Word: snows
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Montgomery has more of a chance to spread himself than his leading lady. He gets drunk twice--once on hard cider. He staggers past a group of "proper" Hoosier matrons and topples into a snow-bank, in an episode that is frankly slapstick. But Montgomery isn't a hammy drunk, nor is he an actor pretending to be drunk; he manages to get drunk in a delightfully individual and convincing way. And in his sober moments, he's always in complete command of his part, that of a flippant and roguish magazine writer...
...year had pushed its way across the Don and into the industrial city of Stalingrad on the Volga, was cut off from its Army Group and left to shift for itself 300,000 men deep inside the Russian front, supplied inefficiently by air and gradually being killed among the snow-covered steppes and hills and the shattered remains of the city...
...lived through so many years of deaths and explosions land burying details that he scarcely knows whether he is alive himself. As the pressure of Russian attacks forces the German line closer and closer together and the regiments beat their aimless retreat across miles of snow-swept steppes into Stalingrad proper, Plievier introduces many miscellaneous characters who appear briefly, disappear are forgotten by the reader, and reappear again somewhere else...
...safety; the freezing corridors of a field hospital, where the wounded are left to die because there is no medicine; the group of high-ranking generals squatting in a dugout with nothing to do but talk because their units have been wiped out; the early-morning battle in the snow, in which an infantry battalion is shot down to a man between the onrushing rows of Soviet tanks; the transport plane, filled with unopened letters, which lies wrecked on the steppe...
...Stalingrad" is a novel of mood. Instead of a plot, there is only the overpowering atmosphere of snow and gray skies and beaten men--and death. Plievier indulges in lengthy political discourses in the words of his characters and in the third person. His German officers begin, for the first time, to doubt the infallibility of what they have built and operated, and to find in the ruin of the sixth Army and its betrayal by Hitler the first indications that they have devoted their lives to a false cause. It dawns on some of them that...