Forgotten Soldier (12 page)

"Machine guns!" our driver remarked, smiling strangely. "That means we're here." Trenches, foxholes, and dugouts stretched away as far as we could see in all directions. We were stopped by a patrol.

"Ninth Infantry Regiment, ----- company," said the lieutenant. "Is it for us?"

"No, Mein Leutnant. We're looking for the ---- section."

"Ah," said the officer. "You'll have to leave your sleighs here. The section you want is over there on the river bank, and on that little island. You'll have to stick to the trenches, and be careful, because you'll be in range of the Russian forward positions, and they wake up from time to time."

"Thank you, Mein Leutnant." The sergeant's voice was trembling. The lieutenant called over one of the men who was with him: "Show them the way, and then come back."

The man saluted and joined us. Like everybody else, I had grabbed a box that was too heavy for me, and was going to carry it on my back. The sound of machine-gun fire began again, only louder.

"There it goes again. Is it serious or not?"

The gunfire grew louder, stopped, and began again, passionate and violent.

"That's us," our guide replied. "But wait a few minutes. You can't tell right away whether they're doing it just for laughs, or whether it's the beginning of a push onto the ice."

We listened to him without a word. He seemed almost relaxed in this disquieting atmosphere. We were perfect novices: our few scrapes on the "Third International" seemed liked nothing compared to what might happen here. The firing kept stopping and starting, sometimes very close. At other moments we could hear guns that were plainly further off.

Hals suggested that we lay our two boxes across our Mausers, to make a kind of carrying litter. We had just reorganized ourselves to put this plan into effect when we heard some heavy detonations which followed each other in rapid succession.

"That's the Russians," grinned the veteran, who was walking just ahead of us.

The air shook with the rhythm of the explosions. They seemed to be about three or four hundred yards ahead of us, to our left.

"That's their assault artillery.... It might be an attack." Suddenly, about thirty yards to the left, there was a sharp and violent burst of sound, followed by a curious, catlike whine, followed by a series of similar sounds. We hastily put down our burdens, and ducked, looking anxiously in all directions. The air was still for a moment.

"Don't panic, boys," said our guide, who had also ducked. "We've got a battery of 107s behind that pile of stuff over there, and we're answering the Russians."

The infernal noise began again. Even though our guide had told us what it was, I could feel my stomach contracting.

"Put on your helmets," said the sergeant. "If the Russians spot that battery, they'll fire on it."

"And let's keep going," our guide added. "There isn't a quiet corner within sixty miles. We're no safer here than anywhere else." We began to move forward, bent double. The air around us shook for the third time, and we could hear gunfire all around us. The German battery was firing nonstop, and ahead the noise of the spandau was getting closer. We passed three soldiers who were unrolling a telephone wire along a footpath which crossed our route. The sound of explosions now seemed to have a regular rhythm.

"This might be an attack," said the soldier who had come with us. "I'll leave you here. I've got to get back to my section."

"Which way do we go?" asked our sergeant, who was clearly terrified.

"Follow the path as far as the geschnauz* (*Assault gun) over there on the right. They'll be able to tell you. But eat something first. It's lunchtime."

He took a few steps in the other direction, doubled over, as before. So, that is how one moves on a battlefield! A few days later I was used to it, and paid no more attention.

We opened our mess tins, and ate huddled in the snow. I didn't feel particularly hungry. The explosions, which made my head ring inside my icy helmet, seemed far more interesting than food.

Hals, who was not entirely in control of his feelings, rolled his eyes like a hunted animal, and looked at me, shaking his head.

"Maybe we shouldn't stop to eat . . . If an officer came along . . ."

A deafening salvo which seemed to be passing right over our heads interrupted us, and we instinctively hunched our shoulders and shut our eyes. Hals was about to speak again when another explosion, different in kind, but no less brutal, shook the earth, followed by a loud whistle and another explosion. This time we felt as if we were being lifted from the ground. We were shaken by a displacement of the air of an astonishing violence. Then an avalanche of stones and chunks of ice poured down on us.

