ABSTRACT
Solzhenitsyn’s military career began as farce and ended in tragedy. It began with the seventy-fourth Horse-drawn Transport Battalion of the Stalingrad Army Command, based on the river Buzuluk about 150 miles north-west of Stalingrad. To his vast disgust and embarrassment, Solzhenitsyn was pressed into service as a cart-driver and groom, jobs for which he had not the slightest qualification or aptitude. Solzhenitsyn portrays Zotov very much as he himself was at that time, overwhelmed by the bold spirits of men who had been under fire and selfconsciously envious of their front-line experience. Arriving at last in Semyonov, Solzhenitsyn joined the course for artillery officers. Solzhenitsyn was dispatched to the Third Leningrad Artillery School, in Kostroma, about two hundred miles north-east of Moscow, for an accelerated training course for artillery officers.
