Forgotten Soldier (41 page)

I plunged back into the heap of Russian corpses, falling onto the fellow who'd been hit a moment before. He let out a howl. We lay side by side, with our heads touching, as an avalanche of rubble poured down all around us.

"I'm wounded," he groaned.

"Something is burning in my back. Call for a stretcher."

I looked at him, and dazedly shouted: "Sanftentrager!"

But my ludicrous cries were lost in the deafening uproar of two spandaus firing quite near us. The big fellow from the Gross Deutschland was shouting at us to advance, as loud as he could: "Come on, fellows! Some of our boys are already at the water tank."

I looked at the wounded man, who was staring at me with desperate, imploring eyes and clutching my sleeve. I didn't know how to tell him that there was nothing I could do for him just then. The big soldier had jumped out of the shelter. I pulled myself brutally away, and turned my head. The wounded man called again, but I had already jumped from the shelter and was running like a madman after the other fellow, who was nearly fifteen yards ahead of me.

I joined another group who were hurriedly setting up two trench mortars, and helped them maneuver the tubes into position. Instantly our mortar bombs were shooting almost straight up. A landser, whose face was pouring blood, shouted that the Russians had withdrawn to the central tower.

The veteran, whom I hadn't noticed before, let out a savage howl: "Got 'em!"

As he shouted, a white flash lit his face, which was covered with an incredible layer of dust, and a geyser of flame enveloped the tower. The Russian defense crumbled and fell under the impact of our concentrated fire. Our assault groups moved in and cleaned up the last resistance. Another German soldier fell, clutching his face, and then it was all over, except for a few widely scattered shots.

I and my companions ran into the ruins of what had once been a factory but was now reduced to rubble beyond classification. Once again, we were victorious; but the victory gave us no joy. Stupefied by the noise and the nervous tension, we wandered among the twisted, collapsed metal roofs. A landser with a face drawn by exhaustion mechanically picked up an enameled plaque which had something written on it in Cyrillic characters, perhaps a direction, or the word for "toilet."

The town had fallen to us. There were about three hundred prisoners, in addition to two hundred enemy dead or wounded. The noncoms regrouped us, and led us back through the smoking devastation of the village. Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau reviewed his two companies, and called roll. About sixty men were missing. We collected the wounded, and regrouped them to wait for our three orderlies to give them first aid. There were about fifteen wounded men, including Holen Grauer, whose right eye was gone.

Finding water was difficult. The preikas had been smashed, and we finally had to lower soup kettles down a well in the ashes of one of the isbas. The water was black with soot. The wounded were screaming with pain; most of them were delirious.

There were also about seventy-five Russian wounded, who presented a dilemma to our Kommandant. In principle, we should have helped them too, as best we could. But we were under orders to rejoin our division as soon as the operation was completed. So we abandoned the Russian wounded, and piled ours into and onto the vehicles we had, which bore no resemblance to ambulances, or even to ordinary trucks -a few gun carriages and a couple of light artillery tractors. We felt exhausted, disgusted, and numb.

There was also the question of how to move the prisoners. There was no room in our collection of already overloaded vehicles. Finally, a sidecar fitted with an F.M. slowly drove some fifty of the prisoners along ahead of it. We turned them loose two days later, for lack of anything better to do with them.

As an autonomous group, we were faced with extremely difficult problems of supply. In theory, the vehicles carrying munitions and gasoline picked up the flotsam of war as their loads grew lighter. But the division already had some eleven hundred prisoners, and we didn't know what to do with them. We set off with clusters of men-German and Russian-hanging on to everything that could roll.

We all looked back at the town, from which a thick cloud of smoke was climbing, and spreading out to the horizon. The dark gray sky was threatening rain, which would soon fall on the graves of forty German soldiers sacrificed to neutralize a single point of enemy resistance, which we weren't even interested in holding. We moved on to another operation, not as part of any design to conquer, but simply as part of an attempt to protect our vast withdrawal of troops to the west bank of the Dnieper.

