Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege by Alexander Werth Page B

captain with the patch over one eye smiled a little grimly. ‘The doctors say they’ll save my eye,’ he said. As on nearly all Leningrad faces, the captain’s had two hard little lines on each side of the mouth.
    We looked through the telescope sights and rangefinders at the German positions and were struck by the fact that everything seemed completely deserted: there was no trace of any living being. ‘That’s because of our snipers,’ somebody said. ‘They never even put their heads out if they can help it. This has been the greatest front for sniping. But it has become a disappointing trade; they’ve become so infernally careful now. They’ve got stuff about ‘Scharfschützen’ written up all over the place.’ ‘For the rest, it’s not so difficult now,’ said the captain. ‘We bomb them every day so that keeps them fairly quiet most of the time, and when we answer their shelling, they soon shut up. They stay in their rat-holes now; in the past they would run around quite openly, gathering in hay, Katyusha had a crack at them on one occasion. It made a nice hay-crop of dead fritzes! They use their six-barrel mortars against us – nasty stuff – but nothing like our Katyusha. Oh, Lord, when Katyusha starts her song, it makes us all dance about up here, with concussion and excitement! And Katyusha has a nice long range – get right to Uritsk!’ I noticed a large bell – formerly a church bell – on top of the tower stair and marked ‘Chemical alarm.’ ‘You don’t think they’ll use gas, do you?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said the captain, ‘not now, but there was a time when we couldn’t be sure of anything.’
    We were about to leave when things began to happen. A white cloud – a smoke screen – suddenly rose around the Pishmash building on the other side of the water. ‘Aha,’ said the captain, ‘I bet you they’ll start some nonsense in a minute or two. They want to hide their gun-flashes. I had better get busy.’ Then the German guns suddenly went off with one or two gunflashes faintly visible to the side of the smoke-screen. The Russians got ready to answer. Somewhere high up, a German shell whined, harmlessly, like a mosquito. Then, looking back over the panorama of Leningrad, dominated by the large brown dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, we saw it land about a mile away, right inside the city. A brown cloud of smoke – or was it dust? – rose from among the houses. ‘Fontanka way,’ somebody remarked. The major, captain and the soldiers were now busy with their optical instruments, and the captain was shouting instructions’ into a telephone to the neighbouring batteries. And these batteries – whose whereabouts could just be guessed, so well were they camouflaged – began to fire. It was pleasantly exciting to see the gunflashes, to hear the loud reports of the shells going off towards the German lines, and a second or two later to see little clouds of smoke rise from the other side of the little gulf. A few shells landed in the water, raising fountains of spray. ‘Fifty metres out,’ the captain with the black patch and the bandaged head cried into the telephone. ‘Fifty metres out!’ Again the batteries fired, and this time all the shells could clearly be seen landing and exploding on the other shore, inside the German positions. The Germans were firing back, and we saw two shells again land a mile away, inside Leningrad. It was odd to think that this seemingly harmless spectacle – as harmless as a game of tennis – might mean death to ten, twenty, a hundred people, if either side was lucky. Then a moment later we observed how the Germans were extending their smoke-screen further west. Would the firing die down as a result, or grow in intensity? It might be either. Actually, it died down, and soon stopped completely. ‘There’s no accounting for what they’ll do,’ said the captain. ‘I think this was just a little nuisance shelling, and when they saw