Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [44]
Five days later, Balogh’s train passed some of the battlegrounds of the previous year. ‘Everywhere crushed Russian tanks can still be seen. We look at them and fear the idea of this Red hell moving against Hungary. Thanks be to God that this has been stopped. We are firmly confident that we shall smash the Red danger for Europe.’ On 1 July at Ivanovka, they heard artillery fire for the first time. ‘Everywhere the remains of burnt-out German vehicles can be seen. Aren’t the Germans starting to lose their military luck? Believe in God so that good fortune will stay with us in spite of some defeats.’
The vast majority of all allied soldiers were conscripts, of whom at least half were illiterate. A lack of familiarity with technological advance made them liable to panic if attacked by tanks or aircraft. Their daily pay, as a Romanian cavalry lieutenant acknowledged when captured, was only ‘enough to buy one litre of milk’. The medical services appeared to have changed little since the previous century.
Morale in Hungarian units was not improved by the way the officers treated their men. Field punishment in the allied armies could be arbitrary, if not chaotic. ‘A man went to his comrade without the permission of his detachment commander,’ Corporal Balogh recorded on 3 July. ‘They wanted to hang him, but changed the punishment to eight hours’ guard at night, but this was also postponed. Three other soldiers were hanged, however. To my regret, it is as if we were still living in the fourteenth century.’ Romanian soldiers could still be condemned to flogging by their officers. Disciplinary measures had become even more necessary after the Romanian forces suffered 98,000 casualties in the siege of Odessa during the late summer of 1941. Few of them had understood the reason for continuing to advance east of the Dniester, once Bessarabia had been reoccupied.
The Balkan attitude to war remained primitive in other ways. A number of soldiers expressed their disappointment at the shortage of pickings in Russia after all that their officers had promised them. ‘The habit of looting is in the blood of Germans and Hungarians alike,’ one of them naively admitted to his NKVD interrogator after capture.
The true weakness of these allied armies was not put to the test until that autumn. By the time that Hitler came to recognize, but not to acknowledge, the mistake, it was too late to evade disaster. When one contemplates Hitler’s almost compulsively over-optimistic ambitions at this stage, it is clear that he never read, or never digested, Leo Tolstoy’s tale, ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ written in 1886. In it a wealthy peasant named Pahom is told of the rich earth in the land of the Bashkirs beyond the Volga. They are simple folk and he will be able to get all the land he wants from them without much trouble. When Pahom reaches the land of the Bashkirs, they tell him that for a thousand roubles he can have as much land as he can walk round in a day. Pahom, despising them for their lack of sophistication, is exultant. He is certain that he can enclose a huge distance. Almost as soon as he starts out, however, he spots one attractive feature after another that he decides to include, a pond over there, or a stretch of land that would be good for flax. Then, he notices that the sun is starting to go down. Realizing that he risks losing everything, he runs faster and faster to make it back in time. ‘I have grasped