Europe Central (89 page)

Rüdiger shook his head, Gernot was as silent as a Russian civilian, while Dancwart, who’d once had a Slavic wife but did the right thing, looked up from the raw potato he was cutting rotten spots out of, and with genuine amazement inquired: Why in the world should we care?

Anyhow, chuckled the cripple, here I am. I’ve been fighting for Germany ever since we Aryanized the Hermann Tietz department store. Here we go again!

I remembered him then.—How’s your wife? I said.

He started wiping his eye then, and we got disgusted.

I was a telephonist; I sat there cranking my grey box. Operation Citadel was Operation Suicide, and I sincerely tried to warn him of that fact. Consider the enemy salient—half the size of England! They should have taken my discouragements into account when I came before the Denazification Court, but there’s another tale. Yes, I tried to weaken Hitler’s army—I was practically a member of the Resistance!—for I told the old man: Watch out for those T-34 wolfpacks!

Believe it or not, he replied, I can stand my ground as well with one leg as you can with two.

What could I say to that? The T-34s comprised my own worst fear. They came in daylight or darkness, with their headlights continuously on. And how many Tiger tanks do you think we had in Ninth Panzer? Not one. So how could we hope to stop the Slavs? To get right down to it, my hope was for something both more private and more realistic: a moderate wound. I was moderate in everything. A soldier hunching low and weary in a narrow mud trench, that was me. In those days, when a soldier went on leave from the Ostfront he got a special Führer-parcel of sausage, butter and chocolate. That’s all I was wishing for. But Rüdiger sighed that there might not be any leaves from now on, no more ever.

The cripple said, and I’d forgotten that he was even here: It’s no use denying it. There was an air raid. That was her end.

Gernot rolled leaves into a cigarette. Gernot didn’t care. Gernot’s wife had already burned.

The cripple said: The Amis did it, but I don’t mind revenging myself on Russians. Besides, I’m a former athlete. I like exercise. I believe in physical culture.

Well, I don’t know why I troubled myself, but I led him to Sergeant Gunther, who said: We need every man we can get. He can draw Schnelling’s rations; the dead list hasn’t gone through. If he’s thickskulled enough to volunteer, maybe the Russian shells will bounce off his head . . .

2

Operation Citadel commenced at 0430 hours on 5.7.43. It concluded on 19.7.43, after seventy thousand of us were dead. Well, from the very beginning we’d known that it was no use; as I’ve just told you, it was up to us as frontline soldiers simply to obey orders and bear the responsibility. Nobody was singing “Erika, We Love You” anymore. And all that time the air burned with the sound of metal screaming; and after we’d failed on the Ol’khovatka axis, the sky grew light grey, like the service colors of an
-general; and after Ninth Army lost two-thirds of its tanks on the Ponyri axis the sky became as brown as the service colors of an
concentration camp guard; and finally, after we’d lost on the Oboian’ and Korcha axes it was as black as an army engineer’s armband. The Prokhorovka axis was where we were truly beaten. Stalingrad had been the end, but Kursk was really the end; two years after Operation Citadel I saw a Russian with his German girl in Berlin; they were playing with his pistol, shooting it at the sun, and he was kissing her and she was kissing him and she wore a blood-red rose in her hair.

3

As for us, no Russians had tasted our girls yet; we still bore arms, and on command we disguised the X of our divisional emblem with a V overhung by a horizontal bar. We didn’t want to make it easy for those Slavs to know who we were, see.

It’s said that Freissner’s Twenty-third Corps struck first, but I’ll never believe that we didn’t earn the prize! At 0500 hours we came forth from the Butovo-Gerzovka Line, with the long guns of our Tiger tanks pointing the way far above our heads; I won’t forget how those great steel nursemaids rolled calmly at our side, comforting us in our triple line of march. So far, our formation was still as perfectly spaced as the eyelashes of Lisca Malbran. I didn’t feel unsteady. You see, I hadn’t spied any T-34s yet. When the Tigers began to pull away (they all belonged to the bastards in Twenty-first Panzer), it was as if someone were holding my head underwater and I had to accept my first breath of fatality; but although I choked, it didn’t kill me; death was in my lungs now and soon would be in my blood, but I just went on choking; thus my German fortitude. Once upon a time, a woman loved me and I loved her and everything was perfect; then she stopped wanting to sleep with me quite so much and I panicked, which drove her farther away; eventually I learned to hide my anguish from her, to delay the final disengagement; in short, I believed in magic; if I only concealed my need for the Tigers to stay, they’d keep me company for a half hour longer! But there they went now; the shadows of their eighty-eight guns passed over me and cooled me; a grenadier, standing in his open hatch, waved at me, and his tank groaned and clattered onward; then they were all roaring ahead out of sight, and we remained alone.

Rüdiger shook his head. I liked him because he always expected the worst.

