The Unwomanly Face of War Page 10

  We could never have enough uniforms: they’d give us a new one, and a couple of days later it was all bloody. My first wounded man was First Lieutenant Belov, my last was Sergei Petrovich Trofimov, sergeant of a mortar platoon. In 1970 he came to visit me, and I showed my daughters his wounded head, where he still had a big scar. Altogether I carried 481 wounded soldiers from under fire. One of the journalists counted them up: a whole infantry battalion…We hauled men two or three times our weight. When they’re wounded they’re still heavier. You carry him, his weapon, plus there’s his overcoat, boots. So you hoist some 180 pounds on your back and carry it. Unload it…Go for the next one, and again it’s 150 or 180 pounds…Five or six times in one attack. And you yourself weigh a hundred pounds—like a ballet dancer. It’s hard to believe now…I myself find it hard to believe…

  Vera Safronovna Davydova

  FOOT SOLDIER

  It was 1942…we were going on a mission. We crossed the front line and stopped by some cemetery. We knew the Germans were three miles away from us. It was during the night, and they kept sending up flares. With parachutes. These flares burn for a long time and light up everything far around. The platoon commander brought me to the edge of the cemetery, showed me where the flares were fired from, where the bushes were that the Germans might appear from. I’m not afraid of dead people, even as a child I wasn’t afraid of cemeteries, but I was twenty-two, I was standing guard for the first time…In those two hours my hair turned gray…It was my first gray hair, I discovered a whole streak in the morning. I stood and looked at those bushes, they rustled and moved, I thought the Germans were coming from them…And something else…Some monsters…And I was alone…

  Is it a woman’s job to stand guard by a cemetery at night? Men took it all more simply, they were already prepared for the thought that they had to stand guard, had to shoot…But for us in any case it was unexpected. Or to make a twenty-mile march. With combat gear. In hot weather. Horses dropped dead…

  Lola Akhmetova

  FOOT SOLDIER, RIFLEMAN

  You ask what’s the most frightening thing in war? You expect me…I know what you expect…You think I’ll say the most frightening thing in war is death. To die.

  Am I right? I know your kind…Your journalist’s tricks…Ha-ha-ha…Why aren’t you laughing? Eh?

  But I’ll say something else…For me the most terrible thing in war was—wearing men’s underpants. That was frightening. And for me it was somehow…I can’t find the…Well, first of all, it’s very ugly…You’re at war, you’re preparing to die for the Motherland, and you’re wearing men’s underpants. Generally, you look ridiculous. Absurd. Men’s underpants were long then. Wide. Made of sateen. There were ten girls in our dugout, all wearing men’s underpants. Oh, my God! Winter and summer. For four years.

  We crossed the Soviet border…As our commissar used to say at political sessions, we were finishing the beast off in his own den. Near the first Polish village we got a change of clothes: new uniforms and…And! And! And! For the first time they issued us women’s underpants and brassieres. For the first time in the whole war. Ha-ha-ha…Well, of course…We saw normal women’s underwear…

  Why aren’t you laughing? You’re crying…Why?

  Nina Vladimirovna Kovelenova

  SERGEANT MAJOR, MEDICAL ASSISTANT IN AN INFANTRY COMPANY

  They wouldn’t send me to the front…I was too young, just barely sixteen. But they did accept a woman we knew, a paramedic. She was very upset and wept, because she had a little son. I went to the recruiting office: “Take me instead of her…” Mama didn’t want me to go: “Nina, no, how old are you? Maybe the war will be over soon.” Mama is mama.

  The soldiers used to save things for me, one a dry crust, another a piece of sugar. They looked out for me. I didn’t know we had a Katyusha rocket launcher under cover behind us. It started shooting. It shoots, there’s thunder all around, everything’s on fire…And I was so shocked, I was so frightened by this thunder and fire, that I fell into a puddle and lost my forage cap. The soldiers laughed: “What’s wrong, Ninochka? What’s wrong, dear girl?”

