World War: The Sour Smell of Death

After World War I, when the last whiff of smoke was safely blown away, thousands of eager trippers toured the battle fields of France. Last week some of them and their children got a vicarious look at a still-pungent battlefield of World War II —through the eyes of the first U.S. and British correspondents allowed by the Russians to visit the front.

Gist of the correspondents’ reports on the Smolensk front—and inference of the Russians’ having permitted the tour at all —was that the central front had settled down and the Reds neither planned nor expected a real offensive any time soon in that area.

Most vivid impressions of the field, on which the Russians had driven the Germans back about 15 miles in three weeks’ fighting, were those of Cyrus L. Sulzberger, correspondent of the New York Times and nephew of its Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Wrote Correspondent Sulzberger:

“This village, which is called Ushakovo, has lost one of its three dimensions. Now it has only length and breadth; there are no vertical elements save a couple of gateposts and a small wooden obelisk on a mass grave. . . .

“Three dud shells lie in what must have been a garden. A dud bomb is buried in the roadside mud. The front half of an armored car is parked in the shadow of what was once a house. A bent, bullet-riddled fragment of what had been a tank lies near a dirt-caked helmet. The helmet looks like a tortoise’s back: it smells sour.

“Most of this area has been reconquered, and the slightly sour smell of death hovers over it. … Fields have been chewed by tractor and tank treads and pitted by shellbursts. . . .

“Acre after acre of sheaved flax awaits gathering. Winter wheat is beginning to sprout. Ruined rye crops are brown with rot. . . . Cavalry and artillery horses graze quietly. Crows and magpies peck at the blood-soaked earth. . . .

“A machine-gun post has been dug in the shape of a swastika. It is filled with used and unused clips of bullets, with tattered pieces of cloth, some lined in fleece, and with puddles of water still dyed with the unmistakable stain of blood. . . .

“Behind is … testimony to the power of artillery: hole upon hole, fragment upon fragment, a worn shred torn from the Völkischer Beobachter, the soggy yellow bones of a hand, helmets, old shoes, pieces of steel, an unexploded stick of bombs, unidentifiable fragments.

“Upon the mound, fenced in by evergreens and topped by a silver star, is a grave—a common grave for those who died in this place in the struggle against German Fascism, July 29-Sept. 5, 1941. . . .

“To the southwest, a rutted road winds through a field of rye, decayed in the autumn rain. There, like monster footprints, are the holes dug by the Russian shells that followed the retreating Germans, blasting hurriedly laid coils of barbed wire, ferreting out artillery positions, mangling innumerable machines and men. . . .

“In a potato patch stretch nets of trip wires leading from guns and mines. The slope is honeycombed with tunnels, dugouts, telephone centers and munitions dumps. Dozen upon dozen of mortar shells still stand there, packed in boxes. . . . Here, beside piles of stretchers, is a great plot of turned-up earth, 400 yards square, where the Germans had swiftly buried their dead as they withdrew. A Russian anti-tank gun, wreathed in boughs, now stands there.”