Stalingrad

close to the front line did not last long. Any inhabitants who had already packed straw round their houses, then a layer of planks and logs outside to insulate them for winter, were soon evicted. If they had stayed, they would have seen their home rapidly dismantled, as German soldiers took planks, beams, doors and even windows to improve their dugouts.

Soldiers, having demolished the houses of civilians, revealed an instinctive desire to turn their own dugout into a new home. The revetted communications trenches and the earthworks round the entrances to bunkers gave no impression of what one might find within. They fashioned frames for picture postcards or cherished snapshots. Some things were always respected. No man would touch or insult the photograph of a comrade’s wife or children. Officers made sure that they had bunks, benches and a table. General Edler von Daniels, the commander of 376th Infantry Division, had a bunker complex designed by one of his staff with impeccable architectural plans after they moved to their new position on the south-west flank. The commanding officer of Dr Kurt Reuber, the priest serving as a doctor with 16th Panzer Division, had a particularly large bunker dug so that he could fit a piano inside, which had been abandoned by another division. And there, underground, unheard above and muffled by the earth walls, he played Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. His interpretation was beautiful, but also, it seems, obsessive. ‘The commanding officer played on, even when the walls trembled from bombardments and soil trickled down.’ He even continued to play when officers came in to report on the fighting outside.

Some units were fortunate enough to retain their old positions. The 297th Infantry Division, south of Stalingrad, had finished its elaborate underground sanatorium before the Russian offensive. They feared that they might lose it together with all the hospital equipment, beds, crockery and cutlery brought by train from Germany. But when the front line of the Kessel was established, their precious hospital, to their relief, was still just a few miles behind the new front line.

Many soldiers had still not received proper winter clothing before the encirclement, so they resorted to improvisation with varying degrees of success. Under their uniforms, more and more of them wore articles of Soviet uniform — buttonless tunic shirts and baggy quilted trousers and the highly prized quilted jackets. In hard frosts, a steel helmet became like a freezer compartment, so they wore puttees, scarves and even Russian foot bandages wrapped round their heads as insulation. Their desperation for fur gloves led them to kill stray dogs and skin them. Some even tried to make tunics out of amateurishly cured horse hide from the knacker, but most of these articles were uncomfortably crude, unless a former saddler or cobbler could be bribed to help.

The most insanitary conditions tended to occur in those units which had been forced by the Soviet attacks to take up new positions in the open steppe at the western end of the newly formed Kessel. ‘Miserably frozen at night,’ the artillery officer who had withdrawn across the Don wrote in his diary. ‘How long are we expected to sleep in the open? The body won’t stand it much more. On top of that the filth and the lice!!!’ In such conditions, troops had not yet had a chance to dig communications trenches and latrines. Soldiers were sleeping, packed together like sardines, in holes in the ground covered by a tarpaulin. Infections spread rapidly. Dysentery soon had a debilitating and demoralizing effect, as weakened soldiers squatted over shovels in their trenches, then threw the contents out over the parapet.

Letter writers generally spared their relatives the full squalor of their lives. ‘We squat together’, wrote Kurt Reuber, ‘in a hole dug out of the side of a gully in the steppe. The most meagre and badly equipped dugout. Dirt and clay. Nothing can be made of it. Scarcely any wood for bunkers. We’re surrounded by a sad landscape, monotonous and melancholic. Winter weather of varying degrees of cold. Snow, heavy rain, frost then sudden thaw. At night you get mice running over your face.’

The progressive infestation of clothes really started during the chaotic days of the encirclement, with constant movement. ‘The plague of lice was frightful,’ wrote a corporal in a panzer regiment, ‘because we had no opportunity to wash, change clothes or hunt them down. In my helmet, I found about 200 of these faithful little beasts.’ An unknown soldier was prompted to write a new version of a favourite song:

Underneath the lantern
in a little house
I sit every evening
searching for a louse…

During the long nights of the Russian winter, there was ample opportunity for conversations about home and how much better life had been before coming to Russia. In the 376th Infantry Division, they bemoaned their departure from Angouleme for the Ostfront, leaving behind cafes, cheap wine, and French girls. Other thoughts went further back, to the triumphant welcome home in the summer of 1940. The waving crowds, the kisses and the adulation had been largely inspired by the idea that the fighting was as good as over. The vast majority of the country had cheered Hitler for having brought them through a short victorious war with so few casualties.

Often, when thoughts turned to home, harmonicas played sentimental tunes in the bunker. After such a dramatic reversal of fortune, men grasped at rumours more than ever before, with constant questions and ill- informed speculation. Even their officers had little idea of the true situation. Another subject, linked to the chances of getting out, was the perfect wound which would not cripple, or be too painful, yet would still qualify its recipient for evacuation by air. Comrades who had gone on leave just before the encirclement were viewed with admiring envy, while those who had returned just before faced good-natured, but no doubt deeply provoking, jokes. One person who never complained of his bad luck was Kurt Reuber. He had returned to his unit just two days before the Kessel was closed. It would soon be hard to tell whose services would be more needed, those of the doctor or those of the priest.

Besieged Germans imagined that the Red Army soldiers opposite them lacked for little, in either rations or warm clothing, but this image was often inaccurate. ‘Because of bad communications, food is not brought forward in time for soldiers at the front,’ ran one Don Front report. ‘The failure of officers and commissars to use bunkers to warm up soldiers’, said another, ‘has led to many men having to be sent to hospital with frostbite, mostly in the feet.’

The best-equipped Soviet soldiers were the snipers. Little was denied them. Out in the snowfields of the steppe in their white camouflage suits, they operated in pairs, one with a telescope and the other with the long- range rifle. They crawled forward at night into no man’s land, where they dug snow-holes and hides from which to watch and shoot. Their casualty rates were much higher than in the city, because they had fewer choices for concealment and lines of escape. But the ‘sniper movement’ still attracted more volunteers than it could train or use.

Any lingering problems with morale usually reflected the Soviet authorities’ indifference to the individual soldier. The obsession with secrecy meant that men not directly involved in Operation Uranus had not been told about it until up to five days after the start. At first sight, the most surprising aspect of this time of triumph is the number of deserters from the Red Army who continued to cross the lines to the surrounded German Army, thus entering a trap, but this paradox seems to be explicable mainly through a mixture of ignorance and mistrust. Colonel Tulpanov, the sophisticated NKVD officer in charge of recruiting German officers, admitted quite openly to one of his star prisoners, the fighter pilot Count Heinrich von Einsiedl, that: ‘These Russians were most astonished to hear from the Germans the same story that had been put out by their own propaganda. They had not believed that the Germans were encircled.’

Zhukov was characteristically to the point when he described the encirclement of the Sixth Army as ‘a tremendous education for victory for our troops’. Grossman was also right when he wrote: ‘The morale of the soldiers has never been so high.’ (Interestingly, neither of these observations exactly confirmed the official Soviet propaganda line that ‘the morale of an army depends on the socially just and progressive order of the society it defends’.)

Red Army soldiers now took a predictable pleasure in taunting the enemy who had so recently taunted them. Some companies sent out a patrol at night with a scarecrow dressed up as Hitler. They then erected it in no man’s land, and hung a placard inviting Landsers to shoot at it. The scarecrow would be booby- trapped with a couple of grenades, in case a German officer sent out a patrol to remove it the next night. On a more