The Forgotten Soldier

16. FROM POLAND TO EAST PRUSSIA

One September morning, we found ourselves in a farmyard somewhere in the south of Poland.

The horror of our previous experiences had left us entirely without reaction, and we stared about us with the stunned eyes of someone who has been heavily drugged. A short way off an officer was shouting something at us — a speech or a report — which fell on deaf ears. We stared at the sky, to avoid thinking about the earth, which supported human life. Only an explosion, or perhaps a feld’s whistle, could have dragged us from our lethargy.

However, in this district there was at least a semblance of order, and under cover of this last fragment of organization we were trying, as best we could, to recover our strength and some sense of morale.

The Russian thrust to the south was so strong that we had to consider Rumania enemy territory. We should soon be fighting in Hungary too, before Kekskemet, and then in Budapest.

The officer went on with his speech, to talk of a counter-offensive, of regaining control of events, regrouping our troops — even of victory, a word which no longer had any meaning for us. Although we couldn’t conceive of the defeat which lay ahead, we understood that victory was not possible. We knew that we would still be obliged to make intense efforts defending some particular, organized positions, but we had no doubt that we could stop the enemy before the German frontier.

Despite our general unease and near-collapse and all our disillusion, we knew that we couldn’t simply give up. The looming disaster was inconceivable to us. Even today, survivors of that experience find it difficult to accept all the facts. But, despite our unshakable faith, we all felt temporarily unable to continue fighting; some time off, some rest, was absolutely essential. We were in a state of exhausted collapse, capable of nothing.

“General Friesener has re-established the Southern Front,” the officer was shouting. “Our regiments will be re-formed and reinforced by substantial reserves. The enemy must not go any further. You will stop him.”

We were divided into groups, companies, and regiments, and loaded into trucks. It seemed there was still gas hereabouts. The Gross Deutschland units were sent north, which surprised us, as the rest of the division or what was left of it — was fighting with Army Group Center. Some units were already with Army Group North, and the two hard-pressed armies were eventually joined.

The trucks took us to a train which was waiting on a single track, sheltered by a pine forest. There was no station. We left in a long string of miscellaneous cars. My group was loaded onto an open platform like the one which had taken me out of Poland and into Russia so long ago. Today there was no need to fear any future in Russia: the Germans had been chased from that country. Today we were going north, slowly and carefully, as the track might be mined, or the sky full of bombs. The train took us to Lodz, where we saw many astonishing things.

We stayed in Lodz for about thirty hours.

The front was very close, and like all towns near the fighting Lodz was full of troops. As in the south, men were being sorted out and regrouped. Thirty, forty, even fifty percent of the names on the regimental lists had to be scratched off. In some cases, men already scratched off as dead or missing reappeared from the void.

The Gross Deutschland had a rallying point at Lodz — a former candy shop stripped of all its wares, the adjoining room for the concierge, and a long corridor. A large panel correctly painted black on white, and a stylized white helmet, the regimental emblem, hung over the door, which was still intact. Two sentries in correct uniform were stationed on either side of the door.

“Here we are,” Lensen said. “Back at the Gross Deutschland.” For an hour and a half we had been tramping through the city from which nearly all the civilians had gone — looking for this place. Lieutenant Wollers presented the officer at the center with his list of the men with him, including the numbers of their companies, regiments, and groups. There were about two hundred of us.

“Here is the list of men with me, Herr Hauptmann.”

“But you’re bringing me a bunch of Russkis, Herr Leutnant,” the captain said, looking at our motley collection of clothes. Many of us were wearing padded Russian jackets.

“My apologies, Herr Hauptmann. We began to run short of uniforms.”

“Very short,” said the officer, smiling. “I’m going to send you to the store, and you’ll see if there’s anything left. You’ll have to be quick, because you won’t be here long.”

In the next street, we found the divisional store, which was still much better stocked than the supply stores of ordinary divisions. Some of our men could be given quite a few of the things they needed. While we waited, we watched a crowd of men, part of a new Volkssturm battalion, swarm into a factory courtyard. When we looked more closely at these men recently called up by the Fuhrer our eyes opened wide with surprise. They all belonged to the last class of reserves and seemed to be an even more extreme case than the Marie-Louise conscripts at the end of the Napoleonic era.

Some of these troops with Mausers on their shoulders must have been at least sixty or sixty-five, to judge by their curved spines, bowed legs, and abundant wrinkles. But the young boys were even more astonishing. For us, who had saved our eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty year-old lives through a thousand perils, the idea of youth meant childhood and not adolescence, which was still our phase of life, despite our disillusion. But now we were looking literally at children, marching beside these feeble old men. The oldest boys were about sixteen, but there were others who could not have been more than thirteen. They had been hastily dressed in worn uniforms cut for men, and were carrying guns which were often as big as they were. They looked both comic and horrifying, and their eyes were filled with unease, like the eyes of children at the reopening of school. Not one of them could have imagined the impossible ordeal which lay ahead. Some of them were laughing and roughhousing, forgetting the military discipline which was inassimilable at their age, and to which they had been exposed for barely three weeks. We noticed some heart-wringing details about these children, who were beginning the first act of their tragedy. Several of them were carrying school satchels their mothers had packed with extra food and clothes, instead of schoolbooks. A few of the boys were trading the saccharine candies which the ration allotted to children under thirteen. The old men marching beside these young sprouts stared at them with incomprehension.

What would be done with these troops? Where were they expected to perform? There was no answer to these questions. Were the authorities going to try to stop the Red Army with them? The comparison seemed tragic and ludicrous. Would Total War devour these children? Was Germany heroic, or insane?

Who would ever be able to judge this absolute sacrifice?

We stood in profound silence, watching and listening to the final moments of this first adolescence. There was nothing else we could do.

Some hours later, we were driven to a new assembly area a few miles from the Vistula, in a town called Medau. There we found a large part of our full division, which had left us in the south long ago. Even our regiment was there, and its officers, with their familiar names. The auxiliary services of our autonomous unit had performed enormous feats of imagination to continue functioning. We were extremely surprised to find that the full Gross Deutschland Division was still quite strong — a discovery that raised our morale considerably. We needed to cling to some form of solidity to avoid recognition of the final tragedy which had engulfed us, and of our strictly limited choice between combat in the most desperate circumstances, captivity, or the end, once and for all. Here, on the banks of the Vistula, which could be considered the cradle of hostilities, we found companies restocked with young boys to fill the gaping holes the war had made in our elite division. We also found some familiar faces, including Wiener, the veteran, who seemed quite astonished that we were all still alive.

“We must really be indestructible,” he exclaimed. “When I left you on the second Dnieper front, everything looked so black I really thought I’d never see any of you again.”

“Quite a few missing,” Wollers said.

“And quite a few still here. Mein Gott, Leutnant!”

We told Wiener that Wesreidau was dead, and Frösch…. He too had a list of names we could forget. No matter how intense the grief aroused by any particular name, the expressions on our worn faces never changed.

We pressed Wiener for news of Germany, of civilian life there and the situation of ordinary citizens. We all had reasons for concern and followed the movements of his lips, trying to grasp the implications of his inadequate words.

“I was in the Kansea military hospital in Poland,” he told us. “I had lost so much blood and seemed so weak that for two horrible days they did almost nothing about me. I would never have guessed that life had so strong a grip on me. It would have been so easy — one last sigh, and then into the hole. But it didn’t happen that way. I groaned and howled for ten days or so-especially the first two — and went through infection, transfusion, disinfection, re-infection, and here I am, back with you again, for another autumn of crap. Now I find the damp hard to take, too. I’ve got rheumatism, and that’s fatal.”

As before, the veteran relieved his desperation by cracking jokes.

“But you must have had convalescent leave, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Hals. I was in Germany. I went to Frankfurt, not am-Main, but am-Oder. I could have gone further if I’d wanted to, but there wasn’t any particular reason. They put us up in a girl’s high school — sad to say, without the girls. There wasn’t enough to eat, but at least they let us alone. Have you noticed, by the way, that I’m missing an ear?” The veteran grinned sardonically.

When we looked, we saw that his right ear was gone, and that his skin where the ear should have been was a pale, shiny pink, which looked as though it might break at any minute. We had all noticed, with out attaching any particular significance to it. So many men were missing one piece or another that we scarcely registered such things any more.

“Yes,” Prinz said. “On that side, you look dead.”

The veteran grinned again. “That’s because you’re so used to stiffs you’re beginning to see them even where there aren’t any.”

