The Forgotten Soldier

1. TOWARD STALINGRAD

We were standing beside a long railway convoy. We had been ordered to stack our guns on the tracks and take off our packs. The time was somewhere between twelve noon and one o’clock. Laus was munching on something he had taken from his pack. His face, although scarcely attractive, had grown familiar to us, even reassuring. As though his action were some kind of signal, we all took out our food, some immediately devouring the equivalent of two meals. Laus noticed this, but contented himself with a brief comment: “All right, go ahead, gobble it all down. But there won’t be another distribution before the week is over.”

Although we all felt as if we’d eaten only half of what we really needed to assuage our giant appetites, we also felt a little bit warmer. By this time we had been waiting in the cold for more than two hours, and it was beginning to get the better of us. We tramped up and down, joking and stamping our feet. Some, who had paper, wrote letters, but my fingers were too numb, and I contented myself with observation. Trains loaded with war materiel were continuously passing through the station, which had turned into a vast bottleneck, with cars backed up for at least six hundred yards. Everything seemed very badly organized, with convoys moving out, only to be shuttled onto other sections of track, where other companies brought from God knows where were being kept waiting as we were. People were always moving out of the way to let a train go by, only to see it a few minutes later headed in the opposite direction. What a mess!

The train we were leaning against seemed to have been immobilized for eternity. Perhaps it would have been bitter if it had never left.

To give myself some exercise, I hoisted myself up as high as the air holes in the carriages. Instead of cattle, the train was filled with munitions.

By this time we had been in the station for four hours, and felt frozen. It grew colder as it grew dark, and to kill time we plunged once more into our provisions. Although it was already quite dark, traffic continued, dimly lit. Laus was beginning to look as though he had had enough. With his cap pulled down over his ears, and his collar turned up, he was tramping up and down for warmth; he must have covered at least ten miles. We had formed a small group of friends from Chemnitz, which wasn’t to break up until much later: Lensen, Olensheim, and Hals, three Germans who spoke French as badly as I spoke German; Morvan, an Alsatian; Uterbeick, an Austrian, as dark and curly as an Italian dancer, who eventually dissociated himself from our group; and me, a Franco-German. Among the six of us, we were making progress in both languages, except for that damned Uterbeick, who never stopped humming Italian love songs under his breath. These plaintive melodies sounded out of place and totally foreign to ears more accustomed to Wagner than to Italian composers, especially those lamentations of an abandoned Neapolitan swain.

Hals had a watch with a luminous dial which informed us that it was already eight-thirty. We felt sure that our departure was imminent, that they were not going to leave us on the station platform for the night. But that is how it turned out. After another hour, several men unpacked sleeping rolls and stretched out as best they could — if possible on some raised surface, for a little protection from the damp. Some even had the temerity to sleep under the train, hoping that it wouldn’t start rolling.

Our sergeant had settled on a pile of railway baggage and lit a cigarette. He looked worn out. We simply couldn’t accept the idea of a night out of doors. It seemed impossible that we would be left where we were. We knew that the departure whistle would blow soon, and that all the idiots who hadn’t had the patience to wait would have a fine time packing up their bedrolls in a hurry. As it turned out, we would have done better to imitate them and gain two hours’ sleep; two hours later we were still sitting on the cold stones of the road bed. It was growing steadily colder, and a fine rain had begun to fall. Our sergeant was busy building himself a shelter with the railway baggage — not at all a bad idea. When he covered this over with his waterproof sheet, he was completely sheltered — the old fox.

We now felt compelled to find ourselves some shelter too. We couldn’t move too far from our weapons, but we left them nonetheless, with their barrels in the air, open to the rain, expecting a royal dressing down later on. The best places, of course, were taken by this time, and the only thing we could think of was to shelter beneath the railway cars. It had certainly occurred to us to try to get inside, but the doors were held shut with wire cables.

Full of complaints, we crawled into our disquieting and altogether relative shelter. The rain blew in sideways after us, and we were furious. Later on this anger made me laugh….

As best we could, we arranged some degree of shelter from the rain. This was my first night in the open air, and needless to say I never shut my eyes for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I can remember long periods of staring at the huge axle that served as the roof of my bed. Through my exhaustion it often seemed to be shifting, as if the train were about to move; I would wake with a start to find that nothing had changed, fall back again into a half sleep, only to be startled back into wakefulness once again. At the first glimmer of daylight we left this chance resting place, stiff and numb, looking like a gang of disinterred corpses.

We fell in at eight o’clock, and marched to the embarkation platform. Hals remarked several times that we could perfectly well have spent another night at the castle. None of us as yet had any idea of the dispiriting necessities of military life in wartime. This had been our first night out of doors, but we were destined to spend many others which were far worse.

For the moment, we were train guards. Our company had been divided among three long convoys of military materiel, two or three to a car. I found myself with Hals and Lensen on a flatcar which carried airplane wings marked with a black cross, and other parts covered by canvas. These were supplies destined for the Luftwaffe; according to the inscriptions we had been able to read, they came from Ratisbonne, and were going to Minsk.

Minsk: Russia. Our mouths suddenly went dry.

We were pursued by bad luck. We were stuck on an open car; the rain had turned to snow; the unbearable cold was intensified by the motion of the train. After due consideration we ducked under the tarpaulin which covered a large DO-17 engine. This maneuver cut the wind, and by clinging together we managed to achieve a semblance of warmth.

We stayed there a good hour, roaring with laughter over nothing. The train was rolling along and we hadn’t the slightest idea what was happening outdoors. From time to time we could hear trains going in the other direction.

All of a sudden, Lensen thought he heard a voice shouting above the noise of the wheels. Carefully he stuck his head out of our shelter. “It’s Laus,” he said calmly, turning back to us and pulling the canvas down again.

Ten seconds later, the canvas was ripped back to reveal the sergeant fuming with rage at the sight of our three happy faces. Laus, wearing a helmet and gloves, looked very much on the job. His face and coat were powdered with snow, like the rest of the train, whose long profile joggled and swayed behind him. The air rang with a loud “Achtung!” but the spasmodic motion of the train prevented the order from being executed with its customary stiff precision.

The scene which followed was worthy of burlesque. I can still see that great teddy bear Hals, swaying from right to left as he tried to maintain a rigid posture. As for me, my long coat had caught on one of the numerous sections of airplane engine, which made it impossible for me to straighten up. Laus was no better than we were at maintaining a dignified attitude. Finally, beside himself with exasperation, he braced himself with one knee against the floor. We followed his example, and from a certain distance we might have been taken for a quartet of conspirators whispering secrets. In fact, I and my companions were receiving a magisterial dressing-down.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing under there?” Laus shouted. “Where in God’s name do you think you are, and what do you think you’re supposed to be doing on this train?”

Hals, who had a spontaneous nature, interrupted our superior. He said that it was impossible to stay outside the canvas because the cold was so bad, and that anyway there was nothing to look at.

It would seem that by making these observations, Hals was demonstrating a total lack of objectivity. Like an enraged gorilla the sergeant seized our comrade by the collar and shook him violently, with a torrent of abuse.

“I’ll make my report! At the first stop I’ll have you sent to a disciplinary battalion. This is nothing less than abandoning your post. You could get the firing squad…. What if a car had blown up behind you? You couldn’t have warned anyone from that hole of yours!”

“Why?” Lensen asked. “Is a car going to blow up?”

“Shut up, idiot! There are terrorists all along the line, ready to risk anything. When they don’t blow the trains right up they throw explosives or incendiaries. You are here precisely to prevent that sort of thing. Take your helmets and come to the front of the car, or I’ll throw the whole lot of you overboard!”

We didn’t wait for him to repeat himself, and despite the cold which bit into our faces, we took up the positions he appointed. Laus continued forward through the loaded cars, hanging on as he moved from one to the next. He wasn’t really a bully, but a man with a clear idea of a job to be done. I never saw him try to make things easier for himself, which is probably why I felt he must have a sympathetic streak, although I hadn’t yet spoken to him. None of the other feldwebels in the company were so strict; they claimed to be saving themselves for the big job; but when the moment came Laus did as much as they, if not more. He was the oldest of the sergeants; perhaps he had already been at the front. In fact, he was like every sergeant-major in the world: afraid of responsibility, and at the same time giving us a hard time.

During his tirade he had made us realize, rightly enough, that if we couldn’t stand a little cold and a vague, possible danger, we would never survive at the front. It certainly would be idiotic to get killed by some anarchist before we’d seen anything.

We were rolling through a forest of squat, snow-covered pines. I had plenty of time to ponder the case of conscience the feldwebel had put to me. The north of Poland seemed to be very sparsely populated. We had passed only a few small towns. Suddenly, well ahead of the train, I caught sight of a figure running along beside the tracks. I didn’t think I could be the only person who’d noticed him, but apparently no one in any of the cars head was doing anything about him.

Rapidly I maneuvered my Mauser into a good position, and took aim at what could only be a terrorist.

Our train was moving very slowly: a perfect target for a bomb. In a few minutes I was level with the man. I couldn’t see anything unusual about him. He was probably a Polish woodcutter who had come up out of curiosity. I felt disconcerted. I had been all ready to fire, and now nothing seemed to justify it. I aimed deliberately over his head and pulled the trigger.

The report shook the air, and the butt of my gun crashed violently into my shoulder. The poor fellow took off as fast as he could, obviously fearing the worst, and I felt certain that my ill-considered action had made another enemy for the Reich.

The train maintained its speed, and a few minutes later Laus appeared, continuing his endless patrol despite the cold. He gave me a curious look.

We had decided to take duty in shifts. While two of us watched, the third would try to warm up under the canvas. We had now been on the train for something like eight hours, and felt apprehensive about the night, which would undoubtedly be spent in these conditions. Twenty minutes ago I had taken Hals’s place, and for twenty minutes had been unable to control my violent shivering. Night was drawing close; perhaps Minsk was too. The train was moving along the only track. To the north and to the south we were enclosed by dark forest. For the last quarter of an hour the train had been accelerating, which would undoubtedly result in our deaths by freezing. We had also consumed a large part of our rations to keep warm.

Suddenly the train slowed down. The brake blocks grated against the wheels, and the couplings shook violently. We were soon moving at the speed of a bicycle. I saw the front of the train turn to the right: we were diverting onto a secondary track.

The train moved forward for another five minutes, and then stopped. Two officers had jumped down from one of the front cars and were walking back. Laus and two other noncoms went out to meet them. They conferred for a moment but didn’t tell us anything. All along the train people were looking out. The forest seemed a likely haven for terrorists. Our train had been standing still for several minutes when we heard the distant sound of wheels. We were walking up and down trying to warm ourselves up when a blast from a whistle accompanied by gestures indicated that we should return to our posts at once. A locomotive appeared in the distance on the track we had just left; it was entirely blacked out.

What I saw next froze me with horror. I wish I were a writer of genius so that I could do justice to the vision which appeared before us. First we saw a car loaded with railway materials, pushed along in front of the locomotive and hiding its dim lights. Then came the smoking locomotive, its tender, and a closed car with a hole in its roof to accommodate a short length of smoking pipe — probably the train kitchen. Behind this another car with high railings carried armed German soldiers. A twin-mounted machine gun covered the rest of the train, which consisted simply of open flatcars like ours, but loaded with a very different kind of freight. The first one of these to pass my uncomprehending eyes seemed to be carrying a confused heap of objects, which only gradually became recognizable as human bodies. Directly behind this heap other people were clinging together, crouching or standing. Each car was full to the bursting point. One of us, more informed than the others, told us in two words what we were looking at: “Russian prisoners.”

I thought I had recognized the brown coats I had seen once before, near the castle, but it was really too dark to be sure. Hals looked at me. Except for the burning red spots made by the cold, his face was as white as a sheet.

“Did you see that?” he whispered. “They’ve piled up their dead to shield themselves from the wind.”

In my stupefaction I could only reply with something like a groan. Every car was carrying a shield of human bodies. I stood as if petrified by the horror of the sight rolling slowly by: faces entirely drained of blood, and bare feet stiffened by death and cold.

The tenth car had just passed us when something even more horrible happened. Four or five bodies slid from the badly balanced load and fell to the side of the track. The funereal train didn’t stop. A group of officers and noncoms from our train walked over to investigate. Driven by I don’t know what element of curiosity I jumped down from our car and went over to the officers. I saluted and asked in a faltering voice if the men were dead. An officer looked at me in astonishment and I realized that I had just abandoned my post. He must have noticed my confusion, as he didn’t reprimand me.

“I think so,” he said sadly. “You can help your comrades bury them.” Then he turned and walked away. Hals had come with me. We went back to our car to fetch shovels and began to dig a trench a short distance above the embankment. Laus and another fellow looked through the dead men’s clothes to try to find some identification. I learned later that most of these poor devils had no civilian identity. Hals and I needed all our nerve to drag two of them over to the ditch without looking at them. We were covering them with dirt when the departure whistle blew. It was growing colder by the minute. I felt overcome by a vast sense of disgust.

An hour later our train passed through a double hedge of structures which, despite the absence of light, we could see were more or less destroyed. We passed another train, less sinister than the preceding one, but scarcely comforting. Its cars were marked with red crosses. Through some of the windows we could see stretchers, which must have been carrying badly wounded men. At other windows, soldiers swathed in bandages were waving to us.

Finally we arrived at Minsk station. Our train pulled to a stop down the whole length of a long, wide platform covered with a busy, motley crowd: armed soldiers and soldiers in fatigues, civilians, and groups of Russian prisoners cordoned in by other prisoners who wore red — and white armbands and carried truncheons. These were the informers who had denounced the famous “People’s Commissars” and were therefore anti-Communist. They claimed the right of guarding their comrades, which suited our authorities very well, as no one would be more likely to get a decent day’s work from the Russian prisoners.

We could hear orders being given, first in German, then in Russian. A crowd of men came up to our train, and the unloading began in the lights of the trucks parked along the platform. We joined in this work, which took the better part of two hours, warming ourselves a little, then plunging once more into our provisions. Hals, a greedy-guts, had consumed more than half his allotment in less than two days. We spent the night in a large building where we were able to sleep in a certain degree of comfort.

The next day we were sent to a military hospital, where we were kept for two days and given a series of shots. Minsk was very badly damaged. There were many gutted houses and walls cross-hatched by machine-gun fire. Some of the streets were totally impassable, with a continuous line of shell holes and bomb craters, often more than fifteen feet deep. Passageways of a sort had been made by planks and other solid objects thrown across this chaos. From time to time we gave way to a Russian woman loaded with provisions, and always followed by four or five children who stared at us with astonishingly round eyes. There were also many curious shops whose broken windows had been replaced by boards or sacks stuffed with straw. Hals, Lensen, Morvan, and I went into several of these out of curiosity. There was always an array of big earthenware crocks painted in various colors, which contained either a liquid and steeping plants, dried vegetables, or a curious heavy syrup which was halfway between jam and butter.

As we didn’t know how to say so much as “hello” in Russian, we always went into these places talking among ourselves. The few Russians who were inside invariably assumed an attitude half anxious, half smiling, while the shopkeeper or proprietress would approach us with a white-lipped smile and offer us large dippers of these products, in an obvious effort to placate the fierce warriors they imagined us to be.

We were often given a fine yellowish flour to mix into this syrup whose taste was far from disagreeable, somewhat reminiscent of honey. Its only discouraging aspect was a superabundance of fat. I can still see the faces of those Russians, smiling as they held out this product and pronouncing a word which sounded rather like “ourlka.” I never was sure whether this meant “eat” or was simply the name of the mixture. There were days when we really gorged ourselves on “ourlka,” which nonetheless did not prevent us from appearing at eleven o’clock for the official midday meal.

Hals accepted everything the Russians offered him with so much politeness. Sometimes I found him quite revolting, holding out his mess tin for the largess of these Soviet merchants as they poured into it mixtures resembling each other only in their loose, runny consistency. Sometimes his tin would hold a combination of the famous ourlka, cooked wheat, salt herring cut into pieces, and several other ingredients. Whatever the concoction, Hals devoured it with evident relish, like a great pig. Except for these moments of distraction seized in the intervals between our many jobs, we scarcely had time to amuse ourselves. Minsk was an important army supply center, where shipments were constantly loaded and unloaded.

Life for the troops in this sector was remarkably well-organized. Mail was distributed; there were films for soldiers on leave — which we were not allowed to attend — libraries, and restaurants run by Russian civilians, but reserved entirely for German soldiers. The restaurants were all too expensive for me and I never went into them, but Hals, who would sacrifice anything for a good stuffing, spent all his money in these places, and a certain amount of ours. The understanding was that he would give us a detailed account of his experiences, which he adhered to faithfully, with many embellishments. We slavered with vicarious pleasure as we listened to him.

We were much better fed than we had been in Poland, and were able to supplement our rations very cheaply — which we really needed to do. The cold in these opening days of December had become extremely sharp, dropping to more than five degrees below zero. The snow, which fell in great abundance, never melted, and in places was already over three feet deep. Evidently this slowed the movement of supplies to the front, and, according to troops returning from forward positions where the cold was even more bitter than at Minsk, the poor fellows were reduced to sharing rations which were already ridiculously small. Insufficient food combined with the cold produced many cases of pneumonia, frostbite, and frozen limbs.

At this moment, the Reich was making an immense effort to protect its soldiers from the implacable hostility of the Russian winter. At Minsk, Kovno, and Kiev, there were enormous stores of blankets, special winter clothing made of sheepskin, overshoes with thick insulating soles and uppers of matted hair, gloves, hoods of double catskin, and portable heaters which operated equally well on gasoline, oil, or solidified alcohol, mountains of rations in specially conditioned boxes, and thousands of other necessities. It was our duty, as convoy troops of the Rollbahn, to deliver all of this to the front lines, where the combat troops were desperately awaiting us.

We made superhuman efforts, and yet they were not enough. The punishment we suffered, not at the hands of the Russian Army, which until that moment had done almost nothing except retreat, but from the cold, is almost beyond the powers of description. Outside the great towns there had not yet been time to repair the damaged roads — few and far between to begin with — or to open others. While our unit was doing its autumn gymnastics, the Wehrmacht, after an extraordinary advance, had marched itself and its supplies into an unbelievable quagmire. Then the first frosts had solidified the monstrous ruts leading to the east. Our machines had suffered enormously on these roads, which in fact were passable only for wagons, but the hardening of the soil had temporarily allowed the provisioning of the troops. Then winter poured down its tons of snow across the immensity of Russia, once again paralyzing traffic.

That is the point we had reached in December, 1942. We shoveled away snow so that our trucks could move forward fifteen or twenty miles in a morning, only to find our efforts covered over again the same day. The earth beneath the snow was a sinister relief of bumps and potholes, which we tamped down or blew up. In the evenings we scrambled to find shelter for the night.

Sometimes this would be a but fitted out by the engineers, sometimes an isba,[3] or any house we could find. We often crowded more than fifty men into a but intended for a couple and two children. The most desired accommodations were the big tents especially designed for Russia. They were tall and pointed, like teepees, weather-proofed, and planned for nine men. We were rarely fewer than twenty, and even at that there weren’t enough tents. Luckily, we had raided our stores of food because of the cold, and with enough to eat, we were able to keep going reasonably well. Some of us began to crawl with vermin, as we were only rarely able to wash, and when we returned to Minsk, our first duty was to pass through disinfection.

I was beginning to feel that I’d had more than enough of Holy Russia and of truck driving. Like everybody else I was afraid of the idea of being under fire, but I was also beginning to long to use the Mauser which had been dragging around with me for what seemed like an eternity, without ever being the slightest use. I felt that somehow firing at something would avenge me for my sufferings from the cold, and from my blisters. My hands were badly blistered from shoveling, and my woolen gloves were already full of holes, exposing the tops of my icy fingers. My hands and feet felt the cold so sharply that it sometimes seemed as if the pain were stabbing me in the heart. The thermometer remained around five degrees below zero.

We were now billeted some fifteen miles north of Minsk, guarding a huge parking depot for military vehicles. We occupied the seven or eight houses in the hamlet, leaving only one, the largest, occupied by a Russian family. Their name was Khorsky; they had two daughters and claimed to have originally come from the Crimea, which they spoke of with nostalgia. They ran a kind of canteen where we could buy food and drink — from our own pockets — and find a few companions with whom to kill time.

The snow had stopped, but the cold was growing steadily more intense. One evening after our company had been in the hamlet for about a week, I was scheduled for two hours of guard duty. I crossed the huge parking lot, where five hundred or more vehicles of every description were half buried in snow. I had been feeling apprehensive all day at the prospect of walking across this space at night. It would be so easy for partisans to hide between the cars and shoot us as we went by. But I had gradually persuaded myself that the war, if it existed at all, was really taking place somewhere else. The only Russians I had seen were either merchants or prisoners, and it seemed highly probable that I would never see any others.

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.

The first train passed by without even slowing down. Our feldwebel, who had outdone himself in his efforts to stop it, was furious. Soldiers shouted to us from the train that their orders were not to stop for any reason whatever.

Extremely irritated, we walked on in the direction of the train which had passed us. At all events, the road must be parallel to the tracks; we would only have to make a right-angle turn to find our company again. The difficulty was that we were far from the kitchen and the hour for the distribution of food must have come and gone. I had two pieces of rye bread in my coat pocket, but I didn’t want to take them out for fear of having to share them. The two soldiers with whom I had been shoveling snow must have known each other for some time. They were deep in conversation, and had stuck together ever since we’d left the convoy. Our noncom was walking ahead of us, by himself, and I tried to catch up with him. By now we had been walking for some time. The tracks were sunk between two banks which supported a thin growth of scrubby brush. They extended straight ahead into an indefinite distance. If a train came along, we would be able to see it for at least five miles. The scrub on the banks at this point was growing more thickly, and extending a greater distance from the tracks.

It was now some three hours since we had left our company. Everything stood out clearly against the snow. For some moments now I had been staring at a black shape about five hundred yards away. Ten minutes later, we could see that it was a hut. Our feldwebel was walking toward it; it must be a shelter for railway workers. The feldwebel raised his voice: “Hurry up. We’ll wait in that shelter over there.”

It didn’t seem a bad idea. We had regrouped, and a young fellow covered with freckles, one of my snow-shoveling companions, was joking with his friend. We were making our way toward the but when a violent burst of sound struck my ears. At the same moment, I saw, to the right of the hut, a light puff of white smoke.

Utterly astounded, I looked around at my companions. The feldwebel had flung himself down on the ground like a goalie onto a ball, and was loading his automatic. The fellow with the freckles was staggering toward me with enormous eyes and a curious stupefied expression. When he was about six feet from me, he fell to his knees. His mouth opened as if he wanted to shout, but no sound came, and he toppled over backward. A second barrage of sound ripped the air, followed by a modulated whistle.

Without thinking, I threw myself flat on the snow. The feldwebel’s automatic crackled, and I saw some snow from the roof of the but shoot up into the air. I couldn’t take my eyes off the freckled young soldier, whose motionless body lay a few yards away.

“Cover me, you idiots,” the feldwebel shouted, as he jumped up and ran forward.

I looked at the freckled soldier’s friend. He seemed more surprised than frightened. Calmly, we aimed our weapons toward the woods, from which a few shots still rang out, and began to fire.

The detonation of my Mauser restored some of my confidence, but I was still very scared. Two more bullets whistled in my ears. Our sergeant, with appalling self-assurance, stood up and threw a grenade. The air rang with the noise of the explosion, and one of the worm-eaten planks of the but disintegrated.

With incomprehensible calm, I continued to stare at the cabin. The feldwebel’s automatic was still firing. Without panic, I slid another bullet into the barrel of my gun. As I was about to shoot, two black figures ran from the ruins of the hut, and headed toward the forest. It was a perfect opportunity. My gun sight stood out clearly in black against the white of the countryside, and then merged into the darkness of one of the galloping figures. I pressed the trigger… and missed.

