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a typical Russian hut, so sour-smelling that we almost reeled straight back out again. The walls are papered with old newspapers — against cockroaches, as we soon discovered. A table, a bench, a bed behind the stove and two pictures of saints are the only furnishings. The only metal objects are the stovepipe and the samovar. . Fedor, our host, is the archetypal Russian muzhik. His wife is unbelievably dirty and seems to be the source of all the unpleasant smells in the place. It’s difficult to tell the children’s ages, so it’s hard to say whether the blonde girl with red cheeks, who reminds me of a little piglet with her round body and dirty feet, is their daughter or grand-daughter. A small runny-nosed boy called Kolya completes the family. .

We don’t talk a lot. We sit at the table or lie on the floor, smoking and drinking tea. From time to time Fedor comes out from behind the stove and picks cigarette butts out of the herring tin that serves as an ashtray. If there’s nothing in it he takes a piece of newspaper, comes to the table, clicks his heels together and smiles, holding out the empty paper. Willynilly I then have to reach into my tobacco and give him a few strands, whereupon he makes a deep bow and retires behind the stove again.

The poverty of these people surpasses all our previous conceptions of the peasants’ and workers’ paradise. Fedor hasn’t seen tea or sugar for years, and tobacco and paraffin are luxuries. Sitting in the embers of the fire is a pot filled with potatoes and some sort of unidentifiable broth, on which the family live from day to day. They drink hot water out of the samovar in old tin cans. When I gave little Kolya a roll of boiled sweets the old woman grabbed it from him and put one in each can, adding hot water.

Life now began to be frightening as well as uncomfortable. On the very evening of his arrival in Rakhmysha, Hockenjos was sent to deal with the first of what was to be a long series of Soviet guerrilla attacks:

Darkness falls at four, and in the gloomy light of the paraffin lamp the hours are long. So we all go to bed at eight — the Russians climb onto the stove, and we bed down on straw. . At ten o’clock someone knocks on the door and shouts ‘Alarm! A field-ambulance is on fire on the road to Glad. Shots have been fired. Bicycle unit, go and investigate immediately!’

Arriving at the scene, the unit found the ambulance burned out and its driver badly injured. ‘We can’t find any tracks through the forest. A long-distance patrol? Partisans? By two in the morning we are back lying on our straw.’ Over the next five days three more trucks ran over mines.

When not picking up casualties, the Radfahrzug’s job was to patrol the gaps between German-held villages along the straggling front line. On the evening of 7 December, Hockenjos and his men were ordered to pick up reinforcements from a neighbouring battalion. In the pitch-black darkness and forty-one degrees of frost at six o’clock the following morning, they discovered that their lorry, despite having been kept running most of the night, would not start. Instead they set off on foot, the frost scorching lungs and icing up eyelashes and nostrils. At nine the sun rose out of the woods in a red haze, lighting up tiny ice crystals that hung suspended in the motionless air. At ten they reached a command post, by which time two men had already been disabled by frostbite. ‘In five hours’, wrote Hockenjos,

it will be dark again. We creep out and dive once more into no-man’s-land — a long row of dark figures in a bright aspen wood, clumsy in the knee-deep snow and a frighteningly good target against the white. We have neither snow-capes nor snow-shoes.

For a good hour we stumble through the tall, silent, snow-filled forest. Here and there shells have made little clearings amongst the spruce and pines. A larger clearing opens up, with a half-ruined cabin. We think we see movement so I set up a machine gun at the edge of the trees and send a group over. They find two shaggy horses, who have been feeding off the cabin’s thatched roof. They gallop away, manes and tails flying.

Further on the woods thinned out and the snow reached the men’s hips. They crossed the tracks of what they guessed were wolf and elk. From the south came the sound of heavy fighting, and they pressed themselves against the trees when Russian fighters flew overhead. At seven in the evening, four hours after the sun had set, they came to a road, a neat stack of corpses and a line of huts — the village of Gorneshno. ‘Schnapps, tea, and army bread. . Twenty of my men have frostbite, mostly of the worst degree. The feet of some have turned black, and they crawl to their quarters on hands and knees.’ The next morning Hockenjos was told that during the night a field kitchen had driven over a mine, leaving only one survivor. ‘We wait for our truck but it doesn’t come. Instead a patrol comes