Forgotten Soldier (40 page)

We were watching the progress of about thirty of our men who were leaping through the ruins of a brickworks. Five or six Panzer grenadiers were running along beside the principal building. One of them had just thrown a grenade through a gaping window. A moment later the air was shaken by its explosion, which was immediately followed by a heartrending scream of a kind we had often heard before. We knew that that nothing must distract us from our objective; however, we saw a human figure dressed in white fall from the window and roll down to the feet of our soldiers. It was a Russian civilian, a woman, who had been cowering beside the window, probably praying to all the saints. In spite of her fall, she seemed to be unhurt, and ran toward us, screaming. One of our soldiers lifted his gun, and we thought we heard it fire, but nothing happened. The Russian woman in her white shirt ran screaming through the ranks of petrified men.

No one said a word, and for a half minute, the war seemed to be standing still. Our grenadiers had already kicked in the door, and were in the house. Three other civilians came out, two men and a child. Once again we watched as they ran through our astounded ranks.

The Russians had not evacuated the village, and we would have to take the civilian population into account.

Wesreidau, who had just realized this, installed a loudspeaker on a half-track, which drove between the rows of houses waving a white rag fastened to a pole. The loudspeaker crackled out some nasal Russian words, while the four men on the half-track looked desperately at their comrades, who had remained in shelter.

The loudspeaker must have been giving the Russians a chance to evacuate civilians or to lay down their arms. But the half-track had gone less than a hundred yards when the irreparable occurred. It suddenly seemed to fly upward, as a series of deafening explosions rang out, and five or six huts disintegrated. The truck had driven over a minefield.

A heavy cloud of dust and smoke hid the village from our eyes. We could see two black silhouettes gesticulating in the flaming halftrack, and hear them screaming.

"Look out for mines!" someone shouted.

But his voice was drowned by the roaring of mortars and Paks, as the ground in front of us burst into geysers of flame and earth. Thatched roofs flew off in one piece, leaving the houses exposed, like bald men who've lost their wigs.

The Russians reacted, using at least two batteries of heavy howitzers. Every shell landing within 150 yards of us made the ground shake under our feet, and sucked the air from our lungs. Despite the almost certain presence of mines, the assault whistles blew. Everyone left shelter and ran for the nearest embankment. Our mortars pounded the ground some thirty yards ahead of us, to disrupt the arrangement of mines, and if possible explode some of them. The Russians, with multi-barreled machine guns set up on trucks, poured a devastating fire on everything they could see.

What had seemed so simple only fifteen minutes earlier now looked impossibly difficult, and suddenly no one felt confident. There were five of us hiding in the rubble of the brickworks, and our faces, pressed into the ground, knocked against the dirt with every explosion. From another heap of shattered bricks, a noncom was shouting at the top of his lungs to fire at anything we could see. One at a time we risked looking out, but the whine of shells made even the boldest duck down immediately.

Only our mortars and rocket launchers kept on firing steadily and profusely at an enemy who, for the moment, had the upper hand. In the distance, the metallic factory tower we had noticed when we arrived was proving curiously resistant to our Pak shells, which must have passed right through it at several points. Once again, we had to jump to a more advanced position. Some men were shouting to give themselves courage. Others, like me, ground their teeth, and clenched their sweaty hands on their guns, less from emotion than from a reflex akin to that of a drowning man hanging on to a rope.

Accompanied by deep or shrill sounds, and brilliant or fading light, the earth flew up all around us, sometimes engulfing pathetic human figures dressed as soldiers. About thirty yards away, on our left, five of our men who had hidden behind a small wooden building, like a blacksmith's shed, fell, one after the other. The last two had no idea where to run, and looked frantically for the enemy who would presently knock them off too. Finally, they threw themselves down among the bodies of their companions. A thick stream of blood ran out from the tangled mass of limbs and trunks and sank into the gray dust, which absorbed it like blotting paper.