“Drop all the crap,” Solma shouted, “and tell us about Germany.”

“Well… Yes.” There was a moment of silence, which seemed to last forever.

“What’s it like in Frankfurt?” asked Feldwebel Sperlovski, elbowing the rest of us aside. (He came from Frankfurt, and his family was probably still there.)

The veteran was no longer looking at us. He seemed to be staring into his own interior.

“The high school was on the east banks of the Oder, up on a hill. You could see a big piece of the town from there. It was all gray — the color of dead trees — with walls sticking up here and there, all black from the smoke of fires. People were living down there, like landser in the trenches.”

As Sperlovski listened his face began to twitch, and his voice trembled as he spoke. “But our fighters… and flak… wasn’t there any defense?”

“Of course… but so out of proportion…”

“Don’t worry too much, Sperlovski,” Wollers said. “Your family was certainly evacuated to the country.”

“No,” Sperlovski shouted in a voice of despair. “My wife wrote me that she had been conscripted and had to stay in town. No one has the right to leave his job.”

Wiener knew very well what effect his words must have on an audience starved for good news, but nothing seemed to distress him any more.

“It’s total war,” he said, like an automaton. “Nothing and no one will be spared, and German soldiers must be able to endure everything.” Sperlovski walked away. He looked stunned. His eyes were glazed, and his steps faltered, as if he were drunk.

German soldiers would have to endure everything, in the world we had created. We were fitted only for that world, and were otherwise inadaptable. Lensen was as still as stone, and listened, stony-faced.

“Is it the same for all our towns?” Lindberg asked. He must have been thinking of his town, by Lake Constance.

“I don’t know,” the veteran said. “It’s possible.”

“You certainly know how to raise morale,” said Hals in irritation.

“Do you want the truth, or a fairy story?”

I felt as though I were wandering through a landscape shrouded with fog and strewn with rubble. I knew that I could never manage to be disappointed again. Before mourning with the suffering world, I would somehow have to regain my balance. Of course I thought of Paula, but it was so long since I had heard anything from her that I wondered if I would even be capable of reading a letter if we should suddenly get mail. I was filling up with bad news like a barrel filling with water from a rainpipe. When the barrel is full to overflowing, all the torrents in the world are incapable of adding to its capacity.

We found ourselves in one of the rare trains still moving through that region, rolling toward East Prussia through the first frosts of our third winter of war — the fifth or sixth for some of the older men. We moved at night, with all our lights out, as Russian planes, which occupied our bases in Poland, were particularly active by day. We were moving toward Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Courland front, to which the remnants of several German divisions were clinging.

Through the darkness and the thick fog we could see large masses of people moving on foot across the northern Polish landscape. At first, we thought we were watching infantry units on the march, but after several good looks we realized we were watching civilians — thousands of them — fleeing through the night and fog to escape the Red hordes who they sensed were very close behind them. We couldn’t linger to watch those people, but could easily imagine their situation.

Then we crossed the Prussian frontier, into the home territory of Lensen and Smellens — two pure-bred Prussians, suddenly back on their native soil. Lensen stood up and leaned over the carriage door to get a closer look at his country. The rest of us didn’t care so much: the landscape was scarcely distinguishable from that of Poland. Perhaps there were a few more lakes. Otherwise, as in Poland, there was forest.

“You really ought to see it when there’s snow on the ground,” Lensen said. He was suddenly smiling again. “This way, you can’t really tell what it’s like.”

As we remained silent and uninterested, he spoke up again.

“You’re in Germany, for the love of God! Wake up! Think how long you’ve been dreaming of this.”

“East Germany,” Wiener said, “practically the front. And then, I don’t know if you realize it, but I have a compass, and I can tell you we’re moving to the northeast, which is no good at all.”

Once again Lensen turned purple with anger.

“You’re nothing but a bunch of milksops,” he said. “It’s your kind of defeatism that’s brought us to this. The war is already lost inside your goddamned heads, but you’ve got to fight anyway, whether you want to or not.”

“Shut up!” shouted five or six voices. “If they want us to win the war, let them treat us like normal soldiers.”

“You’re just a bunch of whining puppies. The whole time I’ve known you, you’ve done nothing but whine. For you, the war has been lost since Voronezh.”

“For good reason,” Hals said.

“You’ll fight, whatever the cost, and I’m the one who’s telling you because you have no choice. There’s no other way out.”

The veteran stood up.

“Yes, Lensen, we’ll fight — because we can’t stand the idea of defeat any better than you can. And we have no choice. I don’t, anyway. I’m part of a machine which operates a certain way, and only that way — and I’ve been part of it for too long.”

We stared at Wiener, somewhat taken aback. We had thought he would be able to adapt himself to any kind of life. And now here he was saying that he could live only for the cause which had already cost him so much.

Lensen went on grumbling, and we went on thinking confusedly about the glimpse of the future the veteran had given us. For me, from the vantage point of Prussia, France seemed remote and unimportant. The cause which Wiener spoke of was also my cause, and despite all the difficulties and disappointments I had endured, I still felt closely linked to it. I knew that the struggle was becoming more and more serious, and that we would soon be obliged to face appalling possibilities. I felt a strong sense of solidarity with my comrades, and I could think of my own death without too much flinching, as a soothing veil that would fall slowly over me and all my terrors of the past, present, and future. My head seemed to be filled with a milky fog, which was without joy, but which suddenly made everything easy. Did my comrades feel the same way? I couldn’t be sure, but my resignation seemed general. We rolled on for several hours at a reduced speed. Finally we stopped and walked through the gray, foggy morning to a camp of wooden huts, whose appearance recalled the robust military organization only recently lost. We were given an hour to rest, and the chance of a cup of hot water with a few grains of soya in it.

“And to think that some fellows volunteered for the food,” somebody muttered.

“There couldn’t be too many volunteering these days,” another voice said. “Very few are around for long enough even to dream of becoming an officer. There’s hardly the time to make obergefreiter, before they’re getting a posthumous stripe.”

A few were still around for a little longer than that.

Then a major, who was probably the camp commander, spoke to us.

“Proud soldiers of the Gross Deutschland,” he said. “Your arrival in this sector fills us with joy. We know your reputation for courage in combat, which gives us a strong sense of support. Your comrades-in-arms in the infantry regiments fighting in the Polish forests near our frontiers feel as we do. Your arrival here reassures and comforts us, and also helps us in the extremely difficult task which has fallen on us: the defense of German and European liberty against the Bolsheviks, who would take it from us, employing the most extreme and bestial means. Today, more than ever before, our unity in combat must be total and deliberate. With the addition of your strength, we shall build a definitive rampart against the Soviet horde. Think of yourselves as the trailblazers of the European revolution, and feel proud that you have been chosen for this undertaking, however heavy it may be. I wish the greatest possible glory for you, and convey to you the congratulations of the Führer and of the High Command. Transportation and food have been specially placed at your disposal to help you in achieving your aims. Bravo, soldiers, and courage. I know that so long as a single German soldier remains alive no Bolshevik will ever tread on German soil. Heil Hitler!”

We gaped at the elegant officer in stunned silence, trying to penetrate the veil of ignorance which hid our valor from us.

“Heil Hitler!” shouted a feld, who realized that the prescribed response to the major’s remarks had not occurred.

“Heil Hitler!” we shouted heroically.

“Either I’m crazy,” Kellerman muttered, “or he was expecting us to raise his morale.”

“Ssht,” said Prinz. “We’re getting another speech.”

This time, it was a hauptmann.

“It will be my privilege,” he said, “to take two-thirds of the men in your regiment under my command, and lead them into battle.”

We all had known what was waiting for us, but that phrase made us swallow hard.

“The entire division will be operating in a sector to the north of us. It will be broken up into several fragments so that a series of widely scattered attacks can be made against the Russian thrust, which is extremely strong in this sector. I am expecting from you the utmost in courage and actions of distinction and glory. These are essential because we must stop the Russians here. No negligence or hesitation will be allowed. Three officers can constitute a court-martial at any time, and sanction any penalty….”

(Poor Frösch! How many officers decided to hang you?)

“We shall be victorious here, or be covered with shame. No Bolshevik must ever, I repeat, ever, set foot on German soil. And now, my friends, I have some good news for you. There is mail for some of you, and citations, and promotions. But, before giving free reign to your joy, you must present yourselves at the store for fresh rations and ammunition. Dismiss. Heil Hitler!”

