p For the night, my three friends and I were given a tent, carefully camouflaged with young asp trees. Fir branches laid on the ground and covered with a cape were our bedding. We huddled close together for warmth, piled our greatcoats on top of us, and fell asleep.

p At 11 p.m. the earth quaked under me, and through my sleep I heard the heaving roar of an explosion. I threw aside my greatcoat and sat up. In the stillness that followed I could clearly hear the pine trees rustling in the wind and the raindrops hitting the sides of the tent. The stillness did not last long. From somewhere far away in the west came the hollow sound of a shot, and then through the noise made by the rain I heard the low, moaning wail of a shell flying over us and immediately after came the thunderous burst.

p “The Germans are firing from heavy guns,” said the sleepy voice of the young, cheerful lieutenant who lay next to me. He glanced at the glowing face of his wrist-watch and continued: “They”re shelling the road along which we drove here. It’s harassing fire, they do it every night. My advice to you is take no notice and sleep. You’ve got to get used to it. The Germans are a punctual breed: they fire for exactly fifteen minutes, then they stop, and after an hour or an hour and a half they start amusing us again.”

p The lieutenant soon went back to his young, sound sleep, while I, hard though I tried, hadn’t been able to get used to the too-near bursts of the German shells in those fifteen minutes. I didn’t fall asleep until midnight, but when I did I slept like a log and no longer heard the Germans amusing us with the music of their heavy guns nor our batteries answering them. Just before daybreak I was awakened by the man on my left. He was frozen through because his greatcoat had slid off him and he shuddered so terribly, in great shudders like a dog, that I thought someone was shaking me awake. Yet he slept on throughout.

p We emerged from the tent. Early-morning mist hung low over the forest. The soldiers, stripped to the waist, were rubbing themselves down with ice-cold water. Two of them, who 50 had already finished, were wrestling to get warm. They did it so earnestly that one of them had drops of sweat standing out on his forehead, and the other had become purple in his face and neck.

p We had a filling army breakfast: hot soup with meat, canned pork, and tea. We thanked our kind hosts, and started off on our way.

p Our heavy battery was changing its firing positions. Fastmoving prime movers rumbled past us drawing impressivelooking long-muzzled guns. We were compelled to turn off the road in order to give way to these monsters. After that we gave way to two ambulances carrying wounded soldiers, and a truck with wounded horses. I stood just off the road, and the boarded up side of the swaying truck sailed past just above me, it seemed, and close to me I saw a wounded horse’s neck wet with dew and its huge, violet, weeping eye. These were the first victims of the night’s fighting.

p The staff of Commander Kozlov’s unit was not far away. We left the car in a wooded hollow and started up the steep slope, densely overgrown with centuries-old pines. We were almost on the territory of the staff when suddenly the figure of a sentry appeared out of thin air on the path right before us, materialising as soundlessly and unexpectedly as an apparition. This apparition, however, was armed with an automatic rifle and wore a camouflage cape. He had apparently stepped out from behind a bush. Holding his rifle at the ready, he looked us over, asked to see our passes and subjected them to a very close scrutiny. I noticed that the bush behind him was stirring slightly, and through the leaves I saw the points of two bayonets aimed our way.

p The ground here was cut up with slit trenches. We came upon many dugouts covered with branches. There were quite a few cars in the forest, but they were so cleverly camouflaged that one could not see them at all until one walked right into them. Sappers were at work all over the place, hammering, sawing, and digging new shelters. The forest smelt of pine needles and wet clay.

p A squat captain met us at the door of the staff dugout. He told us that General Kozlov and the chief of staff were busy at the moment, and politely invited us into the commander’s dugout next door.

p We went down some broad steps, entered a narrow passage and opened the door before us. This was not a dugout in the usual meaning of the word. It was a spacious peasant cottage 51 sunk by magic deep into the ground. To make the illusion complete there ought to have been n big Russian stove, but for practical purposes the iron stove they had did just as well. The large room had a freshly scrubbed wooden floor, the walls were panelled with new boards, and the ceiling was dazzlingly clean. An electric lamp burnt brightly above the table. There was a smell of pine needles and, one thought, freshly baked bread. We gazed about this underground dwelling with admiration, and the captain said smiling:

p “Our General is a very practical person. There’s an abandoned village not far from here which the Germans shell regularly every day and they’ve razed half of it to the ground already. The General ordered the sappers to bring the remaining cottages over here, since they were doomed anyway. The sappers did the job in two days, and here we are.”

p Artillery commander Colonel Grositsky, an energetic, jovial man, came into the room and, the introductions over, told us about the situation on this section of the front.

