Dniester

The Dniester is a river in the route of the 79th Division during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In the novel’s wartime narrative, the division crosses it after advancing through Bessarabia, then continues toward Odessa and farther east. The crossing makes the river a specific point in the campaign’s geography, while the advancing army’s path connects that geography to the destruction surrounding it.

Place in the Military Advance

The Soviet Union is attacked on June 22, 1941. The 79th Division is attached to the 11th German Army, whose resources are more limited than those of the larger formations advancing farther south. The division crosses the Prut, fights across the steppes and hills of Bessarabia, and then crosses the Dniester before reaching the outskirts of Odessa. After the Romanians halt, the German troops continue their advance, fighting retreating Soviet forces and crossing the Bug.

The River in the Campaign’s Landscape

The Dniester appears in a compressed sequence of crossings and continued movement, rather than as the setting for a separate battle described in detail. Its narrative function is geographical and temporal: it locates the division’s progress between Bessarabia and Odessa, and helps register the scale of the eastward march. The account stresses that the advance proceeds despite difficult terrain, few roads, and the division’s reliance on soldiers and mules for movement.

Destruction Along the Route

The division’s advance leaves burned Ukrainian villages and granaries behind it. Woods also catch fire across the wheat fields, but the soldiers do not know who set them alight. Reiter asks Wilke about the fires; Wilke, Neitzke, Kruse, and Sergeant Lemke deny that their men burned the woods, while acknowledging that they did burn or bomb villages. The narrative does not establish who caused the fires in the forests. This uncertainty sits beside the acknowledged destruction of settlements, making the river crossing part of a campaign whose movement is clear even when responsibility for every act of devastation is not.