Forgotten Soldier (14 page)

"Absolute sacrifice" was what the High Command called it. These words made my head spin, as I stared with wide eyes into the impenetrable darkness, sinking gradually into sleep, as into a large black pit.

THE MARCH TO THE REAR

From the Don to Kharkov

First Spring First Retreat

The Donetz Battle

For three or four more days, we were involved in occupations of more or less the same kind. The snow was melting everywhere, and the cold was lessening as rapidly as it had increased-which seemed to be the way of Russian seasons. From implacable winter one was shifted into torrid summer, with no spring in between. The thaw did not improve our military situation, but made it worse. The temperature rose from five degrees below zero to forty degrees above, melting the unimaginable ocean of snow which had accumulated all winter.

Enormous pools of water and swampy patches appeared everywhere in the partly melted snow. For the Wehrmacht, which had endured the horrors of five winter months, this softening of the temperature fell like a blessing from heaven. With or without orders, we took off our filthy overcoats and began a general cleanup. Men plunged naked into the icy waters of these temporary ponds for the sake of a wash. No gunfire disturbed the tranquil air, which was sometimes even sunny.

The war itself, whose indefinable presence we still felt, seemed to have grown less savage. I had made the acquaintance of a sympathetic fellow, a noncom in the engineers, whose section was temporarily billeted in the hut opposite ours. He came from Kehl, right across the Rhine from

Strasbourg, and knew France better than his own country. He spoke perfect French. My conversations with him, which were always in French, were like rest periods after the painstaking gibberish I was forced into with my other companions. Hals often joined us to improve his French in the same way I tried to improve my German.

Ernst Neubach-my new friend-seemed to be a born engineer. He had no equal in his ability to knock a few old boards into a shelter as weatherproof as one a fully-equipped mason might build. He made a shower from the gas tank of a large tractor, and it functioned miraculously, with a lamp-heater continuously warming its forty gallons of water. The first men to use this shower unfortunately received a tepid downpour of water flavored with gasoline. Although we rinsed the tank repeatedly, the water remained tainted for a long time.

In the evenings waiting to use the shower there was always a crowd of shouting, pushing men which often included our superiors. Priority was awarded to whoever produced the largest number of cigarettes, or a portion of the bread ration. Our feldwebel, Laus, once paid three hundred cigarettes. The showers always began after the five-o'clock meal and continued late into the night in an atmosphere of rowdy horseplay. Those who got through the showers first often found themselves tossed onto their backsides in the liquid mud which flooded the outskirts of the camp. Here we had no curfew or other barracks regulations. Once all the day's work was done, we were free to joke and drink for the whole night, if we wanted to.

We spent about a week in this way, with quiet, uneventful days. Each fatigue party obliged us to flounder through a sea of increasingly sticky mud. We made three trips back to the front; each time it was unbelievably quiet. On horseback or in carts, we took supplies to our troops, whose laundry was spread out to dry on all the parapets. Across the Don, the Russians appeared to be similarly engaged.

We spoke to a bearded soldier and asked him if everything was going well. He laughed. "The war must be over. Hitler and Stalin have made it up. I've never seen it so calm for so long. The Popovs do nothing but drink all day and sing all night. They have terrific nerve, too, walking around in the open air, right under our guns. Werk saw three of them going to get water from the river, just like that. Didn't you, Werk?" He turned to a sly-faced soldier who was washing his feet in a puddle.

"Yes," Werk said. "We just couldn't shoot them. For once, let's all stick our noses out without getting a bullet between the eyes."

A feeling of joy and hope had begun to take hold. Could the war be over?

"It really might be," Hals said. "The fellows on the front are always the last to be told anything like that. If it's true, we'll know in a few days. You'll see, Sajer. Maybe we'll all be going home soon. We'll have a terrific celebration. It's almost too good to be true!"

"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched," said one of the older men from the Rollbahn. His realism damped us down a little. As usual, we set off down the track-more accurately, canal-of liquid mud which led to our camp. We stopped a moment to talk to Ernst, whose section was trying to restore the track to a usable condition.

