Forgotten Soldier (61 page)

If the Fuhrer ever saw me like that, I'd be thrown out of the Gross Deutschland for good, shipped off to one of the Brandenburg disciplinary battalions. To complete my downfall, my ravisher, who was clearly more accustomed to manipulating an axe handle than the personal appendage in question, had grabbed me, and was making me jerk and shudder like an invalid with a severe case of hiccoughs. I might perhaps have been able to oblige her, if the Polska, in the height of her frenzy, hadn't suddenly flung up her petticoats over the obese folds of her stomach and thighs. This spectacle destroyed the minimal desire my predicament might have aroused in me, and the delicious memory of Paula offered a contrast which was too absurd. With a brusque twist of my body, I freed myself from this female in rut, who was exciting herself without any cooperation from me. Her somewhat porcine face, in which, a few moments before, I might have found a certain charm, now wore an expression of bovine ecstasy. I stood up and turned out my pockets, which were filled with liquid egg and broken shell. My companion regained some measure of self-control and tried to laugh, suddenly afraid that her audacity might provoke severe consequences. In a flash, I was at the bottom of the ladder, gesturing to the women to bring me something to clean off my jacket. I myself was worried about the consequences the stains on my uniform might bring down on me. I tried to look furious, but an overpowering sense of inadequacy made me flush hotly instead.

The Polska, half smiling, half uneasy, led me over to the house. We went through a door which opened outward, down a few steps, and then through a second door which opened inward.

The house was built into the ground to a depth of about two and a half feet. We came into a dark, low-ceilinged room with a single tiny window, whose yellowish panes admitted very little light. The building was divided by a heavy wooden grate-one side was for people, the other for animals. This explained the fetid smell which I noticed as soon as the door was open. A couple of pigs were being fattened just beyond the grate. The wide benches built against the grate and covered with straw ticks were obviously the beds. An old woman turned toward us as we came in. She smiled with the indifference of a sphinx, I doubt if the idea of "a German" even existed for her. Two children were playing on a woodpile which stood in the middle of the room. The Polska brought me some water in a wooden dipper, like the ones used in Russia for measuring millet. I had to take off my tunic, and reveal the extent of my deprivation. The pullover my mother had sent me over a year and a half before no longer had any sleeves below the elbow, and the waistband had become a scant, lacelike fringe.

I was preparing to wash my tunic when the Polska took it from me. She rubbed the stains between a round stone and a stiff straw implement shaped like a large cork. With a graciousness which almost excused her excesses of a few minutes earlier, she returned my tunic, which was clean once more. I didn't dare smile lest I rekindle her amorous fury. However, all of that seemed to have been forgotten. These Polish peasants seemed curiously primitive, living wholly in the present, unburdened by any thoughts of the past or the future. I said goodbye, thrusting out my stiffened arm in a regulation salute.

While the old woman on the bench smiled-a smile which seemed to cross a gulf of several millennia-the younger one rummaged through a heap of cooking pots which stood on the table. She found an egg and held it out to me.

I accepted it, not knowing what expression to put on to disguise my embarrassment. The egg recalled the loft of recent history. I could feel myself blushing as I went through my pockets for the correct change. However, the woman gestured to me that I need not pay. Still embarrassed, I withdrew in a flurry of "danke schons."

I had already taken a few strides away from the house when the door behind me opened again. The woman stood there calling me, holding out the gun which I had left propped against the table.

How humiliating!

I recovered myself with another sequence of voluminous thanks, and feeling ridiculous, straightened my back and tried to look stern, to make up for what had happened. I knew that this episode was destined to lighten the evening hours of these people, and found it hard to forgive myself. What an idiot-to survive the battle of Belgorod, only to get my pants torn off by a fat Polish mama! I might be a proud member of a proud regiment, but all I had to show for it was a single egg, and an experience I wasn't going to disclose in a hurry for fear my friends would rip off my pants again, to make sure she hadn't stolen anything.

"Why didn't you tell us right away?" they asked me later.

