In Europe

remained upright amid the battle. It is hung with handkerchiefs and rags, like a spirit tree in the Orient. Every year the fields here still spew forth grenades and gun barrels, bullets and buckles, skulls and bones.
    In the display cases of the Historical Museum in Volgograd one finds a small selection of the personal belongings found on German corpses: wedding rings, a fountain pen, a watch, a tiny saint's figure, a few letters. ‘Yesterday again, as so often, a comrade blown to pieces by a direct hit,’ Bertold D. wrote to Frau Elisabeth Sturm in Worms on 24 December, 1942.‘Now we are sitting together, celebrating Christmas Eve in Stalingrad, while the Russians outside continue to shoot wildly. We sing Christmas songs, accompanied by a comrade on the accordion. Then everyone goes to his corner and thinks of home.’ Konrad Konsuk wrote: ‘My darling, don't fear for me. I am doing well. This evening we were given a hundred grams of bread and a quarter-litre of marmalade.’ An unknown soldier: ‘I desperately wish you were with me. How badly only you, my dearest, as the only one in the world, can know.’
    Very interesting is the difference in tone of the Russian letters collected by the British military historian Antony Beevor.
    ‘Hello my dear Pavlina,’ a soldier wrote to his wife, ‘I am still alive and in good health … The war is hard. Every soldier has a simple task: to destroy as many Krauts as possible, and to drive the rest back to the West.’ A lieutenant: ‘Hello, Shura! I send kisses to our two little ones,Slavik and Lidusya. I am in good health. I was wounded twice, but they are only scratches and so I can still aim my cannon well … In these days of heavy fighting I avenge my beloved city of Smensk, but at night I sit in the cellar with two blond children on my lap. They remind me of Slavik and Lida.’ It was the last letter he wrote.
    The city outside bears almost no trace of the war, except for the two ruins that have been left standing deliberately. The House of Pavlov is a plain, four-storey building where a little group of Soviet soldiers, led by Sergeant Yakov Pavlov, held up under siege for almost two months. It is now little more than a well maintained state monument. The only other real memorial is a little further on: the remains of an enormous mill, full of breaches and bullet holes, still the way it was in summer 1943, empty and desolate amid the tall grass.
    ‘Hello, Mariya,’ soldier Kolya wrote. ‘I have been fighting here for three months to defend our lovely [deleted by censor] … Only the most stubborn SSers remain. They have withdrawn into bunkers and are shooting from there. And now I am going to blow up one of those bunkers. Greetings, Kolya.’
    On the morning of Sunday, 10 January, the last great Soviet attack began: Operation Koltso (Ring). For almost a full hour the German lines were pounded by some 7,000 field cannons, mortars and Katyushas. Then the Red Army closed ranks and advanced, the red banners out in front, a T-34 tank every fifty to a hundred metres. The German divisions did not have a chance. Their ammunition and fuel were sorely depleted, the soldiers could hardly stand upright. Until the very last moment, wounded men at Pitomnik airfield were trying to fight their way on board one of the planes leaving for Germany. Overloaded Junkers, sometimes too heavy to gain enough altitude, were fired on by the Soviets and crashed. An enormous Focke-Wulf Kondor, filled to the gunnels with wounded men, took off too slowly, flipped onto its back and exploded on the ground.
    Hundreds of wounded men were left to their fate in the snow. One survivor spoke later of ‘an endless wailing of the wounded and dying’.
    Paulus surrendered on 31 January, 1943. The agitprop newsreel cameras recorded the whole thing. The emaciated German soldiers camestumbling out of Stalingrad's cellars and bunkers. The occasional Russian shouted ‘
Kameraden, Krieg kaput!
’, but most of them only shouted ‘
Faschist! Komm! Komm
!’ Then the Germans were led off in long, tattered columns.
    So came the end for all those enthusiastic soldiers who, in that warm, distant August less than five months earlier, had travelled across the steppes, eaten helmetfuls of pears and stolen honey by the spoonful. Along with Paulus, close to 90,000 Germans were taken prisoner. By the time spring came almost half of them had died of starvation and hardship. Some 180,000 German soldiers remained