Our chief had run as far as the hut, firing after the fleeing men without hitting them. After a moment, he signaled us to join him, and we extricated ourselves from our holes in the snow.

The feldwebel was staring at something in the ruins of the cabin. As we drew closer we could see a man leaning against the wall. His face, half covered by a wild, shaggy beard, was turned toward us; his eyes looked damp. He gazed at us without a word; his clothes, of skin and fur, were not a military uniform. My eye was caught by his left hand. It was soaked with blood. More blood was running from his collar. I felt a twinge of unease for him. The feldwebel’s voice brought me back to reality.

“Partisan!” he shouted. “Hein?… You know what you’re going to get!”

He pointed his gun at the Russian, who seemed frightened and rolled farther back into the corner. I too recoiled, but our noncom was already putting his automatic back in its holster.

“You take care of him,” he ordered, waving toward the wounded man.

We carried the partisan outside. He groaned, and said something unintelligible.

The sound of an approaching train was growing steadily louder. This one, however, was returning to the rear. We managed to stop it. Three soldiers wrapped in heavy reindeer-skin coats jumped from the first carriage. One of them was a lieutenant, and we snapped to attention. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” he barked. “Why did you stop us?”

Our noncom explained that we were looking for labor.

“This train is carrying only the wounded and dying,” the lieutenant said. “If we had some troops on leave I’d help you out. As it is, I can’t do anything for you.”

“We’ve got two wounded men,” the sergeant ventured.

The lieutenant was already walking over to the freckled soldier, who was lying motionless where he had fallen. “You can see that this one’s dead.”

“No, Mein Leutnant. He’s still breathing.”

“Ah… well, maybe… But another fifteen minutes…” he gestured vaguely. “Well, all right… we’ll take him.” He whistled at two skeletal stretcher-bearers, who lifted our young comrade. I thought I could see a brown stain in the middle of his back, but I wasn’t sure whether it was blood mixed with the green of his coat, or something else.

And the other one?” the lieutenant asked impatiently. “Over there, beside the hut.”

The lieutenant looked at the bearded man, who was clearly dying. “Who’s this?”

“A Russian, Mein Leutnant, a partisan.”

“So that’s it. Do you really think I’m going to saddle myself with one of those bastards who’ll shoot you in the back any time — as if war at the front wasn’t enough!”

He shouted an order to the two soldiers who were with him. They walked over to the unfortunate man lying on the snow, and two shots rang out.

A short time later, we were making our way back to the road. Our noncom had abandoned the idea of an improvised labor force, and we would now rejoin our unit, which undoubtedly had not made much progress.

I had just been under fire for the first time, an experience I can no longer describe with any precision. An element of the absurd was mixed into the day’s events: the feldwebel’s footsteps in the snow were so enormous, and I, in my confusion, kept looking for the young freckled soldier who should have been returning with us. Everything had happened so quickly that I hadn’t been able to grasp the significance of anything. Nevertheless, two human beings had suffered senseless deaths. Ours had not yet celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

It had already been dark for some time when we finally found our company. The night was clear and cold, and the thermometer was dropping with horrifying speed.

Despite our forced march of nearly four hours, we were shaking with cold, and famished. My head was swimming with exhaustion, and frost from my breath lay on the high collar which I had pulled up almost to my eyes.

For some time before we reached it, we were able to see our convoy, standing out clearly, black against white. Its progress had indeed been small. The trucks had sunk in through the icy white crust over the tops of their wheels, and great slabs of snow clung to their tires and mudguards. Almost everyone had taken refuge inside the cabs. After chewing on their meager rations, they had wrapped themselves in everything they could find, and were trying to sleep, despite the bitter cold. A short distance away, the two fellows who’d been chosen for guard duty were stamping on their boots, hoping to warm their feet.

Inside the cabs, through the frosted glass, I could see an occasional gleam from someone’s cigarette or pipe. I climbed into my truck and felt in the darkness for my rucksack and mess tin. When the tin was propped between my icy fingers, I wolfed down a few mouthfuls of some filthy mixture that tasted like frozen soya. It was so bad that I tipped most of it onto the snow and ate something else.

Outside, I could hear somebody talking. I craned my neck to see who it was. A small fire had just been kindled in a hole in the snow, and was burning with a cheerful brilliance. I jumped down from the truck and hurried as fast as I could toward this source of light, heat, and joy. Three men were standing beside the fire, among them my feldwebel of this afternoon. He was breaking pieces of wood across his knee.

“I’ve had enough of this cold. I had pneumonia last winter, and if I get it again it’s goodbye to me. Anyway, our trucks are visible for at least two miles, so we’re not giving anything away by just lighting a few sticks.”

“You’re right,” replied a fellow who must have been at least forty-five. “The Russians, partisans or not, are all snug in their beds.”

“I certainly would be glad to be home in my bed,” said another, staring into the flames.

We were all practically in the fire, except for the big feldwebel, who was busily reducing a packing case to fragments.

Suddenly someone shouted at us. “Hey, you over there!”

A figure was approaching us between the trucks. We could see the silver trim on his cap gleaming through the darkness. Already the feldwebel and the old man were trampling on the fire. The captain came up to us, and we stood at attention.

“What do you think you’re doing? You must have lost your minds! Don’t you know the orders? Since you’ve come out to watch round the campfire, you can pick up your guns and make a nice patrol of the neighborhood. Your festivities have undoubtedly attracted a few guests.

Now it’s up to you to find them. By twos until we leave. Understood?” It was the last straw. With death in my soul, I went off to look for my damned gun. I was on the point of collapse from hunger, exhaustion, cold, and God knows what else. I would certainly never have the strength to spend the night slogging through that horrible snow, whose frozen crust covered more than two feet of white power, into which I sank over the tops of my boots. I was filled with rage which I couldn’t express. Exhaustion prevented reaction. I returned to my companions in misfortune as best I could. The feldwebel decided that the fellow who was pushing fifty and myself should take the first patrol.

“We’ll relieve you in two hours, which will be easier for you.”

I have never understood why, but I had the distinct impression that the miserable cur had purposely put me with the old man. No doubt he preferred the other fellow as a companion — twenty-five years old and strongly built — to a scrawny seventeen or an old man. I started off with my fellow sufferer, convinced that we were a vulnerable combination. After the first few steps I tripped, and fell down full length onto the snow, scraping my hands against the hard, icy crust. As I was pulling myself up, I was scarcely able to contain a paroxysm of tears.

The old man was a decent sort: he too seemed to have had about enough.

“Did you hurt yourself?” he asked in a paternal tone.

“Merde,” I replied.

He said nothing. Pulling his collar a little higher against his head, he let me get in front of him. I didn’t really know where we were supposed to be going, but that was unimportant. What I knew beyond a doubt was that I would double back as soon as the black mass of the convoy was out of sight, and despite my exhaustion I managed to put a considerable distance between myself and the old man. I moved forward nervously, breathing as little as possible, as the icy air burned my nose. But after a moment I couldn’t go on. My knees trembled, and I dissolved in tears. I could no longer grasp anything that was happening to me. I could see clearly in my mind’s eye France, and my family, and the games I used to play with my friends and my Meccano set. What was I doing here? I can remember crying out between bursts of sobs: “I’m too young to be a soldier.”

I don’t know whether or not my companion was surprised by my confusion. When he caught up with me he contented himself with saying:

“You walk too quickly, young fellow. You must forgive me if I can’t keep up with you. I shouldn’t even be a soldier. I was retired before the war. But six months ago they called me up anyway. They need everyone they can get, you know. Anyway, let’s hope we get home again safely.”

As I didn’t understand very much about the times, and needed someone to blame, I began to attack the Russians: “And all of this on account of those bastards! The first one I meet has had it!”

However, I wasn’t able to forget the events of the afternoon. The partisan and his execution had overwhelmed me. The poor old man looked at me in bewilderment. He must have wondered whether he was involved with a party fanatic or a security agent.

“Yes,” he said in a carefully veiled tone. “They’re certainly making us sweat. It would be better to let them settle it among themselves. They won’t stay Bolshevik for long. And in the end, anyway, it’s none of our business.”

“And Stalingrad! We certainly have to supply the Sixth Army! My uncle is there! They must be having a tough time.”

“Of course they’re having a tough time. We don’t know everything. Finishing off Zhukov isn’t going to be easy.”

“Zhukov will quit, the way he did at Kharkov and Zhitomir. This won’t be the first time General von Paulus made him run.”

He said nothing. As we lived without much information from the advanced front, the conversation came to a halt. I certainly never guessed that the doom of Stalingrad was already sealed; that the soldiers of the Sixth Army had given up hope and were fighting in horrible conditions, with heroic tenacity.

The sky was covered with stars. In the moonlight I was able to see the little student’s watch strapped on my wrist, a souvenir of my certificat d’etudes in France. Time seemed to be standing still, and those two hours dragged like centuries. We walked slowly, watching the tips of our boots sink into the snow with every step. There was no wind, but the cold, which was growing increasingly severe, pierced us through and through.

For two hours at a time, throughout that accursed night, we shivered in this way. Between each tour of duty, I was able to snatch a brief sleep. The first glimmers of light, which found me shoveling snow, fell on a face creased with exhaustion.

With dawn, the cold grew even more intense. The woolen gloves we had been issued were worn through, and our frostbitten hands were wrapped in rags, or in our extra pairs of socks. But in spite of the exercise of shoveling the cold was no longer bearable. We slapped our hands against our sides and stamped our feet to keep our chilled blood moving. The captain, in a moment of compassion, ordered some ersatz coffee prepared and served to us boiling hot. This was doubly welcome because for breakfast that morning we had been given nothing but a portion each of frozen white cheese. The corporal at the canteen told us that the thermometer outside his truck read twenty-four degrees below zero.

I don’t remember exactly how much longer this journey took. The days which followed have remained in my memory like a frozen nightmare. The temperature varied between fifteen and twenty-five below zero. There was a horrifying day of wind when, despite all of the orders and threats from our officers, we abandoned our shovels and took shelter behind the trucks. On that day the temperature fell to thirty-five degrees below zero, and I thought I would surely die. Nothing could warm us. We urinated into our numbed hands to warm them, and, hopefully, to cauterize the gaping cracks in our fingers.

Four of our men, who were seriously ill, suffering from pulmonary and bronchial pneumonia, lay groaning in makeshift beds set up in one of the trucks. There were only two medical orderlies for our company, and there wasn’t much they could do. In addition to these serious illnesses, there were at least forty cases of frostbite. Some men had patches of skin on the ends of their noses which had been frozen and had become infected. Similar infection was common in the folds of the eyelids, around the ears, and particularly on the hands. I myself was not seriously affected, but each movement of my fingers opened and closed deep crevices, which oozed blood. At moments the pain was so intense that I felt sick at my stomach. At moments my despair was so intense that I broke down in tears, but as everyone was preoccupied with his own troubles, no one paid much attention.

Twice, I went to the canteen truck, which doubled as the infirmary, to have my hands washed in 90-degree alcohol. This produced paroxysms of pain which made me cry aloud, but afterward my hands felt warm for a few minutes.

Our inadequate diet contributed to our desperation. From Minsk, our point of departure, to Kiev, the first stop, was a distance of about 250 miles. With all the difficulties of the route taken into consideration, the authorities had given us food for five days. In fact, we required eight days, which obliged us to consume some of the rations intended for the front. In addition, we had to abandon three of the thirty-eight vehicles in our group because of mechanical failure, destroying them along with their cargoes, so that they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the partisans. Of the four men who were seriously ill, two had died. Many others suffered from frostbite, and a few had to have frozen hands or feet amputated.

Three days before we reached Kiev, we crossed what must once have been the Russian line of defense. We drove for hours through a landscape littered with the carcasses of tanks, trucks, guns, and aircraft, gutted and burned, a scattering of junk which stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there, crosses or stakes marked the hasty burial of the thousands of German and Russian soldiers who had fallen on this plain.

In fact, many more Russians than Germans had been killed. However, insofar as was possible, the soldiers of the Reich were given decent burials, while each orthodox emblem marked the grave of ten or twelve Soviet soldiers.

Our journey across this boneyard naturally did not make us feel any warmer. The huge shell holes, which we had to fill in as best we could, made it particularly difficult.

Finally, our convoy arrived at Kiev. This handsome city had not suffered much damage. The Red Army had tried to stop the Wehrmacht outside the town, in the zone we had passed through. When they had no longer been able to withstand German pressure, they had preferred to withdraw to the other side of the city, to spare it the kind of destruction Minsk had suffered. Kiev was our first stop, halfway between Minsk and Kharkov. Our ultimate destination, Stalingrad, was still more than six hundred miles away.

Kiev was an important strategic center, where units coming from Poland and Rumania regrouped and made ready for the offensive which would push on to the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. To an even greater degree than Minsk, the city swarmed with soldiers and military vehicles, with the difference that here there was a perceptible atmosphere of alert.

Our group entered the outlying zone of the city, and halted until further orders from the Kommandantur.

Once again we found ourselves walking on a snow-covered roadway as slick and firmly packed as a ski run. We thought we had reached the end of our troubles. Everyone was anticipating the arrival of orders which, we felt certain, would direct us to our new lodgings.

We were sent first of all to the hygienic center, which was extremely welcome as the cold had made even the most cursory washing impossible. We were all disgustingly dirty and covered with vermin.

Those with serious injuries were hospitalized — a category to which only seven men were admitted. For everyone else, the journey continued: we spent only seven hours in Kiev.

As we left the remarkably well-organized sanitary service, our group was ordered to stand at attention on the snow-covered esplanade in front of the building. A hauptmann arrived at high speed in a Volkswagen. He turned toward us and delivered a short speech without getting out of the car.

“Soldiers! Germans! Convoy troops! At this hour, when the conquests of the Reich extend across a vast territory, the Fatherland depends on you to assure the victory of our arms by your devotion. It is your responsibility to hasten the pace at which essential supplies reach our fighting troops. The hour has come for you to perform your duty on the front you know so well — the road, fraught with a thousand perils and hardships, upon which you have already expended such prodigious energies. From our factories, where our workers are drawing on all their strength to forge the necessary weapons, through your exhausting journey toward our heroic combatants, no one is allowed a moment’s respite so long as any German soldier might suffer from a shortage of weapons, food, or clothing. The nation is drawing on all its strength to insure that our soldiers at the front receive what they require and are thus able to retain their enthusiasm and confidence in our solidarity. Not one of us has the right to flinch or falter in the face of momentary discouragement. No one has the right to doubt the heroism daily confirmed by our fresh victories. We all have to bear the same sufferings, and dealing with them as a unified group is the best way of surmounting them. Never forget that the nation owes you everything, and that in return it expects everything of you, up to and including the supreme sacrifice. You must learn to support suffering without complaint, because you are German. Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” we answered in unison.

The hauptmann cleared his throat and continued in a less theatrical tone: “You will make up a full group and will rejoin the 124th and the 125th at the edge of town, on the Rollbahn to Kharkov. Your formation will be accompanied by a section of motorized combat troops belonging to Panzerdivision Stulpnagel. They will protect your convoy from the terrorists who will try to impede your advance. As you will see, the Reich is making every effort to facilitate your task.”

He saluted, and his orderly immediately shifted into gear.

We joined the two other sections of our company at the selected place to form the 19th Kompanie Rollbahn, under Kommandant Ultraner. My first thought was that now I would surely run into my friends from training camp, if they hadn’t been transferred or killed. I didn’t know whether they’d left Minsk before or after us, but in fact our old 19th had been re-formed.

We now possessed a rolling kitchen which could serve us hot meals. This made a great difference to us. Immediately before our departure we were served a large hot meal, which produced an almost unbelievable sense of well-being, and raised our spirits to a remarkable degree. The cold seemed to have settled at about four degrees below zero, which was an improvement. But then we had just taken hot showers and changed our clothes.

I had no trouble finding Hals, whose exuberant gestures I recognized easily.

“Well, what do you think of the weather, young one? And of the restaurant, hein? It’s ten days since I’ve swallowed anything hot. We thought we’d die of cold on that damned train.”

“You were on a train! If that’s not luck…”

“Luck! You can talk… You should have been there when the locomotive blew up. It made a cloud of steam at least a hundred yards high. Four of the fellows were killed and seven wounded. Morvan was wounded while we were cleaning up the mess. It went on like that for five days. I was with a patrol that went after some terrorists. We caught two of them hiding in a kolkhoz.[4]

One of the peasants they’d robbed put us on their trail, and afterward invited us to his place and gave us a regular feast.”

I wasted no time in telling him my adventures; talking this way made us both feel better. We had just run into Lensen and Olensheim. Our sense of happiness and relief at meeting again was so great that quite spontaneously we grabbed each other by the shoulders and mimed an exaggerated polonaise, shouting with laughter. Some of the older men stared at us in astonishment, unable to see any reason for this burst of gaiety, so inconsistent with the gray and icy atmosphere.

“Where’s Fahrstein?” I asked.

“Ouf,” roared Lensen, still laughing. “He’s snug and warm in his truck. He sprained his ankle, and it’s so swollen he can’t take his boot off, so he’s waiting for it to deflate.”

“He’s making the most of it,” Hals remarked. “If I carried on like that every time I turned my ankle…”

Our conversation was interrupted by the order for departure, and we returned to our posts. Knowing that my friends were there, with only a few trucks between us, made me feel a great deal better, and I almost forgot that each turn of the wheels was taking me closer to the front. It was still so far away. We were traveling on bad roads covered with snow and ice. On either side, a wall of snow thrown back by road-clearing operations hid the countryside. Through the occasional gaps we were able to see traces of the terrible fighting which had overrun this part of the country the year before. The hastily patched road was so rough that we had to crawl through several hundred miles of this ruined countryside.

The troops of von Wichs, Guderian, von Reichenau and von Stulpnagel had wrenched this territory from the Soviets after weeks of heavy fighting, and held several hundreds of thousands of prisoners between Kiev and Kharkov. The amount of Russian war materiel strewn about under the snow made me wonder how they could possibly have much left.

Rising temperatures brought fresh snowfalls which made it necessary for us to bring out our shovels again. Fortunately, a section of the armored column which was supposed to accompany us joined us two days later. We were able to attach four or five trucks to the back of a tank so that, with their engines going, the trucks were able to manage a slipping, sliding advance despite the snow and ice.

However, the low clouds soon vanished, leaving a pale blue sky. The thermometer plunged sharply, and we were caught once more by a biting cold, on that accursed Russian plain. Occasionally a group of German airplanes would pass over our column with throbbing engines. We waved wildly at the pilots, who responded by dipping their wings. Higher up, squadrons of JU-52s passed slowly over us, flying east. Our hot meals no longer warmed us, and frostbite was eating into my hands once again. Fortunately, this time our convoy included a doctor. Each time we stopped to eat, we lined up beside his truck. He coated my hands with a greasy, curative ointment which I tried to keep on as long as possible as it reduced the pain in my cracked skin and preserved it from the cold. I kept my hands buried in the depths of my giant overcoat pockets unless absolutely forced to pull them out, and then I was very careful not to rub off the ointment against the rough cloth.

I spent long hours in the cab of a three-and-a-half-ton Renault, jolting from rut to rut. From time to time we had to remove the snow which accumulated between the mudguard and the tire, or help another machine which had skidded and gotten stuck.

Otherwise, we avoided everything which obliged us to step outside. So far I had escaped guard duty at night. When darkness made further advance impossible, we stopped where we were. The driver had the right to the seat. I usually slept on the floor, with my legs wedged in beside the pedals and my nose on the engine, which gave off a sickening stench of hot oil. We always woke up stiff and numb with cold.

Well before daybreak we began the exhausting struggle of starting our frozen engines. Hals had come to see me several times, but my driver always protested that three was too many for our tiny cab. He advised me to go and see my friend instead, but that always came to the same thing, and there was certainly no question of standing outside for a chat.

One day, just after we had passed a large town with a Luftwaffe airfield beside it, we were joined by a reconnaissance plane, which entered into radio communication with the Kommandergruppe of the armored section accompanying us. A moment later, the plane left the convoy and veered to the north. The tanks in our column disappeared in whirlwinds of snow thrown up by their treads. We went on as before, without feeling any special anxiety. A few hours later we heard the booming sound of distant explosions. This stopped, began again a few minutes later, then stopped, then began again. At eleven o’clock the convoy halted in a village covered with snow. The sun was shining, and its gleam on the snow made us squint. The cold, although intense, was bearable.

We walked over to the soup truck, whose two stoves were belching smoke. The first arrivals were sent by the cook to fetch the kettles. This cook was not at all a bad sort, and his skill was adequate at least to prevent insurrection. The dishes he prepared really weren’t bad at all. The only oddity of his cooking style was that everything without exception was served with the same thick flour sauce. I joined Hals and Lensen, and we were walking back to our trucks, bent over our steaming mess tins. Suddenly a series of more or less distant explosions shook the icy air. We stopped for a moment and listened. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same thing. The explosions began again. Some of them were obviously far away. Instinctively we began to hurry.

“What’s going on?” Lensen asked an older soldier who was climbing into his truck.

“Guns, fellows. We’re getting closer,” he said.

We had all guessed this already, but we needed confirmation.

“Ha!” said Hals. “I’m going to get my gun.”

Personally, I didn’t take any of this too seriously. There were a few more explosions, some separate and distinct, others overlapping each other.

The departure whistle blew, and we climbed back into our trucks. The convoy jolted into motion. An hour later, as we reached the top of a hill, the gunfire brought us to a complete stop. It was coming from much closer. Each explosion literally shook the air, which was a very strange sensation. Some nervous drivers had stepped on their brakes much too quickly. Their trucks had skidded on the ice, and the drivers were racing the engines, trying unsuccessfully to straighten their machines. I had opened our door, and was looking down the line of trucks. A Volkswagen was driving from the rear at top speed, and a lieutenant was shouting through its open door: “Hurry up, get going, keep moving! You… help that idiot out of the rut.”

I jumped down from our Renault and joined a group of soldiers trying to pull an Opel Blitz back onto the road. The firing had begun again. It seemed to be quite close and coming from the north. Slowly, and with difficulty, the convoy began to move. As we had jammed on our brakes in the middle of an ascent, my driver had a particularly hard time starting up our truck. We descended slowly into a rolling, wooded countryside. The dull sound of explosions continued. Suddenly, the trucks at the head of the column stopped again, and we heard the blast of a whistle. We quickly jumped to the ground. Soldiers were running to the head of the convoy. What was happening?

The lieutenant of a while ago was running too, collecting a group of soldiers as he went by. I was one of them. Carrying our Mausers, and running as fast as we could, we reached the front of the column. The big Kommandergruppe half-track seemed to have driven deliberately into the thick snow at the side of the road.

“Partisans up ahead,” a feldwebel shouted. “Scatter for defense.” He pointed to our left.

Without understanding very much, I followed the sergeant who was at the head of our group of fifteen soldiers and plunged into the snowy slope. As I pulled myself up on the white barrier, I could see very clearly a swarming mass of black figures emerging from a stunted woods and proceeding at right angles to our line of march. The Russians seemed to be moving as slowly as we were. The cold and the weight of our clothes combined to deprive this spectacle of the animation of Westerns, or of American so-called “war” films. The cold made everything sluggish: both gaiety and sadness, courage and fear.

Ducking my head like everyone else, I moved forward, paying more attention to the position of my boots than to the movements of the enemy. The partisans were still too far away for me to see them in any detail. I imagined that, like us, they must be making huge strides to avoid disappearing in a hole in the snow.

“Dig your foxholes,” the feldwebel ordered, lowering his voice as if the other side could hear us.

