Forgotten Soldier (43 page)

"We still have one hope," he went on, "a swift and brutal breakthrough by all our forces pressing at a single point. This point must be to the west, and we shall engage all our units at once. The success of this attempt depends on the courage of every one of us. There will only be one attempt, and it must be successful. There are some strong infantry units which will be going into action to help us, on the other side of the Russian ring. If each one of us performs his duty, I feel confident that we shall break out of the Bolshevik noose. I know the qualities of the German soldier."

Wesreidau saluted and requested us to get ready.

Our companies were directed to the points from which they were to press our final assault. There were many wounded men among us, more deserving of a warm bed than of further battles, and fellows like me, who were sick. The vast majority were utterly exhausted, staring with infinite weariness from glittering feverish eyes. These were the troops Wesreidau had been exhorting to an excess of courage: valiant German soldiers who looked more like worn-out stock ready for the slaughterhouse.

And yet we had to attack, or die. At that time, there was no question of captivity. As always, after a hard knock, we rediscovered a kind of unity, and seemed to be held together by tighter bonds. What provoked the sentiments of generosity which brought out the last cigarettes, or the chocolates so rare they were usually devoured in secret, a fraction at a time, inciting all the scum to fake friendship, leading the noncoms, who had probably been mixed up with every kind of dirt in civilian life, to pat a suspected possessor on the shoulder and talk of trust and faith, when they were really hinting for a bite, just like everyone else? Where did they come from, precisely when no one could use them?

I was sick of the whole thing. My stomach was turning over and I felt cold. I looked for Hals or some other friend, but couldn't see any familiar faces. They must all have been sent to a different position. For me, they had become almost like relatives, and their absence weighed on me. I felt very much alone among these mutilated men with their raging fevers, trying to find some excuse for hope and encouragement. I myself began to daydream about a soft bed with silk covers, imitating the veteran, who liked to dream aloud about beds like that, which he himself had never known. Even before the war, he'd been an unfortunate and unhappy man, but he knew how to dream. Sometimes, as his bony body lay stretched out on the hard ground, he smiled in a way which suggested such a powerful sense of well-being that I am sure, in those moments at least, he was unaware of the harshness of his situation, and that his dream was more powerful than reality. I myself was not yet that well trained, and my dreams could not obliterate the feverish vise which gripped my temples.

Straight ahead, to the west, the smoke had climbed so high it blotted out the sky, and the distant horizon was ringed with fire. What substance could be feeding such a huge conflagration?

Companies of men black with dust and soot were pouring back, on the run. It seemed that our first contact with the Russians had not been in our favor. The retreating troops left a certain number of wounded with us, but no one knew what to do with them. The medical teams, which at best were inadequate, had already packed up and gone, or were about to leave. The wounded men were left lying in the street where they had been put down, trying to stanch- the flood of their own blood, which was often pouring from several wounds at once. Everyone tried to help as much as possible, but we were capable only of ludicrous gestures. The most extraordinary scenes unfolded in front of our incredulous eyes. As we were sponging off a fellow who'd passed out, a fat Gefreiter came to help us, explaining that he'd just dropped a fellow with a smashed knee.

"He was making too much noise, and I couldn't stand it. Give me someone who's knocked out, any time."

For the moment, our stretch of cleared street was not under bombardment. The battle was raging directly ahead, as well as to the northwest and southwest. Directly to the north, the Russian artillery was raking over the ruins like a monstrous plough. However, as a few of the retreating men huddled beside us trying to catch their breaths, the Russian fire shifted, and began to sweep through our position like a giant scythe. Our officers' orders were drowned by the shouts of the men, and the uproar of a frantic stampede for shelter.

