And I had an excellent plan to put the bicycle on a tram and travel ten miles into the northern suburbs, intending to ride from there back along what were once the front lines. I had a spray to fend off midges, which otherwise descend in blanketing waves. The next morning I was better prepared to do battle with Stalingrad. There was a buffet in the dining room, and after dinner, when I was studying my maps and celebrating my bike rides around Volgograd, a friend of mine called from New York on my cell phone (thinking I was home at my desk), and we chatted for thirty minutes as if having cognac in the hotel bar. I enjoyed my first evening back at the Hotel Volgograd, in which I sometimes felt that I was the only guest, a commissar on a provincial inspection tour. Now at Rossoschka, twenty miles from Volgograd, the German military cemetery has been expanded to collect the war dead from what was called the Kessel, the pocket between the Volga and Don rivers.
During the 1942-43 battle of Stalingrad, these fields west of the city were covered in snow, and it was here that the noose closed on the invading German Sixth Army.
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