Forgotten Soldier (44 page)

The proportion of sick men to healthy rose at an alarming rate. "A healthy mind in a healthy body" was the slogan our leaders had held up to us. Under the conditions of our retreat, it was often hard to tell which was affected first-mind or body. It seemed that well over half our men had nothing healthy about them.

Luckily, the weather remained frightful. This was particularly hard on the sick and feverish-undernourished, dehydrated men with filthy, suppurating wounds and bodies barely covered by torn, ragged uniforms. But anything the weather could produce-wind, rain, heavy clouds trailing down to the ground-was preferable to clear skies, which invariably meant the humming planes, diving down at us like carrion crows attacking a moribund animal. Indifferent to everything, we continued our slow march.

Two or three times a day, covering troops were organized and left behind to slow down the enemy, who were following at a leisurely pace. The men chosen for this task dug shallow holes which protected less than a quarter of their bodies, and waited, resigned, for the juggernaut to crush them.

We knew that we would never see them again. In other districts. entire regiments had been wiped out by Russian armored troops which had caught up with them. The retreat was costly, and reached its climax on the east bank of the river, in an incredible crush of men and materiel, spread out over acres of flat sand, so that each Russian missile was assured a maximum destructive effect. A healthy mind in a healthy body would have done everything possible to escape those circumstances.

Our eyes, which had grown used to accepting everything without surprise, gaped at the most astonishing sights.

Everyone reached the river, the outer boundary of safety, in a state of indescribable panic, only to find it was necessary to trample on the men already there, even drown them, to have any hope of getting onto the wretchedly inadequate vessels, which often foundered before they reached the other side.

On the eighth day, after skirting a broad hill, we reached the bank of the river, or, more precisely, the swarm of landser who covered the bank, hiding it completely. Through the noise and confusion we could hear the sound of engines, which we found curiously reassuring: working engines must mean there was gasoline somewhere. We knew that motorized transport was essential for such a huge country, and that even with motors we could only move very slowly because of the terrible roads. However, if we heard engines, it must at least mean that some reorganization had begun. Among the crowd of men there were many vehicles which had been dragged as far as the river despite almost insuperable obstacles, and were waiting in the long grass, which looked like dune grass. In fact, the engines we heard did not belong to refueled trucks, but to the boats-inadequate in size and number-which the engineers were using to move across as many men and machines as they could. Whenever materiel could be moved, it was given priority. Loading trucks and guns and light tanks onto vessels built to carry hay carts was not easy, but fortunately we had plenty of manpower to replace the cranes and derricks of a port-at least a hundred thousand at our point of arrival alone. I saw men standing up to their necks in water, supporting makeshift landing stages until the water rose over their chins-rickety, hastily improvised piers which collapsed as soon as their human props moved away. Half drowned, these men worked frantically against time, with extraordinary persistence and patience. The urgent task of transporting five divisions was not begun until two days after our arrival, when all materiel that could be moved was across the river. We had ten boats at our disposal, each with a maximum capacity of twenty men, four barges which had run out of gas and were towed in turn by two small boats equipped with B.M.W. portable engines, and four precarious pontoons, each with a capacity of 150 men.

At this point, south of Kiev, the Dnieper is about eight hundred yards wide. Had we chosen a section to the north of the city, we would have been in rich, densely populated country, where we would undoubtedly have been able to acquire plenty of boats for crossing, and where, in addition, the river often narrows to less than a hundred yards. There were also bridges in Kiev itself; some had undoubtedly been destroyed, but others must have been standing. . . . By the evening of the third day after our arrival at the river, at least ten thousand men had crossed to the west bank. First of all, the sick and wounded were taken, and I witnessed many instances of lightly wounded or sick men giving up their places to the more seriously injured. Although the rain was remorseless and savage, and we all were sickened by our diet of horse meat-often raw-we nonetheless made use of this forced delay to rest as much as we could.

