Forgotten Soldier (56 page)

In that moment, so close to death, I was seized by a rush of terror so powerful that I felt my mind was cracking. Trapped by the weight of earth, I began to howl like a madman. The memory of that moment terrifies me still. The sense that one has been buried alive is horrible beyond the powers of ordinary language. Dirt had run down my neck and into my mouth and eyes, and my whole body was gripped by a heavy and astonishingly inert substance which only held me more tightly the harder I struggled. Under my thigh I felt a leg kicking with the desperation of a horse between the shafts of a heavy cart. Something else was rubbing against my shoulder. With a sudden jerk, I pulled my head free of the dirt and of my helmet, whose strap was cutting into my windpipe, nearly strangling me. Some two feet from my face a horrible mask pouring blood was howling like a demon. My body was still entirely trapped. I knew that I was either going to die or lose my reason.

My throat burst with screams of rage and despair. No nightmare could possibly reach such a pitch of horror. At that moment, I suddenly understood the meaning of all the cries and shrieks I had heard on every battlefield. And I also understood the marching songs, which so often begin with a ringing description of a soldier dying in glory and then suddenly turn somber:

We marched together like brothers, And now he lies in the dust.

My heart is torn with despair, My heart is torn with despair....

Once again I learned how hard it is to watch a comrade die: almost as hard as dying oneself.

During the night, the Russians made nine attempts to break through our lines, and failed. If they had persevered once, or maybe twice more, they would surely have been successful. I watched, three quarters buried, for about twenty minutes, while a hurricane of fire broke over our rear, destroying what was left of the village, and killing something like 700 men in our regiment alone, which, at the beginning of the offensive had numbered about 2,800 men. I scratched at the ground with my hands, and somehow managed to free myself. Two men were lying beside me in pools of blood. The dying man had been buried under more than a yard of earth, and could no longer hope for anything but the mercy of heaven. A fellow beside me, who had been wounded, was groaning with pain. He was buried almost as deeply as I had been. I dug him out as fast as I could, and helped him to crawl through the explosions toward the rear. On the way, I saw a gun lying on the ground and picked it up.

The rest of the night was consumed by a series of almost insuperably difficult problems, as if we were caught in a terrible game with all the odds against us and our lives at stake.

At dawn, in the first faint light of a dark winter day, the front grew quiet.

The scattered remnants of our regiments collected as they met among the craters and shell holes. A cloud of stale smoke hung over the snowy ground, which was littered with Russian and German dead. The wounded who had not yet succumbed to the bitter cold were still groaning, filling the air with a chorus of misery which our exhausted ears heard as they might have heard a winter wind howling over the roof of an isba in an isolated hamlet on the steppe. Sections were organized to help the stretcher-bearers with a job of impossible magnitude.

As always, the Russians left all rescue efforts to us. Their wounded were left lying where they fell, with a possibility of either dying on the spot or of being picked up by one of our first-aid teams. Their supplies of materiel seemed to be increasing daily in quantity and quality, but their medical services barely functioned. As our army grew more and more disorganized by retreat, we became increasingly unable to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers, whose number was continuously growing. The Russian wounded could hope for very little from us.

While the medical service tried to deal with the wounded, some twelve of us settled into a half-covered bunker back of our former sleeping quarters, which had been entirely destroyed. Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau, who had just arrived, was one of the group. Despite a general sense of foreboding in the face of disaster, we all felt a surge of joy whenever a particular friend appeared. Hals, Lensen, and Lindberg were all there. I was helping a wounded corporal bandage his severely burned right hand when the captain announced that we would retreat. He sent us out to help the noncoms count off and regroup our decimated company before moving camp at dawn. I went with Lensen, to help him find what was left of his section. The Russians, who had also taken a beating, were catching a moment's rest before demolishing what remained of our front. For the moment, everything was quiet in the eerie half light of December.

Lensen couldn't quite grasp what had happened to me.

For him, the simple fact that I had survived the Soviet thrust was extraordinary. My explanations that at the time I had understood nothing made no difference to him; he simply supplied his own scenario.

