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

The commissar looked squarely at Zaitsev. “I speak frankly, comrade. I don’t care if you want to be a hero or not. It’s not my concern. I do care, however, that the rest of Russia knows we are holding out here. I care also that the soldiers in the ruins and trenches believe that heroes are kneeling next to them. You understand, every Red soldier is not a superman. The least we can do is let them know they are fighting at the side of supermen.”

Zaitsev looked at Danilov’s gray grin, set in the thicket of a heavy beard line. It would be a mistake, he thought, if I interpret this chat to be a request for my cooperation. I haven’t been invited by this commissar to a banquet of choices. Yesterday I was a sniper doing my job. Today I’m what… a hero?

But I can do this. I can be this. This hero.

Danilov touched his pencil to his pad. He began. “You are from the Urals, I understand.”

Zaitsev nodded. “Yes. I am a hunter.”

IN 1937, WHILE JAPAN AND GERMANY RATTLED SWORDS at the world, twenty-two-year-old Vasily Zaitsev enlisted in the Red Navy. Born in Siberia, he’d never seen an ocean, and the idea seemed a romantic one. He was stationed in Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast. For five years he kept accounting records and waited for Japan, only seven hundred kilometers away, to attack.

Zaitsev read reports on the German siege of Leningrad, the occupation of the Ukraine, and the battle for Moscow. He listened to Party speeches and read articles about the inconceivable Nazi plan to capture the western third of the Soviet Union. The vast territory was to become a slave colony of farms and forced labor to feed the growing Aryan empire.

Off duty, Zaitsev hunted in the forests above the naval base. Lying in the leaves and rich humus, he trained his rifle on rabbits and deer, pretending they were Nazis. He was at home in the woods. He’d spent much of his boyhood hunting in the taiga, the white-barked birch forests near his home in Ellininski in the Ural foothills of western Siberia. His grandfather Andrei was one of a long line of woodsmen. The old man, lanky and bone white, like the birch forest itself, taught Vasha about the taiga while the boy was barely old enough to chew the meat of the animals they killed. When Vasha was eight, Andrei gave him a bow. Because he had to chase the arrows he shot or else fashion new ones, he studied ways to ration his ammunition, to shoot only when certain. Vasha learned to read tracks and lie in silent ambush, keeping his breathing shallow and his concentration deep.

In the summer of 1927, Andrei took twelve-year-old Vasha to hunt a wolf that was preying on their cows. Several kilometers from home, in a copse of trees, the wolf sprang at them. Andrei whirled and killed it with the sharpened end of his walking staff. This, said Andrei, ramming the spear again into the shuddering wolf s heart, was a lesson in courage for the boy. Never forget how easy it is to kill. Never be afraid to kill when you must. Andrei wiped a warm streak of blood across the boy’s cheek. He watched Vasha skin the wolf. Then he presented his grandson with the old rifle he carried. On his way back to the village, Vasha shot two hares and a wild goat. He was a hunter now, with his own gun and three hides he could throw on the pile at the hunters’ lodge.

Vasha often spent more time in the forest than with people. Sometimes he smeared bear fat over his body and gun to hide his scent; often his mother refused to let him in the house because of the smell. On these evenings he slept gladly with his dogs.

Grandmother Dunia taught him to read and write. Zaitsev believed it was his babushka’s breadth of spirit and broad-hipped will that held his family together. His sisters, parents, cousins, and even the dogs obeyed her smartly swung birch switch with only the occasional grumble.

Dunia was a spiritual old woman. She fought with Andrei over God, determined to keep religious holidays in her home. Though Andrei did not accept Duma’s saints, he would not insult them, perhaps in deference to Dunia’s God or more likely the whip of her stick.

Once, Zaitsev asked his grandfather about his beliefs.

“Grandmother says the soul leaves the body and goes to heaven after we die, Grandpapa. Is that true for animals, too?”

Andrei cuffed him on the side of the head. “Neither man nor beast lives twice,” he snorted. “Come here.”

The old man walked Vasha to a side of venison hanging in the smokehouse. “This dawn, you killed that animal.” He pointed with a hand sharp as his spear. “If I see you killing it again, I’ll shoot you!”

The old man motioned outside to the deerskin tacked to the side of the shed. “The hide is drying. The flesh is on the table, and the guts we throw to the dogs. Remember, Vasha, soul is shit. God is about fear, a way to make you afraid and obey. The man of the forest is without fear.”

The family’s interest in Vasily’s hunting exploits gradually waned. On his fourteenth birthday he returned in the morning with several wolf and lynx hides strapped to his back. He received no notice. That evening Andrei told him to always come back to the village from a good hunt before dawn or at night so that no one would see the number and quality of hides he brought home. Pride is good in a hunter, Andrei explained, but boastfulness is not. Vasily knew he was now considered an adult. He was expected to perform like a man of the taiga. Now his rewards were a glass of vodka, some peace and quiet from his sisters, perhaps even some respect, and a seat in the men’s place, the hunters’ lodge.

At sixteen Vasily was sent three hundred kilometers away to Magnitogorsk to attend technical school at Russia’s largest ore processing plant. In the workers’ settlement he finished primary school and began bookkeeping courses. Numbers came easily to him. In his free time he hunted in the hills around town.

After six years learning the trade of a clerk and another five years filing papers in the navy, the twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev wanted to fight Germans. The Nazis had invaded Russia. Japan would keep.

Hitler had taken the city of Rostov in a bloody July campaign to cauterize his right flank on his thrust to the Caucasus. Before the Germans could continue south, their left flank also had to be secured. In the middle of that flank stood the manufacturing center of Stalingrad on a bend of the Volga.

A fierce battle was shaping up on the steppe west of the city. Throughout the summer the Red Army lumbered out to meet the Germans to fight intense tank battles across immense fields and steep ravines. At first the Russians proved no match for the rolling blitzkrieg. They retreated east over the Don River to lick their wounds. On the land bridge between the Don and Volga Rivers, the Red Army regrouped.

In the first week of September 1942, Zaitsev and two hundred other Siberian sailors in Vladivostok were mustered as marines into the 284th Rifle Division of the Sixty-second Army. They were assigned to the western front and the battle that Winston Churchill called “the hinge of fate.”

They were sent to Stalingrad.

THE TRAIN CLATTERED DAY AND NIGHT, RESTING ONLY in the afternoons to take on fuel and food. The villages where they stopped seemed asleep, moving at the heavy pace of age, of exhaustion. Children chased through the alleys playing army, ducks-on-the-pond, or October revolution, but even their laughter did not enliven the pall over the tile rooftops and dull, smokeless mills. There were no young men left in the towns. They were all gone to war.

The townspeople approached the halted troop train, tears welling in their eyes, hands lifted with bread, vegetables, vodka, clothes, and photos of Stalin and Lenin. The fleshy girls handed up letters to the uniformed arms reaching from the windows; the envelopes were often addressed to “Brave Young Man.”