Retreat From Rostov Part One

By Paul Hughes

This book is Part One of Three Parts that collectively tell the story of thirty-four days in late 1941 which saw armies of Adolf Hitler defeated for the first time, at Rostov in the North Caucasus.

Its characters—with the obvious exceptions of Stalin, Hitler, Timoshenko, von Kleist, and others equally well known to fame—are fictional. But its historical matters, military movements, communiqués, and the like, are authentic.

Originally published in 1943 as a nearly 600-page war novel by Random House, it was dedicated by Paul Hughes “in worshipful humility, to the Russian people, who, without drama and without complaint, are shedding their blood so copiously in defense of their land.”

Within one week the advance printing of 15,000 books was sold out, and Random House immediately ordered the next printing. Critics hailed it as one of the best war stories to be written while World War II raged. Three generations later this amazing treasure trove of memorable characters drawn from the fertile mind of Paul Hughes continues to fascinate those who read it.

It is an amazing array of multi-faceted word pictures of male and female characters that the reader will not soon forget. It was soap opera on a grand scale before soaps took over day-time television.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UCS PRESS
• Release date: Jul 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9780943247359

Book preview

Here is how a feature in TIME magazine described Retreat From Rostov:

The novel was a Russian rodeo of heroes,

heroines, Nazi villains, Don Cossacks, foreign

correspondents, soldiers, civilians, enough snow

to bury an army, enough melodrama to burn

out every fuse in Hollywood.

A bit of World War II trivia:

When future United States President George H. W. Bush was aboard the submarine USS Finback, which had rescued the young Bush on September 2, 1944 after his Avenger torpedo bomber went down near the island of Chichi Jima, he wrote the following in a letter to his parents:

I have been doing quite a bit of reading lately.

Retreat From Rostov; and Dos Passo’s Number One

plus Captain from Connecticut and now The Robe.

NOTE: The full letter was published in War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars by Andrew Carroll; Simon & Schuster, 2002.

This book is Part One of Three Parts that collectively tell the story of thirty-four days in late 1941 which saw armies of Adolf Hitler defeated for the first time, at Rostov in the North Caucasus. Its characters—with the obvious exceptions of Stalin, Hitler, Timoshenko, von Kleist, and others equally well known to fame—are fictional. But its historical matters, military movements, communiqués, and the like, are authentic.

Originally published in 1943 as a nearly 600-page war novel by Random House, it was dedicated by Paul Hughes in worshipful humility, to the Russian people, who, without drama and without complaint, are shedding their blood so copiously in defense of their land.

Within one week the advance printing of 15,000 books was sold out, and Random House immediately ordered the next printing. Critics hailed it as one of the best war stories to be written while World War II raged. Three generations later this amazing treasure trove of memorable characters drawn from the fertile mind of Paul Hughes continues to fascinate those who read it.

This three-part presentation of

Retreat From Rostov

is dedicated to the memories of

Paul Hughes

(May 1, 1916-January 20, 1979)

and his beloved wife,

Marjorie Hughes

(May 22, 1920 -December 11, 2009)

who was a great support to her husband

during research and writing of the

original Random House edition.

****

Retreat From Rostov

Part One

November 4 to November 13, 1941

Paul Hughes

Published by UCS PRESS at Smashwords

UCS PRESS is an imprint of MarJim Books

PO Box 13025

Tucson, AZ 85732-3025

Copyright 2011 by Paul M. Hughes and his sisters Jo Nell Boyle and Amy Jane Hinerman who are, collectively, as heirs of Paul and Marjorie Hughes, the sole owners of all rights to this book.

Cover design by Marty Dobkins

ISBN: 978-0-943247-35-9

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.

Table of Contents

Tuesday, November 4, 1941

Wednesday, November 5

Thursday, November 6

Friday, November 7

Saturday, November 8

Sunday, November 9

Monday, November 10

Tuesday, November 11

Wednesday, November 12

Thursday, November 13

****

Tuesday, November 4, 1941

Colonel Adrian Pfeiffer of the German infantry treasured his own traits, finding sharp pleasure in an awareness of himself and his abilities. He was proud of his thin and soldierly bearing, contrasting himself as frequently as possible with fellow officers who had degenerated into obese middle age. At forty-five, and with iron-gray fingers of hair streaking his head, he barked an order, looked down his disapproving nose, or marched the length of a post with the same brisk sense of efficiency which had been his at twenty-five.

