Front-Line Stalingrad by Victor Nekrasov

Author:Victor Nekrasov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 1962-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

4

* * *

At night we changed positions. I hurried to try and get everything finished by midnight, before the moon came up. But the Germans set fire to two barns and the whole of my sector was as bright as day. That held up the transfer for almost the whole night. A machine-gun was firing from underneath the bridge practically without a break. I felt there was going to be a lot of trouble with that machine-gun—it was cutting off all my routes. Towards the morning a big gun appeared there too. But I had nothing to reply with—there were barely enough bullets for one day. So I got across under cover of regimental mortars. The eighty-two millimetre guns had no mortars. I asked for support from our regimental artillery. But they were short of ammunition—they fired only three times throughout the night.

It was a horrible sector. It was divided by a high railway embankment which wound along the foot of the hill. It was full of wagons. From the left flank the right could hardly be seen—only the upper part of the ravine. There were no trenches of any kind. The troops of the first battalion making room for us were huddling together in some holes and craters, taking cover behind any old scrap-iron. Along the ravine, on the other side of the embankment there was something at any rate resembling trenches, though without, it is true, the slightest signs of communicating paths.

Yes, it wasn’t much like the ‘Metiz’. There you could go from one end to the other practically without bending down.

In itself the sector was not large for a normal battalion—some sixty metres—but I had altogether thirty-six men. There had been four hundred, but now there were thirty-six.

I tried to find myself a command point, if only a temporary one, so as to fix up a telephone. There was nothing but ruins, burnt-out barns and no cedars. Valéga solved the problem. Beneath the embankment he found a well-camouflaged reinforced concrete pipe. But there were some artillery men in it.

A lanky lieutenant with a little beard sticking out in all directions gave us a cold reception:

‘I won’t let you in, and that’s that … There are five of us crammed in here already, and you’ll bring a whole staff.’

But I wasn’t in the mood for diplomatic negotiations. I ordered the telephone to be fixed and the senior adjutant to make out a report. The artillery men cursed, didn’t want to move their boxes and said they’d complain to Pozhársky, the head of the artillery. I didn’t know Pozhársky.

‘Move in, boys, and that’s that … Don’t move until I tell you.’

That was all the signallers wanted. They led the line in, set themselves up right on the stone floor and at once began calling up their ‘Forget-me-nots’ and ‘Tulips’.

Kharlámov, the senior adjutant, short-sighted and forever losing everything, lost, of course, his most important file of papers and got in everybody’s way, searching under their feet.

‘I must have left it behind, in the old command post,’ he muttered to himself, looking round bewilderedly.

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