David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

“We’re ordered to hold this building,” he growled, “and that’s what we’re going to do. I don’t know the strength across the hall, so we’ll keep our position until we have more info. Or until we find a way to get the Reds out of here.”

A soldier spoke up. “Why don’t we just rush them, sir? There can’t be more than a few.”

“How do you know that, Private? There are eighty Germans in here. Would you like to hold us off with just a few? I don’t think the Russians would, either. I doubt that’s all they brought with them.”

Nikki looked at the grimy faces leaning into the officer’s words.

“No,” Mercker said, “I’m not ready to turn this into a slaughterhouse. We’ll wait them out. See who gets scared first. Probably they’ll sneak out a window tonight and go report that the Reich has got this building now.”

Nikki moved to the center of the room and sat. He watched two men lift the martyred soldier out of his smoldering blood and carry him to a window. It was Private Kronnenberg. A boy his own age, nineteen or twenty. They’d spoken only a few times. Kronnenberg was new, just called up. He’d been hopeful, still certain that Germany needed Russian soil. A young patriot. He was no longer young, Nikki thought. Kronnenberg was dead. He couldn’t get any older than that. He was lowered out the window gently.

Nikki’s eyes fixed on the door. The Russians are just like us, he thought. There’s a hundred of them. They’re huddled in the middle of a big room. They’re making plans to spend the night, too, figuring we’ll creep out through the windows as soon as we’re sure we don’t want to die enough to keep this building.

Nikki was scared. He marveled that he could still be afraid for his life. When would the fear leave him completely? When would he have seen enough, run and crawled enough? He didn’t shake after the battles in these buildings anymore. He no longer curled up in a corner under the clearing smoke, looking breathlessly at the dead of both armies. No longer. This was a bad sign. He didn’t want to get used to this. But it was happening.

“COMRADE CHIEF MASTER SERGEANT. COME IN. SIT down.”

Zaitsev stepped down onto the dirt floor of Colonel Nikolai Batyuk’s bunker. Batyuk stood and motioned to a keg as a stool. The commander of the 284th Division was taller than Zaitsev but just as slim. His dark hair was combed back to show a high, pale forehead.

Batyuk’s desk was a collection of planks laid over two barrels. Unlike the bunker Zaitsev shared with Viktor, this cave had been dug not by a German bomb but by sappers into the limestone cliff above the Volga, southeast of the Barricades plant. The walls and roof were fortified with timbers, recalling a Siberian sauna. Behind Batyuk, two women worked field radios, plugging and unplugging wires at a furious rate and speaking into microphones in low tones. Three staff officers leaned over another crude table to scribble lines on a map.

Zaitsev perched on the keg. He set his pack at his feet and rested his sniper rifle across his knees.

“You wished to see me, Comrade Colonel?”

“Yes, Vasily. You were stationed in Vladivostok before you were transferred here. You were in the navy. A clerk?”

“Yes, sir.” I am not, Zaitsev thought, still a clerk.

Batyuk pointed to Zaitsev’s neck. “I see you still wear your sailor’s shirt under your tunic.”

Zaitsev tugged at the blue-and-white striped jersey beneath his outer shirt.

“Yes, sir. In the navy we say the blue is the ocean’s waters and the white is the foam.”

Batyuk smiled. “I’ve never seen the Pacific. I hear it’s beautiful. Perhaps one day.”

The two sat silently. Both wore thin, faraway smiles across their faces. Batyuk blinked and cleared his throat.

“Let me see your sniper journal.”

Zaitsev handed the black leather booklet across the desk.

The colonel flipped through the pages. Without looking up, he said, “As you know, in the last two weeks the Germans have kicked us out of the Tractor Factory in all but the northeast corner. They’re also threatening our positions in the Barricades and Red October plants.”

Batyuk laid the journal on the desk. “Our bridgehead is dwindling. I’m going to tell you a few things you may not know. Then again, since you’re one of the men who makes those lines on that map come and go”—he motioned to his staffers drawing and erasing at their table— “you might know a great deal.”

Zaitsev looked hard at his colonel. Batyuk reached under the desk and produced a bottle of vodka and two glasses. He poured.

The two raised their drinks in toast. They gulped, then inhaled deeply through their shirtsleeves, the Russian ritual to make the sting of the vodka last a moment longer.

Batyuk exhaled. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you any cabbage.”

Zaitsev smiled. “Another time, Comrade Colonel.”

Batyuk leaned across his desk. “Something’s up. I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve had our ammunition cut every day for a week. That means it’s being diverted somewhere else.” The colonel picked up a penknife and tapped it in his palm. “We have to hold out, Vasily. We’ve got to keep the Germans’ feet to the fire. I can’t tell you why, because I don’t know why. But something very big is up.”

Batyuk motioned Zaitsev to follow him to the map table. He indicated the row of three giant factories, red and black lines mingled in a tangle of battle activity. Zaitsev thought how little the lines told of the destruction and terror inside those buildings.

“We have forty thousand men in place,” Batyuk began. “We can stay at that level so long as we continue to get reinforcements. Whenever the Germans reduce our bridgehead, we just pack the men in more densely. Even though our positions are getting smaller, they’re not getting weaker. The Germans have been slow to catch on to this. In fact, Zhukov and the rest of the generals who know what’s going on aren’t concerned with space. If we can keep that number of men fighting somewhere in the city, the Nazis can’t pull out. Hitler won’t let them. He’s already announced to the world he controls Stalingrad. I think Hitler’s just mad because the city is named after Stalin.” Batyuk chuckled. “Who knows. Anyway, as long as they can’t leave, you and I are doing our jobs.”

The colonel moved his hand to an open area between the city center and the factory district. His finger came to rest over a black circle. “This is Hill 102.8,” he said, referring to the hill’s height in meters above sea level. Its real name was Mamayev Kurgan, the burial mound of Mamay, an ancient Tatar king. “The Germans control this hill. From here they can see every damned thing going on… here.” Batyuk drew a ring around the city center. “Here…” He motioned to a five-kilometer stretch of the ruins of three huge factories: on the eve of war, these plants had produced 40 percent of the Soviet Union’s tractors and 30 percent of its high-grade steel; the bombings of August and September had reduced them to gargantuan tangles of steel, twisted rails, and forlorn brick facades.

“And worst of all, here.” Batyuk stabbed his finger three times along the Volga at the landing stages: the Skudri crossing, behind the Tractor Factory; Crossing No. 62, at the rear of the Barricades; and the moorings south of the Banny Gully, directly across from Krasnaya Sloboda, the Red Army’s main embarkation point on the east bank.

“From 102.8, German spotters are directing artillery and air strikes against our supplies and reinforcements on the river.” Batyuk moved back to his desk. “With supplies already being cut, we could be in serious trouble if we don’t maximize use of what we do get from the east bank.”