We broke ranks without any clear idea of our situation. “Things are looking up,” I said.

“A bastard who’d be glad to see us all killed,” muttered Hals.

We were standing in a long line in front of a large wooden building. “So that’s what we get instead of Wesreidau. Something tells me we’ll be having a few eye openers, Prinz.”

“Impossible. We’ve already seen everything there is to see.”

“He’s another one of these madmen,” said Hals.

“He’s not. He’s perfectly right,” said another voice behind us. We turned around in surprise.

“He’s right. It has to be here, or not at all. I can’t explain why without taking too long… but he’s right.”

More and more disconcerted, we stared at Wiener without saying a word, unable to grasp his attitude, which suddenly seemed so changed. “I’ll tell you why some other time,” Wiener said. “For now, you’re too thick to get it.”

For several days now, we had been fighting again as we retreated. The Bolsheviks must never set foot on German soil. However, three powerful Soviet armies had already crossed the German frontier at five or six points, penetrating to a depth of some thirty miles. These three armies had rolled over our defending troops, whose survivors were dragging with them through the autumn countryside the last weapons which supported their claim to be part of an army.

To my regret, I am unable to retrace in detail the chaos of those bitter moments. But I can outline the ends of my friends, like Prinz, Sperlovski, and Solma, and of Lensen, who, in spite of everything, was really a friend. And it is Lensen I wish to salute now, by describing the tragedy of his death, which I can still see clearly, through the memories of so many other deaths. Whatever Lensen may have thought of me at times, I am certain that for all of us, and for his country, he was a brave man, who would have sacrificed his life without hesitation to help the most insignificant fellow soldier. The manner of his death fully supports this view of him, and it is perhaps because of him that I am sitting here now, writing these lines.

Lensen could never have accepted life as it is lived today, with all the concessions the former troops of the Eastern Front are obliged to make. Like the order for which he died, he was irreversible. Men who have embraced one idea can live only by and for that idea. Beyond it, they have nothing but their memories.

Our attempt to save the Courland front failed, and the overpowering Russian thrust reached the Baltic at several points, which I can no longer locate with any precision. The Northern Front was cut in two — the far north, around the Bay of Riga, as far as Libau; and the sector to which we were sent, a continuously shrinking front to the west of Libau, in Prussia and Lithuania, clinging farther south to the Vistula, which was the scene of hideous carnage.

The division was split into several small groups which attempted to throw the enemy off balance by attacking simultaneously at many points.

For the most part, these attacks were unsuccessful, and were hastily transformed into defensive actions. At that time, the division was precipitately attempting to regroup, in order to establish a defensive front some forty miles to the northwest. The bad roads, lack of fuel, mud, and faltering communications combined to slow down an operation which, under good conditions, wouldn’t have lost us any time. In addition to our other difficulties, we had to contend with enemy aircraft, which had become increasingly active. Each over-flight spread fresh disorder through our already weakened columns. When the order to regroup came through, our officers decided that the retreat should be spread out, and divided into small groups. This idea made sense in that we offered less of a target to planes. However, when an enemy armored unit ran into two or three widely dispersed companies, our chances of survival were at best problematical. It was under these conditions, in a village of scattered houses, that an encounter took place which almost erased our group from the divisional list.

“I’m sure I’ve been here before,” said Lensen, who was shocked by the misery of the country.

“Everything looks so different now that I don’t recognize any details, but I’m sure that over that way there are some villages I know. My own village is about sixty miles from here,” he gestured toward the southwest.

“Königsberg is over that way. I’ve been there several times, and once I went to Cranz, too. It was raining cats and dogs, but we went swimming anyway.”

He laughed, and we listened.

Despite the crushing retreat and numbing cold, Lensen seemed to have revived on his native soil. But he felt the anguished silence of this village, whose inhabitants had fled the day before, more intensely than the rest of us. Three hundred of us, exhausted by a march, which had begun at dawn, of twelve miles over waterlogged ground, were sitting doubled up for warmth, waiting for an uncertain eleven-o’clock distribution of food. Only Lensen was on his feet, pacing up and down the length of the stable wall, which the rest of us were leaning against, sheltering from the incessant rain. We heard his voice against a background of explosions which were more or less loud, more or less distant, coming from the southeast. We scarcely noticed the sounds of war any more. They had become so much the ordinary background of our lives that we no longer paid any attention to them unless they were inside a perimeter small enough to threaten immediate danger. Except for the noise to the east, everything was quiet. We were somewhat like people these days who cannot enjoy peace and quiet without a phonograph — who need noise before they can relax. Perhaps they are simply afraid of true silence. Unfortunately for us, we had no control over the volume of noise, and in fact would have been much happier without it.

Except for Lensen’s harangue, nothing was happening.

Some twenty-five yards from us, six men were preparing lunch. Somewhat further off, another group were seriously engaged in attending to personal needs. Others were resting, with their eyes half closed, or staring into space, dizzy with exhaustion. The melancholy autumn weather brushed our faces with its damp freshness. We had been through so much misery that we were unable to appreciate conditions which ordinarily would have moved us to pity.

Through our condition of near torpor, we were dimly aware of suffering and weeping. The wounded were groaning and dying. But none of that stopped anyone from sleeping whenever there was a chance.

The first part of our meal had been passed out: cellophane sausages stuffed with soybean puree — one for every two men. It goes without saying that these were cold. During the retreat the men in charge of supply, with a stirring display of professional conscience, had collected enough old and wrinkled potatoes to fill a sidecar. They were just handing them round to the men when four soldiers jumped over a wall. They were gasping for breath, and as they ran toward us they made large, sweeping gestures with their arms.

One of them called to us without shouting too loud: “Ivan!”

The sluggish mass of men stood up with a single movement. We knew that the next few minutes could face us with the most appalling danger. With the instinct of hunted beasts, we had already scattered each man running to wherever he saw a possibility of the slightest protection. Those who were lucky enough to have already received their food wolfed it down hastily. Lieutenant Wollers had just joined us in a recess sheltered by a roof. His field radio, which he always kept near him, was already crackling out an alert. We waited in silence for about ten minutes, but nothing happened. The Russians could not have been very far off, as our sentries had announced them. But none of us knew whether we would be dealing with a section or a squad, a regiment or ten men. We hastily organized patrols. We had to find out whether we were going to fight or run as fast as we could.

The six fellows nearest Wollers were sent over toward the wall our two sentries had jumped. I was among them.

Two other groups of about the same size were sent in other directions. To describe my desperation and terror would be repetitive; it was the same as at Outcheni, Belgorod, the sheds where the partisans had hidden, and so on.

Like everyone else, I was resigned to the bad moments of our existence — to the sinking feeling which comes with being ripped from sleep to meet some disagreeable obligation. This was like that, only more so.

We moved along the other side of the stable against which we had been dozing a few moments before, and came out onto a rough piece of ground stacked with old timbers.

We were fully aware of our danger, and a heavy sense of desperation, which no longer accelerated the beating of our hearts, made us alternately hate death and long for it. My Mauser weighed down my hands like an object of no value, on which I could no longer count for anything. Formerly, as we marched through Polish and Russian villages, its weight of wood and metal had given me such a sense of confidence that I had felt almost invulnerable. Today the possibility of organizing any kind of effective defense with these weapons seemed entirely unlikely.

We crossed the waste ground and arrived at a cluster of buildings, where we separated into two groups of three men each, and continued to advance as carefully as if we were carrying explosives. We turned the corner of the building, and were able to see a much larger piece of the horizon, marked by a line of trees which had been almost entirely stripped of branches. Beyond the trees was a road, swarming with men. In the distance, we could see still more approaching.

“There must be at least three or four hundred of them,” whispered the man next to me. “Look over there.”

We walked back past the building where we had been resting earlier. At its far end, a row of tar barrels stood out very black against the chalky soil. Beyond them was a small house. Our steps made a light crunching noise against the fine gravel. Still silent, we stepped into the space beyond the barrels. We took four steps and found ourselves face to face with four Russian soldiers on patrol, who were taking the same precautions and observing the same silence we were. For us, all process of thought froze.

Our gestures were without haste. The Russians opposite us were also moving very slowly, and watching us. It seemed as if, by some miracle, the same calm had been imposed on both sides. No one fired. With deliberate, calculated movements, both Russians and Germans withdrew to the shelter of the building. We stared at each other with enormous eyes.

“We’ve seen enough of them,” muttered Wiener. “Half turn.”

