The room was rapidly warming. Frying pancakes at the stove, Vera took off her shawl and fur coat, disclosing a ragged sweater, and a skirt over thick leggings and boots. “People ate strange things,” she said calmly. “Leather straps. Glue off the wallpaper. Even dogs and cats, and rats and mice and sparrows. Not me, none of that. But I heard of such things. In the hospital we heard awful stories.” She pointed at the pancakes starting to sizzle on the stove. “I’ve made these with sawdust and petroleum jelly. Terrible, you got very sick, but it filled your stomach. There was a small ration of bread. I gave it all to Mama, but after a while she stopped eating. Apathetic.”
“Tell him about the coffin,” said Yevlenko.
“A poet lives downstairs,” Vera said, turning the sputtering cakes. “Lyzukov, very well-known in Leningrad. He broke up his desk and made Mama a coffin. He still has no desk.”
“And about the cleanup,” said the general.
The daughter-in-law snapped with sudden peevishness, “Captain Henry doesn’t want to hear of these sad things.”
Pug said haltingly, “If it makes you sad, that’s different, but I am interested.”
“Well, later, maybe. Now let us eat.”
She began setting the table. Yevlenko took from the wall a photograph of a young man in uniform. “This is my son.”
The lamplight showed a good Slavic face: curly hair, broad brow, high cheekbones, a naive clever expression. Pug said, “Handsome.”
“I believe you told me you have an aviator son.”
“I had. He was killed in the Battle of Midway.”
Yevlenko stared, then gripped Pug’s shoulder with his good hand. Vera was setting a bottle of red wine on the table from the canvas bag. Yevlenko uncorked the bottle. “His name?”
“Warren.”
The general got to his feet, filling three glasses. Pug stood up, too. “Varren Viktorovich Genry,” said Yevlenko. As Pug drank down the thin sour wine, in this wretched lamplit room growing stuffy from the stove heat, he felt — for the first time — something about Warren’s death that was not pure agony. However briefly, the death bridged a gulf between alien worlds. Yevlenko set down his drained glass. “We know about the Battle of Midway. It was an important United States Navy victory which reversed the tide in the Pacific.”
Pug could not speak. He nodded.
With the pancakes there were sausages and American canned fruit salad from the general’s bag. They rapidly emptied the bottle of wine and opened another. Vera began to talk about the siege. The worst thing, she said, had been when the snow had started to melt last spring, late in March. Bodies had begun to appear everywhere, bodies frozen and unburied for months, people who had just fallen down in the streets and died. The garbage, the rubble, and the wreckage, emerging with the thousands of bodies, had created a ghastly situation, a sickening smell everywhere, a big threat of an epidemic. But the authorities had severely organized the people, and a gigantic cleanup had saved the city. Bodies had been dumped in enormous mass graves, some identified, many not.
“You see, whole families had starved,” Vera said. “Or only one would be left, sick or apathetic. People wouldn’t be missed. Oh, you could tell when a person was getting ready to die. It was the apathy. If you could get them to a hospital, or put them to bed and try to feed them, it might help. But they would say they were all right, and insist on going out to work. Then they would sit or lie down on the sidewalk, and die in the snow.” She glanced at Yevlenko and her voice dropped. “And often their ration cards would be stolen. Some people became like wolves.”
Yevlenko drank wine and thudded his glass on the table. “Well, enough about it. Big blunders were made. Crude stupid unforgivable blunders.”
They had been drinking enough so that Pug was emboldened to say, “By whom?”
Immediately he thought he had committed a fatal offense. General Yevlenko gave him a nasty glare, showing his big yellow teeth. “A million old people, children, and others who weren’t ablebodied should have been evacuated. With the Germans a hundred miles away, and bombers coming around the clock, food stores shouldn’t have been left in old wooden warehouses. Six month’s rations for the whole city burned up in one night. Tons of sugar melted and ran into the ground. The people ate that dirt.”
“I ate it,” said Vera. “I paid a good price for it.”
