Forgotten Soldier (5 page)

With this idea in my head, I walked to my post, about fifteen yards from the first vehicles, through a trench about a yard deep, which allowed us to advance as far as the cars, or withdraw, without being exposed. The edges of the trench had already been raised nearly another three feet by new snow, and each fresh fall obliged us to dig. I stood up on the box that allowed the sentry to see a little farther. I had wrapped a blanket over my coat, which made it very hard for me to move my arms.

I had refused my allotment of alcohol, the taste of which disgusted me, and was mentally preparing myself for another siege of uncontrollable trembling from the cold. The night was clear; I could have seen a raven a hundred yards off. In the distance the horizon was cut by a mass of stunted bushes. Three of the four telephone lines which crossed our camp were visible, stretching away in different directions. Their posts, shoved unevenly into the ground, were indifferent supports for the wire, which sometimes drooped right down to the snow.

My nose, the only part of me directly exposed, began to burn with cold. I had pulled my cap down as far as I could, so that my forehead and part of my cheeks were covered. Over this I wore the helmet required for guard duty. The turned-up collar of the pullover my parents had sent me overlapped the edge of my cap at the back of my head.

From time to time I looked at the expanse of machinery I was guarding and wondered what we would do if we had to move it all in a hurry. The engines must have reached a state of magnificent solidity!

I had been at my post for a good hour when suddenly a silhouette appeared at the edge of the parking lot. I threw myself down into the bottom of my hole. Before extracting my hands from the depths of my pockets, I risked another look over my parapet. The silhouette was advancing toward me. It must be one of our men making the rounds, but supposing it was a Bolshevik!

Grunting with the effort, I pulled my hands from their shelter and grabbed my gun. The breech, sticky with frost, bit into my fingers, as I maneuvered my weapon into firing position and shouted out, "Wer da?" I got back a reasonable reply, and my bullet remained in the gun. All the same, I had been prudent to take these elementary precautions: it was an officer going his rounds. I saluted.

"Everything all right?"

"Yes, Leutnant."

"Fine. Well, Happy Christmas." "What? Is it Christmas?" "Yes. Look over there."

He pointed to the Khorskys' house. The roof, loaded with snow, sloped down to ground level; the narrow windows were shining far more brightly than blackout regulations usually permitted, and in their light I could see the swiftly moving silhouettes of my comrades. A few moments later a tall flame burst from an enormous woodpile which must have been soaked with gasoline.

A song supported by three hundred voices ascended slowly into the stillness of the frozen night. "O Weihnacht! O stille Nacht!" Was it possible? At that moment, everything beyond the perimeter of the camp was without meaning for me. I couldn't tear my eyes from the light of the bonfire. The faces closest to the flames were illuminated; the rest were lost in darkness, while the strong outpouring of song continued, divided now into several parts. Perhaps the circumstances of this particular Christmas night made a critical difference, but in all the time since then I haven't heard anything which moved me so much.

The memories of my earliest youth, still so close, returned to me for the first time since I had been a soldier. What was happening at home this evening? What was happening in France? We had heard bulletins which informed us that many French troops were now fighting along with us-news which made me rejoice. The thought of Frenchmen and Germans marching side by side seemed marvelous to me. Soon we would no longer have to be cold; the war would be over, and we could all recite our adventures at home. This Christmas hadn't brought me any gift I could hold in my hand, but had brought so much good news about the harmony between my two countries that I felt overwhelmed. Because I knew that I was now a man, I kept firmly at the back of my mind a foolish and embarrassing idea which kept pursuing me: I really would have liked someone to give me an ingenious mechanical toy.

My companions were still singing, and all along the front millions like them must have been singing as they were. I didn't know that, at that very hour, Soviet T-34 tanks, taking advantage of the truce which Christmas was supposed to bring, were crushing the forward posts of the Sixth Army in the Armotovsk sector. I didn't know that my comrades in the Sixth Army, in which one of my uncles was serving, were dying by the thousands in the hell of Stalingrad. I didn't know that German towns were being subjected to the horrifying bombardments of the R.A.F. and the U.S.A.F. And I would never have dared to think that the French would refuse a Franco-German entente.

This was, in its way, the most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek-a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.

By the time I got back to the billet, the officers had put an end to the celebrations, and ordered the bonfire extinguished. Hals had saved a half bottle of schnapps for me. I swallowed down a few mouthfuls, not to disappoint him.

Four more days went by. The hard cold continued, embellished by snow-filled squalls. We went out only for obligatory duties, which we reduced to the minimum, and burned tons of wood. The houses had been built to conserve heat, and we were sometimes even too hot. We felt very well, and as is usual under such circumstances, we very soon had some trouble.

Ours began one morning sometime around three o'clock. A guard noisily kicked open the door of the hut, admitting a blast of icy air and two soldiers whose stiff, bluish faces made them look remarkably alike. They rushed to our stove, and it was a few minutes before they spoke. Along with everybody else, I shouted at them to shut the door. In reply, we received a curse, and were ordered to stand at attention. As we gaped, somewhat startled and without reaction, the fellow who had shouted kicked over the bench standing next to him, and shouting out his order a second time, hurled himself at the improvised bed of one of our men, violently ripping apart the mound of blankets, coats, and jackets in which our comrade had buried himself. In the dim light of the stove we recognized the epaulettes of a feldwebel.

"Are you bastards going to get the hell up?" he shouted pulling out everybody he could reach. "Who's at the head of this bunch? It's a disgrace! Do you think this is how we'll stop the Russian offensive? If you're not ready in ten minutes I'll throw you out of here just the way you are."

Stupid with sleep and stunned by our sudden awakening, we hurriedly collected our things. Leaving the door wide open, the feldwebel rushed from our but like a madman, to inject panic into the isba across the way. We had no very clear idea of what was happening. Our sentry, who seemed quite shaken, told us that the intruders had arrived from Minsk in a sidecar. Those fifteen-odd miles must have taken them quite a long time, which would explain their furious condition.

But, despite all the demonic howling the feldwebel could muster, it was a full twenty minutes before we were standing at attention in the snow. Laus, who had been as deeply asleep as anyone else, tried to shock us into wakefulness with a pretense of rage as intense as his colleague's.

The other feldwebel, whose anger had not abated, barked out our orders: "You will join Kommandant Ultraner's unit at Minsk before dawn." He turned to Laus. "You will take fifteen trucks from the depot and proceed as I've ordered."

Why hadn't he telephoned, instead of working himself into such a state? We found out later that, while we had been sleeping peacefully, the telephone line had been cut in four places.

The difficulty of getting under way and bringing the trucks out from the depot was almost unimaginable. We had to roll out barrels of gasoline and alcohol to fill the gas tanks and radiators, crank up the engines an exhausting labor-and shovel out cubic yards of snow, almost entirely without light. When the fifteen trucks were ready, we set out for Minsk, following the bumpy, snow-covered track the feldwebel had taken to reach us. One of the trucks skidded on the icy ground, and it took a good half hour to pull it from the ditch. We hooked it to another truck, which could only skate along the ice. In the end, almost the entire company was involved in the struggle,, and we literally carried the damn machine back onto the road. Toward eight o'clock in the morning, well before the late winter dawn of those regions, we joined Ultraner and his regiment, and stood shivering, despite our exertions, in a vast city square, with two or three thousand other soldiers. Minsk seemed to be bursting with excitement and energy.

A network of loudspeakers which had been set up throughout the square disseminated a short lecture from the High Command. The lecture pointed out that even a victorious army had to accept deaths and casualties, and that our role as a convoy unit was to carry, at whatever the cost and despite all the hardships, which the High Command thoroughly recognized, the food, munitions, and materiel the combat troops required. Our convoy, by any means available, had to reach the banks of the Volga, so that von Paulus could continue to wage his victorious battle. One thousand miles separated us from our destination, and we hadn't a moment to spare.

We left after the midday meal. I found myself, separated from my closest friends, aboard a five-and-a-half-ton D.K.W. loaded with heavy automatic weapons. The road leaving the city was well ploughed, and we rolled along at a brisk pace. There must have been road gangs working around the clock. The snow banks on either side of the road were nearly twelve feet high. We passed a signpost bristling with pointers. On the sign indicating the road we took I read NACH PRIPET, KIEV, DNIEPER, KHARKOV, DNIEPROPETROVSK.

Our troops had rounded up everyone capable of holding a shovel, and we were able to cover nearly one hundred miles in good time. We soon reached the summit of a hill from which we could see the immensity of the Ukraine stretching into the distance under a yellowish gray sky.

The ten or twelve vehicles ahead of us had suffered a serious reduction in speed. Ahead of them, a company of soldiers were busily engaged in moving snow. A heavy truck was pushing a sled fitted with a kind of ventilator which blew out the snow in all directions. Beyond lay an infinity of immaculate snow nearly three feet deep. (Heavy snowfalls buried the road so completely after the passage of each convoy that we needed a compass to dig it out again.) Our commanding officer and his noncoms had walked a short distance out onto the upswept snow, sinking in over the tops of their boots, and were scanning the horizon, wondering how they could possibly proceed through all that soggy cotton. Inside our D.K.W., with all the windows shut, I and my traveling companion were relishing the warmth of our running engine.

But soon they were ordering us out of our machines and distributing snow shovels. As there weren't enough to go round, our noncoms told us to use anything we could lay our hands on. I saw men digging with boards, helmets, big serving platters. . . .

With two other fellows I was pushing against the tailgate of a truck which we had detached, hoping to use it as a crude sort of snow plough. The blast of a feldwebel's whistle interrupted our disorganized labor.

"What do you think you're proving over there? Come along with me; we'll go and round up some manpower. Bring your guns."

I felt a surge of jubilation, which I kept well-hidden, as I inwardly thanked the idiots who had devised our hopeless procedure. I preferred almost anything to shoveling snow. We followed the feldwebel. I had no idea where he hoped to find more manpower. We had only passed two deserted villages since leaving Minsk. With our guns slung, our little group split off from the track the trucks had traced in the snow, and headed north. We sank in over our knees with every step, which made progress extremely difficult.

For ten minutes I did my best to follow the feldwebel, who was about fifteen feet ahead of me. I was gasping for breath, and I could feel the sweat beginning to trickle down my spine under the heavy cloth of my coat. My breath projected long streams of vapor, which vanished instantly in the icy air. I kept my eyes glued to the feldwebel's deep footprints, trying to step exactly into them, but as he was bigger than I, this meant that every step was a leap. I deliberately avoided looking at the horizon, which seemed so far away. A thin screen of birches soon hid the convoy from us.

Ludicrous in our smallness, we continued forward into the immensity of white. I was beginning to wonder where our noncom thought he would find his famous manpower. We had been exhausting ourselves in this way for nearly an hour. Suddenly, in the absolute quiet, we heard a rumbling sound which was growing steadily louder. We stopped.

Our sergeant limited himself to the observation that we hadn't much further to go, and then added that it was a pity we would miss this one.

I didn't really understand what he was talking about, but the noise was becoming increasingly clear. To our left I caught sight of a black line stretching across the snow. A train! We were approaching a railway line. I still didn't see what a train could do for us. Would they take our cargoes on board?

The train was going by very slowly about five hundred yards ahead of us. It was extremely long, a line of black broken at intervals by one of the five locomotives, spewing out impressive clouds of white vapor which vanished almost instantly, as if by magic. The train must have had a special mechanism for snow disposal.

Fifteen minutes later, we reached the tracks.

"A lot of supply trains go through here," the feldwebel said. "Most of the cars carry materiel, but there are usually a few passenger cars for Russian civilians. We'll stop one of them and collect some Russian labor."

Finally I understood.

All we had to do now was wait. We tramped briskly up and down the tracks trying to keep warm. However, it felt as if the temperature had risen somewhat, as if by now it might be up to 15 degrees-which indicates the astonishing degree to which we had grown accustomed to zero temperatures. The cold, as we waited for the next train, seemed quite bearable. Soldiers wearing only pullovers were shoveling snow and streaming with sweat. I have never met anyone better able to stand punishment, whether from cold or heat or anything else, than the Germans. Each Russian I saw was more frozen than the last, but I certainly could not feel superior on that account. Life in Russia for me was a perpetual shivering fit.