We had six command tanks, thirty-eight Panzer-IVs, thirty-eight Panzer-IIIs, which at this stage of the war were scarcely better than bicycles, and one repainted Panzer-II, whose crew regarded themselves as already buried. There you have the tale of us in Ninth Panzer. We were skinny soldiers marching out of order, with cigarettes drooping in our mouths as we stared anxiously ahead. Twenty-first held only half as many tanks, so they had the cheek to envy
us
; we would have been happy to trade them two for one, as long as we got Tigers! That woman I mentioned (Lina was her name), when she wasn’t there I missed her so much I thought I’d die; when I was with her the knowledge that I’d soon lose her poisoned everything; that was how I felt now, seeing the Tiger tanks go away. There went another of our mortar platoons with their eighty-ones; my God, were we really going to be left without help on our assault front? Those seventy-fives that our Panzer-IVs were saddled with, well, I’ll complain about them later. At least Army Groups Center and South were both engaged today, and that was comfort of a sort: strength in numbers, as they say. Unfortunately, the salient was so vast that Army Group South remained an infinite distance away! On the bright side, South faced ten thousand Russian tanks, while we in Center faced only three thousand—excellent news for me. No doubt our dedication would produce decisive results. At least that was what the cripple said, and so did our commander, Lieutenant-General Scheller.

The enemy had beset our way with many tank traps, especially in the Gerzovka lowlands, but we broke through the outer Russian line. That wasn’t pleasant. We waited a moment, to let them finish shooting their own wounded before we moved in. Nobody can say we’re not humane.

By 0900 hours we had reached our first objective, Point 237.8, which lay westward of Cherkasskoye. You can take it from me that it wasn’t in Private Volker’s guidebook. And beside me, excellent Rüdiger, still young but powder-burned, his blond hair cropped, watched ahead, his neck pulsing, his right hand ready on the trigger; he searched for death with his bitter, wary eyes. Oh, that was Rüdiger for you! And Rüdiger shook his head.
Action!
We now faced a heavy aircraft assault, and by 0915 hours our regimental bomb station had received a direct hit. Among those killed were my friend Regimental Adjutant Hauptmann Hildebrand. (He was the one who always used to say: It could have been worse! We could have been at Stalingrad!) His pale head met the dirt; dark blood crept from his mouth. Well, so what? It could have been me. Somebody I didn’t know was already blubbering about the betrayed offensive, and the officers were all shouting, far too late:
Set up defensive positions!
after which the roaring of our eighty-eights silenced everything human.—At 1000 hours we achieved our second objective, Point 210.7, where First and Second Battalions joined us. Here we were delayed by more tank traps.

Rüdiger, soulful Rüdiger was now in the truck ahead of me and Volker was behind. According to his guidebook, the Tverskaia quarter of Moscow is supposed to be very nice; Stalin widened the streets just for us! As for the old cripple, I initially supposed that he was with Sergeant Gunther, which couldn’t have been the case; to tell you the truth, I couldn’t have cared less about him right then. We could almost hear the breathing of the Slavs all around us in the wheat fields. That made me sick with fear. And here I want to state that the sleepwalker made sure that the best new assault guns went to his pets in the Waffen-
; we were under strength and certainly didn’t get to ride in armored half-tracks, I can assure you! As I’ve already inserted into the record, I was only a telephonist; I had to ride in an open truck. I kept saying to myself: If there’s only something I can do; if I can only reason it out! I’m not a good person but I’m not such a monster, either. I’ve never shot a civilian except when under orders. I deserve to live. What measures can I take? Hermit crabs become all helmet whenever they want to; smugglers invent a hiding place that no one has ever thought of before; tank crews get themselves transferred into Tigers. And tanks protect themselves with anti-magnetic paste, so that Russian mines can’t—

Then suddenly from somewhere within a dense tall forest of sunflower-stalks rose a metal thing which resembled a cup on a stick; this innocuous object whirled through the air, landed on the engine cover of the Panzer-III on our left flank, which was Dancwart’s, and blew it up, just as I’d expected; that was the end of Dancwart. To the sleepwalker, all this was merely reconnaissance in force.

At 1100 hours our engineers had completed their bridge over the Gerzovka lowlands, and even I, who knew better, almost convinced myself that we would actually break through and shatter these supernatural enemy concentrations, because an illusion was better than the nastiness of Sergeant Gunther, who’d said: Whoever doesn’t get killed is going to be called a traitor for losing, so you might as well give it your all! And don’t think about getting captured, either. Slavs drink from the skulls of their enemies.—At 1300 hours a Russian tank attack toward Korovino was halted by us, we destroying all seven tanks. But then came more tanks in squares of a hundred and two hundred.

Well, we kept doing what we could. Our wills were armored, like our Führer’s heart, train and automobile. Volker said: There’s nothing we can do, so we may as well roll on and find out what’s going to happen to us . . .

By the end of the second day we’d achieved a breakthrough to the depth of fifteen kilometers. After that, everything got impossible. By the fifth day we’d penetrated deeper, to be sure, half a dozen more kilometers; our wills might have been armored, but the enemy’s armor was thicker. We tried to be cautious; we raised our binoculars and peered through holes in every wall; but dead men, black with flies, lay in the killing zones between barbed wire. Even if only one in four was German, we’d still lost, because there are so many Russians, you see!