The Marshal's Barometer

General headquarters of the Red Central Front were in a little log cabin last week. Marshal Semion Timoshenko, whose job is to keep the Germans away from Moscow, sat behind a desk covered with maps and reports. Beside the papers were several sharpened crayons, a box of cigarets. There was only one thing on the cabin's bleak walls: a barometer.

As he worked, Marshal Timoshenko often looked at the barometer. He knew the unpredictability -- and the importance -- of Russian weather.

Mud up North. On the Leningrad Front the Germans pressed hard, in a hurry clean things up before mud cluttered things up. In that sector the worst rains probably over, but the days were getting so short, the sun's rays were beginning to slant so flat that soon, perhaps within a fortnight, what little new did fall would never dry. Mud would get deeper, softer, crueler.

The Germans would have to accomplish their aim either before, or in spite of, mud. Last week it appeared that the aim might not be to attack Leningrad, street by street, but to lay winter siege to it.

Early this week the Germans to have cast an iron ring all the way around the town.

Mud down South. The Ukraine, which usually has its heaviest rains in June, this summer had unseasonable torrents in August. Mud was last week still a hindrance almost as great as the enemy. Vehicles bogged hub-deep (see cut}. Messagero's war correspondent wrote: "The soldiers say: We are caught in the chocolate." But long, mild, dry days are soon due on this front. And here the winter comes late. The Germans, apparently feeling that they had plenty of time to break through to the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, last week went to work establishing bridge heads across the Dnieper. The destruction of the mighty Dnieperstroy Dam, confirmed last week by German pictures {see cut}, seemed to prevent crossings.

Sun in the Middle. On the most important front, Marshal Timoshenko's center, a period of beautiful crisp days was about to begin. Like New England's summer, this is what the Russians call babie lieta, " the peasant woman's summer." Here September and the first woman's two or three weeks of October should be much better fighting time than July and August.

Knowing this, Marshal Timoshenko was last week heavily engaged in counterattacks, designed to prevent the Germans from getting rolling again in the weather. The Reds called his efforts merely local attacks, but the Germans paid respects to "strategic counter-actions" i.e., the real stuff.

Storm Cloud on the Volga. Russia showed last week that it was also worried about the political weather of the area behind Marshal Timoshenko's lines. In the heart of Russia, by the Volga River, lay an ethnological storm cloud-- the Volga German Republic. This was a colony of hundreds of thousands of Germans, descendants of peasants invited into Russia in the 18th Century by Catherine the Great. These Germans, potential fifth columnists, were last week ordered to move, bag, baggage and bomb, to Siberia.

Surveying these facts, Marshal Timoshenko told a correspondent last week:

"The German attacking spirit has deteriorated; their discipline definitely is waning. . . . They are very much afraid immediately behind their own lines. . . .Many German soldiers are without underwear; many of them are infested; they are getting untidy...

"We are harassing them and will go on harassing them until they are utterly exhausted."

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