During the night of our third or fourth day, everything turned hellish again. As we had feared, we heard the roar of war again as soon as the rain stopped-dull and unclear at first, and then unmistakable: the rumble of tanks moving slowly through the mud.

To begin with, there was only the noise, which in itself was enough to send a wave of terror through the eighty-five thousand men trapped beside the water. On the slopes littered with exhausted soldiers, thousands of men lifted their heads to verify the terrifying sound.

We stared through the darkness, trying to see the unseeable, frozen, for a minute, with our heads lifted to listen. Then, everywhere, shadowy figures began to move, with frantic, intensifying speed.

"Tanks!"

Every man grabbed his things and began to run toward what we knew was an insuperable barrier, hoping that the boats were still moving, and that somehow they would be able to take all of us at once.

We were packed in a dense crowd onto a narrow strip of ground beside the river, and the sound of our shouting voices rose above the heavy rumble of tanks which now filled the night. Frantic men were abandoning everything on the bank and plunging into the water to try to swim to the opposite shore; thousands of voices were shouting toward the gray water and the opposite bank, where they hoped they would at last be able to rest. Men waded out into the icy water until they lost their footing, and the sound of voices pleading and calling for help rose to such a pitch that the boats still operating hesitated to draw into shore for fear of being swamped. Madness seemed to be spreading like wildfire. Almost unconscious with exhaustion, I sat through about twenty minutes of panic with five or six other soldiers, collapsed onto a heap of packs which had been abandoned on the wet grass, letting the howling mob and the rush of events pass us by. Here and there, we could see other small groups like ours, moving only when the frantic stampede swept them along.

The officers, who had managed to keep some self-control, organized a few more or less conscious men, and ran to meet the mob, trying to stop them, like shepherds trying to control a herd of crazed sheep. They were able to reorganize a few groups, which they posted on the slopes of the hills to attempt interception of the Soviet tanks, if they should come that way. Our dense crowd of men stretched down the river bank as thinly as possible, to offer fewer opportunities for mass destruction by the T-34s which appeared about an hour and a half later. Fortunately, there were not many tanks, and they didn't linger, as their real objective was Kiev, where heavy fighting was in progress.

I stayed where I was, sitting on the heap of packs with a few strays, when we heard that a raft made of tires taken from the trucks parked nearby would be able to carry a certain number of landser across to the west bank. We ran several hundred yards upstream, and saw a tight .cluster of men beside the dark water. We quickly went over to them. There must have been about a hundred men wading in the mud. In the center of the group, about a dozen fellows were busily taking out the inner tubes of a heap of tires, and tying them together to make a raft -which would clearly never be large enough to hold everyone. We were greeted with unwelcoming stares, and given no encouragement to stay. Finally, a big fellow who was standing watching the work spoke to us: "You can see that this thing won't even take half the men here. Go on a little further-you'll be sure to find something."

He must have said more or less the same thing several times over to the fellows who'd arrived ahead of us, but most of them had stayed, hoping to get onto the raft somehow-even to fight their way on, if necessary. I had neither the build nor the strength to force my way onto a contraption that would probably sink anyway. So, despite the distant rumble which came to us in spurts on the wind, I went on up the river, accompanied by two stray artillerymen.

We walked through a damp, heavy fog, between clumps of dripping furze, past groups of frantic, terrified men pacing up and down that interminable bank. The fog grew steadily thicker, until at last it blotted out the countryside completely, and turned us into Chinese shadow puppets. We could no longer tell which way we were going, and were gripped by continual anxiety that we were walking in the wrong direction. Luckily, from time to time someone would check on the position of the river, and shout out into the darkness: "Ach gut! das Wasser ist da."

We went on without thinking, unaware that if we followed the river long enough we would arrive at Kiev, which was the heart of the fighting. No one seemed capable of any logical, connected thought, but the constant fear, exhaustion, and threat of tanks kept us moving, trying to get away. It didn't really matter where we might get to, or how -just away.

