The Forgotten Soldier

7. THE NEW FRONT

In September, Kharkov was retaken by the Soviets.

The entire south and central front was seriously shaken, with several major breakthroughs which the enemy poured their tanks, jeopardizing our whole system of defense. A general withdrawal began, during which the Russians often managed to surround entire divisions. Our unit had been re-equipped with new weapons and rapid motor vehicles, and was used to check enemy penetration behind our lines, often achieving prodigies which were cited in the orders of the day. Wherever the Gross Deutschland appeared, our troops took heart and routed the enemy — or so it seemed. Of course, the general difficulties of our situation — our encirclement, and the despair of troops forced to abandon their weapons in a sea of mud — were never mentioned. Nor were such things as the adjutant and his section taken prisoner, and liberated too late, or the profound sense of hopelessness and misery which settled over the adult children we were, facing another winter of war — more human bridges across icy rivers, like the one over the Dnieper; more frozen, abandoned regiments and scorched earth and weeks of terror, like our week at Chernigov; more hands cracked open by chilblains; and more fatal acceptance of the idea of death. Generals have since written accounts of these events, locating particular catastrophes, and summarizing in a sentence, or a few lines, the losses from sickness or freezing. But they never, to my knowledge, give sufficient expression to the wretchedness of soldiers abandoned to a fate one would wish to spare even the most miserable cur. They never evoke the hours upon hours of agony, or the obvious resentment of individuals swamped by the herd, in which each man is lost in his own misery, and oblivious of the sufferings of others. They never mention the common soldier, sometimes covered with glory, sometimes beaten and defeated, burdened by the angry remonstrances of the noncoms and by the hatred of another herd of human beings whom it is officially permissible to hate, confounded by murder and degradation, and later by disillusion, when he realizes that victory will not return him his liberty. In the end, there was only the physical crime of war, and the hypocritical and intellectual crime of peace.

“That’s why you’re fighting,” Hauptmann Wesreidau, our captain, said to us one day.

“You’re nothing more than animals on the defensive, even when you’re obligated to take the offensive. So be brave: life is war, and war is life. Liberty doesn’t exist.”

Captain Wesreidau often helped us to endure the worst. He was always on good terms with his men, and was never one of those officers who are so impressed by their own rank that they treat ordinary soldiers like valueless pawns to be used without scruple. He stood beside us during countless gray watches, and came into our bunkers to talk with us, and make us forget the howling storm outside. I can still see his thin face, faintly lit by a wavering lamp, leaning over, beside one of ours.

“Germany is a great country,” he used to tell us. “Today, our difficulties are immense. The system in which we more or less believe is every bit as good as the slogans on the other side. Even if we don’t always approve of what we have to do, we must carry out orders for the sake of our country, our comrades, and our families, against whom the other half of the world is fighting in the name of truth and justice. All of you are old enough to understand that. I have done a good deal of traveling — to South America, and even to New Zealand. Since Spain, I have fought in Poland and France, and now Russia — and I can tell you that everywhere there are the same dominating hypocrisies. Life, my father, the example of former times — all of these taught me to sustain my existence with rectitude and loyalty. And I have clung to these principles in spite of all the hardships and follies which have been my lot. Many times, when I could have responded with a thrust of the sword, I only smiled, and blamed myself, assuming that I myself was the cause of all my troubles.

“When I had my first taste of war, in Spain, I thought of suicide — it all seemed so vile. But then I saw the ferocity of others, who also believed in the justice of their cause, and offered themselves up to acts of murder, as to a purification.

I watched the soft, effete French shift from terror to toughness, and take up the arms they couldn’t use when they needed them, once we had restored their confidence, and offered them the hand of friendship. In general, human beings don’t accept the unaccustomed. Change frightens and upsets them, and they will fight even to preserve situations they have always detested. But a slick armchair philosopher can easily arouse a rabble to support an abstract proposition — for instance, ‘all men are equal’ — even when the differences between men are obviously as great as the differences between cows and roosters. Then those exhausted societies, drained by their ‘liberty,’ begin to bellow about their ‘convictions’ and become a threat to us and to peace. It’s basic wisdom to keep people like that well fed and content, if one wishes to extract even a tenth of the possible return.

“Something of this kind is happening on the other side. As a people, we are fortunate in being somewhat less indolent than they. If someone tells us to examine ourselves, we at least have the courage to do it. Our condition is not absolutely perfect, but at least we agree to look at other things, and take chances. We are now embarked on a risky enterprise, with no assurance of safety. We are advancing an idea of unity which is neither rich nor easily digestible, but the vast majority of the German people accept it and adhere to it, forging and forming it in an admirable collective effort.

This is where we are now risking everything. We are trying, taking due account of the attitudes of society, to change the face of the world, hoping to revive the ancient virtues buried under the layers of filth bequeathed to us by our forebears. We can expect no reward for this effort. We are loathed everywhere: if we should lose tomorrow those of us still alive after so much suffering will be judged without justice. We shall be accused of an infinity of murder, as if everywhere, and at all times, men at war did not behave in the same way. Those who have an interest in putting an end to our ideals will ridicule everything we believe in. We shall be spared nothing. Even the tombs of our heroes will be destroyed, only preserving — as a gesture of respect toward the dead — a few which contain figures of doubtful heroism, who were never fully committed to our cause. With our deaths, all the prodigies of heroism which our daily circumstances bring and the memory of our comrades, dead and alive, and our communion of spirits, our fears and our hopes, will vanish, and our history will never be told. Future generations will speak only of an idiotic, unqualified sacrifice. Whether you wanted it or not, you are now part of this undertaking, and nothing which follows can equal the efforts you have made, if you must sleep tomorrow under the quieter skies of the opposite camp. In that case, you will never be forgiven for having survived. You will either be rejected or preserved like a rare animal which has escaped a cataclysm. With other men, you will be as cats are to dogs and you will never have any real friends.

Do you wish such an end for yourselves?

“Anyone who wishes to go but is hesitating from fear of our authority should speak to me; I will take as many nights as it needs to reassure you. I repeat: those who wish to leave should do so. We cannot count on men who feel that way, and our efforts cannot gain from their presence. Please believe that I understand your sufferings. I feel the cold and fear as you do, and I fire at the enemy as you do, because I feel that my duty as an officer requires at least as much from me as your duty does of you. I wish to stay alive, even if it’s only to continue the struggle somewhere else. I wish my company to be united in thought and in deed. Once the fighting begins, I will not tolerate doubt and defeatism. We shall be suffering not only in the interests of ultimate victory, but in the interests of daily victory against those who hurl themselves at us without respite, and whose only thought is to exterminate us, without any understanding of what is at stake. You can feel certain of me, in return, and certain that I will not expose you to any unnecessary dangers.

“I would burn and destroy entire villages if by so doing I could prevent even one of us from dying of hunger. Here, deep in the wilds of the steppe, we shall be all the more aware of our unity. We are surrounded by hatred and death, and in these circumstances we shall daily oppose our perfect cohesion to the indiscipline and disorder of our enemies. Our group must be as one, and our thoughts must-be identical. Your duty lies in your efforts to achieve that goal, and if we do achieve it, and maintain it, we shall be victors even in death.”

Our conversations with Captain Wesreidau made a deep impression on us. His obvious and passionate sincerity affected even the most hesitant, and seemed of another order than the standard appeals to our sense of sacrifice, which left us stupefied and incredulous. He invited questions, which he answered with intelligence and clarity. He spent his time with us, whenever he was free from other duties. We all loved him, and felt we had a true leader, as well as a friend on whom we could count. Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau was a terror to the enemy, and a friend to his men. Every time we moved, or were sent out on an operation his steiner preceded our vehicles.

The veteran, who had a good sense of men, had pointed him out to us the day after the battle for Belgorod, while we were resting in the rear, nursing our wounds.

“I’ve seen our captain,” he said. “He looks intelligent and wise.”

We fought two more battles before re-crossing the Dnieper in the beginning of the autumn. Several of us had to be re-equipped before these engagements, and the most serious accusations were leveled against anyone who returned without his weapons.

Lindberg, the Sudeten, and Hals, however, were officially recognized as wounded, when they came back the evening of the rout, in rags, without weapons or equipment. It can easily be imagined that equipment has to be abandoned when one is on the run, but in Russia our soldiers were never supposed to abandon their arms. They were supposed to die with them — or live, hanging on to them at all times. I myself had kept my gun without thinking of the consequences, like a blind man who never lets go of his white cane, and the veteran had dragged along his heavy spandau, out of habit or discipline; but I had lost my helmet, my ground sheet, the gas mask we never used, and what remained of the ammunition for the veteran’s spandau.

We met Lensen, who had come out alive too, although he had left behind most of his gear. He was tearing his hair at the thought that this oversight might cost him his rank.

The veteran, who was also an obergefreiter, suggested that next time Lensen think of putting in for a posthumous promotion. Lensen’s anxiety and our laughter were simultaneously drowned a short time later in the samahonka[12] someone found in the cellar of an abandoned house.

It was almost surely because of Wesreidau that we all escaped a court martial, which filled us with just as much terror as Soviet rockets. We had three good weeks of rest behind our lines, in a village of dreary, identical shacks. Luckily, the weather was magnificent. I took advantage of the lull to write often to Paula, but I could never bring myself to tell her of my terror at Belgorod. Hals had made the acquaintance of a Russian girl, with whom he was able to arrange a mutually profitable relationship. It turned out he was not the only one to enjoy the good woman’s favors. One evening he arrived to find himself part of a troika. The other masculine member was the Catholic chaplain, who had survived hell and was indulging a few sins of the flesh as his consciousness of life returned, hoping they would be pardoned because they were so rare. From that moment on, he was never able to intone a psalm without an accompanying chorus of laughter, at which he would blush furiously, and laugh as loudly as the rest of us.

All went well until one morning toward the end of September, when the distant rumble of guns reminded us that we had not come to Russia to play. In fact, the Russians had just broken through the front which our troops had managed to re-establish west of Belgorod, and our grand debacle was beginning.

Our generals, who believed that our troops could, if not attack, at least hold the reconstituted front, noticed somewhat belatedly that our regiments were being decimated simply to slow down the irresistible momentum of the strong Russian forces which were attacking all along the central sector.

What we should have done, before even thinking of turning back to the east, now seems like a simple act of realism which should have been recognized while it was still possible. At the time, however, the order to withdraw to the west bank of the Dnieper was given very late. The line of the Dnieper meant Kiev on the central axis, Cherkassy on the south, and Chernigov to the north, on the Desna: a distance of hundreds of miles. We were continuously pursued by an enemy who was fast becoming far more mobile than we, and threatening to overtake us at any moment, filling our ranks with panic and confusion. What might have been possible before Belgorod was no longer so, except at an inordinate price in blood and sweat, with incessant rearguard fighting. The Wehrmacht, adhering strictly to orders, sacrificed many more men on this belated retreat than they had during their advance.

We died by the thousands that autumn on the Ukrainian plain, and our battles, unheralded by any fanfare, consumed many heroes.

The front-line troops, in constant contact with an ever more pressing enemy, had already made up their minds about the future. Even the most hermetically sealed of our men understood that no matter how many hundreds of Russians he killed, or how bravely he fought, the next day hundreds more would appear, and so on for the next day and the day after that. And even the blindest saw that the Russian soldiers were moved by a blind heroism and boldness, so that even a mountain of dead compatriots wouldn’t stop them.

We knew that under such circumstances combat often favors simple numerical superiority, and much of the time we felt desperate.

Can anyone blame us?

We knew that we would almost surely be killed, buying time for a large-scale redeployment of troops. We knew that our sacrifice was in a good cause, and if our courage incited us to hours of resignation, the hours and days which followed would find us with dry eyes which were filled with an immense sadness. Then we would fire in a lunatic frenzy, without mercy. We didn’t wish to die, and would kill and massacre as if to avenge ourselves in advance for what we knew was going to happen. When we died, it was with fury, because we hadn’t been able to exact enough retribution. And, if we survived, it was as madmen, never able to re-adapt to the peacetime world. Sometimes, we would try to run away; but orders, adroitly worded and spaced, soothed us like shots of morphine.

“On the Dnieper,” we were told, “everything will be easier. Ivan won’t be able to force the barrage. So courage, and do your best to hold him off, if you want everyone to get through. The Russian counter-offensive will be crushed on the Dnieper, and then we’ll resume our push to the east.”

Through our panic and despair, an order became a duty. Our adversaries were astonished by the courage of ordinary German soldiers. A hundred yards at a time, we withdrew to the Dnieper and safety, slowing down the enemy as much as we could, watching our comrades fall all around us. Our desperate efforts sometimes continued for days at a time, across hundreds of miles. When men who had escaped from rearguard units finally reached the river, they were faced with a vast human swarm. Entire armies were waiting beside the few bridges which our engineers had managed to restore, tramping up and down the sandy bank, climbing onto anything that could float. The Russians were right on our heels, pressing against our perimeter of defense, which shrank alarmingly. The Luftwaffe was always somewhere overhead, and partly saved the situation, but our planes were soon outnumbered by Migs, and Yabos. Those of our planes which escaped the long-range anti-aircraft fire had to face a constantly growing swarm of fighters. The men who had not crossed the river were pressed into counter-attacks at odds of a hundred to one. We performed deeds of astonishing heroism, which demonstrated once again the extraordinary resourcefulness of our soldiers. The weather was still good, and we fought many successful battles. However, these are victories which can never be celebrated. An army fighting for its life cannot speak of victory.

Nonetheless, they were victories, which cost us far more than those we had fought as conquerors. This time, on the banks of the river, we were fighting not simply to take this or that town or district, but to avoid catastrophe. Everyone felt it and knew it. We had hours and even days of calm, but our anguish and anxiety always increased to a point of unbearable pressure, and we would throw ourselves back into battle to try to drive off the red monster about to devour us. This time, we managed to avert a total catastrophe: Army Group Center passed through, and the regiments still fighting were ordered to disengage. During the night, we destroyed almost everything, leaving only men and light arms to be transported in the ferries which had been provided to embark the last of our troops to the west.