  Hand-to-hand combat…What do I remember? I remember crunching…Once hand-to-hand combat begins, there’s immediately this crunching noise: the breaking of cartilage, of human bones. Animal cries…When there was an attack, I’d walk along with the fighters, well, just slightly behind, virtually next to them. It all happened before my eyes…Men stabbing each other. Finishing each other off. Breaking bones. Sticking a bayonet in the mouth, in the eye…In the heart, in the stomach…And this…How to describe it? I’m too weak…Too weak to describe it…In short, women don’t know such men, they don’t see such men at home. Neither women nor children. It’s frightful to think of…

  After the war I went home to Tula. I used to scream during the night. Mama and my sister sat with me at night. I’d wake up from my own screaming…

  Nina Alexeevna Semyonova

  PRIVATE, RADIO OPERATOR

  We came to Stalingrad. There was deadly combat going on there. It was the most deadly place…The water and the earth were red…We had to cross from one bank of the Volga to the other. Nobody wanted to listen to us: “What? Girls? Who the hell needs you here? We need riflemen and machine gunners, not radio operators.” And there were lots of us, eighty in all. Toward evening the older girls were taken, but another girl and I were left behind. We were small. Hadn’t grown up yet. They wanted to leave us in the reserve, but I set up such a howl…

  In my first battle the officers kept pushing me off the breastwork, because I stuck my head up to see everything. There was some sort of curiosity, childish curiosity…Naïveté! The commander shouts: “Private Semyonova! Private Semyonova, you’re out of your mind! Fuck it all…You’ll be killed!” I couldn’t understand that: how could I be killed, if I’d only just arrived at the front? I didn’t know yet how ordinary and indiscriminate death is. You can’t plead or argue with it.

  Old trucks kept bringing people’s militias. Old men and young boys. They were given two grenades and sent into the battle without a rifle. They were supposed to find themselves a rifle in battle. After the battle there was nobody to bandage…They had all been killed…

  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Rabchaeva

  PRIVATE, MEDICAL ASSISTANT

  I went through the whole war from beginning to end…

  When I was hauling my first wounded man, my legs nearly gave way under me. I was hauling him and whispering: “Only let him not die…Only let him not die…” I was bandaging him and weeping, saying something gentle to him. And the commander passed by. He yelled at me, even used some dirty language…

  Why did he yell at you?

  I shouldn’t have pitied him, shouldn’t have wept like that. I’d just wear myself out, and there were many wounded.

  We drove along, dead soldiers lay there, cropped heads, green as potatoes from the sun…They were scattered like potatoes…As they ran, so they lay on the plowed field…Like potatoes…

  Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva

  PRIVATE, NURSE-AIDE

  I can’t tell you where it was…In what place…Once there were two hundred wounded men in a shed, and I was alone. The wounded were brought straight from the battlefield, lots of them. It was in some village…Well, I don’t remember, so many years have gone by…I remember I didn’t sleep or sit down for four days. Each of them cried out: “Nurse…dear nurse…help me, dear girl!” I ran from one to another, and once I stumbled and collapsed, and instantly fell asleep. I was awakened by shouting. Our commander, a young lieutenant, also wounded, raised himself a little on his healthy side and shouted: “Quiet! I order you to be quiet!” He realized that I was exhausted, and everybody was in pain and calling to me: “Nurse…dear nurse…” I leaped up and ran—I don’t know where, why. And then, for the first time since I got to the front, I wept…

  And so…You never know your own heart. In winter some captive German soldiers were led past our unit. They walked along all f
rozen, with torn blankets on their heads, holes burnt in their overcoats. It was so cold that birds dropped in flight. The birds froze. A soldier was marching in that column…A young boy…There were tears frozen on his face…And I was taking bread to the mess in a wheelbarrow. He couldn’t take his eyes off that wheelbarrow; he didn’t see me, only the wheelbarrow. Bread…Bread…I broke a piece off a loaf and gave it to him. He took it…Took it and didn’t believe it…He didn’t believe it!

