The idea had occurred to him that perhaps the German ear had grown accustomed to the name Friedrich. He had not really thought this seriously, but still…It was just then that a little grain of very hard sand had grated under his foot – or rather, against his teeth.

Headquarters had been full of a general sense of triumph and exultation. He was constantly receiving written reports, oral reports, radio reports, telephone reports, from the commanding officers of his different units. This hadn't seemed like work at all; it had been simply a symbolic expression of German triumph. And then one day the telephone had rung: 'Herr Commander-in-Chief…' Somehow this matter-of-fact voice had immediately sounded out of harmony with the peals of triumph filling the ether.

Weller, a divisional commander, had reported that in his sector the Russians had gone over to the offensive. An infantry detachment, equivalent in size to a reinforced battalion, had succeeded in breaking through to the railway station. It was with this seemingly insignificant incident that he had felt his first prickle of anxiety.

Schmidt read the plan of operations out loud. As he did so, he straightened his shoulders and raised his chin. He wanted to indicate that, in spite of the good personal relations between him and Paulus, he was aware of the formality of this meeting.

Quite unexpectedly, Paulus came out with some words that Schmidt found strange and upsetting. In a quiet voice – not that of a commander-in-chief, not that of a soldier at all – he said:

'I believe in victory. But you know what? There's something quite senseless and unnecessary about the whole struggle for this city.'

'That comes a little unexpectedly from the commander-in-chief of the armies around Stalingrad.'

'You think so? But Stalingrad no longer exists as a centre of communications or heavy industry. What do we want it for? We can cover the north-eastern flank of our Caucasian armies along the line Astrakhan-Kalach. We don't need Stalingrad for that… I'm confident of victory, Schmidt – we shall capture the Tractor Factory. But that won't help us cover our flank. The Russians are going to attack -von Weichs is quite sure. None of our bluffing will stop that.'

'The course of events changes their meaning,' said Schmidt. 'But the Fuhrer has never yet withdrawn without first attaining an objective.'

Paulus himself believed that if the most brilliant victories had failed to bear the expected fruits, this was because they hadn't been carried through with the necessary tenacity and decisiveness. At the same time, he felt that the ability to abandon an objective that had lost its meaning was a sign of strength.

He looked into Schmidt's intelligent, piercing eyes.

'It's not for us to impose our will on a great strategist.'

He picked up the order of operations and signed it.

'Four copies only, in view of its particular secrecy,' said Schmidt.

13

After his visit to Army Headquarters, Darensky went to a unit deployed along the south-eastern flank of the Stalingrad Front, in the waterless sands around the Caspian Sea.

The steppes, with their small rivers and lakes, now seemed like an earthly paradise. Feather-grass grew there, there were horses, an occasional tree…

Thousands of men – all of them used to morning dew, the rustle of hay, and humid air – had now taken up quarters in these sandy wastes. The sand cut their skin, got into their ears, found its way into their bread and gruel, grated in the mechanisms of their watches and the bolts of their rifles, penetrated their dreams… These were harsh conditions for a human body, for human throats and nostrils, for human calves and thighs. It was as though the human body were a cart that had left the road and was now creaking its way across rough ground.

All day long Darensky visited artillery positions, had discussions, jotted down notes, made sketches, inspected equipment and ammunition dumps. By evening he was exhausted; his ears buzzed and his legs, unaccustomed to these shifting sands, were aching and throbbing.

Darensky had long ago noticed that, during a retreat, generals become particularly sensitive to the needs of their subordinates; commanding officers and Members of the Military Soviet suddenly reveal themselves to be modest, self-critical and full of scepticism. Never does an army prove to be so full of intelligent, all-understanding men as during a forced retreat, when the General Staff are searching for culprits.

But here in the desert people were simply apathetic and lethargic. It was as though the officers were convinced there was nothing for them to do, nothing for them to be concerned about – after all, these sands would be exactly the same tomorrow, the following day, in a year's time…

The chief of staff of an artillery regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Bova, invited Darensky to stay the night with him. Bova was stoop-shouldered, bald and hard of hearing in one ear. His quarters were in a shack made from boards smeared with clay and manure; the floor was covered with ragged sheets of tarred roofing paper. The shack was identical in every detail to those where the other officers were quartered.

'Greetings!' said Bova, shaking Darensky energetically by the hand. 'How's this then?' he asked, gesturing at the walls. 'It looks like I'll be spending the winter in a dog-kennel smeared with shit.'

'I've seen worse lodgings,' said Darensky, surprised at the transformation of the usually quiet Bova.

Bova sat Darensky down on a crate that had once contained cans of food from America, poured out some vodka into a large dirty glass whose rim was smeared with dried toothpaste, and handed him a green pickled tomato on a piece of damp newspaper.

'Make yourself at home, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!' he insisted. 'We've got vodka and we've got fruit.'

Darensky, who seldom drank, took a small, cautious sip and pushed his glass away. He asked Bova about the state of his troops. Bova, however, didn't want to talk shop.

'Yes, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,' he said. 'I've had enough of work. In the old days I never took a moment off – not even when there were all those splendid women around in Kuban and the Ukraine. Heavens! And they weren't shy either – believe me! You only had to wink at them. But I just sat on my arse in the Operations Section. I didn't know what I'd missed till I was out here in the desert.'

At first Darensky was annoyed by Bova's reluctance to discuss the average density of troops per square kilometre of front, or to give his opinion on the possible advantages of mortars over artillery in desert conditions. Nevertheless, he was not uninterested by the new turn the conversation had taken.

'You can say that again!' he exclaimed. 'There are some magnificent women in the Ukraine! There's one I used to visit in 1941, when we had our HQ in Kiev… She was a real beauty – the wife of someone in the public prosecutor's office… And I'm not going to argue about Kuban either. Yes, I rate Kuban very highly indeed – the number of beautiful women there is quite remarkable.'

Darensky's words had an extraordinary effect on Bova; he started to curse and then gave a cry of despair: 'And now we have to make do with Kalmyks!'

'Wrong!' said Darensky emphatically. He then became surprisingly eloquent about the charm of these swarthy and high-cheekboned women who smelt of wormwood and the smoke of the steppes. Remembering Alla Sergeyevna, he concluded: 'You're wrong. There are women everywhere. There may be no water in the desert, but there are always women.'

Bova didn't respond – he was asleep. Only then did Darensky realize that his host was drunk.

Bova's head was hanging off the edge of the camp-bed and his snores were like the groans of a dying man. Darensky, with the special tenderness and patience that a Russian feels towards a drunkard, placed a pillow under his head and some sheets of newspaper under his legs. He then wiped the saliva off Bova's lip and began looking round for somewhere to lie down himself.