Foreign News: FROM STALINGRAD'S RUINS

This report of a trip through battle-torn Stalingrad was written by Author Konstantin Simonov, published in Moscow's Krasnaya Zvezda and cabled to TIME by its Moscow Correspondent Walter Graebner:

Stalingrad is no longer a city of cheerful crowds scrambling down steep brown banks for an afternoon swim or an excursion on the Volga. It is no longer a city of men & women riding or walking to work with dinner pails and laced sacks over their arms. Stalingrad is now a grey smoking city above which fire dances day & night and ashes float in the air. Stalingrad is a soldier city burned in battle. Barges have stopped moving food, fuel and lumber up & down the river. Now ferryboats ply back & forth carrying supplies to the embattled city and removing its wounded and dead (including many civilians trapped in burning buildings) to the east bank. The wounded go to hospitals; the dead are laid out for burial on the shore.

Already many streets of the city no longer exist. Others are pitted with craters or full of crashed bombers. The Germans are trying to convert Stalingrad into an uninhabitable hell.

It is evening and we are standing on the outskirts of the city. Before us is the battlefield: smoking hillocks and flaming streets. Everywhere there is a bluish-black smoke cut by fairy arrows rf mortar fire from our guards. White German flares light up the long circular front. First we hear the Nazi bombers roar toward the city, then the explosions of their bombs. Next comes the roar of our bombers sailing west. They drop yellow flares to illuminate the German position, and a few seconds later they drop cargoes of death.

On the east bank of the Volga we see the supply system in operation. The sky above us is rose-colored. Our ferryboat is overloaded with five trucks full of munitions, a company of Red Army men and a number of nurses. Bombs are whistling all around. Next to me sits a doctor's assistant, a young Ukrainian woman named Victoria Tshepnya. This is her fifth crossing. Doctors' assistants and nurses gathered the wounded themselves. They took them all the way across the city and loaded them on ferryboats which crossed the river. It was impossible to operate hospitals in the city.

Victoria and another Ukrainian reminisce about their native city of Dniepro-petrovsk. Both feel that the city is not really in German hands. To them it is still Russian.

As the ferryboat approached the landing stage, Victoria confessed: "You know me, always a little frightened to get out. I've already been wounded twice, once very seriously. But I don't believe I'll die yet because I haven't begun to live."

It must be frightful to have been wounded twice, to have fought for 15 months, and now to make a fifth trip to a flaming city. In 15 minutes she will pass through burning buildings, and somewhere under the rain of shrapnel and bombs will pick up a wounded man and bring him back to the ferryboat. Then she will make her sixth trip.