Forgotten Soldier (7 page)

For two hours at a time, throughout that accursed night, we shivered in this way. Between each tour of duty, I was able to snatch a brief sleep. The first glimmers of light, which found me shoveling snow, fell on a face creased with exhaustion.

With dawn, the cold grew even more intense. The woolen gloves we had been issued were worn through, and our frostbitten hands were wrapped in rags, or in our extra pairs of socks. But in spite of the exercise of shoveling the cold was no longer bearable. We slapped our hands against our sides and stamped our feet to keep our chilled blood moving. The captain, in a moment of compassion, ordered some ersatz coffee prepared and served to us boiling hot. This was doubly welcome because for breakfast that morning we had been given nothing but a portion each of frozen white cheese. The corporal at the canteen told us that the thermometer outside his truck read twenty-four degrees below zero.

I don't remember exactly how much longer this journey took. The days which followed have remained in my memory like a frozen nightmare. The temperature varied between fifteen and twenty-five below zero. There was a horrifying day of wind when, despite all of the orders and threats from our officers, we abandoned our shovels and took shelter behind the trucks. On that day the temperature fell to thirty-five degrees below zero, and I thought I would surely die. Nothing could warm us. We urinated into our numbed hands to warm them, and, hopefully, to cauterize the gaping cracks in our fingers.

Four of our men, who were seriously ill, suffering from pulmonary and bronchial pneumonia, lay groaning in makeshift beds set up in one of the trucks. There were only two medical orderlies for our company, and there wasn't much they could do. In addition to these serious illnesses, there were at least forty cases of frostbite. Some men had patches of skin on the ends of their noses which had been frozen and had become infected. Similar infection was common in the folds of the eyelids, around the ears, and particularly on the hands. I myself was not seriously affected, but each movement of my fingers opened and closed deep crevices, which oozed blood. At moments the pain was so intense that I felt sick at my stomach. At moments my despair was so intense that I broke down in tears, but as everyone was preoccupied with his own troubles, no one paid much attention.

Twice, I went to the canteen truck, which doubled as the infirmary, to have my hands washed in 9o-degree alcohol. This produced paroxysms of pain which made me cry aloud, but afterward my hands felt warm for a few minutes.

Our inadequate diet contributed to our desperation. From Minsk, our point of departure, to Kiev, the first stop, was a distance of about 250 miles. With all the difficulties of the route taken into consideration, the authorities had given us food for five days. In fact, we required eight days, which obliged us to consume some of the rations intended for the front. In addition, we had to abandon three of the thirty-eight vehicles in our group because of mechanical failure, destroying them along with their cargoes, so that they wouldn't fall into the hands of the partisans. Of the four men who were seriously ill, two had died. Many others suffered from frostbite, and a few had to have frozen hands or feet amputated.

Three days before we reached Kiev, we crossed what must once have been the Russian line of defense. We drove for hours through a landscape littered with the carcasses of tanks, trucks, guns, and aircraft, gutted and burned, a scattering of junk which stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there, crosses or stakes marked the hasty burial of the thousands of German and Russian soldiers who had fallen on this plain.

In fact, many more Russians than Germans had been killed. However, insofar as was possible, the soldiers of the Reich were given decent burials, while each orthodox emblem marked the grave of ten or twelve Soviet soldiers.

Our journey across this boneyard naturally did not make us feel any warmer. The huge shell holes, which we had to fill in as best we could, made it particularly difficult.

Finally, our convoy arrived at Kiev. This handsome city had not suffered much damage. The Red Army had tried to stop the Wehrmacht outside the town, in the zone we had passed through. When they had no longer been able to withstand German pressure, they had preferred to withdraw to the other side of the city, to spare it the kind of destruction Minsk had suffered. Kiev was our first stop, halfway between Minsk and Kharkov. Our ultimate destination, Stalingrad, was still more than six hundred miles away.

Kiev was an important strategic center, where units coming from Poland and Rumania regrouped and made ready for the offensive which would push on to the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. To an even greater degree than Minsk, the city swarmed with soldiers and military vehicles, with the difference that here there was a perceptible atmosphere of alert.