Suddenly, to our left, a raging fire broke out in a cluster of four or five sheds. Its smoke and heat climbed into the sky, and a huge sheet of flame quivered and grew with astounding speed, giving off giant wreaths of black smoke and intense heat, which we could feel even where we were.

Our men surged back rapidly from that quarter. The metal roofs of the sheds buckled in the heat, and the isbas closest to the fire burst into flame. A horde of Russians-both civilian and military-ran from the burning buildings; our soldiers shot them down like rabbits.

One of our shells must have hit a gasoline dump. The resulting inferno routed the panic-stricken enemy, who paid dearly for having concentrated so many men beside such a volcano. Their men rushed through the confusion with their hands in the air, occasionally remembering the way to other Russian entrenchments.

Our Paks were now concentrating their fire on the area immediately surrounding the factory, and the job of cleaning up the people running from the gasoline dump was left to us. The fore-sight of my gun often disappeared in a swiftly moving Russian silhouette. A light pressure on the trigger, a puff of smoke, which for an instant veiled the end of my weapon, and my Mauser looked for another victim. Will I be forgiven? Was I responsible? That young muzhik, already wounded several times, more bewildered than anything else by the lethal uproar whose purpose was as obscure to him as it was to me, who stayed in my sights a moment too long and then turned ashen and clutched his breast with both hands before making a half turn and falling face down onto the ground-shall I ever deserve pardon for that? Can I ever forget?

But the almost drunken exhilaration which follows fear induces the most innocent youths on whatever side to commit inconceivable atrocities. Suddenly, for us, as it had been for Ivan a moment before, everything that moved through the din and the smoke became hateful, and overwhelmed us with a desire for destruction, a desire which led many soldiers to their deaths as they pursued the panic-stricken enemy.

Our big guns pulverized the top end of the village, where the Russian artillery had dug in. In the general flight, the few wretched hovels which had not been burned fell, one by one, into our young, criminal hands. We ran full speed over ground which might have been mined; nothing could stop us. Nothing stopped my good friend Hals from jumping across a stable threshold and shooting the Russian gunners who were desperately trying to fire their jammed weapon. Nothing could stop the glorious 8th and 14th companies of German infantry. As the communiqués later observed: "With an irresistible thrust, our valiant troops retook the town of X this morning. . . ." Nothing could stop our demoniac assault, not even the rending cries of obergefreiter Woortenbeck, who clenched his trembling hands on an iron grille and stiffened himself against the death which flooded from the bloody pulp which had once held his entrails.

A few more of our comrades were destroyed before we reached the factory. At that point, the Paks stopped firing to spare our own troops, who were right beside the Soviet defenders. The Russians clung stubbornly to what they still had, particularly to the sector immediately around the factory.

I no longer remember exactly what happened. My group joined the veteran and his men, who were snatching a few moments of rest in a large cement settling tank. We all emptied our water bottles without quenching our thirst. Everyone was covered with dust. A telephone operator settled down beside us, and spoke with Group Commandant Wesreidau. The fighting had died down somewhat, and the German troops were regrouping for the final assault. The veteran's section had a mortar as well as its two F.M.s. Ours consisted of grenadiers armed with machine guns and rifles. Our sergeant placed us down the length of the cistern, specifying the points we should try to reach once the attack had started. We agreed to do as he asked before there was time for our terror to grow uncontrollable. These moments of waiting were often the hardest of all.

A group of Russians suddenly appeared, climbing through some dismantled scaffolding near the factory, waving a white cloth. There must have been at least sixty of them-all civilians-probably factory workers. Maybe they were partisans, and afraid of execution. They walked up to the veteran's men, and turned themselves in; the anxiety stamped across every man's face lent great pathos to the moment.

The veteran, who was fluent in Russian, talked to them. Protected by the white cloth, four of our men took the prisoners to the rear. It was one of those odd moments of calm, when it almost seemed as if a few friendly words between the adversaries might produce a settlement which would have allowed all of us to sit down and have a drink.

But in the madness of our existence the most simple things eluded us.