He was conscious, too, of the superior intellectual order to which he belonged. He knew that while his eyes took in a Russian sunset and felt the panorama lift him, transform him into disembodied joy, the dullard troops saw only the earth and its commonness. This distinction between himself and the remainder of the race he had long realized; once he had regretted it, longing to bring some companion, or the whole species, into the realm which wrapped him in a peculiar ecstasy—today he found it more pleasant to share the abundant scene with no one, to hoard it, to isolate himself and his singularity.

But surpassing all Colonel Pfeiffer’s gifts—in his own estimation—was his scope, his immediate grasp of even the most obscure and confusing situations. He had noted this power on repeated occasions at staff meetings. When bedlam threatened, it was Adrian Pfeiffer who chose the one word which would encompass all, whittled it to a superb keenness, and flung it accurately into the pandemonium, breaking at once the riot of diverging ideas. While others rolled futilely in a mire of notions and dreams and phrases, it was Adrian Pfeiffer who collected them all and found the common denominator.

He reveled now, at Taganrog, in this appraisal of the soul of Adrian Pfeiffer. He thought of how well he was demonstrating the very individuality which he claimed; for now, as vain and bewildered militarists rattled their brains seeking to comprehend the German offensive into Russia—as historians, pens poised, stood breathless and scratched in corners for words which would sound less puerile—as common soldiers went about their business of eating and fighting and sought no answer because they did not know there was a question—Colonel Pfeiffer told himself and whoever would listen that he knew, he understood.

At times he even felt a sort of sympathy for the type of mind which could observe the greatest military campaign in the history of the world without feeling its immensity in the core of his emotions. To think of it whipped him into delicious, almost unbearable poetry. As the campaign had progressed, he had been at once participant and spectator, his artist half standing aside to enjoy the symphonic glory inherent in the historic struggle. When the mood was upon him, as it was this moment, he found it impossible to remain quiet. He strode violently across the room, ejaculating floods of words to release the sensations of greatness inside him. You do not feel it, Gruska, he said. It does not bite into your heart or gnaw at your vitals; you have no soul.

Indeed, no, said Gruska Palyavitch, who by now knew a little German.

You are like them all,’’ Colonel Pfeiffer told her, though I chose you from the lot, thinking you were distinct. You see a tree or two and have no least vision of the forest."

A tree? A forest? Gruska asked, her attention lapsing.

The war, I mean. He tried to maintain his calm while enlightening her. You watch a few soldiers go by and you do not absorb the magnitude of the effort. Do you know the front is at times two thousand miles long? Do you know ten million men and more are in action? There has never been anything like it.

For answer, Gruska sighed slightly, always an indication of intense boredom, and deliberately folded her hands in her lap.

Oh, you see the one face of it, I don’t deny that, the colonel granted. "You and the others can glimpse the individual soldier and know what the war means to him and his life. But an army is an organism, Gruska. It is a collective existence, composed of millions of private existences, as a human body is made up of millions of cells. All your cells move as one when your brain commands. The army operates the same way, but all you can see is its cells.

But the army has just as clear an existence of its own as any animal; it moves when the head orders; it operates with cohesion and purpose. And now there are two such animals, each two thousand miles long, battling each other in the ultimate of all wars. Does the conception leave you entirely untouched?

I know, Gruska said with her Polish accent; two great animals. Yes, I see them struggling.

Gruska, an ample peasant body which culminated and focused in two black eyes under flowing black hair, smiled back at him with her professional smile. He gripped her hand lightly a moment, then released it and pointed toward a map on the wall of the room.

You see, Gruska, he cried, only you and I understand it, only you and I can hear the music of it! It swells to a height of passion, subsides and swells again, each peak greater than the last. Look back at them—the Dnieper, the coast of the Black Sea, Odessa and Kiev, MariupoI, Taganrog—and now we build to another exciting climax: Rostov, Rostov-on-the-Don!

Yes, yes, Gruska said without spirit, next comes Rostov. I hear the music.

