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By Root 1354 0

‘For ten days I wandered around the steppe, trying to get back to the Red Army. I was frozen, starving and very tired. On the eleventh day I found a straw stack and fell asleep in it. I was woken by a heavy blow on the back from a rifle butt. I opened my eyes to find Hitler’s men standing over me. After that, a new icy and hungry life began for me, with endless beatings. I cannot describe to you all that I have suffered. I can’t bear to talk about it. Only on 17 September did I find an opportunity to escape. At ten in the morning of 21 September I walked through the front line 20 km from Poltava … I still cannot believe that I am back with my own people.’ Corporal Tolstukhin escaped the draconian sanctions often imposed on escaped prisoners by their own commissars, and was merely returned to duty. He was soon wounded by shrapnel, though not badly enough to escape the battlefield; on 16 November, he was killed on the bank of the Dnieper.

The Germans, meanwhile, endured ample miseries of their own. ‘We never heard a frank admission of defeat,’ wrote Guy Sajer. When his unit began to pull back from the west bank of the Don, ‘As most soldiers had never studied Russian geography, we had very little idea of what was happening.’ But after Stalingrad, fear of encirclement gnawed at every German. Sajer and a handful of fellow infantrymen made their escape in darkness, in a Russian truck towed by a tank. ‘The windshield became caked with mud, and Ernst waded through the liquid ground to scrape it away with his hand … Behind us the wounded had stopped moaning. Maybe they were all dead – what difference did it make? Daylight dawned on faces haggard with exhaustion.’ The party halted and an engineer NCO shouted, ‘One hour’s rest! Make the most of it!’ The towing tank commander shouted back, ‘Fuck you! We’ll leave when I’ve had enough sleep!’ There was a fierce altercation between the two men, the engineer seeking to pull rank. The tankman said, ‘Shoot me if you like, and drive the tank yourself. I haven’t slept in two days, and you’re to leave me the hell alone.’ They got away two hours later, but the experience emphasised that German soldiers, like their foes, could flag in the face of acute adversity.

On 18 March two panzer divisions took advantage of a railway embankment to race their tanks in column to Belgorod and retake the city. In the north, Hitler reluctantly authorised a withdrawal from the Rzhev salient, which no longer presented a credible threat to Moscow. This enabled Army Group Centre to shorten its line by 250 miles, and created a sufficient concentration of strength to stem an offensive by Rokossovsky. As the Germans fell back, millions of Russians beheld the devastation and carnage left behind them. Many who remained unmoved by the familiar plight of adults gave way to emotion on witnessing the tragedies of the very young. Captain Pavel Kovalenko wrote on 26 April: ‘We understand the horrors of war, its relentless laws written in blood. But children, these blossoms of life, the blossoms of blossoms, these innocent holy souls, the beauty of our lives … they, who have done no harm to anyone … are suffering for the sins of their parents … We’ve failed to protect them from the beast. One’s heart bleeds, one’s thoughts freeze with horror at the sight of small bloodsoaked bodies, with gnarled fingers and distorted little faces … They bear mute testimony to indescribable human suffering. These small, frozen, dead eyes … reproach us, the living.’

In the village of Tarasevichi by the Dnieper, Vasily Grossman met a teenage boy. ‘They are so frightening, these old, tired, lifeless eyes of children. “Where is your father?” “Killed,” he answered. “And mother?” “She died.” “Have you got brothers or sisters?” “A sister. They took her to Germany.” “Have you got any relatives?” “No, they were all burned in a partisan village.” And he walked into a potato field, his feet bare and black from the mud, straightening the rags of his torn shirt.’ A million such encounters forged the mood of Russia’s soldiers as the time approached when