At dawn, our exhausted men arrived at the river, which was heavily shrouded in autumn fog. Expecting friendly faces, they called out, only to be answered by Ivan’s machine guns. In many places, the Russians had arrived ahead of us, sunk the boats, and killed the ferrymen. Our men threw themselves into the river, and tried to swim, abandoning everything. The Russians, of course, opened fire, shooting at the heads bobbing in the water as if they were clay pigeons at a fair. Perhaps a few Germans managed to reach the western bank. Elsewhere, our men crowded onto the precarious ferries which were fired at from both the shore and the sky. Others were surrounded, and fought to the last. Most of these men were killed, as the Russians were in no mood to take prisoners.

Thus we established a new front, hoping to find safety on the western bank of the Dnieper. We dug ourselves in, preparing for a long stay. This time, Ivan would not break through. It had begun to snow, and we set about arranging our bunkers, calming ourselves, reorganizing, and waiting. But news was spreading with the rapidity of the flash which followed a Russian rocket. The staff officers had done everything they could to keep the true nature of the situation from the troops. But reality was too strong, and too important, and broke down all the barriers of discretion, smashing the fragile hopes of the soldiers, and sweeping them away in a tumultuous flood.

The Red Army was moving toward us from Cherkassy in the east, and the Dnieper in the west. To the north, they had crossed the Desna, and a large number of our troops were trapped at the confluence of the Desna and the Dnieper. Winter had begun, and with the falling snow a deep feeling of despair settled over us. We were exhausted, and had no hope of future respite. Where could we find it? How far would we have to withdraw? To the Pripet? The Bug?

“The Oder?” The veteran grinned sardonically. That seemed impossible, unimaginable.

One can only draw a very general view of our situation from the lines I’ve just written, without any of the details. I am not trying to recreate precise geographic chronologies of the Russo-German War, but to give, an account of the almost inconceivable difficulties we faced. I have never had more than a very approximate idea of our movements and centers of operation, and would certainly be incapable of drawing an accurate diagram of the front at any point in the war. That is the province of the various disbanded staffs. I, on the other hand, can describe certain moments down to the last detail. A simple smell can revive a whole tragic past for me, and leave me, for long stretches of time, wrapped in memory, and lost to the present.

I know in my bones what our watchword “Courage” means — from days and nights of resigned desperation, and from the insurmountable fear which one continues to accept, even though one’s brain has ceased to function normally. I know what it means, remembering deliberate immobility against frozen soil, whose coldness penetrates to the marrow of the bones, and the howling of a stranger in the next hole. I know that one can call on all the saints in heaven for help without believing in any God: and it is this that I must describe, even if it means plunging back into a nightmare for nights at a time. For that is the substance of my task: to reanimate, with all the intensity I can summon, those distant cries from the slaughterhouse.

Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves. They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual. One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort, considering oneself fortunate not to be describing the events in a letter home, writing from a hole in the mud. One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial, and not worth any white hairs. Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace; only an idiot could be really disturbed by a question of salary. One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired, as I am writing about it now, at dawn, while my asthma attack wears off. And even now, in my sleepless exhaustion, how gentle and easy peace seems!

Those who read about Verdun or Stalingrad, and expound theories later to friends, over a cup of coffee, haven’t understood anything. Those who can read such accounts with a silent smile, smile as they walk, and feel lucky to be alive.

I shall now resume my account of our life and how we began to regain our health and spirits, despite the distant thunder of guns.

“It was too good to last,” muttered the Sudeten, as we watched the stream of troop carriers and other vehicles which had been flooding back for the past twenty-four hours.

Each house in the small hamlet had become temporary headquarters for groups of officers deliberating the immediate fate of the men they were leading. The men themselves waited patiently beside their equipment — whose total mass must have been at least ten times as great as the mass of the buildings. We had just been chased from our billets, and were waiting under the trees at the edge of the village. Our entire company was there, grouped in order, with our equipment loaded into civilian vehicles. A rough wind swept across the dried steppe, raising clouds of dust that veiled the empty horizon.

“They’ve thrown us out!” said the veteran to a heavy drinker named Woortenbeck.

“But we’ve left them nothing but empty bottles.”

They waved toward the newly-arrived troops who had pushed us from the isbas where we’d been taking it easy.

“I packed all the samahonka that was left under the seats of the car.”

“Good for you, Woortenbeck,” shouted a thin sergeant.

“Samahonka’s for an elite unit like us. The rest can get water from the troughs.”

I had made a new friend my own age, who spoke French well. Holen Grauer had spent some time studying in France in ’41. Then the army had collared him, promising him that he would be able to continue his studies as well as provide the indispensable value of his presence in the service. Like me, he had been overwhelmed by military enthusiasm at the age of sixteen, and had volunteered, marching in step, and singing “Wolken ziehn dahin, daher,” in the impeccable ranks of the Wehrmacht. Then he had experienced the war through Poland and across a huge expanse of Russia, in Belgorod, and on the sack where we were sitting, contemplating the world and the war.

Like me, he had dreamed of becoming a famous aviator, piloting JU-87s, and like me, all he retained of this dream was a vision of huge birds screaming as they swooped down from the sky. As we couldn’t speak of the ordinary life we had never shared, the shattered dream we had so much desired often illuminated our misfortune.

Hals had made himself scarce for the last few days: his girl, who helped him forget the war, had absorbed him almost entirely. He had just reappeared with one of his comrades in sin. His forehead was creased by an anxious frown, and he couldn’t stop fretting. He unburdened himself to Grauer and me: “If Captain Wesreidau won’t let Emi come with us, the Reds will kill her. We can’t let that happen.”

“I understand how you feel,” I said to Hals.

Woortenbeck and the veteran, who were amused by our innocence, roared with laughter.

“If everyone in the company brought along the girl he’s sleeping with, there wouldn’t be enough transportation in the whole division.”

“But there’s no question of that, you bastards.”

“Don’t cry over it. You’ll have plenty of time to do the same thing somewhere else.”

“You’re too thick to understand what I’m talking about.”

There were many jokes on this subject, which Hals did not find funny.

“Are you in love with her, Hals?” I asked, quite by chance, understanding, because of Paula, what “being in love” meant.

Hals continued to bristle.

“Because it would certainly be possible to fall in love with a whore.”

“Sure. Why not?” said Grauer, who undoubtedly was about as experienced in these matters as I.

Hals calmed down somewhat.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, taking us each by the shoulder. “With you two, at least, it’s possible to talk.”

When we had drawn apart, he unburdened himself. He had fallen head over heels in love and was certain he could never love anyone else. On that point he was absolutely beyond any reason or argument. As for me, despite my earlier certainty that I could never mention Paula to anyone, I found myself pouring out the whole story to Hals and Grauer.

“So that’s why you had such a long face at the end of leave,” said Hals. “Why didn’t you say anything? I would have understood, you know.”

We talked over our amorous difficulties for a long time, and Hals decided I was lucky.

“You, at least, are sure to see her again,” he said, opening his mess tin. Through eyes misty with youthful passion, we watched the sky grow dark and the stars come out.

Our company moved out at dawn, heading west. During the day we watched an aerial combat which revived — for Grauer and me — all our old feelings about the Luftwaffe. Our ME-109s had the upper hand, and seven or eight Yabos fell from the sky in whirling flames, like enlarged fireworks.

Toward noon, we reached an important divisional base. Thirty companies, including ours, were regrouped to form a large motorized armored section.

For the first time, we were given over-garments of reversible cloth: white on one side and ordinary camouflage on the other. We were also given medical checkups, which we hadn’t expected, and drew a large quantity of supplies. A Panzer colonel commanded our group, which was classified as “autonomous.”

We were surprised by the quantity of new supplies for our armored section. Everywhere, drivers and mechanics were giving their machines a final look over, and reving the enormous tank engines.

Tiger tanks on Porsche bodies roared as their engines began to turn over. From the sound of it, we could have been at the start of a giant motor race. We waited about two hours for the order to leave.

Hals, Grauer, several other friends, and I were loaded onto a brand-new truck, which had tires in front and treads at the back. We drove as far as some woods on the edge of an airfield. Everything was perfect, except for the whirlwind of dust raised by our passage. The new vehicles had all been fitted with huge filters against this hazard; some of the filters were so big it was impossible to shut the hoods of the trucks or put back all of the heavy metal plating which protected the tank engines.

In the welcome shade, we shook our clothes, which were gray with dust. Although we had only gone a short distance, dust had penetrated everything, especially our parched throats.

“Damned country!” someone grumbled. “Even the autumn’s unlivable here!”

A second group as large as ours joined us. We were now spread over several acres of brush. A short distance away, Wesreidau had just joined a cluster of officers, who were conferring beside a large radio truck entirely covered with camouflage netting, and all but indistinguishable from the leaves of the woods. Thin scraps of cloth in the whole range of woodland colors fluttered and rustled in the wind, like the leaves themselves.

We were a powerful, well-organized unit. Our two groups together included six or seven thousand men, about a hundred tanks, an equal number of machine-gun carriers, and several mobile machine shops. There were also three companies of light cavalry, equipped with sidecars, who were supposed to seek out the enemy and guide the unit to him. During this period, which was already very critical for the army, materiel was concentrated in motorized units, which in turn were supposed to support selected under equipped infantry divisions. It is certain that the abundance of impeccable, well-conceived new materiel showered upon us at this time gave our morale, which had been faltering seriously since Belgorod, a much needed lift. Soldiers once more walked about with the assured air of men who feel that everything is going well. Only Hals was miserable, because he had been forced to abandon his Emi to a fate which was almost certainly predictable. He was inconsolable.

“They should cut the balls off soldiers in wartime. That would stop fellows like Hals from making things so hard for themselves,” murmured Woortenbeck.

“Have you ever heard of eunuchs making war?”

“Well,” our chaplain put in, “geldings are just as strong as other horses.”

Luckily, the padre had already proved that he was as much inclined that way as any of us, otherwise we would have imagined the worst and refused to listen to him.

When it was dark, our formidable armored column took off. As I watched, I began to understand the powerful impression our long columns of Panzers must have made at the beginning of the war, when they invaded the countries we still occupied. The roaring masses of tanks, their exhausts bursting into intermittent flame, gathered speed, and passed our heavy trucks, spreading out fanwise across the large and favorable terrain. We felt curiously moved and stirred by the sight.

We drove through the deepening darkness, enveloped by a terrible uproar and din, which must have been audible for a great distance. As usual, the common soldiers knew very little about their situation, and for us this movement seemed to mean that everything was going better.

We felt very strong, and in fact, as a group, we were strong. We didn’t realize that a general and laborious retreat was under way throughout the central sector, approximately from Smolensk to Kharkov, involving whole divisions and several hundred thousand men. In our case, our rate of progress was determined by the speed of our engines, but this was not generally so. Hundreds of regiments stripped of even the basic necessities were withdrawing on foot, while fighting constantly against an enemy who enjoyed an almost unbelievable numerical superiority. This time, our armies were even without the horses we had used the year before for dragging heavy machinery through the snow, as most of them had died during that winter. We were also seriously short of fuel. Everywhere, columns of vehicles in perfect condition were burned to keep them from falling into enemy hands, while the infantry plodded slowly westward in tattered boots. The Russians were well aware of our disarray and worked overtime, hoping to weaken the center army.

All our available resources were placed at the disposition of certain units which were then reorganized from top to bottom and sent out to deal with particular desperate situations. This is what happened to our group, giving us the impression, for a couple of weeks, that we once again controlled the steppe. Our principal difficulty, which was clear to us even then, was the question of supply, as we always reached the prearranged sectors too late.

At dawn, when our Panzergruppe stopped, both men and machines were gray with dust. As planned, we had reached a vast forest, which stretched right across the eastern horizon. We were allowed two hours to rest and put them to immediate use, as the jolting of the trucks had been exhausting; but we were wakened again before we had really slept. The weather was perfect, with a soft, almost cool breeze rustling the autumn leaves, and this perfection made everything seem easier. We jumped on board again, wreathed in smiles. Toward noon the dispatch riders, who were always quite far ahead of us, rejoined the front of the column. Brief orders were issued, and shortly afterward a large part of our group turned off for a village which was soon in sight. We could hear the sound of automatic weapons, and before we quite realized what was happening, about fifteen Tiger tanks were firing at a small cluster of houses.

Our heavy tractor was pulling a couple of sixteen-barrel rocket launchers. We were told to prepare for action, and everyone flung himself down on the ground, regretting that the tranquility of such a beautiful day was going to be disturbed.

There seemed to be nothing for us to do. The tanks and one mortar unit whirled like Sioux around the village, which was soon blazing. In the distance, some Russian artillery, whose presence we hadn’t suspected, opened a restrained fire. Several groups were detached and sent to deal with it. They returned twenty minutes later with two or three hundred Russian prisoners. Then the tanks drove through the burnt-out village, knocking down everything which was still standing. The whole operation took less than three-quarters of an hour. Then the whistle blew, calling us back to our places, and we went on our way. During the afternoon we also flattened two advanced Soviet positions. The Russians were so surprised to see us that they offered almost no resistance.

On the second day we reached Konotop, in a dense swarm of troops looking for transport.

Our group moved to the southwest to meet a strong Russian army. We had been supplied in town under the horrified eyes of the Commissariat officers, who had to give us the gas they had been saving for their own personal use. Twenty minutes later, we were in contact with advanced Russian elements, which surprised us. In town, our soldiers were busy with odd jobs, like repairing bicycles. Our tanks were briefly engaged, and then withdrew on orders.

We drove for the rest of the day to reach a point where, according to plan, we should have been supplied. We arrived at the dump just a few minutes before the engineers blew it up. An enormous silo filled with tin cans, drinks, and foods of all kinds was about to be burned. We stuffed our pockets and every cranny in our trucks with everything we could grab, but we had to leave behind enough to feed the whole division for several days, and the flames consumed precious provisions which would have made a great difference somewhere else.

Hals watched the silo collapse with tears in his eyes, cramming as much food into his mouth as his stomach could possibly hold. The whole company witnessed the scene with regret, puffing on the cigars we’d been able to save. Then we had about six hours’ rest before returning to business. During this time, the Red Army entered Konotop, and the German forces withdrew, fighting hard as they went.

Our group thrust violently into the south wing of the Russian offensive, and once again our tanks opened a passage for us through the enemy reserves, which scattered before our guns were ready to fire. However, that evening, the Russians turned away from the town, and concentrated their efforts on us. Our tanks made a half turn, and left six of theirs in flames. All the guns we’d brought with us were prepared to fire, and I saw our famous rocket launchers go into action for the first time.

