The Cross of Iron (8 page)

‘If that’s so, his chances are pretty poor. I’ve had my own experiences with the obstinacy of the 1st Battalion.’ He laughed harshly. ‘You’ve dreamed all this up, Kiesel. I’ve been wearing this uniform a long time and I’ve never yet met such a case.’ 

Kiesel nodded. ‘I grant it is unusual for a commander to want to rule his men’s emotions as well as their actions.’

‘And how, may I ask, does Stransky intend to achieve this, ah, spiritual domination?’

‘I didn’t sound him out on this. But I gather he intends to use his company commanders as his tools since, in his own words, the influence of a commanding officer diminishes in intensity the lower you go in the ranks. He considers personal contact with the other ranks a dangerous experiment.’

‘Beautiful!’ Brandt brought his palm down against the table top in exuberant amusement. ‘You know, Kiesel,’ he said, with a confidential wink, ‘I am rather impressed by this man Stransky, even if he is a visionary.’

‘Not all visionaries are as unpopular as Stransky,’ Kiesel commented.

‘Do you think so?’ Brandt suddenly wore a look of studied indifference.

For a second there was silence between them. Then Kiesel said casually, ‘Oh, well.’ He regarded the tip of his cigarette and resolved to say no more on this dangerous topic.

Brandt drummed his fingers nervously on the table. At last he raised his head with an impatient gesture. ‘At any rate, in the First, Stransky will find few officers or men who will go along with his little game. Less than ever now. To tell the truth, the morale of the men is troubling me. No pep to them. They’re like a set of chess pieces; they’ll let themselves be moved around, but they won’t move of their own accord.’

‘Chess pieces?’ Kiesel frowned reflectively. ‘Haven’t they always been that?’

‘Not a bit of it.’ Brandt shook his head vehemently. ‘I tell you, up to a year ago we had the best troops a commander could wish for. The men knew just what they were doing and why they were doing it. They were capable of winning a battle even when it was being run by an amateur up on top. But today! I never feel easy unless I’m right up there in the trenches myself. It’s impossible to have any confidence in them.’

‘The feeling is mutual,’ Kiesel remarked.

‘What’s that?’ Brandt gave him a look of astonishment that quickly became reproach. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked sharply.

‘What I said,’ Kiesel replied easily. ‘The men no longer have any confidence.’

‘Confidence in whom?’

‘In us, of course. We misunderstand their psychology if we think that they put the blame primarily on the top leadership. If I hop into a cab which gets in an accident because the brakes fail, I blame the driver, not the company he works for. I’ll say that he should have refused to drive a cab with defective brakes.’

‘Just what are they blaming the leadership for?’

Kiesel crossed his legs. ‘The morale of troops wears out after a time. The division has been on active duty for twenty -one months without a break. The men are fed up. You know yourself how often they’ve been promised they’d be taken out of line.’

‘Is that our fault?’

‘I’m no general,’ Kiesel replied evasively. ‘But the way things are now, the men consider every new commander a candidate for the
Ritterkreuz
who wants to earn his medal with their blood. Once he gets that Cross pinned on his chest, a new commander comes along. Within these twenty -one months they have changed their commanders, from general to company leader, as often as a man changes his shirt in peacetime.’

‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Brandt’s fingers drummed impatiently on the table. ‘We burn up replacements as fast as they arrive. On the other hand, the general staff know the situation better than we do, and what they say counts.’

‘I don’t agree. I think they make some big mistakes and that this is one of their biggest.’

Brandt smiled briefly. ‘I wish you could come forward as advocate of the other ranks’ interests. Unfortunately there doesn’t happen to be any such post in the Tables of Organization.’ He slumped back in his chair. ‘I agree with you that our men absolutely must have a change of air. I’m beginning to feel the same way myself. This damned country! The men have been lured into these steppes and endless forests. At first it was all new and exciting for the troops, but the excitement didn’t last long. These frightful spaces, monotonous, repetitive; you can’t help feeling that one of these days they’ll swallow you up. You end up with a complex about it. We’re getting that now. Still, we’re here and here we have to stay. The men must be made to realize how hard it is to relieve them. Where would we get the transport? You know how much it takes to move a division from France to Russia, and vice versa. Then again, you talk of twenty -one months of uninterrupted duty. Let’s be honest, Kiesel—how many of the original personnel are left?’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘In my former battalion I could count the survivors on my fingers. The regiment today consists 90 per cent, of replacements who have served no more than a few months in Russia. The general is right when he insists that relief of the division would not be justified for the sake of the few old hands. Don’t you see that?’