We went back to our starting point, and Wiener made his report. We felt as if we’d been dreaming.

A quarter of an hour later, we had set up our defenses in the northern part of the village and its approaches. According to our intelligence, we were involved with an infantry regiment of some two or three thousand men. There were three hundred of us, but we were not ordered to retreat.

Hours of agonized waiting went by. We were used to lengthy Russian preparations, but we also knew how steady their thrust would be. By the time the first contacts occurred, it was already growing dark. The first Russian assault units moved carefully up to the buildings under cover of dusk. The waves of Russian infantry no longer had the same dash as at Belgorod or on the Dnieper. Such astounding losses had been inflicted on those howling mobs throughout the reconquest of their territory that the Russian High Command had been obliged to conceive a somewhat less heroic tactic. Also, although they were fiercely determined to revenge themselves on us by trampling on German soil, they were fully expecting us to mount a desperate resistance. And they had come to count more heavily on the effectiveness of their tanks and aviation to reduce our smaller, underequipped units.

On our side, the magnificent lines of shouting soldiers were becoming increasingly rare, while the Bolsheviks were increasingly fighting in a “European” style, using techniques more or less learned from us. This shift did not make our position any easier. Our group fired at a Russian patrol leaping toward us, but we saved our mortar for later; we were beginning to run out of shells.

This was only a small encounter, which seemed without importance to men accustomed to tornadoes of fire — a few fragments of brass hurtling through the dusk, breaking a shoulder, crushing a breastbone, or carrying off a life — nothing, in short, which even approximated the pitch of a real battle. Of course, if the same exchange should take place in Paris today, it would be considered sufficiently serious to empty a whole section of the city, and make all the headlines; each time has its own habits and style….

Throughout that black and foggy night, the Russians continued to dig in beside our precarious positions. The thought that they might burst out at any minute was terrifying enough to make us sick. Perhaps this evening would be our last. Ivan would overrun us and put an end to this desperate chase which had lasted for nearly two years and covered thousands of miles marked with fear and blood. Probably tonight would be the night; we no longer knew what to hope for. But the night went by — a night of cold watchfulness broken by flares and distinguished by nothing in particular. The Russians, who seemed to be in no hurry, watched us, as we watched them.

I even managed to sleep, despite the watch we were supposed to keep unbroken. Several others did the same, and it was only the cold that kept us from having a real rest. Finally, dawn broke, and with it our tension increased. The air and ground shook. The rain, which usually muffles noise, seemed to have no effect on the heavy grinding of chains and the percussive exhaust of a large number of armored vehicles. A column of tanks was driving toward the motionless village, where Russian infantry was already waiting, calm and resolute, for our deaths.

We knew that there were not enough of us for any kind of defense against tanks. We had no anti-tank guns, and the few Panzerfausts we had left would never be able to stop that mass of tanks, which we judged from the noise to be quite large. Our hair bristled with cold and fear as we organized our disengagement with the speed that had become familiar. Everyone was on foot except for the drivers of our two sidecars, which were used for liaison between the command group and ourselves. Ten soldiers were harnessed to each gun, as we couldn’t let the Russians hear the sound of engines. The company withdrew in a silence worthy of Hollywood Indians, leaving just enough men to form three interception groups. Each of these was made up of ten men, with two Jägerpanzerfausts, and four covering riflemen.

My group included Smellens and a young boy who had been specially trained in handling a Panzerfaust. Lindberg, two other fellows, and I covered them. This proved to be the only time I was ever in command — a unique and tragic time during which I was responsible for five other men.

In the second group, I knew Lensen at the Panzerfaust. In the third group, no one.

Each anti-tank group had three Panzerfausts — heavy, cumbersome weapons which allowed us a total of eighteen chances. With maximum luck, if we hit home every time, we could hope to stop eighteen of the sixty to eighty tanks we knew were coming toward us.

We stiffened with terror as we grasped the desperate reality of our situation. Lieutenant Wollers told us that the enemy was slowing down, and that when five or six of their tanks were in flames their demoralization would increase. He said that we would rejoin the company within twenty-four hours. But nothing could distract us from the horrible mathematics of the situation. We knew too well that the implacable thrust of the war could not be stopped. Today, on this day accursed of all others, our turn would probably come.

The rest of the company moved silently past us, as we listened to the final recommendations of our superior. The rumble of tanks continued unbroken. I saw Hals going by beside the veteran, and ran out to grasp his hand. Lieutenant Wollers stopped talking when he noticed me. I produced a few obscenities for Hals and Wiener, inappropriate to the gravity of the moment, and briefly considered giving Hals something to send to my family later. But I couldn’t find anything, and limited myself to a hoarse laugh. Hals couldn’t think of anything to say to me, and Wiener dragged him off.

Wollers left us next, and our groups separated. I remained alone with my command, and with my doubtful friend, Lindberg, who had turned white and numb with fear. I — much too young for the job myself had become a group leader, charged with dragging five other boys who had not yet attained their majorities into a horrible game of cops and robbers. I threw a quick glance at my subordinates. They were staring toward the south, where the noise was coming from. Lensen shouted, and waved toward a dip in the ground where there were four or five buildings — probably a farm. I and my group ran after Lensen. The third group looked for somewhere to hide along the road.

The wind was blowing in gusts, carrying the first half-formed flakes of the season. At that moment, the Russians began to pound the positions we had just left. The houses in the village about half a mile away were surrounded by geysers of black earth. Hastily, I sent my two jägers to a position among the large roots of some overturned trees. They began to dig frantically, trying to lower themselves a little deeper into the ground.

The rest of us looked for shelter nearby. I was with a young fellow whose name I forget but whose expression of determined tenacity remains ineffaceable. Lindberg and our sixth man ran into the house behind us. A hundred yards to our left, I could see Lensen and his assistant.

The Russians were pounding the village into the ground. It was lucky we had left it when we did.

As we listened once again to the noise of tanks rolling through smoking ruins, we relived the sensation of waiting through the unbearably long minutes just before action begins. We tried hard to think, but the diabolic round of our past unwound through our memories — good and bad moments in a rush too fast for any of the relief tenderness can bring. For me, there was a mixture of childhood, the war, and Paula and all the things I still had to do and should have done: the kind of debt which weighs on the heart, when time for settling has run out.

We were all torn between wanting to weep and run away, and to scream and run out to meet the danger.

“No Bolshevik will ever tread on German soil.” But they were there by thousands, crushing it with frenzy and jubilation — and there were eighteen of us to stop them: eighteen young men ready to cling to any miraculous superstition to go on hoping for a future as tormented as the present.

Then they appeared, ten of them at first, following the road guarded by our third group.

The third group watched them coming and did their duty. We helped them, inspired by almost unbearable emotion, played out by thousandths of a second.

The first tank was stopped some twenty yards from the two Panzerfausts in the third group. One of their projectiles burst on the tank’s front apron scattering a shower of rivets and killing the monster and its occupants.

The others were slowly maneuvering, heavily attacking the incline of the bank, to make their way around the burning tank.

I couldn’t stop myself from whispering, “They’re coming for us.” But the tanks — three to be exact — climbed back to face up to the threat. They hoped to frighten the anti-tank crew, counting heavily on their terrifying appearance — a calculation which almost always worked. However, a second monster burst into flame. The tank behind it brushed past, opening up a passage. It reached the German position, and broke its occupants’ nerve. We saw our comrades jump from their hole and run like madmen. They were trying to reach the woods, and began to climb the hill. The tank, which was following right behind them, drew so close it almost touched them, before knocking them to pieces with the machine guns on board. The rest of the defense suffered the same fate. In three or four minutes, the third group was knocked out. Ten or twelve tanks were roaring down the road the company had taken — on foot — an hour earlier. They were certainly too far for us to try to reach them with any prospect of success. Five more tanks appeared, following the dip of the valley, driving straight at the farm and at Lensen, who was just in front of it.

Lensen and his number-two man fired at the tanks, which were about twenty yards from them. They hit two, and the noise of the explosions flooded the valley with a wave of sound. A third tank passed the two wrecks and seemed to beheading directly for my group. Lensen’s group fired a third time, missing the tank and nearly killing us. A building some five yards from our hole burst into flame. The explosion half buried us, and made us totally deaf for nearly a minute. The three tanks continued, pouring fire into the farm buildings. They must have thought our defense was centered there. Two more T-34s which had just appeared on the road left it, driving at Lensen’s position. They were out of our range, but we fired at them anyway. Smellens fired at a tank some 150 yards away and just missed it. The shell touched the ground, bounced off it, and landed farther off without exploding. All we had done was to draw their attention to us. One of the tanks drove straight at us, using all its guns.

