Forgotten Soldier (66 page)

Then our motley collection of troops continued their retreat-a vain and empty march. We seemed to be tramping along a huge carpet on rollers, which unwound beneath our feet, leaving us always in the same place. How many hours, and days, and nights went by? I can no longer remember. Our groups spread out, and separated. Some stayed where they were, and slept. No order or threat was strong enough to move them. Others-small groups of men who were particularly strong, or who still had enough food to keep going-went on ahead. There were also many suicides. I remember two villages stripped of every scrap of food, and more than one massacre. Men were ready to commit murder for a quart of goat's milk, a few potatoes, a pound of millet. Starving wolves on the run don't have time to stop and talk.

There were still a few human beings left in the wolf pack: soldiers who died to save a can of sour milk-the last reserve of a pair of infants. Others died at the hands of their fellows for protesting against the savagery produced by famine, or were beaten to death because they were suspected of hiding food. Usually, these men were found to have nothing. There were a few exceptions: an Austrian had his head kicked in, and a few handfuls of crumbled vitamin biscuit were found at the bottom of his sack. He had probably collected them by shaking out the provision sacks of some commissariat which had ceased to exist several weeks before. Men died for very little-for the possibility of a day's food. When everything had been eaten, down to the last sprout in the meager gardens, twelve thousand soldiers stared at the village, which had been abandoned by its terrified inhabitants.

Living corpses wandered here and there, staring at the tragic shreds of existence which remained to them. They stared at the scene of pillage, looking for some understanding of the past which might shed some light on the future. They stayed where they were until dusk. Then three or four armored cars from the advancing Russian troops arrived, peppered with machine-gun fire the crowd of men, who didn't even try to escape, made a half-turn, and left. The desperate, ravening men scattered across the steppe.

Everyone fled, running for the west because the west drew them irresistibly, as the north attracts the needle of a compass. The steppe absorbed and obliterated them, leaving only small, scattered groups tramping toward the Rumanian frontier, which was very close, but still out of sight. I belonged to one such group. There were nine of us: Hals and me-inseparable as always-Sperlovski, Frosch, Prinz, an older fellow called Siemenleis, who must have been an incorruptible civil servant before the war, and three Hungarians, with whom all conversation was impossible. Were they volunteers, or had they been enrolled in circumstances similar to mine? No one knew. They looked at us with eyes full of hate, as if we were responsible for the misadventure of the Third Reich in which they had been involved. Yet they clung to us as if we were their last hope of ever returning to their distant firesides.

One day there was a line of trees, or a hedge of saplings, which I can still see, as in a drunken dream, and beyond it, the wide, very wide field which we planned to cross. We could see some buildings on the crest of a small hill, and had decided to search them for food.

Halfway across the field the sound of planes made us look up. Two Yabos were seeking some prey.

Seven of us melted into that enormous stretch of ground, and two ran-Frosch and myself.

Like hunted animals intent on self-preservation, each man thought only of himself, and no one shouted to us. The two Russian aviators spotted our wild gallop, and dived down at us. Although we had nothing left but our skins, we still represented the enemy to them, and had to be wiped out.

When the noise reached a certain pitch, we instinctively threw ourselves down on the thick grass. The bullets passed over our heads and landed far beyond us. When we lifted our heads, we could see the planes completing a graceful arabesque against the stormy blue and black summer sky. Gasping for breath, we ran desperately until the two vultures once again filled the air with overwhelming noise. The planes made two more passes after that, peppering the ground with bullets, each time twenty or thirty yards wide of the mark. Like a terrible joke, the planes roared gown a fourth time at the trembling, sweating grasshoppers which were ourselves. Suddenly, as if by a miracle, we came to a ditch, and fell into it.

Without seeing them, we distinctly heard the roar of the Russian rockets, which turned both banks of our ditch into ridges of broken earth. Our friends were sure we were dead. The planes made one more pass, and flew off, undoubtedly convinced that they had brought our wanderings to an end. When we walked out through the whirling dust, our companions greeted us with shouts of incredulous delight.