"We would all have gone there, and all insisted on it. Reprisals, you know!" Spring burst out with sudden brutality. On the Eastern Front, things were going from bad to worse, but our training continued in the spirit of an athletic team preparing for a competition. Even more extraordinary, our schedule of exercises was markedly reduced, and we were often given free half days. These were in fact necessary, to give us time to forage and keep adequately fed. Our official rations had been cut back again, and now amounted to a starvation diet. The two villages closest to the camp had almost nothing left to give us, and we had to go farther afield in search of the calories which were largely consumed by our comings and goings. We took up fishing in the Dniester. Unfortunately, we had neither the proper equipment nor any local knowledge. Three times, Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau went with us. As an officer, he had appropriated a certain number of explosive devices, which made the operation profitable. Some pools produced giant fish.

There was also an accident. Two fellows who went out to look for food disappeared. Their friends said they'd gone toward the mountains. Two days went by without any news of them. No one knew anything about them in the villages where we asked. It sounded like partisans. We sent out two search parties, which did, in fact, run into partisans, and suffered five stupid deaths without finding a trace of the missing men.

While the Red Army pushed into Poland toward our camp, which would soon be in the battle zone, we lay in the sun as much as we could, and waited for orders. Hals was daily more deeply in love, and spent as much time as he could with the girl he considered his fiancée. I often went with him, but never found a girl for myself. We had many pleasant times together, and Hals repeatedly told me that I must be due for a leave soon, and would surely see Paula. Sometimes, the two of them plainly wished to be alone, and I would take myself off.

The war seemed to have forgotten us in this enchanted place. But one morning our tranquillity and dreams of love came to an end. The camp hummed with activity, as companies packed up and prepared for action before our incredulous eyes. As motors hummed, the barracks were destroyed. Our amazement was complete.

"What's going on?"

"Los! Los! Schnell! We're clearing out!"

Before we had quite realized it, we were loaded onto dull gray blue trucks, which bumped off to the north. In the beautiful fullness of germinating spring, the settled, organized camp went up in flames behind us. The convolutions of smoke rising into the pure, still air seemed like a sinister presage of things to come.

In the trucks, everyone was talking. What was happening? Why were they destroying the camp? Where was the front now anyway?

Toward ten o'clock the Gross Deutschland column suddenly stopped, on a road dappled by the knobby shadows of branches loaded with thousands of buds bursting from the irresistible pressure of thousands of plump leaves still barely touched with green.

The birds, as unprepared as we for what was coming, were singing, and swooping down low over the trucks. A sidecar from liaison delivered orders to the officers' Volkswagen. Then the noncoms told us to make a half turn.

Through the bursts of backfiring, we could hear the hum of a flight of planes. Then the whistles blew.

"Achtung! Enemy planes coming for us! Achtung!"

In a general rush, we jumped from the slowly moving trucks.

In fact, the Ilyushin fighter-bombers which had spotted us took their time. About fifteen of them were turning in the sky some four or five hundred yards above us. Some trucks had been precipitately abandoned, and were lying across the road. Our officers ran shouting at the drivers, who, caught between two fires, didn't know what to do. Finally, they jumped back into their machines, started them up again and crashed them into the bank at the last possible moment, as the flight of vultures swooped down on us.

First, there were bombs, which we watched fall until the first explosions. They looked like fat darts, with their long shafts, which allowed them to explode just above the ground. The planes had divided into two groups; the second unloaded at about the same spot as the first.

The shock was extraordinarily violent. Everything flew into the air and fell onto our heads. An overturned truck flew toward us, stopping some ten yards short of where we lay. The flames spread quickly in our direction, forcing us to move farther back. We no longer had any doubts about what was happening, and ran as far as we could from the road, which was attacked again with rockets and machine guns.

The running men, intent on getting away, hadn't noticed the second wave of planes and were cut down by the machine-gun fire, which passed over them like a pitiless reaper. Men were jolted off the ground as they ran, to fall back again in pieces, like puppets whose strings are broken.

