All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [248]
The Russian armies drove forward in the same desperate fashion in which they had retreated in the previous year, numbed by daily horrors. Victory at Kursk meant little to a soldier such as Private Ivanov of 70th Army, who wrote despairingly to his family in Irkutsk: ‘Death, and only death awaits me. Death is everywhere here. I shall never see you again because death, terrible, ruthless and merciless is going to cut short my young life. Where shall I find strength and courage to live through all this? We are all terribly dirty, with long hair and beards, in rags. Farewell for ever.’ Private Samokhvalov was in equally wretched condition: ‘Papa and Mama, I will describe to you my situation, which is bad. I am concussed. Very many of my unit have been killed – the senior lieutenant, the regimental commander, most of my comrades; now it must be my turn. Mama, I have not known such fear in all my eighteen years. Mama, please pray to God that I live. Mama, I read your prayer … I must admit frankly that at home I did not believe in God, but now I think of him forty times a day. I don’t know where to hide my head as I write this. Papa and Mama, farewell, I will never see you again, farewell, farewell, farewell.’
Pavel Kovalenko wrote on 9 October: ‘We passed through the area where the 15th Regiment had been trapped. There are corpses everywhere and smashed carts. Many bodies have their eyes poked out … Are the Germans human? I cannot come to terms with such things. People come – and they go. Senior Lieutenant Puchkov got killed. I am sorry about the lad. Last night a cavalryman trod on a mine. Both soldier and horse were blown to pieces. When night fell I sat shivering by the fire, my teeth chattering with wet and cold.’
Next day, his unit trudged into a Belorussian settlement named Yanovichl. ‘What’s left of it? Just ruins, ashes and charred remains. The only living souls are two cats, their fur scorched. I stroked one of them and gave it some potatoes. It purred at me … Everywhere there are lots of unharvested potatoes, beetroot and cabbage. Before driving away the population, the Germans suggested that they bury their belongings. Now, these pitiful relics of domestic felicity lie scattered in gardens. The Germans have taken everything useful. One house has survived out of three hundred, the rest succumbed to flame. An old woman sits grieving. Her eyes are lifeless, gazing frozen into the far distance. She has nothing left, and icy winter is almost upon us.’
Day after day as the Red Army advanced, such scenes were repeated. ‘I was shaken by the ferocity of the tank battles,’ said Ivan Melnikov. ‘What did people feel in those steel boxes under fire? I once saw ten or eleven burned-out T-34s in one place, a ghastly sight. Almost all the bodies lying nearby were badly burnt, while those who had stayed in their tanks had turned into firebrands, lumps of charcoal.’ One night a reconnaissance section from his unit was caught in the open under German flares; four of its six men were killed, and next day the Germans amused themselves by using the bodies for target practice. ‘[They] were a terrible sight by evening: shapeless, torn by bullets, their faces blown off, arms severed.’
Commanders drove units so far and fast that horses pulling baggage carts became too weary to eat their hay. Many animals lay dead by the roadside amid rows of hastily dug German graves, skulls, half-decayed corpses, abandoned sledges, burnt-out vehicles. ‘We march in the footsteps of war,’ mused Kovalenko. ‘Chaos is majestic in its way. I contemplate this vista of destruction and death with pain and helplessness in my soul.’
As snow once more closed down the battlefield in the last months of 1943, the Russians held a large bridgehead beyond the Dnieper around Kiev, and another at Cherkassy. The Germans lost Smolensk on 25 September, and retained only an isolated foothold in the Crimea. On 6 November, the Russians took Kiev. Vasily Grossman described an encounter with infantrymen near the shattered city that day:
The deputy battalion commander,