Thunderous music, Gruska! Since June the animal has been trampling eastward, and the earth shakes wherever his millions of feet touch it. Hear it thud, Gruska! Ah, what godlike days are these, though so few see them!

Gruska Palyavitch again smiled her practiced smile. She shifted herself in her chair, ruffled her hair with slim fingers, looked attentive. I see them, Gruska said, her interest seeming to grow. The gods howl as never before!

Pfeiffer paused, struck by the words, and then raucously exploded into laughter. The howling gods! he shouted, walking across the room to the chair which Gruska occupied. The howling gods! You have hit it, Gruska; you have hit it! Again, as though expressing by the gesture the delicacy and completeness of his affection, he touched her hand, pressed it a curt moment, released it gently. He resumed his pacing, muttering amusedly, The howling gods. Yes, that’s it!

His face resumed its usual rigidity. It is too much to consider, he said. "The mind only gropes for its meaning. The animal is too great to be conceived. It is a fluid animal, too, Gruska; it leaps about unbelievably. Sometimes it is in one piece, sometimes it is in many, all moving in varying paths.

Up and down, backward and forward, it moves as one will; indeed, the army is the tangible expression of one will.

Heil Hitler! Gruska interjected.

Colonel Pfeiffer raised his right arm lazily in a purely figurative salute. Heil Hitler, he said softly. Does it grip you? he asked, seductively, as though her reply, if affirmative, would give him unreckonable pleasure. Does the symbolism strike you—the one creature with eight million cells, which is the German army, directed by a heart and head, which are Adolf Hitler?

Before Gruska could reply, he felt the first reaction from his fevered interest; it was his descent from the plane of imagination to sodden reality. It stung deeply for him to know that he had been baring his most prized thoughts before an audience of one army prostitute. In an instant, wretchedness tormented him.

Leave me, he said quietly, but with an obvious effort at self-control. She paused, misconstruing his temperament. Leave me! he shouted. Leave me, you Polish scum! Go back among the women!

Gruska Palyavitch, baffled, left the hut which was the colonel’s quarters at Taganrog and walked, dragging her feet as though they were a burden, to the partly burned hotel which was headquarters for the women of her unit. The colonel stood at a window and watched her approach the building and slowly blend into the shadows near it. As he observed her progress, the calm which had left him instantaneously returned quite as rapidly, for she, her walk, the building reminded him of another of his characteristics, and his mind caressed it fervently.

He was a realist, Adrian Pfeiffer told himself; he had divested himself of ornament and scruple, and he was thus enabled without prejudice to inspect, weigh and decide things as they were. In Gruska was living evidence of his bland appraisal of life and humanity, for he had made a contribution toward solving the sex dilemma of the German army. He smiled.

It was really very simple. Armies consisted principally of young men, for young men were capable of stronger hatred, greater fury, longer resistance. But young men were also embarrassingly in need of young females. Denied the recurrent consolations of women, they tended to develop an alarming neutrality concerning the outcome of the war, to waver between listlessness and rebelliousness.

The colonel saw the main objective clearly: to build a magnificent army. The details were of no importance, and the chips that fell in the building had no effect on the result. If women are required to maintain the spirit of the army, he reasoned, then the army must be given women. But at this juncture the smooth course of his logic had been interrupted. Give it, he had been forced to ask, what women?

Now, standing at the window, he remembered contentedly how well the needed item had been supplied. But there was no gainsaying that there had been a question.

One of the Fuehrer’s objectives was to assimilate the protected races into the New Order. Consequently, some effort had to be made to treat even the defeated with a certain show of politeness. It was notorious that the conquest of a city, followed by the wholesale rape of its women, did not, as a combination, constitute a friendly gesture. When a garrison of occupation had to live among the foreign civilians, it might be, for the protection of the troops, best to discover another source of supply, preventing mass uprisings.

But surely—the mind of the colonel ticked off the points mechanically—surely the Fatherland itself was not expected to furnish the vast numbers of women needed to keep the soldiery bedded. There were, of course, German women, long skilled in the trade, who would have danced in glee at the prospect of enlisting. Still, the Reich might not approve such mass degradation of Teuton womanhood. The colonel—and the German army—had reached the only possible conclusion: all circumstances considered, the natural solution was the women of the previously occupied nations.

