SEPTEMBER 10, 1942 – 11:45 P.M

Time is a fluid entity. It ebbs and flows. It slips through fingers and slides through the hourglass. You can kill it, or try to turn it back. Many try to save it or spare some of it. We can waste it, watch it fly, and never have enough of it.

But in the end it is just an illusion, a concept created by man to count his hours and days spent in our earthly pursuits. It is a marker from which we can look back or look forward, identifying what once was and what is yet to be. It is invisible and intangible, impossible to explain, but it grounds us so we know where we are in the universe and without it there is no past and no future, only now, the moment, and we are nothing but specks floating through eternity.

I have no sense of time. I have a pocket watch, despite its impracticality during warfare, but this has never seemed to help me. In my mind, the loss of food, water, sleep, and heat were nothing in comparison to the loss of time, which made the drive into Stalingrad unbearable.

Private Nikita sat beside me, contemplating the coming assault, while Durasov and Belinski shared rags and oil to clean their rifles before me. Sokolov sat the edge of the compartment, his legs swaying back and forth as they dangled about in the breeze. Colonel Lev Voronin, a barrel-chested man from Moscow, sat beside the driver in the front, while General Dimitri Badanov and Captain Elias Nevski sat together beside Nikita, drawing out maps of the city in preparation for the assault.

We had sent the children to watch the roads ahead in case of a German counter-attack. Rumor has it that the Germans are planning an assault into the city, but my squad and I believe this to be what it is…a rumor.

But General Badanov did not.

After arranging several pieces of Intel his scouts had collected since the beginning of the assault, Badanov managed to find which section in the German line was the weakest; Army Group Black had been on the line since the very start of the campaign, taking mortar and machine gun fire, and suffering from poorly executed charges and foolish military leaders taking the best men off the line to go fight in other battles. So Badanov decided that this would be the best point of attack, rounding up an entire company of shock troopers and loading them all onto trucks despite the negative criticism from his fellow generals. He took Colonel Lev Voronin as his second-in-command and Nevski as Colonel Voronin's subordinate in the field.

Nevski was the toughest and most ruthless man in the entire regiment. He believed a platoon of his shock troopers would be enough for the assault, but was ignored by Badanov, who was swept with the greed that came from the thought that, if the assault was a success, the rest of the German army would be severely flanked, would most likely break and route, and the battle of Stalingrad would have been won by the Soviets because of his "genius" planning. He suspected that after his victory, he would be held in high esteem by Stalin and be given high military honors. Nevski, on the other hand, thought that revealing such a large force would be foolish, as the Germans would see this and have enough time to reinforce their positions. So, after much reasoning, Nevski convinced Colonel Voronin to change the time of the assault from eight in the morning to midnight.

So now we sat, a blanket of stars unveiled above us. We had passed the ruined edges of city—which had received the majority of the artillery fire from the Germans, despite the fact that their armies had already moved deep into the city—leaving Stalingrad far behind only a couple of moments ago. Driving up an upward slope, I found myself resting my rifle on my side so that I did not slide down the bench.

Nikita drew out a cigarette, resting his own rifle aside and offering his pack to me. "Hey, Andrei, would you like a cig?"

"No thank you, comrade." I replied. "Tobacco fuses your bodily fluids, makes it harder to fight. Same with alcohol…it messes you up. I wouldn't want to make things too easy for the fascists, would I?"

Belinski chuckled. "If we had more people with that kind of mindset in this army, comrade, the Germans wouldn't fear us." He leaned in at the sight of my confusion. "I read in a letter I pocketed from a dead German that we are, quote, "No ordinary troopers, fighting on the whim of blood lust and to satisfy their cannibalistic natures. I fear I will not only be killed in this battle, but stripped of my heart, liver, skin, and limbs to be served as the Soviet's next meals. May the Führer show mercy and save me from this hellhole." I believe that if we didn't fight with crazed expressions, we'd have a harder time fighting them, as they would think us normal human beings."

"I'm going to take a guess and say that you're overthinking it, comrade."

He laughed and Nikita slipped his pack of cigarettes back into his breast pocket, taking his rifle and resting it on his lap.

Suddenly, a squadron of jets soared up overhead and, to all of our amazement, began to take fire. We started to count the ones that were destroyed, watching as they plummeted down to Earth. After every two or so, I would lose become distracted by something else and lose count, so my numbers were always ten times smaller than my comrades'. I did, however, manage to deduce what types of planes they were, which the majority of my squad could not. They were IL-2 Sturmoviks, good and feisty planes.

Too bad they had to be used for war.

After a few moments of intense fire mirrored by the stars and the clouds that were hung from the nighttime sky, the fighters broke off and retreated back to the city.

