grateful, and I’ll be there.”
They drove southward from Moscow in the rain, and all morning ground along in a thunderous parade of army trucks, stopping only for a visit to an amazingly well camouflaged airfield for interceptors, in the woods just outside the capital. The little black automobile, a Russian M-1 that looked and sounded much like a 1930 Ford, made cramped quarters, especially with unexplained packages and boxes lining the floor. When they had gone about a hundred miles, their guide, a mild-faced, bespectacled tank colonel, with the odd name of Porphyry Amphiteatrov, suggested that they stop to eat lunch and stretch, their legs. That was when they first heard the German guns.
The driver, a burly silent soldier with a close-trimmed red beard, turned off to a side road lined with old trees. They wound among cleared fields and copses of birch, glimpsing two large white country houses in the distance, and entered a gloomy lane that came to a dead end in wild woods. Here they got out, and the colonel led them along a footpath to a small grassy mound under the trees where garlands of fresh flowers lay.
“Well, this was Tolstoy’s country estate, you know,” said Amphiteatrov. “It is called Yasnaya Polyana, and there is his grave. Since it was on the way, I thought you might be interested.”
Tudsbury stared at the low mound and spoke in a in a hushed way not usual for him. “The grave of Tolstoy? No tomb? No stone?”
“He ordered it so. ‘Put me in the earth,’ he said, ‘in the woods where I played Green Stick with my brother Nicholas when we were boys…’” Amphiteatrov’s bass voice sounded coarse and loud over the dripping of water through the yellow leaves.
Victor Henry cocked his head and glanced at the colonel, for he heard a new noise: soft irregular thumps, faint as the plop of the rain on the grass. The colonel nodded. “Well, when the wind is right, the sound carries quite far.”
“Ah, guns?” said Tudsbury, with a show of great calm.
“Yes, guns. Well, shall we have a bite? The house where he worked is interesting, but it is not open nowadays.”
The bearded driver brought the lunch to benches out of sight of the burial spot. They ate black bread, very garlicky sausages, and raw cucumbers, washed down with warm beer. Nobody spoke. The rain dripped, the army trucks murmured on the highway, and the distant guns thumped faintly. Pamela broke the silence. “Who put the flowers there?”
“The caretakers, I suppose,” said the colonel.
“The Germans must never get this far,” she said.
“Well, that’s a spiritual thought,” the colonel said. “I don’t think they will, but Yasnaya Polyana is not a strong point, and so the great Tolstoy must now take his chances with the rest of the Russians.” He smiled, suddenly showing red gums, and not looking mild at all. “Anyway, the Germans can’t kill him.”
Tudsbury said, “They should have read him a little more carefully.”
“We still have to prove that. But we will.”
The sun momentarily broke through and birds began to sing. Victor Henry and Pamela Tudsbury sat together on a bench, and light shafted theatrically through the yellow leaves, full on the girl. She wore gray slacks tucked into white fur snowboots, and a gray lamb coat and hat.
“Why are you staring at me, Victor?”
“Pam, I’ve never visited Tolstoy’s grave before, certainly not with you, but I swear I remember all this, and most of all the nice way you’ve got that hat tilted.” As her hand went up to her hat he added, “And I could have told you you’d lift that hand, and the sun would make your ring sparkle.”
She held out her fingers stiffly, looking at the diamond. “Ted and I had a bit of a spat about
The colonel called, “Well, Captain, I think we go on?”
Edging into the thickening traffic stream on the main road, the little black automobile rolled in the direction of the gunfire. Trucks filled the highway, one line moving toward the front, one returning. Whiskered men and stout sunburned women, working in fields between stretches of birch forest, paid no attention to the traffic. Children playing near the highway ignored the war vehicles too. In tiny villages, washing hung outside the log cabins and the wooden houses with gaily painted window frames. One odd observation forced itself on Victor Henry: the further one got from Moscow, the nearer to the front, the more normal and peaceful Russia appeared. The capital behind them was one vast apprehensive scurry. Directly outside it, battalions of women, boys, and scrawny men with glasses — clerks, journalists, and schoolteachers — had been frantically digging antitank ditches and planting concrete and steel obstacles in myriads. Beyond that belt of defense began tranquil forests and fields, with fall colors splashing the stretches of green conifer. Mainly the air raid shelters for trucks along the highway — cleared spaces in the woods, masked with cut evergreen boughs — showed there was an invasion on.