Everyone was absorbed by immediate necessities; most of us never even thought of the symbolic value of the steps those men had just taken-first steps back to the essentials of life. Even the exceptions to this general insensibility kept their wild eyes glued to the metallic wreckage of the factory, which we would soon be obliged to attack and enter. Animals, which have a stronger instinctive sense than human beings, turn and run from a fire. But we, the elect among living creatures, press forward, like moths to a candle. That is what we call courage-a quality I lack. Fear knotted my throat, and I felt like a sheep at the threshold of the slaughterhouse.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who had this feeling. The fellow beside me stared at me for a moment from his blackened face and murmured: "If only those bastards would give up!"

But our feelings, of course, were unimportant. The trench telephone rang and crackled out an order: "One-third of the men forward. Count off by threes."

One, two, three . . . One, two, three . . . Like a miracle from heaven, I drew a "one," and could stay in that splendid cement hole, which at that moment seemed to me as magnificent as any palace. It was a secure refuge in which I would have spent my days in gratitude so long as death was stalking outside. I cut off a smile, in case the sergeant should notice and send me onto the field, but inwardly thanked God, and Allah, and Buddha, and heaven, earth, water, fire, trees, anything I could think of, that I was in that cement depression, which had held God knows what kind of filth before it sheltered me.

The fellow beside me had number three. He was looking at me, with a long, desperate face, but I kept my eyes turned front, so he wouldn't notice my joy and relief, and stared at the factory as if it were I who was going to leap forward, as if I were number three. But, in fact, everything was normal. "Drei" was my neighbor; he was going to inspect the factory. Then the sergeant made his fatal gesture, and the brave German soldier beside me sprang from his shelter with a hundred others.

Immediately, we heard the sound of Russian automatic weapons. Before vanishing to the bottom of my hole I saw the impact of the bullets raising little fountains of dust all along the route of my recent companion, who would never again contemplate the implications of number three. The noise of guns and grenades was deafening and almost drowned the cries of the fellows who'd been hit.

"Achtung! Nummer zwei, voraus!"

The veteran and his spandau ran up in turn.

Next, it was going to be me, along with everybody else who'd counted "one." While everything outside was flashing and exploding, I thought for a moment about numbers. Usually, people begin counting with "one." Why had they started with "three" this time? But I could only pose the question. Before there was time to consider it, my turn had come.

"Nummer eins, nachgehen, los!"

After a moment of hesitation, I sprang from my shelter like a jack-in-the-box, into madness. Everything looked gray, through a thick fog of whirling, choking dust, except for the glimmering flashes of light. In a few jumps I had reached the foundation of a shattered hut where a German soldier had died staring at the open breech of his machine gun. It's strange how often human beings die without any kind of style. Two years before I had seen a woman run over by a milk truck, and had nearly fainted at the sight of her mangled body. Now, after two years in Russia, visible death meant nothing at all, and the tragic element of even the best murder novels seemed petty and frivolous.

With my watering eyes, I stared through the smoke, trying to see the enemy and do my duty.

About twenty-five yards away some trucks exploded into little fragments, one after the other, engulfing four or five running soldiers. Were the men German or Russian? I couldn't tell.

I was with two companions in an open shelter made of logs packed with dirt, which the Russians had built to take a machine gun. We were more or less sitting on the mangled bodies of the four Popovs who'd been killed by grenades.

"I did that bunch in, with one shot," shouted a strong young soldier from the Gross Deutschland.

A burst of mortar fire forced us down into the heap of enemy corpses. A shell hit the edge of the bunker, and the earth and logs blew apart, falling back onto our heads. The fellow huddled between me and a dead Russian was hit. As his body jerked up from the impact, I tensed myself to run. Another shell struck the shelter, disintegrating it. The debris poured down onto my legs and sent me reeling back against the opposite wall. I howled for help, sure that my legs were broken, and afraid to move. My trousers were ripped down the leg, but the bruised skin underneath was unbroken, although I could trace the red-violet passage of the blow I'd taken.