Forgotten Soldier (57 page)

Winter at war-a reality we had almost forgotten-fell on us like the die of a gigantic press ready to crush us.

Everything combustible was burned. A lieutenant defended two of our sleighs with a gun against some forty landser, whose breath rattled through their congested lungs. The nose of every face cover developed a block of ice which grew larger as each fresh breath condensed and froze.

"We want the sleighs for wood!" the men shouted.

"Get back!" the lieutenant screamed in reply. "The forest is full of wood."

The landser stared at him, wondering what good the sleighs would do them if they all froze.

A party sent out to fetch wood from the forest ran to the shelter of the trees. Faceless specters returned with bundles which they threw down onto the dying fires. The fires had to be kept alive, which made rest impossible. We prayed that the Russians wouldn't attack: all attempts at defense had been abandoned.

Guard duty was the hardest of all. To stand still one seriously risked being frozen alive. At nine o'clock it was my turn again. Fifteen of us were standing watch in the ruins of a building crusted with hard snow which cracked like glass. We got through the first half hour beating each other to keep our blood moving. The second half hour was torture. Two men fainted. We thrust our stiffened hands from our sleeves and clumsily tried to help them. Our gloves, part wool and part leather, were already full of holes and good for nothing. The pain in our hands and feet seemed to travel through our bodies and clutch at our hearts. Four men carried the unconscious soldiers to the fires which gleamed in the darkness. If the Russians had come, they could easily have wiped us out. One man was running round and round in small circles, crying like a baby. The pain in my feet made me scream aloud. Despite orders, I abandoned my post and ran to the nearest isba. Shoving my way through a compact mass of soldiers, I stopped just short of the fire, and fell grimacing to my knees. Then I thrust my boots right into the coals. They immediately began to crackle and hiss, and at the pain of contact between hot and cold I burst into loud sobs. I was not the only one to cry, and there were others whose screams and moans were far louder than mine.

The hour of release finally came, and we prepared to leave. The Russians had not swarmed down on us, and the steel of our frosted weapons, which had not been heated by explosions, glimmered bluer than ever in the horrible cold, and looked as brittle as glass. Our men assembled listlessly, torn by a conflict of disloyalties which brought them close to madness. Although no one had covered himself with glory fighting against the Russians, another fight, which was equally formidable, had been fought against the cold and our exhaustion and filth and the lice we scarcely felt, they had become so much a part of our everyday condition. The cold had also claimed its victims. Three times, detachments of the last group on guard had returned to the fires carrying inert bodies Pneumonia, generalized frostbite, and physical weakness had been unable to resist the overwhelming cold. For three men, their return to the fire came too late. Five others were revived by flagellation and alcohol.

In the motionless cold of the polar night, we covered the rigid corpses with snow, marking each improvised grave with a stick and a helmet. There was no time for sentiment or reflection. Those who were still-to their astonishment-among the living were trying to shake off the general numbness enough to start our solidly frozen engines. The situation seemed desperate. Not one of the engines turned over.

Feldwebel Sperlovski stamped down on the pedals of his Zundapp, which resisted the pressure his 190 pounds of flesh and bone could still bring to bear and then cracked like a piece of dead wood. The metal itself seemed to be affected. We lit fires under the Panzers, to try to thaw them slowly before making any attempt to start them. For the cursing, gasping landser, the effort was immense, straining our congested lungs, which whistled and rattled. Wesreidau himself was impatient. He had wrapped his boots in rags picked up during the retreat.

We should have kept at least one engine running all night," he exclaimed. "It's elementary. This sort of carelessness could ruin all of us."

We listened to him with expressionless faces. Undoubtedly several among us would have regarded death as a deliverance.

An hour or so later, we heard the asthmatic backfire of an engine. Someone had managed to start one of the half-tracks. The driver let it warm up for a while, and set to work on the gear box, which had not yet thawed. After two hours of intense effort, our column set out, under orders to maintain the lowest possible speed. Until the machines had reached a certain minimum temperature, we had to limp after them on foot.