“People ate worse than that.” Yevlenko stood up. “But the Germans did not take Leningrad, and they will not. Moscow gave the orders, but Leningrad saved itself.” His speech was growing muffled and he was putting on his greatcoat with his back to Pug, who thought he heard him add, “Despite the orders.” He turned around and said, “Well, starting tomorrow, Kapitan, you will see some places that the Germans took.”
Yevlenko travelled at a gruelling pace. Place names melted into each other — Tikhvin, Rzhev, Mozhaisk, Vyazma, Tula, Livny — like American midwestern cities, they were all settlements on a broad flat plain under a big sky, one much resembling another; not in peaceful and banal sameness, as in the American repetition of filling stations, diners, and motels, but in horror. As they flew on and on for hundreds of miles, descending to visit an army in the field, or a headquarters in a village, or a depot of tanks and motor transport, or an operating airfield, Pug got a picture of the Russian front colossal in scale and numbing in wreckage and death.
The retreating Germans had executed a scorched-earth policy in reverse. Whatever was worth stealing, they had carried off; what would burn, they had burned; what would not, they had dynamited. For thousands and thousands of square miles they had ravaged the land like locusts. Where they had been gone for a while, buildings were rising again. Where they had recently been pushed out, shabby haggard Russians with shocked eyes were poking in the ruins or burying their dead; or they were being fed by army field kitchens in queues, under the open sky on the flat snowy plain.
Here was the problem of a separate peace, written plain across the devastated land. That the Russians loathed and despised the Germans as a form of invading vermin was obvious. Each village or city had its horror stories, its dossier of atrocity photographs of beatings, of shootings, of rapes, of heaps of bodies. The pictures numbed and bored by their grisly repetition. That the Russians wanted vengeance was equally obvious. But if after a few more bloody defeats like Stalingrad, the hated invaders would agree to leave the Soviet earth, stop torturing these people, and pay for the damage they had wrought, could the Russians be blamed for making peace?
Pug saw vast quantities of Lend-Lease materiel in use. Above all, there were the trucks, the trucks everywhere. Once Yevlenko said to him, at a depot in the south where olive-painted trucks, not yet marked with Russian lettering and red stars, stretched literally out of sight in parallel rows, “You have put us on wheels. It is making a difference. Now Fritz’s wheels are wearing out. He is going back to horses. One day he will eat the horses, and run out of Russia on foot.”
In an army HQ in a large badly shattered river town called Voronezh, they were eating an all-Russian supper: cabbage soup, canned fish, and some kind of fried grits. The aides were at another table. Yevlenko and Pug sat alone. “Kapitan Genry, we will not be going to Kharkov after all,” the general said in a formal tone. “The Germans are counterattacking.”
“Don’t alter your itinerary on my account.”
Yevlenko gave him the unsettling glare he had flashed in Leningrad. “Well, it’s quite a counterattack. So instead we will go to Stalingrad.”
“I’m sorry to miss your son.”
“His air wing is in action, so we would not see him. He is not a bad young fellow. Maybe some other time you will meet him.”
From the air, the approaches to Stalingrad were a moonscape. Giant bomb craters, pustular rings by the thousands, scarred a snowy earth littered with machines. Stalingrad itself, straggling along a black broad river flecked with floating ice, had the roofless broken look of a dug-up ancient city. As Yevlenko and his aides stared down at the ruins, Pug reca
lled his own dismaying airplane arrival over Pearl Harbor. But Honolulu had been untouched; only the fleet had been hit. No city on American soil had known such destruction. In the Soviet Union it was everywhere, and worst in this scene below.
Yet as they drove into the city past burned-out huts and buildings, tumbled masonry, and piles of wrecked machines, all in a vile stink of destruction, the crowds of workers clearing away the debris looked healthful and high-spirited. Merry children were playing around the ruins. There were many traces of the vanished Germans: street signs in their heavy black lettering, smashed tanks, guns, and trucks piled about or jammed in the rubble, a soldiers’ cemetery in a crater-pocked park, with painted wooden grave markers topped by simulated iron crosses. High on one broken wall, Pug noticed a half-scraped-off propaganda poster: a school-age German girl in blonde braids, cowering before a slavering ape in a Red Army uniform, reaching hairy talons for her breasts.