Our jostling and cries for help and screams of panic were finally obliterated by explosions. Everyone who was able to had run off the street. The slightest protuberance offered some hope of survival, as a wall of fire passed over the two thousand troops concentrated on that spot. The wounded, abandoned in the open, lay writhing in the dust. Through the uproar, we could hear the sound of disarticulated bodies falling back to the ground in broken pieces. As at Belgorod, the earth shook, and everything trembled and grew dim, as the whole landscape suddenly became mobile. The filthy hands of ill and wounded men resigned to death scratched the ground for one last time, and the lined faces of veterans who believed they had already seen everything were transformed by desperate, imploring panic. Quite near us, behind a heap of tiles, a Russian shell scored a bull's eye, exploding in the midst of eleven men who had huddled together like children caught in a sudden rain. The Russian shell landed in the precise center of their trembling group, mixing flesh and bones and tiles in a torrent of blood.

Chance, which continued to favor me, had driven me along with three companions to the shelter of a staircase in a roofless house. The building was hit on all sides during the bombardment, and the cellar filled with broken beams and other debris. However, thanks to our extraordinary helmets, our heads survived intact. When the thunder stopped for a moment and we heard the screams of the newly wounded, we looked outside. The horror of what we saw was so overwhelming that we fell back, as if paralyzed, onto the shaky stairs.

"God help us," someone shouted. "There's nothing but blood." "We've got to get away from here," screamed another voice, in a tone close to madness.

He ran outside, and we followed him. The air was filled with bestial cries. Everyone who'd been lucky enough to survive was falling back to the west, where, as always, safety lay, and now the front, and the gap through which we would try to escape. Anyone who could still stand was helped. The wounded grabbed at the men running past. Two haggard soldiers in front of me were dragging a third man through the dust, probably a friend who was nearly dead. How long had they pulled him along like that, and how long would it take them to dump him?

I can no longer tell how long our stampede lasted, through the anonymous ruins and thick smoke and roaring guns. The Russians were firing at us from all sides, at close range, with 50-mm. guns. We staggered on carrying the wounded as best we could.

In complete disorder, we came to a railroad track strewn with the burnt-out wreckage of a train, and a few Russian corpses. We trampled over them with a kind of fierce delight, taking our revenge for their artillery and their 50-mm. fire. The tracks ran through a kind of trench. We galloped down it, passing a second train as still and broken as the first. Some of our vehicles seemed to be parked there too, surrounded by a crowd of soldiers and several Panzermanner. We ran right into a group of officers. Wesreidau, who had stayed with us throughout, was one of them. We were given a few minutes' rest, and everyone dropped where he stood. To the southwest, the din seemed to have increased tenfold, and made my head swim.

Then we received a fresh blow. Wesreidau and two of his aides ran through the groups of exhausted men.

"Get up! Get moving! We've got to push on now! The division has broken through. If you don't hurry, we'll be caught in the trap, so get the hell up! We're the last ones left."

Already, men half dead with exhaustion were staggering to their feet. The noncoms tapped on the shoulders of the stronger men, who were trying to help the wounded comrades they had carried out of town, and told them not to bother any more.

"Don't load yourself with anyone who can't walk. You'll need all the strength you've got just to make it yourself."

And so we were forced to abandon a great many men to an almost inconceivably horrible fate, despite their desperate pleas for help. Half paralyzed by terror and fear, men who had lost almost all their blood managed to get up and even hide their pain so that they would be allowed to walk beside the healthy. The heroism, pathos, and determination of our breakout exceeds by far my powers of description. Men who had always been cowards became heroes despite themselves. A great many managed to cover barely half the distance.

We fought our way through the fires of hell, losing almost half of our remaining men, as we pushed for more than nine hours, from shell hole to shell hole, along the famous and tragic Konotop-Kiev road, past burnt-out tanks and piles of hundreds of shriveled corpses.

You who perhaps will some day read these lines may also remember that one evening in the autumn of 1943 the bulletins announced that German troops caught in Konotop had managed to break out of a Russian trap. This was true. Of course, the price was never mentioned, because it didn't matter. For you, the day of deliverance was coming.

CROSSING THE DNIEPER

The rain blew in from the horizon in waves.

