The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 5: The Correspondent

Naval Infantry soldiers disembarked from the ferry and applied violence to the civilians, kicking, shoving, and even clubbing them with their rifle butts.

Their actions weren't malicious; Jillian could even read regret in the marines' faces. But their job was to clear a corridor off of the wharf, and the civilians were interfering with that job.

Despondent soldiers followed the Naval Infantry troopers to a staging area that had been formed around Barmaley Fountain, one of Stalingrad's most famous landmarks. The sculpted centerpiece depicted six children happily holding hands and performing a circular dance around a crocodile.

Somehow the fountain had survived the German bombing. But it was black with smoke, and it was difficult to imagine the tired and terrified children crowded on the dock holding hands and dancing like those depicted by the sculpture.

Red Army officials were busy organizing the arriving conscripts into companies while a political officer, armed with a megaphone, tried to inspire them.

He assured the newly arrived conscripts that the city of Stalingrad would never fall. He insisted that the Soviet Government was committed to stopping the Germans here, and that they would provide the common soldier with anything and everything required to halt the German invaders and drive them back. He insisted that there was no greater honor for a Russian than dying in combat.

Jillian wondered if that last part should have been included in the young commissar's speech. Dying in combat, it seemed to her, didn't much help the cause. It would be better to kill the enemy than to simply die, would it not?

And, judging by the depressed expressions of the conscripts, it appeared they had already accepted that since death would be their ultimate fate, why suffer longer than necessary? Why not hurry it along? The fatalism of Russian culture was, it appeared, suddenly asserting itself. These recruits didn't look ready to fight so much as they looked ready to commit suicide. And the Political Officer's speech was simply encouraging them to kill themselves on German bayonets or machineguns.

Jillian already knew that Petr's battalion had been sent to help defend the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, so she left the staging area and set out to the northwest.

As she pushed deeper into the city, she realized that the fires weren't as bad as they had appeared to be from the river's edge. From there, it seemed as if the entire metropolis was one huge bonfire. But now Jillian saw that the smoke was caused by thousands of little fires, not one big one.

Stalingrad's factories and tenement housing was built not of wood, but of brick. As a result there wasn't much for the incendiary bombs to actually burn. Once the flames had consumed the window sills and rooftops, they became starved of fuel and eventually went out.

Some of the trees in the city parks were still burning and the occasional wooden shed or outbuilding would suddenly burst into flame, but a vast majority of Stalingrad was smashed and blackened by soot, but no longer actually on fire.

The other thing that surprised Jillian was that the streets, as well as the rubble that choked those streets, was a pale shade of pink. She had expected everything to be black and gray and as morbid as the smoky iron cross. Instead it was the same color as her childhood dollhouse.

Later she would learn that it was because of all the bricks. When the bombs struck a brick building, they shattered the red clay into a fine dust. That dust slowly settled over the city, turning everything pink.

Jillian avoided the parks. Whatever trees remained were aflame, but more importantly, the scorched fields and paths were open ground that would have made her a tempting target for German strafing runs.