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By Root 1060 0

armies held the ascendant, Russian sufferings persisted. In a peasant hut, Corti came upon a stricken family. ‘I was greeted by the corpse of a gigantic old man with a long whiteish beard lying in a pool of blood … Cowering against a wall, terror-stricken, were three or four women and five or six children – Russians, thin, delicate, waxen-faced. A soldier was calmly eating cooked potatoes … How warm it was in that house! I urged the women and children to do their eating before more soldiers arrived and gobbled the lot.’ Axis troops were often bemused and impressed by the stoicism of the Russians, who seemed to them victims of communism rather than enemies. Even after the alien invaders had brought untold misery upon their country, simple country-folk sometimes displayed a human sympathy for afflicted and suffering Axis soldiers which moved them. Corti wrote: ‘During halts on those marches many of our compatriots were rescued from frostbite by the selfless, maternal care of poor women.’

Throughout that terrible retreat, Hitler’s allies cursed the Luftwaffe, which dropped supplies only to German units. Corti wrote: ‘We watched those aircraft avidly: we found their form and colour repugnant and alien, like the uniforms of German soldiers … If only the familiar outline of some Italian plane had come into sight! If only the slightest thing had been dropped for us, but nothing came!’ Italians’ misery was compounded by censorship at home which kept their families in ignorance of those perishing in the snow: ‘Back in the distant patria nobody knew of their sacrifice. We of the army in Russia lived out our tragedy while the radio and newspapers went on about other things altogether. It was as if the entire nation had forgotten us.’

Corti recoiled from the spectacle of Germans massacring Russian prisoners, though he knew that the Red Army often did likewise to its own captives. ‘It was extremely painful – for we were civilised men – to be caught up in that savage clash between barbarians.’ He was torn between disgust at the Germans’ ruthlessness, ‘which at times disqualified them in my eyes from membership of the human family’, and grudging respect for their strength of will. He deplored their contempt for other races. He heard of their officers shooting men too badly wounded to move, of rapes and murders, of sledges loaded with Italian wounded hijacked by the Wehrmacht. But he was also awed by the manner in which German soldiers instinctively performed their duties, even without an officer or NCO to give orders. ‘I … asked myself … what would have become of us without the Germans. I was reluctantly forced to admit that alone, we Italians would have ended up in enemy hands … I … thanked heaven that they were with us there in the column … Without a shadow of a doubt, as soldiers they have no equal.’

Again and again, German tanks and Stukas drove back pursuing Russian armour, enabling the retreating columns to struggle on, amid murderous Soviet mortaring. One Italian soldier’s testicles were sliced away by a shell splinter. Thrusting them in his pocket, the man bound the wound with string and trudged onward. Next day at a dressing station, he lowered his trousers; fumbling in his pocket, according to Eugenio Corti’s account, he proffered to a doctor ‘in the palm of his hand the blackish testicles mixed with biscuit crumbs, asking whether they could be sewn back on’. Corti survived to reach the railhead at Yasinovataya, and thence travelled through Poland to Germany. A hospital train at last bore him home to his beloved Italy. At the end of 1942 an Italian general asserted that 99 per cent of his fellow countrymen not merely expected to lose the war, but now fervently hoped to do so as swiftly as possible.

In January 1943, the German line in the east suffered a succession of crippling blows. On the 12th, in the far north, the Russians launched an attack which, at the end of five days’ fighting, opened a corridor along the shore of Lake Ladoga that broke the siege of Leningrad. A simultaneous assault further south recaptured Voronezh