I didn’t have a shovel, but scraped away some snow with the butt of my rifle. Once I was crouched in this relative shelter, I was able to observe the scene at leisure. I was astounded by the number of men coming out of the woods opposite; there were so many of them! And I could see still others in the forest itself, through the branches of the leafless trees. They looked like ants swarming through tall grass. They were obviously moving from north to south. As we were moving east to west, I couldn’t grasp their intention. Perhaps they were going to try to encircle us.

Our troops had just set up a heavy machine-gun battery on the slope nearest us, about twenty yards away. I didn’t understand why there had not yet been any exchange of fire. The enemy had begun to cross the road, about two hundred yards from us. The sound of big guns from the north was louder than ever, and there seemed to be some answering fire directly opposite us. My hands and feet were beginning to feel the cold. I didn’t understand our situation, and felt entirely calm.

The band of Russians crossed the road without bothering us. They appeared to outnumber us by three or four to one. Our convoy consisted of a hundred trucks with a hundred armed drivers, and sixty accompanying troops whose sole function was defense. In addition, there were ten officers and noncoms, a doctor, and two medical orderlies.

Each explosion created clouds of powdered snow. From the wooded hill in the near distance, plumes of smoke synchronized with the increasingly frequent sounds of explosion rose into the air. The heavy machine gun to my right burst into sound for a moment, and then fell silent.

Stupidly, instead of crouching down in my hole, I lifted my head. I could see little white clouds puffing out among the numerous silhouettes of the partisans. There was a sound of dry detonation, with an answer in kind from the Russians.

My eardrums had begun to feel as though they would burst from the noise of the machine gun, which was joined by another on the slope opposite. Everywhere, soldiers were firing their Mausers. Over in the Russian sector, the black silhouettes were running in all directions, faster and faster, through the puffs of white smoke. Some of them fell and lay motionless. The sun went on shining. None of it seemed really serious. Here and there, Russian bullets whistled through the air. The noise was deafening. With my slow reflexes, I hadn’t yet fired.

To my right, someone cried out. The sound of firing was almost continuous. The Bolsheviks were running as fast as they could toward the shelter of the snowy thickets. Our tanks were rolling toward them with sharp bursts of gunfire.

Three or four Russian bullets landed in the snow in front of me, and I began to fire blindly, like everyone else. Seven or eight other tanks had arrived and were harassing the partisans. The whole episode lasted about twenty minutes, and when it was over, I had fired about a dozen cartridges.

A short time later, our tanks and armored cars returned. Three of them were driving prisoners ahead of them, in groups of about fifteen men, who all looked deeply humiliated. Three German soldiers supported by their comrades climbed down from one of the cars. One of them seemed almost unconscious, and the other two were grimacing with pain. Three wounded Russians and two Germans were lying inert on the back of one of the tanks, one of them moaning. A short distance off a German soldier, leaning against a snowbank, was gesturing to us and holding his head, which was red with blood.

“The road is clear,” announced the commanding officer of the Mark 4 nearest us. “You can go ahead.”

We helped carry the wounded to the hospital truck. I went back to my Renault. Lensen passed by close to me, and shook his head in perplexity.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you know if anyone was killed?”

“Of course.”

The convoy started off again. The idea of death troubled me, and suddenly I felt afraid. The sunshine of a moment ago had been pale, and the cold had become more intense. Bodies in long brown coats were lying along the sides of the road. One of them gestured as we passed.

“Hey,” I nudged my driver. “There’s a wounded man waving at us.”

“Poor fellow. Let’s hope his side takes care of him. War is hard that way. Tomorrow it may be our turn.”

“Yes, but we’ve got a doctor. He could do something for him.”

“You can talk. We’ve got two truckloads of wounded already, and the doctor has more than enough to keep him busy. You mustn’t be upset by all this, you know. You’ll see plenty more of it.”

“I already have.”

“I have too,” he said, without believing me.

“Especially, I’ve seen my own knee. The whole kneecap was taken out by a shell in Poland. I thought they were going to send me home again. But they stuck me into the drivers’ corps instead, along with the old men, the boys, and the infirm. It’s no joke you know; a wound like that really hurts, especially if you have to wait for hours before they give you any morphine.”

He launched into the history of the Polish campaign as he had experienced it. At that time, he had belonged to the Sixth Army, which now was fighting in Stalingrad.

It was growing dark. Our long convoy stopped in a small hamlet. The armored column was there too. The captain had ordered this halt so that the wounded could be cared for. The crust of snow and the roughness of the road made the hospital truck rock and jolt. The surgeon couldn’t operate under such conditions. Two Russians had already died of hemorrhage, and the rest of the men had already been waiting for several hours.

Our truck had just stopped beside a large building where the peasants stored the harvest. I was about to open the door and run to the kitchen truck when my driver held me back:

“Don’t be in such a hurry, unless you want to be on guard duty tonight. The sergeant doesn’t keep records here, you know, the way he does at the barracks. He just grabs the first people he sees, assigns them, and then takes it easy.”

It was true. A short time later I was listening to the complaints of the eternally hungry Hals: “Scheisse! They’ve stuck me for guard duty again. God knows what’ll happen to us all. It’s getting colder and colder. We won’t be able to stand it.”

It was another clear night, and the thermometer fell to twenty-two degrees below freezing.

I thanked my driver for saving me from another night in the open air. However, the fate that befell me instead almost made me regret my luck. We were walking toward the kitchen truck feeling somewhat anxious about dinner, wondering if there would be enough left to fill our mess tins. When the cook saw us coming, he couldn’t resist a little sarcasm: “So, you’re not feeling hungry tonight?”

He had already taken the tureens off the fire and replaced them with the big serving dishes, which were filled with hissing water coming to the boil.

“Hurry up and eat,” he said, plunging his gloved hand armed with a big spoon into the depths of one of the tureens. “I have to boil this water for the surgeon. He’s busy carving up the wounded.”

We were bolting our tepid meal, still wearing our ragged gloves, when a lieutenant arrived.

“Is the water nearly ready?”

“Just now, Leutnant. It’s just boiling.”

“Good.” The lieutenant’s eye fell on us. “You two: take the water to the doctor.” He pointed to the lighted doorway of one of the houses. We closed our mess tins, still half full of food, and hooked them onto our belts. I grabbed one of the steaming basins, taking care not to empty its contents onto my feet, and walked toward the improvised operating room.

The sole advantage of being inside this house was its temperature. It had been a long time since any of us had experienced indoor warmth. The doctor had requisitioned the large common room of a Soviet farmer, and was busy with the leg of a poor fellow stretched out on the central table. Two other soldiers were holding the patient, who was jerking spasmodically and moaning with pain. Everywhere — on benches, on the floor, on the big storage chests — wounded soldiers were lying or sitting, groaning as they waited. Two orderlies were tending to them. The floor was littered with bloody bandages.

Two Russian women were washing the surgical instruments in basins of hot water. The room was extremely badly lit. The doctor had put the farmer’s big gas lamp beside the operating table. The farmer himself was holding another lamp over the surgeon’s head. A lieutenant and a sergeant were each holding another lamp.

In an angle of the room made by the big comer chimney, a young Russian was crying. He looked about seventeen, like me.

I put my basin down beside the doctor, who plunged a thick wad of dressing into it.

I stayed where I was, transfixed by the terrible sight in front of me. I couldn’t lift my eyes from that naked thigh inside which the surgeon was working. The skin around the wound seemed to have been crushed, and everything was soaked with blood. New streams of blood, of a brighter, clearer red, kept running from the enormous hole in which the doctor was working, with what looked like a pair of flat-bladed scissors. My head began to swim, and I felt sick at my stomach, but I couldn’t look away. The patient was tossing his head from one side to the other. He was being held down firmly by two other soldiers. His face was completely drained of color, and streaming with sweat. They had stuffed a bandage into his mouth, perhaps to keep him from crying out. It was one of the soldiers from the armored column. I couldn’t move.

“Hold his leg,” the doctor said softly to me.

I hesitated, and he looked at me again. My trembling hands took hold of the mangled leg. As they touched the skin, I could feel myself shaking.

“Gently,” murmured the doctor.

I saw the scalpel cut even more deeply into the wound, and I could feel the muscles of the leg tensing and relaxing. Then I closed my eyes. I could hear the sounds made by the surgical instruments, and the heavy, panting breath of the patient, who kept moving in agony, despite the partial anesthetic.

Then, although I could hardly bear to recognize it, I heard the sound of a saw. A moment later, the leg was heavier in my hand unbelievably heavy and I saw that it was supported five inches above the table only by my anguished hands. The surgeon had just detached it from the body.

I remained for a moment in a ludicrous and tragic attitude, holding my hideous burden. I thought I was going to faint. Finally, I put it down on a pile of bandages beside the table. I shall never forget that leg, even if I live a hundred years.

My driver had managed to leave, and I waited for a moment of general inattention to do the same thing. Unfortunately, such a moment did not arrive until very late that night. I had to do a great many other things almost as troubling as the amputation. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when I finally opened the double doors of the house. As the cold struck me, it seemed more violent than ever. I hesitated, but the thought of returning to those dying men and those streams of blood turned me resolutely back into the night. The sky was clear and light, and the air seemed absolutely still. The shadows of the houses and the trucks were stamped with precise outlines on the hard, gleaming snow. I couldn’t see a living soul.

I walked through the village looking for my Renault; the whole convoy could have been destroyed before anyone gave the alarm. The door of an isba flew open and a bundle of blankets with a Mauser slung across it ventured a few faltering steps onto the snow. When the man inside the blankets caught sight of me he mumbled a few words. “You go in now. It’s my turn.”

“Go where?”

“To warm up. Unless you feel like taking another round.”

“But I’m not on guard. I’ve just been helping the surgeon, and now I’m going to get some sleep.”

“I see. I thought you were…” He mumbled a name. “Did you say there was somewhere to get warm?”

“Yes. You go on in there. They’ve made it headquarters for the guard. We take shifts every fifteen or twenty minutes. Of course, you don’t get any sleep that way, but it’s better than freezing for two hours.”

“Yes. Thank you. I’ll go in.”

I pushed open the heavy door and went inside. A big fire was blazing in the fireplace. Four soldiers, one of whom was Hals, were roasting potatoes and other vegetables under the ashes. The light from the fire was the only light in the room. Another fellow came in right after me, probably the guard I had been mistaken for. I warmed up the rest of the food in my mess tin, ate without appetite, and stretched out on the floor in front of the fireplace to sleep as best I could. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, one of the guards would shake awake some poor fellow flattened by sleep. From time to time the voice of someone protesting his fate would waken me. It was still dark when the reveille whistle shrilled in my ears.

Slowly we stood up on the floor which had served as our bed. We were rather stiff, but it had been a long time since any of us had slept without feeling cold. A young Russian woman was coming toward us from the shadows in the corner of the room. She was carrying a steaming pot which she held out to us, smiling. It was hot milk. For a moment I wondered if the milk might not be poisoned, but Hals, who preferred to die with a full stomach, had already grabbed the pot and helped himself to a generous swig. We passed the milk around among the four of us, then Hals laughed and returned it to the Russian woman. Neither of them could understand a word the other said. Hals went up to her and kissed her on both cheeks. She blushed a deep red. We bowed, and left.

Immediately, the cold fell on us like an icy shower. There was roll call, and distribution of lukewarm ersatz coffee. As on every other morning, we needed a good half hour to warm up the engines and get them started. Well before daybreak, the 19th Kompanie Rollbahn was jolting along the glare ice of that damned Soviet highway, the “Third International.”

Several times, we had to make way for convoys driving to the rear. We stopped for lunch in a squalid hamlet where the column of tanks which preceded us had also stopped, and we learned that we were only fifty miles from Kharkov.

We were all jubilant to hear that we were so close to our destination. Our convoy should arrive in two or three hours. We tried to imagine our quarters in Kharkov.

“What do you think it will be like?” Lensen asked.

The fellow who’d been with me for this interminable trip, the one without a kneecap, was not one to jump for joy.

“I hope we won’t be spending too much time there,” he said. “It would be just like them to send us on to the Volga. I’d rather start back the other way than keep on going east.”

“If no one wants to go east, we’ll never be through with the Russians,” someone said.

“That’s true,” another voice remarked.

“Some people would do better to shut up instead of always talking about how afraid they are.”

We were back on the road about half an hour later. The sun had disappeared into a fog which veiled the horizon. The cold seemed less sharp, but damp and penetrating. We drove for about an hour. My eyes were half closed, and I had nearly fallen asleep, staring at an illuminated spot on the dashboard. My head was jolting from side to side with the motion of the truck. I decided I might as well sleep, and propped myself against the door. Before closing my eyes, I looked out once more at the snowy countryside. The sky had turned gray, and seemed heavier than the earth. Two tiny black spots were coming toward us over the top of the nearest hill. Probably a couple of patrol planes. I closed my eyes.

A few seconds later, my eyes flew open again. The roar of an engine passed right over our heads, and was immediately followed by a series of crackling detonations.

Then something unimaginable hurled me against the windshield, and I felt as if my chest and eardrums were going to explode. There was an intensity of noise which sounded like the end of the world, and we were engulfed in a shower of ice, stones, boxes, helmets, and mess tins. Our Renault nearly crashed into the car in front of us, which had come to a dead stop.

Stupefied and bewildered, I opened the door and jumped down to the ground, looking back toward the source of the noise. The truck behind had almost run into us, and behind it a third truck had rolled over. Its wheels were still turning in the air. Beyond it there was nothing but flames and smoke.

“Quick! Get over the bank!”

Soldiers were scattering across the snow as far as I could see. “They’re shooting at the trucks!” someone shouted.

I dug myself into three feet of snow behind the bank. “Anti-aircraft defense!” yelled a sergeant, who was running, doubled over, along the side of the bank.

The soldiers floundering in the snow beside me aimed their guns at the sky.

Good Lord! My gun was still in the Renault. I was already running back to the truck when I heard the noise of airplane engines once again. I pushed my head into the snow. A hurricane passed over me, followed by explosions, both nearby and far away.

I lifted my snowy face and looked at the two bi-motors diving down behind distant birch woods. The captain’s Volkswagen was bouncing from rut to rut, driving down the length of the convoy in reverse. Soldiers were running in every direction.

I got up and ran toward a pillar of black smoke. A truck loaded with explosives had been hit by Soviet planes. The truck had exploded, destroying the vehicles immediately in front of it and behind it. The snow was strewn with smoking debris for a distance of nearly sixty yards. What was left of the trucks was burning, giving off a black, acrid smoke. I saw the feldwebel emerging from this cloud with another soldier. They were carrying a bloody, blackened body.

Instinctively, I and some others ran into the black fog to see what we could do. Through the smoke which stung my eyes I tried to see if I could recognize any human beings. A silhouette crossed my path, coughing.

“Don’t stay here; it’s too dangerous. The munitions cases are about to blow up.”

I heard the sound of a racing engine, and then two headlights pierced the curtain of smoke. A truck was coming along the bank, and behind it another, and two others… The convoy was continuing its journey.

Despite the flames, I was beginning to freeze. I decided to return to the relatively warm cab of my Renault. As the road was becoming visible once more, through the veil of thinning smoke, I noticed a group of soldiers, wrapped in their long overcoats, lined up in front of an officer.

“Come over here, you two,” shouted the lieutenant.

We ran over to the line.

“You,” he said, pointing at me. “Where’s your gun?”

“Over there, Leutnant… behind you… in the Renault.”

My voice was trembling with anxiety. The lieutenant looked furious. He must have thought I’d lost my gun, and that I was just telling him a story to cover up. He walked over to me like an enraged sheep dog.

“Break ranks!” he shouted. “Attention!”

I stepped out, and had only just snapped to attention when I was rocked by a thunderous slap. Although I had pulled it down as far as I could, my cap rolled onto the snow, exposing my dirty uncombed hair. I thought the lieutenant was going to shower me with kicks.

“Guard duty until further orders,” he muttered, shifting his furious gray eyes from me to the sergeant, who saluted.

“At ease,” he added, staring at me with a petrifying expression.

“You scum,” he went on.

“While your comrades in arms are getting themselves killed to protect you, you are incapable of spotting two stinking Bolshevik aircraft firing at us. You should have seen them. You must have been asleep. I’m going to get all of you sent to the front in a disciplinary battalion. Three trucks destroyed, seven men killed, two wounded. They must have been asleep too. There’s your result. You are unworthy of the arms you bear. I am going to report your attitude.” He walked off without saluting.

“To your posts,” the sergeant shouted, trying to maintain the tone of his superior.

We all ran off our separate ways. I darted for my cap, but the sergeant caught me by the shoulder.

“Back to your post!”

“My cap, Sergeant.”

A soldier who was standing right beside my hat gave it back to me. In a daze I climbed into my truck, which was just starting up.

“Wipe your nose,” said my driver.

“Yes… It seems as if I’m getting it in the neck for everybody.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Tonight we’ll be at Kharkov. Maybe there won’t even be anything to guard.”

After the shock of a moment ago, I was beginning to feel angry.

“He could have seen those planes himself. After all, he’s part of the convoy too!”

“Why don’t you go tell him that?”

I thought of the two little black dots I had noticed in my half sleep. There was some truth in what the lieutenant had said, but we hadn’t been prepared for anything like that. In fact, we hadn’t yet encountered any of the real dangers of war, and we were all exhausted by the lack of sleep, the cold, this endless journey, and by our revolting condition of almost unbelievable filth. We were too cold to wash during the few minutes of our daytime halts, and in any case it was almost impossible to find water. We had to ask the peasants for it, and as they didn’t understand a word we said we had to proceed without their permission, in front of their stupefied faces and their enormous eyes. All of that took time, and we had time only in the evening, after dark, when all we could think of was sleep.

But all these excuses wouldn’t bring my comrades back to life. I was appalled by the thought that a difference of three trucks would have meant ours. I had never been wounded, but I already had an idea of how painful that could be…. I glued myself to the window.

“If any others come back, I certainly won’t miss them.”

My driver looked at me with his habitual mocking expression.

“You’d better look in the rear-view mirror too. They might come up from behind.” He was almost sneering.

“You think I’m an idiot. What should we do?”

He shrugged his shoulders. His expression didn’t change.

“Well, you know, there really isn’t too much you can do. When I broke my knee, I was thinking about my head. The best thing would be to go in the other direction.”

“That’s it! And quit on our comrades at the front!”

He looked at me, and for a moment stopped smiling. Then his face relaxed again, and he added in the same offhand tone as before: “All they have to do is what I just said: half-turn, right face.” He imitated the tone of a feldwebel.

“You’re not really thinking about what you’re saying,” I said. “The Bolsheviks would certainly take advantage of anything like that. It’s impossible. The war isn’t over. You have no right to talk that way.”

He looked me full in the face. “You’re too young. You thought I was serious. No. We’ve got to go as fast as we can, and faster.” As if to emphasize his remarks, he stepped on the gas.

“I’m too young! You all drive me crazy saying that. As if only fellows your age were any good. Don’t I wear the same uniform you do?”

I didn’t really believe what I was saying with such passion, or even that I was really there, among all those soldiers.

“If you’re not satisfied, get another taxi.” He was openly laughing at me.

As he plainly wasn’t going to take me seriously, I was silent. I was both furious and sad. First they beat me up for lack of vigilance, then they bawl me out. Our line of trucks was continuing its sliding advance across the ice and snow. Night was falling, and with the darkness the cold was increasing. The thought that we were nearly at the end of our journey was in some way encouraging. We would be approaching the outskirts of Kharkov within a half hour. What condition would the town be in? It was the last big city before the front, before the Don, and beyond that, the Volga, and Stalingrad. Stalingrad was still four hundred miles from Kharkov. Secretly, despite my feeling of revulsion toward the Soviet countryside, I felt almost disappointed that we weren’t yet at the front.

Then came the crushing blow.

I remember that we were going down a hill. The trucks ahead of us slowed down, and then stopped.

“What now?”

I had already opened the door.

“Shut that door. It’s too cold.”

I slammed the door in his face, and walked across the icy crust that covered the narrow “Third International” highway. A sidecar had just come to a stop ahead of me, and was still skidding on the ice. A courier from Kharkov was bringing us an order. In the gray light I could see some officers talking rapidly to each other. They seemed to be trying to make a plan, to be discussing some serious news. One of them, our captain, was reading a paper.

Another moment went by, and then a sergeant ran down the length of the convoy, blowing the whistle for assembly. While everyone was collecting, the sidecar, which had started up again, drove by in front of me. There were two soldiers in it, wearing what looked like diving suits. The captain came over to us, followed by his two lieutenants and three feldwebels. He didn’t lift his eyes from the ground, and his expression was one of despair.

A shiver of anxiety ran across our shaggy and exhausted faces.

“Achtung! Stillgestanden!” shouted a feldwebel.

We stood at attention. The captain gave us a long look. Then slowly, in his gloved hand, he lifted a paper to the level of his eyes.

“Soldiers,” he said. “I have some very serious news for you; serious for you, for all the fighting men of the Axis, for our people, and for everything our faith and sacrifice represents. Wherever this news will be heard this evening, it will be received with emotion and profound grief. Everywhere along our vast front, and in the heart of our fatherland, we will find it difficult to contain our emotion.”

“Stillgestanden!” insisted the feldwebel.

“Stalingrad has fallen!” the captain continued. “Marshal von Paulus and his Sixth Army, driven to the ultimate sacrifice, have been obliged to lay down their arms unconditionally.”

We felt stunned and profoundly anxious. The captain continued after a moment of silence.

“Marshal von Paulus, in the next to last message he sent, informed the Fuhrer that he was awarding the Cross for bravery with exceptional merit to every one of his soldiers. The Marshal added that the Calvary of these unfortunate combatants had reached a peak, and that after the hell of this battle, which lasted for months, the halo of glory has never been more truly deserved. I have here the last message picked up by short wave from the ruins of the tractor factory Red October. The High Command requests that I read it to you.

“It was sent by one of the last fighting soldiers of the Sixth Army, Heinrich Stoda. Heinrich states in this message that in the southwest district of Stalingrad he could still hear the sound of fighting. Here is the message:

Heinrich Stoda was the son of Doctor of Medicine Adolph Stoda of Munich. There was an impressive silence, broken only by a few blasts of wind. I thought of my uncle there, whom I had never met because of the rupture between our two families. I had only seen his photograph, and they had told me he was a poet. I felt very keenly that I had lost a friend. A man in the ranks began to whimper. His white temples made him look like an old man. Then he quit his rigid posture and began to walk toward the officers, crying and shouting at the same time.

“My two sons are dead. It was bound to happen. It’s all your fault — you officers. It’s fatal. We’ll never be able to stand up to the Russian winter.” He bowed almost double, and burst into tears. “My two children have died there… my poor children…”

“At ease,” ordered the feldwebel.

“No. Kill me if you like. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters… Two soldiers stepped forward and took the poor man by the arms, trying to lead him back to his place before anything worse happened. Hadn’t he just insulted the officers? Unfortunately he struggled, like someone possessed by demons.

“Take him to the infirmary,” the captain said. “Give him a sedative.” I thought he was going to add something else, but his expression remained fixed. Perhaps he too had lost a relative.

“At ease.”

We returned to our trucks in small, silent groups. By now it was full night. The rolling white horizon was tinged with a cold bluish gray. I shivered.

“It’s getting colder and colder,” I said to the fellow walking beside me.

“Yes. Colder and colder,” he answered, staring into the distance.

For the first time I was strongly impressed by the dismal vastness of Russia. I felt quite distinctly that the huge, heavy gray horizon was closing in around us, and shivered more violently than ever. Three quarters of an hour later, we were rolling through the ravaged outskirts of Kharkov. We couldn’t see very much by our dim headlights but everything that appeared in the path of the light was damaged.

