Forgotten Soldier (8 page)

We walked over to the soup truck,. whose two stoves were belching smoke. The first arrivals were sent by the cook to fetch the kettles. This cook was not at all a bad sort, and his skill was adequate at least to prevent insurrection. The dishes he prepared really weren't bad at all. The only oddity of his cooking style was that everything without exception was served with the same thick flour sauce. I joined Hals and Lensen, and we were walking back to our trucks, bent over our steaming mess tins. Suddenly a series of more or less distant explosions shook the icy air. We stopped for a moment and listened. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same thing. The explosions began again. Some of them were obviously far away. Instinctively we began to hurry.

"What's going on?" Lensen asked an older soldier who was climbing into his truck.

"Guns, fellows. We're getting closer," he said.

We had all guessed this already, but we needed confirmation.

"Ha!" said Hals. "I'm going to get my gun."

Personally, I didn't take any of this too seriously. There were a few more explosions, some separate and distinct, others overlapping each other.

The departure whistle blew, and we climbed back into our trucks. The convoy jolted into motion. An hour later, as we reached the top of a hill, the gunfire brought us to a complete stop. It was coming from much closer. Each explosion literally shook the air, which was a very strange sensation. Some nervous drivers had stepped on their brakes much too quickly. Their trucks had skidded on the ice, and the drivers were racing the engines, trying unsuccessfully to straighten their machines. I had opened our door, and was looking down the line of trucks. A Volkswagen was driving from the rear at top speed, and a lieutenant was shouting through its open door: "Hurry up, get going, keep moving! You ... help that idiot out of the rut."

I jumped down from our Renault and joined a group of soldiers trying to pull an Opel Blitz back onto the road. The firing had begun again. It seemed to be quite close and coming from the north. Slowly, and with difficulty, the convoy began to move. As we had jammed on our brakes in the middle of an ascent, my driver had a particularly hard time starting up our truck. We descended slowly into a rolling, wooded countryside. The dull sound of explosions continued. Suddenly, the trucks at the head of the column stopped again, and we heard the blast of a whistle. We quickly jumped to the ground. Soldiers were running to the head of the convoy. What was happening?

The lieutenant of a while ago was running too, collecting a group of soldiers as he went by. I was one of them. Carrying our Mausers, and running as fast as we could, we reached the front of the column. The big Kommandergruppe half-track seemed to have driven deliberately into the thick snow at the side of the road.

"Partisans up ahead," a feldwebel shouted. "Scatter for defense." He pointed to our left.

Without understanding very much, I followed the sergeant who was at the head of our group of fifteen soldiers and plunged into the snowy slope. As I pulled myself up on the white barrier, I could see very clearly a swarming mass of black figures emerging from a stunted woods and proceeding at right angles to our line of march. The Russians seemed to be moving as slowly as we were. The cold and the weight of our clothes combined to deprive this spectacle of the animation of Westerns, or of American so-called "war" films. The cold made everything sluggish: both gaiety and sadness, courage and fear.

Ducking my head like everyone else, I moved forward, paying more attention to the position of my boots than to the movements of the enemy. The partisans were still too far away for me to see them in any detail. I imagined that, like us, they must be making huge strides to avoid disappearing in a hole in the snow.

"Dig your foxholes," the feldwebel ordered, lowering his voice as if the other side could hear us.

I didn't have a shovel, but scraped away some snow with the butt of my rifle. Once I was crouched in this relative shelter, I was able to observe the scene at leisure. I was astounded by the number of men coming out of the woods opposite; there were so many of them! And I could see still others in the forest itself, through the branches of the leafless trees. They looked like ants swarming through tall grass. They were obviously moving from north to south. As we were moving east to west, I couldn't grasp their intention. Perhaps they were going to try to encircle us.

Our troops had just set up a heavy machine-gun battery on the slope nearest us, about twenty yards away. I didn't understand why there had not yet been any exchange of fire. The enemy had begun to cross the road, about two hundred yards from us. The sound of big guns from the north was louder than ever, and there seemed to be some answering fire directly opposite us. My hands and feet were beginning to feel the cold. I didn't understand our situation, and felt entirely calm.