‘No.’

‘Why not, in the devil’s name?’

Kiesel crushed out the remainder of his cigarette. Brandt’s words had impressed him, less by their logic than by their psychological penetration. He would not have expected such insight from the commander. Abstractedly, he gazed at the small window near the door. Tiny particles of dust danced in the band of sunlight that fell through the single pane.

‘It isn’t easy to explain,’ he began hesitantly. ‘You have to put yourself in the soldier’s place. Consider what the situation was just a few months ago. That was when the first defeats began. But the defeats were not enough to shake the men’s confidence.’ 

‘Why not?’

‘For various reasons. The most important probably is that our men have a certain sense of justice; after all those grand victories they’re willing to grant our top leadership the right to make a few mistakes.’

‘In other words they want to be fair.’

‘I think that’s about it. The soldier is far away from the direct influence of the demagogues, but because of his sense of fairness he has managed to retain a good measure of patriotism.’

Brandt rubbed the knuckles of his left hand. ‘Those are harsh words,’ he said.

‘Perhaps. If it weren’t for the presence of a superior officer, I might express myself even more clearly. But I don’t intend to discuss politics.’

‘If you did I would ask you not to. Go on.’

‘If you wish,’ Kiesel puffed misshapen smoke-rings at the ceiling. ‘It is the few men who were here from the start that I am concerned about. They have been steady as steel all along, and they are the ones who have been keeping the replacements in line. To them we owe -’ Abruptly he fell silent as he caught the faint smile on the commander’s face.

‘Why are you stopping?’ Brandt said. ‘What you say interests me enormously. I’d like to hear it to the end.’

‘It isn’t worth saying,’ Kiesel murmured.

The commander studied him coolly for a moment. ‘It is always worth saying when I am your audience, remember that. But I can guess what you were going to say. You take the same view of the replacements that I do. They’re no longer any good; they’re infected by a spirit of tired resignation. They have experienced nothing but retreats here at the front, and have every reason to believe the myth of Russian invincibility. I started at the bottom, remember, and anything you can say about the old hands interests me now just as much as it did then.’

‘All right, let’s talk about the old hands. To them the recent setbacks have been nothing more than the shifting fortunes of war. During the years we were on the offensive, they saw the retreating back of the enemy too often to be frightened by his face now. The replacements, on the other hand, think every Russian is an infallible fighting machine.’

‘Good, we’re getting to the heart of the matter. Go on.’

Kiesel propped his chin in his fists. ‘I could spend hours praising them. And what is happening now? The
elite
of the division, the men who wear their medals as though they were a natural part of their uniforms, are becoming just as unreliable as the replacements. Why?’

Brandt nodded thoughtfully. ‘I suppose you are going to say that the men feel mistreated. Their sense of duty has been shamefully exploited; they’ve been disappointed in us, and distrust and bitterness are the result.’

‘Precisely,’ Kiesel said. ‘What do you think is going to be the end of it? If we can no longer rely on our experienced men, if we can no longer -’

Brandt interrupted him. ‘Enough,’ he said wearily. ‘With the situation as it is, we can’t blame them. Perhaps it is best not to talk about all this. It seems to me such conversations only make things harder for us.’ He sighed and stood up. ‘You can accompany me this afternoon. I intend to see for myself how the positions look.’

‘I’ll be here,’ Kiesel said. As he went out, he saw Brandt sit down at the table again and rest his head on his hands. The issue of the war had already been decided, Kiesel thought. They both knew it; there was no sense pretending any longer.

