269, Lt Col Cabrera, who has asked me to go back up to the front with the newly manned ‘Tia Bernarda’, as my unit is nicknamed. The war has gone better for the Germans recently and they are back in control of all territory west of the Volkhov and are beginning to turn the screw on Leningrad.
9th February 1943
A Ukrainian deserter came over today and told us more than we wanted to know about what was happening in Kolpino. Huge numbers of batteries were being brought up behind the town, hundreds of trucks unloading shells. The enemy were ready to attack tomorrow. After all this waiting we didn’t believe him, but he showed us his clean underwear and that was enough. The Russians always issue clean underwear before an attack. It means you ‘re going to die, but you can do it with dignity. It was why he had deserted. But why, with all that firepower behind him, did he come over to us, who are about to receive it? Vodka does something to the Slavic brain.
The big Kolpino guns started lobbing shells at our positions south. The infantry blew up their minefields in front of their lines. Our own pathetic artillery started up and the Russian got the psychology just right … they didn’t even dignify it with a reply.
Night came at five in the afternoon. The cold crept inside our bones. We’re all scared, but the inevitability brings out the determination. The Reds’ tank engines started up in unison with a deafening roar. The motors run all night, the Russians worried they’ll freeze.
‘Tomorrow the bulls will run,’ says one of the sergeants. I go out to check the sentries. The cold makes them slack. As I chat to the men, the pine trees in front of the peat bogs bristle where thousands of soldiers rush through the woods to take up their positions for tomorrow’s attack.
10th February 1943
Nothing the Ukrainian deserter told us prepared us for this. At 6.45 the Kolpino guns opened fire on us. One thousand pieces of artillery fired at once. The devastation, in a matter of minutes, was as complete as after an earthquake. Whole hillsides came away, erupted, as if under volcanic pressure. The frost-brittle pine trees burst into flame. The snow around us instantly melted. Heavily fortified positions behind us disappeared into smoking earth. We were cut off. No phones and no visibility as the air filled with black smoke and the stink of peat. We crouched under a torrent of earth, planks, barbed wire, lumps of ice and then the limbs. Arms, legs, helmeted heads, a half-roasted torso. It was the opening statement. It said: ‘You will not survive.’
Some of the men were sobbing, but not through fear, just unable to contain their shock. We waited. The inevitable Urrah! and the Reds charged. They hurled themselves into our minefields and after ten metres they were all down. The next wave followed. Another ten metres and they were all down. As they reached the edge of the minefield we opened fire and mowed down line after line of them. The corpses were five deep and still they came. We blasted away, our machine-gun barrels glowing dull red even in the deep cold of the morning.
The Reds sent their new KV-1 tanks towards their objective — the Sinevino heights. Our 37mm shells bounced off the armour.
We were cut off to our left and rear. They pounded our position. Our Captain was hit in the arm. The smaller T-34 tanks smashed through our line, infantry behind, which we mowed down, blood streaking across their white capes. They hit us with anti-tank and mortar until we couldn’t think. We had no machine guns by the end of it. No automatic rifles. Any Russian who got close enough was dragged in and stabbed. More mortar fire. I wanted to laugh, our position was so desperate. The Captain was hit in the leg. He hopped around, exhorting us to