I could hear the shouts of my men. They were unable to fix their sights on the huge machine, which drove at the ruins of the house and skidded over them, probably in the belief that they were crushing us beneath their tracks. I could hear the grinding from my hole — a sound I shall never forget.

The monster stopped short and turned back toward its original route, along the road.

Lower down, the David and Goliath battle between Lensen’s group and four more tanks, all firing with all their guns, continued.

We heard the final crash of Lensen’s Panzerfaust. The tank closest to them turned back on its tracks, bumping the tank behind it. We could hear horrible screams through the demented confusion of smoke and flame. A T-34 drove straight over the hole which sheltered Lensen and his companion. Then it reversed, and leveled the place. So Lensen died, on the soil of Prussia, where he had wished to die.

For us, the nightmare went on. If the tanks left us to continue their advance, we would be in terror of the infantry, which must be right behind them. In a state of indescribable fear, we looked about us. By “we” I mean myself and my companion in our hole, and the two others, who remained as motionless as the roots that sheltered them.

What had happened to Lindberg and to the sixth man in my group? They had probably been crushed in the debris of the building knocked down by the tank. For the moment, that was the only possible conclusion. I also knew that the group on the road had been knocked out, and that Lensen had died a horrible death. Where were the rest of his men? Perhaps they too were lying under the rubble of the farm. Probabilities and possibilities poured through my head. It was most unlikely that any of us could remain unseen against that pale gray soil, where every protuberance was marked by a dark shadow. I thought of making a break for it, but quickly realized that every way out was in fact impossible. I might head for the pine woods to the left, but that meant at least three hundred yards entirely in the open. The Popovs would be sure to see me before I had gone even halfway. There was still a lot of smoke, but most of it was rising vertically and wouldn’t hide anything.

Suddenly, in a spasm of egotism, I felt myself caught in a trap from which there was no escape. I was so sure of this that I ordered my companion to shoot me. He was feeling much as I was, and stared at me with anguish.

“No,” he said. “I could never do that. But I wish you would kill me. Please kill me.”

Caught in our grotesque dilemma, we stared at each other, full of mistrust and rancor — each trying to hand over sole responsibility to the other.

“We’re going to die here, you bastard,” I snarled. “So shoot me. That’s an order.”

“No. No, I can’t,” he sobbed.

“You’re afraid of being left alone, that’s all.”

“Yes. And so are you.”

“But don’t you see there’s nothing else we can do?”

We could hear the sound of fighting. It was coming from the north from behind us.

“Those bastards must have caught up with the company,” I said.

The noise continued. We stared at each other, motionless and silent. There was no more to say, because everything had already been said a long time ago.

Then my two forward men appeared, and a few moments later Lindberg, dragging along with him a fellow with a badly swollen face. We all squatted down, and then someone noticed some men whose moving figures blotted out the ruins of the farm. They were moving forward by cautious leaps, toward the woods, some 150 yards to the left.

“We should get over there too,” pleaded Lindberg. “The Russians are nearly here.”

“That’s easy enough to say,” I answered. “But look at the open ground we’d have to cross. The Russians would see us right away.”

No one could argue with that. Everyone looked from the woods to the edge of the village to me. If only, at that moment, I had possessed the conviction and the decisiveness to impose on the others an idea of what to do, to take responsibility for the men entrusted to me. I remained as I was, incapable of dealing with either the circumstances or the men, who were looking to me for some sort of initiative. The damning appraisal Lensen had once made of me seemed crushingly true: I was unworthy of command, incapable of leading.

And it was here, a hundred yards from the site of Lensen’s heroic death, that my incapacity manifested itself.

I remained where I was, overwhelmed by the thousand miseries of our situation, internally sobbing with despair.

I felt that my companions would make for themselves the decision I was unable to impose on them with any authority. Was I a simple coward? Wasn’t I really as bad as Lindberg, whose all too obvious fear had so often disheartened us? I no longer wished for death, but simply cursed my existence, which had become a series of nightmares.

On that day, at a critical moment, I failed. I failed in everything I had hoped for, from others and from myself.

My head wobbled on my neck like the head of a drunk at the moment when his condition changes over from hilarity to despair. I was there, fully conscious, aware of everything, but paralyzed by insurmountable panic. I shall never forgive myself for that instant, when reality touched the deepest recesses of my being.

Minutes went by, and my condition remained unchanged — minutes I should have been putting to good use. Fear nailed me where I was, in the midst of five other human beings who were all on the brink of madness. I was no longer trying to see where our danger might be coming from, but was turned inward, on myself. I found nothing but despair.

We could hear more tanks — the grinding of tracks and the roar of engines. I began to tremble uncontrollably, unable to tear myself from my obsession. The others were clinging to each other, their faces distorted with fear, ready to scream.

Lindberg stood up, in spite of himself. He wanted to see what was happening. He had lost his gun and was no longer thinking of defending himself. A wild thought had entered his stunned mind. He fell forward, across the edge of the hole, trembling convulsively, like me. He had just clenched his fists around two stick grenades.

Death was stalking us, approaching with giant steps. This time, with a horrible shudder, I could feel its presence.

Once again, from all sides, we heard the firing of big guns. The explosions nearest us destroyed what was left of our lucidity. We were no longer in a state to understand anything, except that we could also hear the sound of a truck, quite nearby. Then we heard the barking of light machine guns. We stared at each other, without words. The sound of a voice speaking German fell on our incredulous ears. Behind the shattered building, beside a truck with a throbbing engine, some men were speaking German. We heard more tanks and automatic weapons, and stayed where we were, stiff with fear. A man leaned over our hole: a German officer. We observed his presence without really seeing him. Perhaps he thought we were dead. He went away again. But a few minutes later two Panzergrenadiers led us from that hole, and we followed meekly.

The anticipated German counter-attack had taken place, led by two S.S. armored regiments, and had caught the Russians on the flank, inflicting heavy losses. We even took back the village for a few days, before continuing our retreat.

17. MEMEL

We moved back to the north, as a junction with the Courland front was no longer possible. What was left of the division gradually regrouped. The attempt to reunite the front had inflicted terrible losses. During this time, in a desperate lunge further to the south, the Russians reached the Baltic. Fighting of unequaled ferocity had taken place at many points through and around the swarms of terrified refugees, who made it very difficult for our troops to defend themselves.

The entire Prussian civilian population was fleeing toward the coast, in a tragic tide. We ourselves had two choices. We could turn south, opening a route through several advanced Soviet positions, or move back to the north, toward the newly established front at Memel. However, the divisional command quickly realized that we no longer had the means to move south, toward Königsberg, or even Elbing. Both towns were equally threatened, and the closest was some one hundred miles away. We would have to fight for every mile, with little chance of success and almost no possibility of picking up any food along this route of mass exodus.

So Memel was chosen: a short front which had been practically surrounded since the autumn. We would have to fight our way through, to make a passage for ourselves and for the flood of refugees moving with us, constantly slowing us down and often nearly paralyzing us — a pitiful, imploring procession, dragging on foot through the bitter cold and the slush of the first snows. In spite of orders, we had to help, reassure, and support this chaotic wash of human beings. Everyone with an engine which would still run — even for an hour — carried a swarm of terrified children, trembling with cold and fear and God knows what else, while their families ran alongside, mixed in with the soldiers who were their last hope of protection.

We passed through towns and villages where the inhabitants had still been living a more or less normal life until four or five days earlier, although they had realized that their danger might become imminent at any time. Now, for the last two days, old men, women, and children had been desperately digging out the trenches, gun pits, and anti-tank ditches which were to stop the waves of enemy tanks. This pathetic and heroic effort before the infernal debacle which would sweep them into the flux of terrorized civilians was a preliminary shock for these virtuous civilians, who saw the front coming toward them in the form of exhausted, half-starved troops, tired of fighting and of living, who brushed aside human pawns without a qualm, as if they were pieces in a losing game of chess.