The band of Russians crossed the road without bothering us. They appeared to outnumber us by three or four to one. Our convoy consisted of a hundred trucks with a hundred armed drivers, and sixty accompanying troops whose sole function was defense. In addition, there were ten officers and noncoms, a doctor, and two medical orderlies.

Each explosion created clouds of powdered snow. From the wooded hill in the near distance, plumes of smoke synchronized with the increasingly frequent sounds of explosion rose into the air. The heavy machine gun to my right burst into sound for a moment, and then fell silent.

Stupidly, instead of crouching down in my hole, I lifted my head. I could see little white clouds puffing out among the numerous silhouettes of the partisans. There was a sound of dry detonation, with an answer in kind from the Russians.

My eardrums had begun to feel as though they would burst from the noise of the machine gun, which was joined by another on the slope opposite. Everywhere, soldiers were firing their Mausers. Over in the Russian sector, the black silhouettes were running in all directions, faster and faster, through the puffs of white smoke. Some of them fell and lay motionless. The sun went on shining. None of it seemed really serious. Here and there, Russian bullets whistled through the air. The noise was deafening. With my slow reflexes, I hadn't yet fired.

To my right, someone cried out. The sound of firing was almost continuous. The Bolsheviks were running as fast as they could toward the shelter of the snowy thickets. Our tanks were rolling toward them with sharp bursts of gunfire.

Three or four Russian bullets landed in the snow in front of me, and I began to fire blindly, like everyone else. Seven or eight other tanks had arrived and were harassing the partisans. The whole episode lasted about twenty minutes, and when it was over, I had fired about a dozen cartridges.

A short time later, our tanks and armored cars returned. Three of them were driving prisoners ahead of them, in groups of about fifteen men, who all looked deeply humiliated. Three German soldiers supported by their comrades climbed down from one of the cars. One of them seemed almost unconscious, and the other two were grimacing with pain. Three wounded Russians and two Germans were lying inert on the back of one of the tanks, one of them moaning. A short distance off a German soldier, leaning against a snowbank, was gesturing to us and holding his head, which was red with blood.

"The road is clear," announced the commanding officer of the Mark 4 nearest us. "You can go ahead."

We helped carry the wounded to the hospital truck. I went back to my Renault. Lensen passed by close to me, and shook his head in perplexity.

"Did you see that?" he asked.

"Yes. Do you know if anyone was killed?"

"Of course."

The convoy started off again. The idea of death troubled me, and suddenly I felt afraid. The sunshine of a moment ago had been pale, and the cold had become more intense. Bodies in long brown coats were lying along the sides of the road. One of them gestured as we passed.

"Hey," I nudged my driver. "There's a wounded man waving at us.

"Poor fellow. Let's hope his side takes care of him. War is hard that way. Tomorrow it may be our turn."

"Yes, but we've got a doctor. He could do something for him."

"You can talk. We've got two truckloads of wounded already, and the doctor has more than enough to keep him busy. You mustn't be upset by all this, you know. You'll see plenty more of it."

"I already have."

"I have too," he said, without believing me.

"Especially, I've seen my own knee. The whole kneecap was taken out by a shell in Poland. I thought they were going to send me home again. But they stuck me into the drivers' corps instead, along with the old men, the boys, and the infirm. It's no joke you know; a wound like that really hurts, especially if you have to wait for hours before they give you any morphine."

He launched into the history of the Polish campaign as he had experienced it. At that time, he had belonged to the Sixth Army, which now was fighting in Stalingrad.

It was growing dark. Our long convoy stopped in a small hamlet. The armored column was there too. The captain had ordered this halt so that the wounded could be cared for. The crust of snow and the roughness of the road made the hospital truck rock and jolt. The surgeon couldn't operate under such conditions. Two Russians had already died of hemorrhage, and the rest of the men had already been waiting for several hours.

