Forgotten Soldier (4 page)

We had decided to take duty in shifts. While two of us watched, the third would try to warm up under the canvas. We had now been on the train for something like eight hours, and felt apprehensive about the night, which would undoubtedly be spent in these conditions. Twenty minutes ago I had taken Hals's place, and for twenty minutes had been unable to control my violent shivering. Night was drawing close; perhaps Minsk was too. The train was moving along the only track. To the north and to the south we were enclosed by dark forest. For the last quarter of an hour the train had been accelerating, which would undoubtedly result in our deaths by freezing. We had also consumed a large part of our rations to keep warm.

Suddenly the train slowed down. The brake blocks grated against the wheels, and the couplings shook violently. We were soon moving at the speed of a bicycle. I saw the front of the train turn to the right: we were diverting onto a secondary track.

The train moved forward for another five minutes, and then stopped. Two officers had jumped down from one of the front cars and were walking back. Laus and two other noncoms went out to meet them. They conferred for a moment but didn't tell us anything. All along the train people were looking out. The forest seemed a likely haven for terrorists. Our train had been standing still for several minutes when we heard the distant sound of wheels. We were walking up and down trying to warm ourselves up when a blast from a whistle accompanied by gestures indicated that we should return to our posts at once. A locomotive appeared in the distance on the track we had just left; it was entirely blacked out.           ,

What I saw next froze me with horror. I wish I were a writer of genius so that I could do justice to the vision which appeared before us. First we saw a car loaded with railway materials, pushed along in front of the locomotive and hiding its dim lights. Then came the smoking locomotive, its tender, and a closed car with a hole in its roof to accommodate a short length of smoking pipe-probably the train kitchen. Behind this another car with high railings carried armed German soldiers. A twin-mounted machine gun covered the rest of the train, which consisted simply of open flatcars like ours, but loaded with a very different kind of freight. The first one of these to pass my uncomprehending eyes seemed to be carrying a confused heap of objects, which only gradually became recognizable as human bodies. Directly behind this heap other people were clinging together, crouching or standing. Each car was full to the bursting point. One of us, more informed than the others, told us in two words what we were looking at: "Russian prisoners."

I thought I had recognized the brown coats I had seen once before, near the castle, but it was really too dark to be sure. Hals looked at me. Except for the burning red spots made by the cold, his face was as white as a sheet.

"Did you see that?" he whispered. "They've piled up their dead to shield themselves from the wind."

In my stupefaction I could only reply with something like a groan. Every car was carrying a shield of human bodies. I stood as if petrified by the horror of the sight rolling slowly by: faces entirely drained of blood, and bare feet stiffened by death and cold.

The tenth car had just passed us when something even more horrible happened. Four or five bodies slid from the badly balanced load and fell to the side of the track. The funereal train didn't stop. A group of officers and noncoms from our train walked over to investigate. Driven by I don't know what element of curiosity I jumped down from our car and went over to the officers. I saluted and asked in a faltering voice if the men were dead. An officer looked at me in astonishment and I realized that I had just abandoned my post. He must have noticed my confusion, as he didn't reprimand me.

"I think so," he said sadly. "You can help your comrades bury them." Then he turned and walked away. Hals had come with me. We went back to our car to fetch shovels and began to dig a trench a short distance above the embankment. Laus and another fellow looked through the dead men's clothes to try to find some identification. I learned later that most of these poor devils had no civilian identity. Hals and I needed all our nerve to drag two of them over to the ditch without looking at them. We were covering them with dirt when the departure whistle blew. It was growing colder by the minute. I felt overcome by a vast sense of disgust.

An hour later our train passed through a double hedge of structures which, despite the absence of light, we could see were more or less destroyed. We passed another train, less sinister than the preceding one, but scarcely comforting. Its cars were marked with red crosses. Through some of the windows we could see stretchers, which must have been carrying badly wounded men. At other windows, soldiers swathed in bandages were waving to us.