Every time a defense seemed possible, it was undertaken. The enemy at our heels were slaughtering the civilian population, who watched their approaching end in mute horror; the enemy had to be slowed down. The groups impressed into this effort accepted their fate in the ludicrous hope of putting out fires which were already raging. Their situation and sentiments were understood and their misery measured and valued by those who came to bid them farewell. These men had reached the point beyond which death seemed desirable, and still the war went on, like a blazing fire which no sentiment, however realized, could stop. Those who broke through and reached Memel would probably die at Memel. Death at Memel would seem a relief and release, and a more orderly end than death in a place which would never be distinguished by any military operation.

At this time and place, the absolute would be resolved by the absurd — unless, perhaps, they were already the same thing.

Finally, our division — which is to say, a third of it — broke through, and the command at Memel was able to include it in their strength. The division had broken through, and the fifteen hundred men it cost us simply represented another figure to swell the note of heroism. For those who had been in the fighting, besides the men who were killed, the losses included some twenty names which had to be scrubbed from the company lists, including Siemenleis and Wienke.

We might perhaps have fought our way into a trap. We even thought that perhaps the Russians had, deliberately loosened their grip to let us through. We had brought along with us as many civilians as we could, but many others had stayed behind, and for them the game was nearly over. They had to dodge the tanks pursuing them, and multiple barrages of howitzers and quadruple machine guns, and Ivan’s bayonets — all of which is very difficult for a mother with an infant at her breast and a small child hanging on to her skirts. But after all everyone is born to die.

We arrived in Memel with trucks pulled by men, and tanks serving as locomotives to trains of incredible length. We had reached the absolute limit of our capacities. Everything which still possessed a shred of human or mechanical life was moving, suppressing misery to a sense of gratitude that so much, at least, was still allowed them. Bombings stopped only those who were definitively dead. The rest — the merely wounded or dying — kept on, with burning eyes, pushing past the collapsing and the collapsed, whose bodies lay strewn along the road.

The town of Memel was still alive, in ruins beneath the flames, the smoke-darkened sky, the throb of Russian fighter-bombers, the heavy artillery, the terror, and the whirling snow.

Once again, I cannot find the words to describe what I saw.

My impression is that all words and syllables were perfected to describe unimportant things. Words cannot describe the end of the war in Prussia.

I was part of the exodus in France, fleeing the German troops which I later joined, and I saw mothers asking for milk at quiet farms. I also saw overturned cars, and was once even machine-gunned near Montargis. But my memories of all that are touched with only a small degree of anxiety, which is even somewhat intoxicating, like the memory of a trip on which one was not alone. Also, in France, the weather was beautiful. In Prussia, it was snowing and everything had been destroyed all around us. Refugees were dying by the thousands, and no one was able to help them. The Russians, when they were not fighting our troops, pushed the tide of civilians along in front of them, firing at them and driving tanks through the terrified mob. Anyone with a little imagination can try to conceive what I am talking about. Cruelty has never been more fully realized, nor can the word “horror” ever adequately express what happened.

We had reached the Memel cul-de-sac, a half circle about fifteen miles across, backing onto the Baltic, whose cold, gray swells rolled in under a thick blanket of fog. We held this constantly shrinking space by some inexplicable miracle for most of the winter, harassed by continuous bombardment and permanent attack from the Russians, whose strength grew steadily as ours dwindled, overrun by thousands upon thousands of refugees. The extreme of misery to which these people were reduced can never be adequately described. They waited at Memel to be evacuated by sea, before the troops were taken off in mid-December.

The ruins of Memel could neither hold nor shelter the large segment of the Prussian population which had sought refuge there. This population, to which we could give only the most rudimentary help, paralyzed our movements and our already precarious system of defense. Within the half circle we were defending, ringing with the thunder of explosions which covered every sort of shriek and scream, former elite troops, units of the Volkssturm, amputees re-engaged by the services organizing the defense of the town, women, children, infants, and invalids were crucified on the frozen earth beneath a ceiling of fog lit by the gleam of fires, or beneath the blizzards which emptied their snows over this semi-final act of the war. The food ration was so meager that the occasional distributions which were supposed to feed five people for a day would not now be considered enough for a school child’s lunch. Appeals for order and observation of the restrictions rang incessantly through the fog, which in part veiled the scene. Ships of every kind were leaving by day and by night, loaded with as many people as they could carry. Long files of refugees, whom the authorities tried vainly to register, moved toward the piers, creating targets for Russian pilots which were impossible to miss. The bombs opened hideous gaps in the screaming crowd, which died in fragments beneath these blows, but remained in line in hopes of getting on the next ship. These people were exhorted to patience, reminded of the rationing, and told to fast while they waited for deliverance. Old people killed themselves, and mothers of families, who would hand their children over to another woman, begging her to feed them with the ration card she herself was giving up. A gun taken from a dead soldier would accomplish these jobs. Heroism and despair were closely intertwined. The authorities tried to keep up the spirits of the crowd by speaking of the future, but at that time and place everything had lost its importance. These martyrs often watched suicides without really trying to stop them. Some, in a surge of madness, shot themselves on the pile of bodies which civilian aides collected in each district. Capitulation would at least have put an end to this hideous nightmare. But Russia inspired such terror and had demonstrated such cruelty that no one even considered the idea. We had to hold, no matter what it cost us, until we were eventually evacuated by sea. We had to hold, or die. Or perhaps the High Command had another idea; perhaps they were planning to transform the stronghold at Memel into a bridgehead from which they would launch a a counter-attack to split the Soviet thrust. This last speculation struck those of us holding the town as sheer fantasy. However, soldiers were still landing at Memel, as the civilians left. We could only suppose they had come to strengthen our position. The idea of a counter-attack seemed entirely unrealistic.

Here we fought with the stubbornness so much admired by the High Command, solely because we still hoped there might be some sort of launch left at the end to take us out after the last civilian had been evacuated. We had to hold on, even if despair had separated us from all other human conditions. At Memel, no one could stay out of the fighting; children and young girls dried their tears and helped the wounded, distributing food, resisting their desire to devour it, and suppressing horror and fear which were so fully justified. They performed tasks which their overburdened elders gave them, without argument or complaint. One either died or lived; no intermediate condition could be given any consideration. The children all felt this fact, without discussion or explanation. Those who survived this dramatic training would never be able to take the normal difficulties of normal life seriously. The German people really experienced the depth of things, and left me with an ineffable feeling of respect, which I can describe no further.

In the disorder of our advanced positions, civilians sometimes became directly involved in the fighting beside the soldiers; these civilians were often women. At the price of heavy sacrifice, the front held. By “held” I mean that it did not crumble altogether. In fact, it was constantly yielding in one or several places, and constantly shrinking. The long anti-tank trenches we had dug beforehand played a large part in the consolidation of our defense. The Russians depended above all on their aviation and their heavy artillery — which they strengthened constantly to knock us out.

Nonetheless, their attacks cost them heavily. The contraction of our front allowed us to concentrate our defense. Memel was ringed with innumerable carcasses of Russian tanks, and there were as many anti tank gunners as there were ordinary soldiers. Carloads of mines were driven out by civilian volunteers and placed in front of our defenses by the infantry in the course of small counter-attacks organized solely for this maneuver. We were defenseless only against aviation. Russian fighterbombers flew over continually. To the northwest of our position the remains of several dismantled railway carriages underwent eight attacks in two days. What was left of our anti-aircraft defense was concentrated around the piers, where the peril was greatest. This target constituted a real danger to the Russian pilots, who preferred to attack the rest of the stronghold, where there was no serious resistance.

Thus, despite the hell of cold and fire and shortage, despite the names scratched daily from our lists, Memel, almost incredibly, held. Then, one gray afternoon, some elements of our famous division were regrouped at a precise point. Ammunition for an offensive was handed out, and we were given two tins of food each, without regard to the contents. Some received a pound of apple sauce, others a pound of margarine. However, these variations seemed insignificant compared to the fact that the ghost of German military organization was still functioning during those days of grace on the fringes of a disintegrated city, which would still be known as Memel for a short time. Supplies, although obviously rationed to the limit, were still distributed before an offensive. Incredible as it may now seem, the vestigial remnants of the German Army in Memel were to attempt an offensive to the south, whose aim was to re-establish contact with the front at Cranz and Königsberg. The officers who prepared the maneuver issued their directives to the disillusioned ears of combat veterans.

Hals and I were jolted from the void in which we had grown used to living. We were accustomed to the most astounding orders, but this time the fact that we were going to hurl ourselves into an assault with the incredibly slender means available to us made us tremble and reel with uncontrollable vertigo.