The next day, after one more night on the floor of the Renault, I was able to look at the chaos which was all that remained of Kharkov, a city of considerable importance, despite the devastation of war.

During the years 1941, 1942, and 1943 it was taken by our army, retaken by the Russians, taken back by the Germans, and then finally retaken by the Russians. At this particular moment, our troops were holding it for the first time. But the town looked like a jumble of burnt-out wreckage. Acres of total destruction had been used as dumps for the piles of wrecked machinery of every kind which the occupying troops had collected in their efforts to clear the roads. This mass of twisted, torn metal reflected the ferocious violence of the battle. It was all too easy to imagine the fate of the combatants. Now, motionless beneath the shroud of snow which only partially covered them, these steel cadavers marked a stage of the war: the battles of Kharkov.

The Wehrmacht had organized itself in the few sections of the city which were more or less standing. The sanitary service, ingeniously installed in a large building, was a bath of rejuvenation for us. When we were clean we were taken to a series of cellar rooms which made up a large basement filled with every conceivable kind of bed. We were advised to try to sleep, and despite the hour — it was the middle of the afternoon we almost all fell into leaden unconsciousness. We were wakened by a sergeant, who led us to the canteen. There I found Hals, Lensen, and Olensheim. We talked about everything; particularly about the fall of Stalingrad.

Hals maintained that it wasn’t possible: “The Sixth Army! My God! They couldn’t be beaten by the Soviets!”

“But since the communiqué said they were surrounded, that they didn’t have anything more to fight with, what else could they do? They were forced to surrender.”

“Well, then we’ll have to try and rescue them,” someone else said.

“It’s too late,” remarked one of the older men.

“It’s all over…”

“Shit, shit, shit!” Hals clenched his fists. “I just can’t believe it!”

If for some the fall of Stalingrad was a staggering blow, for others it provoked a spirit of revenge which rekindled faltering spirits. In our group, given the wide range of ages, opinion was divided. The older men were, generally speaking, defeatist, while the younger ones were determined to liberate their comrades. We were walking back to our dormitory when a fight broke out for which I was mainly responsible.

The fellow with the broken knee, my companion in that damned Renault, had just fallen into step with me.

“Well, you must be pleased,” he said. “It sounds as if we’ll be going back tomorrow.”

I could see a certain irony on his face, and felt myself turning red with anger.

“That’s enough from you,” I shouted. “I hope you’re satisfied. We’re going back, and it’s at least partly your fault if my uncle is dead in Stalingrad.”

He turned pale.

“Who told you he’s dead?”

“If he’s not dead that’s even worse,”

I went on shouting. “You’re nothing but a coward. It’s you who told me we ought to leave them to their fate.”

My companion was astonished, and looked around for reactions. Then he grabbed my collar. “Shut up!” he ordered, lifting his fist.

I kicked him in the shin. He was going to hit me when Hals grabbed his arm.

“That’s enough,” he said calmly. “Stop it, or you’ll get yourselves thrown in jail.”

“So. You’re another young fellow who wants what’s coming to him?”

My antagonist was now carried away with rage. “I’m going to give it to all of you, you…”

“Drop it,” Hals insisted. “Shit.”

He didn’t say anything more. A blow from Hal’s fist caught him on the chin. He spun round and fell onto his backside in the snow. By now Lensen had come up too.

“You bunch of kid shits,” shouted my driver. He tried to get up to return to the attack.

Lensen, short and thick-set, kicked him in the face with his metaled boot before he’d regained his balance. He fell onto his knees with a cry of pain, lifting his hands to his bloody face.

“Savage,” somebody shouted.

We didn’t persist further, and rejoined the group, swearing under our breath. The others looked at us blackly, and two of them helped my driver to his feet. He was still groaning.

“We’ll have to look out for that one,” Hals warned.

“He might very well shoot one of us in the back the next time we’re attacked.”

Reveille the next day was later than usual. We went out for company roll call and were greeted by a whirlwind of snow. With our heads muffled in our upturned collars to escape the stinging ice fragments in the wind, we heard some good news. Feldwebel Laus, whom we hadn’t seen in an eternity, was standing in front of us holding a piece of paper with both hands. He too was having trouble with the wind.

“Soldiers!” he read, in the lull between two gusts.

“The High Command, aware of your condition, grants you a leave of twenty-four hours. Nevertheless, given the present situation, a counter order could come at any time. You will, therefore, present yourselves at your billets every two hours. Needless to say, this will not give you time to call on lady friends or visit your families,” he added, laughing. “But at least you’ll be able to write to them.”

Laus sent two men to fetch the mail, which was then distributed. There were four letters and a package for me. We would have liked to look at Kharkov, but the appalling weather kept us indoors. We spent a restful day, preparing for the return journey. We were therefore astonished to be told next day that we would re-supply with food and weapons a unit stationed in the combat zone. We were even given more or less precisely the location of our new destination. We were to proceed to a sector somewhere to the south of Voronezh. We received this news without enthusiasm.

“Bah!” said Hals. “Whether we tramp through the snow to Kiev or to Voronezh, it’s all the same thing.”

“Yes,” said Olensheim somewhat cautiously. “But Voronezh is at the front.”

“I know,” said Hals. “But we’ll have to see it sometime.”

As for me, I didn’t know what to think. What really happened on a battlefield? I felt torn by curiosity and fear.

2. THE FRONT

Winter seemed endless. It snowed every day, almost without a break.

At the end of February or beginning of March — I no longer remember which — we were taken by rail to a town used as a major supply center, some fifty miles from Kharkov. Food, blankets, medicines, and other supplies were stored in big sheds, and every cellar and hole in the ground was jammed with munitions. There were also repair shops some indoors, others in the open air. Soldiers perching on tanks blew on their fingers when they grew too numb to hold a wrench. A system of trenches and strongpoints had been organized on the outskirts of the town. This part of the country suffered from frequent partisan attacks, often by large groups of men. Whenever this happened, every mechanic and warehouseman abandoned his tools and inventories for a machine gun, to protect the supplies and himself.

“The only advantage we have here,” one of the soldiers said to me, “is that we’re very well fed. There’s an awful lot of work. We have to organize our own defense — we take turns standing guard — and things can get pretty tough with the partisans. They’ve given us some hard times, even with all of us fighting, and they’ve already destroyed a lot. Several times the C.O. has asked for an infantry unit to help him out — but it’s only happened once. An S.S. company came, but three days later they were sent on to the Sixth Army. We’ve already had forty killed, which is a lot for one company.”

That afternoon, we organized an odd-looking convoy using four wheeled Russian carts to which runners could be attached, transforming them into sleighs. There were also some real sleighs — a few eidekas and even two or three troikas covered with decorations — all requisitioned from Russian civilians. As we started off, I remember wondering where we were taking this convoy, which looked so like Christmas, but whose load of shells and grenades was of such a different character.

We set off towards the northwest, and a sector somewhere near Voronezh. We had been given special rations for the cold, new first-aid kits, and a two-day supply of precooked dinners. We took a track more or less blocked with snow — which crossed the line of defenses that cut off the steppe. A bulky, hooded soldier, who was the only sentry in sight, waved to us as we slowly went by him. His round shape looked enormously vulnerable as he stood there, puffing on a huge covered pipe, with his feet planted in the snow.

After an hour or so on the trail, which grew increasingly snowy, we fastened the runners to the wheels. Our leather boots, although they were remarkably waterproof, were not the ideal foot gear For tramping through nearly two feet of snow. We tired quickly, and hung on to the horses’ harnesses or the edges of the sleighs with the desperation of cripples clinging to their canes. I myself twisted my fingers into the long hair of one of those shaggy ponies whose pelts are thick and tufted, like sheep’s wool. However, the horses’ pace was too quick, and forced us into an exhausting rhythm which made us pour with sweat despite the cold. From time to time one of the leaders of a column would stop and watch the long convoy going by, catching his breath under the pretext of checking the line of march. When they rejoined the column, it was always at the end of the line: I never saw anyone run back to the front.

Hals, who had become a real friend, was holding on to the other side of my horse. Although he was much bigger and stronger than I, he also looked as though he were nearly through. His face was almost hidden between his upturned collar and his cap, which had been pulled down as far as it could go. His red nose, like everyone else’s, was producing a plume of white vapor.

We hardly spoke. I had learned to be as silent as Germans usually are. But, even without words, I knew that Hals was a friend who felt as warmly toward me as I did toward him. We gave each other occasional smiles of encouragement, as if to say: “Hang on! We’ll make it!”

We halted at dusk. Feeling that I had been pushed beyond the limits of my strength, I collapsed onto a cart shaft. My legs ached with stiffness, and I could feel exhaustion pulling down my face.

Hals let himself fall onto the snow.

“Aie, my poor feet.”

All along the convoy, men were sitting or lying on the snow.

“We’re not spending the night here, are we?” asked a young soldier who was sitting next to me.

We looked at each other uneasily.

“I don’t give a damn what anyone else does,” said Hals, opening his mess tin. “I’m not taking another step.”

“You say that because you’re still sweating. Wait until you’re a little colder. Then you’ll have to move if you don’t want to freeze.”

“Shit,” said Hals without looking up.

“This food stinks.”

I opened my mess tin too. The cooked dinners they had given us early in the afternoon had long since cooled, and then frozen in the metal containers. It looked like tripe.

All around us, other soldiers were making the same discovery.

“God damn it!” said Hals. “But there’s no point in just throwing it out.”

“What do you think?” someone asked a feld, who was looking at the stuff in his own tin.

“Those bastards must have given us rotten meat.”

“Or a week of leftovers. It’s unbelievable. There’s enough food in that town for a whole division.”

“It’s not edible…. It stinks!”

“We’ll have to get out some cans.”

“No you won’t,” the feldwebel flared out at us. “We still have a long way to go, and none too much food as it is. Throw away the meat if you don’t like it, and eat the cereal.”

Hals, who was never too particular, crunched something vaguely like a lamb cutlet between his teeth. Two seconds later, he spat it out on the snow.

“Pah! It’s rotten. The shits must have cooked a Bolshevik.”

In spite of our dismal situation, we couldn’t help laughing. Faced with the ruins of the meal he had been anticipating with such eagerness, Hals was on the brink of one of his rare fits of rage. Given his giant size, these were always impressive. With a stream of oaths, he gave his mess tin a magisterial kick, which sent it flying across the snow. There was a silence, and then a few laughs.

“You’ve made things a lot better for yourself,” said the young soldier standing beside me.

Hals spun round, but said nothing. Then he slowly went off to pick up his tin. I began to wolf down the mess which had been flavored by the rotten meat. Hals, who looked crushed, collected his battered tin, whose contents had been scattered across the snow. A few minutes later, cursing a cruel fate, we were both digging into my ration.

The noncoms appointed guards, and we were faced with the problem of where to sleep. Already clenched with cold, we wondered where and how to spread out our ground sheets. Some men dug themselves hollows in the snow, others constructed rough huts, using the sacks of dried grass which hung from each side of the horses’ collars. Others tried to insure a supply of warmth by making the horses lie down. We had already spent several nights out of doors, but always under more or less sheltered conditions. The fact of sleeping absolutely in the open in such appalling cold terrified us. Here and there, clusters of men discussed what we might do. Some thought we should keep on walking until we came to a village, or at least to some sort of building, on the grounds that it was better to die of exhaustion than of cold. According to this faction, if we stayed where we were, at least half of us would be dead by morning.

“We won’t be coming to any village for at least three days,” the noncoms told us.

“We’ll have to make out the best we can.”

“If only we could light a fire!” one man exclaimed. His teeth were chattering, and his voice was almost a whimper. Appalled by the prospect, we prepared ourselves for the night as best we could. Hals and I reorganized the load on a sleigh so that there was a space between the cases of explosives big enough to hold us both. Despite the obvious danger of such a resting place, we preferred disintegration in a hot flash to death by freezing.

Hals had the spirit to crack a few obscene jokes, and they made me laugh in spite of my misery. We managed to doze intermittently, huddled together, haunted by the fear of freezing in our sleep.

We spent a fortnight in these bitter conditions, and it proved fatal for many of our group. On the third day we had two cases of pneumonia. On subsequent days we had frozen limbs and Hergezogener Brand, a kind of gangrene from cold, which first attacks the exposed portion of the face, and then other parts of the body, even if they are covered. Those affected by this condition had to apply a thick yellow pomade, which made them look both comic and pitiable. Two soldiers, driven mad by despair, left the convoy one night, and lost themselves in the featureless immensity of snow. Another very young soldier called for his mother, and cried for hours. We tried alternately comforting and cursing him for disturbing our rest. Toward morning, after he had been quiet for a while, a shot jolted us all awake. We found him a short way off, where he had tried to put an end to his nightmare. But he had bungled his effort and didn’t die until the afternoon.

My feet, tortured by so much walking and by the cold, caused me agonizing pain at first, but soon became so numb that I felt almost nothing. Later, when a doctor checked us, I saw that three of my toes had turned an ashen gray. Their nails remained stuck to the double pair of pestilential socks which I took off for the examination. A painful injection saved by toes from amputation. It still seems astonishing to me that any of us should have survived such an ordeal; especially I, who have never been particularly strong.

Now, “at last,” I was going to experience war at the front — and ordeals far worse than anything I had yet known.

We used the huts and bunkers of a temporary Luftwaffe airfield for a rest that was indispensable. Most of the field had been abandoned by the Luftwaffe, which had been forced to withdraw farther to the west. Some fighter planes were still there, in various states of disrepair and covered with ice, but a rump ground staff had moved out most of the equipment on big sleighs pulled by tractors.

We were allowed several days to restore ourselves in these more or less comfortable circumstances. However, the moment we began to look better, the authorities plunged us back into the thick of things. For the fighting troops of that sector, our company represented a considerable and unexpected supply of manpower. We were divided into fatigue parties and assigned various jobs. Three-quarters of our men were put to work preparing positions for 77s and even for light machine guns. This meant shoveling masses of snow, and then attacking the earth, which was as hard as rock, with picks and explosives.

Hals, Lensen, and I had managed to stay together. We were in a group that was ordered to supply an infantry section about ten miles away with food and ammunition. We were given two sleighs, each with a troika of shaggy steppe ponies. The distance was not great, our equipment was better than we’d had on our last tragic expedition, and thinking that we could easily manage the round trip in a day, we accepted the job as an easy one.

There were eight of us altogether, counting the sergeant. I was on the second sleigh, which was carrying grenades and magazines for spandaus.[5]

Sitting on the back of the sleigh, I had plenty of time to observe the dreary, empty landscape. At rare intervals, small stands of spindly trees thrust up from the immaculate white ground. They seemed to be engaged in an unequal struggle with the overpowering whiteness; it seemed to be gaining on them, slowly but surely. There was nothing else to be seen in this countryside, which must surely be inhabited by wolves — nothing except for the opaque, grayish-yellow sky. We seemed to have reached the far end of the world.

After a short time, we were following a depression in the snow which we took as an indication of a path. As we came to the edge of a thick forest, a soldier jumped up from behind a pile of wood, and stood in front of our first sleigh, which came to a dead stop. After a few words with our sergeant, he stepped aside, and we entered the forest, where we saw a spandau in action, manned by two soldiers, and further on an ant-like swarm of soldiers and innumerable gray tents. There were a great many big guns, light tanks of the Alpenberg type, Paks,[6] and mortars set up on sleighs. A slaughtered horse had been pulled up into a tree, and was gradually being transformed into steaks by soldiers whose coats were spattered with blood. We were besieged by soldiers who asked us for mail, and cursed us when we said we didn’t have any.

An officer checked our orders. The company we were to resupply was farther to the east. He sent an orderly to guide us. We continued through the woods, which concealed some three or four thousand men, and then crossed a series of small, partly cleared hills; I can still see them with absolute clarity. The white snow was crossed by three telephone lines which had been more or less covered over.

“Here we are,” said the orderly, who was on horseback. “Beyond this crest you will be under enemy fire, so go as quickly as you can. Follow the telephone line. The company you’re looking for is about a mile and a quarter from here.”

He saluted in the prescribed fashion and went off at a trot. We looked at each other.

“Well, here I go again,” said our sergeant, who undoubtedly was a long-time Rollbahn veteran.

He waved us forward, then stopped us.

“We’re going to try and get there really fast. Don’t be afraid to beat the horses. If the Russians see us, they’ll open fire, but it usually takes them a while. If things get too hot we’ll leave the sleigh with ammunition, because if that goes anyone closer than thirty yards will never see his mother again.”

I thought of the attack on the convoy near Kharkov. “Let’s go,” someone shouted, to prove he wasn’t afraid.

The sergeant jumped onto the first sleigh and waved us forward. We soon reached the top of the hill. The horses, panting from the climb, stopped for a moment before dashing down the other side.

“Get going!” shouted the sergeant. “We can’t stay here!”

“Use the whip!” Hals shouted to the fellow who was driving. Our sleigh was the first to start down. I can still see our three plucky ponies jumping through the snow like rabbits, from one depression to the next, churning up a white cloud which undoubtedly was visible a long way off. The three of us huddled behind the driver, in the center of the sleigh, perched on dark green boxes which carried a disquieting inscription in white stenciled letters. We were all feeling nervous, and had forgotten the cold.

I tried to watch the horizon through veils of white dust, despite our jolting progress. I thought that I could dimly see a group of isbas in front of us. All around us, shell holes of a remarkable symmetry mutilated the immaculate whiteness of the slope. Despite our precipitate speed, I noticed the curious borders of these excavations, which the earth thrown up by the explosions had tinged a light yellow. They looked like enormous, stylized flowers, with dark brown centers and yellow petals which turned very pale, almost white, at their outer edges. The holes which had already been there for long enough to be partly filled by new snow made a subtle variation in this curiously decorative pattern.

We reached the bottom of the slope without incident. There were a few heavily damaged isbas, and several large guns almost buried in the snow.

We stopped beside an isba whose roof sloped right down to the ground. The wall nearest us was of open lattice, and we could see some engineers working inside. They seemed to be taking the building apart. A few men came out carrying pieces of wood. Then a plump sergeant with a white garment pulled over his coat came up to us.

“Unload right here,” he said. “The engineers are preparing a shelter. It’ll be finished in an hour.”

A loud explosion made us jump. To our right, we saw a yellow flash, and then a geyser of stones and dirt, which spouted almost thirty feet into the air.

The sergeant turned calmly toward the noise. “Goddamned dirt,” he said. “Harder than a rock.”

We concluded that these fellows were engineers playing with dynamite. The corpulent noncom looked at our orders.

“Ah,” he said, tapping a box of cans with a gloved finger. “These aren’t for us. But our supplies are already three days late, and we’re living on our reserves which we’re not supposed to touch. If this goes on… You truck drivers certainly take your own sweet time! That’s why fellows up front die of the cold. When you haven’t got anything inside, you know, you can’t keep going.” He slapped his belly.

Judging by his waistline, it was hard to imagine that he’d fasted for long. He must have had a private store of food hidden away somewhere, because it was clear that, despite our best efforts, the front lines were extremely short of supplies.

“You’ll have to get over that way,” he pointed down the track. “That section is holding a piece of the Don bank… and you’ll go there on your hands and knees, if you know what’s good for you.”

We set off across the snow-covered chaos, following a trail marked by trucks half buried in snow. Beyond an embankment, some big guns and heavy howitzers were hidden by a heap of piled-up snow. Once we had passed them, they simply vanished from sight: their camouflage was perfect.

We came to a big trench in which a group of thin, shivering horses were pawing the hard ground. Some sacks of hay — so dry it was practically dust had been ripped open and put down for them. The poor animals were sniffing at the hay with their rimy nostrils, but didn’t seem too tempted. A few frozen horse cadavers lay on the ground among the animals that were still standing. A handful of soldiers in long coats were watching the horses. We passed through a string of rough dugouts, and heard machine-gun fire coming from quite nearby.

“Machine guns!” our driver remarked, smiling strangely. “That means we’re here.” Trenches, foxholes, and dugouts stretched away as far as we could see in all directions. We were stopped by a patrol.

“Ninth Infantry Regiment, … company,” said the lieutenant. “Is it for us?”

“No, Mein Leutnant. We’re looking for the … section.”

“Ah,” said the officer. “You’ll have to leave your sleighs here. The section you want is over there on the river bank, and on that little island. You’ll have to stick to the trenches, and be careful, because you’ll be in range of the Russian forward positions, and they wake up from time to time.”

“Thank you, Mein Leutnant.” The sergeant’s voice was trembling. The lieutenant called over one of the men who was with him: “Show them the way, and then come back.”

The man saluted and joined us. Like everybody else, I had grabbed a box that was too heavy for me, and was going to carry it on my back. The sound of machine-gun fire began again, only louder.

“There it goes again. Is it serious or not?”

The gunfire grew louder, stopped, and began again, passionate and violent.

“That’s us,” our guide replied. “But wait a few minutes. You can’t tell right away whether they’re doing it just for laughs, or whether it’s the beginning of a push onto the ice.”

We listened to him without a word. He seemed almost relaxed in this disquieting atmosphere. We were perfect novices: our few scrapes on the “Third International” seemed liked nothing compared to what might happen here. The firing kept stopping and starting, sometimes very close. At other moments we could hear guns that were plainly further off.

Hals suggested that we lay our two boxes across our Mausers, to make a kind of carrying litter. We had just reorganized ourselves to put this plan into effect when we heard some heavy detonations which followed each other in rapid succession.

“That’s the Russians,” grinned the veteran, who was walking just ahead of us.

The air shook with the rhythm of the explosions. They seemed to be about three or four hundred yards ahead of us, to our left.

“That’s their assault artillery… It might be an attack.” Suddenly, about thirty yards to the left, there was a sharp and violent burst of sound, followed by a curious, catlike whine, followed by a series of similar sounds. We hastily put down our burdens, and ducked, looking anxiously in all directions. The air was still for a moment.

“Don’t panic, boys,” said our guide, who had also ducked. “We’ve got a battery of 107s behind that pile of stuff over there, and we’re answering the Russians.”

The infernal noise began again. Even though our guide had told us what it was, I could feel my stomach contracting.

“Put on your helmets,” said the sergeant. “If the Russians spot that battery, they’ll fire on it.”

“And let’s keep going,” our guide added. “There isn’t a quiet corner within sixty miles. We’re no safer here than anywhere else.” We began to move forward, bent double. The air around us shook for the third time, and we could hear gunfire all around us. The German battery was firing nonstop, and ahead the noise of the spandau was getting closer. We passed three soldiers who were unrolling a telephone wire along a footpath which crossed our route. The sound of explosions now seemed to have a regular rhythm.

“This might be an attack,” said the soldier who had come with us. “I’ll leave you here. I’ve got to get back to my section.”

“Which way do we go?” asked our sergeant, who was clearly terrified.

“Follow the path as far as the geschnauz[7] over there on the right. They’ll be able to tell you. But eat something first. It’s lunchtime.”

He took a few steps in the other direction, doubled over, as before. So, that is how one moves on a battlefield! A few days later I was used to it, and paid no more attention.

We opened our mess tins, and ate huddled in the snow. I didn’t feel particularly hungry. The explosions, which made my head ring inside my icy helmet, seemed far more interesting than food.

Hals, who was not entirely in control of his feelings, rolled his eyes like a hunted animal, and looked at me, shaking his head.

“Maybe we shouldn’t stop to eat… If an officer came along…”

A deafening salvo which seemed to be passing right over our heads interrupted us, and we instinctively hunched our shoulders and shut our eyes. Hals was about to speak again when another explosion, different in kind, but no less brutal, shook the earth, followed by a loud whistle and another explosion. This time we felt as if we were being lifted from the ground. We were shaken by a displacement of the air of an astonishing violence. Then an avalanche of stones and chunks of ice poured down on us.

