Unlikely Warrior (14 page)

At noon on the fourth of March, Sergeant Konrad called me to the switchboard, where he had spent the last hour and a half busily connecting the incoming calls.

“You and Schmidt go immediately back to the repair unit and pick up two radio tubes of this number.” He handed me a scrap of paper with some scribbling on it.

“Where is the repair unit?” I asked.

“Exactly twenty kilometers southwest of here, there’s a good-sized town. That’s where the regimental mess and the bakery are located. The railroad passes through, so probably they have all sorts of other backup supplies, too. You can’t miss it.”

Taking just our rifles and bread bags, we started off. The day was warm and sunny. The track was torn up and softened knee-deep from the military vehicles, but we discovered firmer ground on the edges.

I found myself hopping to keep up with Baby Schmidt’s incredibly long stride. Schmidt hadn’t earned his nickname because of his age alone. His eyes were baby blue, and his soft pink cheeks still hadn’t felt the scrape of a razor. He reminded me of a giant’s baby from one of those fairy tales.

That day I asked him, “Why did they take you so young, anyway?”

“I joined up voluntarily,” Baby answered.

“Humph,” I grunted. “You must already be sorry about that decision.”

His face turned red, and he didn’t answer for quite a while. Then he said, “My father fell two years ago in Yugoslavia. Partisans. My stepmother took over our farm in the Black Forest. She and I never hit it off so well, and my brothers had all been drafted already. There wasn’t anything more for me at home, so I joined up.”

I thought about how different we all were. To me, volunteering to be sent to a front like this was the next closest thing to committing suicide. But I kept my thoughts to myself and concentrated on checking my compass as we tramped on.

We took our time, and by late afternoon we reached a small town where a tank unit was filling up on gas. We also tanked up with monster portions of a good beef stew from the field kitchen and slept that night on a soft bed of grain that filled up half a room in one of the houses.

By noon the following day we reached the place where the repair unit was supposed to be. It was a large village, filled with soldiers from the various supply units. The artillery was on the move, and everybody seemed to be in a hurry.

“It looks as though they are all pulling out,” Schmidt commented.

I stopped next to a soldier working under the hood of a heavy truck. “Can you tell me where to find the radio repair unit from Division 282?”

“Sorry, I can’t help you.”

We asked a few more times, but without success. Even at the command post no one seemed to know. As the day wore on, it became increasingly obvious that everyone was preparing for a hasty departure.

That night we made ourselves comfortable in one of the officers’ quarters that had just been vacated. Before turning in, I said to Baby Schmidt, “We might as well head back to the front tomorrow. The unit we’re looking for is probably long gone. There’s no sense in searching any longer.”

The following morning the streets were almost deserted. Most of the units had left the village during the night. As we passed the last houses, I stopped abruptly and listened.

“Do you hear what I hear?”

“
Ja
, heavy artillery and other firecrackers.”

“Yeah, that, too,” I said. “Nothing else?”

We both stood listening for a moment, then took off in the direction of one of the houses. After stopping once more to listen, we circled the house and there it was: a makeshift wooden box with three chickens and a rooster.

“Looks like someone prepared those for a trip but couldn’t fit them into the taxi,” Schmidt said with a broad smile.

After a futile search for an old woman, we were obliged to kill, pluck, and boil the chickens ourselves. It took us all morning, but while the last two were cooking, I also discovered two horses. We rode away at noon, minus the radio tubes but carrying mess kits stuffed with chicken pieces and two gas mask containers full of hot soup.

Heavy battle noises drifted from the direction in which we were riding. After only five kilometers we arrived at a rear position held by an array of antitank guns, entrenched soldiers with bazookas, and a few camouflaged tanks.

Just a few minutes later I saw a mass of fleeing soldiers running in our direction. “Let’s get out of here,” I yelled to Schmidt. We pulled up and galloped back to the village.