Our group entered the outlying zone of the city, and halted until further orders from the Kommandantur.

Once again we found ourselves walking on a snow-covered roadway as slick and firmly packed as a ski run. We thought we had reached the end of our troubles. Everyone was anticipating the arrival of orders which, we felt certain, would direct us to our new lodgings.

We were sent first of all to the hygienic center, which was extremely welcome as the cold had made even the most cursory washing impossible. We were all disgustingly dirty and covered with vermin.

Those with serious injuries were hospitalized-a category to which only seven men were admitted. For everyone else, the journey continued: we spent only seven hours in Kiev.

As we left the remarkably well-organized sanitary service, our group was ordered to stand at attention on the snow-covered esplanade in front of the building. A hauptmann arrived at high speed in a Volkswagen. He turned toward us and delivered a short speech without getting out of the car.

"Soldiers! Germans! Convoy troops! At this hour, when the conquests of the Reich extend across a vast territory, the Fatherland depends on you to assure the victory of our arms by your devotion. It is your responsibility to hasten the pace at which essential supplies reach our fighting troops. The hour has come for you to perform your duty on the front you know so well-the road, fraught with a thousand perils and hardships, upon which you have already expended such prodigious energies. From our factories, where our workers are drawing on all their strength to forge the necessary weapons, through your exhausting journey toward our heroic combatants, no one is allowed a moment's respite so long as any German soldier might suffer from a shortage of weapons, food, or clothing. The nation is drawing on all its strength to insure that our soldiers at the front receive what they require and are thus able to retain their enthusiasm and confidence in our solidarity. Not one of us has the right to flinch or falter in the face of momentary discouragement. No one has the right to doubt the heroism daily confirmed by our fresh victories. We all have to bear the same sufferings, and dealing with them as a unified group is the best way of surmounting them. Never forget that the nation owes you everything, and that in return it expects everything of you, up to and including the supreme sacrifice. You must learn to support suffering without complaint, because you are German. Heil Hitler!"

"Heil Hitler!" we answered in unison.

The hauptmann cleared his throat and continued in a less theatrical tone: "You will make up a full group and will rejoin the 124th and the 125th at the edge of town, on the Rollbahn to Kharkov. Your formation will be accompanied by a section of motorized combat troops belonging to Panzerdivision Stulpnagel. They will protect your convoy from the terrorists who will try to impede your advance. As you will see, the Reich is making every effort to facilitate your task."

He saluted, and his orderly immediately shifted into gear.

We joined the two other sections of our company at the selected place to form the 19th Kompanie Rollbahn, under Kommandant Ultraner. My first thought was that now I would surely run into my friends from training camp, if they hadn't been transferred or killed. I didn't know whether they'd left Minsk before or after us, but in fact our old 19th had been re-formed.

We now possessed a rolling kitchen which could serve us hot meals. This made a great difference to us. Immediately before our departure we were served a large hot meal, which produced an almost unbelievable sense of well-being, and raised our spirits to a remarkable degree. The cold seemed to have settled at about four degrees below zero, which was an improvement. But then we had just taken hot showers and changed our clothes.

I had no trouble finding Hals, whose exuberant gestures I recognized easily.

"Well, what do you think of the weather, young one? And of the restaurant, hein? It's ten days since I've swallowed anything hot. We thought we'd die of cold on that damned train."

"You were on a train! If that's not luck . . ."

"Luck! You can talk . . . You should have been there when the locomotive blew up. It made a cloud of steam at least a hundred yards high. Four of the fellows were killed and seven wounded. Morvan was wounded while we were cleaning up the mess. It went on like that for five days. I was with a patrol that went after some terrorists. We caught two of them hiding in a kolkhoz.*  (Collective farm).

One of the peasants they'd robbed put us on their trail, and afterward invited us to his place and gave us a regular feast."