We made ourselves as small as we could, not daring to move or speak. We had dropped our guns and our mess tins.

“They’ll kill me!” shouted a young fellow who had hurled himself into my lap in the general confusion.

“They’re going to kill me!” There was another loud boom, and then a deafening German salvo passed over our heads.

“Let’s go on; we can’t stay here!” yelled our sergeant, shoving his helmet further down onto his head.

We picked up our boxes like automatons. The trench was wide enough for four men to walk abreast, but we proceeded single file, keeping close to one of the walls. I was with Hals, directly behind the sergeant, who kept exhorting us to move.

“Hurry up! Quick! The Russians have spotted our battery! They can see it, and we’re right beside it! This damned trench is heading right into their fire. We’ve got to get to that communication trench down there.”

Every other minute we had to throw ourselves into the bottom of the trench. The heavy cases kept slipping from our icy fingers no matter how tightly we tried to hold them: it still seems astonishing that they didn’t explode in our faces.

“Hurry up,” said the sergeant, disregarding our troubles. “It’s down there.”

“Tell me,” said Hals. “There’s still twice as much as this on the sleighs. Do we have to bring all that too?”

“Yes, of course… I don’t know…. Hurry up, for God’s sake!” While the Russians were reloading, our battery had fired twice. The next Russian salvo fell about forty yards behind us, followed by two others at an indefinable distance, which nonetheless made us double over a little lower. Suddenly there was a deafening hooting sound, followed by an overwhelming noise which shook the earth and the air. One side of the trench collapsed. It all happened so quickly I had no time to duck. I remember seeing what looked like a disintegrating scarecrow flying through the rubble in a cone of flame, and falling in several pieces onto the edge of the trench, before rolling to the bottom. We were all thrown to the ground without the strength or courage to get up again.

“Quick! Up! We’ve got to get to the other trench!” shouted the sergeant, whose face was contorted by fear.

“If a shell lands here, it will be a volcano.”

There were two more explosions. Our guns were firing steadily. Dragging the cases, we climbed across the debris and the body of the poor wretch who had been blown into the air. I glanced at him quickly as we went by. It was a horrible sight. His helmet had fallen down over his face, and its visor was half-buried in his chin, or neck. His heavy winter clothes were like a sack holding together something which no longer bore any resemblance to the human form. He was missing a leg — or perhaps it was doubled under him. Another body was mixed into the rubble a short way off. The Russian shell must have landed right on some poor fellows who had ducked their heads and were waiting for the storm to pass.

I can remember very distinctly the first deaths I encountered in the war. The thousands upon thousands which followed are blurred and faceless: a vast, cumulative nightmare which still haunts me, in which atrocious mutilations appear side by side with figures who seem to be peacefully sleeping, or with others whose eyes are opened astonishingly wide, stamped by death with an uncommunicable terror. I thought I had already experienced the limits of horror and of endurance, that I was a tough fighting man who would return home in due course to recount my heroic exploits. I have used the words and expressions which my experiences from Minsk to Kharkov to the Don suggested to me. But I should have reserved those words and expressions for what came later, even though they are not strong enough.

It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later. It’s a mistake, for instance, to use the word “frightful” to describe a few broken-up companions mixed into the ground: but it’s a mistake which might be forgiven.

I should perhaps end my account here, because my powers are inadequate for what I have to tell. Those who haven’t lived through the experience may sympathize as they read, the way one sympathizes with the hero of a novel or a play, but they certainly will never understand, as one cannot understand the unexplainable. This stammering outpouring may be without interest to the sector of the world to which I now belong. However, I shall try to let my memory speak as clearly as possible. I dedicate the remainder of this account to my friends Marius and Jean-Marie Kaiser, who are in a position to understand me, as they lived through the same general events in the same part of the world. I shall try to reach and translate the deepest level of human aberration, which I never could have imagined, which I never would have thought possible, if I hadn’t known it firsthand.

We reached the communications trench, which had seemed like safety to our sergeant, and literally dived into it as a brutal burst of fire scattered the soil beyond the parapet. The two men in white overalls who were already there jumped up in astonishment.

One of them had been standing beside the gun surveying the scene through field glasses. The other, hunched down at the bottom of the hole, had been fiddling with the knobs of a radio apparatus.

“The 2nd… section?” asked our sergeant, puffing for breath. “We’ve got some supplies for them.”

“It’s not very far,” said the soldier with the field glasses, “but you won’t be able to get there right now; you’d only be blown up. Put your explosives down — but not right here — and use the bunker.” He smiled.

Without waiting for him to repeat the invitation, we slid down into a tomblike structure of boards and hard earth, which was almost without light. Inside, there were four soldiers dressed in white. One of them had somehow managed to go to sleep. The others were writing beside a flickering candle.

The bunker wasn’t high enough for us to stand, and everyone had to move over so we could get in, but we were, at any rate, something new.

“Is it solid?” Hals asked, pointing his tattered finger at the roof of the rathole.

“Well… if something lands a little closer, it might collapse,” one of the soldiers answered mockingly.

“And if something lands square on us, our pals won’t have to bury us,” added another.

How could they joke? Habit, probably. The fellow who had been asleep woke up and yawned.

“I thought they’d sent us some women.”

“No… just a bunch of kids. Where did you find this brood, sergeant?”

We all laughed.

As if to rub our noses in our situation, the ground shook again. From here the noise was less violent.

“These boys are new recruits, part of the supply train, and they’ve crossed the whole of Russia so you can fill your stomachs.”

“That’s nothing,” said the fellow who’d just waked up.

“We’ve been sweating it out here for three months already, while you were taking your own sweet time. I know they’ve got pretty girls in the Ukraine, but you shouldn’t have stayed there so long. We’ve been dying of hunger.”

I ventured a few words in my atrocious German:

“Girls! We didn’t see any girls! All we saw was snow.”

“Alsatian?” somebody asked.

“No, he’s French,” Hals answered, joking.

Everyone burst out laughing. Hals was taken aback, and didn’t know what to say.

“Merci,” the questioner added with a good accent, holding out his hand to me.

“Ma mere est allemande,” I replied.

“Ach, gut. Votre mutter ist Deutsche? Sehr gut.”

The ground shook again. Some pieces from the ceiling rattled down onto our helmets.

“Things don’t seem to be going very well here,” said our sergeant, whose mind was absorbed by his terror, and who plainly didn’t give a damn whether my mother was German or Chinese.

“Oh, they’re just having fun,” the other one said. “The beating they took three days ago really calmed them down.”

“Ah?”

“Yes. Those bastards made us re-cross the Don about a month ago. We had to give up at least forty miles. Now our front is on the west bank. They’ve tried to cross on the ice at least four times already. The last time was five days ago. Then you would really have seen something. They attacked for two days, especially at night. It was really pretty rough. You see how I am today: I’m trying to catch up on my sleep. We haven’t had much lately. We’re supposed to counterattack too, but nothing’s happened yet. Take a look through the glasses. The ice is still covered with Russians. The pigs don’t even pick up their wounded. I’ll bet some of them down there are still groaning.”

“We’re supposed to resupply the 2nd section,” our wretched sergeant explained anxiously.

“You’ll find them a little further on — right down on the river bank — real daredevils. I think they’ve got the little island too. They lost it one night when they had to fight hand to hand, but in the morning they took it back. It’s a pretty tight spot down there, I can tell you. I’d rather be where I am.”

Our battery had been silent for a few minutes, but the Russian shells were still coming over at a slow but regular pace. The soldier with the field glasses came in, hunched up and blowing on his fingers.

“Your turn,” he said to one of the soldiers. “I’m shaking so hard I’m afraid my teeth will fall out.”

The man he called got up with a groan, and pushed his way through to the exit.

“Our guns aren’t firing any more. Have they been destroyed?” our sergeant asked the newcomer.

“You’ve got some funny ideas,” the soldier replied, still rubbing his fingers.

“We’d be in a fine fix without them. A few days ago, we’d have just been overrun without those guns. I sincerely hope that all our comrades of the 107th are still among the living.”

“I do too,” our sergeant agreed emphatically, realizing that he’d said the wrong thing. “But why have they stopped firing?”

“You should know how tight supplies are. We have to fire drop by drop, so to speak, or when we know we can’t miss. The infantry and the artillery both have to economize on munitions to the maximum. But we can’t let the Soviets know that, so from time to time we give them a heavy dose… you see?”

“I see.”

“They’re not shooting any more,” said someone in our group.

“Yes. It’s quieted down. You’d better make the most of it,” said one of the soldiers from the geschnauz.

“Let’s go, children,” said our sergeant, who seemed to have regained some confidence.

Children… he wasn’t far wrong: we seemed like children beside these Don veterans. A few rounds from the big guns had seemed to us like the end of the world. There was a great difference between the proud soldiers we’d been in Poland, marching smartly through the villages with our guns slung, and what we were now. How many times in the past I had thought myself invulnerable, filled with the pride we all felt, admiring our shoulder straps and helmets and magnificent uniforms — and the sound of our footsteps, which I loved, and love still, despite everything. But here, by the banks of the Don, we seemed like nothing, like bundles of rags which each sheltered a small, trembling creature. We were underfed and unbelievably filthy. The immensity of Russia seemed to have absorbed us, and as truck drivers we were not dashing figures, but more like the junior maidservants of the army. We were dying of cold like everybody else, only our plight was never mentioned.

We left the shelter timidly, glancing toward the nearby parapet which screened off the war, and picked up our dangerous burdens. Everything seemed to have calmed down. There was no more noise, and the light in the sky had become less brilliant. We took a zigzag line of trenches, which ran parallel to the point we had to reach. Everywhere there were shelters filled with half-frozen soldiers trying to warm themselves beside those miraculous gasoline lamp-heaters, and everywhere we were greeted by the same question: “Any mail?” Three Messerschmitts passed overhead, and were greeted by a loud cheer. The confidence which the infantry placed in the Luftwaffe was absolute, and on innumerable occasions the familiar shapes of the planes with the black crosses restored faltering courage and frustrated a Russian attack.

Several times, as we moved forward, we had to press ourselves against the side of the trench so that stretcher-bearers carrying wounded could get through. We were drawing close to the outermost limit of the German lines. The trenches grew progressively narrower and shallower, so that eventually we became a kind of human chain, bent nearly double in order to remain unseen. Several times, I sneaked a look over the parapet. Some sixty yards ahead, I could see the tall grass on the river bank, stiff with frost; and somewhere in that space was the section we were supposed to supply.

Now we were advancing half exposed, setting off slides of earth and snow as we jumped from one hole to the next. We clattered down into a huge crater, where an orderly in heavy winter clothes was bandaging two fellows who were clenching their teeth to keep themselves from crying out. He told us we had reached our destination. We wasted no time inspecting the situation of this cursed section, but put our cases in the hole we were shown, and turned back for another trip.

By nightfall we had completed what we later learned to call the “priority” supply of this front-line section. Nothing had happened since the bombardment of the afternoon, and the unfortunate soldiers on the Don were preparing themselves for another icy night. Although the temperature had risen a little, it was still very cold.

We were waiting for two of our men who were collecting the scattering of letters these soldiers had managed to write. Hals, another soldier, and I were sitting on a mound of frost-hardened earth, hidden from enemy eyes.

“I wonder where we’ll be sleeping tonight,” said Hals, staring at his boots.

“Outdoors, I guess,” our companion answered. “I don’t see any hotels around here.”

“Come over this way,” called someone else from our group. “You can see the river very well from here.”

We got up from the ground to look through a heap of frosty branches that camouflaged a spandau aimed and ready to fire.

“Look,” Hals said. “Bodies lying on the ice.”

There were numbers of motionless bodies, victims of the fighting of a few days earlier. The soldiers at the geschnauz had not been exaggerating: the Russians had not removed their dead.

I tried to see further into the distance, to what must be the island we had heard so much about, but this was difficult, as it was growing dark. I could recognize only vaguely what looked like snow-covered trees. Our soldiers must be crouched among them, watching in the silence, with every sense alert. Beyond, in the heavy, unbreathable mist falling across this mournful landscape, the far bank was almost invisible. On this bank, the German advance had been halted, and Russian soldiers were watching for us.

I had reached the front line, the line I had thought about with such dread and had been so curious to see. For the moment, nothing was happening. The silence was almost complete, broken only by occasional voices. I thought I could see a few thin streams of smoke rising through the mist on the Russian side. Then some other soldiers pushed me aside.

“If it interests you so much,” said one of the grenadiers standing at the foot of the spandau, “I’ll gladly give you my place. I’ve had enough of this cold.”

We didn’t know what to say. His place was certainly not very enviable.

A lieutenant in a long hooded coat jumped into our hole. Before we had time to salute, he lifted a pair of field glasses, and stared into the distance. A few seconds later, we heard the sound of heavy detonations coming from behind us.

Almost at once, there were explosions on the ice, immediately reproduced by a long, repetitive echo, and then a sharp whistling sound which rang through the air very close to us. The entire German front responded immediately. The noise of the guns became indistinguishable from the explosion of their projectiles. We all dropped to the bottom of the hole. We felt lost, and stared at each other with anguished, questioning eyes.

“They’re attacking,” someone said.

The two machine gunners didn’t fire right away, but stayed beside the lieutenant, staring at the Don. Some of the explosions were loud and strident; others sounded heavy, and as if they were coming from under ground. Finally, the grenadier who had so generously offered his place decided to speak to us: “The ice is breaking more easily tonight; it’s not so cold. Pretty soon they’ll have to swim over.”

We all hung on his words, as none of us understood what was happening.

“We’ll send out the lightest one here,” he said. “If the ice holds his weight, we’ll have to blow it up.”

“He’s the lightest,” said Hals with a constricted laugh, pointing to a cringing, very young soldier.

“What will I have to do?” the boy asked, white with anxiety. “Nothing just yet,” the gunner said jokingly.

The bombardment stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The lieutenant looked out through his glasses for a few more minutes, then climbed over the parapet and vanished. We stayed where we were, without moving or speaking. To break the anxious silence, our sergeant ordered us to open our mess tins and eat dinner, while we waited for the fellows with the mail.

We swallowed down our tasteless, frozen portions without much appetite. As I chewed I went over to the spandau to look down once more at the river.

What I saw explained the German bombardment of a few moments ago. Great blocks of ice, some of them two feet thick, were standing up at right angles to the surface of the river. These ice blocks, partly broken and crushed, formed steep hills of ice, whose crests oscillated with the rhythm of the current beneath the frozen surface. The German gunners fired on the ice every night to deny access to the incessant Soviet patrols, who nonetheless exposed themselves to great danger on these moving blocks. Now the broken ice was rearing up and crashing into other pieces with a strange, heavy sound. New fissures were opening, and the night was filled with the noises of cracking, breaking ice.

I stood for a long time, transfixed by the unreal vision, gradually noticing that hundreds of lights were springing up on the east bank. With my eye glued to the loophole, I stared at these lights, which seemed to be growing stronger.

“Hey,” I shouted at the two regulars, “something’s happening!” They rushed over to me, pushing me aside so they could see. I stayed where I was, shoving my head between theirs.

“Hell, you really scared us,” one of them said. “That’s nothing; they do it every night. The Popovs like to make us think they’re warming up. Not at all a bad idea, either. Those lights are a damned nuisance. Look how hard it is to see the river now. Even flares make it hard.”

I couldn’t tear myself away from this disquieting vision. All along the vast horizon, the Russians had lit hundreds of braziers, not to warm themselves, because they must certainly have kept their distance from them, but to dazzle our observers. And in fact, when the eye traveled to the east bank, it remained fixed on those fires. Everything else, by contrast, was plunged into darkness, and this enabled the enemy to effect numerous changes which we could deduce only with difficulty. We were able to see a little with flares, but their radiance, although intense, was reduced at least to half strength by the enemy’s arrangement of alternating light and darkness.

I would have stood and stared much longer if our sergeant hadn’t given the signal for departure. We had no trouble returning to the rear. The night, undisturbed by the noises of war, hid our movements perfectly.

Everywhere, soldiers were curled up in their holes. Those who were asleep had covered themselves with everything they could find, leaving no fraction of themselves exposed — not a nose, or the tip of an ear. One needed to be accustomed to this strange mode of existence to know that beneath these mounds of cloth subtle human mechanisms were managing to survive and garner their strength.

Others were playing cards in the depths of their lairs, or writing letters in the flickering light of a candle, or of a lamp-heater. These marvelous objects — and I call them “marvelous” deliberately — were about two feet high, and would operate on gasoline or kerosene: one simply had to regulate the nozzle and the intake of air. A reflector behind a glass projected the light. A story had it that the army was working on an improved model which would also dispense beer.

Those who were neither asleep, on guard, playing cards, or writing letters were absorbing the alcohol which was freely distributed along with our ammunition.

“There’s as much vodka, schnapps and Terek liquor on the front as there are Paks,” I was told later by a wounded infantryman who was waiting for evacuation on the hospital train. “It’s the easiest way to make heroes. Vodka purges the brain and expands the strength. I’ve been doing nothing but drink for two days now. It’s the best way to forget that I’ve got seven pieces of metal in my gut, if you can believe the doctor.”

We got back to our two sleighs without incident.

“Am I dreaming,” Hals said, “or has it grown warmer? I’m sweating like an ox in these clothes. Maybe I’ve got a fever: that’s all I need.”

“Then I’ve got one too,” I said. “I’m soaking wet.”

“That’s because you had the balls scared off you today,” said the fellow who earlier in the afternoon had shouted, “They’ll kill me!”

“Listen to who’s talking,” Hals said. “You’re still as green as your clothes, and you think you can judge us.”

Our sleighs were now carrying six wounded as well as ourselves. Although they were less heavily loaded than they had been, they ran less smoothly. The little horses were clearly having a hard time: we could almost see the snow growing softer as we looked at it. The wind was carrying large flakes of melting snow, which soon changed to rain. This milder air, after such terrible cold, seemed to us like the Côte d’Azur.

It took us two hours to reach our huts in the rear lines, and we needed no urging to fling ourselves onto our rough pallets. However, despite the physical and emotional exhaustion of that wearing day, I wasn’t able to sleep immediately. I kept seeing the banks of the Don, and hearing the whine of enemy projectiles, and the explosions, whose violence I would never have been able to imagine. For me, whose eardrums were shattered by the firing of a Mauser, our Polish exercises now seemed like the most trifling of games.

The infantry on the west bank had to fight as well as survive: that was the difference between them and us. We had been promised that we would be as honored as the infantry, as combat troops, if we distinguished ourselves on our supply missions. This promise, which had been made to us on behalf of our commander at the Wagenlager near Minsk, was clearly addressed to young recruits like Hals, Lensen, Olensheim, and me. We had taken it as an honor, and were proud of the confidence which had been placed in us.

Yet the reports in the front-line journal blamed us squarely, almost making us responsible for the German retreat from the Caucasus, and back beyond Rostov. For lack of supplies these troops had been forced to abandon territories won with great sacrifices, so that they would not suffer the same fate as the defenders of Stalingrad. In their exhortations to us, our officers often asked us to achieve a certain goal despite adverse conditions, at whatever the cost, to do more than was humanly possible, to face the prospect of the worst, including death. We had thought that we had accomplished more than the bare minimum. In fact, despite our unstinted efforts, and all our bitter moments, we had achieved somewhat less than half of what had been expected. Maybe we should have given our lives too.

“Absolute sacrifice” was what the High Command called it. These words made my head spin, as I stared with wide eyes into the impenetrable darkness, sinking gradually into sleep, as into a large black pit.

3. THE MARCH TO THE REAR

For three or four more days, we were involved in occupations of more or less the same kind. The snow was melting everywhere, and the cold was lessening as rapidly as it had increased — which seemed to be the way of Russian seasons. From implacable winter one was shifted into torrid summer, with no spring in between. The thaw did not improve our military situation, but made it worse. The temperature rose from five degrees below zero to forty degrees above, melting the unimaginable ocean of snow which had accumulated all winter.

Enormous pools of water and swampy patches appeared everywhere in the partly melted snow. For the Wehrmacht, which had endured the horrors of five winter months, this softening of the temperature fell like a blessing from heaven. With or without orders, we took off our filthy overcoats and began a general cleanup. Men plunged naked into the icy waters of these temporary ponds for the sake of a wash. No gunfire disturbed the tranquil air, which was sometimes even sunny.

The war itself, whose indefinable presence we still felt, seemed to have grown less savage. I had made the acquaintance of a sympathetic fellow, a noncom in the engineers, whose section was temporarily billeted in the hut opposite ours. He came from Kehl, right across the Rhine from Strasbourg, and knew France better than his own country. He spoke perfect French. My conversations with him, which were always in French, were like rest periods after the painstaking gibberish I was forced into with my other companions. Hals often joined us to improve his French in the same way I tried to improve my German.

Ernst Neubach — my new friend — seemed to be a born engineer. He had no equal in his ability to knock a few old boards into a shelter as weatherproof as one a fully-equipped mason might build. He made a shower from the gas tank of a large tractor, and it functioned miraculously, with a lamp-heater continuously warming its forty gallons of water. The first men to use this shower unfortunately received a tepid downpour of water flavored with gasoline. Although we rinsed the tank repeatedly, the water remained tainted for a long time.

In the evenings waiting to use the shower there was always a crowd of shouting, pushing men which often included our superiors. Priority was awarded to whoever produced the largest number of cigarettes, or a portion of the bread ration. Our feldwebel, Laus, once paid three hundred cigarettes. The showers always began after the five-o’clock meal and continued late into the night in an atmosphere of rowdy horseplay. Those who got through the showers first often found themselves tossed onto their backsides in the liquid mud which flooded the outskirts of the camp. Here we had no curfew or other barracks regulations. Once all the day’s work was done, we were free to joke and drink for the whole night, if we wanted to.

We spent about a week in this way, with quiet, uneventful days. Each fatigue party obliged us to flounder through a sea of increasingly sticky mud. We made three trips back to the front; each time it was unbelievably quiet. On horseback or in carts, we took supplies to our troops, whose laundry was spread out to dry on all the parapets. Across the Don, the Russians appeared to be similarly engaged.

We spoke to a bearded soldier and asked him if everything was going well. He laughed. “The war must be over. Hitler and Stalin have made it up. I’ve never seen it so calm for so long. The Popovs do nothing but drink all day and sing all night. They have terrific nerve, too, walking around in the open air, right under our guns. Werk saw three of them going to get water from the river, just like that. Didn’t you, Werk?” He turned to a sly-faced soldier who was washing his feet in a puddle.

“Yes,” Werk said. “We just couldn’t shoot them. For once, let’s all stick our noses out without getting a bullet between the eyes.”

A feeling of joy and hope had begun to take hold. Could the war be over?

“It really might be,” Hals said. “The fellows on the front are always the last to be told anything like that. If it’s true, we’ll know in a few days. You’ll see, Sajer. Maybe we’ll all be going home soon. We’ll have a terrific celebration. It’s almost too good to be true!”

“Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” said one of the older men from the Rollbahn. His realism damped us down a little. As usual, we set off down the track — more accurately, canal — of liquid mud which led to our camp. We stopped a moment to talk to Ernst, whose section was trying to restore the track to a usable condition.

“If it goes on this way,” he said, “we’ll have to take to boats. Two trucks came through here, and the stones we broke our backs shoving into the mud completely disappeared. It must be nice down in the trenches.”

“They’re in a mess,” Hals said. “And their morale is really terrible, too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they broke up their guns for kindling. Our fellows and the Popovs are having a real spree down there.”

“Well let them make the most of it,” Ernst said. “There’s something funny going on. That radio truck over there is taking messages nonstop. And messengers all the time, too. The last one had to leave his scooter and wade in here to bring the Kommandant his message.”

