Today, we would say that Malaparte, an Italian journalist, was ’embedded’ with the invading German forces as they attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

8 August 1941, Kachikovska:      …Until one arrives on the scene of the struggle there is nothing to indicate the extent of the slaughter or savagery of the fighting. The dead lie partly on the slopes of the valley, partly in the fields of sunflowers or in the corn, partly in the slit-trenches which the Russians dug along the extreme edge of the plain. Where the Soviet resistance has been fiercest and most prolonged they lie in groups, close to one another, sometimes on top of one another. Elsewhere they lie in twos and threes behind clumps of shrubs, face downwards, still with their rifles clutched in their hands, or on their backs, with arms outspread, surprised by death in that attitude of complete surrender which characterizes the man who has been shot through the chest…. I sit down in the shade of a tree and look about me. The Soviet detachment that fought here was not large, possibly less than a battalion. It resisted to the last, it sacrificed itself in order to cover the retreat of the main body. A battalion of desperate men, abandoned to their fate. No one has had time to ‘clean up’ the battlefield. Everything is still as it was a half an hour ago. This, then, is the first opportunity I have had of studying the essential, secret nature of the Soviet Army…. No one in this unit fled, no one, apart from a few badly wounded men, has surrendered. It was therefore a good unit. The officers exercised complete control over their men. They remained, every one of them, at their posts. And even as I begin to look for the factors on which the discipline of this unit and its technical efficiency depended, I note with surprise this blend of the military and the political, the remarkable balance that has been struck between such a variety of elements — social, political, military, human — this extraordinary alliance between military discipline and the Communist Party…

I get up and walk slowly across the battlefield. Presently my foot stumbles across an electric battery… a German soldier points to something in the branches of a tree. I look up: it is a loudspeaker. Hanging down the trunk of the tree is an electric wire. We follow the course of the wire through the grass. A few yards from the tree, in a hole in the ground, we come upon the crumpled body of a Russian soldier, covering which his chest a large metal box — a radiogram. Scattered all around in the grass are fragments of gramophone records.

… During the fighting, the words of Stalin, magnified to gigantic proportion by the loudspeaker, rained down upon the men kneeling in holes behind the tripods of their machine-guns, din in the ears of the soldiers lying amid the shrubs, of the wounded writhing in agony on the ground. There is something diabolical, and at the same time terribly naive, about these soldiers who fight to the death, spurred on by Stalin’s speeches ont the Soviet Constitution, about these soldiers who never surrender; about these dead, scattered all around me; about the final gestures, the stubborn, violent gestures of these men who died so terribly lonely a death on this battlefield, amid the deafening roar of the cannon and the ceaseless braying of the loudspeaker. … The wind rustles the leaves of the tree, sways the branches, many of which are warped and mutilated by the blast from the shells, ruffles the grass where the corpses lie. The blood-stained uniforms, the papers that litter the ground, stir in the breeze. As though by a miracle, the faces of the dead are suddenly illuminated. It is the light of the setting sun that revives those poor faces. The chatter of machine gun fire is borne on the wind from the village of Shumi. In the distance, the cannon hammers against the green wall of a wood like a battering-ram. A forlorn neighing of horses ascends from the depths of the valley. From time to time the sound of a rifle-shot dies away among the folds of the purple evening, as among the folds of an immense red flag.

Before Mogilev on the Dniester, 18 July 1943:          It may be that the battle for Ukraine, which has been raging for several days along the entire Dniester sector, within sight of the Stalin Line, is the battle that will decide the fate of the “Gates of Asia.” It may be that the public, hypnotized by the famous names of the cities — Moscow, Leningrad, Smolensk — that constitute the objectives of the German advance in the northern and central sectors of the vast battlefield, have not yet grasped the fact that the issue is really being decided on the southern front, that the decisive theatre of the war is here, in Ukraine, where the two armies are fighting not only for possession of the Soviet granary but for control of the roads that lead to the industrial and mineral basins of the Dnieper and the Don, to the oil of Baku, to Asia.

…I have often asked myself in recent days why the Bolsheviks did not set fire to the crops before retreating. Such a method of agricultural sabotage would have been far simpler and infinitely quicker. The corn is ripe, the harvest is imminent, a match would suffice to start a tremendous fire blazing all over the Ukraine. But the peasants would undoubtedly have replied to such an attempt to destroy the harvest by rising in revolt. And an insurrection in the Ukraine would have favored the Germans’ plans to such an extent that the Bolsheviks simply dared not provoke it.

Soroki, 4 August 1941:          Behold the Dniester! Two days ago we left the mechanized division to which we were attached and moved further south to join a column of assault-troops. This war is profoundly different from that of which I have been a witness in recent weeks. It is no longer a war of machines, a clash of great formations of heavy armoured tanks. It is, instead, an old-fashioned war of infantry battalions, of gun-batteries drawn by horses. The odour of horses’ dung is welcome to me after the constant smell of oil and petrol. The voices of the soldiers sound in my ears like the voices of a humanity that has finally rediscovered itself.

… The Germans declare that the Russians have shown themselves to be the best soldiers of all those whom they have hitherto encountered in this war. Better than the Poles, better even than the British. They never surrender. They fight to the last man, with calm, single-minded tenacity.