Legion of the Damned (18 page)

"And you can do that every morning. We all do."

With the help of all this precious flour that I "organized" I became good friends with many of the GPU men to whom I sold it, and I also managed to get Fleischmann transferred to decent work outside the camp. Nor was it long before I had got us both permission to go about the town freely, as long as we reported for morning roll call. For a couple of months we had a wonderful time and lived as well as any free Soviet citizen. Once a week we went to the cinema and saw Russian films, many of which were excellent, though the weekly "news" films from the front were not. To me these seemed bogus and stilted, sometimes even grotesque. One of them was of a Soviet soldier in the fighting in the Crimea. He was badly wounded, having had both legs shot off above the knee while a shell splinter had knocked the eyes out of his head, yet no sooner had he been bandaged up than he jumped out of bed, seized an armful of land mines and ran out on his stumps to continue the fight. German tanks were rolling along the street. Like a tiger this legless, eyeless Russian crawled up onto a tank and blew it up. He continued doing this till he had smashed a dozen of them; then, when all the German tanks were blazing furiously, that brave Russian let himself be borne back to the field hospital where the doctors operated and finished him off. As the film ended, an officer on a rostrum called to the audience:

"Comrades! Thus does the Red Army fight against the henchmen of the bourgeoisie and capitalism!"

All good things come to an end sometime or other, and when I heard from a GPU man that there was talk of us being moved shortly, perhaps back to the hell of Tobolsk, Fleischmann and I planned to escape. We thought that we would try to get to Moscow and seek refuge in the Swedish Embassy. One morning I promised the duty GPU man a bag of flour if he would not notice if we did not report for roll call the following morning. He laughed and said something about girls. So we let him believe it was that. At the mill I asked for a couple of days off as I had something to do for the commissar. I fetched a flour bag and stuffed into it all the money I had saved from my black market dealings in flour. Then I walked calmly out of the town to our rendezvous. Fleischmann was already there.

I had been walking for twenty-four hours without a break and when I eventually let myself tumble into a ditch I was so exhausted that I fell asleep at once. There is no landscape so tedious as the Russian. The country roads are long and twisty, made of just earth and gravel. On all sides is steppe and more steppe as far as the eye can see. Now and again you may see a bird. The villages lie fifty or sixty miles apart. After two and a half days' marching I reached a railway line which, judging by the map, must have been that between Gorki and Saratov. Feeling tired and done, I lay down on the slope of the embankment and waited. There was no shade so I was almost roasted by the blazing sun. I began to be troubled by thirst. Specks danced before my eyes. I could not sleep and yet I felt dead and empty inside. Time stood still and no longer concerned me. I just lay writhing in my gloom. Feeling both apathetic and savage, I hungered for a woman. Ursula, you have gone, I shall never see you again. I don't know if I wept with the hurt of it; I may have kicked the ground and cursed God and generally behaved like a spoiled child, but those were dreadful, interminable and bittersweet hours that I spent lying waiting for a train somewhere between Gorki and Saratov.

When one came it was a freight train traveling fairly fast. You're jumping that if it costs you your neck, I told myself; and as soon as the engine was past I began running alongside the cars, terrified in case I should stumble on the loose stones of the embankment and fall beneath the wheels. I caught hold of a handrail on a gondola. Three, four times I tried to swing myself up but did not manage it, and I was on the point of losing my head and either letting go or else stopping running and just letting my feet trail; but then I clenched my teeth and jumped again. A moment later I heaved myself in over the back of the car and dropped onto a cart that had been hidden by the tarpaulin covering the gondola.

Then I nearly had a stroke, for suddenly a ghastly face appeared over the edge of the cart on which I lay panting. Paralyzed with fright, we stared at each other. Then I pulled the pistol out of my pocket. The other groaned and shut his eyes.

"
Jetzt ist alles aus!
"

"What the hell--are you German?" I lowered my pistol in amazement, and the next moment another man emerged.