We made ourselves as small as we could, not daring to move or speak. We had dropped our guns and our mess tins.

"They'll kill me!" shouted a young fellow who had hurled himself into my lap in the general confusion.

"They're going to kill me!" There was another loud boom, and then a deafening German salvo passed over our heads.

"Let's go on; we can't stay here!" yelled our sergeant, shoving his helmet further down onto his head.

We picked up our boxes like automatons. The trench was wide enough for four men to walk abreast, but we proceeded single file, keeping close to one of the walls. I was with Hals, directly behind the sergeant, who kept exhorting us to move.

"Hurry up! Quick! The Russians have spotted our battery! They can see it, and we're right beside it! This damned trench is heading right into their fire. We've got to get to that communication trench down there."

Every other minute we had to throw ourselves into the bottom of the trench. The heavy cases kept slipping from our icy fingers no matter how tightly we tried to hold them: it still seems astonishing that they didn't explode in our faces.

"Hurry up," said the sergeant, disregarding our troubles. "It's down there."

"Tell me," said Hals. "There's still twice as much as this on the sleighs. Do we have to bring all that too?"

"Yes, of course ... I don't know.... Hurry up, for God's sake!" While the Russians were reloading, our battery had fired twice. The next Russian salvo fell about forty yards behind us, followed by two others at an indefinable distance, which nonetheless made us double over a little lower. Suddenly there was a deafening hooting sound, followed by an overwhelming noise which shook the earth and the air. One side of the trench collapsed. It all happened so quickly I had no time to duck. I remember seeing what looked like a disintegrating scarecrow flying through the rubble in a cone of flame, and falling in several pieces onto the edge of the trench, before rolling to the bottom. We were all thrown to the ground without the strength or courage to get up again.

"Quick! Up! We've got to get to the other trench!" shouted the sergeant, whose face was contorted by fear.

"If a shell lands here, it will be a volcano."

There were two more explosions. Our guns were firing steadily. Dragging the cases, we climbed across the debris and the body of the poor wretch who had been blown into the air. I glanced at him quickly as we went by. It was a horrible sight. His helmet had fallen down over his face, and its visor was half-buried in his chin, or neck. His heavy winter clothes were like a sack holding together something which no longer bore any resemblance to the human form. He was missing a leg-or perhaps it was doubled under him. Another body was mixed into the rubble a short way off. The Russian shell must have landed right on some poor fellows who had ducked their heads and were waiting for the storm to pass.

I can remember very distinctly the first deaths I encountered in the war. The thousands upon thousands which followed are blurred and faceless: a vast, cumulative nightmare which still haunts me, in which atrocious mutilations appear side by side with figures who seem to be peacefully sleeping, or with others whose eyes are opened astonishingly wide, stamped by death with an uncommunicable terror. I thought I had already experienced the limits of horror and of endurance, that I was a tough fighting man who would return home in due course to recount my heroic exploits. I have used the words and expressions which my experiences from Minsk to Kharkov to the Don suggested to me. But I should have reserved those words and expressions for what came later, even though they are not strong enough.

It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later. It's a mistake, for instance, to use the word "frightful" to describe a few broken-up companions mixed into the ground: but it's a mistake which might be forgiven.

I should perhaps end my account here, because my powers are inadequate for what I have to tell. Those who haven't lived through the experience may sympathize as they read, the way one sympathizes with the hero of a novel or a play, but they certainly will never understand, as one cannot understand the unexplainable. This stammering outpouring may be without interest to the sector of the world to which I now belong. However, I shall try to let my memory speak as clearly as possible. I dedicate the remainder of this account to my friends Marius and Jean-Marie Kaiser, who are in a position to understand me, as they lived through the same general events in the same part of the world. I shall try to reach and translate the deepest level of human aberration, which I never could have imagined, which I never would have thought possible, if I hadn't known it firsthand.