The jeep pulled up before a bullet-riddled building, on a broad central square where all the other structures were entirely bombed out. Inside, Soviet bureaucracy was regenerating itself, complete with file cabinets, noisy typewriters, pasty men at rough desks, and women carrying tea. Yevlenko said, “I will be very busy today. I will turn you over to Gondin. During the battle Gondin was secretary to the Central Committee. He did not sleep for six months. Now he is quite sick.”
A big very tough-looking gray-headed man in uniform, his face graven with deep lines of fatigue, sat behind a plank desk under a photograph of Stalin. Resting a large hairy fist on the desk, he looked pugnaciously at the stranger in the blue bridge coat. Yevlenko introduced Victor Henry. Gondin sized the newcomer up with a lengthy stare, thrust out a heavy jaw, and sardonically inquired, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
“Govaryu po-russki nemnogo”(“I speak a little Russian”), Pug mildly returned.
The official raised thick eyebrows at Yevlenko, who put his good hand on Victor Henry’s shoulder. “Nash,” he said. (“Ours.”)
Pug never forgot that, and never understood what had prompted Yevlenko to say it. At any rate, “Nash” worked on Gondin like magic. For two hours he walked and rode with Pug around the wrecked city, out into the hills, down into the ravines that sloped to the river, and along the waterfront. Pug could scarcely follow his rapid Russian talk about the battle, spate of commanders’ names, unit numbers, dates, and maneuvers, all poured out with mounting excitement. Gondin was reliving the battle, glorying in it, and Victor Henry did get the general idea: the defenders backed up against the Volga, surviving on supplies and reinforcements ferried across the broad river or brought across the ice; the fighting slogan, There is no land east of the Volga; the long horror of Germans on the hills in plain view, on rooftops of captured sections, or rumbling in tanks down the streets; the bloody deafening house-by-house, cellar-by-cellar fighting, sometimes in rain and in blizzards, the unceasing artillery and air bombardment, week upon week, month upon month. In the outskirts of the city, the German defeat was written in the snow, in long trails winding westward of smashed tanks, self-propelled guns, howitzers, trucks, half-tracks, and most of all in gray-clad bodies by the thousands, still strewn like garbage over the quiet cratered fields, miles upon miles. “It’s a tremendous job,” said Gondin. “I suppose in the end we’ll have to pile up and burn these dead rats. We’re still taking care of our own. They won’t be back to bury theirs.”
That night, in a cellar, Pug found himself at the sort of feast the Russians seemingly could produce in any place, under any circumstances: many varieties of fish, some meat, black and white bread, red and white wine, and endless vodka, served up on plank tables. The feasters were army officers, city officials, Party officials, about fifteen men; the introductions went fast, and obviously didn’t matter. It was Yevlenko’s party, and three themes ran through the boisterous talk, singing, and toasts: the Stalingrad victory, gratitude for American Lend-Lease, and the imperative need of a second front. Pug gathered that his presence was the excuse for some relaxation by these big shots. He too bore a heavy burden of emotion and tension. He let go, and ate and drank as though there were no tomorrow.
Next morning when an aide woke him in the frigid darkness, a blurry recollection made him shake his aching head, if it was not a dream, he and Yevlenko had staggered down a corridor together, and Yevlenko had said as they parted, “The Germans have retaken Kharkov.”
After Pug’s swift passage through war-torn Russia, Moscow appeared to him about as untouched, peaceful, well-kept, and cheery as San Francisco, despite the unfinished buildings abandoned and deteriorating, the sparseness of traffic, the difficulty of getting around, the dirty humps and ridges of ice, and the whole look of wartime neglect.
He found the ambassador ebullient. Pravda had printed every word of the Stettinius Report on Lend-Lease, leading off with it on the front page! A rash of stories on Lend-Lease was breaking out in the Soviet press! Moscow Radio was broadcasting Lend-Lease items almost every day!