The darkness of the night was continually broken by flares, and by the noise of guns. A group of men passed by, invisible, but quite close to judge by the sound of their voices.

"Achtung! Ivans! Achtung!"

I looked imploringly at the man from the artillery who had been stumbling along beside me for more than half an hour, but received nothing except the fixed stare of a hunted animal. We no longer understood anything. We had thought the Russians were on our right, behind the hills-but the firing was coming from the river bank, which was on our left.

Expecting the Russians to begin shooting at us at any minute, we began to run, to look for some hole or hollow where we could hide. Once we had flattened ourselves down into what seemed to be a shallow frog pond, we tried to grasp the facts of our situation.

A noncom in our group thought the Popovs must be patrolling in boats, knocking off Germans whenever they could. To judge by the lights of the explosions, which were sometimes hundreds of yards apart, there must have been several Russian boats. The darkness which hid our trapped men rang with the sounds of our frantic disorder.

Shells were coming in from the west, and landing somewhere to the east of us, beyond the hills. This comforted us somewhat; since the shells were falling beyond the hills, they must be landing on the Russians, and our men must be firing them. The artilleryman remarked in a pleased and knowing voice: "Those are ours all right. I'd know that yap anywhere."

"I never thought we'd get any help," said a soldier who had just joined us.

In the end, the shelling lasted only ten minutes, and probably had very little effect, as there was no effort to aim it with any precision. The fog had grown so thick that the glow of the discharges of the 77s was almost invisible, emerging from the darkness and vanishing again, as if we were watching through a thin, semi-transparent cloth. But, although the fog was thicker, the air had also grown astonishingly cold, stabbing our lungs every time we took a breath.

"My God, it's cold," someone said.

The temperature of the water, which came to the middle of our boots, must have been close to freezing. Despite their remarkable resistance to water, our boots had at last become waterlogged, and our feet felt frozen.

"We can't keep on like this," said the artilleryman, almost laughing. "We've got to get out of here, or we'll catch our deaths. Anyway, why should we be afraid of our own guns?"

My boots each seemed to weigh a ton: a ton of dense, solid matter which was, in fact something like 95 percent water.

The exhaustion we had been dragging about with us for days increased the fear we could no longer control. Fear intensified our exhaustion, as it required constant vigilance. We had learned to see in the dark, like cats, but on that particular night no look, however penetrating, could pierce the fog, which was as thick as a London pea souper. I could no longer breathe through my clogged nose, and only drew in through my pursed lips the bare minimum necessary to sustain life. We seemed to be moving through a mixture of water and sulphur, and each icy breath stabbed me with hundreds of sharp points, all the way down to my empty stomach.

I remembered the veteran's advice, but couldn't think of anything convincingly warm or dry, so I began deliberately to recollect pleasant things that had happened to me, that I might have experienced a long time ago. But this proved almost impossibly difficult; my mind filled only with unpleasant memories. The hunched back of the soldier in front of me could not be transformed into the back of my mother busy with some household task on a long winter evening, or my brother's back, or the back of anyone I had ever known in peacetime. All I saw was a silhouette of the history of the war, and Russia, which memories of youth could not blot out. It seemed as if the war would mark men for life. They might forget women, or money, or how to be happy, but they would never forget the war, which spoiled everything-even the joy which was bound to come, like the victory ahead. The laughter of men who lived through the war has something forced and desperate about it. It does them no good to say that they must now make use of the experience; their mechanisms have been run too hard, and something has gone out of balance. Laughter no longer has any more value for them than tears.

The back of the soldier in front of me filled me with pity and respect and even exasperation. I felt like hitting him until he fell, so that he would be on a level with the war. But, if that man fell, there would be another right after him, and then thousands more after that thousands of hunched backs swollen by acid fog. Russia is still full of backs like that, the hunched backs of men who have forgotten how to dream, and it will take more toil and war, too, before they all have been toppled.