When he reported to the regional military committee, he had added a year to his age and two days later had found himself sitting on a hard bench with other boys in fatigues, lean, with cropped heads, listening to a noncommissioned officer's very military language, blunt but clear. He was talking about "tank phobia," explaining that there was no need to be afraid of tanks and that running away as they approached was a sure way to be had. You had to be smart. And the sergeant had even drawn a tank on the old blackboard, showing its vulnerable points: the caterpillar tracks, the fuel tank…

"In a nutshell: if you're scared of tanks, you've no place in the ranks," the sergeant concluded, highly pleased with his own wit.

Two months later, in November, lying in a frozen trench, with his head raised slightly above the clods of frozen earth, Ivan was watching a line of tanks emerging from the transparent forest and slowly forming up. Beside him lay his rifle – it was still the ancient model invented by Mossin, a captain in the czarist army – and two bottles of explosive liquid. For the whole of their section, as they clung to this scrap of frozen earth, there were only seven antitank grenades.

Had it been possible to stand up, they could have seen the towers of the Kremlin with the aid of field glasses, through the cold fog to the rear of them.

"We're an hour's drive from Moscow," a soldier had said the previous day.

"Comrade Stalin's in Moscow," the officer replied. " Moscow will not fall."

Stalin!

And suddenly the temperature rose. For him, for their Country, they were ready to take on the tanks with their bare hands! For Stalin's sake it all made sense: the snow-filled trenches, their own greatcoats, which would soon stiffen forever under the gray sky, and the officer's harsh cry as he hurled himself beneath the deafening clatter of the tank tracks, his grenade in his hand, with the pin removed.