Forgotten Soldier (63 page)

In the eyes of the Wehrmacht, we were still officially considered part of a motorized unit standing by, and therefore available. In consequence, we were always moving, and had to be ready to leave at a moment's notice for points anywhere within a radius of 150 miles. The post calling us was some 100 miles away, and had appealed to us because its officers had been told that in emergencies they could rely on our mobility. In fact, we had four trucks in bad condition, a small civilian van, a sidecar, and the C.O.'s steiner. Wesreidau tore his hair and cursed.

As quickly as possible, a hundred of us left to answer the S.O.S. We took along as many automatic weapons as we could to make up for our small number. Each truck carried two spandaus ready to fire. Above all else, we feared planes. We drove as quickly as we could along the terrible Russian roads, raising a thick cloud of dust. About 30 miles from our starting point, we hurtled through a village which could have be longed to prehistory. The inhabitants ran as fast as they could to get out of our way. We were bristling with weapons and black with dust, and we must have looked far from reassuring. As we left the village, a group of terrified residents scattered ahead of us. The steiner went through, and then the first truck, which crushed a dog. The second truck bumped a black pig, which ran out from nowhere and threw itself under the wheels.

I was in the third truck, and saw the whole sequence: the sudden braking ahead, the shrieking villagers running to the side of the road, the screaming pig, dragging itself through the dust. Five or six landser jumped off the truck to chase the pig, trying to kill it as it squealed in agony. Finally, they stabbed it with their bayonets. It was still kicking, spattering its executioners with blood, as they tied its feet with belts and ropes, and hung its 150 pounds from the tailgate of their truck.

Then we started off again, to catch up with the others, leaving the village in a squeal of gears. The pig too was soon covered with dust, which mingled with its streaming blood. We no longer objected to details like that; for those who survived, there would be fresh meat this evening. Sieg Heil!

We were now driving through a strange landscape of smooth black hills, almost like enormous boulders, scattered with a few stunted trees. Wherever the ground was broken, the soil was black and seemed as hard as stone. I wished that I knew something of geology; our route took us through this curious terrain for about fifteen miles.

We had just left that strange district when a group of planes was reported. One of our spotters confirmed that he had seen them through the treetops, slightly to our left. Our trucks pulled over to the side of the road, where they were screened by leaves. Wesreidau stared at the sky through his field glasses, but couldn't see anything. It seemed wise to wait for a few minutes. The landser in the third truck put the time to good account, slitting open the pig and getting rid of its guts with lightning speed. As the job wasn't quite finished when we started out again, they finished it on the back of the truck.

A few miles farther on, as we bumped through a chaotic landscape, two planes came over very low. We shouted at the drivers, who jammed on the brakes. There were no thick trees anywhere near us. As the planes passed directly overhead, we were all gripped by an insane, hopeless panic. Some men wet their pants. As the planes vanished into the distance, we lifted our heads and saw two ME-109Fs, which must have been the survivors of some squadron. No one thought of cheering the Luftwaffe; we had all been too afraid.

Toward four, we approached the zone of operations. Our trucks were following a winding track through mountainous country, driving very slowly for fear of ambush. Wesreidau's steiner was in the lead. Two observers, hunched on the hood, kept their eyes riveted on the dust along the way, and on the heights surrounding us. Nothing we could see was in any way reassuring. Suddenly, we were looking down into an open valley. We stopped, cutting off our engines, and immediately heard the distant sound of machine guns. Beyond all doubt, we had arrived. In the distance, through the heat haze, we could see what looked like a village. We kept the trucks a hundred yards apart, and maintained a moderate speed, as the men clung onto the outside of the railings. Once again our stomachs clenched at the approach of danger, and we wondered when we would begin to be adult men.

Naturally, the enemy knew we were coming. The first truck suddenly saw the commander's steiner driving backward at breakneck speed from a turn in the road. The vehicle was rolling down a slope when a sharp explosion burst on the track some ten yards ahead of it. Everyone plunged to the ground, and the trucks took whatever shelter they could. A second explosion tore a hole in the road, lifting a large cloud of dust. They were plastering us with shells from a 37-mm. gun. Then a burst of machine-gun fire riddled the first truck. Luckily, everyone was already out. The driver must have watched in a cold sweat.

