Forgotten Soldier (65 page)

The two planes flew over us at an altitude of about fifteen hundred feet. The snore of their engines pierced the gentle breeze and seemed to echo in the depths of our tense stomachs.

The two Popovs took our fire without sending down anything in return. They flew in a large circle, which we followed with anguished eyes. The second time around, they would surely let us have it.

However, their second swoop produced nothing but a swarm of white butterflies, flashing and fluttering against the blue of the sky.

As soon as the planes were gone, some of our men went out to pick up the leaflets. A fellow came over to me waving a dozen.

"Ivan doesn't seem to understand: if we can't eat, we can't crap. He's gone and sent us a lot of paper."

We read the Communist tracts.

"German soldiers: You have been betrayed. . . . Surrender to our units, which will rehabilitate you. . . . You have lost the war."

Then, to raise our morale, we were shown some bad photographs of anonymous ruins, which, it was claimed, were German cities flattened by bombs. Also, there were photographs of smiling German prisoners. Under each of these photographs was a short caption: "Comrades: The temporary captivity which we are experiencing in no way resembles the lies we were led to believe. We have been agreeably surprised by the kindness of the camp officers. When we think of you, comrades, wading through the slime of the trenches to preserve the capitalist world, we cannot advise you strongly enough to lay down your arms."

And so it went on.

One fellow, who had managed to escape from Tomvos, was shouting with rage. "The bastards! For all I know, I'm the only survivor from that damned place."

In disgust, he tore the leaflet to shreds, and scattered it into the wind.

We resumed our march. The leaflets were still circulating from hand to hand, and their words and phrases "the war is lost," "treason," "cities destroyed" echoed in our minds like a gloomy round.

Of course, it was Communist propaganda. All we had to do was talk to the fellow who'd escaped from Tomvos to understand that. But then anyone who'd been home on leave had seen the bombed German cities. And then there was our continuous and painful retreat, and our daily existence, with its total lack of transport, gas, food, mail, everything. Perhaps the war really was lost. But that couldn't be possible.

Here we were walking across the Russian plain. Was it still ours? Or was it simply witnessing our slow death?

But that, too, was impossible. We had to dismiss these black thoughts. We were simply living through a difficult period which was bound to pass.

Tomorrow, surely, we would get some supplies, and everything would once more make some kind of sense. We had to shake our heads and dispel our dark reveries. Today the sun was shining, and we had to press on.

We began to sing one of our marching songs with deliberate vehemence:

Auf der Heide bluht ein kleines Blumelein

Und das heisst Erika

Heiss von hunderttausend kleisen Bienlein

Wird umschwdrmt Erika.

This was the second time Hals had shaken me awake.

Despite the exhaustion which rapidly returned us to unconsciousness, it was annoying to be torn from such deep sleep.

"I'm telling you, I can hear guns," he said.

I listened, but was aware of nothing except the pale, glittering night.

"Leave me alone, Hals, for the love of God. Don't wake me for anything. We'll be marching again tomorrow, and I'm so tired I could die."

"I'm telling you that off and on we can hear guns. If you'll look around, you'll see that other fellows are standing up and listening too." I listened again, but still heard nothing except the gently blowing wind.

"Well, it's possible. But so what? This isn't the first time. Go back to sleep. You'll be better off."

"I can't sleep on an empty stomach. I'm sick of this. I've got to find something to eat."

"So that's why you wake me up?"

Someone walked over to us. It was Schlesser, who was on guard duty.

"Did you hear that, fellows? Guns."

"That's what I was trying to tell this blockhead," said Hals, nudging me.

Despite the sleep stagnating in me so that I was only half conscious, I felt obliged to listen to what my companion was saying.

"All we need here is a Soviet breakthrough," Schlesser said.

"That would be the end of us," said Hals, his voice suddenly hoarse.

"We can still fight, though," said someone else who'd just come up.

"Fight!" said Hals, hideously objective. "With what? Seven or eight hundred anemic, half-starved men armed with light infantry weapons. You must be joking. It would be the end of us, I tell you. We haven't even got the strength to run."