Late that evening the men were still working on the positions. Meyer had left his bunker a few minutes before; he was nervous and wanted to inspect the trenches and foxholes. He noted that the work was progressing well, and turned back toward his headquarters. Lost in thought, he trudged slowly along the head -high trench. Steiner would certainly be coming in tonight. Once the Russians built up a solid front line, there would hardly be any chance for the platoon to get through. Even as it was, the platoon would have to detour around the city and that would take time. Meyer looked at his watch. It was shortly before ten. He stopped walking and stood for a moment, indecisive. Then, since he felt not the slightest inclination to sleep, he swung himself up out of the trench, climbed a few yards up the slope, and sat down on the ground. There was a deep stillness all about, broken only by the clank of shovels as the men dug deeper here and there. The star -studded sky arched high above the hills, casting soft light over the landscape. For a long while Meyer sat staring into the night. Longing thoughts of home filled his mind. He lay back, clasped his hands behind his neck and closed his eyes. If only it were over soon. Since November the hopelessness of it all had been obvious. At that time Tuapse had been almost within their grasp, the Turkish frontier only a few days’ march away, and no one doubted that the war would soon be won. While now! The collapse of the front at Stalingrad and the resultant danger of encirclement for the divisions fighting in the Caucasian forests had reversed the picture. It was true that their division and a few others had escaped envelopment by withdrawing from the Caucasus into the present bridgehead. But what had been gained? At their backs was the sea, in front of them were the superior forces of a fanatical enemy who had seized and was holding the initiative. Here were a few undermanned German divisions clinging desperately to the Circassian hills and the Kuban swamps, exhausted from endless fighting, without hope, with nothing but endurance. Meyer sighed. He craned his neck to see beyond the positions. The moon was rising and it was growing lighter. The highway, a pale band, ran eastward along the edge of the forest, and Meyer suddenly became aware of how intensely he hated this country with its murderous distances and its miserable roads.

A noise in the trench roused him. There was a murmur of voices nearby. He sat up, listening, alert to danger. But it was only a sentry being relieved. He lay back again and watched with halfshut eyes as the head of a man appeared over the rim of the trench. As Meyer watched him, he felt his bitterness slowly dissolving. Perhaps I am seeing things too blackly, he told himself; perhaps we will still make it. The sentry in front of him stood motionless. He was probably watching that patch of woods where—possibly at this very moment—the advance scouts of a Russian assault division would be groping their way forward.

Somewhere beyond the hill a flare rose against the sky, flooding the ground with light for a few seconds. The man in the trench turned his head to the right. Meyer got up and went to his bunker. He opened the door, lit a candle, and sat down at the table. Later he pillowed his head on his arms. He waited for the platoon to arrive until the first dawn light trickled into the bunker.

‘Gentlemen,’ Stransky began, his voice cool and businesslike, ‘I believe there is no need of my going into the general tactical picture. The daily army communique should be keeping you up -to -date on that.’

Meyer gave a slight cough and received a stern look from the commander. Merkel clasped his hands patiently over his knees. Gausser and Schwerdtfeger stared at the floor with ill -concealed expressions of boredom.

‘The map, please,’ Stransky said. Triebig hurried to the table, took a map out of a portfolio, and pinned it to the wall. Stransky went up to it. ‘Very well,’ he said, and paused until Triebig had returned to his place. Then he continued: ‘A few words are, however, in order concerning our own particular situation. Parts of the army, withdrawing through Rostov, have been fitted into the new main line of resistance in the north, which runs’—his finger pointed to a spot on the map—‘east of Taganrog northward in the direction of Voronesh. The front seems to have become stabilized again. The Supreme Command regards the maintenance of the Kuban bridgehead as indispensable since, as you will recognize, its tactical importance for future offensives will be of the greatest importance.’ Stransky paused briefly. Meyer thought, bitterly: Where were they to get the material and the men for future offensives? The other officers were also looking sceptical. Apparently Stransky sensed their doubts, for his voice grew louder. ‘A new offensive starting from the bridgehead and moving north will shake the entire Russian southern front. Striking as it would against the rear of the Russian army, it might well decide the outcome of the war.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Merkel whispered. Schwerdtfeger nodded derisively; Gausser passed his hand over his face as if to wipe away a grin.