My winter overalls had entirely disappeared, leaving me with nothing but my singed overcoat. During my flight, I had picked up a gun which proved to be Russian. For Lensen, it was all clear. The Russians had overrun my position, and had either failed to notice me or had taken me for dead. In a desperate man-to-man struggle, I had managed to wrest a weapon from one of them and, with his gun, had fought my way to our lines.

"You're still stunned," he insisted. "But I'm sure you'll remember later. I don't see any other explanation."

Lensen's version certainly had its advantages.

I myself retained nothing but a chaotic impression of flashing lights and thunderous noises over a sense of such total disorientation that I had no longer been capable of distinguishing east from west or up from down. Perhaps Lensen was only trying to compensate for his attitude during our evening of celebration.

At dusk, which fell in the middle of the afternoon, the German Army abandoned the second Dnieper front. While the immense Russian thrust whose fringe had swept over us was pressing with its principal strength against German and Rumanian units further to the south, our depleted columns withdrew from their positions, abandoning all materiel which was no longer usable or transportable. Our Gross Deutschland regiments, half of us on foot, left in relative silence, our backs bent by the weight of our burdens, hoping that the gray skies would hold back for a while longer the rain of metal and fire which the pursuing enemy was bound to send after us.

THE THIRD RETREAT

Partisans

Christmas, 1943

The Siege of Boporoeivska

Our prayers were granted and we were able to march for thirty miles undisturbed.

We were unpleasantly surprised to find no reserve positions in that distance. Except for a few surveillance posts, where the fellows to their astonishment were told to pack up and leave with us, we encountered no serious defensive efforts. The Russians could easily have continued their advance without firing a shot.

On the second day of this third retreat, the most mobile portion of our battalion stopped and settled in to act as a covering force while the rest continued westward. Some two thousand men, among them myself, were stationed near a village which was not marked on any of the staff maps. As we arrived, the inhabitants fled into the thick forest. We established ourselves with light but motorized weapons. We had four minuscule tanks, which had been effective in Poland but were like toys compared to the T-34s. Their armament consisted of a double-barreled machine gun and a grenade thrower, and we used them principally as tractors, to pull the twelve sleighs which made up our train. Four half-tracks doubled as anti-tank machine-gun posts, and as a source of emergency power for our six trucks when they stuck in the deep snowdrifts.

Three enormous Zundapp-Russland sidecars skated through the powdery snow, which often plugged the space between the front mudguard and tire, preventing that wheel from turning. Their engines were powerful enough to free the back wheel and the wheel of the sidecar, which was also motorized, and send the whole machine zigzagging forward, roaring from its twin exhausts, while the blocked driving wheel skated over the surface like the runner of a sleigh. Three Paks completed our defense. With these weapons, which were suitable for chasing partisans, and the classic infantry weapons-P.M.s, mortars, F.M.s and grenades-we had been ordered to stop three Russian divisions, including several armored regiments, for at least twenty-four hours. Lastly, our orders were to withdraw, even if our efforts should be triumphantly successful.

Throughout our sector, whose front was roughly sixty miles long, groups analogous to ours were left behind, while the main body of troops withdrew to the west in a series of forced marches.

The Russians, who had broken through further south, neglected our sector. There was no need for them to take any more losses pursuing an enemy who was withdrawing anyway. The Red Army left our harassment to the partisans, whose numbers were continuously increasing, and which soon reached proportions astonishing in a country nominally under our control. On Stalin's orders, they intensified the desperation of our retreat with sudden ambushes; shells with delayed action fuses; booby-trapped and mutilated bodies of men from interior positions; attacks on supply trains, isolated groups, and rallying points; hideous mutilation of prisoners; and a constant refusal of contact with units capable of fighting.

The partisans-or terrorists, a name they richly deserved-always took on easy victims, and greatly intensified the usual cruelties of wartime. By these means, they achieved an effect which the regular army was never able to equal.

