But the 2nd Panzer Army and its constituent parts, such as the 24th Panzer Corps and the 4th Panzer Division, were not the same units as had taken Orel without interrupting their line of march. Fritz Farnbacher saw his first snow on the night of 6–7 October. It turned to rain and the unsealed roads, baked hard by the summer, turned into a quagmire – ‘a liquid, bottomless swamp, black pastry mixed by thousands and thousands of boots, wheels, caterpillars’, as the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman described it.
