Forgotten Soldier (3 page)

"You will be leaving this billet to convoy several military trains to a more advanced post. You have just been issued with supplies for eight days, which you will now include in your equipment. You will assemble in twenty minutes. Now get ready."

Quickly, silent with anxiety, we return to our quarters and gather together our possessions. As I fasten my pack to my back, my neighbor in the next bed asks: "How long will we be gone?"

"Don't know."

"I just wrote to my parents and asked them to send me some books."

"The P.O. will forward your package."

At that moment Hals, my enormous friend, hits me across the back. "At last we'll see some Russians," he shouts, grinning sardonically.

I sense that he is trying to build up his nerve. In reality everyone feels considerable emotion. Despite our perfect innocence, the idea of war terrifies us.

Once more we find ourselves standing in the courtyard in that damned rain. We are each given a registered Mauser and twenty-five cartridges. I don't know if it's a reaction to receiving these arms, but I notice that everyone is turning pale. Certainly we can all be excused for this: no one in the company is more than eighteen. I myself won't be seventeen for another two and a half months. The lieutenant notices our confusion, and to raise our spirits reads us the latest Wehrmacht communiqué. Von Paulus is on the Volga, von Richthofen is near Moscow, and the Anglo-Americans have suffered great losses in their attempts to bomb the cities and towns of the Reich. Our officer seems reassured by our answering cries of "Sieg Heil." The entire 19th Company stands at attention in front of the flag.

Laus, our feldwebel, is there, also helmeted and fully equipped. At his side he carries a long automatic in a black leather sheath, which gleams in the rain. We are all silent. The order to move out sounds like the abrupt blast of an express train's whistle: "Achtung! Rechts um. Raus!"

In threes, we leave the place which was home during our first army experiences. We cross the stone bridge for the last time, and set off down the road which brought us here a month and a half ago.

I look back several times at the imposing gray mass of the ancient Polish castle which I shall never see again, and would have succumbed to melancholy if the presence of my comrades had not raised my spirits. We arrive at Bialystok, a sea of green uniforms, and march to the station.

Part One

Russia

Autumn, 1943

TOWARD STALINGRAD

Minsk-Kiev-Baptism of Fire-Kharkov

We were standing beside a long railway convoy. We had been ordered to stack our guns on the tracks and take off our packs. The time was somewhere between twelve noon and one o'clock. Laus was munching on something he had taken from his pack. His face, although scarcely attractive, had grown familiar to us, even reassuring. As though his action were some kind of signal, we all took out our food, some immediately devouring the equivalent of two meals. Laus noticed this, but contented himself with a brief comment: "All right, go ahead, gobble it all down. But there won't be another distribution before the week is over."

Although we all felt as if we'd eaten only half of what we really needed to assuage our giant appetites, we also felt a little bit warmer. By this time we had been waiting in the cold for more than two hours, and it was beginning to get the better of us. We tramped up and down, joking and stamping our feet. Some, who had paper, wrote letters, but my fingers were too numb, and I contented myself with observation. Trains loaded with war materiel were continuously passing through the station, which had turned into a vast bottleneck, with cars backed up for at least six hundred yards. Everything seemed very badly organized, with convoys moving out, only to be shuttled onto other sections of track, where other companies brought from God knows where were being kept waiting as we were. People were always moving out of the way to let a train go by, only to see it a few minutes later headed in the opposite direction. What a mess!

The train we were leaning against seemed to have been immobilized for eternity. Perhaps it would have been bitter if it had never left.

To give myself some exercise, I hoisted myself up as high as the air holes in the carriages. Instead of cattle, the train was filled with munitions.

