p Armed with pencils, note-books and light machine guns, we rode in a car to the frontline, and on the road we overtook a great number of lorries carrying ammunition, provisions and 45 soldiers. All these lorries were so cleverly camouflaged with birch and spruce branches that looking down on the road from the rise one had the impression that shrubs and trees were migrating from the east to the west, moving in a fabulous procession. A whole forest seemed to be on the move.

p The thunderous roar of artillery fire came louder and closer. We were nearing the front, but the way was still shown by Red Army traffic officers, waving their red or yellow flags, and the stream of lorries was advancing as rapidly along the road along the sides of which rumbled our powerful trailer tractors.

p Having been warned that we might be attacked from the air any moment, my comrades and I took turns as lookouts, standing on the footboard, but no German planes appeared, and we rode on without mishap.

p To me, an inhabitant of almost woodless steppe, the scenery in Smolensk Region seemed foreign, and I gazed at the landscape curiously as it unfolded before me. Pine woods rose in a wall on either side of the road, and from them came a breath of coolness and a strong pitchy smell. These woods were wrapped in twilight even in the middle of the day, and there was something sinister in their dusky silence, and this land covered with tall ferns and rotting stumps seemed hostile to me.

p There were clearings, few and far between, overrun by young birches and asps, and suddenly a rowan bush covered with red berries would flash in the sun, and once again the forest would hem the road in on both sides. In the space between the treetops we would glimpse a hilly field with the rye or oats stamped out by countless soldiers’ boots, and on a distant slope there would loom the charred remains of a village, burnt to the ground by the Germans.

p We turned on to a country road and drove through a locality which had been in German hands until a few days ago, and which bore traces of recent fierce fighting. The land was pocked with ugly holes made by shells, mines and bombs. These holes were without number. The dead had not yet been buried, and we saw more and more dead men and dead horses. The sweetishly putrid smell made us hold our breath more and more often. Not far off the road lay the swollen carcass of a bay mare, and beside the dead mother lay a tiny dead colt with its fluffy broom of a tail flung back in quietude. This small victim looked so tragically unnecessary on that large battlefield.

p The Germans’ trenches and dugouts on the slope had been ploughed up by our shells. Split logs stuck from the ground, 46 and beside the parapets there were used cartridges, empty food cans, helmets, shapeless tatters of German greenish-grey uniforms, pieces of smashed weapons and intricately twisted telephone lines. A direct hit had blown up a machine-gun crew together with the machine gun. A crippled antitank gun could be seen in the door of the barn a little distance away from the ditches, completing this frightening scene of destruction caused by a squall of Soviet artillery fire.

p The village over which the fighting had raged here for several days was on the other side of the hill. Before relinquishing it the Germans set fire to all the houses there. Our sappers were now building a bridge over the small river at the foot of the hill, and there was a smell of fresh pine shavings and river mud. The sappers had stripped down to their trousers, and in the sun their tanned bare backs shone with sweat and looked as smooth as the new boards they were laying down.

p Very carefully we drove across the river over the timbers placed in a row. Tanks and tractors had raked the mud up on the banks with their tracks. We entered what was once the village. We saw the charred ruins of houses, blackened chimneys rising over piles of brick, charred household utensils, broken bits of pottery, a child’s bedstead with warped metal rods.

p A sunflower, the only one to miraculously survive, looked unnaturally, sacrilegiously beautiful against this sombre background as it turned its round face, framed in golden-yellow petals, to the sun. The flower stood in the midst of a stampedout potato patch a little way from the foundation of a burntdown house. Its leaves were slightly scorched, debris had piled up against the stalk, but it lived! It lived in spite of everything amid this general destruction and death, and this sunflower— swaying gently in the wind—seemed the only living being in this graveyard.

p But it was not so. As we walked up the street we saw a yellow cat sitting on a black, charred wall. The cat was placidly washing itself and appeared to be quite unimpressed by the frightening happenings which had left it without home and master. However, on seeing us, the cat stared motionlessly for a second and then darted, flashing like a yellow lightning, into the ruins.