“Maybe it was congratulations for your showers,” said Hals.

“That would be fine by me, but I doubt it. When those fellows run around like that, everybody else will too, before you know it.”

“Defeatist,” Hals shouted as we left.

When we got back to the camp, nothing seemed to have changed. We devoured the steaming mess the cook served up and prepared for another evening of larking. Then Laus blew the whistle for assembly.

“Lord,” I thought. “Neubach was right. Here we go again.”

“I’m not going to say anything about the way you look,” Laus said. “Just pack up. We could be moving out of here any time now. Got it?”

“Fuck,” someone said. “It was too good to last.”

“You didn’t think you could just sit here and fart, did you? There’s a war on.”

“Packing up” meant that we had to be ready for inspection, with our uniforms in impeccable order, and all our straps and buckles polished and fastened in the prescribed manner. At least, that is what it had meant at Chemnitz and Bialystok. Here, of course, that kind of discipline was somewhat relaxed, but it all still depended on the humor of the inspecting officer, who could quibble at anything from the inside of a gun barrel to the state of our toes, and impose heavy details, or endless guard duty.

I could still remember only too well the four hours of punishment handed out to me a few days after I had arrived at Chemnitz. The lieutenant had drawn a circle on the cement of the courtyard, which was fully exposed to the sun. Then I had to put on the “punishment pack” — a knapsack filled with sand, which weighed nearly eighty pounds. I weighed one hundred and thirty. After two hours, my helmet was burning hot from the sun, and by the end I needed all my will power to keep my knees from buckling. I had nearly fainted several times. That is how I learned that a good soldier does not cross the barracks yard with his hands in his pockets.

So we rushed to get our gear in order, and frantically polished our sodden leather boots.

“And before we’ve walked ten yards, all this will be for nothing!” It took us a good hour to make our kit more or less respectable. Then we had another twenty-four before our country holiday on the Don was transformed into a nightmare.

The day after our sprucing-up, I was put on guard duty and given the period from midnight until 2:30 A.M. I had summoned up all my patience, and was standing on the platform of empty munitions cases which had been put there so the sentry wouldn’t sink into the mud. Beside the platform, a foxhole half filled with water was ready to receive the guard responsible for the stocks of gasoline — in this case, myself.

The night was mild. A rainy wind blew fat white clouds rapidly across the sky, occasionally revealing a large white moon. To my right, the outlines of our vehicles and the camp buildings stood out sharply. Ahead of me, the enormous dark, hilly horizon melted into the sky. As the crow flies, the Don lay about five miles from our first line of German reserves. Between us and the river, some thousands of men were sleeping in conditions of almost unimaginable squalor. The sound of engines came to us on the wind. Both sides used the dark for moving supplies and troops. Two of the sentries patrolling our perimeter came by, and we exchanged the usual formalities. One of the men told a joke. I was about to reply when the whole horizon, from north to south, was suddenly lit by a series of brilliant flashes.

Then there was a second series of flickering intensity, and I thought I felt the earth shake, as the air filled with a sound like thunder. “Lord! It’s an attack!” shouted one of the men on patrol. “I think it’s them!”

We could already hear whistles in the camp and voices shouting orders through the still-distant noise of explosions. Groups of men went by on the run. Artillerymen who had been asleep were running to their guns on the edge of the abandoned airfield. As no one had told me to leave my post, I stayed where I was, wondering what would be asked of my comrades. A supply expedition through such a heavy bombardment would be an operation of an entirely different kind from the ones we had recently grown used to. The bursts of distant fire continued, mixed with the sound of our guns. Flashes of light, closer and more brilliant than before, turned the groups of men running through pools of water into shadow puppets.

It was as if a giant, in a fit of terrible fury, were shaking the universe, reducing each man to a ludicrous fragment which the colossus of war could trample without even noticing. Despite the relative distance of danger, I bent double, ready to plunge into my water-filled hole at a moment’s notice. Two big crawler tractors came toward me, with all their lights out. Their wheels and treads had churned the mud into a kind of liquid sludge. Two men jumped down, and almost disappeared in it.

“Give us a hand, guard,” one of them called. They were splattered with mud right up to their helmets.

The bombardment continued to enflame the earth and sky, as we loaded some drums of gasoline onto their machine.

“There’s always something to fart in your face,” one of them said to me.

“Good luck,” I answered.

Further off, the soldiers in my unit were rounding up the nervous, jostling horses, which kept falling in the mud and whinnying frantically. Several times, trucks came to collect drums of gasoline, so that by day break, when my relief hadn’t appeared, I wondered how much there was left for me to guard. The bombardment was almost as strong as ever. I felt exhausted and confused. A group of boys from my company came by, led by a sergeant who waved me over to join them. At that moment precisely, one of the first Soviet long-range shells landed about a hundred yards behind us. The explosion shook us, and we all started to run as hard as we could. I didn’t ask any questions, but looked in vain for the broad shoulders of Hals.

Other projectiles were now falling on the camp, which was lit up everywhere. We had thrown ourselves onto the ground, and stood up again covered with mud.

“Don’t dive like that,” said the sergeant. “You’re always late. Keep your eye on me, and do what I do.”

A significant howl filled our ears, and all twelve of us, the sergeant included, plunged into the liquid mess. An enormous explosion sucked all the air from our lungs, and a simultaneous wave of mud washed over us.

We stood up again, soaked with filth, and wearing the pinched smiles of civilians who climb unscathed from a bad wreck. Three or four more bursts quite nearby forced us down again. Behind us, something was burning. As soon as we could, we ran to the nearest munitions dump.

The sight of this mountain of canvas-covered boxes made our stomachs turn over. If anything hit it, no one within a hundred yards would have a chance.

“Good God,” said the sergeant. “There’s nobody here. It’s incredible.”

With no apparent thought of danger, he climbed onto the hill of dynamite, and began to check the numbers on the boxes, which indicated their next destination. We stood and watched him, petrified, like condemned prisoners, with our feet apart, and our heads empty, waiting for orders. Two fellows soaked through, like us, came running up. The sergeant began to shout at them from his eminence. They snapped to attention despite the thunder of the guns.

“Are you supposed to be on duty here?”

“Yes, Herr Sergeant,” they answered in unison. “Then where were you?”

“The call of nature,” one of them said.

“You went off to crap like that, both of you at once? Idiots! We’ve got too much trouble here for fun and games. Your names and units.” The sergeant had not climbed down.

Silently, I cursed this animal with his niggling discipline, who stood there preparing a report, as if nothing unusual were happening. Fresh explosions which sounded very close threw us all onto the ground except the sergeant, who continued to provoke Providence.

“They’re cleaning up our rear,” he said. “They must have let loose their goddamned infantry. Get your fat tails up here and help me!”

Half paralyzed by fear, we climbed onto the volcano. The flashes of light all around us lit our bodies in a tragic glare. A few moments later, we were running as hard as we could, oblivious of the weight of the cases, in our anxiety to get away.

Daylight had now begun to rob the spectacle of some of its brilliance. The flashes of light were scarcely visible, and the horizon was shrouded by a dense cloud of smoke, irregularly punctuated by darker plumes. Toward noon, our artillery began to fire. We were still running from job to job, although we were nearly dropping with exhaustion. I can remember sitting in a huge crater which had been dried out by an explosion, staring at the long barrel of a 155 spitting fire with rhythmic regularity. I had found Hals and Lensen, and we were sitting together, with our hands over our ears. Hals was smiling, and nodding at each explosion.

For two days we had practically no sleep. The dance of death continued. We were carrying the growing number of wounded to shelters half filled with water, and laying them on hastily improvised stretchers made of branches. The orderlies administered first aid. Soon these rough infirmaries, filled with the groans of the wounded, were overflowing, and we had to put fresh casualties outside, on the mud. The surgeons operated on the dying men then and there. I saw horrifying things at these collection points — vaguely human trunks which seemed to be made of blood and mud.

On the morning of the third day, the battle intensified. We were all gray with fatigue. The shelling went on until dusk, and then, inside of an hour, stopped. Clouds of smoke were rising all along the battered front. We felt as if we could smell the presence of death — and by this I don’t mean the process of decomposition, but the smell that emanates from death when its proportions have reached a certain magnitude. Anyone who has been on a battlefield will know what I mean.

Two of the eight huts that made up our camp had been reduced to ashes. The ones that remained standing were overflowing with wounded. Laus — who had a good heart when the chips were down saw that we were foundering, and allowed us each an hour or two of sleep, as he could. We dropped to the ground wherever we were, as if felled by sleep. When our time was up, and we were shaken awake, we felt as though we’d only been asleep for a few minutes.

With exhaustion threatening to overwhelm us again, we returned to the nightmare of carrying agonized, mutilated men, or laying out rows of horribly burned bodies, which we had to search for their identity tags. These were then sent to the families of the deceased with the citation “Fallen like a hero on the field of honor for Germany and for the Fuhrer.”

Despite the thousands of dead and wounded, the last battle fought by the German army on the Don was celebrated the day after the shooting stopped. The mouths of dying men were pried open so that they could toast this Pyrrhic victory with vodka. On a front approximately forty miles long, General Zhukov, with the help of the accursed “Siberia” Army, which had just contributed to the German defeat at Stalingrad, had been trying to break the Don line south of Voronezh. Instead, the furious Russian assaults had broken against our solidly held lines. Thousands of Soviet soldiers had paid with their lives for this abortive effort which had also cost us very dear.

Three-quarters of my company left that evening. The trucks were jammed with wounded, who were lying almost in piles. I was separated from Hals and Lensen for the moment: a separation I never liked. Friendships counted for a great deal during the war, their value perhaps increased by the generalized hate, consolidating men on the same side in friendships which never would have broken through the barriers of ordinary peacetime life. I found myself alone with a couple of men who may have been more or less interesting, but with whom I never had the chance to talk. As soon as I could, I abandoned them for a truck seat on which I attempted to regain some of my strength.

The assembly whistle rang in my ears very early the next morning. I opened my eyes. The truck cab had made an excellent bed, more or less the right size, and I felt at last as though I’d had some sleep. But exhaustion had stiffened my muscles, and despite my sleep, I had a terrible time pulling myself onto my feet. Lining up outside, I saw the same exhausted, disheveled look on almost every face.

Even Laus wasn’t feeling particularly energetic: he had slept with his equipment like all the rest of us. He told us that we were going to leave this area for a point farther west. As a preliminary, we should stand by to help the engineers load up, or destroy what we weren’t taking with us. We filed past a big kettle from which we were served a hot liquid that made no pretense to being coffee, and went to join the engineers.

We were sent out with donkeys, under orders to range widely, picking up all the ammunition we could find, so that it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. The departure seemed to be general. Long lines of infantry caked with filth were marching away from this sea of mud, to the west. At first we thought we were being replaced, but this proved to be untrue. The entire Wehrmacht along the western bank of the Don had been ordered to withdraw. We couldn’t grasp the logic of following a heroic three-day resistance with retreat.

Most of us were unaware that the Eastern Front had entirely changed since January. After the fall of Stalingrad, a strong Soviet push had reached the outskirts of Kharkov, re-crossed the Donetz, and moved on to Rostov, almost cutting the German retreat from the Caucasus. Troops there had been forced to return to the Crimea by way of the Sea of Azov, with heavy losses. Our periodical Ost Front and Panzer Wolfram reported that there had been heavy fighting at Kharkov, Kuban, and even Anapa.

We never heard a frank admission of retreat, and as most soldiers had never studied Russian geography we had very little idea of what was happening. Nevertheless, a glance at any map was enough to inform us that the west bank of the Don was the easternmost German line in Russian territory. Luckily for us, the High Command ordered our retreat before an encirclement from the north and south could cut us off from our bases at Belgorod and Kharkov. The Don was no longer one of our defenses; it had been crossed both in the north and in the south. The thought that we might have been trapped, like the defenders of Stalingrad, still makes my blood run cold.

For two days, the landser[8] had been pulling out — either on foot or loaded in trucks. Soon only a small section of the Panzergruppe was left at the nearly empty camp. The passage of vehicles and men had turned the Luftwaffe field into an extraordinary quagmire: thousands of trucks, tanks, tractors, and men rolled and tramped for two days and two nights through terrain running with streams of mud.

We were in the middle of this syrup, trying to reorganize the materiel we had to abandon. The engineers were working with us, preparing to dynamite the ammunition we had heaped against the huts, over the carcasses of eight dismantled trucks. Toward noon, we organized a fireworks display which any municipality might have envied. Carts, sleighs, and buildings were all dynamited and burned. Two heavy howitzers which the tractors hadn’t been able to pull from the mire were loaded with shells of any caliber. Then we poured any explosive that came to hand into their tubes, and shut the breech as best we could. The howitzers were split in two by the explosions, scattering showers of lethal shrapnel. We felt exhilarated, filled with the spirit of destructive delight. In the evening, the spandaus stopped a few Soviet patrols, who had undoubtedly come to see what was happening. During our last hour, we were under light artillery fire, which caused us a certain emotion. Then we left.

After the period of light artillery fire, the troops covering the Panzergruppe signaled several enemy penetrations into our former positions. A hasty departure order was given. We were no longer organized to hold off the Russians for any length of time. I was carrying my belongings, looking for a vehicle, when our feld assigned me to a truck we had captured from the enemy which was now carrying our wounded.

“Step on the gas!” he shouted. “We’re getting out!”

Every soldier in the Wehrmacht was supposed to know how to drive. I had been given some idea of how to handle military vehicles during my training in Poland, but on machines of a very different kind. However, as one never discussed orders, I jumped into the driver’s seat of the Tatra. In front of me, the dashboard presented an array of dials whose needles uniformly pointed down, a few buttons, and a series of words in indecipherable characters. The engineers had just attached the heavy truck to the back of a Mark 4. We would be leaving instantly; it was essential that I get the wretched machine to start. I considered climbing out and confessing my incapacity, but repressed the idea on reflection that they might assign me to something more difficult, or even leave me behind, to get out on my own feet as best I could.

If I couldn’t move, I would be captured by the Bolsheviks — a thought which terrified me. I pawed frantically at the dashboard, and was blessed by a miracle. My desperate eye fell on Ernst, who was clearly looking for a lift. I felt saved.

“Ernst!” I shouted. “Over here! I’ve got room!” My friend joyfully jumped aboard.

“I was ready to hang on to the back of a tank,” he said. “Thanks for the seat.”

“Ernst,” I asked in a voice of supplication. “Do you know how these damned things work?”

“You’re a fine fellow, sitting here when you don’t know the first thing about it!”

I had no time to explain. The powerful engine of the tank to which we were attached was already roaring. Hurriedly, we pulled at the controls. From the turret, one of the tank men signaled to me to put the truck in gear at the same time as the tank, to reduce the jolt for the wounded. Neubach pulled a lever under the dashboard, and we felt a responding throb from under the hood. I pressed down hard on the accelerator, and the engine made a series of loud bangs.

“Gently,” the feld shouted at me. I smiled, nodded, and let up on the pedal. The chain stretched taut, and we increased our speed. How fast were we going? I had no idea. I knew with certainty only that we were not in reverse. The heavy truck took off with a brusque jolt, producing a chorus of groans and curses behind me.

Later on, in France, a pretentious bastard undertook to instruct me on a wretched Renault 4 CV, with all the airs of a commander of an ocean liner. I had to sit through a course of ludicrous demonstrations to receive a scrap of pink paper declaring me competent to drive an automobile. I didn’t waste any time explaining that I had driven through Russia on a track which was more like a river than a road, fastened to a huge tank whose jolts were a constant threat to the front of my machine, which I felt certain would be wrenched off.

He would never have believed me. By that time I belonged to the Victorious Allies, who were all heroes, like every French soldier I met after the war. Only victors have stories to tell. We, the vanquished, were all cowards and weaklings by then, whose memories, fears, and enthusiasms should not be remembered.

The first night of retreat was complicated by a fine rain, which required of Ernst and me the agility and balance of acrobats simply to keep our Tatra in the wake of the Mark-4. Without the tank, we would never have been able to escape from that swamp. The driver stepped on the accelerator in fits of irritation, dragging the Tatra, which threatened to disintegrate. The tank treads churned the ground into a heavy syrup, which the rain thinned into soup. The windshield became completely caked with mud, and Ernst waded through the liquid ground to scrape it away with his hands.

The blacked-out headlight had been left with only a narrow strip uncovered. Within a few minutes this strip was sealed by mud, so that we had no light at all. I couldn’t even see the back of the tank, although it was no more than five yards ahead of us. Our truck, more often than not at an oblique angle to the tank, was constantly being pulled back into line by the tightly stretched chain. Each time this happened, I wondered if we still had our front wheels.

Behind us, the wounded had stopped moaning. Maybe they were all dead — what difference did it make! The convoy moved ahead, and daylight dawned on faces haggard with exhaustion. During the night, the convoy had spread out. It no longer seemed to matter whether we were ahead of schedule or behind. The driver of our Panzer suddenly turned off to the right, leaving the track, which had become impassable even for a tank, and drove straight up the scrub-covered bank, crushing the sodden birches under his treads.

Our truck, whose wheels by this time were balls of mud, was pulled forward, while its engine rattled helplessly. Then everything came to a complete halt. This was the second stop since our departure. We had stopped once in the night to gas up. The poor bastards on the back of the tank jumped down among the broken branches. Their backsides had been burning all night on the hot metal over the engine, while the rest of their bodies froze in the cold rain. An exchange of shouted abuse which was nearly a fight broke out at once between a noncom in the engineers and the Panzerführer. Everyone else took advantage of this opportunity to crap and eat.

“One hour’s rest!” shouted the noncom, who had taken on himself the leadership of the group. “Make the most of it!”

“Fuck you,” shouted the Panzerführer, who had no intention of being pushed around by some half-baked engineer.

“We’ll leave when I’ve had enough sleep.”

“We have to get to Belgorod this morning,” the noncom said in a steely voice. He undoubtedly nourished dreams of being an officer. Then, putting his hand on the Mauser which hung at his side, he added: “We’ll leave when I give the order. I’ve got the highest rank here, and you’ll obey me.”

“Shoot me if you like, and drive the tank yourself. I haven’t slept in two days, and you’re going to leave me the hell alone.”

The other flushed crimson, but said nothing. Then he turned to us. “You two! Instead of standing there asleep on your feet, get into the truck and help the wounded. They have their needs, too.”

“That’s it,” added the tank driver, who was clearly looking for trouble. “And, when they’re finished, the Herr Sergeant will wipe their asses.”

“You watch it, or I’ll report you,” snorted the sergeant. He was now white with rage.

Inside the truck, the wounded had not died, despite the jolting of the journey. They were no longer making any noise, and we could see that some of their bandages were soaked with fresh blood. Fighting the exhaustion which made our hearts race, we helped them down and back as best we could — omitting only one man, who was missing both legs. They all asked us for something to drink, and in our ignorance we gave them as much water or brandy as they wanted. We certainly shouldn’t have done this: two men died a short time later.

We buried them in the mud, with sticks and their helmets to mark their graves. Then Ernst and I curled up in the cab, to try to snatch a little sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come, and we lay instead, with throbbing temples, talking of peace. Two hours later, it was the tank driver who gave the order to depart, as he had predicted. It was now midmorning. The day was clear and bright, and large chunks of snow fell slowly from the trees.

“Hah!” he said. “Our general left us all while we were asleep. Maybe he felt like taking a walk!”

It seemed that the noncom really was gone. He must have managed a ride in one of the trucks that had passed us during our rest.

“That shit has gone to make his report!” shouted the tank driver. “If I catch up with him, I’ll drive right over him, flatten him out like a goddamned Bolshevik!”

It took us a while to extricate ourselves from the bank we had driven into. However, two hours later we arrived at a hamlet whose name I no longer remember, some five miles from Belgorod. It was filled with soldiers from every branch of the army. The few streets were perfectly straight, and lined with low houses; the way the roofs sat on the walls reminded me of heads with no foreheads, whose hair grows right into the eyebrows. There were swarms of soldiers, and a multitude of rolling equipment covered with mud, pushing through the shouting mob of soldiers, most of whom were looking for their regiments. The road at this point had been roughly resurfaced, and was much more negotiable.

We unhooked ourselves from the tank, and took on eight or ten of the engineers who had been riding on its back. Somewhat bewildered by this flood of soldiers, I had stopped the truck, and was looking for my company. Two M.P.s told me they thought it had gone on toward Kharkov, but as they weren’t sure, they sent me to the redirection center which had been organized in a trailer and was staffed by three officers, who were tearing their hair. When I was finally able to catch their attention through the thousands of shouts and gesticulations besieging them, I was harshly reprimanded for straggling. They probably would have sent me to be court-martialed, if they’d had time. The disorder was incredible, and the landser, half furious, half joking, flooded into the Russian huts.

“We might as well sleep while we wait for all this to settle down.”

All they wanted was a dry corner where they could lie down, but there were so many men crammed into each isba that there was almost no room left for the Russians who lived in them.

Not knowing what to do with myself, I went to find Ernst, who had gone to look for information. However, he had run into a truck hospital, and had returned to the Tatra with an orderly, who was checking over our wounded.

“They can go on as they are,” he said.

“What?” Ernst asked. “But we’ve already buried two of them. At least we should give them fresh dressings.”

“Don’t be stubborn and stupid. If I label them ‘urgent,’ they’ll have to wait their turn, lying in the street. You’ll get to Belgorod quicker than that — and escape the trap that’s closing on us.”

“Is the situation serious?” Ernst asked.

“Yes.”

So Ernst and I found ourselves responsible for twenty wounded men, some of them in critical condition, who had already been waiting several days for essential medical attention. We didn’t know what to say when a man grimacing with pain asked us if he would soon be at the hospital.

“Let’s get going,” Ernst said, frowning anxiously. “Maybe he’s right. If I’d ever thought it would be like this…”

I had been at the wheel for only a few minutes when Ernst tapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, little one, stop. You’ll finish somebody off if it goes on like this. Hand over.”

“But I’m supposed to drive, Ernst. I’m the one who’s in the drivers’ corps.”

“Never mind. Let me do it. You’ll never get us out of here.”

It was true. Despite my best efforts, the truck was jolting and sliding from one side of the road to the other.

We arrived at the village exit point, where there was an interminable line of vehicles waiting for gas. Thousands of soldiers were walking up and down on either side of the road. An M.P. ran over to us.

“Why aren’t you waiting like everybody else?”

“We’ve got to leave right away, Herr Gendarm. We’re carrying wounded, and that’s what the infirmary told us.”

“Wounded? Serious cases?” He spoke in the doubting, disbelieving tone of every policeman in the world.

“Of course,” said Ernst, who certainly wasn’t exaggerating.

The policeman had to peer under the canvas anyway:

“They don’t look so bad to me.”

There was a furious outburst of swearing. From time to time, wounded men availed themselves of their special position to abuse the police.

“You sonofabitch,” groaned one man, who was missing a piece of his shoulder. “It’s shits like you who should be sent to the front. Let us through, or I’ll strangle you with the one good hand I have left.”

The feverish landser was sitting up in spite of his pain, which made him frighteningly white. He seemed quite capable of putting this threat into action.

The policeman flushed, and his nerve faltered at the sight of these twenty battered wrecks. The position of a big-city policeman roaring at some pathetic bourgeois for going through a red light is a far cry from that of an M.P. behind the lines dealing with a gang of combat veterans who are holding their guts in with their hands, or have just bayoneted the guts out of somebody else. His display of bad temper turned into a set little smile.

“Get out of here,” he said, with the air of someone who doesn’t give a damn. When the wheels of the truck began to turn, he vented the last of his spleen: “Go and die somewhere else!”