The enemy was hidden by the undulations of the country, and was very hard to see. Nonetheless, the men in the steiner knew they'd been lucky. It was miraculous that the 37-mm. gun hidden behind the tees to the right of the turning hadn't opened fire the moment the steiner appeared. The partisans had felled a tree across the road, right after the turn.

We set up two light mortars, and shelled the enemy gun, which soon fell silent.

"Probably amateurs," Wesreidau remarked.

We deployed a dozen F.M.s, which made movement very difficult for the partisans firing from the mountainside. Our group slid through the brush and climbed the first rocky outcrops, while our mortars rained a hail of projectiles, more terrifying than destructive, onto any point that seemed to harbor opposition. We had just uncovered an enemy post-real Johnny-come-latelys giving Fritz a hard time in order to reap a reward from their grateful country.

"What bastards," muttered Prinz to Smellens, "coming to shoot at us just for the bell of it. We'll fix them."

Our group attacked the partisans with grenade throwers. In that enclosed bowl of hills, the explosions made an overwhelming noise. Then someone raked the edges of the enemy ambush with a spandau, which we recognized by the sound of its fire. After two more grenades, the apprentice sharpshooters were ready to give up. A figure ran out, attempting a desperate flight. He was quickly cut down by the spandau.

"What a bastard!" Prinz shouted. "It's horrible to shoot down idiots like that. Why can't they stay home and wait until the war ends, for the love of God! If I was in their shoes, no one could twist my arm-and you'd be the same, wouldn't you, Sajer?"

Home! The thought went to my head like a gulp of wine. Home, to wait for the war to end . . .

"Yes," I said finally.

"And now we have to shoot them," he said. "It's disgusting."

We could hear plaintive cries from the enemy entrenchment. To our left, spandaus and grenade throwers were destroying the tranquility of the spring. Suddenly, one of the Russian boys in an excess of zeal stood up, exposing half his body, and raked us with a burst of machinegun fire. His loose, approximate fire wounded one of our men in the right hand, and then another, undoubtedly on the ricochet, in the calf. The Russian was shot down by our spandau, while our wounded man began to groan in a shaded corner.

"God damn it!" someone shouted. "Will you stop this bullshit!" Two figures climbed from the partisan position and, without any apparent hurry, began to run. Our F.M. sent them rolling in the dust too.

"Did you see that?" Smellens said to the gunner. "You just got a girl."

"A girl? Are you sure? If women are getting mixed up in this mess now, that's the last straw."

A few minutes later we counted the bodies of the partisans: six young people about our age. Among them were two pretty girls, bathed in blood and covered with a swarm of blue flies.

We stared down at our victims, sickened by the sight. Why had they thrown themselves across the route of our misery? Their amateur barrier was quickly dismantled. We cleared the road, and marched to the village. The trucks followed slowly behind us.

Had the enemy been misinformed? Had they received exaggerated estimates of our minuscule capacity? Were they afraid? Whatever the reason, they abandoned their grip on the post which was almost theirs, and came out to meet us.

The sun was shining brightly on the narrow, dusty road. At the head of the column, our men were in contact with the enemy, who had taken refuge in the town cemetery. It was a typical Russian cemetery-blue and gold and white, with no suggestion of sadness about it. The day was perfect, the spring of late June turning into summer. We could almost have been fighting for a lark. Each plume of smoke was immediately carried away by a gentle breeze. We would certainly have been satisfied by a light exchange of fire, but our commander saw things differently; we couldn't let the enemy think we were too weak to attack. So our grenade throwers and light mortars destroyed the blue cemetery. Two groups chased the partisans out, and occupied the cemetery gardens. The partisans had taken refuge in a nearby wooden building where the crops were stored. On the door, the enemy had just daubed the Marxist slogan: "Workers of the World, Unite."

This hasty scrawl, with dripping letters, gave a tearful impression of Marxist beliefs.