A few tanks which were still intact would support our progress. Materiel which belonged to the Courland soldiers, and even some from Germany, had been delivered. We were to proceed to a village some ten miles to the south, on the road which followed the coast, beside a large bay. The commanding officer of the operation chose a moment of appalling weather to launch his offensive. It was simultaneously snowing and raining. The atmospheric conditions were so disastrous that even the Russian artillery had practically stopped functioning. It was this circumstance which our leaders hoped to exploit on our last, lunatic expedition.

A dozen dirty-gray tanks went out to meet an inexorable fate. The black crosses painted on their gray sides, the color of our misery, were scarcely visible. Inside the turrets, the “Ride of the Valkyrie” was coming over the short-wave radios — a fitting accompaniment to supreme sacrifice. Decrepit trucks carrying field pieces and heavy machine guns followed close behind, replacing the full-track caissons of Panzergrenadiers of our prosperous days. A mass of infantry, mixed with the remnants of naval and aerial groups, ran along beside the motorized materiel. My group, in which, to my joy, I recognized the faces of Hals and Wiener, were clinging to the exposed chassis of an automobile which had been stripped of its skin.

With ludicrous ease, our point units surprised a camp of Russian armor lined up under the snow as if on parade. The Russians. staggered by this absolutely unforeseen blow, abandoned the camp, which we burned, using one of our special incendiary techniques. A supply of Soviet fuel allowed us to think of pushing our offensive even farther, and we went on, despite the gusts of wind which lashed our hands and cheeks. Several concentrations of Russian troops gave way before our surprise thrust.

However, the enemy was massed around Memel in depth, and as soon as they struck back, our thrust came to an end. We could hear the first Russian reaction, and knew that we would soon be inundated by a merciless rain of fire, and that the first Russian tanks were already rolling toward us.

As things were reaching a critical point for us, we heard artillery fire from the sea. The bad weather prevented us from seeing the ships just off shore, but their providential fire fell on the Red tide as it moved toward us. Two or three destroyers or torpedo boats had come especially to support us. Despite zero visibility, the coordinates supplied by our tanks in forward positions enabled the ships to fire with considerable precision, and the Russian thrust was more or less stopped. It was also possible that the Russians, who were further inland, misjudged the source of our fire, and supposed that we possessed more ground artillery than we actually did.

However, none of this made any real difference. The Russians possessed infinitely greater means than we did. Toward the end of the day, our meager operation was attacked along a flank of some six miles. This was much more than we could take. Soon half our tanks were on fire. As foreseen, we had failed and were ordered to return to Memel — six miles back the way we’d come — which was far more difficult than the way out.

We abandoned the road we had followed for our last, epic attack except for our motorized materiel, which separated as widely as possible when the Russians fired. In the darkness, striped with thousands of lights, breathless troops were running across the dunes from one hole to the next, valuing each step which brought them closer to Memel. As a crowning blow, the column had to cross a stretch of road we ourselves had mined that morning.

We tramped a mile lit by flares and streaked with white flashes. The road was narrow, but still more or less intact, except for a few shell holes. The first vehicles drove full speed down that infernal space. The Russians had not yet had the time to adjust their aim, and their shells fell beyond us. However, their second round was more successful. Two trucks were hit dead on, and disintegrated. Two more, although they were mangled and torn, got through to less dangerous ground. The wreckage of the first two obstructed the road, and we were sent to clear it away. Ivan was now quite close, letting us have it with grenade launchers and peppering us with machine-gun fire. Despite our intense terror, we tried to keep on firing back as we climbed the slippery banks of flying gravel. The ditches where we might have found shelter had been mined; we were caught in a trap we had prepared ourselves. Several of our men fell, their arms flung outward and their eyes fixed for the last time on the dark, tormented sky. While we waited, our small band clung to the possibilities of survival. We waited beside the first two vehicles which had been wrecked and were obstructing the passage. All around us, Russian grenades were exploding, illuminating the darkness. A Russian quadruple machine gun was spraying the edge of the ditch, which was luckily somewhat higher than the road.

The Russian gun swept much of the wreckage from the road, jarring the shattered heaps further into disintegration with each salvo. Beside these fragments of metal, which had lost almost all their shape, lay two men in their ragged uniforms — men who, like us, had believed in a way out, and were now eternally at rest.

We would have to clear the road of the wreckage which still obstructed it, but anyone who stood up would probably be hit. Once again, Wiener, the veteran, emerged from our petrified group. On his knees under the flying bullets, he hurled a grenade at the first heap of metal and blew it from the road. The second wreck went up the same way. The third — a three-and-a-half-ton truck — required four grenades. Unfortunately, the wounded men inside the truck were blown up too — but that’s war.

Toward midnight, at the height of the storm, two-thirds of our men were back in Memel. The command had become aware of our enterprise, and had provided covering fire. In a state of exhaustion, we arrived at the rear of our entrenched camp. Inventory of the missing was taken outside, among the ruins of a bathing establishment. Then, in the perpetual roar of noise from the front, we settled down and tried to sleep, even though the circumstances were so heavily against it that the attempt itself was an act of heroism.

The next day, toward eleven in the morning, when we had finished eating the rations distributed before the offensive, we were sent back to posts which had to be defended. In our dramatic situation, our rest periods could not be of any greater duration. Civilians continued to embark, despite all the risks this entailed.

Seas were running high, and all the buildings were covered with frost. Their human complement were waiting to leave from the jetty. Although the waves sprayed their bluish faces, there wasn’t the slightest murmur of complaint.

Our troops continued to deny the Russians access to the town and its immediate surroundings. The possibility of evacuation by sea represented such a lifeline that a maximum effort was mounted to make it possible for us to hold on. Food, munitions, and medicines were sent in. On certain days our hammering from the Russians seemed to be diminishing, and despite the cold which grew daily more intense, life seemed easier. We didn’t realize that the Soviet armies were concentrating their efforts farther south. Königsberg, Heiligenbeil, Elbing, and then Gotenhafen were increasingly threatened.

The problem of refugees, as I learned later, was ten times greater in those places. The Russians abandoned Memel for the moment to cut further into Prussia, where they were met with desperate resistance. However, they swept it all aside. The three powerful Soviet armies which had entered German territory possessed means infinitely greater than those remaining to us. In addition to this, they were inspired by savage feelings of vengeance. The tortured population of Prussia were indelibly instructed in what this meant.

Elsewhere, scattered through the population, were Lithuanians, anti-communist Russians, Poles, and even English and Canadian prisoners, who shared our fate, even at Memel. The general terror of Russia superseded all national divisions and differences of opinion; it was a brute fact — simple and unassimilable. When no other course was possible, everyone fled — even the English and Canadian prisoners. The likelihood of being distinguished by the Russian assault units was too doubtful. Women of all ages were exposed to another form of outrage. The number of people evacuated by sea must have risen into the millions.

The veteran had carefully set up his F.M. in the ruins of a house whose walls rose no higher than three feet from the ground. From time to time he brushed the snow from the breech with the back of his hand, which had turned gray from repeated frostbite. Since our last attack to the south of the town, the veteran seemed to have regained his calm. The nervous excitement which affected all of us no longer seemed to touch him. He no longer took part in our desperate discussions, and seemed to have separated himself from all our sufferings. The war, the cold, and all the other horrors which plagued us no longer seemed to touch him. His manner was strange and we wondered about his frame of mind.

However, that morning, his F.M. had saved us from a Russian patrol which had become particularly interested in our group. Twenty Russian bodies lay stiffening in front of the Volkssturm truck which continued to function despite the fact that one of its back wheels was a thick log wedged against the chassis — another of the minor miracles of Memel. Then the Russians had sent a 50-mm. bullet under its hood, finishing off the two old men dressed as soldiers who sat in the cab. Hours later the damned thing was still blocking our view. The Russians had tried to use it as a shield to get close enough to wipe us out with grenades, but Wiener had riddled them with enough fire to finish them off too. Speed had been the critical factor, and Wiener had simply been the quickest. Now he sat in silence, wiping his gun as if it were a precious jewel. The rest of us — Hals, Lindberg, two others, and I — remained sitting in nervous agitation behind our cold, gray weapons, fully aware that they were no longer enough to guarantee our safety.

I had at my disposal three Panzerfausts, and the new P.M. which the Volkssturm had recently distributed — an extremely effective weapon which combined features of both the F.M. and the old P.M. I also had a small magnetic mine, which gave my stomach an extra turn. At Memel we each carried enough of an armory to ensure a quick death — with all that load, there was no question of getting away quickly.

