Victor Henry decided to ignore the jollying, even ribald tone, and not to try to rewrite this record. “I’m grateful, and I’ll be there.”
They drove southward from Moscow in the rain, and all morning ground along in a thunderous parade of army trucks, stopping only for a visit to an amazingly well camouflaged airfield for interceptors, in the woods just outside the capital. The little black automobile, a Russian M-1 that looked and sounded much like a 1930 Ford, made cramped quarters, especially with unexplained packages and boxes lining the floor. When they had gone about a hundred miles, their guide, a mild-faced, bespectacled tank colonel, with the odd name of Porphyry Amphiteatrov, suggested that they stop to eat lunch and stretch their legs. That was when they first heard the German guns.
The driver, a burly silent soldier with a close-trimmed red beard, turned off to a side road lined with old trees. They wound among cleared fields and copses of birch, glimpsing two large white country houses in the distance, and entered a gloomy lane that came to a dead end in wild woods. Here they got out, and the colonel led them along a footpath to a small grassy mound under the trees where garlands of fresh flowers lay.
“Well, this was Tolstoy’s country estate, you know,” said Amphiteatrov. “It is called Yasnaya Polyana, and there is his grave. Since it was on the way, I thought you might be interested.”
Tudsbury stared at the low mound and spoke in a hushed way not usual to him. “The grave of Tolstoy? No tomb? No stone?”
“He ordered it so. ‘Put me in the earth,’ he said, ‘in the woods where I played Green Stick with my brother Nicholas when we were boys…’” Amphiteatrov’s bass voice sounded coarse and loud over the dripping of water through the yellow leaves.
Victor Henry cocked his head and glanced at the colonel, for he heard a new noise: soft irregular thumps, faint as the plop of the rain on the grass. The colonel nodded. “Well, when the wind is right, the sound carries quite far.”
“Ah, guns?” said Tudsbury, with a show of great calm.
“Yes, guns. Well, shall we have a bite? The house where he worked is interesting, but it is not open nowadays.”
The bearded driver brought the lunch to benches out of sight of the burial spot. They ate black bread, very garlicky sausages, and raw cucumbers, washed down with warm beer. Nobody spoke. The rain dripped, the army trucks murmured on the highway, and the distant guns thumped faintly. Pamela broke the silence. “Who put the flowers there?”
“The caretakers, I suppose,” said the colonel.
“The Germans must never get this far,” she said.
“Well, that’s a spiritual thought,” the colonel said. “I don’t think they will, but Yasnaya Polyana is not a strong point, and so the great Tolstoy must now take his chances with the rest of the Russians.” He smiled, suddenly showing red gums, and not looking mild at all. “Anyway, the Germans can’t kill him.”
Tudsbury said, “They should have read him a little more carefully.”
“We still have to prove that. But we will.”
The sun momentarily broke through and birds began to sing. Victor Henry and Pamela Tudsbury sat together on a bench, and light shafted theatrically through the yellow leaves, full on the girl. She wore gray slacks tucked into white fur snowboots, and a gray lamb coat and hat.
“Why are you staring at me, Victor?”
“Pam, I’ve never visited Tolstoy’s grave before, certainly not with you, but I swear I remember all this, and most of all the nice way you’ve got that hat tilted.” As her hand went up to her hat he added, “And I could have told you you’d lift that hand, and the sun would make your ring sparkle.”
She held out her fingers stiffly, looking at the diamond. “Ted and I had a bit of a spat about that. When he produced it, I wasn’t quite ready to wear it.”
The colonel called, “Well, Captain, I think we go on?”
Edging into the thickening traffic stream on the main road, the little black automobile rolled in the direction of the gunfire. Trucks filled the highway, one line moving toward the front, one returning. Whiskered men and stout sunburned women, working in fields between stretches of birch forest, paid no attention to the traffic. Children playing near the highway ignored the war vehicles too. In tiny villages, washing hung outside the log cabins and the wooden houses with gaily painted window frames. One odd observation forced itself on Victor Henry: the further one got from Moscow, the nearer to the front, the more normal and peaceful Russia appeared. The capital behind them was one vast apprehensive scurry. Directly outside it, battalions of women, boys, and scrawny men with glasses—clerks, journalists, and schoolteachers—had been frantically digging antitank ditches and planting concrete and steel obstacles in myriads. Beyond that belt of defense began tranquil forests and fields, with fall colors splashing the stretches of green conifer. Mainly the air raid shelters for trucks along the highway—cleared spaces in the woods, masked with cut evergreen boughs—showed there was an invasion on.