Commanded by Captain Wesreidau, our company and two others were used to protect the left wing of an armored detachment. Some of our fellows squeezed onto the platforms of the motorized geschnauz. The rest tramped along behind the machines, which proceeded at more or less a normal walking pace. It is strange how often the sense of having the initiative can lead men to confront an enemy far stronger than they. The progress of our Panzers had seemed so irresistible during the last couple of days that everything seemed possible to us. Our three companies, in groups of thirty, tramped through the relatively cool night among the ragged stands of brush scattered across this part of the plain. From the near distance, the roar of our engines filled the air, giving us a sense of reassurance, and, we hoped, a proportionate sense of alarm to the Soviets who were trying to intercept us. From time to time we could hear shots, which were undoubtedly intended for the shadowy figures fleeing through the brush. We went on in this way for about two miles, until suddenly we were surrounded by flares, shooting upward and throwing their light onto the ground all around us. Everyone — that is to say, every one of our eight hundred souls — plunged down in a single movement. Our steel helmets, which in theory had a dull finish, glinted in the flashes of brilliant light. In no time, the armored cars had turned back into the brush, their formidable barrels swinging silently in search of a moving silhouette. We braced ourselves for a shower of missiles from the Russian bomb throwers, instantly aware of the shrinking sensation which comes with bad moments.

Two violet German flares shot into the sky. We knew that this was the signal to advance. After a moment of surprise and hesitation, we began to crawl forward, taking every precaution. A few men stood up, and advanced bent double. Most of the Russian rockets had already landed, and we took advantage of the lull to make a leap forward. I reached a small hollow edged with low scrub. A moment later, two companions caught up with me, and the sound of their quick, loud breathing betrayed the nervous tension knotting their throats. There is nothing more terrifying than moving at night through a piece of wooded or bushy country, in which every shrub might release a sudden flash of white light to dazzle and blind — a moment before the intense pain which could mean the end of life. There was no way of keeping our progress silent, and for an invisible Russian waiting with his finger on the trigger any moment might present an ideal opportunity.

However, everything remained more or less quiet. The enemy, who must have been very close to us, decided to stay hidden, and kept us in a state of prolonged tension. We continued to advance, slowly and cautiously. My temples throbbed, and my body was taut, ready for the plunge which might be necessary any minute.

We heard a voice some twenty or thirty yards to our left, and the three of us shoved our noses into the dry grass. For a moment, we thought we were finished. I fitted my Mauser into the hollow of my shoulder with my eyes screwed up, anticipating the first shot. However, nothing more happened. On the left, where we’d heard the noise, two Russians had just surrendered to some of our men. A short distance in the other direction, the same thing happened. We couldn’t understand it. What could have been happening inside the heads of these men who’d been ordered to intercept us? It’s anybody’s guess. Maybe they thought they were cut off from their main body of men and were afraid. For at that time, when the spirit of vengeance was the rule, the Russians were just as afraid of us as we were of them. We even thought we might have fallen into some kind of trap.

An hour went by before we were ordered to regroup. During that time, our tanks went back into action, and as we silently withdrew, the flashes of their guns lit our faces with glimmers of pink light. We climbed into our trucks and started off again, apparently in the same direction as before. Dispatch riders whirled busily around our group of heavy transports. About two miles ahead, the tanks were apparently pushing back an enemy who was putting up only a feeble show of resistance. In these circumstances, the first light of dawn fell over our column — or rather columns — for we were out of line by as much as five hundred yards, both to the left and to the right.

During the night our forward troops had been firing continuously. Ahead of us, through a veil of fog, we could see a town whose name I no longer remember. The motorized troops of the Gross Deutschland were fighting through streets lined with houses with tightly closed shutters. Our vehicles moved slowly forward, with soldiers walking on either side, holding their guns, and ready for anything. We came to a small square where a group of vehicles which included two ambulances had stopped. About thirty Russian civilians were standing under guard beside one of the houses. We kept straight on. At the edge of town we passed several tank crews patching up minor damage. The miserable shacks all around them were on fire. We stopped for a moment and stared at what was left of these wood-and-straw hovels. There was no sidewalk, no orientation or alignment of the buildings; this place, like the outlying districts of innumerable Russian towns, looked like an oversized barnyard. Watering troughs or preikas obstructed without any rhyme or reason passageways which might eventually be turned into streets. Villages buried in the wilds of the steppe seemed more attractive, with their clusters of isbas turning their backs to the north. The outlying districts and even most of the town centers I saw — with the exception of Kiev — were of an incredible dreariness.

We had stopped above all to wash and get water, and we knew we had only a very short time. Some men beat their clothes against trees or the sides of buildings, as if they were ambulatory doormats; others drenched themselves with water from the preikas or wash troughs, although the day was cool and a damp wind boded no good. Nonetheless, we were frantic with thirst from the dust stirred up by our machines. German water bottles are small, so we took along extra water in anything we could find. Next, joined and encouraged by the veteran, we climbed over a low wall surrounding a small orchard. The branches of the nearest tree were weighed down with masses of skimpy, unripe pears, which refreshed our parched mouths even though they were hard and sour. We were busily picking them when a Russian popped up, like a jack-in-the box. He had summoned up the nerve to come out of his house, carrying a kind of bowl of braided straw full of pears like the ones we were nibbling. He jabbered a few words to the veteran, who had gone over to him. His white face was trying to smile, but was only able to manage a stiff and desperate grin. His eyes were glued to the straps of the veteran’s gun belt, which crossed his chest, and especially to his spandau.

“Davai,” said the veteran, reaching out a hand. The Russian held up the basket, from which our friend took a pear. He threw it away and took another, which he also rejected. This was repeated some five or six times. Then the veteran began to shout at the Popov, who backed away, with nervous little steps.

“They’re all half rotten,” roared the veteran as he came back to us.

The Russian, hoping to save his orchard, had offered us the putrefying fruit he kept for his pig. As soon as we realized this, we shook the tree, which filled a tent cloth. The Popov disappeared into his lair.

We could hear guns to the northwest; our advance troops must have made contact with the enemy. We were ordered to move out. Half an hour later, we climbed down from the trucks again. The feld’s whistle was blowing for combat readiness. Fighting was in progress about half a mile, away, in a small village built round a factory.

Wesreidau quickly explained that we had to neutralize a large enemy force which was holding the place. Two companies had been detached for the job; the rest of the group would keep moving.

With our guns slung, we walked toward the village, while our tractors pulled our rocket launchers and anti-tank guns into firing position. Almost immediately, the Russians, who were watching from their trenches, showered us with a rain of shells. If their aim had been more precise, it would have been the end of us. As it was, their only effect was to make everyone run for cover. Our two companies spread out and partly surrounded the fortified point. Then we had about ten minutes of quiet while our captain, sheltered behind a pile of stones, discussed the forthcoming action with his subordinates.

The noncoms rejoined us and told us what positions we should try to reach. We scanned our surroundings as they talked, observing with our combat sense, which by now was quite well developed, every fold and hollow which might offer some shelter. Everything was quiet, and the. instructions seemed ludicrously easy.

Nothing was moving, and the silence would have been total, if it had not been for the vehicles of our armored group bumping along the rocky road below us, filling the air with exhaust and deafening noise. The Russians kept quiet, and many of us thought they had already been knocked out. The immediate presence of our main body of troops reassured us, and it seemed likely that the approaching fight would be no more than a skirmish.

We were ordered to move out, and from every nook and cranny troops proceeded toward the village, bent double. Here and there we could hear someone laughing, and wondered if it was innocence or bravado.

Our men reached the first houses. The Russians remained silent and invisible. I had just joined my group, which included Hals, the dear friend who so often saved me from feeling completely lost. His innocent, good-natured face smiled at me from the crowd, and I smiled back. We exchanged a look which said a great deal more than many long conversations do.

The war seemed quite different to us now that we had an aerial escort. Our terrible memories of the Don, and the retreat from Belgorod belonged to the past, and to bad times which wouldn’t come back. Of course, we knew that the war wasn’t over, but for the last week we had been making the enemy run.

We were watching the progress of about thirty of our men who were leaping through the ruins of a brickworks. Five or six Panzer grenadiers were running along beside the principal building. One of them had just thrown a grenade through a gaping window. A moment later the air was shaken by its explosion, which was immediately followed by a heartrending scream of a kind we had often heard before. We knew that that nothing must distract us from our objective; however, we saw a human figure dressed in white fall from the window and roll down to the feet of our soldiers. It was a Russian civilian, a woman, who had been cowering beside the window, probably praying to all the saints. In spite of her fall, she seemed to be unhurt, and ran toward us, screaming. One of our soldiers lifted his gun, and we thought we heard it fire, but nothing happened. The Russian woman in her white shirt ran screaming through the ranks of petrified men.

No one said a word, and for a half minute, the war seemed to be standing still. Our grenadiers had already kicked in the door, and were in the house. Three other civilians came out, two men and a child. Once again we watched as they ran through our astounded ranks.

The Russians had not evacuated the village, and we would have to take the civilian population into account.

Wesreidau, who had just realized this, installed a loudspeaker on a half-track, which drove between the rows of houses waving a white rag fastened to a pole. The loudspeaker crackled out some nasal Russian words, while the four men on the half-track looked desperately at their comrades, who had remained in shelter.

The loudspeaker must have been giving the Russians a chance to evacuate civilians or to lay down their arms. But the half-track had gone less than a hundred yards when the irreparable occurred. It suddenly seemed to fly upward, as a series of deafening explosions rang out, and five or six huts disintegrated. The truck had driven over a minefield.

A heavy cloud of dust and smoke hid the village from our eyes. We could see two black silhouettes gesticulating in the flaming halftrack, and hear them screaming.

“Look out for mines!” someone shouted.

But his voice was drowned by the roaring of mortars and Paks, as the ground in front of us burst into geysers of flame and earth. Thatched roofs flew off in one piece, leaving the houses exposed, like bald men who’ve lost their wigs.

The Russians reacted, using at least two batteries of heavy howitzers. Every shell landing within 150 yards of us made the ground shake under our feet, and sucked the air from our lungs. Despite the almost certain presence of mines, the assault whistles blew. Everyone left shelter and ran for the nearest embankment. Our mortars pounded the ground some thirty yards ahead of us, to disrupt the arrangement of mines, and if possible explode some of them. The Russians, with multi-barreled machine guns set up on trucks, poured a devastating fire on everything they could see.

What had seemed so simple only fifteen minutes earlier now looked impossibly difficult, and suddenly no one felt confident. There were five of us hiding in the rubble of the brickworks, and our faces, pressed into the ground, knocked against the dirt with every explosion. From another heap of shattered bricks, a noncom was shouting at the top of his lungs to fire at anything we could see. One at a time we risked looking out, but the whine of shells made even the boldest duck down immediately.

Only our mortars and rocket launchers kept on firing steadily and profusely at an enemy who, for the moment, had the upper hand. In the distance, the metallic factory tower we had noticed when we arrived was proving curiously resistant to our Pak shells, which must have passed right through it at several points. Once again, we had to jump to a more advanced position. Some men were shouting to give themselves courage. Others, like me, ground their teeth, and clenched their sweaty hands on their guns, less from emotion than from a reflex akin to that of a drowning man hanging on to a rope.

Accompanied by deep or shrill sounds, and brilliant or fading light, the earth flew up all around us, sometimes engulfing pathetic human figures dressed as soldiers. About thirty yards away, on our left, five of our men who had hidden behind a small wooden building, like a blacksmith’s shed, fell, one after the other. The last two had no idea where to run, and looked frantically for the enemy who would presently knock them off too. Finally, they threw themselves down among the bodies of their companions. A thick stream of blood ran out from the tangled mass of limbs and trunks and sank into the gray dust, which absorbed it like blotting paper.

Suddenly, to our left, a raging fire broke out in a cluster of four or five sheds. Its smoke and heat climbed into the sky, and a huge sheet of flame quivered and grew with astounding speed, giving off giant wreaths of black smoke and intense heat, which we could feel even where we were.

Our men surged back rapidly from that quarter. The metal roofs of the sheds buckled in the heat, and the isbas closest to the fire burst into flame. A horde of Russians — both civilian and military — ran from the burning buildings; our soldiers shot them down like rabbits.

One of our shells must have hit a gasoline dump. The resulting inferno routed the panic-stricken enemy, who paid dearly for having concentrated so many men beside such a volcano. Their men rushed through the confusion with their hands in the air, occasionally remembering the way to other Russian entrenchments.

Our Paks were now concentrating their fire on the area immediately surrounding the factory, and the job of cleaning up the people running from the gasoline dump was left to us. The fore-sight of my gun often disappeared in a swiftly moving Russian silhouette. A light pressure on the trigger, a puff of smoke, which for an instant veiled the end of my weapon, and my Mauser looked for another victim. Will I be forgiven? Was I responsible? That young muzhik, already wounded several times, more bewildered than anything else by the lethal uproar whose purpose was as obscure to him as it was to me, who stayed in my sights a moment too long and then turned ashen and clutched his breast with both hands before making a half turn and falling face down onto the ground — shall I ever deserve pardon for that? Can I ever forget?

But the almost drunken exhilaration which follows fear induces the most innocent youths on whatever side to commit inconceivable atrocities. Suddenly, for us, as it had been for Ivan a moment before, everything that moved through the din and the smoke became hateful, and overwhelmed us with a desire for destruction, a desire which led many soldiers to their deaths as they pursued the panic-stricken enemy.

Our big guns pulverized the top end of the village, where the Russian artillery had dug in. In the general flight, the few wretched hovels which had not been burned fell, one by one, into our young, criminal hands. We ran full speed over ground which might have been mined; nothing could stop us. Nothing stopped my good friend Hals from jumping across a stable threshold and shooting the Russian gunners who were desperately trying to fire their jammed weapon. Nothing could stop the glorious 8th and 14th companies of German infantry. As the communiqués later observed: “With an irresistible thrust, our valiant troops retook the town of X this morning….” Nothing could stop our demoniac assault, not even the rending cries of obergefreiter Woortenbeck, who clenched his trembling hands on an iron grille and stiffened himself against the death which flooded from the bloody pulp which had once held his entrails.

