Most of the people who are flocking to see the film, which is this week's third-highest grossing release in the country, are presumably drawn to it by word of mouth about its big-budget opening battle scene and its catchy plot, a duel between two master snipers. If they know anything at all about the battle of Stalingrad, however, I hope they're leaving the theater feeling vaguely uneasy -- if not outraged.

Why? Because World War II's Stalingrad is just too momentous, too epic, too dreadful an event in the history of this century to be used, as Annaud uses it, as a mere colorful background for a formulaic genre film. "Saving Private Ryan," despite its sentimentality, not only brought the terrible reality of the Omaha Beach landing home to viewers in a way no film had done before, it remained essentially true to the grim realities of being a G.I. on combat patrol -- due allowances being made for Hollywood license. War is hell from the beginning of Spielberg's film, and it stays hell until the end. In "Enemy at the Gates," war starts out as hell, then it turns into heck and stays there.

That would be bad enough, though hardly unexpected, if this were just another glib, conventional war movie, unable to reconcile the demands of bloody realism with Hollywood's usual feelgood requirements. But this is a movie about Stalingrad -- the worst battle of the worst war in human history, a war that ended not so very long ago. It is almost unbelievable, and historically offensive, that a filmmaker would choose this story, spend close to $100 million reproducing its ninth-circle-of-hell atmosphere -- right down to the Russian city's bizarre fountain, with statues of children playing ring-around-the-rosie around an alligator -- and blithely toss it all away to make a hackneyed "duel" movie, essentially an updated western complete with a ridiculously contrived love triangle, in which the battle itself is reduced to nothing more than a visually stimulating backdrop. Is World War II so meaningless to us now, so distant, that its most hideous battle can simply be turned into aesthetic wallpaper?

By an odd coincidence, Stalingrad reared its head before I had even heard of Annaud's film. Poking around the stacks of books in the office recently, I chanced to pick up a book called "Stalingrad 1942-1943: The Infernal Cauldron." I had been something of a military history buff when a teenager, and knew a little about Stalingrad: It was one of the decisive battles of World War II, shifting the tide on Germany's invasion of Russia. It went on for close to six months, turned a large city into rubble and left over a million men dead. I also remembered from William L. Shirer's biography that it was Hitler who was responsible for trapping his troops in the ruined city in the heart of winter. The German 6th Army was surrounded, but it still might have been able to break out -- if the Fuhrer had given the order. But obsessed with the symbolism of the struggle over a city named after Stalin, and willing to sacrifice a quarter of a million men to make the point that "Where the soldier of Germany sets foot, there he remains!" Hitler refused. Those German troops who were not slaughtered by the Russians or killed by starvation, cold or disease finally surrendered: 95 percent of them died as well.

As a teenager I also read a little paperback called "Last Letters From Stalingrad." The letters, which were purportedly written by the doomed German soldiers caught in the Russian vise, were heartbreaking: searing final testaments written by men who knew they were going to die. I have since learned that they were probably fakes, but they made a powerful impression on me at the time.

That was the sum total of my knowledge of Stalingrad as, casting about for something to read one night, I opened Stephen Walsh's oversize, lavishly illustrated book.

As one gets older, certain historical events that are receding into the past suddenly play an odd trick: They get closer. Although the war ended only eight years before I was born, it never felt even slightly contemporary to me when I was a teenager. It was a grand clash of men and weapons that had happened in some distant, parallel universe. It might as well have been the Crusades.

It feels a lot closer now. Part of the reason is the simple passage of time: As you get older, the entire shape of your own life starts coming into view, and you realize that 50 years isn't the eternity you once thought it was. Then there's death. You know it slightly better, and this knowledge somehow keeps every fatality in front of you, like a wrong answer, a flaw in God's eye, a nightmare that you're condemned to keep seeing again and again. But remembering what happened -- what really happened, not the neat, bugle-playing death of the old movies but the screaming, incomprehensible pain and terror of actual war -- is more than just a nightmare. It's an act of solidarity, of acknowledgment -- your own hands reaching up to ring the bell that tolls for all of us.

Stalingrad was not the Holocaust, but its scale, its bleakness, its challenge to morality, to faith in a meaningful universe, demands an act of memory. That is the homage the present owes to the past.

And as I read Walsh's book -- and then, drawn hopelessly into the battle's consuming, hypnotic void, the definitive work on Stalingrad, Antony Beevor's 1998 masterpiece "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943" -- a whole army of ghosts rose up.

That regiment of young Russian recruits who died on top of an ancient Tartar burial mound, saving the city by holding the city's high ground for an hour -- they were over there, behind the parking lot, invisible, dug in, realer than you or me. The German schoolteacher with the copy of Goethe in his pocket, cut down by a machine gun burst as he hid amid the mannequins on the second floor of the Univermag department store -- he was there too. So were the Communist officers who shot their own troops as they tried to retreat, and the German doctors who had the chance to take the last flight out of hell but refused to leave their patients, and the little Russian girl with a broken back being ferried across the Volga. They were all here, the victors and the vanquished, those who came through Stalingrad on this side of life and the million souls who did not.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"