commanding officer and the commissar [8] of an infantry regiment in Rodimtsev's division. He intended first to give a short lecture to the staff officers and then to sort out the quarrel.
An orderly from the Army Political Section led him to the mouth of the vast conduit that housed Rodimtsev's command-post. A sentry announced his arrival, and a gruff voice replied: 'Bring him in! The poor man's probably shitting in his pants by now.'
Krymov walked in under the low ceiling. Conscious that everyone was watching, he introduced himself to Vavilov, the divisional commissar. He was a stout man in a soldier's jacket, sitting on top of an empty crate.
'Splendid!' said Vavilov. 'A lecture's just what we need. People have heard that Manuilsky and a few others have arrived on the left bank and aren't even coming over to Stalingrad.'
'I've also been instructed to sort out a quarrel between the commander of one of your infantry regiments and his commissar.'
'Yes, we did have some difficulties there,' said Vavilov. 'But yesterday they were settled: a one-ton bomb fell on the command-post. Eighteen men were killed, the commander and his commissar among them.
'They couldn't have been more different,' he went on confidingly, 'even in appearance. They were like chalk and cheese. The commander was a straightforward man, the son of a peasant, while the commissar had a ring on one finger and always wore gloves. And now they are lying side by side.'
In the manner of someone used to being in control, both of his own feelings and of other people's, he suddenly added in a quite different tone of voice:
'Once, when we were based near Kotluban, I had to drive a lecturer from Moscow to the front- Pavel Fyodorovich Yudin. [9] The Member of the Military Soviet had said it would be the end of me if he lost so much as a hair off his head. Now that really was hard work. We had to dive straight into the ditch if a plane came anywhere near. But comrade Yudin certainly knew how to take care of himself – I'll say that for him! He showed true initiative.'
The other listeners laughed. Krymov knew it was him they were making fun of.
As a rule, he was able to establish good relations with officers in the field, tolerable relations with staff officers, and only awkward, rather insincere relations with his fellow political-workers. It was the same now: he was irritated by this commissar. He'd only just been sent to the front and he put on the airs of a veteran. He probably hadn't even joined the Party till just before the war.
On the other hand, there was obviously something about Krymov that got under Vavilov's skin.
After the lecture, people began asking questions. Belsky, Rodimtsev's chief of staff, who was sitting beside the general, asked: 'When are the Allies going to open a second front, comrade lecturer?'
Vavilov, who had been stretched out on a narrow bunk fixed to the stone facing of the conduit, sat up, raked aside some straw with his fingers and said: 'Who cares about that? What I want to know is when our own Command intends to act.'
Krymov glanced at him in irritation. 'Since the commissar puts the question in that form, it seems more appropriate that the general should answer it.'
Everyone turned to Rodimtsev.
'A tall man can't even stand up in here,' he began. 'This is a dead end if ever there was one. You can't launch an offensive from out of a pipe. I'd be only too glad – but how can you effect a concentration of troops in a pipe?'
The telephone rang. Rodimtsev picked up the receiver.
Everyone's eyes were on him.
He put down the receiver, leant over towards Belsky and whispered a few words in his ear. The latter reached out for the receiver himself. Rodimtsev put his hand over it and said: 'Why bother? Can't you hear?'
Up above they could hear frequent bursts of machine-gun fire and the explosions of hand-grenades. The conduit amplified every sound. The gunfire was like the clatter of carts going over a bridge.
Rodimtsev said a few words to various staff officers and again picked up the impatient telephone-receiver. He caught Krymov's eye for a moment, smiled calmly and said: 'The weather's turned fine here on the Volga.'
The telephone was now ringing incessantly. Krymov had gathered what was happening from the conversations he had overheard. Colonel Borisov, the second-in-command, went up to the general and leaned over the crate where the plan of Stalingrad was spread out. With a sudden, dramatic gesture he drew a blue perpendicular through the red dots of the Soviet front line right up to the Volga, then looked pointedly at Rodimtsev. A man in a cape came in out of the darkness and Rodimtsev got up to meet him.
It was obvious enough where he had come from. He was shrouded in an incandescent cloud and his cape seemed to be crackling with electricity.
'Comrade General,' he said plaintively, 'the swine have forced me back. They've reached the ravine and they're almost at the Volga. I need reinforcements!'
'You must stop the enemy yourselves, at whatever cost,' said Rodimtsev. 'There are no reserves.'
'At whatever cost,' repeated the man in the cape. He clearly understood what this meant.
'Just here?' asked Krymov, pointing to a spot on the map.
Rodimtsev didn't get a chance to answer. From the mouth of the conduit came the sound of pistol-shots and the flashes of hand-grenades.
Rodimtsev blew a piercing blast on his whistle. Belsky ran towards him, shouting: 'Comrade General, the enemy have broken through to the command-post!'
Suddenly the respected general, the man who had coloured in troop dispositions on a map with almost theatrical calm, was no longer there. And the war in these overgrown ravines and ruined buildings was no longer a matter of chromium-plated steel, cathode lamps and radio sets. There was just a man with thin lips, shouting excitedly: 'Divisional staff! Check your personal weapons, take some grenades and follow me!'
Both his voice and eyes had the burning cold of alcohol. His strength no longer lay in his military experience or his knowledge of the map, but in his harsh, wild, impetuous soul.
A few minutes later, staff officers, clerks, signallers and telephonists were pushing and shoving each other as they streamed out of the conduit. Following the light-footed Rodimtsev, they ran towards the ravine. It was full of the sound of shots and explosions, of shouting and cursing.
Krymov was one of the first to reach the ravine. As he looked down, breathing heavily, his heart gave a shudder of mingled disgust, fear and hatred. Dim figures appeared out of the darkness, rifles flashed, red and green eyes gleamed momentarily, and the air was full of the whistle of iron. He seemed to be looking into a vast pit full of hundreds of poisonous snakes that were slithering about in confusion, hissing and rustling through the dry grass.
With a feeling of revulsion and fury, Krymov began firing at the flashes below and the quick shadows creeping their way up the slope.
Thirty or forty yards away a group of Germans appeared on the crest. They were making for the mouth of the conduit. The rumble of exploding grenades shook both the air and the earth.
It was as though a huge black cauldron were boiling and Krymov were immersed, body and soul, in its gurgling, bubbling waters. He could no longer think or feel as he had ever thought or felt before. For a moment he seemed to be in control of the whirlpool that had seized hold of him; then a thick black pitch seemed to pour into his eyes and nostrils – there was no air left to breathe, no stars over his head, nothing but this darkness, this ravine and these strange creatures rustling through the dry grass.
And yet, in spite of the confusion around him, he retained a clear sense both of his own strength and of the strength of the men beside him; he felt an almost palpable sense of solidarity with them, and a sense of joy that Rodimtsev was somewhere nearby.
This strange clarity, which arose at a moment when it was impossible to tell whether a man three yards away was a friend or an enemy, was linked to an equally clear and inexplicable sense of the general course of the fighting, the sense that allows a soldier to judge the true correlation of forces in a battle and to predict its outcome.
11