"If it goes on this way," he said, "we'll have to take to boats. Two trucks came through here, and the stones we broke our backs shoving into the mud completely disappeared. It must be nice down in the trenches."

"They're in a mess," Hals said. "And their morale is really terrible, too. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they broke up their guns for kindling. Our fellows and the Popovs are having a real spree down there."

"Well let them make the most of it," Ernst said. "There's something funny going on. That radio truck over there is taking messages nonstop. And messengers all the time, too. The last one had to leave his scooter and wade in here to bring the Kommandant his message."

"Maybe it was congratulations for your showers," said Hals.

"That would be fine by me, but I doubt it. When those fellows run around like that, everybody else will too, before you know it." "Defeatist," Hals shouted as we left.

When we got back to the camp, nothing seemed to have changed. We devoured the steaming mess the cook served up and prepared for another evening of larking. Then Laus blew the whistle for assembly.

"Lord," I thought. "Neubach was right. Here we go again."

"I'm not going to say anything about the way you look," Laus said. "Just pack up. We could be moving out of here any time now. Got it?"

"Fuck," someone said. "It was too good to last."

"You didn't think you could just sit here and fart, did you? There's a war on."

"Packing up" meant that we had to be ready for inspection, with our uniforms in impeccable order, and all our straps and buckles polished and fastened in the prescribed manner. At least, that is what it had meant at Chemnitz and Bialystok. Here, of course, that kind of discipline was somewhat relaxed, but it all still depended on the humor of the inspecting officer, who could quibble at anything from the inside of a gun barrel to the state of our toes, and impose heavy details, or endless guard duty.

I could still remember only too well the four hours of punishment handed out to me a few days after I had arrived at Chemnitz. The lieutenant had drawn a circle on the cement of the courtyard, which was fully exposed to the sun. Then I had to put on the "punishment pack"-a knapsack filled with sand, which weighed nearly eighty pounds. I weighed one hundred and thirty. After two hours, my helmet was burning hot from the sun, and by the end I needed all my will power to keep my knees from buckling. I had nearly fainted several times. That is how I learned that a good soldier does not cross the barracks yard with his hands in his pockets.

So we rushed to get our gear in order, and frantically polished our sodden leather boots.

"And before we've walked ten yards, all this will be for nothing!" It took us a good hour to make our kit more or less respectable. Then we had another twenty-four before our country holiday on the Don was transformed into a nightmare.

The day after our sprucing-up, I was put on guard duty and given the period from midnight until 2:30 A.M. I had summoned up all my patience, and was standing on the platform of empty munitions cases which had been put there so the sentry wouldn't sink into the mud. Beside the platform, a foxhole half filled with water was ready to receive the guard responsible for the stocks of gasoline-in this case, myself.

The night was mild. A rainy wind blew fat white clouds rapidly across the sky, occasionally revealing a large white moon. To my right, the outlines of our vehicles and the camp buildings stood out sharply. Ahead of me, the enormous dark, hilly horizon melted into the sky. As the crow flies, the Don lay about five miles from our first line of German reserves. Between us and the river, some thousands of men were sleeping in conditions of almost unimaginable squalor. The sound of engines came to us on the wind. Both sides used the dark for moving supplies and troops. Two of the sentries patrolling our perimeter came by, and we exchanged the usual formalities. One of the men told a joke. I was about to reply when the whole horizon, from north to south, was suddenly lit by a series of brilliant flashes.

Then there was a second series of flickering intensity, and I thought I felt the earth shake, as the air filled with a sound like thunder. "Lord! It's an attack!" shouted one of the men on patrol. "I think it's them!"

We could already hear whistles in the camp and voices shouting orders through the still-distant noise of explosions. Groups of men went by on the run. Artillerymen who had been asleep were running to their guns on the edge of the abandoned airfield. As no one had told me to leave my post, I stayed where I was, wondering what would be asked of my comrades. A supply expedition through such a heavy bombardment would be an operation of an entirely different kind from the ones we had recently grown used to. The bursts of distant fire continued, mixed with the sound of our guns. Flashes of light, closer and more brilliant than before, turned the groups of men running through pools of water into shadow puppets.

It was as if a giant, in a fit of terrible fury, were shaking the universe, reducing each man to a ludicrous fragment which the colossus of war could trample without even noticing. Despite the relative distance of danger, I bent double, ready to plunge into my water-filled hole at a moment's notice. Two big crawler tractors came toward me, with all their lights out. Their wheels and treads had churned the mud into a kind of liquid sludge. Two men jumped down, and almost disappeared in it.

"Give us a hand, guard," one of them called. They were splattered with mud right up to their helmets.

The bombardment continued to enflame the earth and sky, as we loaded some drums of gasoline onto their machine.

"There's always something to fart in your face," one of them said to me.

"Good luck," I answered.

Further off, the soldiers in my unit were rounding up the nervous, jostling horses, which kept falling in the mud and whinnying frantically. Several times, trucks came to collect drums of gasoline, so that by day break, when my relief hadn't appeared, I wondered how much there was left for me to guard. The bombardment was almost as strong as ever. I felt exhausted and confused. A group of boys from my company came by, led by a sergeant who waved me over to join them. At that moment precisely, one of the first Soviet long-range shells landed about a hundred yards behind us. The explosion shook us, and we all started to run as hard as we could. I didn't ask any questions, but looked in vain for the broad shoulders of Hals.

Other projectiles were now falling on the camp, which was lit up everywhere. We had thrown ourselves onto the ground, and stood up again covered with mud.

"Don't dive like that," said the sergeant. "You're always late. Keep your eye on me, and do what I do."

A significant howl filled our ears, and all twelve of us, the sergeant included, plunged into the liquid mess. An enormous explosion sucked all the air from our lungs, and a simultaneous wave of mud washed over us.

We stood up again, soaked with filth, and wearing the pinched smiles of civilians who climb unscathed from a bad wreck. Three or four more bursts quite nearby forced us down again. Behind us, something was burning. As soon as we could, we ran to the nearest munitions dump.

The sight of this mountain of canvas-covered boxes made our stomachs turn over. If anything hit it, no one within a hundred yards would have a chance.

"Good God," said the sergeant. "There's nobody here. It's incredible."

With no apparent thought of danger, he climbed onto the hill of dynamite, and began to check the numbers on the boxes, which indicated their next destination. We stood and watched him, petrified, like condemned prisoners, with our feet apart, and our heads empty, waiting for orders. Two fellows soaked through, like us, came running up. The sergeant began to shout at them from his eminence. They snapped to attention despite the thunder of the guns.

"Are you supposed to be on duty here?"

"Yes, Herr Sergeant," they answered in unison. "Then where were you?"

"The call of nature," one of them said.

"You went off to crap like that, both of you at once? Idiots! We've got too much trouble here for fun and games. Your names and units." The sergeant had not climbed down.

Silently, I cursed this animal with his niggling discipline, who stood there preparing a report, as if nothing unusual were happening. Fresh explosions which sounded very close threw us all onto the ground except the sergeant, who continued to provoke Providence.

"They're cleaning up our rear," he said. "They must have let loose their goddamned infantry. Get your fat tails up here and help me!"

Half paralyzed by fear, we climbed onto the volcano. The flashes of light all around us lit our bodies in a tragic glare. A few moments later, we were running as hard as we could, oblivious of the weight of the cases, in our anxiety to get away.

Daylight had now begun to rob the spectacle of some of its brilliance. The flashes of light were scarcely visible, and the horizon was shrouded by a dense cloud of smoke, irregularly punctuated by darker plumes. Toward noon, our artillery began to fire. We were still running from job to job, although we were nearly dropping with exhaustion. I can remember sitting in a huge crater which had been dried out by an explosion, staring at the long barrel of a 155 spitting fire with rhythmic regularity. I had found Hals and Lensen, and we were sitting together, with our hands over our ears. Hals was smiling, and nodding at each explosion.