Free A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman

‘noble bone’.

SEVEN
The Withdrawal before Moscow
    Stalin did not react to the growing disaster on the Bryansk Front until 5 October. That was the day when a fighter patrol of Red Army aviation spotted a German armoured column, some twelve miles long, advancing on Yukhno. The Stavka , the Red Army general staff headquarters in Moscow, refused to accept this report and a subsequent confirmation. Beria even wanted to arrest the air force officer concerned and accuse him of spreading defeatism, but Stalin finally woke up to the threat to the capital.
    There was only one thing which could slow the German advance on Moscow at this stage, and that was the rasputitsa , the season of mud before winter set in for the duration. After a short freeze and snowfall on 6 October, a thaw rapidly followed the next morning. Grossman described the effect.
    I don’t think anyone has ever seen such terrible mud. There’s rain, snow, hailstones, a liquid, bottomless swamp, black pastry mixed by thousands and thousands of boots, wheels, caterpillars. And everyone is happy once again. The Germans must get stuck in our hellish autumn, both in the sky and on the ground. At any rate, we have managed to escape from the sack. Tomorrow we will get on to the Tula highway.
    A village near Tula. Brick houses. Night. Snow and rain. Everyone is frozen, especially those sitting in the Noah’s Ark: Regimental Commissar Konstantinov, a teacher, and Baru, correspondent of Stalinsky sokol . 1 Lysov, Troyanovsky and I are warmer: we are travelling in the Emka. The vehicles stop in the middle of a dark village street. Petlyura, who is a real magician at procuring milk and apples and digging slit trenches, disappears into the night. But just foronce he fails. We enter an izba , which is cold and dark, like a grave. In the izba , a seventy-year-old woman is sitting amid the cold and darkness. She is singing songs. She welcomes us merrily and eagerly, like a young person, without grunting or whining, although, apparently, she has all the reasons to complain about her fate.
    Her daughter, a factory worker, brought her to this village to stay with her son and went back to Moscow. The son, who is the chairman of the collective farm here, couldn’t allow her to stay in his house because his wife wouldn’t let him. This wife has also forbidden her husband to help his mother, and the old woman is living off what kind people give her. Sometimes the son secretly brings her a little millet or potatoes. The younger son, Vanya, had been working at a plant in Tula. He volunteered. He was fighting near Smolensk, [but] she hasn’t had any letters from him for a month. Vanya is her favourite.
    She tells us the whole story in a kindly, calm voice, without any bitterness, resentment, pain or reproach. With a tsarina-like generosity, she gives all that she has to our frozen horde: a dozen logs which would have lasted her for a week, a handful of salt, leaving not a single grain for herself, half a bucket of potatoes. She keeps only a dozen, along with her pillow, a sack stuffed with straw, and her torn blanket. She brings a kerosene lamp. When our drivers want to pour some petrol into it, she does not allow this. ‘You will need this petrol yourselves.’ And she brings a tiny bottle in which she keeps her sacred reserve of kerosene and pours it into the lamp.
    Having graced us with warmth, food, light and soft beds, she retires to the cold part of the izba . She sits down there and begins singing.
    I went to her and said: ‘Babushka, are you going to sleep here in the darkness, in the cold, on bare wood?’ She just waved me off with her hand. ‘How do you live here alone? Do you have to sleep in the cold and dark here every night?’
    ‘Ah well, I sit in the dark, sing songs, or tell stories to myself.’ She boiled a cast-iron pot of potatoes, we ate and went to sleep, and she started singing to us in a hoarse voice, like an old man’s.
    ‘Oh, I used to be so healthy,