War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (6 page)

In the summer of 1927, Andrei took twelve-year-old Vasha to hunt a wolf that was preying on their cows. Several kilometers from home, in a copse of trees, the wolf sprang at them. Andrei whirled and killed it with the sharpened end of his walking staff. This, said Andrei, ramming the spear again into the shuddering wolf s heart, was a lesson in courage for the boy. Never forget how easy it is to kill. Never be afraid to kill when you must. Andrei wiped a warm streak of blood across the boy’s cheek. He watched Vasha skin the wolf. Then he presented his grandson with the old rifle he carried. On his way back to the village, Vasha shot two hares and a wild goat. He was a hunter now, with his own gun and three hides he could throw on the pile at the hunters’ lodge.

Vasha often spent more time in the forest than with people. Sometimes he smeared bear fat over his body and gun to hide his scent; often his mother refused to let him in the house because of the smell. On these evenings he slept gladly with his dogs.

Grandmother Dunia taught him to read and write. Zaitsev believed it was his
babushka’s
breadth of spirit and broad-hipped will that held his family together. His sisters, parents, cousins, and even the dogs obeyed her smartly swung birch switch with only the occasional grumble.

Dunia was a spiritual old woman. She fought with Andrei over God, determined to keep religious holidays in her home. Though Andrei did not accept Duma’s saints, he would not insult them, perhaps in deference to Dunia’s God or more likely the whip of her stick.

Once, Zaitsev asked his grandfather about his beliefs.

“Grandmother says the soul leaves the body and goes to heaven after we die, Grandpapa. Is that true for animals, too?”

Andrei cuffed him on the side of the head. “Neither man nor beast lives twice,” he snorted. “Come here.”

The old man walked Vasha to a side of venison hanging in the smokehouse. “This dawn, you killed that animal.” He pointed with a hand sharp as his spear. “If I see you killing it again, I’ll shoot
you!”

The old man motioned outside to the deerskin tacked to the side of the shed. “The hide is drying. The flesh is on the table, and the guts we throw to the dogs. Remember, Vasha, soul is shit. God is about fear, a way to make you afraid and obey. The man of the forest is without fear.”

The family’s interest in Vasily’s hunting exploits gradually waned. On his fourteenth birthday he returned in the morning with several wolf and lynx hides strapped to his back. He received no notice. That evening Andrei told him to always come back to the village from a good hunt before dawn or at night so that no one would see the number and quality of hides he brought home. Pride is good in a hunter, Andrei explained, but boastfulness is not. Vasily knew he was now considered an adult. He was expected to perform like a man of the taiga. Now his rewards were a glass of vodka, some peace and quiet from his sisters, perhaps even some respect, and a seat in the men’s place, the hunters’ lodge.

At sixteen Vasily was sent three hundred kilometers away to Magnitogorsk to attend technical school at Russia’s largest ore processing plant. In the workers’ settlement he finished primary school and began bookkeeping courses. Numbers came easily to him. In his free time he hunted in the hills around town.

After six years learning the trade of a clerk and another five years filing papers in the navy, the twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev wanted to fight Germans. The Nazis had invaded Russia. Japan would keep.

Hitler had taken the city of Rostov in a bloody July campaign to cauterize his right flank on his thrust to the Caucasus. Before the Germans could continue south, their left flank also had to be secured. In the middle of that flank stood the manufacturing center of Stalingrad on a bend of the Volga.

A fierce battle was shaping up on the steppe west of the city. Throughout the summer the Red Army lumbered out to meet the Germans to fight intense tank battles across immense fields and steep ravines. At first the Russians proved no match for the rolling blitzkrieg. They retreated east over the Don River to lick their wounds. On the land bridge between the Don and Volga Rivers, the Red Army regrouped.

In the first week of September 1942, Zaitsev and two hundred other Siberian sailors in Vladivostok were mustered as marines into the 284th Rifle Division of the Sixty-second Army. They were assigned to the western front and the battle that Winston Churchill called “the hinge of fate.”

They were sent to Stalingrad.

* * * *

THE TRAIN CLATTERED DAY AND NIGHT, RESTING ONLY
in the afternoons to take on fuel and food. The villages where they stopped seemed asleep, moving at the heavy pace of age, of exhaustion. Children chased through the alleys playing army, ducks-on-the-pond, or October revolution, but even their laughter did not enliven the pall over the tile rooftops and dull, smokeless mills. There were no young men left in the towns. They were all gone to war.

The townspeople approached the halted troop train, tears welling in their eyes, hands lifted with bread, vegetables, vodka, clothes, and photos of Stalin and Lenin. The fleshy girls handed up letters to the uniformed arms reaching from the windows; the envelopes were often addressed to “Brave Young Man.”

On the fifth day the train stopped in a treeless vista of quivering wheat. The sailors set up tents. They were addressed by Batyuk and ordered to spend three more days on the steppe preparing for battle while waiting for the trucks to carry them onward.

Dusk settled over the flat, featureless land; a trembling orb of orange appeared low in the western sky. Silence blew like a fog through the men. Standing beside the train and their tents, one by one, they held up hands to quiet each other and listen. In the gloaming, a barely audible boom and howl came from the flashing dome of light in the west, its source still well below the horizon. Zaitsev heard the sailors around him, and himself, breathe the word:
Stalingrad.