Toward evening the car rolled into a small town and stopped at a yellow frame house on a muddy square. Here red-cheeked children lined up at a pump with pails; smoke was rising from chimneys; other children were driving in goats and cows from broad fields, stretching far and flat under a purpling cloudy sky; and three burly old men were hammering and sawing at the raw frame of a new unfinished house. This was the strangest thing Pug saw all that day—these Russian ancients, building a house in the twilight, within earshot of German artillery, much louder here than at the Tolstoy estate, with yellow flashes flickering like summer lightning on the western horizon.
“Well, this is their home,” the tank colonel replied, when Victor Henry remarked on the sight, as they climbed stiffly out of the car. “Where should they go? We have the Germans stopped here. Of course, we took out the pregnant women and the mothers with babies long ago.”
In the warm little dining room of the house, now a regiment headquarters, the visitors crowded around the table with the tank colonel, four officers of the regiment, and a General Yevlenko, who wore three khaki stars on his thick wide shoulders. He was the chief of staff of the army group in that sector, and Colonel Amphiteatrov told Victor Henry that he had just happened to be passing through the town. This huge man with fair hair, a bulbous peasant nose, and big smooth pink jaws, appeared to fill one end of the narrow smoky room. Much taken with Pamela, Yevlenko kept passing gallant compliments and urging food and drink on her. His fleshy face at moments settled into an abstracted, stony, deeply sad and tired look; then it would kindle with jollity, though the eyes remained filmed by fatigue in sunken purple sockets.
A feast almost in Kremlin style appeared, on the rough yellow cloth, course by course, brought by soldiers: champagne, caviar, smoked fish, soup, fowls, steaks, and cream cakes. The mystery of this magnificent stunt was cleared up when Pug Henry glanced into the kitchen as one of the soldier-waiters opened and closed the door. The red-bearded driver of the M-i automobile was sweating over the stove in a white apron. Pug had seen him carrying boxes from the car into the house. Evidently he was really a cook, and a superb one.
The general talked freely about the war, and the colonel translated. His army group was outnumbered in this sector and had far fewer tanks and guns than the Nazis. Still, they might yet surprise Fritz. They had to hold a line much too long for their strength, according to doctrine; but a good doctrine, like a good regiment, sometimes had to stretch. The Germans were taking fearful losses. He reeled off many figures of tanks destroyed, guns captured, men killed. Any army could advance if its commanders were willing to leave blood smeared on each yard of earth gained. The Germans were getting white as turnips with the bloodletting. This drive was their last big effort to win the war before winter came.
“Will they take Moscow?” Tudsbury asked.
“Not from this direction,” retorted the general, “nor do I think they will from any other. But if they do take it, well, we’ll drive them out of Moscow, and then we’ll drive them out of our
land. We are going to beat them. The Germans have no strategic policy. Their idea of a strategic policy is to kill, to loot, and to take slaves. In this day and age that is not a strategic policy. Furthermore, their resources are basically inferior to ours. Germany is a poor country. Finally, they overestimated themselves and they underrated us. According to V. I. Lenin, that is a very dangerous mistake in war. It is very dangerous in war, Lenin said, to think too much of yourself and too little of your opponent. The result can only be inaccurate plans and very unpleasant surprises, as, for example, defeat.”
Pamela said, “Still, they have come so far.”
