Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman & Vasily Grossman

Author:Vasily Grossman & Vasily Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

22

ON A HOT, dusty August night General Weller, commander of a German grenadier division, a thin-lipped man with a long bony face, was sitting behind a large desk in a spacious village schoolroom.

He was looking through the papers in front of him, making notes on the operations map and tossing the reports he had already read onto a corner of the desk.

The main part of his work, he believed, was already accomplished. What remained were only minor details, of no real consequence to the future course of events.

The general was exhausted; he had put a great deal of time into planning the forthcoming operation. Now that the plans were complete, his thoughts kept returning to the summer campaign as a whole. It was as if he were preparing to write his memoirs, or to summarize his thoughts for some military textbook.

The last act of this drama—this epic drama being performed by grenadiers, tank crews and motor infantry on the huge stage of the steppe—would soon be concluded on the banks of the Volga. There was no precedent for this campaign in all the annals of warfare and the thought of its imminent conclusion was profoundly exciting. The general could sense the edge of the Russian lands; beyond the Volga lay Asia.

Had the general been a psychologist and a philosopher, he might have suspected that what for him was a source of joy and excitement must, inevitably, give rise to very different, dangerously powerful feelings in the hearts of the Russians. But he was not a philosopher—he was a general. And today he was giving free rein to a particular sweet thought he had long treasured. Fulfilment, for him, was nothing to do with rewards and honours. Fulfilment, he believed, lay in the union of two poles—power and subordination, military success and the meek execution of orders. In this play of omnipotence and obedience, this synthesis of power and subordination, he found spiritual comfort—a bittersweet joy.

Weller had toured the river crossings and seen burnt-out Soviet trucks, overturned tanks and guns smashed by shells and bombs. He had seen HQ documents being blown about the steppe, while horses ran wild, dragging their broken harnesses behind them. He had seen wrecked Soviet planes, their engines and broken-off, red-starred wings half-buried in the ground. To him, the dead, twisted Russian metal seemed still to bear traces of the horror that had gripped Timoshenko’s troops as they retreated towards the Volga. The previous day, a bulletin from Supreme Command had announced that “The 62nd Soviet Army has been encircled in the Great Bend of the Don and destroyed once and for all.”

During the night of 18 August, Weller reported to Army HQ that in the north-eastern loop of the Great Bend of the Don, to the northwest of Stalingrad, his advance units had forced a crossing and established a bridgehead on the east bank, in the Tryokhostrovskaya and Akimovsky districts.

The next stage of the plan, about which Paulus had informed him a few days before, was not complicated.

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