Novikov looked at the men's faces as he passed by, but he didn't say a word to anyone.
He remembered the young recruits he had seen the other day on the village square. They really were just children, and the whole world had conspired to expose these children to enemy fire: the plans of the General Staff, the orders given by Yeremenko, the order he himself would give to his brigade commanders in an hour's time, what they heard from their political instructors, what they read in poems and articles in the newspapers. Into battle! Into battle! And to the west men were waiting to blow them up, to cut them apart, to crush them under the treads of their tanks.
'Yes, there is going to be a wedding!' he thought. But with no harmonicas, no sweet port wine. Novikov would shout 'Bitter! Bitter!' [50] – and the nineteen-year-old bridegrooms would dutifully kiss their brides.
Novikov felt as though he were walking among his own brothers and nephews, among the sons of his own neighbours, and that thousands of invisible girls and women were watching him.
Mothers contest a man's right to send another man to his death. But, even in war, you find men who join the mothers' clandestine resistance. Men who say, 'Stay here a moment. Can't you hear the firing outside? They can wait for my report. You just put the kettle on.' Men who say on the telephone to their superior officer, 'Yes, Colonel, we're to advance the machine-gun,' but then hang up and say, 'There's no point in moving it forward, and it will just mean the death of a good soldier.'
Novikov strode back to his jeep. His face looked harsh and grim, as though it had absorbed some of the raw darkness of this November dawn. The jeep started up again. Getmanov looked sympathetically at Novikov.
'You know what I want to say to you right now, Pyotr Pavlovich? I love you, yes, and I believe in you.'
9
The silence was dense and unbroken; it was as though there were no steppe, no mist, no Volga, nothing in the world but silence. And then the clouds grew lighter, the grey mist began to turn crimson – and the earth and sky suddenly filled with thunder.
The nearby guns joined those in the distance; the echoes reinforced this link, and the whole battlefield was covered by a dense pattern of sound.
In the steppe villages the mud walls of the houses began to shake; pieces of clay fell silently to the floor and doors started to open and close of their own accord. The thin ice on the lakes began to crack.
A fox took flight, waving its thick silky tail in the air; a hare for once ran after it rather than away from it. Birds of prey of both day and night flew heavily up into the sky, brought together for the first time. A few field mice leapt sleepily out of their holes – like startled, dishevelled old men running out of a hut that had just caught fire.
The damp morning air over the artillery batteries probably grew a degree or two warmer from the hundreds of burning-hot gun barrels.
You could see the shell-bursts very clearly from the observation post, together with the oily black and yellow smoke twisting into the air, the fountains of earth and muddy snow and the milky whiteness of steely fire.
The artillery fell silent. The clouds of hot smoke slowly mingled with the cold, clammy mist.
Then the sky filled with another sound, a broad, rumbling sound. Soviet planes were flying towards the West. The hum and roar of the planes made tangible the true height of the sky: the fighters and ground-support aircraft flew beneath the low clouds, almost at ground level, while in and above the clouds you could hear the bass note of the invisible bombers.
The Germans in the sky over Brest-Litovsk, the Russians over the steppe… Novikov didn't make this comparison. What he felt then went deeper than any thoughts, memories or comparisons.
The silence returned. The silence was quite suffocating, both for the men who had been waiting to launch the attack on the Rumanian lines and for the men who were to make that attack.
This silence was like the mute, turbid, primeval sea… How joyful, how splendid, to fight in a battle that would decide the fate of your motherland. How appalling, how terrifying, to stand up and face death, to run towards death rather than away from it. How terrible to die young… You want to stay alive. There is nothing stronger in the world than the desire to preserve a young life, a life that has lived so little. This desire is stronger than any thought; it lies in the breath, in the nostrils, in the eyes, in the muscles, in the haemoglobin and its greed for oxygen. This desire is so vast that nothing can be compared to it; it cannot be measured… It's terrible. The moment before an attack is terrible.
Getmanov gave a loud, deep sigh. He looked in turn at Novikov, at the telephone and at the radio.
He was surprised at the expression on Novikov's face. During the last months he had seen it take on many different expressions – anger, worry, anxiety, gaiety, sullenness – but it had never looked anything like this.
One by one, the Rumanian batteries that hadn't yet been neutralized returned to life. From their emplacements in the rear, they were firing on the Russian front line. The powerful anti-aircraft guns were now being used against targets on the ground.
'Pyotr Pavlovich!' said Getmanov anxiously. 'It's time! You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.'
To him, the necessity of sacrificing men to the cause had always seemed natural and incontestible – in peace as well as in war.
But Novikov held back. He ordered his telephonist to get Lopatin, the commander of the heavy artillery regiment that had been clearing the path for his tanks.
'Take care, Pyotr Pavlovich!' said Getmanov, looking at his watch. ' Tolbukhin will eat you alive.'
Novikov was reluctant to admit his deepest feelings even to himself, let alone to Getmanov; they were ridiculous, almost shameful.
'I'm worried about the tanks,' he said. 'We could lose a large number of them. It's only a matter of a few minutes and the T-34S are such splendid machines. We've got those anti-tank and anti-aircraft batteries in the palm of our hand.'
The steppe was still smoking. The men beside him in the observation post were staring at him, wide-eyed. The brigade commanders were waiting for their orders over the radio.
He was a colonel and a true craftsman; he was in the grip of his passion for war. But Getmanov was pushing him on, he was afraid of his superiors, and his pride and ambition were at stake. He knew very well that the words he had said to Lopatin would never be studied by the General Staff or enter the history books. No, they wouldn't win him any words of praise from Zhukov or Stalin; they wouldn't bring any nearer the Order of Suvorov he coveted.
There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their death without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death. Novikov carried out this responsibility to the full.
10
In the Kremlin Stalin was waiting for a report from Yeremenko. He looked at his watch; the artillery barrage had just finished, the infantry had gone forward and the mobile units were about to enter the breach cleared by the artillery. The aeroplanes would now be bombing the German rear, the roads and airfields.
Ten minutes before, he had spoken to Vatutin. The tank and cavalry units to the north of Stalingrad were advancing even more rapidly than planned.
He picked up his pencil and glanced at the silent telephone. He wanted very much to mark the movement of the southern claw of the pincer on his map. But a superstitious anxiety made him put down the pencil. At that moment he could feel very clearly that Hitler – conscious of Stalin's thoughts – was thinking about him.
Churchill and Roosevelt trusted him; but he knew that their trust was by no means unconditional. What annoyed him most was the way, although they were only too willing to confer with him, they always first discussed everything between themselves. They knew very well that wars came and went, but politics remained politics. They admired his logic, his knowledge, the clarity of his reasoning; but he knew they saw him as an Asiatic potentate, not as a European leader.