At midday, there were several breakdowns, and the convoy had to stop. The radiator hoses of several vehicles had been damaged by the pure alcohol in the radiators, and we had to repair them, using spare parts if we were fortunate enough to have them. Otherwise, we patched them up as best we could. While the work was in progress, we opened some cans of solidly frozen food: meat which could be chopped with an axe, a puree of peas and soya with the consistency of cement, and a solid brick of wine. Our enforced stop cost us an hour. According to radio instructions, we had one more hour to rejoin the main body of troops.

We were crossing the territory of one of our interior defense posts: two round blockhouses and three or four huts built into the ground. No one came out to meet us, and the place seemed deserted. However, a plume of smoke was rising from one of the blockhouses. No doubt the men inside were asleep beside a warm fire. We sent a small group over to investigate. Five minutes later, one of them ran back to the column, his breath spreading around his face in white clouds. When he reached us, he stopped, gasping.

"Everything in there has been destroyed, Herr Hauptmann, and everyone is dead. It's terrible!"

Every gray face filled with anxiety. Looking more closely, we saw that the doors of the isbas had all been knocked in, and that four or five bodies lay beside one of the huts.

"Partisans!" someone shouted. "Six men recently killed!"

"There's been fighting here recently, Herr Hauptmann. Those bandits must still be holding their guns."

Another detachment went into the second blockhouse. There was a long, echoing explosion, and a geyser of earth and snow and fragments of wood shot into the air over the building. Wesreidau cursed aloud, and ran toward the smoking bunker. We followed him. Three men had just been torn to pieces. Two were unrecognizable, while the third was gasping his last breath, rattling as the blood spurted from his body. Mixed into the rubble lay the bodies of four German soldiers who had been killed before we arrived.

"Watch out for mines!" Wesreidau shouted.

The word passed from mouth to mouth. Soldiers stopped at the door of the second blockhouse and looked in without daring to enter. Six men, who had been stripped almost naked and hideously mutilated, were lying in pools of black, congealed blood. Some of the mutilations were so horrible that we couldn't look at them. Two soldiers-men who had fought outside of Moscow, at Kursk, Briansk, and Belgorod, and seen appalling horrors-hid their faces in their hands and walked away. None of us had ever seen anything so gratuitously horrible.

Taking infinite precautions, a section removed the cadavers. Two of them had been booby-trapped. We covered their bodies with debris, as we had neither the means nor the time to dig graves.

To all of us, the tactics of the partisans seemed more ignoble and senseless than anything else we'd seen. Wesreidau led a ceremony of final farewell to the eighteen massacred men. We removed our hats and caps and helmets, and stood bareheaded in the snow.

"Ich hatte einen Kameraden . . ."

Our funeral song rang through the stone-age setting of Russian winter with the discordant sonorities of thousands of voices. There were no flags or fanfares-only profound consternation.

The spirit of revenge motivating the terrorists further destroyed the fragments of understanding so far spared by the war. Our men could not accept it. If they could still bear the torment of the trenches with heroic resolution they could not accept the treachery of the partisans.

Our column set out again. As we passed the center blockhouse we saw the coarse placard thrust into the snowy mound. Across it, scrawled in charcoal, we read the word "Revenge."

We drove on for another hour. The snow, which deadened the noise of our vehicles, also intensified distant sounds. Suddenly we heard the crackle of automatic weapons. Wesreidau, together with our two other officers, ordered us to halt. Immediately, we heard the noise of firing more distinctly. Some five miles to the west, fighting was in progress. We were ordered forward on the double. The tank crews wanted to go on ahead and rush to the scene of combat, but our officers couldn't allow them to leave the column. We had to stay together, with our tank-tractors each pulling three Russian sleighs loaded with men and equipment. The half-tracks helped the trucks, which would never have been able to make it alone. I was riding on the third sleigh of one of these trains. Behind us was a large sidecar whose transmission was failing. The tanks were pulling with full power, to the great peril of their own mechanisms. The crackle of guns grew continuously louder. Suddenly, Wesreidau stopped the convoy and jumped down to check his maps. Everyone on the sleighs was ordered to follow him, and I found myself going into action once again. The Panzers detached themselves from their trains and drove toward the noise. We followed, running as fast as we could, waved forward by Wesreidau, who came with us in a large B.M.W. sidecar. A steiner with an 8o-mm. mortar skidded past us in a cloud of whirling snow.