Back home the Senate had passed the renewal of Lend-Lease unanimously, the House with only a few dissenting votes. Standley was snowed under with congratulations for speaking out. American and British newspapers had officially but gently disowned him. The President had passed it all off with an ambiguous joke to reporters about the tendency of admirals to talk too little or too much. “By God, Pug, maybe my head will roll yet for what I did, but by God, it worked! They’ll think twice before kicking us around anymore.”
Thus Standley, in the warm pleasant library at Spaso House, over excellent American coffee and white rolls and butter; his wrinkled eyes bright, his corded neck and face red with pleasure. He got all this out before Victor Henry said anything about his trip. Pug’s account was brief He would at once write up his observations, he said, and submit them to Standley.
“Fine, Pug. Well! Leningrad, Rzhev, Voronezh, Stalingrad, hey? By God, you covered ground. Won’t this ever put Faymonville’s nose out of joint! Here he sits on his ditty box, the grand high mucky-muck of Lend-Lease, never gets a look-see at what’s really happening and here you come along, and go right out and get the dope. Outstanding, Pug.”
“Admiral, I’m the beneficiary of a delusion around here that I’m somebody.”
“By God, you are somebody. Let me see that report soonest. Say, how about the Germans retaking Kharkov? That confounded maniac Hitler has nine lives. Lot of down-in-the-mouth Russkis at the Swedish embassy last night.”
Among the letters piled on Pug’s desk, a State Department envelope caught his eye with Leslie Slote handwritten in red ink on a corner. He first read a letter from Rhoda. The change in tone from her former false-breezy notes was marked.
“I did my best to make you happy while you were here, Pug darling. I was very happy, God knows. But I honestly don’t know how I rate with you anymore.” That was the key sentence in a couple of subdued pages. Byron had passed through, and had told her about Natalie’s removal to Baden-Baden. “I’m sorry you missed Byron. He’s a man, every inch of him. You’d be proud. Like you, though, he’s capable of scary silent anger. Even if Natalie gets home safe with that child, as Mr. Slote assures me she will, I’m not sure she can ever make it up to him. He’s in an agony of worry over the baby, and he feels she let him down.”
Slote’s letter was written on long yellow sheets. The red ink, unexplained, made the contents seem more sensational than they perhaps were.
March 1,1943
Dear Captain Henry:
The pouch is a handy thing. I have some news for you and a request.
The request first. Pam Tudsbury is here, as you know, working for the London Observer. She wants to go to Moscow, where indeed all the major war stories are to be found these days. She applied for a visa some time ago. No soap. Pam sees her journalist’s career going glimmering, whereas she’s developed an interest in her work and wants to keep at it.
Quite simply, can you, and will you, do something about this? When I suggested to Pam that she write you, she tu
rned colors and said not a chance, she wouldn’t dream of pestering you. But having observed you in action in Moscow, I had a notion that you might pull it off. I told Pamela that I would write you about her, and she turned more flamboyant colors and said, “Leslie, don’t you dare! I won’t hear of it.” I took that as British female doubletalk for “Oh, please, please do.”
One can never be sure why the Narkomindel turns deaf or sulky. if you want to have a go at this, the problem may be a matter of some forty Lend-Lease Airacobras. These planes were earmarked for the Soviet Union, but the British managed to divert them for the invasion of North Africa. Lord Burne-Wilke had a hand in this. Of course that may not turn out to be the hitch at all. I mention it because Pam did.
I come to my news. The attempt to get Natalie and her uncle out of Lourdes fell through, because the Germans moved the whole group to Baden-Baden, quite against international law. A month or so ago Dr. Jastrow fell dangerously ill with an intestinal ailment requiring surgery. Operating facilities in Baden-Baden evidently were limited. A Frankfurt surgeon came and looked him over, and recommended that he be moved to Paris. The best man in Europe for such surgery is in the American Hospital there, we’re told.
The Swiss Foreign Office has handled this very smoothly. Natalie, Dr. Jastrow and the baby are in Paris now. The Germans were quite decent about allowing them to remain together. Apparently his life was in some danger, because there were complications. He was operated on twice, and he is slowly recuperating.