A few more of our comrades were destroyed before we reached the factory. At that point, the Paks stopped firing to spare our own troops, who were right beside the Soviet defenders. The Russians clung stubbornly to what they still had, particularly to the sector immediately around the factory.

I no longer remember exactly what happened. My group joined the veteran and his men, who were snatching a few moments of rest in a large cement settling tank. We all emptied our water bottles without quenching our thirst. Everyone was covered with dust. A telephone operator settled down beside us, and spoke with Group Commandant Wesreidau. The fighting had died down somewhat, and the German troops were regrouping for the final assault. The veteran’s section had a mortar as well as its two F.M.s. Ours consisted of grenadiers armed with machine guns and rifles. Our sergeant placed us down the length of the cistern, specifying the points we should try to reach once the attack had started. We agreed to do as he asked before there was time for our terror to grow uncontrollable. These moments of waiting were often the hardest of all.

A group of Russians suddenly appeared, climbing through some dismantled scaffolding near the factory, waving a white cloth. There must have been at least sixty of them — all civilians — probably factory workers. Maybe they were partisans, and afraid of execution. They walked up to the veteran’s men, and turned themselves in; the anxiety stamped across every man’s face lent great pathos to the moment.

The veteran, who was fluent in Russian, talked to them. Protected by the white cloth, four of our men took the prisoners to the rear. It was one of those odd moments of calm, when it almost seemed as if a few friendly words between the adversaries might produce a settlement which would have allowed all of us to sit down and have a drink.

But in the madness of our existence the most simple things eluded us.

Everyone was absorbed by immediate necessities; most of us never even thought of the symbolic value of the steps those men had just taken — first steps back to the essentials of life. Even the exceptions to this general insensibility kept their wild eyes glued to the metallic wreckage of the factory, which we would soon be obliged to attack and enter. Animals, which have a stronger instinctive sense than human beings, turn and run from a fire. But we, the elect among living creatures, press forward, like moths to a candle. That is what we call courage — a quality I lack. Fear knotted my throat, and I felt like a sheep at the threshold of the slaughterhouse.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who had this feeling. The fellow beside me stared at me for a moment from his blackened face and murmured: “If only those bastards would give up!”

But our feelings, of course, were unimportant. The trench telephone rang and crackled out an order: “One-third of the men forward. Count off by threes.”

One, two, three… One, two, three… Like a miracle from heaven, I drew a “one,” and could stay in that splendid cement hole, which at that moment seemed to me as magnificent as any palace. It was a secure refuge in which I would have spent my days in gratitude so long as death was stalking outside. I cut off a smile, in case the sergeant should notice and send me onto the field, but inwardly thanked God, and Allah, and Buddha, and heaven, earth, water, fire, trees, anything I could think of, that I was in that cement depression, which had held God knows what kind of filth before it sheltered me.

The fellow beside me had number three. He was looking at me, with a long, desperate face, but I kept my eyes turned front, so he wouldn’t notice my joy and relief, and stared at the factory as if it were I who was going to leap forward, as if I were number three. But, in fact, everything was normal. “Drei” was my neighbor; he was going to inspect the factory. Then the sergeant made his fatal gesture, and the brave German soldier beside me sprang from his shelter with a hundred others.

Immediately, we heard the sound of Russian automatic weapons. Before vanishing to the bottom of my hole I saw the impact of the bullets raising little fountains of dust all along the route of my recent companion, who would never again contemplate the implications of number three. The noise of guns and grenades was deafening and almost drowned the cries of the fellows who’d been hit.

“Achtung! Nummer zwei, voraus!”

The veteran and his spandau ran up in turn.

Next, it was going to be me, along with everybody else who’d counted “one.” While everything outside was flashing and exploding, I thought for a moment about numbers. Usually, people begin counting with “one.” Why had they started with “three” this time? But I could only pose the question. Before there was time to consider it, my turn had come.

“Nummer eins, nachgehen, los!”

After a moment of hesitation, I sprang from my shelter like a jack-in-the-box, into madness. Everything looked gray, through a thick fog of whirling, choking dust, except for the glimmering flashes of light. In a few jumps I had reached the foundation of a shattered hut where a German soldier had died staring at the open breech of his machine gun. It’s strange how often human beings die without any kind of style. Two years before I had seen a woman run over by a milk truck, and had nearly fainted at the sight of her mangled body. Now, after two years in Russia, visible death meant nothing at all, and the tragic element of even the best murder novels seemed petty and frivolous.

With my watering eyes, I stared through the smoke, trying to see the enemy and do my duty.

About twenty-five yards away some trucks exploded into little fragments, one after the other, engulfing four or five running soldiers. Were the men German or Russian? I couldn’t tell.

I was with two companions in an open shelter made of logs packed with dirt, which the Russians had built to take a machine gun. We were more or less sitting on the mangled bodies of the four Popovs who’d been killed by grenades.

“I did that bunch in, with one shot,” shouted a strong young soldier from the Gross Deutschland.

A burst of mortar fire forced us down into the heap of enemy corpses. A shell hit the edge of the bunker, and the earth and logs blew apart, falling back onto our heads. The fellow huddled between me and a dead Russian was hit. As his body jerked up from the impact, I tensed myself to run. Another shell struck the shelter, disintegrating it. The debris poured down onto my legs and sent me reeling back against the opposite wall. I howled for help, sure that my legs were broken, and afraid to move. My trousers were ripped down the leg, but the bruised skin underneath was unbroken, although I could trace the red-violet passage of the blow I’d taken.

I plunged back into the heap of Russian corpses, falling onto the fellow who’d been hit a moment before. He let out a howl. We lay side by side, with our heads touching, as an avalanche of rubble poured down all around us.

“I’m wounded,” he groaned.

“Something is burning in my back. Call for a stretcher.”

I looked at him, and dazedly shouted: “Sänftentrager!”

But my ludicrous cries were lost in the deafening uproar of two spandaus firing quite near us. The big fellow from the Gross Deutschland was shouting at us to advance, as loud as he could: “Come on, fellows! Some of our boys are already at the water tank.”

I looked at the wounded man, who was staring at me with desperate, imploring eyes and clutching my sleeve. I didn’t know how to tell him that there was nothing I could do for him just then. The big soldier had jumped out of the shelter. I pulled myself brutally away, and turned my head. The wounded man called again, but I had already jumped from the shelter and was running like a madman after the other fellow, who was nearly fifteen yards ahead of me.

I joined another group who were hurriedly setting up two trench mortars, and helped them maneuver the tubes into position. Instantly our mortar bombs were shooting almost straight up. A landser, whose face was pouring blood, shouted that the Russians had withdrawn to the central tower.

The veteran, whom I hadn’t noticed before, let out a savage howl: “Got ’em!”

As he shouted, a white flash lit his face, which was covered with an incredible layer of dust, and a geyser of flame enveloped the tower. The Russian defense crumbled and fell under the impact of our concentrated fire. Our assault groups moved in and cleaned up the last resistance. Another German soldier fell, clutching his face, and then it was all over, except for a few widely scattered shots.

I and my companions ran into the ruins of what had once been a factory but was now reduced to rubble beyond classification. Once again, we were victorious; but the victory gave us no joy. Stupefied by the noise and the nervous tension, we wandered among the twisted, collapsed metal roofs. A landser with a face drawn by exhaustion mechanically picked up an enameled plaque which had something written on it in Cyrillic characters, perhaps a direction, or the word for “toilet.”

The town had fallen to us. There were about three hundred prisoners, in addition to two hundred enemy dead or wounded. The noncoms regrouped us, and led us back through the smoking devastation of the village. Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau reviewed his two companies, and called roll. About sixty men were missing. We collected the wounded, and regrouped them to wait for our three orderlies to give them first aid. There were about fifteen wounded men, including Holen Grauer, whose right eye was gone.

Finding water was difficult. The preikas had been smashed, and we finally had to lower soup kettles down a well in the ashes of one of the isbas. The water was black with soot. The wounded were screaming with pain; most of them were delirious.

There were also about seventy-five Russian wounded, who presented a dilemma to our Kommandant. In principle, we should have helped them too, as best we could. But we were under orders to rejoin our division as soon as the operation was completed. So we abandoned the Russian wounded, and piled ours into and onto the vehicles we had, which bore no resemblance to ambulances, or even to ordinary trucks — a few gun carriages and a couple of light artillery tractors. We felt exhausted, disgusted, and numb.

There was also the question of how to move the prisoners. There was no room in our collection of already overloaded vehicles. Finally, a sidecar fitted with an F.M. slowly drove some fifty of the prisoners along ahead of it. We turned them loose two days later, for lack of anything better to do with them.

As an autonomous group, we were faced with extremely difficult problems of supply. In theory, the vehicles carrying munitions and gasoline picked up the flotsam of war as their loads grew lighter. But the division already had some eleven hundred prisoners, and we didn’t know what to do with them. We set off with clusters of men — German and Russian — hanging on to everything that could roll.

We all looked back at the town, from which a thick cloud of smoke was climbing, and spreading out to the horizon. The dark gray sky was threatening rain, which would soon fall on the graves of forty German soldiers sacrificed to neutralize a single point of enemy resistance, which we weren’t even interested in holding. We moved on to another operation, not as part of any design to conquer, but simply as part of an attempt to protect our vast withdrawal of troops to the west bank of the Dnieper.

No one smiled. We knew that our victory couldn’t make any difference to the outcome of the war, and only hoped that it might have some strategic interest. The experience of the battle itself had been as always — more fear and, for some, like my friend Grauer, irreparable mutilation.

A young blond soldier, huddled beside the driver of the machine which was carrying about thirty of us, began to play on his harmonica. The melody rang softly in our nearly insensible ears: “…mit dir, Lilli Marlene, mit dir, Lilli Marlene…”

The music was slow and filled with a nostalgia which weighed heavily on our exhaustion. Hals was listening, his mouth hanging half open, making no sound, and staring at nothing.

8. THE BREAKTHROUGH AT KONOTOP

We drove for an hour — which meant about thirty miles — before it grew dark.

We were all anxious to stop so that we could get rid of the thick, choking dust which coated us from head to foot. We were also exhausted and longing for sleep. Although a good bed in a warm barracks would have been paradise, any place where we could have stretched out and lost consciousness would have done, and we knew that when we did stop we would collapse onto the ground, and sink immediately into blackness.

The dark sky was filled with heavy black clouds lit up on their outer fringes. Large drops of rain began to fall as the storm broke. The rain — so often a curse — seemed like a blessing this time, washing off the filthy faces we turned up to meet it. It soon became a downpour, running down our collars and over our bodies, like a gift from Providence to friend and foe alike, making us all smile with a sense, however partial, of returning well-being. The soaking cloth of the uniforms on our tightly packed bodies clung to all of us — gray-green for the Germans, violet-brown for the Russians. We all grinned at each other without distinction, like players from two teams in the showers after a match. There was no longer any feeling of hatred or vengeance, only a sense of life preserved and overwhelming exhaustion. The rain became so heavy that we had to improvise shelter, and covered our heads and shoulders with our ground sheets. Although hardly anyone understood more than a few words of the other language, we were all laughing and trading cigarettes — Hannover cigarettes for machorka tobacco from the Tartar plain. We smoked and joked over nothing — a “nothing” which in fact represented the most absolute human joy I had ever known. The exchange of tobacco, the smoke under the ground sheets, which made us choke and cough, and the simple fact of laughter without reserve — all of this made a small island of joy in a sea of tragedy, which affected us like a shot of morphine. We were able to forget the hate which divided us, as our stupefied senses reawakened to an awareness of life. Understanding nothing, I laughed uncontrollably, as a curious sensation took hold of me and filled my veins. Suddenly I was covered with gooseflesh, as one is during a particularly moving piece of music. The rain was beating on the metal hood. Would we have to shoot our Russian fellow passengers tomorrow? That seemed impossible; it was impossible that such things could continue.

We had just caught up with a regiment of motorized cavalry, stopped in the middle of nowhere. Streams of water were running down every exposed surface; the dull finish of the sidecars sheltering under the dripping leaves of the trees at the edge of the woods glistened with raindrops.

Wesreidau climbed down from his sidecar to talk to the cavalry commander. The fellows in the sidecars had long oilskins which pretty well covered them, and kept them more or less dry. However, all their camping equipment was in the trucks of the supply column, so instead of sleeping they had to spend their rest period tramping up and down through the puddles.

Two fellows distributed food: a stale sausage for each German soldier and loaves of bread to be divided among eight. There was no food for the prisoners, whose rations, in theory, would be provided by the division. We thought of walking off a short way to devour our meager portions, but we were bunched around our dripping communal plates. The Russians, who had nothing but their lives, kept their feverish eyes fixed on the food, which was impossible to hide. Finally, our torn and filthy hands broke the hard bread and held it out to the men who had been trying to kill us only a few hours before.

Our stomachs were still rumbling with hunger five minutes later, as we swallowed down the last mouthfuls of our rations. Everyone was thirsty, and our water bottles had been emptied after the fighting. Like feverish sheep, we needed water. We had obtained permission to leave the trucks to relieve ourselves, but for no other reason. We were in the middle of wild, uninhabited country, and there were no preikas or drinking troughs. However, the rain was still pouring down, and we collected the run-off from the backs of the trucks, and the leaves, and the puddles in the oilcloths. When we had quenched our thirst, we left with the cavalry regiment.

Finally, the rain stopped, leaving us chilled and bone-tired, to the misery of our throbbing machines. Lightning was still streaking through the sky behind us and over our heads, and the thunder was still rumbling. Ahead, there were other flashes too, which unfortunately had nothing to do with the storm. These were produced by Stalin’s organs, firing at the division blocked behind Konotop. As we drew nearer, we were able to gauge the size of the battle by the intensity of the fire flashing across the horizon. Soon we also could hear the loud and continuous sound of guns.

We had been hoping for a refuge where we could spend the night. Instead, we were faced with the anguish of a fresh hell, and a fresh uncertainty of survival, as war tightened its viselike grip once again around our throbbing temples. The young face of the blond boy who had played the harmonica a short time before hardened suddenly into the face of a man. Was it exhaustion, or did he simply want to get it over with? In the space of a few moments, he suddenly aged twenty years.

We arrived at the town, which was black and deserted. Intermittent flashes from the battle being fought somewhere to the west of us, through the outer fringes of the town, lit the darkness. The thunder of explosions filled the air, shattering window panes and breaking off the gutters of the houses all around us.