We reached the communications trench, which had seemed like safety to our sergeant, and literally dived into it as a brutal burst of fire scattered the soil beyond the parapet. The two men in white overalls who were already there jumped up in astonishment.

One of them had been standing beside the gun surveying the scene through field glasses. The other, hunched down at the bottom of the hole, had been fiddling with the knobs of a radio apparatus.

"The ---section?" asked our sergeant, puffing for breath. "We've got some supplies for them."

"It's not very far," said the soldier with the field glasses, "but you won't be able to get there right now; you'd only be blown up. Put your explosives down-but not right here-and use the bunker." He smiled.

Without waiting for him to repeat the invitation, we slid down into a tomblike structure of boards and hard earth, which was almost without light. Inside, there were four soldiers dressed in white. One of them had somehow managed to go to sleep. The others were writing beside a flickering candle.

The bunker wasn't high enough for us to stand, and everyone had to move over so we could get in, but we were, at any rate, something new.

"Is it solid?" Hals asked, pointing his tattered finger at the roof of the rathole.

"Well ... if something lands a little closer, it might collapse," one of the soldiers answered mockingly.

"And if something lands square on us, our pals won't have to bury us," added another.

How could they joke? Habit, probably. The fellow who had been asleep woke up and yawned.

"I thought they'd sent us some women."

"No . . . just a bunch of kids. Where did you find this brood, sergeant?"

We all laughed.

As if to rub our noses in our situation, the ground shook again. From here the noise was less violent.

"These boys are new recruits, part of the supply train, and they've crossed the whole of Russia so you can fill your stomachs."

"That's nothing," said the fellow who'd just waked up.

"We've been sweating it out here for three months already, while you were taking your own sweet time. I know they've got pretty girls in the Ukraine, but you shouldn't have stayed there so long. We've been dying of hunger."

I ventured a few words in my atrocious German:

"Girls! We didn't see any girls! All we saw was snow."

"Alsatian?" somebody asked.

"No, he's French," Hals answered, joking.

Everyone burst out laughing. Hals was taken aback, and didn't know what to say.

"Merci," the questioner added with a good accent, holding out his hand to me.

"Ma mere est allemande," I replied.

"Ach, gut. Votre mutter ist Deutsche? Sehr gut."

The ground shook again. Some pieces from the ceiling rattled down onto our helmets.

"Things don't seem to be going very well here," said our sergeant, whose mind was absorbed by his terror, and who plainly didn't give a damn whether my mother was German or Chinese.

"Oh, they're just having fun," the other one said. "The beating they took three days ago really calmed them down."

"Ah?"

"Yes. Those bastards made us re-cross the Don about a month ago. We had to give up at least forty miles. Now our front is on the west bank. They've tried to cross on the ice at least four times already. The last time was five days ago. Then you would really have seen something. They attacked for two days, especially at night. It was really pretty rough. You see how I am today: I'm trying to catch up on my sleep. We haven't had much lately. We're supposed to counterattack too, but nothing's happened yet. Take a look through the glasses. The ice is still covered with Russians. The pigs don't even pick up their wounded. I'll bet some of them down there are still groaning."

"We're supposed to resupply the ---- section," our wretched sergeant explained anxiously.

"You'll find them a little further on-right down on the river bank-real daredevils. I think they've got the little island too. They lost it one night when they had to fight hand to hand, but in the morning they took it back. It's a pretty tight spot down there, I can tell you. I'd rather be where I am."

Our battery had been silent for a few minutes, but the Russian shells were still coming over at a slow but regular pace. The soldier with the field glasses came in, hunched up and blowing on his fingers.

"Your turn," he said to one of the soldiers. "I'm shaking so hard I'm afraid my teeth will fall out."

The man he called got up with a groan, and pushed his way through to the exit.

"Our guns aren't firing any more. Have they been destroyed?" our sergeant asked the newcomer.