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I’ve been looking for a copy of the WWII documentary The World At War, particularly the episode on Stalingrad. In the meantime I watched the 2-disc documentary The World in Conflict: 1931-1945. It’s a collection of newreels and archival footage, mostly US Army propaganda—useful for historians, I suppose, but dry and unenlightening, with very little mention of Stalingrad.

The History Channel series Hitler’s War is more compelling: it contains interviews with survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad, both Russian Red Army and German Sixth Army. A German soldier recounts how early on, when they were winning, they saw Russian women and children gathered around a dead horse, cutting it up for meat. They regarded the besieged, starving Russians with disgust and contempt. A year later there were reports of cannibalism among the Germans, who were forced to hold on when they were surrounded. Only the very badly injured were airlifted out—one of every three planes was shot down—and one pilot recalls how the wounded were covered in newspaper in a vain attempt to keep their insides in.

Back in Germany Hitler was insisting that Stalingrad was a victory.

Afterwards I read Gert Ledig’s The Stalin Front (translated by Michael Hofmann), a harrowing novel of carnage and death, so intense it reads like a long hallucination.

The Lance-Corporal couldn’t turn in his grave, because he didn’t have one. Some three versts from Podrova, forty versts south of Leningrad, he had been caught in a salvo of rockets, been thrown up in the air, and with severed hands and head dangling, been impaled on the skeletal branches of what once had been a tree.

The NCO, who was writhing on the ground with a piece of shrapnel in his belly, had no idea what was keeping his machine-gunner. It didn’t occur to him to look up. He had his hands full with himself.

“His hands full with himself”. The breezy, almost droll way the author describes a man trying to keep his guts from spilling out magnifies the horror of his situation. The horror is so extreme that it’s absurd: the brain protects itself by resorting to black humor.

Then in the middle of bloody chaos, a quiet moment:The grass under her feet felt soft like cottonwool. The meadow was insanely green.

Later I will recover from this savagery by reading Jane Austen. (Nothing can be as good as Persuasion, but I hope Emma will be close.) Relationships are also a kind of warfare, but the protagonists usually get to keep their intestines.