Gasping for breath, we ran along the track made by the tanks. They had pulled far ahead of us and entered into combat with the enemy some ten minutes before we reached the scene of fighting. We could hear their machine guns ripping into the air, sounding much louder than usual. The sidecar came back toward us and suddenly spun round.

"Spread out into the forest."

We carried out the order, some of us remaining behind to pull out the sidecar, which was stuck in a drift, before running on through the trees, standing up as straight as the masts of ships. The virgin snow rasped and cracked in great sheets under our weight. We could no longer see the tanks, which seemed to be pursuing an enemy in flight. We didn't meet any partisans ourselves. Twenty minutes later, a flare called us to the nearby blockhouse, which was like every other. It was supposed to guard the track, which in normal times was heavily used.

The post had been attacked by partisans-which, of course, we had to expect-probably the same band that had massacred the men we'd found earlier. Here, fortunately, there had been time for the defense to react. Of the twenty-two men holding the post, six had been wounded and two killed. Some twenty enemy dead or wounded lay on the trampled snow. There were also several guns: Russian and German and some American. A few wounded partisans were trying to crawl into the forest. No order could have stopped our men. They fired at the Russians and put an end to their suffering. Two shaggy prisoners had fallen into our hands. Their eyes rolled wildly like the eyes of trapped wolves, and they answered our questions with absurd, repetitive replies: "We . . . not . . . Communists." What did they take us for? Or did they really know nothing? That, of course, was possible. They looked like beasts being dragged to slaughter. No talk was possible, and our men were muttering for revenge.

Wesreidau looked at the partisans, and then at us. He tried a little longer to get something from the prisoners, but his efforts were unavailing. Finally, his patience exhausted, he raised his arm with feigned indifference. Our men grabbed the two prisoners and pushed them along in front of them. The human wolves looked back, snarling. But the sight of our guns made them lose their heads. They began to run, and ran until the first volley caught them and knocked them to the ground.

The post had been saved at the last possible moment. According to the men who'd been there, at least four hundred partisans had attacked them, and the fighting had lasted for over two hours. The men greeted us with bear hugs. They were overjoyed to hear that we had brought an evacuation order with us. For the moment, we seemed to be acting as the last broom of the Wehrmacht, making a clean sweep.

To crown the misery of the day, a hideous incident occurred within ten minutes of our departure from that place. The sidecar at the head of the column, preceding the first tank by some thirty to forty yards, drove back onto the track, moving through the snow with considerable difficulty. A tank followed it, rolling over the same ground. Suddenly an explosion shook the earth and reverberated through the air. Frozen snow showered down with a crystalline sound from the heavily laden branches all around us. The tank had been blown off its tracks and torn open from below. We could hear the roar of the flames as fat plumes of smoke rolled out from beneath the machine, spreading over the icy ground. The men on the sleighs which followed reacted immediately. One of the junior officers jumped onto the turret of the tank to try to free the frantic men inside, who were probably seriously wounded. Others ran to help, while the infantry spread out on either side of the road, to be ready for any eventuality. By now the tank was wrapped in thick black smoke, and we could do nothing to help the trapped men. We emptied three extinguishers onto the blackened metal, but the flames inside only increased in violence. The sleighs were hastily drawn back, as the tank's reservoir poured out forty gallons of flaming gasoline, which spread across the snow. In panic, the scorched landser yielded to the fire whose black plumes of smoke were climbing into the dark sky. In helpless anger, officers and men alike watched the immolation of three men. The smell of burned flesh mingled ignominiously with the smell of gas and oil. The two men in the lead sidecar had passed over the same spot a few seconds before the tank. Their tires must have missed the detonator