  I was happy…I was happy that I wasn’t able to hate. I was astonished at myself then…

  * * *

  *1 The daughter of a Russian officer, Nadezhda Durova (1783–1866) disguised herself as a man and served in the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars, for which she was much decorated. Her memoirs, entitled The Cavalry Maiden, were published in 1836.

  *2 The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named for the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany, was a nonaggression pact signed in August 1939. It was broken by the German invasion of eastern Poland in June 1941.

  *3 NKVD is the abbreviation for People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, a police agency that by the 1930s had become a vast internal security force, responsible for running the Gulag, among other things. The Cheka was the early secret political police force of the Bolsheviks.

  *4 The Russian Civil War (1917–1922) was fought between various pro- and antirevolutionary factions, loosely known as the Reds and the Whites.

  *5 Messerschmitts, German fighter aircraft.

  *6 Larissa Reisner (1895–1926) was a pro-Bolshevik Russian journalist and, after the revolution, a political commissar.

  *7 Factories in the Soviet Union offered “patronage” to schools and orphanages, helping to train young people, sending them to summer camps, and so on.

  *8 Semyon Budenny (1883–1973) was a Russian cavalry officer during World War I, became the leader of the Red Cavalry during the Civil War, served in various government positions, and was a close ally of Stalin’s. He was one of the first Marshals of the Soviet Union, the highest Soviet military rank.

  *9 A major battle took place in July-August 1943 at a salient (“bulge”) around the city of Kursk, ending in a decisive Russian victory.

  *10 The Russo-Japanese War was fought between February 1904 and September 1905 over conflicting territorial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea, and ended with Russian defeat.

  *11 The Russo-Finnish War, also known as the Winter War, was fought between the Soviet Union and Finland from November 1939 to March 1940, following a Soviet invasion of Finland to “reclaim” extensive border territory around Leningrad.

  *12 The siege of Leningrad by the German army began in September 1941 and ended in January 1944, after 872 days, with a toll of some 1.5 million lives of Russian soldiers and civilians.

  *13 Russians often use “uncle” and “aunt” as terms of endearment, with no reference to family relations.

  *14 The Steppe Front was a new formation, formed by the Soviet army on territory near the Ukrainian border after the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943.

  I’m on my way to Moscow…What I know about Nina Yakovlevna Vishnevskaya at the moment takes up only a few lines in my notebook: at seventeen she left for the front, went through the war as a medical assistant in the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Tank Brigade of the 5th Army. Took part in the famous tank engagement near Prokhorovka, a confrontation between a total, on both sides—Soviet and German—of 1,200 tanks and self-propelled guns. It was one of the biggest tank battles in world history.

  Her address was furnished to me by the schoolboys of Borisovo, who had gathered a lot of material for their museum about the 32nd Tank Brigade, which had liberated their town. Ordinarily the medical assistants in tank units were men, but here was a girl. I prepared to go at once…

  I had already begun to think about how to choose among dozens of addresses. At first I took notes from everybody I met. They learned about me through the grapevine; they phoned each other. They invited me to their reunions, or simply to one of their homes for tea and cakes. I began to receive letters from all over the country; my address was also passed around. They wrote, “You’re one of us, you’re a frontline girl, too.” I soon realized that it was impossible to write it all down; some other principle of search and selection was needed. What would it be? Having sorted the available addresses, I came up with a formula: to try to record women of various military professions. We all see life through our occupations, through our place in life or the events we participate in. It could be supposed that a nurse saw one war, a baker another, a paratrooper a third, a pilot a fourth, the commander of a submachine-gun platoon a fifth…Each of these women had her own radius of visibility, so to speak. One had an operating table: “I saw so many cut-off arms and legs…It was even hard to believe that somewhere whole men existed. It seemed they were all either wounded or dead…” (A. Demchenko, sergeant major, nurse). Another had the pots and pans of a field kitchen: “Sometimes after a battle there was no one left to eat…I’d cook a whole pot of soup, a pot of kasha, and there’d be no one to give it to…” (I. Zinina, private, cook); a third a pilot’s cockpit: “Our camp was in the forest. I came back from a mission and decided to go to the forest; it was already summer, the strawberries were ripe. I walked down the path and saw a dead German lying there…Already black…I was so frightened. I’d been in the war for a year and had never seen dead people. Up there it’s a different matter…When you fly you have one thought: to find your target, bomb it, and come back. We didn’t see dead people. We didn’t have this fear…” (A. Bondareva, lieutenant of the guards, senior pilot). And for a partisan fighter, war to this day is associated with the smell of a burning campfire: “We did everything on the campfire: baked bread and cooked food; we put jackets and felt boots near the remaining coals to dry. During the night we warmed ourselves…” (E. Vysotskaya).

