Russia at war 1941-1945

"How," I asked, "can you carry on at all when shellfire is heavy? Have you any casualties? And how do your people stand up to it? " "Well," he said, "there is, I suppose, a sort of Kirov Works patriotism. Except for one or two very sick people, I have never yet come across anybody who wanted to quit... "

He pulled out a drawer of his desk and brought out a pile of forty or fifty envelopes with postmarks. These were letters from Leningrad workers who had been evacuated, and who were begging to be allowed to return to Leningrad, alone or with their families.

"They know how difficult conditions here are," he said, "but they also know that they wouldn't be a food problem to us any longer. But we can't agree to their return. These skilled Kirov workers are doing a valuable job of work out there; here we haven't much equipment, and the place is run as a sort of emergency war factory. Not unlike Kolpino, some ten miles away from here, where munitions are turned out in underground foundries

—right in the front line..."

"The way to keep the place going," he then said, "was by having it decentralised. We have divided up the work into small units, with only a corner of each workshop taken up with people and machinery; and this section, as far as possible is protected against blast and splinters. But misfortunes—or rather, a certain normal rate of casualties, will occur.

This month—and it's been a relatively good month—we have had forty-three casualties—

thirteen killed, twenty-three wounded and seven cases of shell-shock."

"You ask how they take it? Well, I don't know whether you've ever been for any length of time under shellfire. But if anybody tells you it's not frightening, don't you believe it. In our experience, a direct hit has a very bad effect for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. In a workshop that's had a direct hit, production slumps heavily during that time, or stops almost completely, especially if many people have been killed or injured. It's a horrible sight, all the blood, and makes even our hardened workers quite ill for a day or two... But after that, they go back to work, and try to make up for the time lost by what's called the

'accident'. But I realise all the same that working here is a perpetual strain, and when I see that a man or girl is going to pieces, I send him or her to a rest-home for a fortnight or a month..."

Later he took me round some of the workshops. It happened to be a quiet day, with

almost no German shelling. The enormous plant was, I could now see, much more

smashed up than the outside view from the street suggested. In a large space, with badly shattered buildings around, stood an enormous blockhouse... The concrete walls were

twelve inches thick, and the roof was made of powerful steel girders. "Nothing but a direct hit from a large gun at close range can do anything to this," said Puzyrev. "It was built during the worst days when we thought the Germans might break through to

Leningrad. They would have found the Kirov Works a tough proposition. The whole

place is dotted with pillboxes like this one..."

Then we went into one of the foundries. One end of it was quite dark, but behind a strong brick partition the other half of it was lit up by flames inside the open furnaces, with their red-hot walls. Dark, eerie shadows of men, but again mostly of girls, were moving about in the red glow. The girls, with patched cotton stockings over their thin legs, were stooping under the weight of enormous clusters of red-hot steel they were clutching

between a pair of tongs, and then you would see them—and as you saw it, you felt the desperate muscular concentration and will-power it involved—you would see them raise their slender, almost child-like arms and hurl these red-hot clusters under a giant steel hammer. Large red sparks of metal were flying and whizzing through the red semi-darkness, and the whole foundry shook with the deafening din and roar of machinery. We watched this scene for a while in silence; then Puzyrev said, almost apologetically, through the din: "This place isn't working quite right yet. We had a few shells in here the other day," and, pointing at a large hole in the floor now filled with sand and cement,

"That's where one of them landed." "Any casualties? " "Yes, a few."

We walked through the foundry and watched more closely all that the girls were doing.

As we were going out I caught a glimpse of a woman's face in the red glow of the flames.

Her face was grimy. She looked an elderly woman, almost like an old gipsy hag. And

from that grimy face shone two dark eyes. There was something tragic in those eyes—

there was a great weariness in them, and a touch of animal terror. How old was she?

Fifty, forty, or maybe only twenty-five? Had I just imagined that look of terror in her eyes? Was it that grimy face and the eerie shadows around leaping up and down that had given me that idea? I had seen some of the other girls' faces. They were normal enough.