Forgotten Soldier (64 page)

A tall, slim figure strode between the two groups. We saw that it was Wesreidau, and that he was white with fury. He stopped five yards from the Russians, and threw them a look so terrible that silence fell at once. He had learned Russian during the long course of the campaign. He told the villagers to bury their dead with the same silence and respect he required of his troops. He said that the war would soon be over for them, and that they should wait for the end, keeping to the sidelines. He said that he had never imagined the war would bring him to shoot civilians, who had been misled into arming by false propaganda, and excused himself for what he had been forced to do. Then his voice became as hard as death. He said that he would not tolerate any further hostile manifestations; that he intended to return to camp with all his men still alive, and that the entire village would be held responsible if he did not.

Wesreidau's words had the effect of a soothing balm. Everything returned to a state of unexpected order. The dead were buried and sobs were stifled.

We found enough gas for our return in the stores of the outpost. The men there entertained us with a few bottles they had put aside several months before. Then we returned to the road, leaving eight wounded men behind at the post, where the medical service would pick them up the next day. Six others failed to answer the roll call, and remained in the Ukrainian soil forever.

"Not so crowded this time," someone said.

We acquiesced without speaking. Our eyes lingered on the village disappearing behind clouds of dust raised by the trucks. The beautiful spring light glowed all around our blackened, steel-capped faces, which seemed irrevocably cut off from the season. Our awareness of everything was similarly split. Our thoughts, like our eyes, couldn't settle on anything that seemed definite, or restful, and a sense of well-being had no place in the convoy.

The whirling dust hid the bursting spring. All we could see were the trucks, and the grotesque, dangling cadaver of the pig, covered with blood and flies.

The trucks lurched along the narrow mountain road, whose illogical course might have been traced by some wandering goat; obstacles like stone outcrops were included without modification, and natural, shaded ridges were avoided. Sometimes the track plunged into the bed of an unexpected stream, or through a temporary pond. At other times, we crossed deserts of dust, where the dryness seemed eternal. The trucks slowly pursued the twists and turns, carrying us along, penned between the rattling railings.

We seemed to be wandering endlessly toward new horizons on which we never had time to gaze, through an oversized, over-intense spring which would not allow us to forget that we were at war. Our expressionless faces stared at the spring with the unhappiness of paupers staring into a shop window decorated for Christmas.

We too wanted the war to stop and dreamed of peace, like the seriously ill for whom the first sight of spring buds kindles a spark of life.

But the fighting didn't stop; there was never more than a semblance of peace, and always someone to fan the flames of war. These people -on both sides-perhaps had perfectly good reasons for what they did. On that day, one of them crossed the road as we climbed up the long slope. He had seen us coming, and quickly, perhaps inside of ten minutes, laid his trap, hiding it in one of the dozens of potholes that pitted the surface. Then he hid, perhaps waiting to see what happened. Perhaps he too saw the yellow flash that tore apart our lead car. As always, there was a loud noise and a great deal of smoke climbing in black plumes toward the desperately smiling sky. Six bloodstained men were slowly dying in the shadows of those plumes. The front of the steiner was gone. The rest of the machine was knocked over onto its side.

A few men pulled the victims from the flaming wreckage, while the rest assumed a defensive position. We laid Wesreidau and the five other occupants of the car against the bank of red earth. Two of them were already dead. Another had a leg torn open in several places by metal fragments; his thigh looked like a mille-feuille pastry. Wesreidau was covered with wounds, and his body seemed to be broken by multiple fractures. We did everything we could for him. The whole company thought of him as a friend. With everyone helping, we managed to bring him back to consciousness.

Unlike everyone else we had watched, our captain did not have a face twisted by the revulsion or agony of death. His swollen face even managed to smile. We thought we had saved him. In a very weak voice he spoke to us of our collective adventure, stressing our unity, which must hold in the face of everything to come. He pointed to one of his pockets, from which Feldwebel Sperlovski pulled an envelope, undoubtedly addressed to his family. After that, for nearly a minute, we watched our chief die. Our faces, used to such spectacles, remained impassive. But the silence was terrible.