The Germans began to open fire on us, with both mortars and machine guns. Amidst the chaos, our truck swerved to the left, coming to a complete stop. Nevski jumped from his seat, unlocking the chain hooked around the gate and opening it up. Slinging his submachine gun over his shoulder, he waved his arms in the air and screamed.

"Get out of the truck! Get out of the truck! Push your way up the hill and send death to the German invader!"

We gave a chorused shout, "Ura!" and charged out from the compartment, speeding through a hail of bullets and explosions. The Germans had fixed positions built into the side of the hill, barbed wire strung up on pillboxes fitted behind a row of makeshift trenches. Mortars, artillery, and anti-tank weapons fired down onto them, assisted by tremendous machine gun fire. Despite this, we pushed forward, taking heavy casualties as we advanced. I distinctively remember firing my rifle at a German that climbed up out of the trench to throw a grenade. I watched as the bullet slammed into his temple and blew out a chunk of his face, and the grenade he had primed dropped down behind him and exploded at the feet of three of his comrades.

We shoved ourselves into the trenches, bayonets fixed and grenades primed, and took the lives of several German soldiers. Elias took a bayonet he had brought from his home in Moscow and began his slaughter of the helpless pig soldiers, who ran in fright of his terrifying weapon. I ordered my men to assault one of the pill-boxes, ordering Belinski and Nikita to head around its flank while Durasov and I primed our grenades.

The Germans climbed up out of the pillbox at the sight of our assault, raising their weapons and covering their escape. I brought one of them down with a pop from my rifle, while Durasov tossed his grenade, killing the rest upon impact. After pulling the bodies into a pile and stripping them of anything of value, we headed back down the hill.

I watched, helpless, as Voronin ordered the bodies and fortifications burned while weapons and ammo were scavenged. We took seventeen Germans prisoner, but only nine were kept alive to be interrogated.

With all of this done and the prisoners were all loaded onto the remaining trucks, Nevski ordered us onto what little space was left on the trucks, to return to the city and help the fighting there. Later, I would learn that half of the Germans taken prisoner were later executed by firing squad, while the rest were set loose and hunted down by the war dogs.

It is these little facts that I have decided to write to you, diary, for war is hell. But that is not the half of it, for war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War can make you a man; war can make you dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime streets. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a fighter jet, the illumination rounds, and the orange plume of a grenade exploding. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say what I say right now is fiction.

SEPTEMBER 21, 1942 – 6:00 P.M

General Badanov has left us today for a meeting in Moscow.

He has given Elias, who has given me, strict orders to hold an important inter-section that homes both a coal mine and two hotels—which we have been using extensively as over watch positions on the Germans, who foolishly try to make their way down the road. We let them do this…let them set up positions inside the houses and bars that stand on either sides of the two interjecting roads. Then we wait until the night after and slit all of their throats as they sleep, leaving them for the next patrol to find dead on the floor.

It is strange what one man can do to another; what a German man can do to a Slavic man. But that's all this war is, a mass genocide of both races.

Colonel Voronin came to my squad with two men carrying weapons and ammo, as well as other supplies. We, sitting there in a dusty corner atop the roof of a three story apartment complex, took the provisions and continued to watch the road. I do not like this guerrilla warfare. I believe in a fair fight—not to the extremes of standing in a line of thirty-some men with fixed bayonets and muskets—but more than ambushing the enemy, popping off a few shots, and then running away only to come back later and do it all over again. Voronin says that the Germans are focusing their attacks on the other side of town, but that they have also been sending armored patrols to our sector.

"Stay vigilante and keep alert, comrades." Voronin said. "Though the generals have lost interest in us, I think they'll be sending some tanks our way, so make sure you keep the guns and anti-tanks ready."

We all nod and Voronin leaves.

Belinski and Nikita begin to share a cigarette as Durasov takes out a pack of cards to play Preferans with Sokolov and I. We agree on playing three rounds, as the sun has begun to fade into distance, hiding behind the thick clouds hovering in the early autumn sky.

SEPTEMBER 22, 1942 – 6:00 A.M

I lost nearly fifty rubles in that card game.

I went to bed with a hot head and an empty wallet, waking up the next morning with a persistent headache.

Sokolov woke up with a burning hole in his pocket, winning over a hundred and fifty rubles between Durasov, Belinski, and I, and two clips of ammo from Nikita, who ran out of money quick into the game. Captain Nevski came up to our position and told me to take one of my men and man a machine gun nest made of a ruined car and barbed wire.

I decided to take Sokolov as revenge for winning the game, despite how bad a shot he was and how angry he was after I chose him. But that's what he gets for winning.

