Slaughter on the Plains

Moscow (318 pp.) -Theodor Plievier -Doubleday ($3.95).

That D-day on June 22, 1941 was like so many other German D-days: a complete pushover. Lying at the edge of the woods with his infantry platoon only 20 yards from the Bug River, Corporal Gnotke saw the small Russian-held village on the other side pulverized in a matter of minutes by German planes and guns. When the infantry attacked, there was no resistance, only dazed old people and the smell of burning flesh. As a newly arrived lieutenant had reflected the night before: "The Fuehrer can work wonders."

Before German Novelist Theodor Plievier brings Moscow to a close, the "wonder" touch has passed from Hitler to Stalin, and the scope and horror of modern war has been described with a combination of pitiless detail and powerful sweep by the best novelist who has written on World War II. Plievier richly earned that rating with Stalingrad (TIME, Nov. i, 1948), and while Moscow is not so dramatic as his earlier story, it is the kind of book that leaves a residue of flaming images in a reader's mind. The second volume of a trilogy, it is to be followed by Berlin, already published in Germany.

Both Sides of Battle. The Russians were worse than surprised. In the border units one man in three had a rifle; the few machine guns were vintage World War I. The Russian tanks actually outfought the Germans, then quickly ran out of gas and became sitting ducks for German artillerymen. For the Germans it was Poland and France all over again on a massive scale. Objectives were taken like clockwork, and Moscow beckoned. For the Russians, even the stunning defeats were not so crushing as Stalin's failure to do something about it. Where were his air "falcons" as the Germans strafed at will? And why were army officers and party functionaries packing wives and food, and taking off? For the faithful there was another shock: instead of resisting the invader to the last breath, the peasants were actually behaving as though the Germans had liberated them.

The description of war, from a private's fatigue to a general's annoyance, is one of Author Plievier's finest talents. Another is his easy way with mass confusion, civilian and military, his ability to control vast combat areas without losing sight of the basic factors, from supply to morale. He shifts from the German side to the Russian as if he had seen the entire battle from a slow, low-flying plane, then describes the movements and feelings of individual soldiers as if he himself had jumped off for both sides. In Moscow, the Russian confusion is described with authority. For Plievier, an old-line Communist, had been in Russia himself since 1933, served Stalin throughout the war with his pen and on the radio.

The Captain's Question. Plievier turned his back on Communism in 1947 and has since lived in Western Germany. What he has to say in Moscow is of considerable importance for history and for now. Had Hitler treated the Russian people with consideration instead of a diet of mass murder, he might easily have touched off a civil war that could have brought an end to Stalinism. The Russians were as quick to question their loyalty to their own Fuehrer as the Germans, once the going got rough; but of even more momentous interest is Plievier's account of party members' conduct, their quickness to forget slogans and preachments when defeat seemed possible.

Moscow, no novel in the ordinary sense of plot and character, is a stunning documentary of victory, defeat, brutality and horror. For Plievier, the great enemies are ruthless power and man's inhumanity to man. And so they are. But for today, the most provocative question & answer in Moscow are those of Captain Uralov, "the most faithful of Soviet citizens," when he is rounded up by the well-fed, suspicious NKVD. Wondering about Stalin and the terrors of the regime, the winner of both the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star asks -himself, of course: "Who [has] heaped defeats on the nation and covered its body with wounds and lice? There is a Russian proverb that it is the head of the fish that stinks."

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