That night, I dreamed of shelling, saw the bodies, woke up in a knot of Russian words. Part of my mind had picked up the horror that was always implied in the soldiers’ tales. But though my own imagination had supplied the blood and flames, the veterans had not dwelled on the grotesque when we talked. As they recounted life before the war, life between battles, and their individual tales of adaptation to the peace, the soldiers could be vivid raconteurs, but their battle stories were as bland as any formal histories of war, the horror disembodied, safe. Even the veterans who talked for hours – and to each other, for the interviews tended to overlap – had kept such details out of their accounts of violence. Rather than trying to relive the grimmest scenes of war, they tended to adopt the language of the vanished Soviet state, talking about honour and pride, of justified revenge, of motherland, Stalin, and the absolute necessity of faith. When it came to accounts of fighting, the individual was set aside, shut off, as if we were all looking at the story through a screen. There were bodies, and there were tears, but there was no blood, no shit, no nervous strain.
This reticence had troubled me when I began the research for this book, but by the time I got to Kursk I had begun to understand. The veterans’ detachment was not merely a feature of their old age, some weakness of psychology to be pathologized and healed, nor was it simply self-defence. Instead, the images that veterans used, and their choice of silences and euphemisms, hinted at the secret of their resilience. Back then, during the war, it would have been easy enough to break down, to feel the depth of every horror, but it would also have been fatal. The path to survival lay in stoical acceptance, a focus on the job in hand. The men’s vocabulary was businesslike and optimistic, for anything else might have induced despair. Sixty years later, it would have been easy again to play for sympathy or simply to command attention by telling bloodcurdling tales. But that, for these people, would have amounted to a betrayal of the values that have been their collective pride, their way of life.
The war gave veterans very little. The assumption, beloved of a certain kind of well-nourished romantic conservative, that war makes nations stronger and more positive would not stand two minutes’ exposure to the reality of Stalingrad. I asked every veteran I met if their army service had improved their lives, and most told me about the things that they had lost. The list included youth, years of freedom, health, and then the scores of people: comrades, parents, families. True, many soldiers received useful training, but most believe (correctly or not) that their skills could more easily have been acquired in peacetime. As for the loot, the feather pillows and the children’s shoes, they were poor compensation for material loss and scant comfort for veterans’ families in the lean years after the war. War pensions used to be worth a great deal. In the hard times of the 1990s, some veterans helped adult children and grandchildren to feed and warm themselves by sharing these regular benefits, but these days even the handouts have started to lose value, turned to cash in an inflationary world. The only gain that significant numbers of the old soldiers did acknowledge was that the misery of war itself had made them value their survival more. This love for life is one of the most attractive qualities they share.
The veterans of Kursk were winners. They were neither former prisoners nor convicts from a punishment battalion. Their silences defended them from memories of injustice, though it would be impertinent to tell them so. But none of them sailed through the war undamaged. It is a measure of their strength, and of their survival, that they can talk at all about shelling, sniping, decomposing limbs and wounds. It is a measure of an entire generation that it kept its dignity. Perhaps their very reticence helped these soldiers to victory. Morale, after all, is largely based on hope. And memory, for them, is sacred, live. ‘What do the old men talk about when they come back to remember?’ I asked the curator of the museum at Prokhorovka, Russia’s greatest battle site. ‘They don’t talk much,’ she answered. ‘They don’t seem to need to. Sometimes they just stand and weep.’
Chronology of Main Events
1938
13 March: Germany declares Austria to be part of the Third Reich
29 September: Munich conference agrees to the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, but guarantees the remaining borders of Czechoslovakia
1939
15 March: Germans invade ‘post-Munich’ Czechoslovakia
31 March: British guarantee to Poland
23 August: Non-aggression pact signed between Germany and the Soviet Union
1 September: German troops invade Poland and annex Danzig
3 September: Britain and France declare war on Germany
17 September: Red Army enters Poland from the east
28 September: German troops capture Warsaw
30 November: Russians invade Finland
14 December: Soviet Union expelled from the League of Nations
1940
11 February: Soviet attack on the Mannerheim Line.
3 March: Red Army captures Vyborg (Viipuri)
12 March: Finland signs peace treaty with USSR, ceding the Karelian isthmus and the shores of Lake Ladoga
10 May: Germans invade Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg
29 May: Beginning of British evacuation from Dunkirk (to 3 June)
14 June: Germans enter Paris
17–23 June: Russians occupy Baltic states
22 June: France signs armistice with Germany
11–18 August: Peak of the Battle of Britain
7 September: First blitz over London
9 December: 8th Army begins offensive in north Africa
1941
22 June: Germany invades the Soviet Union; Finland attacks Soviet Karelia
27 June: Romania declares war on Russia
28 June: Germans capture Minsk
3 July: Stalin’s first wartime broadcast to the Soviet people
16 July: Germans reach Smolensk
25 July: Germans capture Tallinn
30 August: Mga, the last rail link to Leningrad, is captured by the Germans
17 September: Encirclement of Soviet troops near Kiev
30 September: Beginning of the Battle of Moscow
2 October: Germans capture Orel
12 October: Germans capture Kaluga
13 October: Germans capture Kalinin (Tver)
16 October: Height of the ‘Moscow panic’
20 October: State of siege declared in Moscow
30 October: Siege of Sevastopol begins in the Crimea
3 November: Germans capture Kursk
22 November: Germans break into Klin
26 November: Germans capture Istra
6 December: Soviet counter-offensive begins near Moscow
7 December: Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and raid British Malaya
8 December: USA and Britain declare war on Japan
15 December: Soviets recapture Klin and Istra
25 December: Russians begin to establish bridgehead in eastern Crimea
30 December: Soviets recapture Kaluga
1942
15 February: Singapore falls to Japanese
8 May: Germans attack in eastern Crimea
12 May: Unsuccessful Soviet offensive opened near Kharkov