Occasionally a brief moment of light enabled us to spot the next undulating curtain of water sweeping across the streaming steppe. It had rained steadily for two days, and despite the discomfort and inconvenience we hoped the rain would last for at least that long again. In another two days, if we could maintain our rate of thirty miles a day, and had any luck at all, we should reach the Dnieper.

No planes could fly through such a torrential downpour, so there had been no Yaks-and every day without Yaks was a reprieve from death for hundreds of men. The extraordinary mobility of the Wehrmacht-one of its principal sources of strength up to that moment had entirely disappeared in that part of Russia, and the men from Army Group Center were plodding toward the river in interminable columns at the rate of three miles an hour. Our mobility, which had always given us an advantage over the vast but slow Soviet formations, was now only a memory, and the disproportion of numbers made even flight a doubtful prospect. Moreover, the equipment of the Red Army was constantly improving, and we often found ourselves pitted against extremely mobile motorized regiments of fresh troops. To complete our disarray, the Soviet troops which had been tied up in the attempt to trap us at Konotop were now free to pursue our slow withdrawal.

German aviation, which was entirely occupied south of Cherkassy, had abandoned our part of the sky to the Yaks, which took advantage of this freedom to harass us unmercifully. So, despite our heavy, waterlogged clothes, worn-out boots, fever, and the impossibility of lying down except on the soaking ground, we blessed fortune for sending us gray skies and rain.

During the morning, five Bolshevik planes had appeared despite the weather. Our harassed men reacted with an automatic impulse of self-defense and self-preservation, staring desperately at the flat plain for somewhere to hide. But, like animals caught in a trap, we understood there was no way out. The companies in a direct line of fire dropped to one knee, in the regulation position for anti-aircraft defense. These companies received the Yaks' fire, and saw several men torn to pieces by Russian bullets, but nevertheless managed to bring down one of the planes. It was our bad luck that the plane went into a spin, and fell directly onto our convoy, crushing a truck full of wounded men, and opening a crater twenty yards wide filled with shattered flesh. No one cried out: in fact, almost no one looked. We simply picked up our burdens and went on.

We were all too exhausted to react, and almost nothing stirred our emotions. We had all seen too much. In my sick and aching brain, life had lost its importance and meaning, and seemed of no more consequence than the power of motion one lends to a marionette, so that it can agitate for a few seconds. Of course, there was friendship-there were Hals and Paula-but immediately behind them was that hole full of guts, red, yellow, and foul smelling; piles of guts, almost as large as the earth itself. Life could be snuffed out like that, in an instant, but the guts remained for a long time, stamped on the memory.

We walked without stopping. The interminable line of men ahead curved in a semicircle which seemed to be standing still. The Dnieper was not yet in sight. We had planned to reach it in five days, but we were now in the sixth, ploughing through the mud at an average speed of two or two and a half miles an hour. I had never seen a countryside so huge and so empty. The trucks and other vehicles which had gas had all passed us long ago. The rest were pulled by the few half-starved nags we had not already killed and eaten. From time to time, someone gave up his place on a crowded steiner, pulled by two horses, to continue on foot. We were under orders not to abandon materiel for any reason whatever. We were supposed to receive more gasoline-God knows how -probably by air-so that we could continue to drive our machines. In fact, one morning we did receive a delivery from aircraft. Two JU-52s threw down eight large packages of rope, which we retrieved with derision. We were supposed to use them for tying our vehicles to the tanks which had been destroyed at Konotop the week before. In default of gas, our gaunt horses stubbornly pulled our vehicles through the gluey muck which had been freshly trampled by thirty retreating regiments. Our steiner, on which I had hung all my gear, was pulled by two Rhenish horses, probably taken from their peacetime labor about a year before. One of them was covered with sores, and his eyes glittered with fever.

Two days later, on the bank of the Dnieper, our brave horse received his reward. A noncom from the cavalry shot him in the head, along with some ten others. Very few horses were allowed onto the pontoons, whose capacity was inadequate even for the men, and nothing could be left behind which might be useful to the Russians. In a way, this was the beginning of our "scorched earth" policy.