When the enemy withdrew, eighteen of our machines were sending plumes of black smoke up into the sky. The attack had been so sudden and overwhelming that none of us quite grasped what had happened. We returned to the scene of the disaster with one eye on the sky; the enemy might only have pretended to leave, and might still be waiting to attack us again.

The road, still gluey from the recent thaw and the spring rains, was strewn with debris and shattered bodies. The violence of the impact had smashed some of the victims wide open, scattering their entrails over distances of seven or eight yards. The peaceful roadway, which had been filled with the sounds of twittering birds only fifteen minutes before, looked defiled.

Within fifteen minutes our column, made up of thirty trucks transporting three companies, had lost twenty men and eighteen trucks. There were also three wounded men in critical condition.

We collected the remains of our dead, and dug graves. Among the victims were Hoth and Dunde, who had both received Iron Crosses for their bravery on the second Dnieper front. They were both friends with whom we had been laughing and joking barely twenty-four hours before. After the event, the tragic impact of what had happened crushed and overwhelmed us.

We piled onto the remaining trucks, which seemed to buckle under the extra weight. There were men on the running boards, fenders, hoods, and bumpers. Budding twigs clung to these human swarms bumping forward at twenty-five miles per hour. Two of the trucks quickly died under the extra load, and the men they carried had to continue on foot. They joined us six hours later, on the Rumanian frontier, as we were getting ready to join the carnage at Vinnitsa, between the central front, which had been broken, and the southern front, which still seemed to be holding. On the way, these men had been attacked by Russo-Polish partisans; however, they were fortunately able to turn the encounter to their own advantage. They had taken the partisans' horses, and a few more still left on neighboring farms, and had joined us looking like an apparition of chivalric fantasy. The weather was warm and sunny we were returning to Russia just after the period of melting ice. We requisitioned a few Rumanian trucks which had been left for civilian use, to replace the ones destroyed in the attack. These were old machines, bearing the names of private firms, which we didn't have time to paint out. Our section drove off in an English moving van which must have left the factory sometime around 1930.

RETURN TO THE UKRAINE

The Final Spring

The Death of Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau

Exodus

After a rushed, jolting journey, we re-entered the Ukraine, where the ground had not yet entirely absorbed the spring runoff. There were long stretches of gluey mud which we were able to cross only with great difficulty. The weather was beautiful, even hot, and we often stripped to the waist.

On the road we received new orders. We were no longer to proceed to Vinnitsa. Instead, we were to re-establish communications between the rear and the front, which were continually harassed by partisans. We were ordered to annihilate these bands. Their attacks had grown increasingly virulent, and often paralyzed the already uncertain flow of supplies. The Vinnitsa bridgehead had to be maintained as a starting point for new German offensives which would break up the wedge the Russians had driven into Poland before Lvov, and re-establish a connection with the North, which appeared to be holding.

Our detachments, together with other units, had been given the job of engaging the partisans in a contest of ambush, in which the advantage belonged to whichever side surprised the other. Once again, the division was broken up. The largest section was sent to fight north of Lvov and in the northern sector of White Russia. Other units like ours were scattered throughout the rear areas of the south and central sectors before rejoining the division a few weeks later. Our zone of operations extended through Bessarabia as far as the Russian frontier. As before, we were a strong mobile unit designed to move quickly to the support of particular points in imminent danger.

However, our mobility depended on the vehicles I have already described, which we gradually abandoned, continuing on horseback or on bicycles, whose tires were often stuffed with grass. We requisitioned the horses, bicycles, and other vehicles from the thousands of refugees-Ukrainians, gypsies, Polish colonists and others who were fleeing the Red tide in a vast throng. Sometimes partisans infiltrated these crowds, posing as simple peasants who were also fleeing the Bolsheviks. Then, at a given moment, they would shoot some of our men in the back, sowing general confusion. These maneuvers were supposed to crack our self-control, and provoke us to acts of reprisal, which would then turn the refugees against us. From their point of view, any means were justified.