Toward evening the car rolled into a small town and stopped at a yellow frame house on a muddy square. Here red-cheeked children lined up at a pump with pails; smoke was rising from chimneys; other children were driving in goats and cows from broad fields, stretching far and flat under a purpling cloudy sky; and three burly old men were hammering and sawing at the raw frame of a new unfinished house. This was the strangest thing Pug saw all that day — these Russian ancients, building a house in the twilight, within earshot of German artillery much louder here than at the Tolstoy estate, with yellow flashes thick like summer lightning on the western horizon.
“Well, this is their home,” the tank colonel replied, when Victor Henry remarked on the sight, as they climbed out of the car. “Where should they go? We have the Germans stopped here. Of course, we took out the pregnant women and the mothers with babies long ago.”
In the warm little dining room of the house, now regiment headquarters, the visitors crowded around the table with the tank colonel, four officers of the regiment, and a General Yevlenko, who wore three khaki stars on his thick wide shoulders. He was the chief of staff of the army group in that sector, and Colonel Amphiteatrov told Victor Henry that he had just happened to be passing through the town. This huge man with fair hair, a bulbous peasant nose, and big smooth pink jaws, appeared to fill one end of the narrow smoky room. Much taken with Pamela, Yevlenko kept passing gallant compliments urging food and drink on her. His fleshy face at moments settled into an abstracted, stony, deeply sad and tired look; then it would kindle with jollity, though the eyes remained filmed by fatigue in sunken purple sockets.
A feast almost in Kremlin style appeared, on the yellow cloth, course by course, brought by soldiers: champagne, caviar, smoked fish, soup, fowls, steaks, and cream cakes. The mystery of this magnificent stunt was cleared up when Pug Henry glanced into the kitchen as one of the soldier-waiters opened and closed the door. The bearded driver of the M-1 automobile was sweating over the stove in a white apron. Pug had seen him carrying boxes from the car into the house. Evidently he was really a cook, and a superb one.
The general talked freely about the war, and the colonel translated. His army group was outnumbered in this sector and had far fewer tanks and guns than the Nazis. Still, they might yet surprise Fritz. They had to hold a line much too long for their strength, according to doctrine; but a good doctrine, like a good regiment, sometimes had to stretch.
The Germans were taking fearful losses. He reeled off many figures of tanks destroyed, guns captured, men killed. Any army could advance if its commanders were willing to leave blood smeared on each yard of earth gained. The Germans were getting white as turnips with the bloodletting. This drive was their last big effort to win the war before winter came.
“Will they take Moscow?” Tudsbury asked.
“Not from this direction,” retorted the general, “nor do I think they will from any other. But if they do take it, well, we’ll drive them out of Moscow, and then we’ll drive them out of our land. We are going to beat them. The Germans have no strategic policy. Their idea of a strategic policy is to kill, to loot, and to take slaves. In this day and age that is not a strategic policy. Furthermore, their resources are basically inferior to ours. Germany is a poor country. Finally, they overestimated themselves and they underrated us. According to V. I. Lenin, that is a very dangerous mistake in war. It is very dangerous in war, Lenin said, to think too much of yourself and too little of your opponent. The result can only be inaccurate plans and very unpleasant surprises, as, for example, defeat.”
Pamela said, “Still, they have come so far.”
The general turned a suddenly menacing, brutally tough, piteously exhausted, angry big face to her. His expression dissolved into a flirtatious smirk. “Yes, my dear girl, and I see that you mean that remark well and do