They had escaped from a pow camp a hundred miles north of Alatyr. There had been four of them at the start but one of them had fallen off the train and been run over and another had jumped down right into the arms of three Russians. Luckily they had not searched the car.

We studied my map and realized that when we got to Saratov we would have to be careful not to be carried on down to the Caspian Sea. We agreed that our best course would be to try and make our way to the area of the Volga, northwest of Stalingrad, where they both said our troops now were. They had both been taken prisoner a good four months before at Maikop, and since then the Germans had advanced farther toward the Volga.

When we reached Saratov we crawled out to see if there was another train we could get onto if ours were going to continue in the wrong direction. We found a pile of boxes of raw fish, opened one and ate our fill. Raw fish is really palatable provided you are hungry enough. A couple of interested cats had our leavings and the last three fish in the box, which we were unable to eat. Then we went back to where our train had been. It was there no longer, but we found another train and, as this was loaded with trucks and ammunition, we felt sure that it must be going our way--to the front.

Now, for the first time, realization came that I was on my way back to the front. Till then I had not stopped to consider what I was doing, but now the sight of the ammunition boxes brought the fact home to me. Back to all that! Before, I had only been thinking of getting out of Russia, the Soviet Union being a dangerous place for me. But if it was my life I wanted to save ought I to be going back to the front? Back to head all attacks and be the rearguard in all withdrawals? The paradox was depressing. Why was life so pointless? Would not the simplest thing be to put a bullet into my head at once? It was strange and inexplicable, but I felt much more depressed at this moment than I had when I traveled back from my leave with Ursula. Perhaps our marriage and my leave comprised a period of my life that was complete and satisfactory in itself; it gave me the comforting feeling that if I had had nothing else out of life I had had that. Here in the Soviet Union, however, I had not experienced anything that was a complete experience in itself. I had traveled far in it, a lone fugitive, though often helped, and that huge land had shown me in the midst of all my personal suffering how great is the world, how colorful and rich and full of adventurous possibilities. I had seen something that was on a far larger scale than was little, surrounded Germany now in the process of strangulation. I had met a woman who might have come straight from the golden-threaded, colorful carpet of the
Thousand and One Nights
. Without hesitation she had given me what she had, and I knew that I could
always
have come again and again and always been given more, that she would never have had enough. But I would never go again; we would never find each other again. A great country was in the process of closing its great doors behind me after a brief visit. I felt a wild urge to turn back, to return to what was life on a volcano, and to find my princess again and complete the adventure.

It was stupid of me not to do it. It would have been crazy to have done so; but it was also stupid to prefer to turn my nose toward home and the strange "safety" of a tank in the front line. It is true that the conditions under which someone like me must live in the Soviet Union were inhuman, but so they were in a tank, and pointless into the bargain, with no distant, tempting peaks to the feet of which ydu could struggle, enduring hunger and thirst, and thereafter climb. I was returning to a place where my hands would find nothing but shells, and you could not play with those. Nothing happens when you put your finger on the tip of a shell.

We took a box of fish and got up onto one of the railroad cars with it, and while the train rattled along with us we fell asleep beneath a couple of trucks. It poured without stopping all the next day, but we were dry under the tarpaulin, and there we sat, eating our fish, sleeping, talking dully. They were so boring, my two companions. They were Nazis and believed that we were winning. They believed that we could defeat such a huge country. One was called Jurgens, the other Bartram.

At Uvarov, east of the Don, the train stopped and was to go no farther. A little way outside the town we studied our map and decided that we must be two hundred miles or so east of Voronezh. We would have to get at least sixty or seventy miles south of Voronezh before we could hope to find the Germans on our side of the Don, for we knew that north of Voronezh the Russians were west of the river and had control of all the bridges and fords.

The highway swarmed with soldiers, guns and trucks, but we did not dare ask for a lift as only I could speak Russian. The Russian military police were everywhere, and because of that we hid during the day.

