Forgotten Soldier (33 page)

"What the hell are we doing here?" Hals said finally. His face had grown noticeably harder since Bialystok.

I limited myself to a gesture of ignorance.

"I'd like to sleep, but I can't," he said. "Yes. It's just as hot in here as outside." "Let's go out anyway."

We went out and took a few steps. The light was blinding.

"Maybe there's some cold water over there," I said, pointing to an orchard divided by a thin stream.

"I'm not thirsty-not hungry either," Hals answered to my great surprise. I was used to his enormous appetite.

"Are you sick?"

"No. I just feel like vomiting. I'm so tired-and those fellows over there don't help either." He nodded at the thirty putrefying corpses in the little garden.

"That's always how it is, with fellows who won't make any more trouble," I answered, in a tone which still surprises me.

"Ours were picked up before we got here," Hals continued.

"There's some freshly turned ground just inside the village. I don't know how many they were able to stuff in there. Do you know how many we've had killed already?"

We were silent for a moment.

"We'll probably be relieved soon, Hals."

"Yes," he said. "I hope so. We really were shits to kill those Popovs at the bread house."

He was clearly desperately troubled by the same things that troubled me.

"The bread house is how it is, and all there is," I answered.

I could still feel the cartridges running through my hands, see them entering the spandau, and see the bluish smoking metal of the barrel and the sparks that flew out each time the gun fired, painfully striking my hands and face, and hear the shrieks penetrating the infernal din, and the cries for help: "Pomoshch! Pomoshch!" Something hideous had entered our spirits, to remain and haunt us forever.

It was broad daylight, but we had no idea what time it was. Was it still morning? Was it afternoon? It didn't matter: everyone ate and drank when he could, slept when he could, and tried to think whenever he could take off his helmet. It's strange how much a helmet interferes with thought....

It was still daylight when an enemy barrage ripped into the orchards and the advancing troops, who had stopped only a short distance from us. We dived into our cellar shelter, and stared anxiously at the ceiling, which rained down plaster with each explosion.

"We'll have to shore it up too," said the veteran. "If anything lands too close, the whole thing will come down on our heads."

The bombardment lasted for at least two hours. A few Soviet shells fell right beside us, but they were clearly intended for the assault troops. Our big guns answered theirs, and all other sounds were drowned in the noise of artillery. Shells from our howitzer were shooting right over our ruin, contributing as much to the collapse of our ceiling as the Russian shells which sometimes burst less than thirty yards away.

During the bombardment, we were all gripped by an extreme and exhausting tension. Some of us attempted predictions, only to be contradicted by events a few moments later. The veteran smoked nervously, continuously begging us to shut up. Kraus had drawn apart and sat muttering in a corner. Perhaps he was praying.

In the evening, one of the counter-attack units visited us, and installed an anti-tank gun nearby. A colonel came by a little later and tested the new supports we had put in to prevent any further collapse of the roof.

"Well done," he said. He made the rounds of our little group, offering each man a cigarette. Then he rejoined his unit, which was part of the Gross Deutschland, a little closer to the front.

It grew dark. Through the tattered silhouettes of the remaining orchard trees, the horizon glowed red with fire. The battle was not yet over, and the extreme tension it generated was almost unbearable. We had to take turns standing guard outside, and no one had a good night's sleep. We were rounded up well before dawn and forced to abandon our well-organized hole and proceed further into Soviet territory. The German advance had not been stopped.

During our advance, we crossed a frightful slaughtering ground of Hitlerjugend, mixed into the dirt by the bombardment of the day before. Each step made us realize with fresh horror what could become of our miserable flesh.

"Somebody should have buried all this mincemeat so we wouldn't have to look at it," Hals grumbled.

Everyone laughed, as if he'd just said something funny.

We crossed a piece of ground so heavily pitted with shell holes it was hard to imagine that anyone who'd been on it could have survived, and an open-air hospital behind an embankment from which the shrieks and groans came so thick and fast it sounded like a scalding room for pigs. We were staggered by what we saw. I thought I would faint. Lindberg was crying with terror. We crossed the enclosure with our eyes fixed on the sky, seeing as if in a dream young men howling with pain, with crushed forearms or gaping abdominal wounds, staring with incomprehension at their own guts puffing out the piece of cloth which had been hastily flung over them.

Immediately beyond the hospital, we had to wade across a canal. The cool water which rose over our waists made us feel much better. On the far bank, the springing turf was strewn with Russian bodies. A Soviet tank, twisted and blackened by fire, stood beside a big gun and the shattered bodies of its operators. To our left, in the northeast, the battle continued more fiercely than ever. We thought we heard a groan from one of the Russian gunners, and went over to a man smeared with blood, who was leaning, gasping, against one of the wheels of the gun carriage. One of our men uncorked his drinking bottle, and lifted the head of the dying man. The Russian stared at us through enormous eyes, widened by terror or shock. He cried out, and then his head fell back, thudding against the metal of the wheel. He was dead.

We continued across a series of rolling wooded hills, where our front-line troops were regrouping and catching a moment's rest in the shade of the trees. Many men wore bandages, whose whiteness stood out sharply against their gray, dusty faces. We were rapidly regrouped, called out, and sent to precise locations.

The two grenadiers who had joined us were sent somewhere else, while our 8th group was completed by a new pair of strays. Unfortunately, the stabsfeldwebel whom I've mentioned before, and who had only one more day of life, was made the leader of our group. We were swiftly attached to an armored section which transported us on the backs of their machines to the edge of an enormous plateau, which seemed to stretch into infinity....

We jumped off the backs of the moving Panzers to join a group of soldiers lying flat at the bottom of a shallow trench. Already, several 50-mm. rounds fired directly at us by enemy artillery had brought it home to us that we were in the front line. The tanks turned back, and vanished under the trees some fifty yards behind us.

We plunged down beside the fellows who were already there, who seemed none too cheerful. The Russian fire followed the tanks, and was lost in the brush. Our idiot stabsfeldwebel was already feeling uneasy about the distractions of the neighborhood, and was discussing them with a very young lieutenant. Then the young officer waved to his men, who followed him toward the woods, running, and bent nearly double. The Popovs, who must have been watching, sent over five or six rounds aimed directly at them. Some of their bullets landed very close to us.

Once again we were alone-nine of us in a hole, facing the Soviet lines. The sun was directly above us.

"Get cracking on that hole, now," shouted the stabs in a perfect parade-ground voice.

We began to turn over the dusty Ukrainian soil with our short pick-spades. We barely had time to speak. The heat of the sun was crushing, and increased our lassitude.

"We'll probably die of exhaustion before anything else has a chance to get us," Hals said. "I give up."

"My head is killing me," I answered with a sigh.

But our bastard stabs kept after us, staring anxiously out over the grassless plain, which stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see.

We had just finished setting up our two spandaus when the noise of tanks rolling over the brush behind us made us shudder.

On that magnificent summer afternoon, German tanks were once again leaving the shade and driving toward the east. From behind them, entire regiments, bent double, passed us and vanished into a wall of dust, which hid them from view. About five minutes later, the Russians began a bombardment of unprecedented ferocity. Everything became opaque, and the sun vanished from our eyes, which had become enormous with fright. The storm cloud of dust was relieved only by continuous red flashes shooting up against the darker masses of trees eighty or a hundred yards away. The earth shook harder than I'd yet felt it do, and the brush behind us burst into flame. Screams of fear froze in our constricted throats. Everything seemed displaced. The air all around us was filled with flying clods, mixed with fragments of metal and fire. Kraus and one of the newcomers were buried in a landslide before they even knew what had happened to them. I threw myself into the deepest corner of our hole, and stared uncomprehendingly at the stream of earth flooding towards our shelter. I began to howl like a madman. Hals pressed his filthy head against mine, and our helmets clattered together like two mess tins. Hals's face was transfigured by terror.

