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They Are the Army. The love of land, the hatred of trespassers was strong and deep in the Russian soldier long before political commissars appeared to share and fan it, to shape and use it as a weapon. The tunes that Tsar Alexander's soldiers sang at Borodino, when they fought Napoleon, rang over the Red Army's lines last week. In War and Peace Leo Tolstoy's Andrey Bolkonsky said to Pierre: "Victory never can be, and never has been, the outcome of position, numbers and character of arms."
"Of what, then?" Pierre asked.
Tolstoy's Andrey pointed to another soldier and replied: "Of the feeling in me, and in him, and in every soldier."
British and U.S. correspondents, trying to seize in words the feeling of the Red soldier and the Red Army, often sense a profound simplicity, a directness which is likely to seem spurious to western readers. But the feeling is there:
≫ Private Sergei Sazonovich Sviridov, a farm boy from Roga, wept on his hospital bed and cried to the New York Times's C. L. Sulzberger: "I didn't ever get a chance to join in the real attack. I was wounded. If my feet would permit. . . ." His hospital record said: "Feet blown off by shell. . . ."
≫ Sergeant Shapovalov is (or was) an anti-tank rifleman. "What is a tank?" said he. "I can see it, but it can't see me. My rifle is small and hard to hit, but a tank is big. All you have to do is aim at it."
≫ Red officers and privates had one of their frequent after-battle conferences swopping knowledge and correcting mistakes beside a campfire. There was Private Vyazmin, excitedly babbling to his officers instruction on how to improve trench-mortar fire; and Sergeant Smirnov, that joker among scouts, telling how he distracted and captured a German motorcyclist by tying a bunch of foliage to a long cord, dragging the foliage across the road. . . .
≫ Tikhonov, a scout, was supposed to bring his prisoners in alive, for questioning. But his prisoners always had their heads and bodies bashed and were dead or dying. Scout Tikhonov wept, and wrung his hands, and promised to do better, and never did. He said that he had seen the Germans rape and kill a girl in the barn at home.
≫ Lieut. Maslov commanded a British Valentine (16-ton) tank. He had trouble pronouncing Valentine, but liked the tank. He had a snub nose, tow hair and knew English. He talked of Dickens, Chaucer and Sterne by the hour. He and others in his tank regiment gave Russian Correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg the best measure yet recorded of Allied aid to the U.S.S.R.: "Were our front only 100 miles long, we could say we have enough British tanks." The Russian front is 2,000 miles long.*