want his investigators to commiserate with him about being abandoned by the woman he loved? Did he expect them to take into consideration that he called out for her at night, that he had bitten his hand, that his mother had called him Nikolenka?
Krymov woke up during the night, opened his eyes and saw Dreling standing beside Katsenelenbogen's bunk. The glaring electric light shone down on the old jailbird's back. Bogoleev had woken up too; he was sitting on his bunk with a blanket round his legs.
Dreling rushed to the door and banged on it with his bony fists. He shouted in his bony voice:
'Quick! Send us a doctor! One of the prisoners has had a heart attack.'
'Quiet there! Cut it out at once!' shouted the duty-officer who had come running to the spy-hole.
'What do you mean?' yelled Krymov. 'There's a man dying.'
He jumped up from his bunk, ran to the door and banged at it with his fists. He noticed that Bogoleev was now lying down again under the blankets, evidently afraid of playing an active role in this sudden emergency.
Soon the door was flung open and several men came in.
Katsenelenbogen was unconscious. It took the men a long time to lift his vast body onto the stretcher.
In the morning Dreling suddenly asked Krymov:
'Tell me, did you, as a Communist commissar, often hear expressions of discontent at the front?'
'What do you mean?' demanded Krymov. 'Discontent with what?'
'With the collectivization policy of the Bolsheviks, with the military leadership – any expression of political discontent.'
'Not once. I never came across the least hint of any such attitude.'
'Yes, yes, I see. Just as I thought,' said Dreling with a satisfied nod of the head.
7
Two hammers, one to the north and one to the south, each composed of millions of tons of metal and flesh, awaited the signal to advance.
It was the forces to the north-west of Stalingrad that launched the attack. On 19 November, 1942, at 7.30 a.m., a massive artillery bombardment began along the entire length of the South-Western and Don Fronts; it lasted for eighty minutes. A wall of fire came down over the positions held by the 3rd Rumanian Army.
The tanks and infantry went into the attack at 8.50 a.m. The morale of the Soviet troops was exceptionally high. The 76th Division went into the attack to the strains of a march played by its brass band.
By the afternoon they had broken through the enemy front line. Fighting was taking place over an enormous area.
The 4th Rumanian Army Corps had been smashed. The 1st Rumanian Cavalry Division near Krainyaya had been isolated from the remaining units of the Army.
The 5 th Tank Army advanced from the heights thirty kilometres to the south-west of Serafimovich and broke through the positions held by the 2nd Rumanian Army Corps. Moving quickly towards the south, it had taken the heights north of Perelasovskaya by midday. The Soviet Tank and Cavalry Corps then turned to the south-west; by evening they had reached Gusynka and Kalmykov, sixty kilometres to the rear of the 3rd Rumanian Army.
The forces concentrated to the south of Stalingrad, in the Kalmyk steppes, went into the attack twenty-four hours later, at dawn on 20 November.
8
Novikov woke up long before dawn. His excitement was so great he was no longer aware of it.
'Do you want some tea, comrade Colonel?' asked Vershkov solemnly.
'Yes,' said Novikov. 'And you can tell the cook to do me some eggs.'
'How would you like them, comrade Colonel?'
Novikov didn't answer for a moment. Vershkov imagined he was lost in thought and hadn't even heard the question.
'Fried,' said Novikov. He looked at his watch and added: 'Go and see if Getmanov's up yet. We'll be starting in half an hour.'
He wasn't thinking – or so at least it seemed to him – about the artillery barrage that would be starting in an hour and a half, about the bombers and ground-support aircraft that would be filling the sky with the roar of their engines, about the sappers who would creep forward to clear the barbed wire and the minefields, about the infantry who would soon be dragging their machine-guns up the misty hills he had looked at so often through his binoculars. He was no longer conscious of any link with Byelov, Makarov and Karpov. He seemed to have forgotten the tanks to the north-west of Stalingrad that had already penetrated the breach in the enemy front opened up by the infantry and artillery, that were already advancing rapidly towards Kalach; he seemed to have forgotten that soon his own tanks would advance from the south to meet them and surround Paulus's army.
He wasn't thinking about Yeremenko, about the fact that Stalin might cite his name in tomorrow's order of the day. He seemed to have forgotten Yevgenia Nikolaevna, to have forgotten that dawn in Brest-Litovsk when he had run towards the airfield and seen the first flames of war in the sky.
He wasn't thinking about any of these things, but they were all of them inside him.
He was thinking simply about whether he should wear his old boots or his new ones; that he mustn't forget his cigarette-case; that his swine of an orderly had yet again given him cold tea. He sat there, eating his fried eggs and mopping up the butter still left in the pan with a piece of bread.
'Your orders have been carried out,' reported Vershkov. He went on in confiding disapproval: 'I asked the soldier if the commissar was there and he said: 'Where d'you think he is? He's with that woman of his.''
The soldier had used a more expressive word than 'woman', but Vershkov preferred not to repeat this to the corps commander's face.
Novikov didn't say anything; he went on gathering up the crumbs of bread on the table, squeezing them together with one finger.
Soon Getmanov arrived.
'Tea?' asked Novikov.
'It's time we were off, Pyotr Pavlovich,' said Getmanov abruptly. 'We've had enough tea and enough sugar. Now it's time to deal with the Germans.'
'Oh,' Vershkov said to himself, 'we are tough today!'
Novikov went into the part of the house that served as their headquarters, glanced at the map and had a word with Nyeudobnov about various matters of liaison.
The deceptive silence and darkness reminded Novikov of his childhood in the Donbass. Everything had seemed just as calm, just as sleepy, only a few minutes before the whistles and hooters started up and the men went out to the mines and factories. But Petya Novikov had known that hundreds of hands were already groping for foot-cloths and boots, that women were already walking about in bare feet, rattling pokers and crockery.
'Vershkov,' he said, 'you can take my tank to the observation post. I'll be needing it today.'
'Yes, comrade Colonel, said Vershkov. 'And I'll put your gear in -and the commissar's.'
'Don't forget the cocoa,' said Getmanov.
Nyeudobnov came out onto the porch, his greatcoat thrown over his shoulders.
'Lieutenant-General Tolbukhin just phoned. He wanted to know whether the corps commander had set off for the observation post yet.'
Novikov nodded, tapped his driver on the shoulder and said: 'Let's be off, Kharitonov.'
The road left the last house behind, turned sharply to the right, to the left and then ran due west, between patches of snow and dry grass.
They passed the dip in the ground where the 1st Brigade was waiting. Novikov suddenly told Kharitonov to stop, jumped out and walked towards the tanks. They showed up as black shapes surrounded by semi-darkness.