p “We’re pressing the enemy hard. At noon today we shall start preparatory bombardment and then the offensive. The height which you saw on your way here used to be called Kudryavaya (Curly.—TV.) hill, and now it’s been renamed Lysaya hill (Bald.—TV.). It has really turned bald from our artillery fire, but there was a time when it was covered with forest. The leaflets which the Germans are throwing down are proof enough of the effectiveness of this fire, they say: ’Soviet infantryman, surrender! Soviet gunner, don’t let us catch you.’ We’re not letting them catch us, you know, we try to let them catch it instead. And we’re doing alright, too. We drop our observers at the frontline, where our infantry is, and they do the spotting. The team work’s excellent: German guns, mortars and dugouts go up in the air one after the other! They used to roof their dugouts with three layers of logs, and now they have six or seven, they’re burrowing deeper into the ground, but this doesn’t help them much, we dig them out of there with our shells all the same.”

p The battle which began early that morning with a lazy exchange of fire was gathering momentum. The Colonel listened to the increasing bursts of German shells, and went to the telephone. He spoke briefly, in a low voice. Immediately after, the hitherto silent nearby battery went into action, and the Germans’ mortar fire noticeably abated.

p The Colonel did not think much of the German artillery. He told us:

p “They’re poor shots, they’ve no system. If they’ve no spotting plane over the battlefield, they can’t do a thing. Hear those bursts on the left? They’re shelling the section where our battery was last night. We shifted it before light, so they’re firing at nothing, and will go on firing for a long time, and afterwards they’ll probably report to their staff that their guns had destroyed the Soviet howitzer battery.”

p It was not long before General Kozlov appeared. The General, who had fought in five wars, was a middle-aged man with grey temples and unhurried movements. He sat down wearily on a bench and placed his large, beefy hands on the map spread out on the table before him.

p “Did you have tea?" he asked. “No? Bad show. Give us some tea, and be quick about it.”

p The General, who was the son of a peasant, had been in military service since the age of eighteen. He had a common Russian face, a slightly uptilted nose, and mockingly intelligent blue eyes.

p “The German infantry is considerably inferior to what it was in 1914,” he spoke unhurriedly. “They run behind the tanks, but if there are no tanks they take up defense and stay where they are. They won’t take on a bayonet attack, they’re scared. The Finns were better fighters. They’re nervous wrecks, that’s what the German soldiers have become. You can see it from their letters home, from their diaries, and when you’re speaking with the prisoners too. It makes you sick.. They cry, shiver and grovel. No, they’re not the soldiers they were in the last war, not by a long shot!”

p The General told us some interesting episodes, and then tea was served by the cook Anatoly Nedzelsky.

p “Why don’t you treat the guests to some of your jam?" the General asked him.

p The tall stalwart, with the white cook’s cap pushed back at a reckless angle, flew to do the General’s bidding and was back in a flash with a pot of jam.

p “We made it ourselves,” he said proudly. “There is a lot of cranberries in the forest, we picked them in our spare time, and now we’ve plenty of fresh jam.”

p The cook, like his General, was a practical sort, and his jam was really excellent. In the course of conversation we learnt about Nedzelsky’s other qualities as well. The other day the General and a group of officers were at the frontline positions, and Nedzelsky, who had stayed behind at staff headquarters, decided to bring them some hot dinner when the hour for it 53 arrived. He harnessed a horse into a two-wheeled cart and set off. A German shell exploded in the middle of the road and killed the horse, but this misfortune did not daunt the young brave. Filling a pail and a thermos flask with the hot soup, he crawled along under fierce enemy fire and safely delivered the food to his hungry General and his officers.

p When the fighting got hot, Nedzelsky also joined in, running to the trenches with his rifle and some hand grenades, and leaving the staff scribe to watch the dinner and see to it that the steaks did not get burnt. In such emergencies the General’s dinner was not as good as usual, but his cook’s patriotic impulse deserved respect, and respected it was. Once, at the risk of his life, Nedzelsky carried a wounded lieutenant to safety from the field of battle, and he will certainly perform more feats before the war is over. Anatoly Nedzelsky—the cook and the soldier—thus lived a double life. From the trenches he’d rush back to his kitchen and, more likely than not, would find that the soup had boiled away and the meat had burnt to the blackness of anthracite. Or again, he would be making soup, and suddenly through the thunder of explosions he’d hear a mighty, rolling Russian “Hurrah!" and then in his distress that he wasn’t taking part in the attack where he belonged heart and soul, he’d absently pour sugar instead of salt into the pot, and grind almonds instead of pepper. That’s how I imagine it. in any case. But, after all, it’s a private matter concerning the General and his cook only, and they know best, of course.

1941