The general turned a suddenly menacing, brutally tough, piteously exhausted, angry big face to her. His expression dissolved into a flirtatious smirk. “Yes, my dear girl, and I see that you mean that remark well and do not like what has happened any more than we do. Yes, the Nazis, through unparalleled perfidy, did achieve surprise. And there is another thing. They are cocky. Their tails are up. They are professional winners, having already won several campaigns, and driven the indomitable British into the sea, and so forth. They believe they are unbeatable. However, as they watch their comrades die like flies in Russia, I think they are starting to wonder. At first they would advance in column down our highways, not even bothering to guard their flanks. Lately they’ve grown more careful. Yes, Hitler trained them to maraud, kill, and loot, and those are old Teutonic customs, so they are good at it. We are a peace-loving people, and I suppose in a mental sense we were caught unprepared. So, as you say, they have come far. Now we have two jobs: to keep them from coming farther, and then to send them back where they came from, the ones we haven’t squashed into our mud.” He turned to Henry and Tudsbury. “We will do the job faster, naturally, if you help us with supplies, for we have lost a lot. But most of all, the opening of a front in western Europe can lead to the quick destruction of these rats. The English might be surprised to find they could march straight to Berlin once they set foot in France. I believe every German who can shoot a gun straight has been shipped here for this attack.”
“I never broadcast without advocating a second front now,” Tudsbury said.
The general nodded. “You are well known and esteemed as a friend of the Soviet people.” He glanced at Victor Henry. “Well, and what are you interested in seeing, Captain? Unfortunately, this far inland, we cannot show you very good naval maneuvers.”
“General, suppose—of course this is absurd, but—suppose my President could visit your front, in a cloak of invisibility from the fairy tales.”
“We have such stories,” Yevlenko said, “but unfortunately no such cloaks.”
“What would you like him to see?”
The general glanced at the four officers sitting elbow to elbow at the table across from the visitors, smoking continuously, four kinky-haired pale Russians with shrewd weary eyes, who looked like quadruplets in their identical brown tunics. None of them had as yet uttered a word. Now he addressed them, and a colloquy in rapid Russian broke out. He turned back to Henry. “You put that well. It will be arranged. As the situation is a bit fluid, I suggest you make a start at dawn.” He said to Pamela, gesturing upward, “A bedroom has been cleared for you. The gentlemen will bunk with these officers.”
“Good heavens, a bedroom? I counted on sleeping on the floor or on the ground in my clothes,” Pamela said. “Anyway, I’m not at all sleepy yet.”
As the colonel translated, Yevlenko’s face lit up. “So? You talk like one of our Russian girls, not like a delicate Englishwoman.” Offering her his arm, he led them into the next room, where worn, inked-over maps hung on the walls, and the fusty house furniture was jumbled in with desks, stools, typewriters, and black twisting telephone cables. Soldiers pushed furniture, screeching here and there to clear a space around a shabby upright piano with bare wooden keys. An officer sat, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and thumped out “There’ll Always Be an England.” Pamela laughed when she recognized the tune, and stood and sang it. The general led applause and called for more champagne. The pianist began stumbling through “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” With an elegant low bow, General Yevlenko invited Pamela to dance. He towered head and shoulders above her, so they made a grotesque pair, two-stepping stiffly round and round the narrow clear space in heavy muddy boots, but his face shone with enjoyment. She danced with other officers, then with the general again, as the pianist ran through the few American tunes he knew and started over on “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Everybody in the room quaffed much champagne and vodka. In the doorway soldiers crowded, watching with round gay eyes the foreign lady in gray pants dancing and drinking with the officers. Pug knew that she hated to dance, especially with strangers; he recalled almost the first words he had heard Pamela utter, on the Bremen in the dim far past of peacetime: “I shall get myself a cane and a white wig.” But she made a game show.
The pianist began playing Russian music—which he did much better—and Pamela sank into a chair while the officers danced alone or with each other. The laughing and the handclapping grew louder. One handsome young soldier with a week’s growth of beard burst into the room and did a bravura solo, bounding, squatting, pirouetting, then acknowledging applause with the bow of a professional ballet artist. The general lumbered to his feet and began to dance by himself; he too twirled, jumped, then folded his arms and squatted, kicking his feet and hoarsely shouting, “Skoreye! Skoreye! Faster! Faster!” His heavy steps shook the floor. The soldiers broke into the room to ring him and to cheer; the room reeked of men’s dirty bodies, of smoke, of alcohol, yet pressed beside Pamela, Victor Henry could faintly smell her carnation perfume too. When General Yevlenko finished with a shout and jumped up panting, the men roared and clapped, and Pamela came and kissed his perspiring big red face, and he heartily kissed her mouth, causing laughter and more roars; and that was the end. The general left. The soldiers pushed the furniture back as it had been. The visitors went to sleep.