Finally we arrived at Minsk station. Our train pulled to a stop down the whole length of a long, wide platform covered with a busy, motley crowd: armed soldiers and soldiers in fatigues, civilians, and groups of Russian prisoners cordoned in by other prisoners who wore red-and white armbands and carried truncheons. These were the informers who had denounced the famous "People's Commissars" and were therefore anti-Communist. They claimed the right of guarding their comrades, which suited our authorities very well, as no one would be more likely to get a decent day's work from the Russian prisoners.

We could hear orders being given, first in German, then in Russian. A crowd of men came up to our train, and the unloading began in the lights of the trucks parked along the platform. We joined in this work, which took the better part of two hours, warming ourselves a little, then plunging once more into our provisions. Hals, a greedy-guts, had consumed more than half his allotment in less than two days. We spent the night in a large building where we were able to sleep in a certain degree of comfort.

The next day we were sent to a military hospital, where we were kept for two days and given a series of shots. Minsk was very badly damaged. There were many gutted houses and walls cross-hatched by machine-gun fire. Some of the streets were totally impassable, with a continuous line of shell holes and bomb craters, often more than fifteen feet deep. Passageways of a sort had been made by planks and other solid objects thrown across this chaos. From time to time we gave way to a Russian woman loaded with provisions, and always followed by four or five children who stared at us with astonishingly round eyes. There were also many curious shops whose broken windows had been replaced by boards or sacks stuffed with straw. Hals, Lensen, Morvan, and I went into several of these out of curiosity. There was always an array of big earthenware crocks painted in various colors, which contained either a liquid and steeping plants, dried vegetables, or a curious heavy syrup which was halfway between jam and butter.

As we didn't know how to say so much as "hello" in Russian, we always went into these places talking among ourselves. The few Russians who were inside invariably assumed an attitude half anxious, half smiling, while the shopkeeper or proprietress would approach us with a white-lipped smile and offer us large dippers of these products, in an obvious effort to placate the fierce warriors they imagined us to be.

We were often given a fine yellowish flour to mix into this syrup whose taste was far from disagreeable, somewhat reminiscent of honey. Its only discouraging aspect was a superabundance of fat. I can still see the faces of those Russians, smiling as they held out this product and pronouncing a word which sounded rather like "ourlka." I never was sure whether this meant "eat" or was simply the name of the mixture. There were days when we really gorged ourselves on "ourlka," which nonetheless did not prevent us from appearing at eleven o'clock for the official midday meal.

Hals accepted everything the Russians offered him with so much politeness. Sometimes I found him quite revolting, holding out his mess tin for the largess of these Soviet merchants as they poured into it mixtures resembling each other only in their loose, runny consistency. Sometimes his tin would hold a combination of the famous ourlka, cooked wheat, salt herring cut into pieces, and several other ingredients. Whatever the concoction, Hals devoured it with evident relish, like a great pig. Except for these moments of distraction seized in the intervals between our many jobs, we scarcely had time to amuse ourselves. Minsk was an important army supply center, where shipments were constantly loaded and unloaded.

Life for the troops in this sector was remarkably well-organized. Mail was distributed; there were films for soldiers on leave-which we were not allowed to attend-libraries, and restaurants run by Russian civilians, but reserved entirely for German soldiers. The restaurants were all too expensive for me and I never went into them, but Hals, who would sacrifice anything for a good stuffing, spent all his money in these places, and a certain amount of ours. The understanding was that he would give us a detailed account of his experiences, which he adhered to faithfully, with many embellishments. We slavered with vicarious pleasure as we listened to him.

We were much better fed than we had been in Poland, and were able to supplement our rations very cheaply-which we really needed to do. The cold in these opening days of December had become extremely sharp, dropping to more than five degrees below zero. The snow, which fell in great abundance, never melted, and in places was already over three feet deep. Evidently this slowed the movement of supplies to the front, and, according to troops returning from forward positions where the cold was even more bitter than at Minsk, the poor fellows were reduced to sharing rations which were already ridiculously small. Insufficient food combined with the cold produced many cases of pneumonia, frostbite, and frozen limbs.