Over the past month or so, we've stocked up on stolen German weapons as our own begin to dwindle in supply. The MG-42, a German universal machine gun, has seemed to become the most common. We've used them to such extents that I have caught the sight of them more often than the standard SG-43 Goryunov sub-machine gun (the successor to the much older PN M1910 heavy machine gun. Personally, I could care less what weapons we use, so long as they get the job done right.

While the remainder of my squad stayed up on the roof, Sokolov and I made our ways to the nest, relieving fellow soldiers Antonov and Letlev, who had been manning the gun since we'd been deployed onto the intersection. They were both covered in soot and bleeding in several places, probably caused by the several attacks coordinated by the Germans. The pair was relieved to see us, wishing us luck and handing us their helmets, which they had filled with about a dozen belts of ammo. I took the helmets while Sokolov positioned the gun on the hood of the car, taking precise care to make sure the barb wire went over the barrel so that it didn't shoot it and send a ricochet back on them. Sokolov was smart like that, he was smart with weapons.

"Do you really believe the Germans will attack us, comrade?" he asked me.

I sighed. "It doesn't really matter what I believe, comrade. I'm not a German. I don't possess their way of thinking—their intellect. I dropped out of school when I was fifteen, so I have no gift for strategy. What about you? If you're that smart with weapons, you must be smart at something else besides card games."

"I'm good with numbers." Sokolov replied after a moment of thinking.

I sat down in the ditch behind the car and tried to relax. Sokolov, on the other hand, kept his eye on our task. He peered down the sights to the MG-42, watched the other end of the road, and kept checking our recon binoculars. I remained completely still, kicking my legs up onto the edge of the ditch and placing my helmet on my chest. Though I would prefer to be stationed high in the safety of the apartment complex's roof, I was determined to make the best out of my situation and act as if I was up there.

Later, Commissar Pavelonva, our company's political officer, came around and gave his weekly "morale" speech. This mainly consisted of descriptions on the weakness of the Germans, our own strength, how we cannot fail, how Stalin has given us this great honor and must fight to our last breath to see his wishes prevail, and that, by the end of this fight, there would be mountains upon mountains of dead German bodies lined up around the city gates. After this, he passed around packs of cigarettes and unloaded a truck's worth of ammo and supplies to aid the company in our fight. Afterward, he climbed up into the back of the truck and left, informing us that he had urgent business near the center of town. He also warned us that, "The Germans are all around. Keep your eyes peeled, comrades. I shall return."

And he was gone.

Belinski came down to our position and passed around a ration of rum, telling us not to tell Nevski about it, as he would probably shoot us all.

"Enjoy, comrades."

We covered him as he crossed the street and entered one of the buildings, leaving Sokolov and I alone in the crisp, cool weather of the early fall. I do not know how long, but we sat there for a long time, just waiting for something to happen. Even as the temperatures dropped as the sun began to set, we sat there, doing nothing until we were relieved by Nikita and Durasov.

Belinski always seemed to get out of the dangerous jobs, jobs that required work, or just, simply, any jobs in particular. That was what was strange about him, but that was what made him interesting. That is one of the few reasons why I call him "friend."

SEPTEMBER 30, 1942 – 12:00 P.M

An entire squad was slaughtered by a mortar strike today. Antonov, Letlev, Arseni, all of First Squad. Some of them were close friends of mine. I must remain head-strong; I cannot let the Germans get to me. I am scared. My family has fled from Stalingrad and I fear I will never see them again. We've been stuck on the roof of this building for too long now. Way too long now.

SEPTEMBER 31, 1942 – 3:45 P.M

Heard a loud scream this morning followed closely by a big explosion. I have pondered for hours to what it was, as it sounded neither male nor feminine. Nikita and I have made a list of suggestions to what it might have been.

Belinski thinks it was a little girl.

A couple of minutes ago, we were bypassed by an armored patrol. I counted twenty-one troops, three dogs, and four Tiger I tanks. Though my squad has begun to go over why they wished the patrol had spotted us; they wanted to fight, show the Germans that we were tough and not cowardly ambushers. Nevski came to us later, stating that those troopers were members of the Waffen-SS and we would probably have been slaughtered like pigs. Nice. I'm glad our commanding officer has complete and total confidence in our fighting power. I've known Nevski since the beginning of the war, but recently he's been coming off as a bit of an ass.

NOVEMBER 1, 1942 – 2:10 P.M

I was born in July 23, 1925 in Stalingrad, USSR. I'm a squad leader in the Red Army. Before this war I was a factory worker that was forced to work 12 hours a day along with others in collective factories. Stalin made it seem like it was a worker's paradise, while us the workers saw it as hell. We were fools to believe communism would work; now we suffer from our mistake.

I was a fool to volunteer in the armed forces.

If anyone should find this diary, remember me. Remember my story. Because I promise you, it is a story worth telling.

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