It was hard to get even eight gallons of gas, and when we managed it our tank swallowed them in an instant. But we were glad to take what we could and get out. A feeble attempt had been made at surfacing the road, but there were still long stretches of bare ground which had become deep quagmires, to be avoided at all costs. We proceeded on the highway, or beside it, as circumstances required.

Far to the right, we could see another convoy struggling forward in a line parallel to ours. The men were dressed for battle, and seemed to be prepared for an encounter with the Soviets. We were stopped by a new set of police, who combed our papers to see if they could find any mistakes. They checked the truck, verified our I.D. cards and our destination… but when it came to the destination, they had to give us directions. One of them looked through the directory hanging around his neck, and told us, in a voice like a barking dog’s, that we had to turn off the road a hundred yards ahead and proceed to Kharkov. We followed these instructions with regret, because the new road rapidly deteriorated into a ribbon of mire.

At our speed, we would soon have exhausted our supply of gas.

We kept passing vehicles abandoned in the mud because of mechanical failure, or because they had run out of gas. A short distance along the new road, we were stopped by a group of about fifty landser, on foot, and in a state of unbelievable filth. They took our truck by storm. There were several wounded men among them. Some of them had ripped off their filthy dressings, and were walking with their wounds open to the air.

“Make room for us, fellows,” they said, hanging on as hard as they could.

“You can see that we haven’t got any room,” Ernst answered. “Let go.”

But we couldn’t get rid of them. They swarmed over the tailgate, trampling on our wounded to try to make them move over. Ernst and I shouted at them, but it didn’t do any good: they piled on everywhere.

“Take me,” whimpered a poor devil scratching at my door with bloody hands. Another waved a pass which was already almost expired. The arrival of a steiner followed by two trucks restored order.

An S.S. captain climbed out of the steiner.

“What’s this ant heap? No wonder you’ve broken down! It’s impossible! There must be at least a hundred men here.”

The men scattered immediately, without asking for anything more. Ernst saluted, and explained the situation.

“Very good,” said the captain. “You take five more along with your wounded. We’ll take another five, and the rest will have to walk until the convoy comes by. Let’s get going.”

Ernst explained that we would be out of gas in a few minutes. The captain signaled to some soldiers on the steiner, who gave us six gallons. A few minutes later we were on our way again.

We kept passing groups of men wading through the mud who begged us to pick them up, but we didn’t stop. Toward noon, with our last drop of gas, we reached a town where a unit was being assembled for the front. I escaped becoming an infantryman before my time by a hair’s breadth.

We had to wait until the following day before we could use the reserve of five gallons of gas which Ernst was able to draw. We were about to leave, when an unexpected and unpleasant sound struck our ears. In the distance — still quite far away — we heard the booming of big guns. As we thought we were by now far from the front, we were both astonished and alarmed. We didn’t know — and I didn’t know until much later — that our course had been taking us parallel to the Belgorod — Kharkov line.

Nonetheless, after unloading two dying men to make room for three more wounded, we set off without delay. In the middle of that afternoon, everything went wrong again.

Our truck was more or less in the middle of a column of ten. We had just passed an armored unit whose tanks looked like a giant version of the slimy creatures that emerge on mud flats at low tide. They must have been on their way to meet the enemy, who seemed to be very close. We could hear artillery on our left, despite the loud laboring noises of the trucks. Ernst and l exchanged anxious looks. We were stopped by some soldiers who were setting up an anti-tank gun.

“Dig in, fellows,” shouted an officer as we slowed down. “Ivan’s getting pretty close.”

This time, at least, they were telling us something. But I wondered how the Russians, who had been left some ninety miles behind, could already be in this district. Ernst, who was driving, stepped on the gas. Two other trucks did the same. Suddenly, five planes appeared in the sky, at a moderate altitude. I pointed them out to Ernst.

“They’re Yaks,” he shouted. “Take cover!”

We were surrounded by bare mud, with occasional clumps of stunted brush. There was a sound of machine-gun fire from the sky. The column drove more quickly, toward a shallow fold in the ground which might give some protection. I was leaning out the window, trying to see through the flying mud spun by our wheels. Two Focke Wolfs had appeared, and had shot down two of the Yaks, which crashed far to the west.

Until the final stages of the war, Russian aircraft were no match for the Luftwaffe. Even in Prussia, where Russian airpower was its most active, the appearance of one Messerschmitt-109, or one Focke-Wolf would make a dozen armored Ilyushin bombers turn and run. At this period, when German airpower still possessed important reserves, the lot of the Russian pilots was not enviable.

Two of the three remaining Yaks had taken flight, pursued by our planes, when the last dived straight at the convoy. One of the Focke Wulfs was chasing him, and was plainly trying to get him in his sights.

We reached the dip in the road. The Soviet plane had come down very low, to use its machine guns. The trucks ahead of us had stopped short, and the able-bodied were jumping down into the mud. I was already holding the door open, and I jumped, with my feet together, plunging face downward, when I heard the machine guns.

With my nose in the mud, my hands on my head, and my eyes instinctively shut, I heard the machine gun and the two planes through a hellish intensity of noise. The sound of racing engines was followed by a loud explosion. I looked up, to watch the plane with the black crosses on its wings regain altitude. Three or four hundred yards away, where the Yak had crashed, there was a plume of black smoke. Everybody was getting up again.

“One more who won’t give any trouble,” shouted a fat corporal who was clearly delighted to be still alive.

Several voices joined in a cheer for the Luftwaffe.

“Anybody hit?” one of the noncoms called out. “Let’s get going, then.”

I walked over to the Tatra, trying to brush off the worst of the mud that clung to my uniform. I noticed two holes in the door I had opened to get out which appeared to have swung shut on its own momentum: two round holes, each outlined by a ring of metal from which the paint had been scraped away. Nervously, I pulled open the door. Inside, I saw a man I shall never forget — a man sitting normally on the seat, whose lower face had been reduced to a bloody pulp.

“Ernst?” I asked in a choking voice. “Ernst!” I threw myself at him. “Ernst! What… ? Say something! Ernst!” I looked frantically for some features on that horrible face. “Ernst!” I was nearly crying.

Outside, the column was getting ready to leave. The two trucks behind me were impatiently blowing their horns.

“Hey.” I ran toward the first of the trucks. “Stop. Come with me. I’ve got a wounded man.”

I was frantic. The doors of the truck behind me swung open and two soldiers stuck out their heads.

“Well, young fellow, are you going to move, or aren’t you?”

“Stop!” I shouted louder than ever. “I’ve got a wounded man.”

“We have thirty,” one of the soldiers shouted back. “Get going. The hospital isn’t too far from here.”

Their voices rose over mine, and the noise of their trucks, which had pulled out, and were passing me, drowned my cries of desperation. Now I was alone, with a Russian truck loaded with wounded men, and Ernst Neubach, who was dead, or dying.

“You shits! Wait for me! Don’t go without us!”

I burst into tears, and gave way to a mad impulse. I grabbed my Mauser, which I’d left in the truck. My eyes were swimming, and I could barely see. I felt for the trigger, and pointing the gun at the sky, fired all five cartridges in the magazine, hoping that to someone in the trucks this would sound like a cry for help. But no one stopped. The trucks continued to roll away from me, sending out a spray of mud on each side. In despair, I returned to the cabin, and ripped open my kit to look for a package of dressings.

“Ernst,” I said. “I’m going to bandage you. Don’t cry.”

I was insane. Ernst wasn’t crying: I was. His coat was covered with blood. With the dressings in my hand, I stared at my friend. He must have been hit in the lower jaw. His teeth were mixed with fragments of bone, and through the gore I could see the muscles of his face contracting, moving what was left of his features.

In a state of near shock, I tried to put the dressing somewhere on that cavernous wound. When this proved impossible, I pushed a needle into the tube of morphine, and jabbed ineffectually through the thicknesses of cloth. Crying like a small boy, I pushed my friend to the other end of the seat, holding him in my arms, and soaking in his blood. Two eyes opened, brilliant with anguish, and looked at me from his ruined face.

“Ernst!” I laughed through my tears. “Ernst!”

He slowly lifted his hand and put it on my forearm. Half choked with emotion, I started the truck, and managed to begin moving without too great a jolt.

For a quarter of an hour, I drove through a web of ruts with one eye on my friend. His grip on my arm tightened and eased in proportion to his pain, and his death rattle rose and fell, sometimes louder than the noise of the truck.

Choking back my tears, I prayed, without reason or thought, saying anything that came into my head.

“Save him. Save Ernst, God. He believed in you. Save him. Show yourself.”

But God did not answer my appeals. In the cab of a gray Russian truck, somewhere in the vastness of the Russian hinterland, a man and an adolescent were caught in a desperate struggle. The man struggled with death, and the adolescent struggled with despair, which is close to death. And God, who watches everything, did nothing. The breath of the dying man passed with difficulty through that horrible wound, making huge bubbles of blood and saliva. I considered every possibility. I could turn back and look for help, or force the men I was carrying to tend Ernst, at gunpoint if necessary, or even kill Ernst, to cut short his sufferings. But I knew very well I couldn’t kill him. I had not yet been obliged to fire directly at anyone.

My tears had dried, leaving the trace of their passage on my filthy face, to betray my weakness to the world. I was no longer crying, and my feverish eyes stared at the knob on the radiator two meters in front of me, which cut hypnotically into the interminable horizon. For long moments, Ernst’s hand would tighten on my arm, and each time I was overwhelmed by fresh panic. I couldn’t look at that horrifying face. Several German planes passed overhead, through the cloudy sky, and in a desperate attempt at telepathy every fiber in my body appealed to them for help. But maybe they were Russian planes. It didn’t matter; I had no time to spare. No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.

Ernst’s hand gripped my arm convulsively. The pressure continued for so long that I slid my foot off the accelerator, and stopped, afraid of the worst. I turned and looked at the mutilated face, whose eyes seemed to be fixed on something the living can’t see. Those eyes were veiled by a curious film. My heart was pumping so hard that I felt actual physical pain. I refused to believe what I could guess without difficulty.

“Ernst!” I shouted.

From the back of the truck my shout was answered by several others.

I pushed my companion down on the seat, imploring heaven to let him live. But his body fell heavily against the other side of the cabin. Death! He was dead! Ernst! Mama! Help me!

In a delirium of terror, I leaned against the truck door, and then let myself drop, trembling, onto the running board. I tried to persuade myself that none of this was happening, that it was all a nightmare from which I would wake to see another horizon.

As I sat and thought, I still had no idea of the extent of irremediable evil. I dreamed of what life would be like when I shook off this horrible nightmare in which my friend had just died. But my eyes could see only mud, sucking at my boots.

Two heads looked out from the back of the truck. They were saying something but I didn’t hear them. I stood up, and turning my back on them, walked off a short distance. That small physical effort reawakened some sense of life and hope, and I tried to tell myself that all of this wasn’t really serious, that it was only a bad dream I had to forget. I tried to impose an expression of smiling derision on my features. Two of the wounded men jumped down from the truck to relieve themselves. I stared at them unseeing, while the vitality of being alive beat back the darkness. I began to think with hope that surely all the German soldiers in Russia would be sent to help us, that something must be coming to help us. Suddenly I thought of the French. They were already on their way: all our newspapers said so. The first legionnaires had already set out. I had seen the photographs.

I felt a hot flush run through me. Ernst would be avenged: that poor fool who had never hurt a fly, who had spent his time making life more endurable for wretched soldiers shaking with cold. And his marvelous hot showers! The French would come, and I would run to embrace them. Ernst had loved them like his own compatriots. This surge of hope and joy could not be damped by facts I didn’t know — like the fact that the French had decided on quite another course.

“What’s happened?” asked one of the men, whose gray bandage was falling over his eyes. “Are we out of gas?”

“No. My friend has just been killed.” They looked into the cabin.

“Fuck… that’s not so bad. At least he didn’t have to suffer.” I knew that Ernst’s agony had lasted for nearly half an hour. “We ought to bury him,” one of them said.

The three of us lifted out the body, which was already stiffening. I moved like an automaton, and my face was without expression. I saw a small rise of ground which was less trampled than everywhere else, and we took Ernst there.

We had no shovels, so we dug the grave with our helmets, rifle butts, and bare hands. I myself collected Ernst’s identity tags and papers. The other two were already pushing back the dirt, and trampling it down with their boots when I looked my last on that mutilated face. I felt that something had hardened in my spirit forever. Nothing could be worse than this. We pushed in a stick at the head of the grave, and hung Ernst’s helmet on it. I slit the stick with the point of my bayonet, and slid in a piece of paper torn from the notebook Ernst always carried with him, inscribed naively in French: “Ici j’ai enterre mon ami, Ernst Neubach.”

Then, to forestall another emotional crisis, I turned and ran back to the truck.

We started off again. One of the wounded had come to the front and taken Ernst’s place: a stupid-looking man, who fell asleep almost at once. Ten minutes later, the motor coughed, and then died. The jolt woke my sleeping companion.

“Something wrong with the engine?”

“No,” I said in an offhand voice. “We’re out of gas.”

“Shit. So what’ll we do?”

“We’ll walk. On this nice sunny day it should be grand. The strongest will have to help the others.”

My friend’s death had abruptly turned me into a cynic, and I felt almost glad that the others would have to suffer with me. My companion looked me up and down.

“You don’t mean that. We can’t walk. We’re all burning up with fever.”

His stupid assurance made me furious. He was clearly a half-wit who never questioned anything, and had gone to war because he’d been sent. Then a Russian shell had gone off too close, and he’d been pierced, and that is all he felt or knew. Since then, he’d been dozing and stuffing himself with sulfanilamide.

“Well, you can stay here, and wait for help, or for Ivan. I’m clearing out.”

I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and explained the situation. Inside, it stank. The men were lying in a revolting mess. Some of them didn’t even hear me, and I felt ashamed and brutal. But what else was there to do? Seven or eight haggard men pulled themselves up. Their faces were amazingly drawn. Shaggy beards sprouted from their lined cheeks, and their eyes burned with fever. I felt sickened, and unwilling to insist that they walk. When they had climbed down, they discussed the fate of the others.

“It’s impossible to get them up. Let’s just leave without telling them. Maybe someone will be along to help them. They’re still coming behind us.”

Our wretched group set off, haunted by the dying men we had abandoned in the Tatra. But what else could we have done?

I was the only man without an injury, and the only man with a gun. I had offered Neubach’s gun, but no one wanted to carry it. A short time later, a muddy sidecar caught up with us, and stopped, although we hadn’t flagged them. It carried two soldiers who belonged to an armored unit: two generous men. One of them decided to give his place to a wounded man, and, collecting his belongings, got out and walked with us. Somehow, the sidecar managed to take on three wounded.

And so once more I had a strong young man to keep me company, whose humane gesture, if nothing else, made him a sympathetic human being. I no longer remember his name, but I do remember that we talked long and deeply about many things. He told me that the Russian offensive had been mounted very suddenly, and that throughout this vast region we might be stopped at any moment by a Russian motorized unit. My throat went dry, but my companion seemed sure of himself, and of our army.

“We’ll resume the offensive now that it’s spring. We’ll throw the Popovs back across the Don, and then the Volga.”

It’s astonishing how agreeable it is to meet confidence and enthusiasm when one is feeling lost. It was as if heaven had sent me this healthy animal to revive my morale. I would have liked things more if Neubach had still been alive, but one must remain humble and resigned in the face of Providence. After all, it was I who should have been driving instead of Neubach.

Toward evening, we came to an isolated country farmhouse. We approached cautiously. The partisans often used places like this: they had the same choices we did, and for anyone a roof is a roof.

The tall young man who had joined us walked out ahead, slowly and deliberately, with his hand on his gun. For a moment he disappeared behind the farmyard buildings, and we felt a twinge of anxiety. But he reappeared and waved us on. The farm was inhabited by a group of Russians who did everything they could to make the wounded men comfortable. The women cooked us a hot meal. They told us that they hated Communism. They had been deported from a small farm they had owned in the neighborhood of Vitebsk to work on the big kolkhoz we were now walking through. They said they had often given shelter to German soldiers. They had an amphibious V.W. in one of their sheds, which had broken down and been abandoned by one of our sections. They said that the partisans never bothered them because they knew that the Wehrmacht often used their buildings. Our tall newcomer felt somewhat uneasy about the V.W.; the Russians might be lying. They could have stolen it. We tried to start it, but although the engine turned over, the vehicle wouldn’t move.

“We’ll fix it tomorrow,” the big man said. “We ought to rest now. I’ll take the first watch, and you can relieve me at midnight.”

“We’re going to stand watch?” I asked in surprise.

“We have to. You can’t trust these people. All Russians are liars.” This meant another night of anxiety. I walked to the back of the shed, which was dark. There was a jumble of sacks, sheaves of dried sunflower stalks, ropes, and boards, which I arranged as a rough bed. I was about to take off my boots when my companion stopped me.

“Don’t do that. You’ll never be able to stand them tomorrow. You have to let them dry on your feet.”

I was on the point of replying that the sodden leather would prevent my feet from drying… but I didn’t. What difference did it make if my feet were wet or my boots were wet? I myself was soaked through and filthy and so tired….

“You should wash your feet though. That will make you feel fresher, and better tomorrow, too.”

What sort of a fellow was this? He was as dirty as I, but he seemed to be full of will and ardor and spirit, as if nothing fundamental to his being had been damaged.

“I’m too tired,” I said. He laughed.

I threw myself down on my back, overcome by the exhaustion which ached in the muscles of my shoulders and neck. I stared into the shadows, caught by an indefinable fear. Above me, the dusty beams were lost in the darkness. My sleep was leaden and dreamless. Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.

A movement of air shook my heavy head. I sat up slowly. It was already broad daylight, and the sky was shining through the wide door of the shed. Beside the door, next to a large chest, my companion of yesterday sat slumped in sleep. I jumped up like a shot. The idea crossed my mind that he might already be dead. I had learned that life and death can be so close that one can pass from one to the other without attracting any attention. The fresh morning air was shaken by the sound of explosions.

I went over to the other soldier and shook him vigorously. He groaned like a drunk who is being questioned. “Wake up!”

This time he stood up in a single movement. His sleep had exploded like a bomb. Instinctively he reached for his gun. I felt almost afraid.

“Yes?… What is it?” he asked. “Teufel, it’s daylight. I fell asleep on guard, Goddamnit!”

He looked so furious that I kept myself from laughing. His inadequate vigilance had given us both a good night’s sleep. Suddenly he pointed his gun at the open door. Before I could turn around, I heard a foreign voice, and one of the Russians who had received us the day before came and stood in the doorway.

“Kamerad,” he repeated in German. “This morning no good. Boom boom pretty close.”

We went out of the shed. On the roof of the little building in front of us, some Russians from the kolkhoz were inspecting the horizon. We heard some more long-drawn-out explosions.

“Bolsheviks very close,” said one of the Ukrainians, turning to us. “We’ll leave with kamerad soldat German.”

“Where are the wounded?” my companion asked, irritated at having been caught off balance.

“Where you put yesterday,” answered the Popov. “Two kamerad German dead.”

We looked at him in confusion.

“Come and help us,” my companion said.

Two of the more seriously wounded men had died. There were now four, all in poor condition. One of them was groaning and holding his right arm, whose hand was missing. His purulent dressing glistened with the gangrene which was already devouring him.

“Dig two graves over there,” ordered the tall soldier. “We must bury these men.”

“We not soldiers,” answered the Popov, still smiling.

“You… dig grave… two graves,” insisted the. German, aiming his gun at the Russians. “Two graves, and quick!”

The Russian’s eye gleamed wildly as he stared at the black hollow of the gun barrel. He said a few words in Russian, and the others busied themselves with the job.

We had begun to change the dressings of the wounded when we heard the sound of a motor in the courtyard. Without thinking, we ran out. Several armored vehicles had just driven in, and a gang of German soldiers were running toward the big drinking trough. They were followed by four or five Mark-4s. An officer climbed from a steiner, and we ran to meet him, telling him who we were.

“Alles gut,” said the officer. “Help us load up, and leave with us.” We tried to get the amphibious V.W. to start, but that proved impossible. We dragged it from the hut, and one of the landser threw a grenade into the engine. A moment later, it blew to pieces. More vehicles arrived. Others left in the direction from which we’d come. We couldn’t understand what was happening. The sound of explosions from the southeast was continuous. The road that ran through the kolkhoz was a stream of traffic of every description. Whenever anyone stopped I asked for news of my unit, but no one knew anything. It seemed likely that my companions of the 19th Rollbahn were far to the west by now — far from the front, to which it seemed I was being sent. A little while later, I turned west again, in a company of soldiers drawn from many infantry units. The fact that I was involved with this group caused me considerable difficulty a few days later. We appeared to be taking a line parallel to the front, at right angles to the Russian thrust. Far to the north, the Russians were pushing toward the south, hoping to surround the German forces still in the Voronezh — Kursk — Kharkov triangle. For a day and a half, we followed a muddy rut, on which our only troubles were mechanical. The machines we were using had been in Russia since the German advance of 1941, and had been pushed hard. Our forces were obliged to abandon large numbers of trucks and tractors and tanks.

The tanks in particular had taken a beating, often having been used for work their designers had never imagined. They were almost the only vehicles able to move normally during the winter months, and a tank pulling five trucks along a snowy mule track was not an unusual sight. When they had to face the Russian counter-offensive, this rough usage, coupled with their lightness, which had served us so well until then, made them no match for the famous T-34s, incontestably superior to the Mark-2s and -3s. Later, our Tigers and Panthers stood up to Soviet armor, and played with their T-34s and KW-85s.

Unfortunately, as in the air, our inadequate numbers had to yield to an enemy multitude fighting on two fronts. We were obliged, in effect, to defend a fortress with a circumference of two thousand miles.

To cite a single example: the fighting on the Vistula, north of Krakow, pitted twenty-eight thousand Germans supported by thirty-six Tiger tanks and twenty Panthers against two strong Soviet armies of six hundred thousand men and seven armored regiments disposing of eleven hundred tanks of various kinds.

Toward noon the next day, we arrived at a small village about fifteen miles northeast of Kharkov, with a name like Outcheni. I can no longer remember precisely. The place was filled with smoke, and to judge by the noise fighting was still going on quite nearby.

The steiner of the officer who bad picked us up at the kolkhoz drew ahead, while the rest of us jumped down from our machines. Flickering light a mile or so to the south marked the line of fire. The soldiers who had come with me peed into a hedge or chewed some food, with blank faces. I myself have never been able to achieve a resigned, indifferent attitude in the face of pressing danger; nevertheless, I tried to hide my desperate anxiety. Perhaps the others were doing the same thing. The steiner came back, and two noncoms wrote down our names. Then we were organized into groups of fifteen, led either by a sergeant or an obergefreiter.[9]

The officer climbed onto the seat of the steiner and spoke to us briefly, mincing no words.

“The enemy has cut us off from our line of retreat. To get around them, we would have to turn north, onto the plain, where there are no roads. This could be fatal. Therefore, we will have to break through their barrage to reach our new positions, which are quite close.

“As further elements of the Don army arrive, they will be used to maintain the passage already opened, which will allow all our soldiers to escape the Bolshevik noose. Thereafter, you will proceed to positions which will be announced, and which you will maintain until further orders. Good luck! Heil Hitler!”

I was about to say that I belonged to the transport service, when I suddenly felt ashamed. Munitions boxes were opened, and their contents distributed. My pockets and cartridge pouches were full, and I was given two defensive grenades, which I didn’t know how to operate. We moved single file to the edge of the village past houses burning from enemy incendiaries. Groups of men were walking about in the debris; others were tending to the wounded. Some burnt-out German vehicles were still smoking. We were taken over by a lieutenant, who asked five or six of us to follow him down a long street which was still more or less intact. A salvo whistled past us, and we threw ourselves to the ground. It fell somewhere in the center of the village, about seven or eight hundred yards behind us. Enemy shells had dug several holes in the packed earth which lay between two rows of buildings, and occasional mutilated bodies lay sprawled on the street.