At this moment, the Reich was making an immense effort to protect its soldiers from the implacable hostility of the Russian winter. At Minsk, Kovno, and Kiev, there were enormous stores of blankets, special winter clothing made of sheepskin, overshoes with thick insulating soles and uppers of matted hair, gloves, hoods of double catskin, and portable heaters which operated equally well on gasoline, oil, or solidified alcohol, mountains of rations in specially conditioned boxes, and thousands of other necessities. It was our duty, as convoy troops of the Rollbahn, to deliver all of this to the front lines, where the combat troops were desperately awaiting us.

We made superhuman efforts, and yet they were not enough. The punishment we suffered, not at the hands of the Russian Army, which until that moment had done almost nothing except retreat, but from the cold, is almost beyond the powers of description. Outside the great towns there had not yet been time to repair the damaged roads-few and far between to begin with-or to open others. While our unit was doing its autumn gymnastics, the Wehrmacht, after an extraordinary advance, had marched itself and its supplies into an unbelievable quagmire. Then the first frosts had solidified the monstrous ruts leading to the east. Our machines had suffered enormously on these roads, which in fact were passable only for wagons, but the hardening of the soil had temporarily allowed the provisioning of the troops. Then winter poured down its tons of snow across the immensity of Russia, once again paralyzing traffic.

That is the point we had reached in December, 1942. We shoveled away snow so that our trucks could move forward fifteen or twenty miles in a morning, only to find our efforts covered over again the same day. The earth beneath the snow was a sinister relief of bumps and potholes, which we tamped down or blew up. In the evenings we scrambled to find shelter for the night.

Sometimes this would be a but fitted out by the engineers, sometimes an isba, *- A log hut- or any house we could find. We often crowded more than fifty men into a but intended for a couple and two children. The most desired accommodations were the big tents especially designed for Russia. They were tall and pointed, like teepees, weather-proofed, and planned for nine men. We were rarely fewer than twenty, and even at that there weren't enough tents. Luckily, we had raided our stores of food because of the cold, and with enough to eat, we were able to keep going reasonably well. Some of us began to crawl with vermin, as we were only rarely able to wash, and when we returned to Minsk, our first duty was to pass through disinfection.

I was beginning to feel that I'd had more than enough of Holy Russia and of truck driving. Like everybody else I was afraid of the idea of being under fire, but I was also beginning to long to use the Mauser which had been dragging around with me for what seemed like an eternity, without ever being the slightest use. I felt that somehow firing at something would avenge me for my sufferings from the cold, and from my blisters. My hands were badly blistered from shoveling, and my woolen gloves were already full of holes, exposing the tops of my icy fingers. My hands and feet felt the cold so sharply that it sometimes seemed as if the pain were stabbing me in the heart. The thermometer remained around five degrees below zero.

We were now billeted some fifteen miles north of Minsk, guarding a huge parking depot for military vehicles. We occupied the seven or eight houses in the hamlet, leaving only one, the largest, occupied by a Russian family. Their name was Khorsky; they had two daughters and claimed to have originally come from the Crimea, which they spoke of with nostalgia. They ran a kind of canteen where we could buy food and drink-from our own pockets-and find a few companions with whom to kill time.

The snow had stopped, but the cold was growing steadily more intense. One evening after our company had been in the hamlet for about a week, I was scheduled for two hours of guard duty. I crossed the huge parking lot, where five hundred or more vehicles of every description were half buried in snow. I had been feeling apprehensive all day at the prospect of walking across this space at night. It would be so easy for partisans to hide between the cars and shoot us as we went by. But I had gradually persuaded myself that the war, if it existed at all, was really taking place somewhere else. The only Russians I had seen were either merchants or prisoners, and it seemed highly probable that I would never see any others.