At the farm, which the inhabitants had abandoned some fifteen minutes before our arrival, we found a kettle full of steaming Jerusalem artichokes, which had undoubtedly been left to distract us. We went on our way, gorging on this unexpected windfall. Two days later, during which we twice collected potatoes from Russians at gun point, we ran into an interminable convoy retreating into Rumania, and were inescapably absorbed into it.

Then we experienced Rumania and its population, which seemed stunned by the sequence of events, by the route of their army, and by the painful disintegration of the Wehrmacht.

Civilian life was in a state of panic, with Rumanian and foreign partisans, daily over-flights of foreign planes, raids for food and supplies, and Rumanian prostitutes who flocked around the troops in such numbers that it seemed as if most of the women in Rumania must be prostitutes.

We marched twenty, twenty-five, even thirty miles a day, pouring with sweat and stunned by disillusion. Our tortured feet were alternately bare in the dust of narrow, twisting roads, then back in our boots, and then naked and bleeding once more. Our hollow stomachs rumbled with hunger. There were raiding parties, re-formation of units, and a lunatic rabble, whose fringes and surface were skimmed by military police intent on discipline, and as always alert for the possibility of exemplary executions.

The landscape was profoundly romantic, but we had been transformed into ravening wolves, and thought of nothing but food.

A particular episode emerges from my memories of disorder-a tragic paroxysm which still seems to me a symbol of humanity gone mad. We were in the mountains and had just been through a town called Reghin, which at that time was known as Arlau, or Erlau. We were tramping along, gray with dust and pouring with sweat. We had miraculously escaped incorporation into several scratch formations, and our interminable, wretched column was twisting through what seemed like an infinite chain of mountains. The column was broken up into groups of varying size, in which unkempt soldiers pushed along every kind of transport to move our basic necessities.

We requisitioned the most extraordinary vehicles. Anyone who found a bicycle grabbed it, even if it had no tires, and went on ahead of the rest to skim off anything even remotely digestible. In this district of jagged peaks and crags, we were free of enemy aircraft, but the terrain was ideal for partisans, and there were many battles to the death between them and our men, who were now fighting simply to save their skins.

In this district, one group among many others of men in a motley conglomeration of clothes was struggling to reach the mother country. Behind our glittering eyes, deeply sunk into shadowy sockets, one belief sustained us. This was that, if we managed to survive, the mother country would receive us with tenderness, and try to help us forget the unimaginable trial which was nearly over. We thought that, once we reached home, the war would be over, and that in the worst imaginable case the army would be reorganized, so that no enemy would enter Germany itself. We held to this as the one final idea which would justify our sufferings and banish the solution of suicide which others had already accepted.

Yesterday's landser, members of elite units, Panzergrenadiers who had confronted a thousand deaths to live for a chimera, clung to the idea that we had to live to be able to hope, and we had to hope passionately to be able to live as we were. We had to fight against daily ambush, and keep going no matter what, to get away from the Russians, who were hard on our heels. And we had to eat a certain minimum, which wasn't easy to do.

There were twelve in our group-many of them familiar companions: Schlesser, Frosch, Lieutenant Wollers, Lensen, Kellerman, and then Hals and me, kept together by a miracle of silent fraternity. Hals, who had grown startlingly thin, was forcing his large bony body along the narrow mountain road some four or five yards ahead of me. He often walked ahead of me, which gave me a certain sense of security, although his large body was seriously reduced. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a leather belt and a band of cartridges for the spandau across his chest. A Russian blouse, in anticipation of the cool evenings at this altitude, floated from the leather pouch that held his few possessions along with four or five grenades. His heavy steel helmet seemed to be riveted to his head, and the lice in his filthy hair must have died for lack of light.

Many men had thrown away their heavy helmets, but Hals felt his was a last link with the German Army, and that during this terrible trial we should try to remain soldiers, rather than degenerate into tramps. I kept mine too, as a sign of solidarity, dangling from my belt.

Someone up ahead shouted for us to come and see. We looked down into a leafy ravine. A camouflaged truck bearing the inscription "WH" had crashed to the bottom. Lensen was already running down to have a closer look.