Adrian Pfeiffer remembered speaking once in behalf of the proposition; he had reviewed it, step by step, so neatly and thoroughly that he seemed only to have thought of it this moment, as he stood at the window watching Gruska Palyavitch walk away. He had told them, as had others, that a regular corps of women, organized and traveling just behind the army, would serve the purpose admirably.

And there was no shame, no outcry, either. The occupied and controlled regions had been canvassed for women who wanted to join the corps. There had been no coercion, and only women of previous professional experience were permitted to be inducted. There had been persuasion in some instances, he recalled, and perhaps in others sharp words; but the amenities had been scrupulously observed, and, to the colonel’s pride, all had gone uneventfully.

All except the bargain at Warsaw which had got him Gruska Palyavitch.

It was in October, 1939, a few days after the stubborn Polish capital had fallen, that he had entered it with the occupying troops. His task was to enroll those women who saw the strength of the German cause and yearned to follow forever in its wake. It was a task, he knew, which would have been shunned by many substantial officers; but Adrian Pfeiffer drew an intense, almost spiritual, enjoyment from it.

Warsaw women who came only to offer their comforts to the army found themselves questioned at length concerning their knowledge of Polish music, the cathedrals of the nation, their sensual occupation and its origin, and numberless scattered topics which seemed irrelevant to them but piqued the prying curiosity of the officer and, when discussed and answered, gave him an immense satisfaction. No harlot was too monstrous and hardened to be asked where she was born, what kind of woman her mother was, and what her appearance was as a little girl. Adrian Pfeiffer squeezed a perverse enjoyment from their halting replies.

He was sitting behind a desk in headquarters of his unit when an aide brought in Gruska Palyavitch. Pfeiffer prepared his mind to receive the usual sensations.

Dear lady, he said in Polish, arranging a chair for her. We are entirely at your service. Please demand of us.

Gruska Palyavitch accepted the proffered chair, adjusted herself in it, and did not speak. Even then, the colonel saw that her eyes were corners of night. She was, he calculated, twenty, and had known the world a long time. He extended a smile to her.

Your name?

Gruska Palyavitch.

Age?

Nineteen.

Did you wish to join the corps?

What? Gruska asked blankly.

The corps, he explained. I suppose you wish to become a member of the women’s corps.

"No, I don’t think so. I wanted to ask about something, about another matter."

Oh, very well, Pfeiffer said, radiating a comfortable assurance Ask.

It is about Stanislaw, she said. I wonder if you could tell me where he is.

At this point, the colonel should have directed her to the proper authorities, for there was certainly some agency which would tell her about her missing person—or, at least, tell her officially that nothing was known. And he was forming words of dismissal on his tongue when she crossed her legs and revealed that they were good.

About whom? he inquired.

Stanislaw, Gruska repeated. Stanislaw Kern. He went away with the army, but now the war is over and I cannot find him.

A relation?

He was my—he was to have been my husband, Gruska explained. He told me before he went away.

You’re a pretty thing, aren’t you? he said in clipped words, on impulse. Stand up and show yourself.

With some hesitancy, but awed by the colonel’s official nature, Gruska rose, turned slowly, and sat down again, apparently not being at all ashamed of the body she had to demonstrate. Very good, the colonel told her. He sat down, tapped repeatedly on his palm with a pencil, and rubbed his forehead.

Where was this Stanislaw stationed? he asked.

I don’t know.

What branch of the service was he in?

Gruska was pacified.

Is it a bargain, then? he asked. I will try to locate your corporal, and you will come with me. Is that a bargain?

Gruska said it was a bargain, and she went with him.

Looking out that window in Taganrog, he concluded that it had been a good bargain, one which he hoped to continue as long as possible. Corporal Kern had been extremely difficult to find, partially because no effort had been made to find him. There had originally been some threat of embarrassment, for the Fuehrer would certainly have looked askance on a liaison between an officer of high rank and a woman of Warsaw.

But Gruska was technically a member of the women’s corps; it was only in an unofficial sense that she walked to the hut of Colonel Pfeiffer. It was understood, however, that Gruska, to a private soldier, was a marked woman and decidedly not available. The colonel congratulated himself on this arrangement, and noted with relish