Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [82]
The sacrifices of these medical orderlies were often wasted through the subsequent treatment of their charges. The casualties they carried or dragged down to the edge of the Volga were left uncared for until, long after nightfall, they were loaded like sacks of potatoes on to the supply boats, empty for the return crossing. When the wounded were offloaded on the east bank, the conditions could be even worse, as an aircraft woman discovered.
The survivors of a disbanded aviation regiment who spent the night asleep in woods east of the Volga awoke at dawn to strange sounds. Mystified, they crept through the trees towards the river bank to investigate. There, they saw ‘thousands of wounded, as far as the eye could see’, left on the sandy banks, having been ferried back across the Volga during the night. The casualties were calling for water, or ‘screaming and crying, having lost arms or legs’. The ground-crew staff went to help as best they could. The former maternity nurse, Klavdia Sterman, vowed that as soon as they reached Moscow, she would apply to transfer to a front-line medical unit.
Survival was far from guaranteed even on reaching one of the score of field hospitals on the east bank of the Volga. Conditions in Red Army hospitals, despite the presence of some of the finest Russian doctors, made them seem more like a meat-processing factory. The field hospital at Balashchov, which specialized in arms and legs, some six miles from the city, was very meagrely equipped. Instead of normal hospital beds, it had three-tiered bunks. One young woman surgeon, newly arrived, was worried not only about the physical state of the wounded. ‘They often closed in on themselves and wanted no contact with anybody else.’ She at first presumed that the wounded soldiers brought back across the Volga out of the ‘hell’ of Stalingrad would never want to return. ‘On the contrary: it became apparent that soldiers and officers wanted to go back to the front.’ Amputees certainly showed no sense of relief at missing the fighting. In fact, most of those incapacitated or permanently scarred, like the artillery colonel whose face had been sliced up by shrapnel, felt that they were no longer proper men.
Bad rations did not help either recovery or morale. Grossman, in an emotional state, clearly assumed that this was Russia’s fate at that time. ‘In hospital,’ he jotted in his notebook, ‘the wounded are given a very small piece of salted herring by nurses who cut them up with great care. This is poverty.’ In those days, before his eyes were opened, he seemed unable to recognize the truth. Soviet logic mercilessly dictated that the best rations went to the fighting troops. The wounded, if they were lucky, received three helpings of kasha, or buckwheat porridge, a day, nothing more. The salted herring seen by Grossman was an unusual treat.
A more revealing hint of the state of mind controlling the Stalingrad Front medical services came from the results of ‘socialist competition’ in hospitals, reported to Shcherbakov in Moscow. The caterers came first, the surgeons came second, and the drivers came third. Any criteria on which this exercise was based utterly demeaned the genuine sacrifice of medical workers, who gave so much of their own blood for transfusion – sometimes twice in an evening – that they frequently collapsed. ‘If they don’t give blood’, a report explained, ‘soldiers will die’.
In the great battle of attrition, the shipments of wounded to the east bank had to be matched by fresh ‘meat for the cannon’ taken across the Volga into the city. The Stavka drip-fed the 62nd Army with reinforcement divisions as their predecessors were shot to pieces. The new battalions were marched forward at nightfall for embarkation under the eyes of the NKVD troops. They could only stare across at the city on the skyline opposite, lit by fires, and try to ignore the smell of burning. Patches of the river were still aflame with oil. There were also NKVD detachments on many of the ships, ready to shoot anyone who dived overboard in a