"It's ... the ... end," he gasped, his words broken up by the explosions, which took away our breath.

Overwhelmed by horror, I could only agree.

Suddenly, a human figure crashed into our hole. We both trembled with desperation and fright. Then a second human shape joined the first, in a great leap. This time our huge eyes took in that these were two of our own men. One of the newcomers shouted to us through his frantic gasps for breath: "My whole company was wiped out! It's terrible!"

He carefully lifted his head just over the edge of the embankment as a series of explosions began to rip through the air beside us. His helmet and a piece of his head were sent flying, and he fell backward, with a horrifying cry. His shattered skull crashed into Hals's hands, and we were

splattered with blood and fragments of flesh. Hals threw the revolting cadaver as far as he could, and buried his face in the dirt.

The explosions had become so violent that we felt the ground all around us must be shifting. Outside our hole, on the torn and ravaged plain, we could hear an engine roaring out of control. Then there was another explosion, more violent than all the others, and an enormous flash of light swept the edge of our trench. Our two spandaus fell back on top of us in a wave of loose earth. Those who weren't struck dumb with fright howled like madmen:

"We're finished!"

"Mama! It's me!"

"No, no!"

"We'll be buried alive!"

"Help!"

But nothing we said could put an end to this hell, which seemed to go on forever....

About thirty soldiers on the run plunged in with us. We were kicked and shoved without mercy, as everyone tried to burrow down as deeply as possible. Whoever was left on top was finished. The earth all around us was pocked with thousands of shell holes, and from each of these we could hear the sounds of fleeing soldiers looking for refuge. But the cruel Russian soil was torn by fresh salvoes, and those who thought they'd been saved continued to die.

We heard the roar of airplane engines, and cheers for the Luftwaffe rose from thousands of desperate men. The bombardment continued for a few more seconds, and then decreased dramatically.

The officers who were still alive blew their whistles for retreat, and the men packed into our hole poured out like rabbits chased by a ferret. We were about to follow when our stabsfeldwebel, who hadn't yet been killed, shouted loudly after us: "Not you! We're here to stop a Russian counteroffensive. Get your guns ready to fire."

Six Hitlerjugend cadavers were lying on the bottom of the trench, which had completely changed shape. To the left, one end was caved in, and Kraus's boots were sticking out of two cubic yards of gray dirt. The other grenadier had been completely buried.

With the help of the veteran, whose face was streaming with blood, we were able to get the F.M. back into place. The plain, which had been altered beyond recognition, was scarred with holes and lumps, as if giant moles had been at work. Wherever one looked, there were smoke and flame and a scattering of motionless bodies. In the distance, through spirals of dust and smoke, we could see geysers of fire from the bombs which our ME-110's were dropping on the Russian artillery. It looked as though we'd hit a couple of their ammunition dumps. The shock waves from those explosions engulfed the earth and sky in an extraordinary intensity of light and displacement of air.

"Those bastards!" shouted the ober. "Now they're getting what they deserve."

Our ME-110's turned back to the west, and the Russian artillery opened up again. They were concentrating particularly on the Panzers, which were retreating in disorder, with at least half their number destroyed.

Although my left arm had almost been broken when the gang of panic-stricken soldiers jumped into the trench on top of us, I had felt nothing at the time. Now, it was beginning to cause me violent pain, which hovered beside me like a supplementary presence; but I was too busy to pay much attention to it. The bombardment was continuing to the north and to the south, and then passed over us once again, intensifying and spreading its complement of pain and terror. Our group of stupefied men could breathe only with difficulty, like an invalid who gets up after a long illness to find he has lost both strength and wind. We were all unable to speak: there was nothing to say then about the hours we had just lived through, and there is no way of describing them now with the vehemence and force they require. Nothing remains for those who have survived such an experience but a sense of uncontrollable imbalance, and a sharp, sordid anguish which reaches across the years un-blunted and undiminished, even for someone like me, who is attempting to translate it into words, although a precise and appropriate vocabulary remains elusive.