By this time we had been in the station for four hours, and felt frozen. It grew colder as it grew dark, and to kill time we plunged once more into our provisions. Although it was already quite dark, traffic continued, dimly lit. Laus was beginning to look as though he had had enough. With his cap pulled down over his ears, and his collar turned up, he was tramping up and down for warmth; he must have covered at least ten miles. We had formed a small group of friends from Chemnitz, which wasn't to break up until much later: Lensen, Olensheim, and Hals, three Germans who spoke French as badly as I spoke German; Morvan, an Alsatian; Uterbeick, an Austrian, as dark and curly as an Italian dancer, who eventually dissociated himself from our group; and me, a Franco-German. Among the six of us, we were making progress in both languages, except for that damned Uterbeick, who never stopped humming Italian love songs under his breath. These plaintive melodies sounded out of place and totally foreign to ears more accustomed to Wagner than to Italian composers, especially those lamentations of an abandoned Neapolitan swain.

Hals had a watch with a luminous dial which informed us that it was already eight-thirty. We felt sure that our departure was imminent, that they were not going to leave us on the station platform for the night. But that is how it turned out. After another hour, several men unpacked sleeping rolls and stretched out as best they could-if possible on some raised surface, for a little protection from the damp. Some even had the temerity to sleep under the train, hoping that it wouldn't start rolling.

Our sergeant had settled on a pile of railway baggage and lit a cigarette. He looked worn out. We simply couldn't accept the idea of a night out of doors. It seemed impossible that we would be left where we were. We knew that the departure whistle would blow soon, and that all the idiots who hadn't had the patience to wait would have a fine time packing up their bedrolls in a hurry. As it turned out, we would have done better to imitate them and gain two hours' sleep; two hours later we were still sitting on the cold stones of the road bed. It was growing steadily colder, and a fine rain had begun to fall. Our sergeant was busy building himself a shelter with the railway baggage-not at all a bad idea. When he covered this over with his waterproof sheet, he was completely sheltered-the old fox.

We now felt compelled to find ourselves some shelter too. We couldn't move too far from our weapons, but we left them nonetheless, with their barrels in the air, open to the rain, expecting a royal dressing down later on. The best places, of course, were taken by this time, and the only thing we could think of was to shelter beneath the railway cars. It had certainly occurred to us to try to get inside, but the doors were held shut with wire cables.

Full of complaints, we crawled into our disquieting and altogether relative shelter. The rain blew in sideways after us, and we were furious. Later on this anger made me laugh....

As best we could, we arranged some degree of shelter from the rain. This was my first night in the open air, and needless to say I never shut my eyes for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I can remember long periods of staring at the huge axle that served as the roof of my bed. Through my exhaustion it often seemed to be shifting, as if the train were about to move; I would wake with a start to find that nothing had changed, fall back again into a half sleep, only to be startled back into wakefulness once again. At the first glimmer of daylight we left this chance resting place, stiff and numb, looking like a gang of disinterred corpses.

We fell in at eight o'clock, and marched to the embarkation platform. Hals remarked several times that we could perfectly well have spent another night at the castle. None of us as yet had any idea of the dispiriting necessities of military life in wartime. This had been our first night out of doors, but we were destined to spend many others which were far worse.

For the moment, we were train guards. Our company had been divided among three long convoys of military materiel, two or three to a car. I found myself with Hals and Lensen on a flatcar which carried airplane wings marked with a black cross, and other parts covered by canvas. These were supplies destined for the Luftwaffe; according to the inscriptions we had been able to read, they came from Ratisbonne, and were going to Minsk.

Minsk: Russia. Our mouths suddenly went dry.

We were pursued by bad luck. We were stuck on an open car; the rain had turned to snow; the unbearable cold was intensified by the motion of the train. After due consideration we ducked under the tarpaulin which covered a large DO-17 engine. This maneuver cut the wind, and by clinging together we managed to achieve a semblance of warmth.

We stayed there a good hour, roaring with laughter over nothing. The train was rolling along and we hadn't the slightest idea what was happening outdoors. From time to time we could hear trains going in the other direction.

All of a sudden, Lensen thought he heard a voice shouting above the noise of the wheels. Carefully he stuck his head out of our shelter. "It's Laus," he said calmly, turning back to us and pulling the canvas down again.