By two o’clock we could hear that the Russian attack had come to a halt. Asking around, we managed by evening to find the bloody remains of our unit sitting in a ditch next to the road. I served up the four chickens, saving the tenderest pieces, as usual, for Konrad’s ulcer.

A little later a bumpy cart rolled past, and there lay Haas, his face contorted in pain. When I grabbed his hand to shake it, he flashed a wide grin that belied his wound. “A thigh shot. I’ve made it. The war’s over for me.”

I stood waving goodbye as the horse pulled the cart away. I wondered if he really had been shot, or whether he had finally put to use what he had explained to me numerous times in all the technical details.

Just a few weeks earlier he had said, “And don’t forget, if worse comes to worst you can always shoot yourself in the leg. Do it through a loaf of bread or a folded jacket. That way you don’t have to worry about suspicious powder burns.”

However it had happened, Haas had received his injury, and he had more than earned his trip home. I hated to see him go, and I felt more forsaken than ever.

I shouldn’t have felt quite so forlorn, however. A few days later it became clear to me that Sergeant Konrad had received word of the impending tank attack over the wireless and had purposely sent us to the rear for radio tubes to a unit that didn’t even exist. He had wanted to save Baby Schmidt, who was too young to die, and make certain that I, his private cook, was also safe from harm!

Russia, March 17, 1944

Dear Papi,

You simply can’t describe some things because the reader wouldn’t be able to imagine them: the war here in this most forsaken of all countries; the Russians to the north, northwest, east, south, southeast; the river Bug seventy kilometers away, and us—a few sorry units where the staff is often larger than the number of fighting soldiers—continually struggling as much as possible to build a closed front.

Until two days ago the whole country was like soup where everything gets stuck and threatens to sink. By day we’re on the spot; that is to say, we build a front. During the night we wade fifteen to thirty kilometers in muck and goo toward the southwest. It takes us from six in the evening until 9 a.m., at least, just to gain a few kilometers.

Then there’s usually shortwave communication and shooting, and that’s why I’ve hardly slept a full hour for the last eight days. There’s only cold food, and not much of that. To drink? Ditto. The Russians are always close on our tails. The only hope is to get over the Bug as soon as possible, before Ivan really gives it to us.

If a vehicle gets stuck in the mud, it can’t be retrieved, because the Russians already have it. If somebody falls behind for one reason or other, Ivan has him. So we trudge, dead tired, hungry, with the feeling “If I collapse, Ivan’s got me.” The beards keep getting longer, the mood worse, and our strength less.

Since yesterday there has been an overwhelmingly strong snowstorm with temperatures under minus 20 centigrade. I’ve never experienced anything like it. This morning someone made a joke, and I wanted to laugh but was only able to produce a strange grimace. That made me very sad. I’ve always liked so much to laugh, and here I’m completely forgetting how.

Just now the Russians have broken into the left flank and are marching through with two battalions. The counterattack is in progress; the telephone lines are down, so I’ll have to get onto the wireless.

Since I’ve adopted the general point of view “What doesn’t kill me doesn’t bother me,” I can still take it. If I croak, I croak. If I don’t, that’s good, too. I’ve just reread this letter and noticed that it is nothing but bellyaching from beginning to end. Don’t take it too much to heart. This too will pass. Many loving kisses from,

Your Georg

On one of those nights of long marches, a young soldier who had arrived with the last replacements and been at the front only a short time simply sat down and said, “I can’t walk any farther.”

The others kept marching past us, and I told him if he remained behind, he would fall into the hands of the Russians, who were gaining on us.

“They’ll just shoot you,” I said. “They aren’t taking any prisoners.”

“Let them,” he replied dully.

An officer came by and ordered the boy to get up, with no result. The officer pulled out his revolver and shouted, “
Mensch
, get up this minute or I’ll shoot you. This is an order!” But the soldier seemed to have gone deaf or at least to be in a different world.