The rain had begun again, falling in small, delicate drops. We were ordered to leave the trucks, and jumped down like sleepwalkers. The shock of contact with the ground reverberated through our numbed bodies, and we felt sickness rising in undulating waves, along the entire length of our spinal columns. In a herd, we followed our leaders, while the trucks drove off to a nearby street. I could feel the sleep weighting down my eyelids, and, only half awake, staggered like an automaton after the sound of the boots of the fellow in front of me, without grasping that I was going back into battle.

What happened that night at Konotop? I only know that there were explosions and fire and houses collapsing down the length of dark, indefinable back streets. There was a gutter full of running water, and there were my hard, heavy boots, which I scarcely had the strength to lift, and my big bony feet inside them, which felt as if they were growing smaller and smaller, and the heat of my throbbing temples, which had begun to burn with fever, and the crushing fatigue which had settled around my thin shoulders, trapped in the filth of my undershirt and waterlogged tunic, and the tangle of leather straps and cartridge belts, heavy with ammunition, and the incomprehensible, hostile world, whose weight we still had to bear, where we still had to march and crawl and tremble….

Toward morning, which dawned as pale as the last morning of a condemned man, I was overwhelmed by a crushing sleep, and briefly lost my waking nightmare. We collapsed in the shelter of an entrance way, which protected us from most of the rain, except when the wind blew a particularly strong gust. We spent a few hours there — then we were wakened, to stare at a hundred other faces as white and drawn as our own. Our closest relatives would probably have hesitated before identifying us. My eyes, which felt as if they had sunk into my aching head, instinctively looked around to see what the new day would bring.

Directly in front of the gate where we had slept was a building of several stories. Its gray walls were stained with long streaks which dribbled down from its gaping windows. A short distance to one side stood a cluster of miserable shacks which now offered shelter only to a few wandering cats, and troops looking for refuge. These buildings, which at their best could never have looked like much, now seemed soiled by the passage of something monstrous. Further along, the street was entirely blocked by the houses which had collapsed when the Russians had shelled the town the evening before.

I looked for something which might produce an instant of pleasure, and distract me for a moment from the effort of trying to control the spasmodic shivers which shook my whole body.

A sound behind me made me turn my head. The veteran was coming back with two canteens of hot soup, which he had found God knows where. I watched him blankly as he limped through the puddles and the scattered rubble. His uniform was as gray and filthy as the setting, and his thin, shaggy face beneath his heavy steel helmet seemed to fit perfectly with everything else. Above our heads, the sky flowed slowly toward the horizon, trailing gray clouds, like dirty rags, as far as the eye could see.

“Anyone who wants to eat better open his eyes,” the veteran called, putting down the canteens.

I quickly shook Hals, whose sleep, as always, seemed impenetrable. He jumped, but when he realized it wasn’t a new bombardment or attack he pulled himself together, muttering a few incomprehensible words, and finally stood up, rubbing his stiff and aching body.

“God, I’m sick of this,” he said, in a disgusted, weary voice.

“Where are we, and what the hell are we doing here?”

“Come and eat,” said the veteran.

In silence, we devoured the millet and soup, which was already beginning to cool. Some of the fellows preferred to sleep a little longer. Then we were ordered out again, and began to walk slowly through the devastated sector of Konotop. We were too exhausted to notice much, and walked without thinking or looking. When we were forced to recognize an explosion or an airplane, we slid to the ground without haste. Then we got up again… and so on. I was certainly ill. My head and back ached, probably from exhaustion, and I was shaking with the cold shivers of fever. But there was nothing to do about it. If I felt any worse later, I would try to get sent to a hospital — but, for that, I would have to faint.

We reached a section of the town that had suffered particularly heavy damage. In the ruins, we could see an enormous Tiger tank, which had ploughed a large furrow through the heaps of rubble and appeared to have been stopped by a mine, which had blown off its right tread. Despite this it was otherwise intact, and its gun was still spitting occasional shells at the enemy formations, which were very close.

Groups of soldiers hiding in the ruins seemed to be waiting for Ivan, who must have been digging in near by. We moved carefully through the rubble to a hole where Hals and I settled down. For at least a half mile ahead of us, and five hundred yards behind us, we could see nothing but wreckage. Groaning with the effort, we piled up all the solid pieces of rubble we could move, to keep ourselves off the bottom of the hole, which was covered with blackish water. We stared at each other in a kind of stupefied silence: we had already said everything there was to say under the circumstances. Our lives at that moment were reduced to waiting. The force of events had already inflicted enough horror to drive us mad.

“You really look filthy,” Hals said finally.

“I’m sick,” I said.

“We’re all sick,” Hals answered, his eyes fixed on our universe of destruction. Our exhausted eyes met for a moment, and I saw on my friend’s face an almost limitless depth of weariness and despair.

I was also haunted by the thought of what might happen to us. It seemed literally impossible that this existence could go on much longer. We had been living in this way for over a year now, like gypsies — except that that is far too mild a comparison. Even the poorest, most wretched gypsies lived better than we did. For over a year I had been watching my comrades die. Suddenly, all the memories of that year came flooding back: the Don, the “Third International,” Outcheni, the battalions of stragglers, Ernst, Tempelhof, Berlin, Magdeburg, the horrors of Belgorod, the retreat, and only yesterday Wootenbeck, his belly striped by a dozen streams of red blood, which ran down to his boots. What stroke of fortune had saved me from those giant explosions? So many men had already been consumed right in front of my horrified eyes that I wondered if what I had seen could possibly have been true. What miracle had preserved Hals, Lensen, the veteran, and the other survivors of our ill-fated unit? Although our luck had been almost incredible, and had spared us so far, it must almost surely run out, if this went on much longer. Tomorrow, perhaps the veteran, or Hals, or maybe even I would be buried. I suddenly felt terribly afraid. I looked out as far as I could see, in all directions. It would probably be my turn soon. I would be killed, just like that, and no one would even notice. We had all grown used to just about everything, and I would be missed only until the next fellow got it, wiping out the memory of preceding tragedies. As my panic rose, my hands began to tremble. I knew how terrible people looked when they were dead. I’d seen plenty of fellows fall face down in a sea of mud, and stay like that. The idea made me cold with horror. And my parents: I really should see them again; I couldn’t just die like that. And Paula? My eyes filled with tears…. Hals was looking at me, as still as that horrible landscape, indifferent to suffering, death, everything. There was nothing we could do about it — the screams of fear, the groans of the dying, the torrents of blood soaking into the ground like a vile sacrilege — nothing. Millions of men could suffer and weep and scream, and the war would go on, implacable and indifferent. We could only wait and hope; but hope for what? To escape dying face down in the mud? And the war? All it needed was an order from the authorities, and it would end — an order, which the men would respect like a sacrament. And why? Because, after all, the men were only human…. I went on crying, and muttering incoherently to my impassive companion.

“Hals,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here. I’m afraid.”

Hals looked at me, and then at the horizon.

“Get out? Where to? Go to sleep; you’re sick.”

I looked back at him with sudden hate. He too was part of this indifference and inertia.

The tank near us fired a shell, and the Russians sent back about half a dozen, scattering the piles of rubble a little further. Maybe they knocked off a few more of our fellows too: the veteran, perhaps. Suddenly it all seemed unbearable. My trembling hands clutched my head as if they were trying to crush it, and I sank into total despair. My sobs attracted Hals’s attention. He looked at me, almost in irritation.

“Go to sleep, for God’s sake. You can’t go on like that.”

“What difference does it make to you whether I sleep or die? You don’t give a damn, and nobody gives a damn. Nobody gives a damn about anything. And nobody will give a damn when you’re killed, either.”

“You’re right. So what?”

“So what? We’ve got to do something, for the love of God, and not just sit here in a stupor, the way you’re doing now.”

Hals’s listless eyes were without expression. His feeling of misery was probably as great as mine, but for the moment it was dulled, and his listlessness had overcome his outrage.

“Go to sleep, I tell you. You’re sick.”

“No!” I was shouting now. “I’d rather be killed and get it over with, right now.”

I jumped up, and left our hole. But before I had taken more than two steps Hals had grabbed me by the belt and pulled me back.

“Let go, Hals,” I shouted, louder than ever. “Let go, do you hear?”

“You’re going to shut up, for God’s sake! And calm down! And be quick about it!”

Hals clenched his teeth, and clasped his two big hands around my neck.

“You know as well as I do we’re all going to get it, one after the other. So let the hell go of me. What business is it of yours anyway? What difference does it make?”

“The difference is that I need to see your face from time to time, the way I need to see the veteran, or that bastard Lindberg. Do you hear? If you go on like his, I’ll smash you on the head, just to keep you quiet.”

“But if Ivan gets me, I’ll be dead anyway, and you won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

“If that happens, I’ll cry, the way I did when my little brother Ludovik died. But he died because he was sick; he didn’t do it on purpose. And if Ivan gets you, you won’t have done it on purpose.”

A violent shiver engulfed my whole body. Tears continued to pour down my cheeks, and I felt like kissing my poor friend’s filthy face. Hals loosened his grip, and then let go. A burst of fire forced him to duck. He looked at me, and we both smiled.

At the end of the day, our third attempt to move failed like the others. By this time, the piles of rubble which stretched out to the dark horizon seemed to have been leveled absolutely flat, with no protruding shapes — although a few chimneys were in fact still standing.

Once again, the darkness was streaked with white lights, which glimmered back at me from the insensible retinas of my companion, and we began another interminable night of fear, in a dark hole, with a pool of cold water under the stones, and an exhaustion so heavy one wished to die; a night in which nothing — or everything — could happen.

There were fires, and explosions, and short or long flashes of light, which killed the sleep pressing at the backs of our eyeballs. We listened to the cries of our fellow combatants, and the lethal rain of rockets crashing into the ground behind us. A thousand memories of my other life passed through my head — France, and my youth, still so close, and so remote — an act of childish naughtiness, a toy, a scolding, which now seemed so gentle, my mother, and the new focus in my life, Paula….

We hardly spoke during that night, but I knew that I should try to live for the sake of my friend….

Long before daylight, a violent fit of shivering destroyed what was left of my resolution. In the gray daylight, Hals wrapped me in my cover, which I no longer had the will to unfasten.

“Take this,” he said, handing me a half-eaten can of food. “Eat it. You’ll feel better.”

I looked despairingly at the jam mixed with lint and dust from the inside of the pack.

“What is it?”

“Eat it. It’s good. You’ll see.”

I did as I was told, and scooped out the jam with two fingers. But, before I’d swallowed even half of it, I was overwhelmed by nausea, and my vomit increased the filth of our refuge.

“Damn it,” Hals said. “You’re much sicker than I thought. Try to sleep.”

Shaking with fever, I let myself fall into the mire, which I pushed back with my elbows and feet to try to make a flat place where I could stretch out and perhaps really sleep. Several hours passed before I regained consciousness.

Later that morning, we were sent some reinforcements, and Hals was able to help me to another hole a little farther back, where two fellows put me on a makeshift bed laid across the shattered remnants of a ladder. Two other fellows were lying on boards which had been put directly onto the stones.

Behind my head and my ears, ringing with fever, the war went on. I lay where I was, listening to its roar for an indefinable time, shaking with feverish chills, despite the pile of covers and coats which several well-meaning companions had thrown down on top of me. Once, somebody woke me up and made me swallow a pill.

How much time went by? Perhaps a day. I fought my fever while Russians and Germans fought each other through the outskirts of the town. After turning the end of the enemy lines to the east of Konotop, we withdrew to the west, only to find a defensive wall which cut us off from our rear. Several attempts to move out to the west failed, and our autonomous group, already weakened, was faced with the prospect of entrapment in a Bolshevik noose, which was drawing tight, from the north, west, and south.

While I lay shivering on my ladder, our situation grew extremely critical. Our staff officers were doing everything they could to kill the terrible rumor that we were encircled.

The next night I was ordered to leave my ladder in a hurry, and tottered on my unsteady legs to a more secure shelter in a cellar, where about fifty sick or wounded men had been collected. I was almost turned away from this improvised infirmary, but as I looked pretty sick, an orderly stuck a thermometer in my mouth. When this registered nearly 104°, I was told to sit in a corner, where I waited for morning and someone to look further into my case.

Outside, the town was undergoing heavy bombardment simultaneously from the ground and from the air, and the orderlies were run off their feet by a flood of freshly wounded men. My comrades had gone back into the line, to face the increasingly ferocious enemy assaults. Toward noon, the orderlies filled me with quinine, and made me give my place to a fellow who was dripping with blood, and no longer able to stand on his feet.

With stars dancing in front of my eyes, I staggered from the dark cellar into brilliant sunshine. A final burst of summery sun lit a landscape of total devastation. Everywhere, columns of smoke were climb ing into the sky. Groups of slightly wounded men stood staring and talking, visibly stricken with desperation and horror. One of them told me we were surrounded.

This terrible news was almost as destructive as the bombardment. A sense of every man for himself had begun to spread, and our officers needed all the severity they could muster to prevent a hopeless rout.

Still another day passed, and I slowly began to recover, but my head swam, like the head of a convalescent who has gotten up too quickly. I stayed huddled in a corner as long as I could, gleaning fragments of news from the rest of the city.

Surrounded… dangerous situation… the Russians have already reached… we’re trapped… the Luftwaffe is coming…. But, instead of our planes, we heard Yaks and Its throbbing overhead in the pale blue sky, and torrents of Russian bombs shaking what was left of the town.

What, exactly, was happening? Almost no one really knew. I can still remember a roll call, and then the noncoms coming to comb the infirmary. A fellow had to be missing a foot, at least, to be able to stay behind. I was among those who could still be used, and was led back with several bandaged companions to a zone near the front of the fighting.

In a vast space bordered by roofless houses, a new group was hastily organized. Among the five or six officers present, I immediately recognized Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau. From nearby, to the northeast, the thunder of Stalin’s organs drowned our voices, and provoked a wave of panic which was difficult to control. I was still very sick. My mouth tasted sour, and I felt as if my thin, faltering body was supported only by my boots and my filthy clothes.

Wesreidau began to speak, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of the guns. He would probably have preferred to give us a more detailed explanation, but the continuous uproar, the pressure of time, and the risk of Russian planes suddenly diving at our three companies drawn up in the square forced him to be brief.