p Two widowed hens were happily digging for food in the wrecked kitchen garden, but the moment they saw men in khaki they dashed away without a sound and instantly disappeared 47 from view. They had grown so wild that they would not let us come to within fifty yards of them.

p “With their chicken brains they mistook us for Germans,” said one of the men who had taken part in the battles recently fought here.

p He went on to tell us that the Germans staged regular fowl hunts in the villages they occupied, firing their tommy guns at the geese and chickens. They slaughtered the cows and the hogs right in their sheds.

p “These two hens have, no doubt, been under fire, so you mustn’t mind their manners,” the man said with a smile.

p It is really touching how attached animals and birds become to their home. In the same village I saw a small flight of pigeons wheeling sorrowfully over the ruins of the church that had been demolished by German shells. They had probably lived in the belfry, and even though they had been deprived of shelter they still regarded this place as their home and were in no hurry to leave it. In one of the side streets, a small dog came crawling towards us, wagging its tail. It did not seem to have much self-respect, but it had mustered the courage to come here alone from the forest, for this is where it used to live. We startled a flock of sparrows in the hemp field on the edge of the village. They were not at all like those jolly, busily chirping sparrows we were used to in peacetime. These were silent, pitiful things. They circled over the devastation for a bit, then came back and settled on the stalks of the hemp, looking ruffled and forlorn.

p The local peasant women, it must be said, felt as powerfully drawn to the place where they had spent their lives. The men had gone off to war, and when the Germans came the women and children hid away in the nearby forests. They now returned home, and wandered among the ruins with a lost air, digging in the debris for at least something from their household. For the night they went back to the forest where soldiers from reserve troops gave them bread and soup from the regimental pot, and the next morning they were back in the de^ vastated villages again, circling like birds round their ravaged nests.

p In the neighbouring village that had also been burnt to the ground, I saw children helping their mothers to rake the ashes in search of possessions that might have survived. I asked one of these peasant women how they were going to live now, and she replied:

p “Chase away the blasted Germans as far as you can, and don’t worry about us, we’ll build us new houses, the village Soviet will help, we’ll get by.”

p The red-rimmed eyes of the women and children and their wan faces, covered with a grey film from digging in the ashes, were not to be soon forgotten, and I was thinking: “How brutally and fiendishly the nazis must hate all living things to wipe peaceful towns and villages off the face of the earth and senselessly, to no purpose, destroy and set fire to everything.”

p We drove through yet another village, and once more there were forests all about us, then we caught a glimpse of unreaped wheat fields, a plot of flax with a few plants still wearing their blue flowers, and with a warning sign, nailed to a stick protruding from the flax, which said: “Mines!" and a sentry standing at the side of the road.

p Upon retreating the Germans had mined the roads, the ground along the roads, the cars they abandoned, their trenches, and even the bodies of their dead soldiers. Our sappers were busy clearing the recaptured territory, we could see their bent, searching figures everywhere, and in the meantime cars and carts were driven very carefully over the danger zone, all but scraping against one another, while the sentries stationed all around watched hawk-eyed that no one should leave the road in the bad spots.

p The roar of artillery battle mounted and swelled in volume, and now we could already make out the thundering of our Soviet heavy guns, and the sound fell like sweet music on our ears.

p Before long we found ourselves in the disposition of one of our reserve units. The men had just been in battle, and yet someone was already playing a soft little tune on the accordion, and about twenty soldiers stood in a circle in front of the dugout laughing merrily as a young, sturdy private strutted about in the middle of the circle. As he twitched his broad shoulders with comic languor, his shirt stretched across his back and the whitish spots of dried sweat stood out distinctly on his shoulder blades. Slapping the legs of his tall boots with the palms of his big hands, he called out cheerily to his chum, a lanky, awkward soldier:

p “Come on, come on, what’re you scared of? You’re a Ryazan man, I’m an Orel man, so let’s see who’s the better dancer.”

p But soon the brief twilight thickened to darkness and shadowed the forest, and quiet settled over the camp. At 49 daybreak the next day we were to go to Commander Kozlov’s unit which was on the offensive.

1941