Russia at war 1941-1945

the Sivash, where the Russian offensive had started a month before, and then over the Perekop Isthmus, where the Germans had built their defences in depth. It was just as well the Russians had by-passed Perekop.

With its poplars, the country round Simferopol looked like the Touraine. All the apple, peach, cherry and apricot trees were in blossom. Simferopol, small and nondescript,

except for a few small mosques, had suffered some bomb-damage, but not much. More

characteristic of the Crimea were the Tartar villages, with their mosques and the peculiar Tartar cottages with flat roofs and open verandahs. We drove through several such

villages on our way to the mountains and the south coast, and the Tartars looked on, morose and scared.

Then we came to the south coast of the Crimea. At Alushta many houses had been burned out, and the beach was mined and roped off by barbed-wire fences; yet the scenery was of a picture-postcard beauty—a land of vineyards and cypresses, where the fruit-trees and the lilac were now in bloom and houses were bright with the flaming red of the

bougainvilia, the lavender clusters of glycinium and the gardens golden with the yellow bushes of laburnum. Farther west, on the pale blue sea, lay the giant shape of Ayu Dag, the rock which, according to local legend, was the devil who had been turned into a

granite bear trying in vain to drain the Black Sea by drinking it dry. To the right, there rose into the sky the high lilac outline of Ai-Petri, its peaks wrapped in cloud.

At Yalta, the "Nice" of the Crimea, the whole sea front had been burned down by the Germans, but there was little destruction between Yalta and the spot where the road turns inland. We passed the imperial palaces at Alupka, and several sanatoria, now crowded with Russian wounded, and many of them, though bandaged or on crutches, waved

cheerfully as we drove past. (The Germans had also made great use of the Crimea as a gigantic military hospital ever since they had come here in the autumn of 1941).

Nothing was more striking than the contrast between this drive along the picture-postcard coast and the country round Sebastopol. There was nothing here but bleak, windswept

moors, and a few houses, now all destroyed. The Valley of Inkerman was like the Valley of Death. It is separated from Sebastopol by Sapun Ridge, and this also looked one of the most melancholy spots on earth, now pockmarked with shell-holes, like all the country around. God knows how many men died here on May 7. In the plains around Sapun

Ridge and along the road that runs to Sebastopol through the Valley of Inkerman, the air was filled with the stench of death. It came from the hundreds of horses still lying there, inflated and decaying by the roadside, and from the thousands of dead, many of whom

had not been buried deep enough, or even not yet buried at all.

Here, more than anywhere else, one felt that one was driving over layers and layers of human bones—of those who died in the Crimean War, and in the righting in 1920, and in 1941-2 during the deadly 250-day siege of Sebastopol, and now again...

From a distance Sebastopol, with the long and narrow bay beyond, looked like a live city, but it also was dead. Even in the suburbs, at the far end of the valley of Inkerman, there was hardly a house standing. The railway station was a mountain of rubble and twisted metal; on the last day the Germans were at Sebastopol they ran an enormous goods train off the line into a ravine, where it lay smashed, its wheels in the air. Destruction, destruction everywhere.

Sebastopol itself, bright and lively before the war, was now melancholy beyond words.

The harbour was littered with the wreckage of ships the Russians had sunk during the last days of the German evacuation.

It was hard to imagine how people could have lived and fought here during that summer of 1942, in the midst of the stench of hundreds of unburied corpses. And then it all Ht up in a flash: on the remnants of the old Navy monument on the sea front, I noticed an

inscription scratched with a knife or a nail, and written no doubt during the last days of the agony of July 1942:

You are not the same as before, when people smiled at your beauty. Now everyone

curses this spot, because it has caused so much sorrow. Among your ruins, in your lanes and streets, thousands and thousands of people lie, and no one is there to cover their rotting bones.

It was strange to wander along the deserted streets of Sebastopol, so full of historic memories of the Crimean War with that Mikhailovsky Fort—still, more or less,

undamaged across the bay—where young Tolstoy had taken part in the siege of 1854-5,

and so full of the more agonising memories of 1942.