At that moment I did something purely instinctive, without even considering the presence of the superior officer. I took off my wireless box, rifle, and gloves, grabbed the young soldier by his collar, placed myself squarely in front of him, and left, right, slapped him hard across the face. At the same time I roared, “Get up, you idiot!”

Slowly he raised himself, and, almost as if in a dream, he walked on, another soldier carrying his rifle.

During the following days, as we all became more exhausted, the order rang out a few more times, “Slapping squad to the rear!” And with that order, they meant me.

Before dawn on March 22, we dragged ourselves into Pervomaysk, a good-sized town on the river Bug. My regiment and many others were immediately ordered to secure a bridgehead. That entailed building a ring around the city so that each of the many thousands of Germans still within could retreat to the opposite bank of the river. The Russians, of course, were intent on taking Pervomaysk swiftly so that they could capture as many of us as possible.

Konrad and I were situated with the wireless on the ground floor of a two-story building on the eastern edge of the city. We were attempting to keep communications going between several companies and battalion headquarters, located a few houses away. Many of the nearby buildings were on fire, and smoke came through the broken window, making our eyes smart and tear. The city was being fought for street by street, house by house, and we could hear the battle raging in the distance.

By noon the racket sounded much closer. I was just wondering where the Russians had broken through when Konrad yanked out the cable connecting the wireless to the battery box and yelled, “Get out the back! The Russians are in front of the door.”

He was already on his way out the window, the battery box in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. I threw the wireless over my shoulder by one of its straps and grabbed my rifle, and the first bursts from the Russian submachine guns thwacked into the room as I vaulted out the window behind Konrad. The blast of a hand grenade blew me through the opening even faster than planned.

I scrambled to my feet and took off after Konrad across the open square. At the sound of heavy machine-gun fire, I glanced back to see that a tank had shoved its way through one of the ruins facing the square and was merrily shooting away at anything that moved. Zigzagging around debris and riddled vehicles, I made it into one of the side streets. Konrad had halted a few houses farther away to check his compass. He waved his arm in the direction ahead of us and we began running once more.

The street was darkened by heavy smoke. Some of the four-story houses on my right were enveloped in flames, and I could feel the blazing heat as I ran past. The noise on all sides was deafening: mortar hits, machine-gun fire, and the crackling and roaring of the flames from the burning houses.

All of a sudden, the wall of the house just to my right began tilting forward. The panic that seized me at that moment must also have endowed me with tremendous strength. In spite of the heavy wireless still hanging over my shoulder, I somehow ran faster.

A giant cloud of fire and dust exploded through the ground-floor window. The wall buckled at the second story, and all the masonry from the top floors, including the flaming roof beams, came tumbling down with a horrible earsplitting crash.

Some of the longest seconds of my life elapsed before my own legs and the monstrous air pressure propelled me just enough so that I was hit by only a few chunks of brick. I was tossed to the ground in a scorching cloud of dust. I staggered to my feet, checked my bones, and continued to run. Finally I overtook Konrad, who had paused in a doorway to catch his breath.

“This morning one of the bridges crossing the river was still intact,” he said. “If we can find it, and it’s still in one piece, we should be able to make it safely to the other side. The river can’t be too far away, maybe just a few blocks. Let’s go!”

We soon reached a wider street filled with scores of Germans, all running in the same direction. Without hesitating, we joined the rest. The Russians hadn’t penetrated this part of the city yet; nevertheless, all signs pointed to an uncontrolled full-scale flight by the Germans.

We reached the bridge and rejoiced to see it still whole, but it was choked up with soldiers and vehicles, all moving at a maddeningly slow pace toward the west bank. I could see Pioniere attaching explosive charges to the pilings. It had begun to rain.

After finally working our way to the opposite side, we were met by bellowing officers trying to bring some semblance of order or grouping into this milling mass of soldiers. It was a chaotic mixture of everything military: members of the tank corps without tanks, artillery soldiers with no cannons, wounded men on stretchers or still on foot, and officers of every rank. Some of the officers were hastily organizing battle units that they sent marching off in various directions.