“Kameraden! We’re surrounded!… The entire division has… been… surrounded!”

We already knew it, but hearing it officially made us horribly afraid. A situation officially acknowledged to be dangerous by the staff must be very serious indeed. In the near distance, through the sound of explosions, we could hear the howl of Russian rockets. Both the earth and sky were filled with roaring noise, as if to emphasize the desperation of Captain Wesreidau’s announcement.

“We still have one hope,” he went on, “a swift and brutal breakthrough by all our forces pressing at a single point. This point must be to the west, and we shall engage all our units at once. The success of this attempt depends on the courage of every one of us. There will only be one attempt, and it must be successful. There are some strong infantry units which will be going into action to help us, on the other side of the Russian ring. If each one of us performs his duty, I feel confident that we shall break out of the Bolshevik noose. I know the qualities of the German soldier.”

Wesreidau saluted and requested us to get ready.

Our companies were directed to the points from which they were to press our final assault. There were many wounded men among us, more deserving of a warm bed than of further battles, and fellows like me, who were sick. The vast majority were utterly exhausted, staring with infinite weariness from glittering feverish eyes. These were the troops Wesreidau had been exhorting to an excess of courage: valiant German soldiers who looked more like worn-out stock ready for the slaughterhouse.

And yet we had to attack, or die. At that time, there was no question of captivity. As always, after a hard knock, we rediscovered a kind of unity, and seemed to be held together by tighter bonds. What provoked the sentiments of generosity which brought out the last cigarettes, or the chocolates so rare they were usually devoured in secret, a fraction at a time, inciting all the scum to fake friendship, leading the noncoms, who had probably been mixed up with every kind of dirt in civilian life, to pat a suspected possessor on the shoulder and talk of trust and faith, when they were really hinting for a bite, just like everyone else? Where did they come from, precisely when no one could use them?

I was sick of the whole thing. My stomach was turning over and I felt cold. I looked for Hals or some other friend, but couldn’t see any familiar faces. They must all have been sent to a different position. For me, they had become almost like relatives, and their absence weighed on me. I felt very much alone among these mutilated men with their raging fevers, trying to find some excuse for hope and encouragement. I myself began to daydream about a soft bed with silk covers, imitating the veteran, who liked to dream aloud about beds like that, which he himself had never known. Even before the war, he’d been an unfortunate and unhappy man, but he knew how to dream. Sometimes, as his bony body lay stretched out on the hard ground, he smiled in a way which suggested such a powerful sense of well-being that I am sure, in those moments at least, he was unaware of the harshness of his situation, and that his dream was more powerful than reality. I myself was not yet that well trained, and my dreams could not obliterate the feverish vise which gripped my temples.

Straight ahead, to the west, the smoke had climbed so high it blotted out the sky, and the distant horizon was ringed with fire. What substance could be feeding such a huge conflagration?

Companies of men black with dust and soot were pouring back, on the run. It seemed that our first contact with the Russians had not been in our favor. The retreating troops left a certain number of wounded with us, but no one knew what to do with them. The medical teams, which at best were inadequate, had already packed up and gone, or were about to leave. The wounded men were left lying in the street where they had been put down, trying to stanch — the flood of their own blood, which was often pouring from several wounds at once. Everyone tried to help as much as possible, but we were capable only of ludicrous gestures. The most extraordinary scenes unfolded in front of our incredulous eyes. As we were sponging off a fellow who’d passed out, a fat Gefreiter came to help us, explaining that he’d just dropped a fellow with a smashed knee.

“He was making too much noise, and I couldn’t stand it. Give me someone who’s knocked out, any time.”

For the moment, our stretch of cleared street was not under bombardment. The battle was raging directly ahead, as well as to the northwest and southwest. Directly to the north, the Russian artillery was raking over the ruins like a monstrous plough. However, as a few of the retreating men huddled beside us trying to catch their breaths, the Russian fire shifted, and began to sweep through our position like a giant scythe. Our officers’ orders were drowned by the shouts of the men, and the uproar of a frantic stampede for shelter.

Our jostling and cries for help and screams of panic were finally obliterated by explosions. Everyone who was able to had run off the street. The slightest protuberance offered some hope of survival, as a wall of fire passed over the two thousand troops concentrated on that spot. The wounded, abandoned in the open, lay writhing in the dust. Through the uproar, we could hear the sound of disarticulated bodies falling back to the ground in broken pieces. As at Belgorod, the earth shook, and everything trembled and grew dim, as the whole landscape suddenly became mobile. The filthy hands of ill and wounded men resigned to death scratched the ground for one last time, and the lined faces of veterans who believed they had already seen everything were transformed by desperate, imploring panic. Quite near us, behind a heap of tiles, a Russian shell scored a bull’s eye, exploding in the midst of eleven men who had huddled together like children caught in a sudden rain. The Russian shell landed in the precise center of their trembling group, mixing flesh and bones and tiles in a torrent of blood.

Chance, which continued to favor me, had driven me along with three companions to the shelter of a staircase in a roofless house. The building was hit on all sides during the bombardment, and the cellar filled with broken beams and other debris. However, thanks to our extraordinary helmets, our heads survived intact. When the thunder stopped for a moment and we heard the screams of the newly wounded, we looked outside. The horror of what we saw was so overwhelming that we fell back, as if paralyzed, onto the shaky stairs.

“God help us,” someone shouted. “There’s nothing but blood.”

“We’ve got to get away from here,” screamed another voice, in a tone close to madness.

He ran outside, and we followed him. The air was filled with bestial cries. Everyone who’d been lucky enough to survive was falling back to the west, where, as always, safety lay, and now the front, and the gap through which we would try to escape. Anyone who could still stand was helped. The wounded grabbed at the men running past. Two haggard soldiers in front of me were dragging a third man through the dust, probably a friend who was nearly dead. How long had they pulled him along like that, and how long would it take them to dump him?

I can no longer tell how long our stampede lasted, through the anonymous ruins and thick smoke and roaring guns. The Russians were firing at us from all sides, at close range, with 50-mm. guns. We staggered on carrying the wounded as best we could.

In complete disorder, we came to a railroad track strewn with the burnt-out wreckage of a train, and a few Russian corpses. We trampled over them with a kind of fierce delight, taking our revenge for their artillery and their 50-mm. fire. The tracks ran through a kind of trench. We galloped down it, passing a second train as still and broken as the first. Some of our vehicles seemed to be parked there too, surrounded by a crowd of soldiers and several Panzermanner. We ran right into a group of officers. Wesreidau, who had stayed with us throughout, was one of them. We were given a few minutes’ rest, and everyone dropped where he stood. To the southwest, the din seemed to have increased tenfold, and made my head swim.

Then we received a fresh blow. Wesreidau and two of his aides ran through the groups of exhausted men.

“Get up! Get moving! We’ve got to push on now! The division has broken through. If you don’t hurry, we’ll be caught in the trap, so get the hell up! We’re the last ones left.”

Already, men half dead with exhaustion were staggering to their feet. The noncoms tapped on the shoulders of the stronger men, who were trying to help the wounded comrades they had carried out of town, and told them not to bother any more.

“Don’t load yourself with anyone who can’t walk. You’ll need all the strength you’ve got just to make it yourself.”

And so we were forced to abandon a great many men to an almost inconceivably horrible fate, despite their desperate pleas for help. Half paralyzed by terror and fear, men who had lost almost all their blood managed to get up and even hide their pain so that they would be allowed to walk beside the healthy. The heroism, pathos, and determination of our breakout exceeds by far my powers of description. Men who had always been cowards became heroes despite themselves. A great many managed to cover barely half the distance.

We fought our way through the fires of hell, losing almost half of our remaining men, as we pushed for more than nine hours, from shell hole to shell hole, along the famous and tragic Konotop — Kiev road, past burnt-out tanks and piles of hundreds of shriveled corpses.

You who perhaps will some day read these lines may also remember that one evening in the autumn of 1943 the bulletins announced that German troops caught in Konotop had managed to break out of a Russian trap. This was true. Of course, the price was never mentioned, because it didn’t matter. For you, the day of deliverance was coming.

9. CROSSING THE DNIEPER

The rain blew in from the horizon in waves.

Occasionally a brief moment of light enabled us to spot the next undulating curtain of water sweeping across the streaming steppe. It had rained steadily for two days, and despite the discomfort and inconvenience we hoped the rain would last for at least that long again. In another two days, if we could maintain our rate of thirty miles a day, and had any luck at all, we should reach the Dnieper.

No planes could fly through such a torrential downpour, so there had been no Yaks — and every day without Yaks was a reprieve from death for hundreds of men. The extraordinary mobility of the Wehrmacht — one of its principal sources of strength up to that moment had entirely disappeared in that part of Russia, and the men from Army Group Center were plodding toward the river in interminable columns at the rate of three miles an hour. Our mobility, which had always given us an advantage over the vast but slow Soviet formations, was now only a memory, and the disproportion of numbers made even flight a doubtful prospect. Moreover, the equipment of the Red Army was constantly improving, and we often found ourselves pitted against extremely mobile motorized regiments of fresh troops. To complete our disarray, the Soviet troops which had been tied up in the attempt to trap us at Konotop were now free to pursue our slow withdrawal.

German aviation, which was entirely occupied south of Cherkassy, had abandoned our part of the sky to the Yaks, which took advantage of this freedom to harass us unmercifully. So, despite our heavy, waterlogged clothes, worn-out boots, fever, and the impossibility of lying down except on the soaking ground, we blessed fortune for sending us gray skies and rain.

During the morning, five Bolshevik planes had appeared despite the weather. Our harassed men reacted with an automatic impulse of self-defense and self-preservation, staring desperately at the flat plain for somewhere to hide. But, like animals caught in a trap, we understood there was no way out. The companies in a direct line of fire dropped to one knee, in the regulation position for anti-aircraft defense. These companies received the Yaks’ fire, and saw several men torn to pieces by Russian bullets, but nevertheless managed to bring down one of the planes. It was our bad luck that the plane went into a spin, and fell directly onto our convoy, crushing a truck full of wounded men, and opening a crater twenty yards wide filled with shattered flesh. No one cried out: in fact, almost no one looked. We simply picked up our burdens and went on.

We were all too exhausted to react, and almost nothing stirred our emotions. We had all seen too much. In my sick and aching brain, life had lost its importance and meaning, and seemed of no more consequence than the power of motion one lends to a marionette, so that it can agitate for a few seconds. Of course, there was friendship — there were Hals and Paula — but immediately behind them was that hole full of guts, red, yellow, and foul smelling; piles of guts, almost as large as the earth itself. Life could be snuffed out like that, in an instant, but the guts remained for a long time, stamped on the memory.

We walked without stopping. The interminable line of men ahead curved in a semicircle which seemed to be standing still. The Dnieper was not yet in sight. We had planned to reach it in five days, but we were now in the sixth, ploughing through the mud at an average speed of two or two and a half miles an hour. I had never seen a countryside so huge and so empty. The trucks and other vehicles which had gas had all passed us long ago. The rest were pulled by the few half-starved nags we had not already killed and eaten. From time to time, someone gave up his place on a crowded steiner, pulled by two horses, to continue on foot. We were under orders not to abandon materiel for any reason whatever. We were supposed to receive more gasoline — God knows how — probably by air — so that we could continue to drive our machines. In fact, one morning we did receive a delivery from aircraft. Two JU-52s threw down eight large packages of rope, which we retrieved with derision. We were supposed to use them for tying our vehicles to the tanks which had been destroyed at Konotop the week before. In default of gas, our gaunt horses stubbornly pulled our vehicles through the gluey muck which had been freshly trampled by thirty retreating regiments. Our steiner, on which I had hung all my gear, was pulled by two Rhenish horses, probably taken from their peacetime labor about a year before. One of them was covered with sores, and his eyes glittered with fever.

Two days later, on the bank of the Dnieper, our brave horse received his reward. A noncom from the cavalry shot him in the head, along with some ten others. Very few horses were allowed onto the pontoons, whose capacity was inadequate even for the men, and nothing could be left behind which might be useful to the Russians. In a way, this was the beginning of our “scorched earth” policy.

The proportion of sick men to healthy rose at an alarming rate. “A healthy mind in a healthy body” was the slogan our leaders had held up to us. Under the conditions of our retreat, it was often hard to tell which was affected first — mind or body. It seemed that well over half our men had nothing healthy about them.

Luckily, the weather remained frightful. This was particularly hard on the sick and feverish — undernourished, dehydrated men with filthy, suppurating wounds and bodies barely covered by torn, ragged uniforms. But anything the weather could produce — wind, rain, heavy clouds trailing down to the ground — was preferable to clear skies, which invariably meant the humming planes, diving down at us like carrion crows attacking a moribund animal. Indifferent to everything, we continued our slow march.

Two or three times a day, covering troops were organized and left behind to slow down the enemy, who were following at a leisurely pace. The men chosen for this task dug shallow holes which protected less than a quarter of their bodies, and waited, resigned, for the juggernaut to crush them.

We knew that we would never see them again. In other districts. entire regiments had been wiped out by Russian armored troops which had caught up with them. The retreat was costly, and reached its climax on the east bank of the river, in an incredible crush of men and materiel, spread out over acres of flat sand, so that each Russian missile was assured a maximum destructive effect. A healthy mind in a healthy body would have done everything possible to escape those circumstances.

Our eyes, which had grown used to accepting everything without surprise, gaped at the most astonishing sights.

Everyone reached the river, the outer boundary of safety, in a state of indescribable panic, only to find it was necessary to trample on the men already there, even drown them, to have any hope of getting onto the wretchedly inadequate vessels, which often foundered before they reached the other side.

