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Semion Timoshenko, the peasant from Bessarabia, had seldom seen a better stand of wheat. It was high and golden, ripening in the sun, nodding with the blue cornflowers in the summer winds which swept the valley of the Don. The grain, his peasant eyes told him, was almost ready for harvest when the Germans came.
The tanks rolled through the grain. Their treads crushed the food of Russia into the Russian earth. Or, where the Russian scorchers were quick and thorough—and they were usually both—fire curled through the grain. The print of the tanks was harsh and clear in the stubble, and the smell of the burning was bitter in the nostrils of the retreating armies. Many Russians fell in the fields, and the hot, black ash which should soon have been bread pressed into their mouths, their wounds, their souls.
The peasant from Bessarabia did not forget.
Face of the Earth. Semion Timoshenko was a peasant before he became a soldier, Marshal of the Red Army and the defender of the Don. The chances are that his parents could read nothing but the skies and fields, the winds and weathers of Bessarabia when he was born, 47 years ago, in the village of Furmanka. He was 20, long out of the village school and hardened to the farm, when the last Tsar's armies drafted him in 1915. He was a hardening young trooper in the cavalry when he went over with his regiment to the Red Revolution in 1917.
Now only four other soldiers—and Stalin-rank with him or above him in the Red Army scale. Between the cap of an officer and the starred, medaled tunic of a Marshal, his face is still a peasant's face. It is heavy, broad and brooding, cruel and kind, the face of Soviet Russia and the Red Army. In his face, in the whole person and history of Timoshenko, are the qualities by which Soviet Russia must now live or die.
Hate is the Banner. It was to the peasant face and soul of Timoshenko and all Russia that Stalin, the man with the superlative Russian face, spoke last May Day: "They [Red soldiers, sailors and airmen] have learned to hate the German fascist invaders. They know it is impossible to conquer the enemy without learning to hate him with all their souls' fibers."
It was of that face and soul, common to soldier and worker alike, that a Moscow trade-union secretary, Mme. Nikolaeva, spoke when she cried to women in the mills: "All work in the rear is being done under the banner of hatred."
It is a defensive hatred, and the Red Army is a defensive army, which has never yet been outstandingly successful on the offensive and is now learning whether defense can be enough. It is to that hatred that Moscow's communiqués appeal, forever stressing the killing of Germans, the destruction of German tanks, guns, planes. These communiqués sometimes seem to be deliberately deceptive, recounting the deaths of a few hundred Germans in battalion engagements, when great fronts are falling. But for the Russians it is not deception; it is the feeding of the Russian conviction which a Moscow writer expressed to Correspondent-Author Maurice Hindus: "The loss of territory is never much in Russian wars, so long as our armies make it a graveyard for German soldiers."