Near Sakmanka we were hailed by a Russian sergeant. The big truck in which he was traveling alone had sunk into the soft road. After we had helped him extricate it I shot him and put on his uniform. I did it without properly considering what I was doing. It was just a thing that had to be done. We laid him under some bushes and then I drove the truck with the other two in the back. In the driver's cab I found a submachine gun and some grenades. I kept my foot down hard on the accelerator and we made one hundred and twenty miles before we ran out of gas. We then left the truck and continued on foot. I took the submachine gun with me. We were approaching the storm center.

The next day we could hear the guns. It was strange hearing them again. When night fell the horizon was blood red. In battered Jelansk we hid in a ruin but we did not sleep well there, only three miles from the front, for the din of the artillery was deafening, and it was so long since we had heard it that we had lost the ability to sleep in spite of it. Thus our nerves were on edge when, after darkness had fallen, we set off to make our way to the trenches.

Shells went whining past our heads every other moment, landing with hollow smacks and exploding with great roars and sending earth and stones and steel swirling round our ears. It took us several hours to reach the Russian trenches, where we found a hole to shelter in. There we lay, keeping an eye on a lone couple with a heavy machine gun. At a suitable moment we pounced on them and bashed their heads in; then we stormed across the parapet of their trench and ran helter-skelter for the other side. We had to fling ourselves into a shell hole in the middle of no-man's-land, our sudden appearance having started a hysterical outburst of firing from both sides with arms of all calibers and all sorts of flares and lights. It was a long time before things quieted down sufficiently for us to venture out of the shell hole and make the last dash across to the German positions. Just as we were almost there a German machine gun gave a chatter and Jurgens fell forward with a cry. He was dead, which was a relief if only because it meant that we did not have to carry him. Bartram and I ran on, shouting, "
Nicht schiessen! Wir sind deutsche soldaten!
"

Shaking and breathless, we tumbled into the trench and were at once taken to the company commander. After a few questions he sent us back to the regimental HQ, where we were given a meal and somewhere to sleep.

. . . and then he was so stupid as to confide in a nurse who could not hold her tongue. You can imagine the rest. One morning at roll call the old man read out this little item for us:

"Gefreiter Hans Breuer, of No. 5 Company, 27th Tank Regiment, was, on April 12th, condemned to death for an offense against morale in that he purposefully let his foot be crushed by the track of a tank. Degradation and loss of honor for all time. The execution took place on April 24th in Breslau."

That was roughly how it was worded. The Old Un puffed at his pipe and Porta gave a cheerless laugh: "No, it doesn't pay to do it yourself."

I sat down to write to Ursula and Mother and tell them that I was to get long leave in a week's time. That evening I was summoned to the company commander. Meier sat leaning back in a camp chair and glared at me in silence. At length he opened his mouth:

"How dare you have the impertinence to apply for leave over your company commander!"

"I have not applied for leave," I replied. "It was the colonel himself who said I should have it when I got back."

"Your leave is canceled. In this company it is I who decides who is to have leave. You may go."

I was back in it.

"Noses to the Russian earth, you jailbirds!"

All at once cries rang out and swiftly died away in a death rattle.

Tank 534 had sunk into the soft earth and crushed the five men whom Hauptmann Meier had ordered to lie flat on their faces beneath it.

For a moment there was a deathly silence; then a loud growl came from the company. When the five mangled bodies were pulled out Meier looked down at them for a moment as though the whole thing was no concern of his.

We had each been given a short infantry spade for digging up mines, and we were ready to go out into no-man's-land. It was 21.00 hours. Anything that could rattle and give us away--glasses, gas masks, helmets and torches--we had left in the dugout. Our only weapons were pistol, knife and some small egg grenades. Porta had his Russian sniper's rifle, which he always lugged about with him. Just before we were to climb out of the trench Hauptmann Meier came along to see us, and Oberleutnant von Barring was with him. Meier was as insolent as usual: