Forgotten Soldier (27 page)

"Ich weiss, mein Lieber, auf Morgen Guille."

A section was tramping by on the other side of the tracks singing gaily:

Erika, we love you,

Erika, we love you,

And that's why we'll come back,

That's why we'll come back.

"You see, Paula . . . even the song says so. Listen . . ."

I felt overwhelmed by the words. I would come back only for Paula ... that's what the song meant to say.

Then the whistle demolished my sense of joy. I pulled Paula to me and embraced her wildly.

"Einsteigen! Los! Los! Reisende einsteigen! Achtung! Passagiere einsteigen! Achtung! Achtung!"

"I love you, Paula. We'll see each other soon. Don't be sad. See how beautiful it is today. We can't be sad."

Paula was inconsolable, and I felt that I was going to burst into tears myself. I kissed her for the last time. The couplings of the carriages clashed; the train was beginning to move. I jumped onto the step of the carriage. Paula clung to my hand. The train slowly gathered speed. Many of the people standing on the platform were crying, and soldiers leaning halfway out the windows were still hanging on to someone's hand, or kissing a child. Paula ran beside us as long as she could. Then she had to let go.

"See you soon, my love."

The day was so beautiful we should have been leaving for a day in the country. I stood on the step for a long time, watching the outline of my beloved growing smaller and smaller, and finally disappearing for ever.

I will soon come back, Paula. But I never went back. I never saw Paula again, or Berlin, or Killeringstrasse, or the Neubachs.. . . Paula, we'll be married, I swear it. But the war prevented me from keeping my word, and the peace made it lose all its value. France reminded me of that severely enough. So please forgive me, Paula. It wasn't all my fault. You knew the misery of war too, and fear, and anguish. Perhaps-and I wish it with all my heart-perhaps you also were spared. That at least would allow us both to remember. The war destroyed Berlin, and Germany, and Killeringstrasse, and perhaps the Neubachs too, but not you, Paula ... that would be too horrible. I have forgotten nothing. Whenever I close my eyes, I relive our marvelous moments, and hear once again the sound of your voice, and smell your skin, and feel your hand in mine....

TRAINING FOR AN ELITE DIVISION

Auf, marsch! Marsch!

I remained in the corridor of the crowded train, and quickly opened the little box Paula had given me as we parted. It contained two packs of cigarettes which I had given her from my father's parcel. My father wasn't a smoker, and must have collected those cigarettes on odd occasions, for years. Paula had added a short note, and her photograph. In her note, she said that she hoped the cigarettes would help me through some of the hard moments ahead. I must have read her words over at least ten times before tucking her letter and photograph into my pass book.

The train lurched forward. Everyone was wrapped in his private melancholy. I tried to find a relatively stable spot where I could press a piece of paper against the window frame and begin a letter to Paula, but some bastard from the Alpine Corps had to try and talk to me.

"So, leave's over. Always too short, isn't it? Mine's over too. Now, back to the guns!"

I looked at him without answering. He was a pain in the neck.

"And with good weather like this things must be really rough out there. I can remember that very well from last summer. One day we . . ."

"Excuse me, Kamerad, but I'm writing a letter."

"Ah. A girl, eh? Always girls. Well, don't worry about it."

I felt like sticking my bayonet into his stomach.

"There are such marvelous girls everywhere! I can remember in Austria once . . ."

Enraged, I turned my back on him, and tried to begin my letter, but the general uproar was too distracting, and I had to give up till later. I stood for a long time with my forehead pressed against the glass, staring with unseeing eyes at the countryside sliding past us. The carriage was full of raucous talk and laughter. Some of the men were trying to joke, to help themselves forget the hideous reality of a front which stretched from Murmansk to the Sea of Azov-a reality in which two million of them would lose their lives. The train moved slowly, making frequent stops. At every station, both soldiers and civilians got on and off, although most of the passengers were military, and bound for the East. We arrived at Poznan during the night, and I ran to the re-groupment center, where my pass had to be stamped before midnight. I thought that I would then go to the dormitory where I had slept for a few hours passing through the other way. The crush of the crowd at the military police office kept me from thinking of Paula. All the formalities were handled far more rapidly than on the way out, as if the double line of soldiers was moving forward to be devoured by a diabolic machine with the appetite of a giant. Inside of ten minutes, my expired pass had been initialed, stamped, and registered, and I was told to proceed to train number 50 for Korosten.

"Oh?" I was surprised.

"When does it leave?" "In an hour and a half. You've got time."

We would be traveling that night, then. I followed a group of soldiers who were walking along the wooden gallery toward train 50-an interminable string of passenger and freight cars which would be crammed to the bursting point with soldiers.

I walked through the frantic din, looking for a more or less comfortable corner where I could settle myself and write my letter. Following the advice of my father, who considered the rear cars safest in case of derailment, I was thinking of one of the carriages with straw-covered floors at the back of the train. I pushed my way inside one of the cars, past five pairs of boots dangling from an open door.

"Welcome aboard, young fellow," cried the landser already there. "Get set for Paradise."

"Well, kid, coming with us to shoot some Russians?"

"Going back to shoot Russians, you mean."

"Hell. The first time around, you must have still been in your diapers."

Despite everything, we were able to laugh. Suddenly, in that sea of green cloth, I saw Lensen.

"Hey, Lensen! Over here!"

"I'll be damned," Lensen said, climbing over the fellows in the doorway.

"So you didn't desert!"

"And you didn't either!"

"It's not the same for me, though. I'm Prussian. I've got nothing in common with you black-haired bastards from the other side of Berlin."

"Good answer!" shouted one of the boys in the doorway. Lensen was laughing, but I knew that he had meant every word. "Look," he said. "There's another of our gang."

"Where?"

"Over there-the big fellow who thinks he's so tough." "Hals!"

I jumped down from the carriage. "Whoever quits the nest loses his nook," someone shouted.

"Hey, Hals!" I was already running to meet him. I could see his face lighting up.

"Sajer! I was wondering how I'd ever find you in this mob." "Lensen saw you."

"Is he here too?"

We turned back to the train. "Too late, boys. Full up."

"That's what you think!" shouted Hals, grabbing the legs of one of the kibitzers, and pulling him down onto the platform on his backside. Everybody laughed, and, with a jump, we were on board.

"Well, that's fine," said the fellow Hals had dislodged, rubbing his backside. "If this goes on, we'll be jammed in here like frankfurters in a box, and there won't be any room to sleep."

"So it's you, you bastard," said Hals, giving me a long stare. "I've been waiting to hear from you for two solid weeks."

"I'm really sorry ... but when I tell you what happened . . ." "You'd better make it good. It got so that I really didn't know what to say to my parents."

I gave my friend an account of my misadventures.

"Goddamn it," Hals said. "They certainly fucked you up, didn't they? If you'd only listened to me. We could have gone to Dortmund together. Plenty of alerts there too, of course, but the planes only passed over. You got it right in the neck."

"Well, that's life," I answered, in a mock-melancholy tone.

In reality, of course, the experiences of my leave left no regrets. If I had gone straight home with Hals I would never have met Paula.

And Paula had been able to obliterate for me all the sights and sounds of Tempelhof's blazing fires.

"You certainly have a long face," Hals said, commiserating with me.

But I didn't feel like talking. Hals quickly understood, and left me to myself. We were sprawled on the straw like animals, trying to sleep. Each piercing jolt of the wheels passing over the joints in the rails seemed to be adding to the barrier separating Paula from me. We passed through villages and towns and forests, all as dark as the night, and distances which stretched into infinity. The train seemed indefatigable, unending. At daybreak we were still rolling, and three hours later we were in lower Poland, crossing the Pinsk marshes, parallel to the rough, rutted roads pockmarked by war, and washed with sadness, and with the sweat of the armies that had tramped along them. The sky seemed inordinately large, and filled with the summer which the earth was denied. I fell asleep several times. Each time I woke the jolting wheels were still striking the same two notes: CLANG glang, CLANG, glang, CLANG, glang.

Finally, the train slowed down and stopped. The locomotive was re-supplied with coal and water at a pitiful hovel which passed for a station. We all jumped down onto the ballast, which was made of God knows what, to relieve ourselves. There was no question of official nourishment. German troop transports at that period were officially considered to be without that category of need, and no food would be distributed before Korosten. Luckily, nearly everyone had brought supplies from home-which is what the quartermaster general was counting on.

The train resumed its eastward journey. Hals tried to engage me in conversation several times, but always without success. I would have liked to tell him about Paula, but was afraid he'd treat it as a joke. We reached Korosten at nightfall, and were ordered to disembark, and line up beside a mess truck, which produced a revolting gruel. I felt very far from the excellent cooking of Frau X. When we had eaten, we all went to rinse our tins and drink at the tank which held water for the locomotives.

Then we set out again on a Russian train, which was no more comfortable than the one we'd just left, and into another eternity eastward. Trains were moving non-stop toward the front, both day and night. We had nearly reached our sector in less than three days. The Southern Front, where fierce fighting was under way at Kremenchug, had shifted, but our sector seemed almost unchanged. Our exhausting railway journey came to an end at Romny, where we had met with so many difficulties on the way out. From the train we were herded straight to the canteen, where we were given food and drink to quiet us as if we were frantic sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse. Then, with a haste which gave us no time to think, the military police called us out for our various units. It was very hot, and we would have been glad of a chance to sleep. A great many idle Russians stood and watched us, as though they were watching a fairground being prepared for a fair. When our group for the Gross Deutschland was called out, we were told to follow a sidecar, which led us to the edge of town. Instead of staying in first, or slowing down his machine, the bastard forced us onto the double. Heavily loaded, in that heat, we were nearly choking when we arrived at our designated position.

The stabsfeldwebel climbed down from his sidecar, called the other noncoms, to whom he distributed our marching orders, and divided up our group. In sections of forty or fifty at a time we marched off to our new camp. As we were commanded by fellows who were also just back from leave, and none too anxious to return to the firing line, we made numerous stops before arriving at Camp F of the Gross Deutschland Division, about twenty miles from Romny and over a hundred from Belgorod-out in the country, like Akhtyrka.

In this training camp for an elite division-all divisions with names instead of numbers were considered elite-one sweated blood and water. One was either hospitalized after a week of almost insane effort or incorporated into the division and marched off to the war, which was even worse.

We entered the camp through a large symbolic gateway cut into the trees of the forest which stretched away thickly to the northeast. Although we were marching in step, as we'd been ordered to do, and singing "Die Wolken Ziehn" at the tops of our lungs, we were still able to read the slogan which decorated the impressive entrance in large black letters, against a white ground:

WE ARE BORN TO DIE.

I don't think anyone could pass through that gate without a swallow of fear. A little further on another sign bore the words ICH DIENE (I serve).

Our noncoms marched us in impeccable order to the right-hand side of the rough courtyard, and ordered us to halt. A huge hauptmann walked over to us, flanked by two feldwebels.

"Stillgestanden!" shouted our group leader.

The giant captain saluted us with a slow but definitive gesture. Then he walked up and down our ranks, giving each of us a long stare. He was at least a head taller than anybody else. Even Hals seemed small beside this impressive personage. When he had petrified each of us with his astonishingly hard stare, he stepped back and rejoined the two felds, who were standing as still as the cedars of Jussieu.

"GOOD MORNING GENTLEMEN." His words sounded like stakes being driven into the earth.

"I CAN SEE ON YOUR FACES THAT YOU'VE ALL BEEN ENJOYING YOUR LEAVES, AND I'M VERY GLAD TO SEE IT."

Even the birds seemed to have been stilled by the sound of that voice.

"HOWEVER, TOMORROW YOU SHALL HAVE TO THINK OF THE WORK WHICH MUST ABSORB ALL OF US."

A dust-covered company had marched up to the gateway, but had stopped short, in order not to interrupt the captain's speech.

"TOMORROW A PERIOD OF TRAINING BEGINS FOR YOU, WHICH WILL TURN YOU INTO THE BEST FIGHTING MEN IN THE WORLD. FELDWEBEL," he shouted in a voice which was even louder,