Our truck had just stopped beside a large building where the peasants stored the harvest. I was about to open the door and run to the kitchen truck when my driver held me back:

"Don't be in such a hurry, unless you want to be on guard duty tonight. The sergeant doesn't keep records here, you know, the way he does at the barracks. He just grabs the first people he sees, assigns them, and then takes it easy."

It was true. A short time later I was listening to the complaints of the eternally hungry Hals: "Scheisse! They've stuck me for guard duty again. God knows what'll happen to us all. It's getting colder and colder. We won't be able to stand it."

It was another clear night, and the thermometer fell to twenty-two degrees below freezing.

I thanked my driver for saving me from another night in the open air. However, the fate that befell me instead almost made me regret my luck. We were walking toward the kitchen truck feeling somewhat anxious about dinner, wondering if there would be enough left to fill our mess tins. When the cook saw us coming, he couldn't resist a little sarcasm: "So, you're not feeling hungry tonight?"

He had already taken the tureens off the fire and replaced them with the big serving dishes, which were filled with hissing water coming to the boil.

"Hurry up and eat," he said, plunging his gloved hand armed with a big spoon into the depths of one of the tureens. "I have to boil this water for the surgeon. He's busy carving up the wounded."

We were bolting our tepid meal, still wearing our ragged gloves, when a lieutenant arrived.

"Is the water nearly ready?"

"Just now, Leutnant. It's just boiling."

"Good." The lieutenant's eye fell on us. "You two: take the water to the doctor." He pointed to the lighted doorway of one of the houses. We closed our mess tins, still half full of food, and hooked them onto our belts. I grabbed one of the steaming basins, taking care not to empty its contents onto my feet, and walked toward the improvised operating room.

The sole advantage of being inside this house was its temperature. It had been a long time since any of us had experienced indoor warmth. The doctor had requisitioned the large common room of a Soviet farmer, and was busy with the leg of a poor fellow stretched out on the central table. Two other soldiers were holding the patient, who was jerking spasmodically and moaning with pain. Everywhere-on benches, on the floor, on the big storage chests-wounded soldiers were lying or sitting, groaning as they waited. Two orderlies were tending to them. The floor was littered with bloody bandages.

Two Russian women were washing the surgical instruments in basins of hot water. The room was extremely badly lit. The doctor had put the farmer's big gas lamp beside the operating table. The farmer himself was holding another lamp over the surgeon's head. A lieutenant and a sergeant were each holding another lamp.

In an angle of the room made by the big comer chimney, a young Russian was crying. He looked about seventeen, like me.

I put my basin down beside the doctor, who plunged a thick wad of dressing into it.

I stayed where I was, transfixed by the terrible sight in front of me. I couldn't lift my eyes from that naked thigh inside which the surgeon was working. The skin around the wound seemed to have been crushed, and everything was soaked with blood. New streams of blood, of a brighter, clearer red, kept running from the enormous hole in which the doctor was working, with what looked like a pair of flat-bladed scissors. My head began to swim, and I felt sick at my stomach, but I couldn't look away. The patient was tossing his head from one side to the other. He was being held down firmly by two other soldiers. His face was completely drained of color, and streaming with sweat. They had stuffed a bandage into his mouth, perhaps to keep him from crying out. It was one of the soldiers from the armored column. I couldn't move.

"Hold his leg," the doctor said softly to me.

I hesitated, and he looked at me again. My trembling hands took hold of the mangled leg. As they touched the skin, I could feel myself shaking.

"Gently," murmured the doctor.

I saw the scalpel cut even more deeply into the wound, and I could feel the muscles of the leg tensing and relaxing. Then I closed my eyes. I could hear the sounds made by the surgical instruments, and the heavy, panting breath of the patient, who kept moving in agony, despite the partial anesthetic.

Then, although I could hardly bear to recognize it, I heard the sound of a saw. A moment later, the leg was heavier in my hand unbelievably heavy and I saw that it was supported five inches above the table only by my anguished hands. The surgeon had just detached it from the body.

I remained for a moment in a ludicrous and tragic attitude, holding my hideous burden. I thought I was going to faint. Finally, I put it down on a pile of bandages beside the table. I shall never forget that leg, even if I live a hundred years.