  But I wasn’t left alone with my thoughts for long. The attendant brought tea. The people in my compartment began to introduce themselves noisily and cheerfully. On the table the traditional bottle of Moskovskaya appeared, some homemade snacks, and—as usual with us—a heart-to-heart conversation began. About our family secrets and politics, about love and hate, about leaders and neighbors.

  I understood long ago that we are a people of roads and conversations…

  I also told them who I was going to and why. Two of my fellow travelers fought—one went as far as Berlin as commander of a sapper battalion, the other spent three years as a partisan in the Belorussian forests. We began talking about the war at once.

  Later I noted down our conversation as it was preserved in my memory:

  —

  —We’re a vanishing tribe. Mammoths! We belong to the generation that believed there is something more in a life than human life. There is the Motherland and the great Idea. Well, and also Stalin. Why lie? You can’t leave a word out of a song, as they say.

  —There’s that, of course…We had a brave girl in our unit…She used to go to the railroad to plant explosives. Before the war her whole family had been arrested: the father, the mother, and two older brothers. She had lived with her aunt, her mother’s sister. She sought out the partisans from the first days of the war. We could see in our unit that she was asking for trouble…She wanted to prove…Everybody got decorated, but she not once. They wouldn’t give her a medal, because her parents were enemies of the people. Just before our army came, her leg was blown off. I visited her in the hospital…She wept…“But now,” she said, “everybody will trust me.” She was a beautiful girl…

  —When some fool from the personnel department sent me two girls who were commanders of sapper platoons, I sent them back at once. They were terribly upset. They wanted to go to the front line and make mining passages.

  —Why did you send them back?

  —For many reasons. First, I had enough good sergeants who could do what these girls had been sent for. Second, I thought there was no need for a woman to go to the front line. To
that hellfire. There were enough men. I also knew that I’d have to dig them a separate dugout, to surround their commanders’ activities with a heap of different girly things. A lot of bother.

  —So, in your opinion, women are out of place in war?

  —We know from history that Russian women in all times didn’t only send their husbands, brothers, sons to the war, and grieve and wait for them. Princess Yaroslavna already climbed onto the rampart and poured melted pitch on the heads of the enemy.*1 But we men had a sense of guilt about girls making war, and it has stayed with me…I remember, we were retreating. It was autumn, it rained around the clock, day and night. There was a dead girl lying by the road…She had a long braid, and she was all covered with mud…

  —There’s that, of course…When I heard that our nurses, being surrounded, shot at the enemy, defending the wounded soldiers, because they were helpless as children, I could understand that. But now picture this: two women crawl into no-man’s-land with a sniper rifle to do some killing. Well, yes…I can’t help feeling that that was a kind of “hunting,” after all…I myself shot people…But I’m a man…

  —But they defended their native land. They saved the Fatherland…

  —There’s that, of course…I’d go on a scouting mission with such a woman, but I wouldn’t marry her…No…We’re used to thinking of women as mothers and brides. The beautiful lady, finally.*2 My younger brother told me how he and some other boys shot stones from slingshots at captive Germans when they were led through our town. Our mother saw it and boxed his ear. And these Germans were greenhorns, the last scraps Hitler had recruited. My brother was seven years old, but he remembered mother looking at them and weeping: “May your mothers be struck blind: how could they let you go to war!” War is a man’s business. What, don’t you have enough men to write about?