We were able to save two of the men from the car, loading them carefully onto the vehicles which remained. Lieutenant Wollers took command, and organized a decent burial for our venerated leader. We walked past his grave one by one, saluting. We felt that we had just lost the man on whom the well-being of the whole company depended.

We felt abandoned.

That night we returned to the isolated village where our comrades were anxiously waiting for our return. The announcement of our commander's death provoked stupefied consternation. We were all in danger of death, but the annihilation of Wesreidau seemed as impossible to us as life without their parents seems to small children.

We were prepared for every other death, but no one was ready to concede that fate for our leader.

Guard duty that night seemed more uncertain than before; our three companies seemed more vulnerable than ever. We all turned toward a source of strength which remained silent.

Who would our new leader be? On whom would the destiny of our group depend?

At the first light of dawn, after our radio message had reached headquarters, a DO-217 flew over, releasing a smoke signal. This told us that our three motorized companies should proceed quickly to a key position at the front, to the north of us.

We were ordered to destroy our base and most of the village. Nothing should be left which would aid or shelter the enemy. As we had no incendiary material, we limited ourselves to burning the thatched roofs of the cottages.

Then our motorized company left on foot, with our materiel loaded into the four ancient trucks we had left. The radio truck and sidecar preceded them. Every ten or fifteen miles, the trucks and sidecar stopped and waited for us. We would arrive at the front together or not at all.

Our orders made no sense. The officers issuing them seemed to be completely unaware of the actual condition of mobile units allegedly standing by. We were limited to doing the best we could.

Food was our most difficult problem. For a long time now, we had received no supplies, and our meals were produced by some kind of magic. We became hunters and trappers and nest robbers, and experimented with wild plants whose leaves looked like salad greens. After a long chase, we were sometimes able to catch an abandoned horse. But eight hundred men require substantial quantities of food, and every day we were faced with the same difficulties. Every day we called for help on the radio, and every day received the same reply: "Supplies en route. Should have reached you." The Army Postal Service seemed to have vanished too: no letters or packages-no news of any kind.

Despite the warm summer sun, which was now, in fact, somewhat too warm, the situation had become desperate.

Yesterday's pig had been grilled and boiled and devoured the night before, along with a hundred and fifty quarts of hot water which we elevated to the status of "pork bouillon."

Today we were leaving for the front. Our eyes gleamed, like the eyes of famished wolves. Our stomachs were empty, our mess tins were empty, and the horizon was devoid of any hope. Murderous sentiments lurked behind our eyes, which glittered with hunger. Hunger produces a curious frame of mind. It is impossible to imagine dying of hunger. For a long time now, we had been used to living on very little. Our stomachs digested substances which would kill a comfortable bourgeois citizen in a few weeks. No one had any spare fat left-no bellies or double chins, and our long muscles stood out in relief, as though we'd been flayed. As our fast continued, our senses grew more acute. We looked like the bony animals with blazing eyes one might encounter in the desert. It would take days of marching and dust to extinguish that blaze. For the moment, despite the hollows in our bellies, everything still seemed possible. We would simply march until we found food. After all, Russia was not an empty desert. The immense prairie around us looked fertile, and we would surely come across a village we could ransack.

Sperlovski and Lensen checked the map. There were a great many villages in our sector; therefore, the situation wasn't too serious. The trouble was that our rectangle of paper represented an area as large as all of France. Between any two villages, there might be hundreds of absolutely empty miles. The smallest digression to reach one of the names on the map could mean several more days of marching.

"There's nothing really to worry about," said Lensen, who didn't like to concede defeat. "There are plenty of villages lost in the steppe which aren't marked on the map. And then there are the kolkhozes, too."

We had been ordered to march north. There could be no more delay. In any case, there was nothing left to eat where we were. Our long file set out: "Kompanie, marsch! marsch!"

