Stories like this were soon turned into fable. Amid the violence and death, the guilty pleasure of survival wove strong bonds of brotherhood. The brute simplicity of life pared down to its sinews produced a sense of freedom, while battle itself often seemed like release.94 The party was quick to take the credit. It claimed the soldiers’ valour for its own and called them loyal komsomols and faithful patriots. But though its bureaucrats supplied a rhetoric, the emotion that fired the men was beyond words. Sheer rage combined with something very close to love. The emotion is echoed, at a distance, in the evidence of those who clung to Stalingrad in memory, regarding the city as the scene of their most vivid life. Vasily Grossman, the novelist and war correspondent, was one who did not want to leave. As he wrote to his father, ‘I still want to stay in a place where I witnessed the worst times.’95 Once victory was certain, others claimed to share this view. ‘It was pretty terrifying,’ a survivor told Alexander Werth, ‘to cross over to Stalingrad, but once we got there we felt better. We knew that beyond the Volga there was nothing, and that if we were to remain alive, we had to destroy the invaders.’96
‘I cannot understand how men can survive such a hell,’ a pilot in the Luftwaffe wrote home. ‘Yet the Russians sit tight in the ruins, and holes and cellars, and a chaos of steel skeletons which used to be factories.’97 ‘The Russians are not men, but some kind of cast-iron creatures,’ another German concluded.98 This was outrage speaking, the voice of shock when victory was neither swift nor cheap. But until November, Paulus’s men could still believe that they would beat the Slavic devils, crushing them as they had done for seventeen months. Their German rearguard would support them, their planes deliver vital food, rescue the wounded. As the thermometer dropped and the nights grew longer, however, it was the Red Army, and not the invader, that would take the initiative.
The ruins of Stalingrad were the icon of Red Army stoicism, but it was not within the city itself that the outcome of that winter’s long campaign would be decided. Chuikov’s 62nd Army surely earned the honour of the title ‘guards’, but it was planning, not merely endurance, that would save the Soviet cause. In November 1942, a massive operation, codenamed Uranus, was set in train. Its aim was to encircle Paulus’s trapped 6th Army, cutting off its retreat from the city. As Soviet and German troops duelled over rust and rotting bricks, more than a million men were gathering beyond their horizon. Armies were brought into position on three fronts, forming a giant trap around Stalingrad. They waited only for the signal to move out across the steppe.99
It would not have consoled the city’s defenders, but life was hardly easy for the divisions that converged on the city from bases to the north and east. Supply problems would dog them, too, including shortages of winter clothing. Men died of frostbite and hypothermia before they ever reached the front.100 But the operation, which began on 19 November, was a swift and complete success. Three days later, the 6th Army had been surrounded, trapped in the city that their Führer could not allow them to abandon. The mood among Red Army troops in Stalingrad would lift, though there were months of suffering to come. General Paulus held out till the end of January, and the battle to secure the region as a whole continued for weeks after that, but action and a glimpse of victory raised Soviet morale despite November’s fog. Survivors of the great encirclement campaign would later remember the day the order came to strike the enemy at last as the happiest of their war.101 As Konstantin Rokossovsky’s trap closed around the city, it was even possible for wounded veterans to complain, as one wrote to his wife, that they were lying in hospital and ‘missing all this’.102
For months, Red Army men had nursed envy for the invader, for Fritz, with his well-nourished body and his modern guns. There was even, among the better-educated troops, a kind of cultural awe, for these were the people whose civilization had produced Bach, Goethe and Heine (no one, I found, referred to Marx). There had been signs that German morale was cracking elsewhere on the Eastern Front by October. Soldiers based near Smolensk were said to be depressed as winter closed in yet again, and those returning from the Don to rest in occupied Ukraine were already anxious about the possibility of a Soviet recovery.103 From November, trapped in Stalingrad and on the frozen steppe around it, Wehrmacht soldiers tasted their first despair. ‘Snow, wind, cold, and all around us – sleet and rain… Since my leave I have never undressed. Lice. Mice at night,’ Kurt Reuber, a thirty-sixyear-old German from Kassel wrote to his family in December. ‘There is just enough food to stop us from dying of hunger.’104
While Paulus struggled to resist surrender, the two sides starved in a twilight fog. ‘Clay and mud,’ Reuber explained. Like the Russians, the Germans lived in dugouts. There was not even much wood left to reinforce the walls or roof after the bombing and the fires. In fact, there was almost no vegetation at all amid the rubble. In late December, Reuber observed a scrawny Russian pony that had wandered over to his dugout and was nibbling a piece of broken timber. The shivering creature was so hungry that even this would do for food. ‘Today it will be our dinner,’ Reuber remarked.105 When the last Germans were captured a month later, even their wretched shelters impressed Russian troops.106 Soviet dugouts had been even more primitive and cramped. Their commanders, writing from well behind the lines, were concerned at the darkness, the lack of air and space.107 A woman veteran put it more vividly. ‘Let us just say,’ she told me, ‘that with those people sleeping there, and all their clothes, and a fire – well, it wasn’t a place where you went in to breathe.’
Those last weeks were a calvary for soldiers of both sides. A near equality of misery prevailed. The adversaries locked together, contesting spaces that passed between them, back and forth, each time costing dozens, hundreds of lives. After Stalingrad fell, Alexander Werth toured the ruins and was struck by the battle relics that close combat had left. ‘Trenches ran through factory yards and through the workshops themselves,’ he wrote. ‘And now at the bottom of the trenches there still lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes; and there were helmets, Russian and German, lying among the brick debris, and now half-filled with snow.’108 When the thaw came that spring, another witness saw a chunk of ice floating along the Volga with two frozen bodies, a Russian and a German, fixed on to it just as they had died, clasped in a simultaneous assault.