Russia at war 1941-1945

was now impossible, he said: "Of course not. They may always try a last desperate gamble, or even a few 'last desperate' gambles. But I don't think," he added firmly, "that they will get to Moscow."

At sunset we drove to a small fighter base outside Viazma. Here were the "Stalin Hawks"—the Stalinskie sokoly—in their own surroundings. The moment we arrived, we heard the drone of engines and, despite the growing darkness, a Russian fighter swooped down and landed gracefully on the airfield.

A crowd of airmen on the ground ran up to the new arrival. The newly-landed plane was a fighter, but had been fitted with a bomb bay... The young pilot was, by now, busily examining one of the wooden wings which had been pierced by an anti-aircraft shell. He had dropped his bombs on a German airfield near Smolensk, and there had been some

heavy anti-aircraft fire. He had set fire to a hangar, and seemed very pleased with the result. He was about twenty, but had done a good deal of flying. When asked how much flying a day he did, he said: "From here to the German lines—oh, five, six, seven raids a day; only takes about an hour or so, there and back." There was another young, fair-haired airman whom I asked how he liked the dangerous life; "I love it. It may be dangerous, but every moment of it is exciting. It's the best life there is. It's well worth it."

(Did he really mean it? I wondered.)

Later we were shown a rocket that was used by these planes against tanks. Even so, there was something pathetic about these slow obsolete planes being used as supposed fighter-bombers—with probably very little effect, but at a terribly high cost in Russian lives.

That week spent in the Smolensk country—the Smolenshchina— was, in a sense, a

heartening but also a highly tragic experience. This was, historically, one of the oldest of Russian lands, not Estonian, Latvian or even Belorussian or Ukrainian; this was very nearly the heart of old Muscovy. The ancient city of Smolensk was already in German

hands, and the front was running some twenty or twenty-five miles east of it. There were villages through which we travelled where the Germans had not yet been. There were

hardly any young men left in these villages; only women and children and a few very old men, and many of the women were anxious and full of foreboding. Many of these

villages in the frontal zone had been bombed and machine-gunned. Some villages and

small towns, like Dukhovshchina, had been completely wiped out by German bombing,

and the fields of rye and flax around them had remained unharvested.

And then there were the soldiers. We visited many regimental headquarters, some of

them only a mile or two from the front line, and with shells frequently falling around. For the last month these men had been advancing, though at heavy cost. Many of the officers, like Colonel Kirilov, who received us on a wooded hill overlooking the German lines on the other side of a narrow plain, were like something out of Tolstoy—brave, a little gruff, taking war in their stride; some of these men had retreated hundreds of miles, but now they were happy to have stopped and even driven back the Germans. Kirilov had adopted as a "son of the regiment" a pathetic little fourteen-year-old boy, whose father and mother had both been killed in the bombing of a near-by village.

One night we stayed at a field hospital consisting of several large dugouts; two of them were still crowded with men who had been too severely wounded to be transported—men

who had lost both their eyes, or both legs; only a week before, there had been hundreds of wounded in these dugouts. All the nurses were pupils of the Tomsk medical school, all young and extraordinarily pretty, as Siberian women usually are. There was a staff of seven surgeons, six doctors and these forty-eight nurses, and, only a week before, they had had to handle as many as 300 wounded a day. The operating dugout was well-equipped, and there were X-ray and blood-transfusion outfits. As yet, the chief surgeon, a Moscow man, said, they had not been short of any medical supplies.

But perhaps the optimism among the soldiers was more on the surface. I had a talk one day with a captain, whose home town was Kharkov, and who had studied history and

economics at Kharkov University. He had been engaged in some heavy fighting round

Kiev during the previous month, until his regiment had been moved to this Smolensk

sector. He was in a gloomy mood. "It's no use pretending that all is well," he said: "The flag-waving, the hurrah-patriotism of our press are all very well for propaganda purposes to keep up morale; but it can be overdone—as it sometimes is. We shall need a lot of help from abroad. I know the Ukraine; I know how immensely important it is for our whole

national economy. Now we have lost Krivoi Rog and Dnepropetrovsk, and without the