Ten seconds later, the canvas was ripped back to reveal the sergeant fuming with rage at the sight of our three happy faces. Laus, wearing a helmet and gloves, looked very much on the job. His face and coat were powdered with snow, like the rest of the train, whose long profile joggled and swayed behind him. The air rang with a loud "Achtung!" but the spasmodic motion of the train prevented the order from being executed with its customary stiff precision.

The scene which followed was worthy of burlesque. I can still see that great teddy bear Hals, swaying from right to left as he tried to maintain a rigid posture. As for me, my long coat had caught on one of the numerous sections of airplane engine, which made it impossible for me to straighten up. Laus was no better than we were at maintaining a dignified attitude. Finally, beside himself with exasperation, he braced himself with one knee against the floor. We followed his example, and from a certain distance we might have been taken for a quartet of conspirators whispering secrets. In fact, I and my companions were receiving a magisterial dressing-down.

"What the hell do you think you're doing under there?" Laus shouted. "Where in God's name do you think you are, and what do you think you're supposed to be doing on this train?"

Hals, who had a spontaneous nature, interrupted our superior. He said that it was impossible to stay outside the canvas because the cold was so bad, and that anyway there was nothing to look at.

It would seem that by making these observations, Hals was demonstrating a total lack of objectivity. Like an enraged gorilla the sergeant seized our comrade by the collar and shook him violently, with a torrent of abuse.

"I'll make my report! At the first stop I'll have you sent to a disciplinary battalion. This is nothing less than abandoning your post. You could get the firing squad.... What if a car had blown up behind you? You couldn't have warned anyone from that hole of yours!"

"Why?" Lensen asked. "Is a car going to blow up?"

"Shut up, idiot! There are terrorists all along the line, ready to risk anything. When they don't blow the trains right up they throw explosives or incendiaries. You are here precisely to prevent that sort of thing. Take your helmets and come to the front of the car, or I'll throw the whole lot of you overboard!"

We didn't wait for him to repeat himself, and despite the cold which bit into our faces, we took up the positions he appointed. Laus continued forward through the loaded cars, hanging on as he moved from one to the next. He wasn't really a bully, but a man with a clear idea of a job to be done. I never saw him try to make things easier for himself, which is probably why I felt he must have a sympathetic streak, although I hadn't yet spoken to him. None of the other feldwebels in the company were so strict; they claimed to be saving themselves for the big job; but when the moment came Laus did as much as they, if not more. He was the oldest of the sergeants; perhaps he had already been at the front. In fact, he was like every sergeant-major in the world: afraid of responsibility, and at the same time giving us a hard time.

During his tirade he had made us realize, rightly enough, that if we couldn't stand a little cold and a vague, possible danger, we would never survive at the front. It certainly would be idiotic to get killed by some anarchist before we'd seen anything.

We were rolling through a forest of squat, snow-covered pines. I had plenty of time to ponder the case of conscience the feldwebel had put to me. The north of Poland seemed to be very sparsely populated. We had passed only a few small towns. Suddenly, well ahead of the train, I caught sight of a figure running along beside the tracks. I didn't think I could be the only person who'd noticed him, but apparently no one in any of the cars head was doing anything about him.

Rapidly I maneuvered my Mauser into a good position, and took aim at what could only be a terrorist.

Our train was moving very slowly: a perfect target for a bomb. In a few minutes I was level with the man. I couldn't see anything unusual about him. He was probably a Polish woodcutter who had come up out of curiosity. I felt disconcerted. I had been all ready to fire, and now nothing seemed to justify it. I aimed deliberately over his head and pulled the trigger.

The report shook the air, and the butt of my gun crashed violently into my shoulder. The poor fellow took off as fast as he could, obviously fearing the worst, and I felt certain that my ill-considered action had made another enemy for the Reich.

The train maintained its speed, and a few minutes later Laus appeared, continuing his endless patrol despite the cold. He gave me a curious look.