Mr. Chmarsky’s gremlin was very active on this trip. Almost everything he laid out or planned did not come off. There was no chapter or committee of Voks in Stalingrad, consequently, when we arrived at the little wind-blown airport building, there was no one there to meet us, and Mr. Chmarsky had to get on the phone to call Stalingrad for a car. Meanwhile we went outside, and we saw a line of women selling watermelons and cantaloupes, and very good ones. We dripped watermelon juice down our shirt fronts for an hour and a half, until a car arrived, and since we used it quite a bit, and it had a certain individuality, we must describe this car. It was not a car but a bus. It was a bus designed to hold about twenty people, and it was a Model A Ford. When the Ford Company abandoned the Model A, the Russian government bought the machinery with which it had been made. Model A Fords were manufactured in the Soviet Union, both for light automobiles and for light trucks and busses, and this was one of them. It had springs, I suppose, but it couldn’t have had many or they would have been broken. There was no physical evidence of any springs at all. The driver who was assigned was a fine co-operative man, with an almost holy attitude toward automobiles. Later, when we sat alone with him in the bus, he would simply go over the list of cars that he loved.

“Buick,” he would say, “Cadillac, Lincoln, Pontiac, Studebaker,” and he would sigh deeply. These were the only English words he knew.

The road to Stalingrad was the roughest area in the whole country. It was miles to the city from the airport, and if we could have gone off the road it would have been comparatively easy and smooth riding. This so-called road was a series of chucks and holes and great deep gushes. It was unpaved, and the recent rains had translated part of the road into ponds. On the open steppe, which stretched away as far as you could see, there were herds of goats and cows grazing. The railroad track paralleled the road, and along the track we saw lines of burned-out gondolas and freight cars which had been fired and destroyed during the war. The whole area for miles, on all sides of Stalingrad, was littered with the debris of war: burned-out tanks, and half-tracks, and troop carriers, and rusting pieces of broken artillery. The salvage crews went about the country to draw in this wreckage and cut it up to be used as scrap in the tractor factory at Stalingrad.

We had to hold on with both hands while our bus bumped and leaped over the country. We seemed to go on endlessly across the steppe, until at last, over a little rise, we saw Stalingrad below us and the Volga behind it.