"Watch out!" someone shouted. "It might be a trap!"

Lieutenant Wollers had joined Lensen. We drew back, certain that the partisans had arranged a booby trap, and that we would see our two companions blown to pieces any minute. However, a reassuring shout floated up from the gulf.

"A windfall! Mein Gott, it's like a whole commissary!"

Within seconds we were all running toward the miracle.

"Look at that! Chocolate, cigarettes, wurst . . ."

"Good God! And here are three bottles, too!"

"Shut up," shouted Schlesser, "or you'll have the whole army down here! It's a miracle no one found this before."

"So many delicious things," said Frosch in an almost tender voice. "Let's all grab everything we can. We can share it out later, on the road." Frosch and another fellow loaded themselves heavily, and climbed back to the road to keep watch. Thousands of men were wandering very close to us; we would try to take everything. We had almost completed the job when our two lookouts shouted: "Achtung!"

We ran into the brush and heard the distant roar of a motorcycle. The engine slowed down and seemed to stop. We ran off through the thorny growth, clutching our precious cargoes. We were used to getting out of the way in a hurry and melting into the ground when an unfriendly eye might become too interested in our existence. We could hear some noncoms shouting, and supposed that our two companions had been caught by a military patrol, perhaps even by the military police.

"Those two sods were caught with bottles under their arms," muttered Wollers.

"Let's get out of here as fast as we can," said Lindberg, who had just run up.

"Someone's coming down," whispered Lensen. "An M.P.-I saw his badge."

"Hell, let's get out of here."

Everybody ran, scattering into the bushes as if Ivan himself were at his heels. We regrouped after five or six hundred yards, hiding behind a rocky outcrop.

"I've lost enough breath because of those bastards," said Hals. "If they want to chase us this far, I'll take care of them."

"You're crazy," said Lindberg. "Don't talk like that. What are you trying to do to us?"

"Shut up!" Hals said. "You'll never make it home anyway. Ivan's going to get you for sure. Why don't you think for a minute of Frosch and the other fellow who've been caught?"

"We might as well eat," said Wollers. "I've had enough of giving orders, and sweating, and shitting in my pants like a baby when I'm scared. So let's get started. If we're going to die for it, all the more reason to fill our bellies while we can."

Like hungry beasts, we wolfed down the contents of the tins and the other provisions, masticating loudly.

"We'd better eat it all," Lensen said. "If we're caught with anything in our sacks that wasn't handed out, we'll be in trouble."

"You're right. Let's eat it all. They won't slit us open to see what's inside, although it would be just like those bastards to check our shit." For an hour we gorged ourselves until we were almost sick. When it grew dark, we returned to the road by a devious route. Lensen stepped out of the brush first.

"Come on, the coast is clear."

We went on for three or four hundred yards, passing once again the hole with its unexpected windfall which had allowed us to fill our famished stomachs for a moment. There was no one in sight. We went on for another two or three miles, and collapsed at the side of the road.

"I can't go any further," said Schlesser. "We're not used to eating any more, and this is what happens."

"Why don't we go to sleep right here?" someone said. "That will help our digestions."

Toward two o'clock in the morning, a large group of German soldiers came by and woke us up.

"On your feet," shouted an old feldwebel. "Get going, or Ivan will be in Berlin before you."

We resumed our trek. This bunch had collected several horse-drawn wagons, and for a while, we were able to ride. At daybreak, we arrived at a town built on the mountainside. Some men were splashing in an icy bathing place. Others were sleeping on the ground or on terrace walls. Farther on, still others had begun their march again, toward safety, the west, the mother country, waiting to receive them, whose true condition they couldn't begin to guess.

And then there was a tree, a majestic tree, whose branches seemed to be supporting the sky.

Two sacks were dangling from those branches, two empty scarecrows swinging in the wind, suspended by two short lengths of rope. We walked under them, and saw the gray, bloodless faces of hanged men, and recognized our wretched friend Frosch and his companion.