Ivan plastered the buildings and their surroundings with a potpourri of greetings from artillery, anti-tank guns, bang-booms and grenade-throwers. The high point came at bright midday, when fifteen Russians in ski parkas, apparently fired up with vodka, crept out into the open. Artillery Lieutenant Vogt and I watched them from a communications trench on the forward slope. First they approached a group of dark lumps which have been sitting there in the middle of the Volkhov since the last Russian attack, and searched them for something to eat. Through our binoculars we could see them taking tin cans out of the dead men’s backpacks. Next they wandered over the snow towards our edge of the woods, which sticks out from the northern side of the monastery hill towards the river. Two hundred metres short we hit them with our big guns. Our aim was good — most of the fifteen stayed lying down. I would have liked to let the fellows get closer to my sentries, so as to pick them off with rifles, or even to the edge of the forest where my men have been lying in wait for quite a while. But the heavy weapons men didn’t want to miss an easy meal.
In the evening two of the dead Russians tried to come to life, but my sentry was paying attention and shot them down. Another seven [sic]
A few kilometres upstream, opposite the village of Myasnoi Bor (‘Meat Wood’) the Soviet offensive made better progress. Its striking force was the newly formed Second Shock Army, which despite being led by a militarily inept henchman of Beria’s and manned by draftees from the treeless Volga steppe, broke through the German lines on 17 January and penetrated deep into the German rear. By the end of February 100,000 men held a ‘pocket’ roughly fifty kilometres square, its northern edge only ten kilometres away from one of the offensive’s key objectives, the railway town of Lyuban.
The gains, however, were more impressive on paper than in reality. Efforts to widen the gap in the enemy line foundered against swift reinforcement, Lyuban remained just out of reach, and the ground won consisted — a scattering of place names notwithstanding — of flat and virtually uninhabited forest, peat-workings and bog. Realising the Second Shock Army’s vulnerability, on 2 March Hitler ordered Georg von Küchler (who had taken over command of Army Group North from von Leeb in January) to mount an Operation Predator to cut it off from the rest of the Volkhov front. ‘Concentration of air force in that sector’, Halder wrote in his diary, ‘is requested for the period 7–14 March. . After elimination of the Volkhov salient, no blood is to be wasted on reducing the enemy in the marshes; he can be left to starve to death.’17 The ground attack was launched at daybreak on the fifteenth, and within five days had severed both roads — nicknamed ‘Erika’ and ‘Dora’ — into the pocket. By the end of the month, after desperate seesaw fighting round Myasnoi Bor, the Soviets held a corridor into the pocket only a kilometre and a half wide, along which supplies had to be hauled on sleds by night.
In April it began to thaw, glittering silence replaced by drizzle and the sound of running water. Still quartered at Zvanka, Hockenjos watched the landscape change, photographing the first small patch of earth — dark and strewn with wisps of straw — to emerge, and sitting for hours at the top of the monastery bell tower:
Reed beds, wide bodies of water between stretches of yellowed grass, black moorland and the sparse remains of the snow. Over it all a high spring sky with fine lamb’s wool clouds: a sea of larks’ jubilations and lapwings’ cries. In the marshy forest to the right, goldfinches in every bush. . Everywhere, the men sit in front of their bunkers with their shirts off, their torsos pale. . They are whistling and singing. The cheerful noise must carry as far as the Russians, but I am not going to forbid it.18