For three days and nights the company practiced street-fighting skills. The men learned to crawl and run, to kill with bayonets and rifles, knives, shovels, and fists. Grenades with pins pulled to make them live were tossed and caught, then thrown into trenches to explode. Straw dummies were sliced or blown open, and many real noses were bloodied.

The morning of September 20, a dust plume rose out on the dirt road. A staff car came and stopped beside the train. Out stepped Division Commander Konstantinovich Zhukov. He’d ridden from Stalingrad to watch the sailors of the 284th pursue their drills.

The men threw themselves into their training, putting on their most ferocious show for the general. During a hand-to-hand exercise, one of the sailors tripped over his bell-bottom trouser legs. Zhukov slapped his thigh to stop the action.

“Why aren’t you men in army uniforms?” he demanded.

Lieutenant Bolshoshapov stepped forward and came to attention.

“Commander, we are sailors and are proud to fight as sailors.” Bolshoshapov shouted the words over Zhukov’s head.

“Have you been issued your army uniforms, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Change into them immediately. These damned things,” Zhukov said pointing at the billowing pants legs, “will get you killed. Where is your navy discipline?”

Zhukov whirled to return to his staff car. Bolshoshapov called out, “Commander, sir. With your permission, we would like to remain in our navy shirts under our uniforms.”

Zhukov turned back and saluted Bolshoshapov.

“On behalf of the Red Army and the Party, I gladly consent. Of course, sailor. And fight bravely in your navy shirts.”

The Siberians let out a cheer and stripped down to their skivvies and striped navy shirts. Orderlies ran to the train to fetch the drab green uniforms of the Soviet army.

That evening dozens of American Studebaker trucks arrived to ferry the division to the Volga. For two hours the men bumped down the road in the open backs of the lorries. Every soldier watched the spreading glow in the west. The distant thumps of explosions swelled in their ears while the horizon rolled to them.

The trucks stopped on the threshold of a forest, and the thousand-plus men of the 284th lined up on a path that disappeared into a thick stand of poplars. The soldiers marched two by two, burdened with rifles and packs. Zaitsev resisted the urge to look up through the leaves into the flaring sky. He focused instead on the back of the man in front of him. As he walked under the canopy of trees the sounds and lights grew muffled, as if the forest, ever his friend, were soothing him and his company, quieting the conflict for their restive ears.

Along the road, posters and slogans were nailed to the poplar trunks.
If you don’t stop the enemy in Stalingrad, he will enter your home and destroy your village!
one read.
The enemy must be crushed and destroyed at Stalingrad!
and
Soldier, your country will not forget your courage!

Three kilometers into the forest, the march was stopped. Batyuk ordered the men off the path to darken their faces and hands with grease and dirt. While they handed around the greasepaint pots, a hundred wounded soldiers shuffled past on the road away from the battle.

Every one of the bandaged and bloodied soldiers held on to another; the able-legged helped others limp along, the sighted led the blind. Those who had both hands carried stretchers. It seemed the searing heat of battle had melded these men together, so they moved and bled as one giant mangled creature.

The Siberians gaped at the marching soldiers’ misery. They spotted a sailor among the wounded, still in his bell-bottoms. They beckoned him to the side of the road, where he saw the navy shirts showing at their necks beneath their Red Army tunics.

“Comrade sailor! Come, sit down!” they called.

The sailor, grimacing in pain, stepped off the path and was seated on a backpack. Several hands stretched out with cigarettes and matches. The weary man accepted a smoke. He asked to have it lit and held up his right arm. It was cut short, without a hand.

A flask of vodka shot from the crowd.

The sailor dragged heavily on the cigarette. He looked up into the camouflaged faces around him.

“Na zdorovye,”
he said, and threw back a large gulp. Then he held up his truncated arm. “Don’t worry about this. I sold it for a very high price.” He looked at the heads around him. “Where are you from?”

“We’re Siberians. We’ve come a long way to fight.”

The man blinked. “So have the Germans.”

His head sank to his chest. Hands shot out to catch him as if he might collapse.

The sailor pulled himself to his feet. He turned to rejoin the shambling line of wounded. The men parted to let him through. They offered him more cigarettes.

The sailor passed Zaitsev and stopped to look into the broad Siberian face. He tapped himself on the chest with the fingers that clutched the cigarette. Glowing ashes tumbled down his torn navy shirt. He put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and pressed his thumb against Zaitsev’s chest.

“Do some killing.”

* * * *

THE SIBERIANS EMERGED FROM THE TREES ON THE EAST
bank of the Volga. Two kilometers away, on the far side of the river, they saw a volcanic city. Stalingrad, once home to half a million people, appeared now as if not a single person could be alive there.

The city was lit by a thousand fires. Above the limestone river cliffs, charred roofless walls stood along avenues clotted with smoking rubble. Red pillars of dust and brick erupted into the air. Buildings swayed and crumbled as if the quaking city were nothing but a jagged shell and something huge and determined below the ground was kicking its way to the surface.

Lying on the sand, staring at the firestorm across the black, oily Volga, Zaitsev thought of his
babushka
Dunia’s descriptions of the underworld. A gust blew warm against his cheek. It carried the heat and carbon smell of a furnace. How can men be fighting in that perdition? he wondered.

Captain Ion Lebedev, a political commissar, settled in the sand next to him.