Hour after hour, at two or three miles an hour, we tramped in growing desperation through the uncultivated prairie.

"Somebody could make money farming here," remarked a Hannover country boy.

There were large fields of wheat near each village. Beyond these, over spaces as broad as a French department, there was nothing but wild grass and gray or red dust and thick forest, much of which was probably virgin. We had grown used to great distances. Above all, we thought of them as possible battlefields. Other reactions still lay in the future for those who returned to their native countries, with their suffocating densities and horizons which seemed close enough to touch, always marked by commonplace structures of public utility, stones arranged in some dubious style. These men, who had grown used to stretches of ground as vast as the sky, no longer knew how to sit on grass which always belonged to someone.

For us, at the moment, there was only limitless space, where our boots raised a cloud of multicolored dust that settled on everything that disturbed it. We belonged to the earth far more than it belonged to us. Except for the war, we felt a vast, limitless pleasure in our surroundings, in a kind of plenitude for which, in later years, we would always feel nostalgia.

If only there had been something to eat!

After our eleven-o'clock break, our march began again. We had gulped down like a dose of medicine the cooked sprouts of young wheat which had been prepared two days earlier. As a last resort, we had some millet, cooked in water. The weather was very hot. Fortunately, our exceedingly light meals did not produce after-dinner somnolence.

We drank the warm water from our water bottles with a certain apprehension. Running streams were quite widely spaced, and water from ponds carried the risk of malaria, typhoid, and other diseases, like cholera. To keep up our spirits, we sang as we marched: "Ein Heller and ein Batzen." The words, like the tune, were carried into the emptiness by the light summer wind, losing all meaning-which no longer seemed strange to ears once accustomed to hearing them echo between the walls of flag-decked towns:

Der Heller ward zu Wasser

Der Batzen ward zu Wein ...

Not that we had any choice-there was no wine and the water had to be drunk sparingly and with caution.

Heidi, Heido, Heida! Heidi, Heido, Heida! Heidi-Heido-Heida! Ah, ah, ah, ah!

Kompanie, marsch, marsch. We marched, singing for no one but ourselves, and all of us already knew the tune.

Then it grew dark. Darkness fell very late on our bivouac and across the plain, on which it seemed we had hardly moved, on our dust-covered faces and aching muscles. We were already asleep on our feet. The silence seemed to have a special quality, as though it had come from the end of the world.

At daybreak, our march resumed. For hours the long row of hills on the horizon seemed to remain at the same distance from us. We were walking through a rocky plain where the highest rise in the ground was scarcely the height of a man. Small stands of trees, which reminded me of photographs of Africa, were scattered across the landscape. The trees were short and scrubby, curiously like the trees of high altitudes. The wind blew the red dust everywhere, as if we were tramping through a universe of powdered brick. For a long time now, we had given up marching in threes-the regulation order for marching troops-in favor of the system used by partisans. We were broken up into more or less compact groups, in which a man was ahead only until someone else caught up with him. Everyone was tired, and our pace was slackening.

We had given up all unnecessary conversations, keeping all our breath and strength to continue putting one foot in front of the other. How many thousands of steps did we still have to take? Our boots, the color of the dusty universe, kept on across the rocky plain, which seemed to be leading us nowhere. The light wind filled our long, unkempt hair with dust; our position in relation to certain reference points on the horizon seemed unchanging; and the rhythm of our steps, the sounds of our progress, and the wind itself became overwhelmingly monotonous. From time to time we could hear a rumble from the great hollow of emptiness which filled our stomachs.

Just after the eleven-o'clock halt, during which we consumed the last of our millet, an incident disturbed the general monotony. Two twin-engined planes, which we had fortunately been able to see a long way off, appeared in the hot, blue sky. The horizon was so vast that anything which crossed it was visible for at least five minutes before it reached us. We scattered as usual, and assumed a position of anti-aircraft defense. Some of us were going to die.... The planes were either light bombers or reconnaissance planes-but unmistakably Russian.