Inferno - Max Hastings [228]
Only a quarter of us are men, and even they are cripples. For some reason legs are the limbs most often hit—and they are cut off. Every second man here is without a leg. Most amputations are made very high. Petya (who sits next to me in lectures) has no legs at all, [only] artificial ones. He has trouble moving about. He can’t get used to them, and anyway he is weak. He has a very sweet, shy face, and his eyes are very blue. His voice is soft. How could he have commanded a platoon? It becomes especially hard for Petya to move about when our bread ration arrives two or three days late. His face turns grey, cheekbones sharper, eyes bleaker … When we get very tired cutting and collecting firewood Petya jokes a lot, trying to amuse me and the girl next to me. His stories are not particularly funny, but we laugh and laugh at them.
Damn this war … One sees only cripples … To my mind the most wretched is a captain, a sapper. He has no face, but instead just a terrible blue, purple and green mask. It is fortunate that he is blind, and so cannot see himself. People say that, before the war, he was a handsome man. Even now he is tall, slender, and neat. We think that if he had a child he would be born again in it, and everyone would see what he once was like. If only this damn war would end. They are killing and maiming the best. We need to be very strong, to survive it.
One of Evdokiya’s fellow students was a young man named Vitya, once very handsome, now deeply embittered by the loss of a leg. She wrote that he had become hardened, “turned to stone.” He refused to see his family, even his mother, though he wrote to them. In one such letter, Vitya described the life of their town, where he had learned to ride a bicycle: “I push the pedals with one foot, and manage fine. The streets are empty, there are wrecked houses everywhere, empty shells. Evenings in the town park are unimaginably peaceful, there is even music. There are lots of girls, all blonde, and our officers are having a good time with them … as if there was no war now. These young ladies are nicknamed ‘German shepherds’ because they are indifferent to whether their men are Russian or German. I said as much to one, and she replied: ‘You are jealous? Someone’ll turn up for you too, my poor cripple, but not as good.’ I threw my crutch at her.”
All the combatant nations deployed women as nurses, a role many found rewarding. Dorothy Beavers was twenty-two in 1942, the daughter of an Ohio small farmer whose mother still drove a horse and buggy, with no phone at home. She worked in a little local hospital, and suggested to her father that she should join the army medical branch. Her two brothers had already gone into the service, and after some thought he said, “Maybe you should go and take care of them.” She married an army doctor in Winchester, England, the night before sailing for France in June 1944, and landed on Utah Beach still clutching her bridal bouquet. “The job came naturally to me,” she said. But it was a revelation to find herself treating eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who had lost not only limbs, but sometimes their buttocks or “whole chunks of their hips.” No one could call Lieutenant Beavers and her kind publicity seekers, but they all appreciated recognition back home. She was thrilled when a little paragraph about herself and a photograph appeared in the Ohio State Journal.
The Russians and Yugoslav partisans were the only fighting peoples to deploy women for combat functions. The British dispatched a small number of female agents to occupied territories under the orders of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and women fulfilled vital administrative and support functions for both the Allied and Axis armed forces. They were treated with condescension by most senior officers, most of which had been born in the nineteenth century. Western Allied commanders, if not their Soviet counterparts, deplored the intrusion into service relationships of sexual temptations