To dispose as quickly as possible of this flimsy, improvised fortress, we loaded the spandau with explosive incendiary bullets. The thatched roof caught on fire almost at once. The enemy, who were defending themselves with automatic weapons, did not spare their fire.

A salvo of mortar shells knocked the roof into the building, and the partisans had to abandon an untenable position. Our two groups ran toward the burning building to harass the Russians as they fled. An old bearded man was leaning against a pile of stones, shouting curses at us. His right hand rested on the head of a dead comrade who lay on the ground beside him. The old man was wounded himself, and his clothes were torn and burned. We walked past him at a distance of no more than three yards. The sight of our guns didn't silence him. He shook his fist at us, and cursed us. We all saw him through the smoke and sparks of the burning barn, but no one thought of shooting him. He showered maledictions at us until the collapse of the building buried him. A column of sparks rose into the azure sky. The first elements of our group were already in the village streets, firing on anything that moved.

The last of the partisans were running toward the mountains. For a moment, they were directly exposed to our fire, and we shot down twenty of them on the dusty road and among the junipers on the hillside.

The spandau, which had been fitted with a special magazine, took a horrible toll of the fleeing groups of partisans. Then we stopped firing, and the men from the German post came out and joined us. Many of them were wounded, and twelve were dead. We gave the wounded first aid, and drove the local residents from their huts. Fires were spreading everywhere, and had to be put out.

Men, women, and children joined us in fighting the flames. It took almost an hour to put the fires out. Then everyone, ourselves included, dragged the bodies of the dead to a central point. Women screamed and cried as they recognized a husband or son or lover. It looked as if most of the partisans had lived in this place.

Soon, however, the tears and sobs became threats and curses. We collected our own dead and wounded with the usual mute sentiment established by habit. The day was so beautiful it was hard to believe that any of this was really serious. Our eyes, disillusioned by so much accumulated fear and anxiety, no longer distinguished the tragedies of any particular moment.

Hals was staring at the magnificent mountain scenery, as he carried along a comrade whose tunic was blotched with brown stains. The birds had regained their sense of spring joy and were flying once again through the blue sky, which was faintly marked by smoke from the smoldering fires. For us, in the eastern armies, this joyousness of nature almost excused what had just happened. After the mud and the cold, we were like wild animals, overjoyed by the spring sun, and the knowledge that shelter for the night was no longer a serious problem.

We deplored what had just happened as a disturbance of the peace and quiet we so much appreciated.

The villagers were still caught in a crisis of tearful despair, and insults which were comprehensible simply by their tone shook our sense of well-being.

Someone threw a stone, which hit one of our wounded men in the face. Two landser spun around, brandishing their machine guns.

"Break it up, you pigs, or we'll drill you full of holes."

But the shouted curses kept right on. We were ringed by faces, especially feminine faces, distorted by rage, spitting and cursing, and by shaking fists. Suddenly, six planes flying wing to wing appeared in that marvelous sky-six Soviet fighters, looking for one of our convoys. This sign heartened the Russians, who shouted, "Ourrah Stalin," and pointed at the planes, which blindly continued their search.

We could see such hatred on all these faces that we shivered, despite the fine spring day. We were all thinking of our tortured, mutilated comrades, murdered by men who were mixing themselves into a fight that had left them on the sidelines. We remembered once again the tragic deaths at the territorial posts all along our line of retreat during the winter: faces smashed open with axes, so that the gold teeth could be pulled out; the hideous agony of wounded men tied with their heads inside the gaping bellies of dead comrades; amputated genitals; Ellers' section, whom we had found tied up and naked, on a day when the temperature had dropped to thirty degrees below zero, with their feet thrust into a drinking trough which had frozen solid; and the faces of tortured men under the dark winter sky....

With dry mouths, we listened to the mounting rage of these peasants, who were now paying a price they could have avoided for all time. If anyone had ordered us to fire, we would have obeyed without hesitation. I could see the gun shaking in the filthy, nervous hands of the man nearest me. A little way off, another of our men was no longer able to control the trembling of his face muscles. We had all stopped working, and our anger was rising like a storm.