54
AT dawn, it was raining hard. Children and animals floundered in the dim violet light all over the square, and trucks splashed, skidded, and spun their wheels, throwing up curtains of muck. The back seat of the car was roomier, since many of the packages had been eaten or drunk up. Victor Henry thought of complimenting the master chef at the wheel, but decided against it. Pamela, squeezed between her father and Pug, had managed a touch of lipstick and eye makeup. In these surroundings she looked like a movie star visiting the troops, Pug thought.
“Well, we go,” said Colonel Amphiteatrov. “In this weather we will go slower, and not so far.” The car bumped and slid about a hundred yards, then sank and stalled.
“Well, I hope we will go farther than this,” said the colonel. Soldiers in greatcoats surrounded the car. With shouting and shoving they got it to move. The wheels hit solider ground, and the car went splashing, rocking, and slewing out of the town. After a run on asphalted highway through the fields, they took a narrow mud road into a forest. The chef drove well (or the chauffeur cooked well—Pug never did find out the truth), and he kept the car going through terrible ruts, mounds, and holes, for perhaps twenty minutes. Then the car stopped dead. Pug got out with the driver and the colonel. The hubs of the rear wheels were buried in ropy red mud. It was still raining heavily. They were stuck in wild woods, so quiet that rain hitting the hot hood made a hiss.
“I suppose he has a shovel,” Pug said.
“Yes, I suppose so.” The colonel was looking around. He walked off into the woods some yards ahead—to relieve himself, Pug imagined, before getting to work. Pug heard voices, then hoarse engine snorts. The bushes began to move. Out of the shrubbery a light tank appeared, covered with boughs, its cannon pointed at Pug. Behind it walked the colonel and three muddy men in greatcoats. The American had been looking straight at the mottled, camouflaged cannon, yet had not noticed it until it started toward him. The tank chugged out of the trees, swerved, and backed on the road. Soldiers quickly attached a chain and th
e car was pulled loose in a moment, with the passengers inside. Then the bough-festooned turret opened, and two bristly, boyish Slav heads poked out. Pamela jumped from the car, splashed and stumbled to the tank, and kissed the tankists, to their embarrassed pleasure. The turret closed, the tank backed into the wood to its former place, and the black automobile went lurching on into the forest. Thus they were bogged and rescued several times, and so discovered that the wet silent forest was swarming with the Red Army.
They arrived at a washout that severed the road like a creek in flood. The gully’s sides bore gouge marks of caterpillar treads and thick truck tires, but obviously the auto could not struggle across. Here soldiers emerged from the woods and laid split logs across the gash, smooth side up, lashing them together into a shaky but adequate bridge. This was a sizable crew, and their leader, a fat squinting lieutenant, invited the party to stop and refresh themselves. There was no way of telling him from his men, except that he gave the orders and they obeyed. They were all dressed alike and they were all a red earth color. He led the visitors through the trees and down into an icy, mucky dugout roofed with timbers, and so masked by brush and shrubs that Victor Henry did not see an entrance until the officer began to sink into the earth. The dugout was an underground cabin of tarred logs, crisscrossed with telephone cables, lit by an oil lamp and heated by an old open iron stove burning chopped branches. The officer, squinting proudly at a brass samovar on the raw plank table, offered them tea. While water boiled, a soldier conducted the men to a latrine so primitive and foul—though Tudsbury and the Russians happily used it—that Pug went stumbling off into the trees, only to be halted by a sentry who appeared like a forest spirit. While the American attended to nature, the soldier stood guard, observing with some interest how a foreigner did it. Returning to the dugout, Pug encountered three big blank-faced Russians, marching with fixed bayonets around Pamela, who looked vaguely embarrassed and amused.