No one smiled. We knew that our victory couldn't make any difference to the outcome of the war, and only hoped that it might have some strategic interest. The experience of the battle itself had been as always-more fear and, for some, like my friend Grauer, irreparable mutilation.

A young blond soldier, huddled beside the driver of the machine which was carrying about thirty of us, began to play on his harmonica. The melody rang softly in our nearly insensible ears: ". . . mit dir, Lilli Marlene, mit dir, Lilli Marlene . . ."

The music was slow and filled with a nostalgia which weighed heavily on our exhaustion. Hals was listening, his mouth hanging half open, making no sound, and staring at nothing.

THE BREAKTHROUGH AT KONOTOP

We drove for an hour-which meant about thirty miles-before it grew dark.

We were all anxious to stop so that we could get rid of the thick, choking dust which coated us from head to foot. We were also exhausted and longing for sleep. Although a good bed in a warm barracks would have been paradise, any place where we could have stretched out and lost consciousness would have done, and we knew that when we did stop we would collapse onto the ground, and sink immediately into blackness.

The dark sky was filled with heavy black clouds lit up on their outer fringes. Large drops of rain began to fall as the storm broke. The rain-so often a curse-seemed like a blessing this time, washing off the filthy faces we turned up to meet it. It soon became a downpour, running down our collars and over our bodies, like a gift from Providence to friend and foe alike, making us all smile with a sense, however partial, of returning well-being. The soaking cloth of the uniforms on our tightly packed bodies clung to all of us-gray-green for the Germans, violet-brown for the Russians. We all grinned at each other without distinction, like players from two teams in the showers after a match. There was no longer any feeling of hatred or vengeance, only a sense of life preserved and overwhelming exhaustion. The rain became so heavy that we had to improvise shelter, and covered our heads and shoulders with our ground sheets. Although hardly anyone understood more than a few words of the other language, we were all laughing and trading cigarettes-Hannover cigarettes for machorka tobacco from the Tartar plain. We smoked and joked over nothing-a "nothing" which in fact represented the most absolute human joy I had ever known. The exchange of tobacco, the smoke under the ground sheets, which made us choke and cough, and the simple fact of laughter without reserve-all of this made a small island of joy in a sea of tragedy, which affected us like a shot of morphine. We were able to forget the hate which divided us, as our stupefied senses reawakened to an awareness of life. Understanding nothing, I laughed uncontrollably, as a curious sensation took hold of me and filled my veins. Suddenly I was covered with gooseflesh, as one is during a particularly moving piece of music. The rain was beating on the metal hood. Would we have to shoot our Russian fellow passengers tomorrow? That seemed impossible; it was impossible that such things could continue.

We had just caught up with a regiment of motorized cavalry, stopped in the middle of nowhere. Streams of water were running down every exposed surface; the dull finish of the sidecars sheltering under the dripping leaves of the trees at the edge of the woods glistened with raindrops.

Wesreidau climbed down from his sidecar to talk to the cavalry commander. The fellows in the sidecars had long oilskins which pretty well covered them, and kept them more or less dry. However, all their camping equipment was in the trucks of the supply column, so instead of sleeping they had to spend their rest period tramping up and down through the puddles.

Two fellows distributed food: a stale sausage for each German soldier and loaves of bread to be divided among eight. There was no food for the prisoners, whose rations, in theory, would be provided by the division. We thought of walking off a short way to devour our meager portions, but we were bunched around our dripping communal plates. The Russians, who had nothing but their lives, kept their feverish eyes fixed on the food, which was impossible to hide. Finally, our torn and filthy hands broke the hard bread and held it out to the men who had been trying to kill us only a few hours before.

Our stomachs were still rumbling with hunger five minutes later, as we swallowed down the last mouthfuls of our rations. Everyone was thirsty, and our water bottles had been emptied after the fighting. Like feverish sheep, we needed water. We had obtained permission to leave the trucks to relieve ourselves, but for no other reason. We were in the middle of wild, uninhabited country, and there were no preikas or drinking troughs. However, the rain was still pouring down, and we collected the run-off from the backs of the trucks, and the leaves, and the puddles in the oilcloths. When we had quenched our thirst, we left with the cavalry regiment.

