Forgotten Soldier (52 page)

One of the men in our group was a new recruit, very young and tall and stringy, like a weed that has grown too fast in a spell of damp weather. His enormous gazelle-like eyes stared at the anonymous vastness of the landscape, which he was clearly incapable of absorbing. He was visibly affected by the loss of his native dimensions: the short vistas of the Rhineland had never led him to suspect that such a huge scale was possible.

A year ago, I had felt the same way.

The cold, which had turned dry after ten days of snow and cloudy skies, made the landscape into a white screen against which darker objects were startlingly visible. The wind of the preceding days had swept across the snow, piling it up against every barrier, filling in hollows, and leaving brown patches of bare soil in other places, like great stains. As long as we didn't have to make any excessive detours, we preferred to follow the bare patches. Every hour, we stopped for a short rest.

Five or six planes flew by to the south. We froze for a minute, trying to discern their purpose, but they vanished over the horizon before we were able to distinguish whether they were Yaks or ME-109's.

By lunchtime, we were still unsure of our bearings. The noncom responsible for getting us to our destinations claimed that we were moving in the right direction, but his face and voice betrayed his panic.

Country on such a vast scale cannot be trifled with.

One can play explorer in the forest of Fontainebleau, but not on the tundra, where one feels too small and trivial for games. The hostile indifference of nature seems so overwhelming it is almost necessary to believe in God.

We walked for a long time, and finally came to a line of telegraph poles stuck unevenly into the ground. They were following the edge of a road which we could see was in use, as it was deeply marked by fresh ruts.

The noncom decided we should take the road to the south, as the quickest way of finding our units. This seemed odd, as it was clear that we would be proceeding perpendicular to our previous direction. However, no one hesitated. We had long ago learned that it was useless to argue points which had lost all meaning. We also felt heavily oppressed by the prospect of a night in the open-the first of a long series which would require all the patience and endurance we could muster. For a fraction of a second the thought of my wrecked leave flared through my consciousness like a shooting star in the night sky. I swallowed hard, and everything sank back into uniform gray.

The weedy young recruit remained speechless. His astonished eyes moved from the snowy steppe to the faces of the experienced veterans we seemed to be. Trusting us as a shepherd trusts the stars, he plodded dutifully on.

We suddenly caught sight of a massive object buried in the snow about five hundred yards ahead of us. A long gun barrel poked through the white crust, and we realized we were facing a camouflaged tank. Of course, it was one of ours, otherwise we would all have been dead. The Panther was buried up to its turret, and behind it two or three bulges indicated bunkers. Suddenly a fellow appeared on top of the tank, wearing a sheepskin vest over his black tank-corps uniform. He jumped down and walked out to meet us, shouting his name. We did the same, according to the custom of the times. He told us that when his tank had broken down he had been ordered to half bury it and turn it into a blockhouse. With considerable difficulty, he and the eight other men with him had carried out the order. Separated from their armored unit by the force of circumstances, they had been standing guard over this vast, empty panorama for three weeks now. Once in that time some Russians had come by, but the tank's two S.M.G.s had forced them to pass far to one side. This accident had transformed them into an official surveillance post, and they were due to be relieved in two weeks' time. They had been there for three weeks already, and admitted that it was difficult to sleep really soundly at night.

"Where is the front?" our noncom asked.

"More or less everywhere," the other said. "And mostly mobile units. In the evenings, convoys come through on the track. They never have their lights on, and every time it scares us to death. A plane knocked our radio out, so we're completely cut off. It's enough to drive a fellow mad."

"We're supposed to be rejoining our units," the noncom explained. "Do you think we've still got far to go?"

"Well, the front is certainly five or ten miles east of here. But it's very fluid. It's impossible to be exact."

We all felt extremely perplexed.

"Let's go along that way," our guide said finally. "We're bound to find something."