On the eighth day, after skirting a broad hill, we reached the bank of the river, or, more precisely, the swarm of landser who covered the bank, hiding it completely. Through the noise and confusion we could hear the sound of engines, which we found curiously reassuring: working engines must mean there was gasoline somewhere. We knew that motorized transport was essential for such a huge country, and that even with motors we could only move very slowly because of the terrible roads. However, if we heard engines, it must at least mean that some reorganization had begun. Among the crowd of men there were many vehicles which had been dragged as far as the river despite almost insuperable obstacles, and were waiting in the long grass, which looked like dune grass. In fact, the engines we heard did not belong to refueled trucks, but to the boats — inadequate in size and number — which the engineers were using to move across as many men and machines as they could. Whenever materiel could be moved, it was given priority. Loading trucks and guns and light tanks onto vessels built to carry hay carts was not easy, but fortunately we had plenty of manpower to replace the cranes and derricks of a port — at least a hundred thousand at our point of arrival alone. I saw men standing up to their necks in water, supporting makeshift landing stages until the water rose over their chins — rickety, hastily improvised piers which collapsed as soon as their human props moved away. Half drowned, these men worked frantically against time, with extraordinary persistence and patience. The urgent task of transporting five divisions was not begun until two days after our arrival, when all materiel that could be moved was across the river. We had ten boats at our disposal, each with a maximum capacity of twenty men, four barges which had run out of gas and were towed in turn by two small boats equipped with B.M.W. portable engines, and four precarious pontoons, each with a capacity of 150 men.

At this point, south of Kiev, the Dnieper is about eight hundred yards wide. Had we chosen a section to the north of the city, we would have been in rich, densely populated country, where we would undoubtedly have been able to acquire plenty of boats for crossing, and where, in addition, the river often narrows to less than a hundred yards. There were also bridges in Kiev itself; some had undoubtedly been destroyed, but others must have been standing…. By the evening of the third day after our arrival at the river, at least ten thousand men had crossed to the west bank. First of all, the sick and wounded were taken, and I witnessed many instances of lightly wounded or sick men giving up their places to the more seriously injured. Although the rain was remorseless and savage, and we all were sickened by our diet of horse meat — often raw — we nonetheless made use of this forced delay to rest as much as we could.

During the night of our third or fourth day, everything turned hellish again. As we had feared, we heard the roar of war again as soon as the rain stopped — dull and unclear at first, and then unmistakable: the rumble of tanks moving slowly through the mud.

To begin with, there was only the noise, which in itself was enough to send a wave of terror through the eighty-five thousand men trapped beside the water. On the slopes littered with exhausted soldiers, thousands of men lifted their heads to verify the terrifying sound.

We stared through the darkness, trying to see the unseeable, frozen, for a minute, with our heads lifted to listen. Then, everywhere, shadowy figures began to move, with frantic, intensifying speed.

“Tanks!”

Every man grabbed his things and began to run toward what we knew was an insuperable barrier, hoping that the boats were still moving, and that somehow they would be able to take all of us at once.

We were packed in a dense crowd onto a narrow strip of ground beside the river, and the sound of our shouting voices rose above the heavy rumble of tanks which now filled the night. Frantic men were abandoning everything on the bank and plunging into the water to try to swim to the opposite shore; thousands of voices were shouting toward the gray water and the opposite bank, where they hoped they would at last be able to rest. Men waded out into the icy water until they lost their footing, and the sound of voices pleading and calling for help rose to such a pitch that the boats still operating hesitated to draw into shore for fear of being swamped. Madness seemed to be spreading like wildfire. Almost unconscious with exhaustion, I sat through about twenty minutes of panic with five or six other soldiers, collapsed onto a heap of packs which had been abandoned on the wet grass, letting the howling mob and the rush of events pass us by. Here and there, we could see other small groups like ours, moving only when the frantic stampede swept them along.

The officers, who had managed to keep some self-control, organized a few more or less conscious men, and ran to meet the mob, trying to stop them, like shepherds trying to control a herd of crazed sheep. They were able to reorganize a few groups, which they posted on the slopes of the hills to attempt interception of the Soviet tanks, if they should come that way. Our dense crowd of men stretched down the river bank as thinly as possible, to offer fewer opportunities for mass destruction by the T-34s which appeared about an hour and a half later. Fortunately, there were not many tanks, and they didn’t linger, as their real objective was Kiev, where heavy fighting was in progress.

I stayed where I was, sitting on the heap of packs with a few strays, when we heard that a raft made of tires taken from the trucks parked nearby would be able to carry a certain number of landser across to the west bank. We ran several hundred yards upstream, and saw a tight cluster of men beside the dark water. We quickly went over to them. There must have been about a hundred men wading in the mud. In the center of the group, about a dozen fellows were busily taking out the inner tubes of a heap of tires, and tying them together to make a raft — which would clearly never be large enough to hold everyone. We were greeted with unwelcoming stares, and given no encouragement to stay. Finally, a big fellow who was standing watching the work spoke to us: “You can see that this thing won’t even take half the men here. Go on a little further — you’ll be sure to find something.”

He must have said more or less the same thing several times over to the fellows who’d arrived ahead of us, but most of them had stayed, hoping to get onto the raft somehow — even to fight their way on, if necessary. I had neither the build nor the strength to force my way onto a contraption that would probably sink anyway. So, despite the distant rumble which came to us in spurts on the wind, I went on up the river, accompanied by two stray artillerymen.

We walked through a damp, heavy fog, between clumps of dripping furze, past groups of frantic, terrified men pacing up and down that interminable bank. The fog grew steadily thicker, until at last it blotted out the countryside completely, and turned us into Chinese shadow puppets. We could no longer tell which way we were going, and were gripped by continual anxiety that we were walking in the wrong direction. Luckily, from time to time someone would check on the position of the river, and shout out into the darkness: “Ach gut! Das Wasser ist da.”

We went on without thinking, unaware that if we followed the river long enough we would arrive at Kiev, which was the heart of the fighting. No one seemed capable of any logical, connected thought, but the constant fear, exhaustion, and threat of tanks kept us moving, trying to get away. It didn’t really matter where we might get to, or how — just away.

The darkness of the night was continually broken by flares, and by the noise of guns. A group of men passed by, invisible, but quite close to judge by the sound of their voices.

“Achtung! Ivans! Achtung!”

I looked imploringly at the man from the artillery who had been stumbling along beside me for more than half an hour, but received nothing except the fixed stare of a hunted animal. We no longer understood anything. We had thought the Russians were on our right, behind the hills — but the firing was coming from the river bank, which was on our left.

Expecting the Russians to begin shooting at us at any minute, we began to run, to look for some hole or hollow where we could hide. Once we had flattened ourselves down into what seemed to be a shallow frog pond, we tried to grasp the facts of our situation.

A noncom in our group thought the Popovs must be patrolling in boats, knocking off Germans whenever they could. To judge by the lights of the explosions, which were sometimes hundreds of yards apart, there must have been several Russian boats. The darkness which hid our trapped men rang with the sounds of our frantic disorder.

Shells were coming in from the west, and landing somewhere to the east of us, beyond the hills. This comforted us somewhat; since the shells were falling beyond the hills, they must be landing on the Russians, and our men must be firing them. The artilleryman remarked in a pleased and knowing voice: “Those are ours all right. I’d know that yap anywhere.”

“I never thought we’d get any help,” said a soldier who had just joined us.

In the end, the shelling lasted only ten minutes, and probably had very little effect, as there was no effort to aim it with any precision. The fog had grown so thick that the glow of the discharges of the 77s was almost invisible, emerging from the darkness and vanishing again, as if we were watching through a thin, semi-transparent cloth. But, although the fog was thicker, the air had also grown astonishingly cold, stabbing our lungs every time we took a breath.

“My God, it’s cold,” someone said.

The temperature of the water, which came to the middle of our boots, must have been close to freezing. Despite their remarkable resistance to water, our boots had at last become waterlogged, and our feet felt frozen.

“We can’t keep on like this,” said the artilleryman, almost laughing. “We’ve got to get out of here, or we’ll catch our deaths. Anyway, why should we be afraid of our own guns?”

My boots each seemed to weigh a ton: a ton of dense, solid matter which was, in fact something like 95 percent water.

The exhaustion we had been dragging about with us for days increased the fear we could no longer control. Fear intensified our exhaustion, as it required constant vigilance. We had learned to see in the dark, like cats, but on that particular night no look, however penetrating, could pierce the fog, which was as thick as a London pea souper. I could no longer breathe through my clogged nose, and only drew in through my pursed lips the bare minimum necessary to sustain life. We seemed to be moving through a mixture of water and sulphur, and each icy breath stabbed me with hundreds of sharp points, all the way down to my empty stomach.

I remembered the veteran’s advice, but couldn’t think of anything convincingly warm or dry, so I began deliberately to recollect pleasant things that had happened to me, that I might have experienced a long time ago. But this proved almost impossibly difficult; my mind filled only with unpleasant memories. The hunched back of the soldier in front of me could not be transformed into the back of my mother busy with some household task on a long winter evening, or my brother’s back, or the back of anyone I had ever known in peacetime. All I saw was a silhouette of the history of the war, and Russia, which memories of youth could not blot out. It seemed as if the war would mark men for life. They might forget women, or money, or how to be happy, but they would never forget the war, which spoiled everything — even the joy which was bound to come, like the victory ahead. The laughter of men who lived through the war has something forced and desperate about it. It does them no good to say that they must now make use of the experience; their mechanisms have been run too hard, and something has gone out of balance. Laughter no longer has any more value for them than tears.

The back of the soldier in front of me filled me with pity and respect and even exasperation. I felt like hitting him until he fell, so that he would be on a level with the war. But, if that man fell, there would be another right after him, and then thousands more after that thousands of hunched backs swollen by acid fog. Russia is still full of backs like that, the hunched backs of men who have forgotten how to dream, and it will take more toil and war, too, before they all have been toppled.

The roar of the guns was growing louder, like the noise of an oncoming train, and there was the sound of machine guns too, although we still couldn’t see anything. We could also hear a vast din of human voices which rose above the thunder of guns and machinery. We stopped where we were, a light trace of breath escaping from each half-open mouth. I looked for some explanation on the filthy faces of my companions, but their expressions were as bewildered as my own, which had probably not changed much since I had begun to try to lose myself in memories. Since surprises in wartime can only be dangerous, we immediately looked for a hole. All I could find was the river bank. I slid over the edge until I was up to my thighs in the invisible water, which seemed almost warm after the icy air.

I immediately lost hold of my attempted daydream, and stared feverishly through the black and impenetrable wall which hid the action from us, like a curtain in the theatre. The roar of the tanks grew louder, and made the surface of the water tremble, with a motion I was just able to perceive.

When danger finally comes, after hours of harassing fear, it is almost like a liberation. At least one knows what the confrontation will be, and if the danger is terrible, one knows that at least it will soon be over. But, when danger continues indefinitely, it becomes unbearable. Then even an outburst of tears is no release. After hours and then days of danger, as at Belgorod, one collapses into unbearable madness, and a crisis of nerves and tears is only the beginning. Finally, one vomits and collapses, entirely brutalized and inert, as if death had already won.

For the moment, I remained calm. The river blocked our escape but, at the same time, offered a prospect of safety. I was already over my knees in water. The fog hid the terrifying breadth of the river from me, and I thought that, if the worst came to the worst, I could always try that way out, skimming over the surface like a will-o’-the-wisp. I felt almost convinced that I could do it. Then we saw lights, and heard explosions like grenades, and crackling sounds accompanied by little points of light. Five or six gasping soldiers splashed into the water beside me.

“It’s those dumb bastards in the artillery who brought Ivan here.”

Terrifying screams drowned the sound of engines, screams so prolonged and horrible that my blood froze, and the water around my legs seemed even colder than before.

“Mein Gott!” someone murmured in the darkness beside me.

We heard the sounds of gunfire and explosions coming closer, punctuated by bloodcurdling screams. Men suddenly plunged out of the pale, enveloping cotton, and disappeared like ghosts into the black water. From the sounds of splashing, we guessed they were trying to swim. We felt petrified by fear, and stayed where we were. A terrible, growling mass of machines passed by close to us, shaking the earth and water, and a penetrating headlight pierced the fog. We couldn’t see where it was going, only that it was moving. During those moments of terror, we clung to each other like children. A piece of the bank broke away under our weight, and our heap of belongings slid into the mud. My head went under for a few seconds, and when I surfaced the river bank and the long grasses hid what was happening. We could hear the sound of machine guns ripping into the air very close to us, over the grinding roar of tank treads. And always, terrifying screams, as the tanks drove a bloody furrow through the tightly packed crowd paralyzed by terror and darkness. A little higher up, two other lights, barely visible in the gloom, were seeking out other victims.

With daylight, we saw that there must have been about ten tanks, passing through without stopping, on their way to Kiev.

However, our tension was so great that we stayed in the water for a long time, without moving, in spite of the stinking mud which had seeped into our helmets, and through our hair, which was standing on end with terror.

With absolute accuracy, the German guns, firing from the other side of the river, had drawn the Bolshevik tanks onto us, and contributed to the horrible deaths of many of our men.

Cries for help drew us from our slimy refuge, and we ran to do what we could to help the dying — which was very little. We saw sights so horrible they were beyond any imagining. We shot a great many men to put them out of their misery, although mercy killings were strictly forbidden. At dawn the fog lifted, and an almost spring like sun ushered in a new day of difficulties and disappointments.

Burial squads were forcibly organized and began their grisly work, grimacing with horror. Everyone who managed to escape this duty went off as far as he could, to try to sleep or warm up. My partly dried clothes had gone stiff, and I felt uncomfortable and ill. But my exhaustion, which weighed on my eyes and made the sunlight unbearable, prevented me from grasping that I should have stripped and washed in the river, allowing the sun to nourish my exhausted body. I stayed as I was, immobilized by my need for sleep, staring through half-closed eyes at the damp gray-green of my uniform, turning slowly yellow as it dried. When I finally did sleep, I was awakened almost immediately by shouts of terror.

I opened my eyes, and stared up into an infinite, pale blue sky, in which there was a familiar noise: planes. My bones creaked as I propped myself up on one elbow. I couldn’t see anything unusual only the piles of sleeping bodies among the gorse. Everywhere, faces drowning in sleep were turning to the sky. A fellow in a fatigue cap ran by, shouting like a deaf man.

A heavy machine gun behind me opened fire. It took us a while to shake off our torpor. Four Russian planes were circling like hornets about three thousand feet above us. Everyone was shouting — both men and officers.

“Do you all want to be killed?” a ragged lieutenant was yelling at us. “You should at least try to defend yourselves.”