The Wehrmacht bent before the power of an incomparably greater enemy. The unbearable harassment by partisans was added to the overwhelming and heroic rigors of the front, while our territories in the rear no longer guaranteed any repose to our exhausted troops. The Ukraine, which had shown some sympathy for us, was itself pillaged by partisan bands-on orders from Moscow. The Ukrainian population had to choose, and be actively for one side or another. The partisans either killed or enlisted the young Ukrainians who had until then been so respectful to us. The invisible war triumphed: war which no longer offered any retreat, or calm, or pity. Wars of subversion have no face, and like revolutions create their own martyrs, innocent victims, and hostages, and provoke confused judgments of ill-considered actions. Men kill for revenge, in reprisal for what has happened or might happen.

The partisans were pouring oil onto a huge conflagration.

In the name of Marxist liberty, the Ukraine was forced to alter its attitude. German and Ukrainian alike grew bitter and full of hate. The war became a total war, a war of scorched earth, offering the towns and villages in its path no more relief than we would eventually receive when we became the vanquished. In this period, as the war attained the most violent paroxysms of an already unbearable conflict, our unit sat out its sentence of round-the-clock guard duty in the murderous cold.

Over the snow-covered ground silence hung, unbroken except for the occasional howl of a gray taiga wolf deep in the forests, which were still largely unexplored. A quarter of our men were always on guard, watching from the shelter of ludicrously inadequate fortifications or frost-covered tank turrets, or mounting hurried patrols at the edge of the forest. The rest waited in the abandoned isbas.

The stoves in these huts had been systematically destroyed before we arrived-no doubt by partisans, who hoped that without shelter we would die of cold. Some of the isbas were open to the sky, with their roofs burned or pulled off. Probably the partisans had not had time to destroy the village completely before we arrived. There were far too many of us for the number of buildings still standing, and hundreds of men were reduced to finding what shelter they could, huddled behind gutted walls whose only roof was the heavy, opaque fog. Inside the walls, these men burned everything they could find. In the better isbas, the intense flames threatened to set fire at any moment to the structures themselves. Our exhausted troops no longer bothered to collect deadwood from the forest, and burned every combustible fitting left in the huts. Cursing at the smoke which blinded them, and which in the roofed isbas escaped only through the open doors, our soldiers packed closely together for warmth, tried to sleep on their feet, despite the coughs which shook their bodies. In the isbas without roofs smoke was never a difficulty, but the men were never warm. Those closest to the fires rapidly grew so hot they had to move, while others, only four or five yards away, felt only the faintest warming of the air, whose temperature rose to fifteen or sixteen degrees above zero.

Every two hours another quarter of the men went back to the dugouts to make room in our precarious sleeping quarters for those who would return white with cold. The winter was now serious: fifteen degrees below zero, according to the thermometer of our radio group. As before, our general state of filth aggravated the situation. Any desire to piss was announced to all present, so that hands swollen by chilblains could be held out under the warm urine, which often infected our cracked fingers.

I was taking my first tour of guard duty in the early-morning hours of polar darkness, and my second began at one o'clock, in the diffused light of midday, which was veiled by a sky as dark as the sky over Tempelhof the day it was destroyed. Toward the end of my patrol, the day would turn an unusual pink. By three o'clock, when I returned to the smokehouse, there was nothing further to report.

My eyes hurt me, and my nose was so enflamed by frostbite I could no longer bear to leave it uncovered. We hid our faces like Chicago gangsters, with our collars raised and tied around our faces with scarves or strings. An hour later, the pink light turned violet, and then gray. The snow turned gray too, and then it was dark-from mid-afternoon until nine the next morning. With darkness, the temperature always plunged sharply-often to thirty-five or forty degrees below zero. Our materiel was paralyzed: gasoline froze, and oil became first a paste and then a glue, which entirely blocked the mechanism. The forest rang with strange sounds: the bark of trees bursting under the pressure of the freezing. Stones cracked only when the temperature fell to sixty degrees below zero. For us, the horror we had been dreading for so long had arrived.