The tank crew watched us go with regret. With darkness, which fell earlier than we had expected, accompanied by a heavy fog, we arrived at the precarious approximation of a front which existed in that sector. A few arbitrarily disposed Paks emerged from the darkness, and a sentry, green with terror, shouted, "Wer da?" in a trembling voice. The same terror made our noncom squeak an incomprehensible reply. Our preservation from the guns of our own men could only be laid to a simple collapse of vigilance. A frozen, ill-tempered soldier led us to the company commander.

"The Russians come through this way from any direction," he said as we walked along.

"It's pretty demoralizing, and unless the front is stabilized again, it'll go on this way, as far as I can see. Anyway, the regiment you're looking for isn't around here."

We ran into the company commander, a captain, coming up from a candle-lit hole. He looked old and ill. His long overcoat was thrown carelessly over his shoulders, and his chest was covered by a thick, pale scarf which stood out against the gray green of his uniform. He wore a forage cap instead of a helmet. We snapped to attention out of habit. The officer studied our map, trying to find some helpful directions he might give us. He seemed bewildered. The map included very few details, which made it almost as easy to get lost on paper as it was on the ground. He made some deductions in the light of a pocket flashlight, and decided to send us to the northeast. As the regiments were disposed, ours must be in that direction. This seemed a long way from the orderly procedures of the Gross Deutschland office in Vinnitsa.

Despite the exhaustion of the long, painful march on which we had been engaged since dawn, we set off again, into the icy, foggy darkness. Three-quarters of an hour later, some fellows in a company buried in that white desert huddled a little closer in their shelter to make room for us. We had to stop, or we might have been lost for good. The acid, almost palpable fog burned our throats and made every effort excessively painful. We managed to fall asleep despite the cold, which, as always, was much harder to bear at the beginning of the season, before our bodies were used to it. Outside, in the trenches, the sentries were stamping up and down to keep from freezing on their feet. The veil of fog wrapped them round completely, cutting them off from everything that lay beyond their parapets.

We spent a harassed night of half sleep. Despite the lamp-heaters and the canvas stretched across the mouth of our shelter, the cold, still only relative at the beginning of the season, was severe enough to make us feel half frozen. The thermometer must have fallen to as low as fifteen degrees, and the fog poured in, almost as thick as outdoors. The troops passed the time as best they could, either sunk in sleep despite the discomfort, or playing Skat, or writing home with a pen precariously balanced between numbed fingers. The candles, on which they had been ordered to economize as much as possible, were stuck into empty tins which caught the melting wax, prolonging their lives by as much as four or five times. The memory of those bunkers buried in the wildness of the steppe still haunts my memory, like a legendary tale heard in childhood.

The demoralizing dawn cold greeted us as we left the hole. Silently, we resumed our march and our search. Everything was quiet, as if paralyzed by the cold, as dangerous an enemy as the Red Army. For a long time, we walked parallel to a frieze of barbed wire, coated with frost. The fog, which had not yet lifted, clung to the wire in minute drops which froze instantly.

Toward the end of the morning, two-thirds of our group at last found their regiment, whose officers were able to tell us the approximate positions of the other two regiments we still had to find. More precisely, for the sixteen of us still at loose ends, we were looking for two regiments and three companies-the young recruit and I, for example, belonged to separate companies-and the weather was no help. The inescapable necessity of trial and error added a considerable number of miles to our progress. We grew increasingly angry. How could our instructions have been so vague? Organizational failure of this kind were particularly hard on German troops, who were accustomed to the utmost efficiency. In fact, the centers of responsibility had practically ceased to exist. The extraordinarily tight army organization, which had functioned so superbly in Poland and France and all the smaller countries invaded by the Wehrmacht, was lost in the immensity of Russia, where the front was nearly fifteen hundred miles long. Our rapidly dwindling transport capability further complicated the situation during the terrible winter, which was to be followed by only one more.

Our group of sixteen men was made up of fourteen fellows belonging to one unit; myself, attached to another; and the tall young recruit, who was looking for still a third. To be exact, he and I belonged to two separate companies in the same regiment.

