He wasn't thinking about Yeremenko, about the fact that Stalin might cite his name in tomorrow's order of the day. He seemed to have forgotten Yevgenia Nikolaevna, to have forgotten that dawn in Brest-Litovsk when he had run towards the airfield and seen the first flames of war in the sky.
He wasn't thinking about any of these things, but they were all of them inside him.
He was thinking simply about whether he should wear his old boots or his new ones; that he mustn't forget his cigarette-case; that his swine of an orderly had yet again given him cold tea. He sat there, eating his fried eggs and mopping up the butter still left in the pan with a piece of bread.
'Your orders have been carried out,' reported Vershkov. He went on in confiding disapprovaclass="underline" 'I asked the soldier if the commissar was there and he said: "Where d'you think he is? He's with that woman of his.'"
The soldier had used a more expressive word than 'woman', but Vershkov preferred not to repeat this to the corps commander's face.
Novikov didn't say anything; he went on gathering up the crumbs of bread on the table, squeezing them together with one finger.
Soon Getmanov arrived.
'Tea?' asked Novikov.
'It's time we were off, Pyotr Pavlovich,' said Getmanov abruptly. 'We've had enough tea and enough sugar. Now it's time to deal with the Germans.'
'Oh,' Vershkov said to himself, 'we are tough today!'
Novikov went into the part of the house that served as their headquarters, glanced at the map and had a word with Nyeudobnov about various matters of liaison.
The deceptive silence and darkness reminded Novikov of his childhood in the Donbass. Everything had seemed just as calm, just as sleepy, only a few minutes before the whistles and hooters started up and the men went out to the mines and factories. But Petya Novikov had known that hundreds of hands were already groping for foot-cloths and boots, that women were already walking about in bare feet, rattling pokers and crockery.
'Vershkov,' he said, 'you can take my tank to the observation post. I'll be needing it today.'
'Yes, comrade Colonel, said Vershkov. 'And I'll put your gear in -and the commissar's.'
'Don't forget the cocoa,' said Getmanov.
Nyeudobnov came out onto the porch, his greatcoat thrown over his shoulders.
'Lieutenant-General Tolbukhin just phoned. He wanted to know whether the corps commander had set off for the observation post yet.'
Novikov nodded, tapped his driver on the shoulder and said: 'Let's be off, Kharitonov.'
The road left the last house behind, turned sharply to the right, to the left and then ran due west, between patches of snow and dry grass.
They passed the dip in the ground where the 1st Brigade was waiting. Novikov suddenly told Kharitonov to stop, jumped out and walked towards the tanks. They showed up as black shapes surrounded by semi-darkness. Novikov looked at the men's faces as he passed by, but he didn't say a word to anyone.
He remembered the young recruits he had seen the other day on the village square. They really were just children, and the whole world had conspired to expose these children to enemy fire: the plans of the General Staff, the orders given by Yeremenko, the order he himself would give to his brigade commanders in an hour's time, what they heard from their political instructors, what they read in poems and articles in the newspapers. Into battle! Into battle! And to the west men were waiting to blow them up, to cut them apart, to crush them under the treads of their tanks.
'Yes, there is going to be a wedding!' he thought. But with no harmonicas, no sweet port wine. Novikov would shout 'Bitter! Bitter!' [50] – and the nineteen-year-old bridegrooms would dutifully kiss their brides.
Novikov felt as though he were walking among his own brothers and nephews, among the sons of his own neighbours, and that thousands of invisible girls and women were watching him.
Mothers contest a man's right to send another man to his death. But, even in war, you find men who join the mothers' clandestine resistance. Men who say, 'Stay here a moment. Can't you hear the firing outside? They can wait for my report. You just put the kettle on.' Men who say on the telephone to their superior officer, 'Yes, Colonel, we're to advance the machine-gun,' but then hang up and say, 'There's no point in moving it forward, and it will just mean the death of a good soldier.'
Novikov strode back to his jeep. His face looked harsh and grim, as though it had absorbed some of the raw darkness of this November dawn. The jeep started up again. Getmanov looked sympathetically at Novikov.
'You know what I want to say to you right now, Pyotr Pavlovich? I love you, yes, and I believe in you.'
9
The silence was dense and unbroken; it was as though there were no steppe, no mist, no Volga, nothing in the world but silence. And then the clouds grew lighter, the grey mist began to turn crimson – and the earth and sky suddenly filled with thunder.
The nearby guns joined those in the distance; the echoes reinforced this link, and the whole battlefield was covered by a dense pattern of sound.
In the steppe villages the mud walls of the houses began to shake; pieces of clay fell silently to the floor and doors started to open and close of their own accord. The thin ice on the lakes began to crack.
A fox took flight, waving its thick silky tail in the air; a hare for once ran after it rather than away from it. Birds of prey of both day and night flew heavily up into the sky, brought together for the first time. A few field mice leapt sleepily out of their holes – like startled, dishevelled old men running out of a hut that had just caught fire.
The damp morning air over the artillery batteries probably grew a degree or two warmer from the hundreds of burning-hot gun barrels.
You could see the shell-bursts very clearly from the observation post, together with the oily black and yellow smoke twisting into the air, the fountains of earth and muddy snow and the milky whiteness of steely fire.
The artillery fell silent. The clouds of hot smoke slowly mingled with the cold, clammy mist.
Then the sky filled with another sound, a broad, rumbling sound. Soviet planes were flying towards the West. The hum and roar of the planes made tangible the true height of the sky: the fighters and ground-support aircraft flew beneath the low clouds, almost at ground level, while in and above the clouds you could hear the bass note of the invisible bombers.
The Germans in the sky over Brest-Litovsk, the Russians over the steppe… Novikov didn't make this comparison. What he felt then went deeper than any thoughts, memories or comparisons.
The silence returned. The silence was quite suffocating, both for the men who had been waiting to launch the attack on the Rumanian lines and for the men who were to make that attack.
This silence was like the mute, turbid, primeval sea… How joyful, how splendid, to fight in a battle that would decide the fate of your motherland. How appalling, how terrifying, to stand up and face death, to run towards death rather than away from it. How terrible to die young… You want to stay alive. There is nothing stronger in the world than the desire to preserve a young life, a life that has lived so little. This desire is stronger than any thought; it lies in the breath, in the nostrils, in the eyes, in the muscles, in the haemoglobin and its greed for oxygen. This desire is so vast that nothing can be compared to it; it cannot be measured… It's terrible. The moment before an attack is terrible.
Getmanov gave a loud, deep sigh. He looked in turn at Novikov, at the telephone and at the radio.
He was surprised at the expression on Novikov's face. During the last months he had seen it take on many different expressions – anger, worry, anxiety, gaiety, sullenness – but it had never looked anything like this.
One by one, the Rumanian batteries that hadn't yet been neutralized returned to life. From their emplacements in the rear, they were firing on the Russian front line. The powerful anti-aircraft guns were now being used against targets on the ground.