In the Gentle Valleys

On the undulant plateau before Stalingrad, the Germans and the Russians waged one of the great battles of history. Upwards of 1,000,000 men, many thousands of guns and tanks, many hundreds of planes met in and over the gentle valleys and the rolling hillocks of the steppes northwest and southwest of the city.

In each sector it was a battle for one hillock, one valley, then another and another. These separate battles made, in their whole, a struggle which may rank with Tours, Waterloo and the First Battle of the Marne among the conflicts that shape the world. The battle for Stalingrad will certainly stand among the great feats of arms; the very fact that the Germans' Marshal Fedor von Bock was able to keep 500,000 or more men in battle, so far from their main bases, at the fighting end of fantastically inadequate transport routes, placed him with the masters of war.

Last week the writers of the communiques and dispatches did not know how the battle was going. Neither, probably, did the soldiers and commanders who fought in the dust-brown hell outside the city. A few more days of death and agony on the field would determine the fate of Stalingrad and the Volga.

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