Just before dark, the main group of fourteen ran into their unit unexpectedly, as had the others. The young fellow and I were left to fend for ourselves on the icy track already packed hard by endless comings and goings. Feverish with anxiety, we pursued our tentative route, passing through a half-deserted hamlet. The few soldiers occupying it, dressed as they pleased, or as they could, stared at us in silence. We felt embarrassed and frightened.

According to our instructions, we were to keep on to the northeast. As long as there was any light, we tried to fix reference points on the slightest hollow or hump in the ground, on features more imaginary than real, which we projected onto the infinite monotony. We kept the earthworks and trenches of the front on our right. However, the fog soon reduced the possibilities of navigation to nil.

Despite my youth, it seemed that circumstances required me to assert myself. The other fellow was looking at me with wild, questioning eyes. I suggested digging a hole deep enough to cover with our two canvases to make a shelter for the night. This idea terrified my companion, who wanted to keep going.

"Our regiment must be quite close now," he said.

"You're crazy," I said. "We can't keep on like this. We'll only get completely lost, and then the wolves will eat us."

"Wolves?"

"Yes, wolves. And there are plenty of other things about Russia even worse than that."

"But they could come after us right here, too."

"Of course-if we're in the open. But once we're under canvas they'll leave us alone. And then if they do come, we'll shoot them."

"Well, then it comes to the same thing. And by tomorrow, we won't remember any of the directions."

"We're following a sort of track, aren't we? We'll keep on with it tomorrow, and that's that. Believe me, it's the best thing to do."

I finally persuaded him to do as I said. We had just begun to attack the rock-hard ground with our picks when we heard the sound of an engine.

"A truck!" the young fellow shouted.

"A truck? You're crazy! Don't you hear the treads?" He stared at me. "A tank? Is it a German tank?" "How the hell would I know?"

"But we're behind our lines, aren't we?"

"Oh, for God's sake . . . of course . . . I hope so."

People who need long explanations at moments when everything depends on instinct have always irritated me.

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"Get the hell off the track, and try to hide in the snow."

I was already moving back. The noise had grown terrible. The tank was nearly on top of us, and was still totally invisible. I know of no other experience which twists the guts harder than that. We waited for what seemed an eternity before we perceived a squat silhouette sliding smoothly over the ground. The noise was overwhelming. I stared through the darkness, trying to catch some distinguishing details. Finally, drawn by an inexplicable force, I got up, and moved forward cautiously, leaving my astonished companion to his own devices. After a moment, he joined me, staring at me with anguished, questioning eyes.

"It's a Tiger-one of ours. We've got to try and catch it." "Let's run after it!"

"We have to be careful, though. They might think we're Russians." "But if we catch up with them they could take us along." "Exactly."

We began to shout like madmen, running after the tank with some anxiety, but as hard as we could. The noise of its engines drowned our voices, and it passed us by.

"Grab your things," I yelled at the recruit. "We've got to gallop behind them. We've got to catch them."

We began to run along the ruts left by the treads. Although the tank was moving slowly, it was still going faster than we could run. We were already gasping for breath. I quickly realized that we were never going to catch it, and that we would have to take a chance. I grabbed my Mauser and fired into the fog, into which the tank had almost disappeared. This, of course, was extremely dangerous. The tank crew might think they were being attacked and let us have it with their machine guns.

The tank stopped. They must have heard the shot. We shouted, "Kamerad!" as loudly as we could. The engine was idling, and was making much less noise. We heard someone from the turret: "Was ist da?"

We rushed forward, drawing on all our strength. We were now very close. The fellow in the turret must surely have had his finger on the trigger.

"Only two of you?" he yelled when he could see us.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"We're trying to find our unit, Kamerad. We're lost."

"I'm not surprised. We're lost too."

We noticed with relief that he was wearing a white helmet stenciled with tiger stripes-which meant that he belonged to the Gross Deutschland. We explained our situation, and they pulled us into the tank. "You're both Gross Deutschland?"