But the newcomer wasn't joking. His name was Kellerman. Although he was exactly twenty years old, he already had the lucidity of a much older man and an instant grasp of reality. This reality lifted the veil of fear, and exposed the anguish deeply inscribed on his face, whose hardened features seemed incompatible with his youth.

Then we all heard a distant rumble, carried to us on the wind. . . . We stared at each other. The noise stopped, began again, stopped again.

"Artillery," said Schlesser. The rest of us were silent.

I had heard the noise, like everyone else, but my exhaustion had produced the sensation of two simultaneous lives. Sleep and reality had become confused. I felt as though I were deeply asleep, dreaming of artillery fire, lost somewhere in time. My comrades went right on talking. I listened to them without really hearing what they were saying. Sergeant Sperlovski had joined us, and seemed to be making some deductions.

"It's still far off," he said, "but it's the front. We'll be arriving in a day, or a day and a half."

"That would be an hour or two in a car," Hals remarked.

Sperlovski looked at him. "In a hurry? So sorry we're not motorized any more."

"That's not what I meant," Hals growled. "I was thinking of Ivan, who must have gas and tanks. If he breaks through, he could be on top of us just like that."

Sperlovski stalked off without another word. What business had he to be discouraged-a noncom in the Gross Deutschland?

"Let's go to sleep," Kellerman said. "There's nothing better to do."

"It's a nice lookout," I couldn't help saying. "Here we are, like animals in a slaughterhouse, waiting for dawn, when the butchers will come."

"Are we going to be killed with empty stomachs?" Hals roared. Despite our hunger and fear, we managed to fall asleep again, and stayed asleep until daybreak-which arrived at what would be considered the middle of the night in any organized civilian life.

Here we had no bells or bugles, or even a whistle. The gentle commotion made by our group leaders was enough to drag us from the heavy sleep which, paradoxically, was very easily penetrated by sound and movement. According to the custom of troops approaching a combat zone, movement at night, or before full daylight, was preferred. The docile Wehrmacht, even in its death agony, clung to its professionalism and woke its soldiers at the customary hour, leading them in disciplined order to the field of glory.

The rules did not envisage that soldiers without food could avoid this or that trial, but stated that in all cases everything still possible should be accomplished with maximum efficiency. Time is measured out in equal quantities for the poor and the old and the underfed alike.

Our faded uniforms looked gray in the first faintly white light of day. Familiar silhouettes which had walked beside me for nearly two years now were advancing on either side of me in a rhythm that was also mine, and that has remained indelibly stamped on my memory. Whenever I think of those days, I can see again with absolute clarity details which are pointless in themselves: familiar profiles in a diffused light, the loose cloth of trousers improperly tucked into boots, belts loosened by their dangling load of heavy objects, and helmets hanging from one of our straps, always knocking against some other metallic object, with a dull sound I can still hear, without resonance, like a padded bell. And the smells, and the backs, hunched over in a thousand different ways, each one with its own expression, and its own arrangement of creases. The very anonymity of our uniforms created its own kind of individuality. No one uniform was precisely like any other, although no other uniform is so deliberately designed as the German to turn a man into a soldier, absolute and united with his fellows, and not just a civilian in special clothes. For the rest of the world, there are German soldiers with no distinction between them, but for us, the word "Kamerad," meaning one soldier just like any other, was exaggerated. Beyond the uniform and the formula, we were individuals.

That back over there, the same color as thousands of others, is not just any back. It belongs to Schlesser, and over there, on the right, is Solma. Somewhat closer, that's Lensen, and his helmet. It's his helmet, unlike any other among the hundreds of thousands issued in the same series. Then there are Prinz and Hals and Lindberg and Kellerman and Frosch ... Frosch, whom I'd recognize in any crowd. Through our sameness, our individualism emerged, as it must have from all men stripped to essentials, since the beginning of time.