Finally, the rain stopped, leaving us chilled and bone-tired, to the misery of our throbbing machines. Lightning was still streaking through the sky behind us and over our heads, and the thunder was still rumbling. Ahead, there were other flashes too, which unfortunately had nothing to do with the storm. These were produced by Stalin's organs, firing at the division blocked behind Konotop. As we drew nearer, we were able to gauge the size of the battle by the intensity of the fire flashing across the horizon. Soon we also could hear the loud and continuous sound of guns.

We had been hoping for a refuge where we could spend the night. Instead, we were faced with the anguish of a fresh hell, and a fresh uncertainty of survival, as war tightened its viselike grip once again around our throbbing temples. The young face of the blond boy who had played the harmonica a short time before hardened suddenly into the face of a man. Was it exhaustion, or did he simply want to get it over with? In the space of a few moments, he suddenly aged twenty years.

We arrived at the town, which was black and deserted. Intermittent flashes from the battle being fought somewhere to the west of us, through the outer fringes of the town, lit the darkness. The thunder of explosions filled the air, shattering window panes and breaking off the gutters of the houses all around us.

The rain had begun again, falling in small, delicate drops. We were ordered to leave the trucks, and jumped down like sleepwalkers. The shock of contact with the ground reverberated through our numbed bodies, and we felt sickness rising in undulating waves, along the entire length of our spinal columns. In a herd, we followed our leaders, while the trucks drove off to a nearby street. I could feel the sleep weighting down my eyelids, and, only half awake, staggered like an automaton after the sound of the boots of the fellow in front of me, without grasping that I was going back into battle.

What happened that night at Konotop? I only know that there were explosions and fire and houses collapsing down the length of dark, indefinable back streets. There was a gutter full of running water, and there were my hard, heavy boots, which I scarcely had the strength to lift, and my big bony feet inside them, which felt as if they were growing smaller and smaller, and the heat of my throbbing temples, which had begun to burn with fever, and the crushing fatigue which had settled around my thin shoulders, trapped in the filth of my undershirt and waterlogged tunic, and the tangle of leather straps and cartridge belts, heavy with ammunition, and the incomprehensible, hostile world, whose weight we still had to bear, where we still had to march and crawl and tremble. . . .

Toward morning, which dawned as pale as the last morning of a condemned man, I was overwhelmed by a crushing sleep, and briefly lost my waking nightmare. We collapsed in the shelter of an entrance way, which protected us from most of the rain, except when the wind blew a particularly strong gust. We spent a few hours there-then we were wakened, to stare at a hundred other faces as white and drawn as our own. Our closest relatives would probably have hesitated before identifying us. My eyes, which felt as if they had sunk into my aching head, instinctively looked around to see what the new day would bring.

Directly in front of the gate where we had slept was a building of several stories. Its gray walls were stained with long streaks which dribbled down from its gaping windows. A short distance to one side stood a cluster of miserable shacks which now offered shelter only to a few wandering cats, and troops looking for refuge. These buildings, which at their best could never have looked like much, now seemed soiled by the passage of something monstrous. Further along, the street was entirely blocked by the houses which had collapsed when the Russians had shelled the town the evening before.

I looked for something which might produce an instant of pleasure, and distract me for a moment from the effort of trying to control the spasmodic shivers which shook my whole body.

A sound behind me made me turn my head. The veteran was coming back with two canteens of hot soup, which he had found God knows where. I watched him blankly as he limped through the puddles and the scattered rubble. His uniform was as gray and filthy as the setting, and his thin, shaggy face beneath his heavy steel helmet seemed to fit perfectly with everything else. Above our heads, the sky flowed slowly toward the horizon, trailing gray clouds, like dirty rags, as far as the eye could see.

"Anyone who wants to eat better open his eyes," the veteran called, putting down the canteens.