We feverishly grabbed our guns, and waited with one knee on the ground for the enemy, who was about to drop from the clouds. However, the Yaks went away. It was inconceivable that they should have been afraid of us, so we concluded they were running out of gas. We rubbed our eyes and sighed with relief, as our partially revived sense of vigilance died down. Everyone was thinking of stretching out again and catching up with his lost sleep. Then the heavy machine gun pivoted rapidly on its mount and began to fire toward the north. Everyone turned that way too, before throwing himself flat. The four planes roared over us almost at ground level, firing rapidly with all their guns. We could just hear the lieutenant, who was very near us, shouting as loud as he could to make himself heard above the noise of the planes: “Fire, you bastards!”

The planes passed overhead. I saw the lieutenant roll onto the ground, stand up again, and with one hand clutching his stomach fire his revolver at the roaring planes. Then he grimaced, fell to his knees, and rolled over onto himself. Of all the men around us, he was the only one who had been hit. The planes had reserved most of their fire for the overloaded, almost motionless rafts, which made perfect targets.

“Give us some help!” shouted a fellow with a long thin face, who’d gone with a companion to see what he could do for the lieutenant.

“Why in God’s name did he stand up?”

“He was acting like a hero,” answered one of the felds, “and he was the only one. We should all be ashamed.”

The thin-faced fellow was helping to carry the dying man down to the river’s edge. I was behind him with some of the lieutenant’s things.

“Shame has nothing to do with it,” he said, sighing heavily.

We had not been abandoned. From the west bank, our antiaircraft guns were firing on the Russian vultures overhead, and the two ramshackle rafts on the river were continuing their dangerous journey. There must have been many dead and wounded men on board, to judge by the agitation we could all see.

The planes dived down toward the swarming strip of ground which rang with screams of pain and cries for help, and toward the rafts, and achieved a hideous massacre. Every time the danger withdrew for a moment, so that we could lift our heads and look out over the reeds, we saw scenes of tragedy. Almost everyone on the rafts who hadn’t been killed or immobilized by wounds had jumped into the water and was trying to swim. The planes made a fourth pass, and were met this time by all our guns and spandaus, which finally drove them away. We heard a loud sound of shooting. One of the Russian planes had been hit, and was spiraling upward, trying to gain height, leaving a thick plume of black smoke behind it. Suddenly it lurched into an irrevocable dive toward the water. We saw a smaller shape detach from the mass of the plane — probably the pilot, trying to jump to safety. But his parachute, if he had one, failed to open. Man and machine hit the water at the same speed, and disintegrated. For a moment, our cheers drowned the groans of the wounded on the rafts. However, toward noon the Russian planes were back again — about a dozen fighter-bombers this time.

In the interval, we had deepened our holes so that we were better protected; but we couldn’t reach the planes with our fire. The Russians, as before, attacked the heavily loaded rafts on the river, which had almost reached the west bank. Our flak tried unsuccessfully to keep the planes away, and we watched, pale with helpless rage, as the bombs fell toward the water. A raft and all its human cargo were blown to pieces. Our fleet was being liquidated, and the attacks were just beginning. The Ilyushins were gaining height, to dive down again. A soldier beside me was weeping and shouting over and over: “The bastards, the bastards.” Our damp hands scraped nervously against the ground as we maneuvered our guns.

“We’ll never get out of this,” shouted my companion. “They’ll wipe us out, the shits.”

Then a miracle occurred, which completely changed the tone of our cries.

“Sieg! Sieg! Der Luftwaffe!”

Nine Messerschmitt 109-Fs had appeared and were diving down onto the Russian planes, which had just completed an attack formation. The Russian pilots, aware of the technical inferiority of their planes, were trying to get away as fast as they could. We could hear bursts of fire, and felt a surge of intense, savage, and vengeful joy when we saw two of the Ilyushins spinning through the air like partridges hit by hunters’ bullets. Then our cries grew even louder. Five Russian planes passed right overhead before we realized they meant danger. We shook our fists at them.

The fellow beside me, who’d been trembling with fury a moment before, was now trembling with joy, as uncontrolled as a madman. Our fighters were chasing the Ilyushins, which fled, skimming low over the ground. Then the pack disappeared behind the hills, which blocked our view. We heard guns, and a loud explosion. After that we had nothing to do but tend the wounded.

The next day we felt almost happy to wake in the rain. Traffic across the river had continued all night, carrying over as many men as possible; nevertheless, a vast number were still waiting on the east bank. We no longer knew how many days we’d been there, but, despite all our difficulties, we’d been able to reorganize somewhat. Men belonging to the same units had sorted each other out, and waited in distinct groups. Our officers had posted armed men on the hills to warn against a sudden attack. We knew that the Russians were very close, and felt rather surprised that they hadn’t attacked already. Probably the battle for Kiev had absorbed almost all of them.

I had joined a large group of men made up for the most part of members of the Gross Deutschland, and men who had escaped from the infantry regiment which had come to our aid when we broke through at Konotop. The officers present — among whom I was delighted to see Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau — told us that as members of an elite division, and as specialized offensive troops, we should have been among the first to embark for the west. They also said that we would be the next to go. Naturally, we were glad to hear it, as everyone wished to reach the west bank as quickly as possible. Some fellows suggested a technique that had occurred to many of us as soon as we arrived at the river. This was to tie together bunches of reeds with our belts, and use them as floats. This had been proved successful many times, but it was not possible for moving the equipment indispensable to any soldier who did not wish to be considered a deserter.

The reception of these unequipped men on the other bank must have been sufficiently poor for our officers to forbid escape by reed float. But it was difficult for them to impose discipline on men simultaneously paralyzed by fear and prepared to affront the devil. Many men, in fact, drowned, or died of pneumonia, and many, after risking everything, were court-martialed.

I no longer had any clear idea of our situation, and set about trying to discover from the soldiers in my unit what had happened to my friends. Perhaps someone among these three thousand men waiting in the mud had run into Hals or Lensen or the veteran, stretched out on an armful of long, soaking stalks, dreaming of a distant utopia, indifferent to the rain running down his resigned features.

But my researches were in vain, and my questions remained unanswered. Once I thought I recognized a couple of faces from our disbanded company. I talked to the fellows, who answered evasively that they no longer remembered anything that had happened. They were absolutely exhausted, and my questions only seemed to annoy them. Their stunned minds seemed capable of only one idea: they had to cross the river.

There was only one person who might know a little more than the others — Herr Kapitan Wesreidau. But the respect and fear which officers required of us made it almost impossible to speak to them. A few of the older soldiers were bold enough to approach them, but for a boy like myself it was entirely different. However, I was so consumed by desire to speak to the captain that it must have showed on my face. Also, I was always lingering somewhere near him or his group. I was sitting on my bundle a short distance away from Wesreidau and two or three other officers, including a major, when Wesreidau began to walk toward me. I stared in confusion at the tall figure in the long leather coat shining with rain, ready to leap to my feet and snap to attention. But the captain gestured to me to stay as I was, so I remained on the ground, with my eyes glued to his face. He seemed even taller than usual, because I was so low down.

“What regiment do you belong to, young fellow?” he asked.

I stammered out my regimental number, as well as the number of the scratch company I was taken into for the retreat from Konotop. He took me for a Czech, so I explained my origins to him.

“Hm,” was all he said about that.

“Those scratch companies were the last ones out. I led several of them myself.”

“I know, Herr Hauptmann,” I said, blushing. “I saw you.”

I couldn’t get used to the idea that the captain really was talking to me.

“Ah,” said Wesreidau. “Then we have memories in common, of a difficult time.”

“Ja, Herr Hauptmann.”

He reached for a cigarette, but the packet was empty. Had he perhaps been going to offer me one?

“We’ll be crossing tomorrow, young fellow, and I expect you’ll be getting a long leave.”

The word “leave” was like a sudden sip of champagne. “Leave!”

“I think so. We won’t have stolen it from you.”

Sensations which I had thought I would never feel again immediately revived — all the emotions I had buried with so much difficulty. Could it be possible… ? But it had always been possible; how could I doubt it? I suddenly realized the full weight of my despair, how absolutely I had given up hope. Now I began to think again, timidly and gently, of Paula. Since we had been organized into the special assault group, there had been no mail. Although we had been moving continuously, this lack of news had weighed on me terribly. And then, in the face of such intense misery and disgust, words describing love and tenderness lost their meaning. Everything I had felt seemed to have been swept away in the dust and noise of crumbling houses, and in misery far more intense than the miseries of love. I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn’t expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was constantly in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything — fortune, love, even a limb — if I could simply survive.

I sensed that Captain Wesreidau was about to leave, so I asked him if he knew anything of my usual companions. He was only able to remember the veteran, calling him by his proper name.

“August Wiener’s company was supporting a howitzer battery at the beginning of the offensive. The first troops had a hard time. It was very difficult. In any case, the men who got through were probably sent to Kiev. That’s where we would have regrouped if we’d had the trucks.”

I listened to him in silence. He nodded, and walked away.

“We’ll be crossing tomorrow.”

My head was spinning with the thought of a leave, and with the anguish of the possible loss of my special comrades. Perhaps I had already walked past their burnt bodies on the shattered pavement of the Konotop — Kiev road. Would I also have to renounce the friendships which had seen me through so much? I knew that they also were so close to being stripped of everything that the sentiment I had for them seemed permissible, it was so gratuitous and disinterested. Must I also obliterate, without remorse — for remorse is a dangerous luxury in battle — the memories of Hals, and Lensen, and even that bastard Lindberg?

However, if my friends had disappeared, the veteran had left me an inheritance, a special faculty. I would relive all my good memories, even in the worst moments, and lie on the ground, inert and almost insensible, oblivious of the rain which my saturated cap was no longer able to soak up, and which ran over my face and collar and down my neck. The rain streaming across my cheeks would take the place of the tears I should have shed.

The rain continued for a long time, through the night and the next day, until the end of the afternoon. The soil on which we waited had become a giant sponge. Each fresh bundle of rushes soaked up as much water from the ground as it received from the sky. We were so thoroughly soaked through that some of us stripped altogether, to wait naked. Most of the time, we stayed on our feet, with tent cloths over our shoulders, watching the endless back-and-forth of the rafts.

Toward noon, despite the terrible weather, a squadron of Ilyushins appeared. Once again, we cursed those birds of ill — omen, which forced us to lie with our noses in the gluey Dnieper mud. The planes made three passes, scattering bombs and bullets wherever they could see anything. Once again, we were filled with a panic which ended only when the list of killed and wounded had grown a little longer.

Finally, toward six in the evening, as the light was fading, our group was taken in charge by the transit services.

We were ordered to collect our things and proceed in good order to the three embarkation points which the incessant trampling had transformed into an astonishing quagmire.

Carrying our arms and baggage, covered with slimy mire, we set off down the road despite the mud which threatened to engulf us.

With heroic patience and discipline, each man waited his turn, enduring the torrential rain without complaint. With our feet in the muddy water our boots could no longer resist, we kept our assigned places. The last men to embark had to wait for several hours.

Vague, momentary smiles lit our almost unrecognizable faces. At last we were going to cross, and all of this would be over. We would be able to dry ourselves, and sleep, perhaps even in comfort, and stop feeling afraid. We clung to our more hopeful thoughts, although we were haunted by one last fear: what would happen on the trip across? Would the overused, overloaded boats make it? Or would they sink, carrying a hundred desperate souls to the bottom? And then there were the Yabos… If any Russian planes appeared… We could all remember in clear detail the horrible massacre of the day before.

Then it grew dark. Russian planes rarely flew at night, so perhaps we were at least safe from them.

When it was my turn, I climbed with a hundred other men onto a raft whose planks had been splintered by the passage of thousands of hobnailed boots. I watched anxiously as the water rose to within a foot of swamping us.

“That’s enough, cap’n,” shouted a noncom who looked about forty years old. “Do you want us to sink?”

“As many as possible, Herr Spiess,” an engineer said, laughing. “That’s orders, and we’re used to it. Come on — let’s have another ten.” When we were on the point of foundering, the boatmen let go of the ropes and, with the agility of young goats, jumped onto the few inches they had reserved for themselves.

So slowly we were almost unaware of it, the raft began to move out onto the water, which was barely creased by our momentum. Our balance seemed so precarious that no one dared move. The cursed bank, veiled in fog, disappeared from sight. I was huddled in the center of the raft between two fellows I didn’t know: a young lieutenant from an infantry regiment which had come to help us at Konotop, and a fellow from my own company, who seemed to be asleep on his feet. He was the only one who seemed so indifferent. Everyone else was listening and looking intently, especially toward the rainy sky, which we mistrusted absolutely. A boat half the size of ours, but with the same engine, slowly pulled level with us. Its deck was as jammed as ours.

How long was the crossing? Perhaps a quarter of an hour. It seemed interminable. The water slid past us with an easy, regular motion, whose slowness made us frantic. Some of the fellows were counting aloud, marking off the seconds perhaps, or using them as one uses imaginary sheep, to force sleep.

Then voices announced the approach of the west bank and safety and release from our torments. The men at the front of the raft could see it, enveloped in fog. Our blood ran faster in our veins, as we tried, by will power, to increase the speed of the engine. We were about to land, to be safe — quick, while the sky was still quiet.

An empty raft crossed our path, heading back for the east bank. We looked at it coldly. Any movement toward the east made us shiver. Then the west bank was only twenty yards away. We no longer dared to move for fear of foundering, despite an intense joy which we would have expressed in other circumstances by jumping and shouting. After so many days and hours of waiting and despair, we had been saved.

Then there were only ten yards… then five. The engines went into reverse, to slow us down. We drew up beside a pier made of tied branches, and we heard voices telling us to move slowly and care fully. With a sense of enormous privilege, we stepped, one after the other, onto the solid earth — which is to say, onto a quagmire exactly like the east bank. But the mud no longer mattered; we had crossed to the other side. The west bank meant security and safety, a barrier between us and the Russians. We had dreamed of this safety for so long, and so intensely, that we almost felt as if there were a barrier between us and the war itself. The bulletins had been official: we would hold on to the Dnieper. The enemy would not pass beyond that line, and in the spring we would push them back beyond the Volga. During our long and painful retreat to the river and our endless wait, our thoughts had crystallized around this idea, and actually stepping onto the west bank seemed like the end of our misfortune: reorganization, clean clothes, leave, and the assurance that we had not been beaten. Of course, the west bank was still Russia, but it was the part of Russia which had welcomed us a few years earlier, the part of Russia which really favored us. Our exhausted brains clung to this fantasy: the west bank was almost the motherland.