All our helmets were the same gray-green, covered with dust. But none stayed for long at a regulation angle, or moved in the same way, and all were distinctive and distinguishable. One thing above all remains more or less indescribable: the contagious anguish of soldiers stripped of everything, whom each step is carrying closer to an incomprehensible danger. There were also our resignation and our equally profound and violent desire to live.

Apart from these three sentiments in common, everything else was personal. But this was apparent only to us. To anyone else, all Huns were alike.

We saw them when we were still five hundred yards away.

They were swarming around the three or four vehicles which had stopped to wait for us. There must have been at least ten thousand of them. Ten thousand men seems like nothing on the Ukrainian plain, but it is still a considerable number. Ten or twelve thousand soldiers in a pitiful state, storming our wretched trucks, rummaging through them again and again in search of some food or medicine. They had thrown themselves onto our battered machines as if they were revenging themselves for their abandonment. Then, as we arrived and they became aware of our miserable state, they collapsed into a torpor which was close to suicide.

Those wretched men, collected from several infantry regiments, were retreating after several days of fighting an implacable enemy who had toyed with them, decimating them as and when he chose. They were on foot, in rags, their faces livid after so much suffering, dragging along with them nauseatingly wounded men on litters made of branches, like the litters of the Sioux.

These men, numbed by too much disaster, were no longer fighting for any spiritual motive, but were more like wolves, terrified of starvation.

To oppose their sole and legitimate reason for living was to risk one's own life. These men, who no longer distinguished between enemies and friends, were ready to commit murder for less than a quarter of a meal. They were to demonstrate this a few days later, in a horrible phase of the confused flux of the war. These martyrs to hunger massacred two villages to carry off their supplies of food, but thirty of their men died of starvation anyway, near the Rumanian frontier.

Our shock at meeting combat troops in such a state was equal to theirs at finding us as we were.

"Where do you think you're going?" sneered a tall, emaciated lieutenant, swimming in a curious conglomerate uniform which was far too big for him.

He was talking to our lieutenant, who had led us since the death of Wesreidau. Our lieutenant pointed on the map to the position we were supposed to reach. He cited names, numbers, latitudes. The other listened, swaying stiffly, like a dead tree in the wind.

"What are you talking about? What sector? What hill? Are you dreaming? There's nothing left, nothing-do you hear me-but mass graves, which are blowing apart in the wind."

The man talking like this still wore the 1935 commemorative National Socialist decoration pinned to his scorched tunic, which was marked by a thousand stains. He was tall and dark, and a heavy bundle of grenades hung from his belt.

"You can't be serious," our lieutenant answered in a pleading tone. "You've had a hard time, you're a little light in the head, and you're hungry. We too have been keeping ourselves alive by miracles."

The other drew closer. His eyes were filled with such a hateful, disquieting light that we would gladly have killed him, as if he were a sick animal.

"Yes, I'm hungry," he roared. "Hungry in a way the saints could never have imagined. I'm hungry, and I'm sick, and I'm afraid, to such a point that I want to live to revenge myself for all mankind. I feel like devouring you, Leutnant. There were cases of cannibalism at Stalingrad, and soon there will be here, too."

"You're crazy! If worse comes to worst, we can eat the grass, and there's all of occupied Russia, with plenty of reserves for the troops. For God's sake, pull yourself together. You keep going, and we'll cover your retreat."

The other made a noise more like a hiccup than a laugh.

"You'll cover us, and we can take ourselves quietly away! Tell that to the men you see there. They've been fighting for five months, and have lost four-fifths of their comrades. They've been waiting for reinforcements, ammunition, vitamins, food, medicine, God knows what! They've hoped a thousand times, and survived a thousand times. You won't be able to tell them anything, Leutnant, but you can try......

We tried to shift some of the materiel from our decrepit vehicles the last vestige of our motorization-onto our backs, to make room for some of the seriously wounded men among the retreating troops. They left first, driving past the rest of us, who were left to that extent less mobile than before on the great Ukrainian plain. We watched the trucks disappearing into the distance, envying the fate of the wounded, who might be going to escape the oppression of that immensity.