I wasted no time in telling him my adventures; talking this way made us both feel better. We had just run into Lensen and Olensheim. Our sense of happiness and relief at meeting again was so great that quite spontaneously we grabbed each other by the shoulders and mimed an exaggerated polonaise, shouting with laughter. Some of the older men stared at us in astonishment, unable to see any reason for this burst of gaiety, so inconsistent with the gray and icy atmosphere.

"Where's Fahrstein?" I asked.

"Ouf," roared Lensen, still laughing. "He's snug and warm in his truck. He sprained his ankle, and it's so swollen he can't take his boot off, so he's waiting for it to deflate."

"He's making the most of it," Hals remarked. "If I carried on like that every time I turned my ankle . . ."

Our conversation was interrupted by the order for departure, and we returned to our posts. Knowing that my friends were there, with only a few trucks between us, made me feel a great deal better, and I almost forgot that each turn of the wheels was taking me closer to the front. It was still so far away. We were traveling on bad roads covered with snow and ice. On either side, a wall of snow thrown back by road-clearing operations hid the countryside. Through the occasional gaps we were able to see traces of the terrible fighting which had overrun this part of the country the year before. The hastily patched road was so rough that we had to crawl through several hundred miles of this ruined countryside.

The troops of von Wichs, Guderian, von Reichenau and von Stulpnagel had wrenched this territory from the Soviets after weeks of heavy fighting, and held several hundreds of thousands of prisoners between Kiev and Kharkov. The amount of Russian war materiel strewn about under the snow made me wonder how they could possibly have much left.

Rising temperatures brought fresh snowfalls which made it necessary for us to bring out our shovels again. Fortunately, a section of the armored column which was supposed to accompany us joined us two days later. We were able to attach four or five trucks to the back of a tank so that, with their engines going, the trucks were able to manage a slipping, sliding advance despite the snow and ice.

However, the low clouds soon vanished, leaving a pale blue sky. The thermometer plunged sharply, and we were caught once more by a biting cold, on that accursed Russian plain. Occasionally a group of German airplanes would pass over our column with throbbing engines. We waved wildly at the pilots, who responded by dipping their wings. Higher up, squadrons of JU-52s passed slowly over us, flying east. Our hot meals no longer warmed us, and frostbite was eating into my hands once again. Fortunately, this time our convoy included a doctor. Each time we stopped to eat, we lined up beside his truck. He coated my hands with a greasy, curative ointment which I tried to keep on as long as possible as it reduced the pain in my cracked skin and preserved it from the cold. I kept my hands buried in the depths of my giant overcoat pockets unless absolutely forced to pull them out, and then I was very careful not to rub off the ointment against the rough cloth.

I spent long hours in the cab of a three-and-a-half-ton Renault, jolting from rut to rut. From time to time we had to remove the snow which accumulated between the mudguard and the tire, or help another machine which had skidded and gotten stuck.

Otherwise, we avoided everything which obliged us to step outside. So far I had escaped guard duty at night. When darkness made further advance impossible, we stopped where we were. The driver had the right to the seat. I usually slept on the floor, with my legs wedged in beside the pedals and my nose on the engine, which gave off a sickening stench of hot oil. We always woke up stiff and numb with cold.

Well before daybreak we began the exhausting struggle of starting our frozen engines. Hals had come to see me several times, but my driver always protested that three was too many for our tiny cab. He advised me to go and see my friend instead, but that always came to the same thing, and there was certainly no question of standing outside for a chat.

One day, just after we had passed a large town with a Luftwaffe airfield beside it, we were joined by a reconnaissance plane, which entered into radio communication with the Kommandergruppe of the armored section accompanying us. A moment later, the plane left the convoy and veered to the north. The tanks in our column disappeared in whirlwinds of snow thrown up by their treads. We went on as before, without feeling any special anxiety. A few hours later we heard the booming sound of distant explosions. This stopped, began again a few minutes later, then stopped, then began again. At eleven o'clock the convoy halted in a village covered with snow. The sun was shining, and its gleam on the snow made us squint. The cold, although intense, was bearable.