We walked for about fifteen minutes, sticking close to the buildings, until we heard the sound of automatic weapons. About a hundred yards ahead of us, the street was swept by mortar fire. We hesitated for a moment. Then we saw some running figures emerging from the wall of dust stirred up by the enemy salvo.

“Achtung!” shouted the lieutenant.

Instantly, we dropped to our knees, or even onto our stomachs, ready to open fire, but stood up again when we saw German uniforms. The other soldiers ran over to us, and threw themselves down by our sides. We could see that still more were coming through the flying dust. Several of them were howling at the tops of their lungs, a sound which combined fear, anger, and pain.

I watched a soldier without a gun, who was trying to run holding his right thigh with both hands. He fell, stood up, and fell again. Two others were staggering slowly after him. I heard someone shout, “A moi!” and was trying to see which of them had used my language, when a fresh salvo struck the group, scattering about ten of them in search of shelter.

Two of the men continued toward us, despite the danger. They ran to a door, which they were able to kick in without much trouble, and stood in its opening, shouting curses in French.

Amazed, and without a thought of danger, I ran across the street, bursting in on them like a whirlwind. They paid no attention to me. “Hey,” I said, shaking one of them by his straps. “Are you French?”

They turned toward me and looked at me for a fraction of a second. Then their eyes returned to a cloud of dust and smoke pouring from a house which had just burst into flames.

“No. The Walloon Division,” one of them said, without looking back a second time.

A series of explosions made us blink and hunch our shoulders. “Those shits shoot us just like rabbits. They never take prisoners, the bastards.”

“I’m French,” I said, with an uncertain smile.

“Well then, look out. Volunteers are never prisoners.”

“But I’m not a volunteer!”

The street was raked by a new salvo of mortar fire, somewhat closer than before. Twenty yards away, a roof disintegrated, and the retreat whistle broke off our conversation. We ran as hard as we could back the way we had just come, followed by a burst of machine-gun fire. Two or three men spun round and doubled up, screaming with pain. We almost ran over two men with a heavy machine gun, which they hadn’t been able to fire, because we’d been in the way.

Several groups of men had reached a street at right angles to ours, and had scattered among the ruins. The lieutenant was blowing his whistle again, to regroup us, when two Mark-3s suddenly came into sight. They rolled up to the lieutenant, who stood in the middle of the street waving them forward. After a brief consultation, they moved obliquely into the street we had just left, advancing toward the Bolsheviks. The lieutenant tried to reorganize us again, and we set off in the wake of the tanks, which made an infernal din in the rubble-filled streets. I jumped from the corners of buildings to piles of rubble, in a state of terror, unable to grasp why I was there, or to distinguish anything to fire at.

For seconds at a time, our tanks would disappear from view in the turmoil of dust and smoke and flames, but they always re-emerged, with their guns firing. Soon we had run past the point where our retreat had begun, and into an open space surrounded by wooden peasant houses grouped around a pond. The tanks were driving around the pond, crushing every obstacle. On the far side of the pond we could easily see men running in several directions. We stood on the bank, and opened a concentrated fire. Another German company arrived on our right, and threw grenades at a house in which some of the enemy had taken shelter.

Our tanks were now on the other side of the pond, and were flattening the position just taken from the enemy. At last I had the opportunity to fire at some Russians. They were no more than thirty yards away,: running from the house our soldiers had attacked with grenades. At least ten Mausers fired, and not one of the Russians stood up again. The fact that we were advancing, and that we felt ourselves suddenly in control of the situation, stimulated us in spite of everything. We had just dislodged an enemy numerically stronger than we — as was always the case in Russia — and we felt as if we’d been given wings.

The sound of firing and the groans of the wounded incited us to massacre the Russians, who had inflicted us with so many horrifying wounds. An attacking army is always more enthusiastic than an army on the defensive, and more likely to accomplish prodigies. This was particularly true of the German Army, which was organized to attack, and whose defense consisted of slowing the enemy by counter-attack. A few of our men took over a Russian cannon, and immediately put it into action. A rapid liaison was established between our two tanks and this newly improvised artillery, which poured all the shells just captured from the Russians onto precisely selected targets.

Then the tanks turned back, leaving the defense of the area to us.

Directed by the lieutenant, we placed ourselves as best we could, in readiness for any new surprises. We could hear the sound of continuous firing all around us. A fine rain began to fall.

At dusk, we were still exchanging fire with the enemy, who had grown bolder, and were trying to come back. With darkness, our terror returned, and the firing almost stopped. The lieutenant sent someone to fetch some flares. To the southwest, the horizon lit up in time with sporadic heavy artillery fire. Without knowing it, we had become part of the third battle of Kharkov, whose front extended for some two hundred miles around the city. With darkness and rain, the fighting, for our group, was almost over. Behind us, we could still hear the sound of automatics, which penetrated the noise of engines. Our vehicles were using the darkness to try to get through the Russian barrage. We thought that at any moment we might see the Popovs running toward us through the night. A Volkswagen came up from behind with all its lights out. The driver spoke for a moment with the leader of our group, and then handed some flat mines to four of our men.

With white faces, they went off into the darkness, to place the mines on either side of the pond. Five minutes later, we heard a rough cry from the left, and a short time after that, two of the four came back from the right. After another half hour, we concluded that the two who had gone to the left had run into a Russian knife.

Much later that night, when we were all feeling overwhelmed by sleep, we witnessed a tragedy that froze my blood. We had just thrown about a dozen grenades at random, to forestall some suspected danger, when a prolonged and penetrating cry rose from the hole on my left. It lasted for several minutes, as if it were coming from the throat of someone who was fighting desperately. Then there was a cry for help, which brought us all from our holes and shelters. About ten of us ran toward the sound. The darkness was torn by the white lights of several shots. Fortunately, no one was hit.

We arrived at the edge of a foxhole, where a Russian, who had just thrown down his revolver, was holding his hands in the air. At the bottom of the hole, two men were fighting. One of them, a Russian, was waving a large cutlass, holding a man from our group pinned beneath him. Two of us covered the Russian who had raised his hands, while a young obergefreiter jumped into the hole and struck the other Russian a blow on the back of his neck with a trenching tool. The Russian let go at once, and the German who had been under him, who had just missed having his throat cut, ran up to ground level. He was covered with blood, brandishing the Russian knife with one hand, like a madman, while with the other he tried to stop the flow of blood pouring from his wound.

“Where is he?” he shouted in a fury.

“Where’s the other one?”

In a few bounding steps he reached the two men and their prisoner. Before anyone could do anything, he had run his knife into the belly of the petrified Russian.

“Cutthroat,” he yelled, looking with wild eyes for another belly to open.

We had to hold him so he wouldn’t run past our lines.

“Let me go!” he shrieked.

“I want to show these savages how to use a knife.”

“Shut up!” shouted the lieutenant, exasperated by having to deal with such a motley crew.

“Get back into your foxholes before Ivan machine guns the lot of you.”

The lunatic, who was losing a lot of blood, was dragged to the rear by two men. I went back to the hole I was sharing with four others. I would gladly have fallen asleep, but nervous exhaustion kept me awake.

I had not yet absorbed all the emotions of the day, and was suffering a belated reaction.

The intermittent rain began to soak into our clothes and weight them down. The pond gave off a faint smell. Two men began to snore. Throughout the night, which seemed interminable, I kept up a dull conversation with my companions, to prevent a nervous collapse. In the distance, we could hear the continuous rumble of our retreating trucks. Enemy action began again well before dawn. Flares above our position blinded us with their unexpected white lights. We looked at each other in wordless confusion. The intensity of this diabolic light threw a sinister, almost indecent glare on our ghostly faces.

At daybreak, enemy artillery poured a hail of projectiles of every caliber onto the road about a quarter of a mile behind us. Beyond my hole, when I dared look outside, I could see other helmets poking up here and there from below the ground. Under their visors, eyes gleaming with fatigue were trying to discern our immediate future on the dim bank across the pond.

I scraped up some crumbs of vitamin biscuit, which was the last food in my possession. Insomnia and exhaustion made us incapable of grasping the situation with any precision. We were simply there, shivering and wet, and if even a small group of Russians had appeared, we wouldn’t have been able to stop them.

Fortunately, the Soviets didn’t attack, and we were only subjected to one round of mortar fire, which nevertheless wounded nine of us. At last the sun rose, and we felt somewhat better. When it reached its zenith, we were still waiting in our holes, which the spring warmth had not been able to dry out. We had not been given any more food, but then a soldier of the Reich was supposed to be able to withstand cold, heat, rain, suffering, hunger, and fear. Our stomachs growled, and the blood beat in our temples and at our smallest joints. But the air and the earth and the universe were growling too. From habit, we were almost able to persuade ourselves that this was a possible way to live. I know of many who actually managed it.

Toward six o’clock that evening, we were ordered to abandon our positions. This step required many precautions. We had to cover a considerable distance with all our equipment, while two men stayed behind to lay mines for the enemy. When we reached the ruins of the first house, we were finally able to straighten up. We went into the battered buildings, whenever we could, to look for food. I can remember devouring three raw potatoes, and finding them delicious.

We arrived at the crossroads from which our group had set out twenty-four hours earlier. The two mutilated but recognizable roads we had taken the day before had been turned into a jumble of churned earth. As far as I could see, the disabled carcasses of Wehrmacht vehicles lay scattered in a haze of whirling smoke, across the ruins of what must once have been houses. There were several muddy German bodies, too, lying in rigid attitudes beside wrecked machines, waiting for the burial squad.

Some men from the engineers were setting fire to the vehicles that blocked the road. We walked through this chaos for a while, supporting our wounded. A hundred yards away, another group, larger than ours, was also withdrawing, with arms and equipment.

We followed the lieutenant as far as the re-groupment center, abandoned by the officers two hours before we received the order to withdraw. Not a soul was left in the battered building which had housed the officers responsible for the defense of the town. A sergeant on a motorcycle was waiting alone in front of the building to instruct stragglers. The lieutenant seemed disgusted by the available options, and continued to lead us westward.

We covered another twelve miles on foot, constantly threatened by Soviet patrols, who would open fire without hesitation on even a single famished landser. After diving down some thirty times or more to avoid Russian salvos, we arrived at a Luftwaffe airfield, which had already been abandoned. We thought that the wooden buildings — which were like the ones we had occupied on the Don — might still contain some scraps of food. Carrying our four wounded men on improvised stretchers, we walked toward one of the huts, stumbling with exhaustion. But we never reached it: a scene of intense horror stopped six or seven of us.

We had just passed a bunker in which we noticed a body lying at the bottom. Two emaciated cats were eating one of its hands. I felt sick.

“Get out, you damned cats!” shouted my companion.

Everyone came over to look. The lieutenant, as sickened as I had been, threw a grenade. The two ghostly cats ran off into the countryside, while the explosion sent a column of more or less human debris straight up into the air, like a chimney.

“If the cats are eating stiffs,” somebody said, “there couldn’t be much left in the pantry.”

There were still two bi-motors with Maltese crosses on their wings standing on the empty field — probably inoperable in some way. From the sky, we heard a disquieting sound, which was growing louder. We all turned our white faces the same way, suddenly realizing that we were standing beside two planes in the center of a vast, flat space, and could hardly fail to attract attention.

We scattered without waiting for any orders, flinging ourselves onto the ground, trying to escape those six black dots, which were already falling toward us like lightning. I thought immediately of the bunker where the cats had been feasting. Six others had the same idea, and although I ran as fast as I could, I arrived next to last beside the hole where four soldiers were already trampling on what was left of a human being.

I looked desperately into that crowded space, hoping that some miracle would make it larger. Two others were doing the same thing. Maybe we’d made a mistake; maybe the planes were really ours…. But that was impossible; the sound was unmistakable.

The noise grew louder and louder. We threw ourselves down, painfully aware of our absolute exposure. I held my head between my hands, and closed my eyes, trying to obliterate the muffled explosions which reached my partially blocked ears. I felt the fury of hell pass over me like a hurricane. The blows striking the earth shook every organ in my body, and I knew that I was going to die. Then the storm passed as quickly as it had come. I lifted my head to see the enemy formation break apart as it climbed higher into the pale blue sky. Here and there across the field, men were getting up and running for better cover. The Russian planes had regrouped and were turning as tightly as they could. Then they swooped down at us again. I felt a bitter presentiment freeze my blood. I began to run like a madman, with my legs flying, trying to force myself to go faster. But I knew that exhaustion had the upper hand, that I would never reach the road, with its ditch, which might shelter me. I kept stumbling over my heavy boots.

In desperation, and despite myself, I fell onto the wet grass, instinctively aware that the planes were on top of us again. The first explosions shook the ground, filling me with a frantic fear. I scratched at the ground like a rabbit whose last hope of escape is to bury itself. I could hear the earth being torn, and horrifying human shrieks. White flashes burned into my eyes through my clenched fists and eyelids. I lay there for two or three minutes, which seemed like an eternity.

When I finally looked up, the two bi-motors were burning like torches. The Russian planes were far off, turning back into formation for another attack. They had pulled up after this one in all directions. Once again I called on all my reserves of strength to get up and run, the other way this time, to the wooden buildings, which suddenly seemed to offer refuge. I had covered about a third of the distance when the Russian planes attacked, shooting rockets into the buildings, which disintegrated like matchwood. After a few moments of further terror, we could hear the engines of the planes fading into the distance. Everyone who was able stood up again. No one spoke. We stared at the flames, at the sky, at the reddening heaps of human remains. Our lieutenant, who seemed to have lost his sanity, although he was unhurt, was running from one wounded man to another.

“Shit,” someone shouted. “Another attack like that, and there won’t be anyone left. They’ve just left us here. We’ll never get out….”

“Shut up!” shouted the lieutenant, who was supporting a wounded man. “War is never a picnic.”

Who did he think he was telling? We gathered around him. He lifted the shoulders of a poor fellow covered with mud and blood, who was laughing to split his sides. For a moment, I thought he was crying with pain, but he was in fact howling with laughter.

“Das ist der Philosoph,” someone said.

I had never noticed the man before. His friend added that he had always believed he would return home unscathed. Three of us tried to lift him to his feet, but soon realized this was impossible. His bursts of laughter were interrupted by words which I understood perfectly, and thought about for a long time afterward, and which still trouble me. As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly. No one questioned the philosopher, but he himself, through his hilarity and his agony, tried to explain:

“Now I know why…. I know why…. It’s too simple…. It’s idiotic….”

Perhaps we would have learned what he meant, but a sudden surge of blood poured from his mouth, and ended his life. We dug graves for the new victims, and then stretched out, exhausted, on the bed of warm ashes that marked the site of the destroyed buildings.

At nightfall, we were wakened by the sound of guns, which seemed to be following us. By now we all felt desperately hungry and thirsty. Despite our rest, we had not recovered our strength, and we looked appalling. We stared at each other suspiciously, wondering if the next fellow didn’t have a couple of biscuits hidden somewhere, forgetting the lessons of comradeship we had been taught in Poland. But apparently we were all cleaned out. If anyone had been hiding something, we could scarcely have reproached him, as we all might easily have done the same thing.

In the darkness, as we fled the curtain of flares which had pursued us since our retreat from the Don, we heard once again the sound of a moving column, and were once again filled with panic. The night was as black as pitch. A fine rain was falling. We followed the lieutenant: God knows where he was taking us. No one spoke. Our strength seemed barely adequate to move our legs, weighted by exhaustion and mud.

Finally the lieutenant spoke: “Maybe they’ll go by without seeing us. Are any of you anti-tank gunners?”

Quickly, our solitary spandau was set up for a final effort of defense. Luckily, the exhaustion which made my temples throb under my leaden helmet prevented me from clearly grasping the seriousness of our situation. The simple fact that we had stopped walking presented my foundering body with a moment of relief which had to be used to the utmost. I knew that my fear would return with my breath, and that I would again be aware of everything that was happening.

The first black mass which came into view, with all its lights out, seemed to be some kind of light vehicle. We tried to see what it was, but the darkness was too thick. Then we heard tank treads, unmistakable and frightening, as those who have heard the sound on the front at night will appreciate.

As the noise grew louder, our panic increased. While some were trying to see where the tanks would come from, others — including myself — lay with their faces pressed into the ground. Two black shapes loomed against the sky some thirty meters away. Another, less than ten meters from us, made the earth shake, and every hair stand on end. Someone called out: “Die Maltakreuze, mein Gott!… Kameraden! Hilfe! Hilfe!”

For me, who spoke German so badly, and understood it even worse, this was a signal for everyone to save his skin. I jumped up and started to run. This, evidently, is what one should not do. Through the noise of the tanks, I could hear shouts and curses. The group had taken my action as a signal for general flight. Everyone had jumped up, and was running, shouting at the tanks — with the exception of the lieutenant and one or two more reflective, prudent soldiers. Later it occurred to me that even German tanks might have machine-gunned us, taking us for Russians. Also, they might have been Russian tanks.

However, we managed to make ourselves recognized, and were taken in by a detachment of the 25th Panzerdivision, commanded by General Guderian.

These men were extremely well-equipped, and had not been involved in our retreat. They put us wherever there was room, on the backs of the tanks, where the heat of the engine burned our buttocks. No one asked if we’d eaten, and it wasn’t until hours later, under the rolling fire of the Russian artillery which was raking Kharkov, that we were served a hot, greasy soup, which we received like a benediction.

It was here that I first saw one of the enormous Tiger tanks and two or three Panthers. I also saw, a few hours later, the appalling avalanche of the famous Katushas, which poured hours of devastating fire on the German infantry advancing with appalling losses through the outlying district of Slaviansk-Kiniskov. Guderian’s tanks took us right into Kharkov, where the Donets battles had already been in progress for more than a week. Once again, the Wehrmacht took the battered city, before losing it finally in September, after the failure of the Belgorod counter-offensive.

Dawn found us in the sand pits to the northwest of the city, where our group was gone over with a fine-toothed comb by the Kommandos responsible for sending men back to their original units. As they didn’t know where most of these units were, the best they could do was to form the strays into new groups, which everyone wished to avoid. These new units, with no official affiliation or assignments, simply sapped the actual strength of the army as recorded by military registration and on the maps at headquarters. The men assigned to these varied and un-measurable groups could not be fitted into any logical organization. Already classified as missing or dead by their original units, they were officially considered dead, and used as unexpected reinforcements whom there was no reason to spare. Long lines of soldiers, sitting, lying down, asleep and awake, were waiting for orders which would somehow fit them into the battle.

I can still remember the look of the Donets Valley, and the river, with its wide sand banks stretching some eight or ten miles back from the water. The thunder of guns reached us from the front, which was about twenty miles to the south. The German attack was moving from the north and west. With their left wing protected by the Donets, the Panzer assault was driving into the Russian artillery, which had rapidly crossed the river in an attempt to follow up their counter-offensive. Now these batteries had been driven back to the river, and were unable to re-cross it, as all the bridges were out. In effect, the Russians had just made the same mistake as the Germans at Stalingrad, although not on the same scale. In their haste to drive us out, they had overextended their supply lines and underestimated the forces pitted against them. A hundred thousand Russians, of whom fifty thousand were killed, were caught for over a week in the Slaviansk-Kiniskov pocket.

Of course, I didn’t know what had happened around Kharkov until months later. For me, the Donets battle, like the battles of the Don and of Outcheni, was a smoking chaos, a wellspring of continuous fear, alarm and rumor, and thousands of explosions.

I had just been reassigned, and was waiting for further instructions with a handful of other filthy, shaggy men, when a policeman handed me a scrap of paper. The police, like the Kommandos, were authorized to organize strays, and the scrap of paper purported to give us the route we must take to return to our company. It seemed that the 19th Rollbahn was operating in the neighborhood, and the three other fellows also belonged to it.

We cleared out as quickly as we could. The fear of being incorporated into an impromptu battalion lent wings to our feet. I have never had a very strong sense of direction, but here in this chaos of mud and ruin even a migratory bird would have lost the north. Our scrawled note only gave us the principal points to look for, which might have been recognizable to regiments camped on the spot. To us, however, in an entirely new landscape, it was almost impossible to distinguish one point from another. The rare signposts that remained on the battered streets had been twisted in the fighting, and had to be disregarded.

After a thousand false leads and a thousand delays, we finally found our company two days later. In the meantime, we had been pressed into service unrolling telephone wire for an S.S. regiment which was mounting an attack. I still remember a railway embankment which some very young S.S. were charging under heavy machine-gun fire.

We huddled in a drainage pipe which had been uncovered in a bombardment, waiting for the S.S. to take the area — which they did, with heavy losses. Beyond the two cement walls, the flash of mortar fire and red-hot metal fragments streaked through the air. Then the same regiment used us to supply a Haubitz battery, which had been engaged for several days in an artillery duel with the Soviet guns on the east bank of the Donets. We were moving the heavy projectiles from their distant depot when we ran into some men from our company, repairing a collapsed bunker.

The first familiar face I saw belonged to Olensheim.

“Hey!” I shouted, running to my friend, followed by the three others. “It’s us!” Olensheim stared, as if he’d been struck by lightning. “Another four!” he shouted.

“God must be with us! Laus scratched you off the list long ago. There are still thirty who haven’t showed up. We thought you must have been put in one of the scrap units.”

“Don’t mention bad luck,” I said. “Where’s Hals?”

“That fellow has all the luck. Right now, he’s in Trevda, being taken care of, while we dig up this damn dirt.”

“Was he wounded?”

“A fragment in the neck. Absolutely nothing. But he was collected along with the seriously wounded. He said he was unconscious for two hours. But he always exaggerates.”

“And Lensen?”

“He’s fine. He’s changing a tread over there.” Laus arrived, and we instinctively saluted.

“Glad to see you, boys. Really glad.” He shook each of us by the hand, his old soldier’s face filled with emotion. Then he took a few steps backward. “Announce yourselves clearly and intelligibly, the way I taught you.”

We conformed to the prescribed pattern with a good will that came from a deep sense of comradeship. But, apart from this encounter, everything looked dark. The sky was filled with lowering clouds which threatened rain, and at the four cardinal points white flashes preceded geysers of damp earth and rubble by fractions of seconds.

A short time later, Lensen, who was heavier and stronger than I, lifted me bodily from the ground in his delight at seeing me again. Despite the heavy labor we had to perform, the day was colored by the joy of this reunion.

Two days later, I managed to get to Trevda, which was some twenty-five miles from the front. Another fellow gave me his place in the D.K.W. he was supposed to drive, and I was able to visit Hals. I found him in a swarm of wounded men, singing at the top of his lungs. Spring had arrived at last, and the heavily wounded were cavorting between two avenues of wild pear trees.

Hals was unable to curb his delight at seeing me. I was carried in triumph by men who had lost arms, who were powdered with sulfanilamides and smeared with unguents. I was made to finish the remains of all the bottles they had opened, and accordingly was not able to keep the appointment I had made with the fellow who had brought me out. After waiting for a while, he grew bored, and left without me. I was taken back much later by a driver attached to my camp. Hals made me promise to visit him again, but I never had the chance: a few days later, the doctor found him fit, and he rejoined us.

Hals detested the squalid cellar where we were established, and following his lead, I volunteered for service in the motorized infantry. We were fed up with digging and acting as maidservants to the rest of the army.

This decision almost cost us our lives many times, but even now, looking back on everything that happened, I cannot regret having belonged to a combat unit. We discovered a sense of comradeship which I have never found again, inexplicable and steady, through thick and thin.