We were to hold our position for about two more weeks, fighting off more or less soft attacks every forty-eight hours. Our rear was no great distance from the front, which made it possible for us to rotate our rest periods at reasonably frequent intervals, and rest in a manner which was more or less refreshing. Not far from us, beside what was left of the street, was a signpost stating that we were five miles from the coast: the last five miles of our retreat from the Don — an almost incredible sweep of over a thousand miles, much of it on foot. As the veteran sometimes jokingly said to me: “The same route your great-grandfather took with Napoleon, my boy. You might think of it as a family affair, if that’s any consolation to you.”

Then, one evening, as we were returning to the damp and icy cellar we used as a dormitory during our rest periods, we noticed that the civilian population of Memel had almost disappeared. The last shipload of refugees must have left while we were at the front. We walked through the darkness of the town, which was more like an abandoned cemetery than a town, and returned to our cellar with something like joy in our hearts.

My companions sat huddled on their ragged pallets without talking, attacking whatever comestible Grandsk had been able to produce, without even noticing what it was. It didn’t matter a damn; their attention was elsewhere. They were dreaming in the heavy silence, fixing their eyes, which burned with accumulated distress, on the dirty gray vault of our cellar. They were dreaming of the deliverance which must be near at hand, of the leaking hulk which would carry us out onto the sea against which we had been pressed for so long. They were dreaming, staring from their dark sockets with mad, transparent eyes, and it was understood that no one would speak. Their eyes, which had grown used to staring only at the war, had turned toward the possibility of an inner vision it was just possible to glimpse, with an intensity which I also felt in myself. They were dreaming, and so that the war wouldn’t catch them at it, they tried to hide it, looking at no one and keeping their eyes fixed on some inner vision of hope.

I was the only one who saw them. I saw them because I had nothing else to see. I had already dreamed too much, and perhaps had lost that capacity. Too many of my dreams had been nightmares. Even if I had still been able to dream, I wouldn’t have dared, because in the end, when one of the dreams came true, it was too painful.

So I no longer dreamed but watched the others, drinking in some of their hope, and turning it for moments at a time into concrete images: worn boots on the slimy deck of a ship — boots, vomiting discolored, empty uniforms. And then I would stop, because hope was so horrible. What forms did the hope of others take? It seemed that I no longer knew how to dream.

And yet I too still possessed this impatience, which we hid and cherished like a treasure which life had not yet stolen. I still had it too, and was hiding it inside myself. I felt it, and heard it, shrieking through my silence, shrieking so loudly that it overwhelmed me, like the noise of explosions. My balance was damaged by that sound, because I no longer dared lay claim to any particular hope or promise. I was afraid to ask too much, afraid that the least desire might seem like a demand.

I was still alive, and was afraid that somebody might notice.

I had given everything else I had: my feelings, my anguish, my sorrow, my fear. I had also forgotten Paula, and, so that I wouldn’t still seem too rich, I had forgotten that I was too young. I was not in very good health, but everything at Memel was hard. People with holes in their stomachs as big as fists were asked to be brave. Others, whose blood was pouring out onto the snow, fired at the war until their eyes grew glassy. I was lucky. In spite of my fits of coughing and my bloody phlegm, I still had a spark of life, which I kept hidden. One must no longer ask anything of anybody. Even if God heard our prayers, whatever we received would be consumed.

So I watched my companions as they dreamed. They too knew how dangerous dreams were in that place. Memel needed everything — dreams and hopes included. Men who still could hope fought better than those who couldn’t. And we were all so tired of fighting.

From time to time one of us would emerge from torpor and scream. These screams were entirely involuntary: we couldn’t stop them. They were produced by our exhaustion, by our organs, writhing with fatigue.

Some laughed as they howled; others prayed. Men who could pray could hope, and for so many hope was dead — so they howled their prayers. In any case, it was too late. Even if their prayers had been heard, God would no longer have dared to appear. He had abused His mercy — as in the case of Smellens, who had died that morning. Smellens had wanted to die, but not until he had received some news of his little brother, whom he had only seen twice. With dry eyes, we had watched the road which should have brought us the post, but no news came. Smellens had hung on to life as long as he could; but here, in Memel, it was too late for the All-powerful.

During the following days the first military evacuations took place. First, the units which had been most sorely tried, with the gravely wounded given priority — except for the hopeless cases, who would be as well off dying in Memel as anywhere else. The silently impatient joy of the less seriously injured, who could go, helped them to forget their wounds, which were tortured by the cold. Gangrenous cases stopped thinking about the amputations which awaited them. It was as if a veil of confidence had drifted gently over the town. Except for the planes, which hammered at us continuously, life might also have become life again. Ships gutted by bombs blocked the approaches to the piers. Mutilated corpses floated in the debris. The Navy was performing a prodigious task. We would have been lost without it.

A barge packed with men had been bombed amidships by an adroit pilot who hit the bull’s eye the first time. We were summoned from our rest period to deal with the mess. I shall omit the details, the memory of which still nauseates me. Our boots were red with blood. The human refuse which we threw off the front of the half-submerged wreck drew a throng of fish, and the smell of bodies torn open by gaping wounds is beyond expression, even though the water washing over the carnage diminished it somewhat.

The water in which we worked at first seemed warm in comparison to the air. After a short time, however, it began to seem like torture. Our gestures became slow and hesitant, and our hearts felt the wrenching of pain which clouded our vision. We had to hang on. Two more ships were loading up with troops, and soon it would be our turn.

By mid-morning, the sky cleared. The pale sun attempting to shine over this scene of disaster filled us with unease. Any pleasure in the sun had long ago been killed for us. It invariably meant Russian planes.

Before we had finished our cleanup, the Russian fighter-bombers were overhead. This surprised no one. With good weather it could only be expected. Limping on our painful feet, we ran as fast as we could for whatever shelter we could find. All the true concrete shelters were used as first-aid hospitals, or shelters for the wounded. We had to huddle in the ruins, or in shell holes and bomb craters. We hid ourselves away in small clusters, and tried to concentrate on our imminent escape.

We could hear the anti-aircraft guns on all sides. Perhaps they would keep the planes away from the port itself…. But then we heard planes flying low overhead, making the icy air around us vibrate with their passage. We watched them, rubbing our fingertips, which were numb with cold, as they passed over the ruined town, and the men in rows, bowing beneath them like grasses in a wind. They passed over two ships which cast off their moorings to make less of a target. Five bombs fell simultaneously from the five planes gliding over the piers. Two fell in the water, where they burst, covering the waiting men with spray. A third scattered debris on the beach, while the last two opened a crater in front of a line of men who would not be leaving until much later. Bodies flew into the air. Some of the survivors gave way to despair, but those who still dared to hope supported them. There were no cries except from a few wounded men, who howled without meaning to.

There were now some forty planes overhead, and others were coming up from behind the cliffs to the north. One of them exploded in the air; perhaps one of our guns had hit it. But there were no cries of triumph, as in the old days. Here there was only the noise of war; the men were silent.

The ships had drawn somewhat away from the piers, but the men waiting to embark remained in their places so they wouldn’t lose them. The planes turned in the sky, probably looking for the most effective positions for letting go their bombs.

We watched, trembling with cold and despair. But no one questioned the sanity of the men who remained in line. We knew that, when our turn came, we would do the same thing. At that time and place, hope was worth everything — a fortune which there was no question of staking. Everyone there had invested everything their torments had spared them in the possibilities which those ships represented.

The planes came over again, and I hid my eyes so that I couldn’t see. The rhythm was too horrible, and in the end I was only human, not God. I hadn’t died on the Cross, and had no right to watch.

The days went by. Memel no longer existed, except on strategic maps. The front had shrunk, but a great many men had embarked. However, there were still thousands waiting their turn, shuttling between the positions they still had to hold and the semi-tombs where they slept their mutilated sleep. I still watched, through my dazed eyes, as these thousands wandered through the heights of tragedy, in a silence which, to my ears, drowned out all the noises of the earth. They had been stripped of their human condition, and I watched them in hideous loneliness, weeping internal tears as heavy as mercury.

How long were we there? For how many lifetimes? It is no longer possible to say, and the world will never know. I feel now as though I was born to experience that test. Memel had become the summit of my life, the ultimate peak, with only the infinite beyond it. We felt that after Memel nothing of us would remain, and that the life we would experience in the future would be like the crutches one offers to a cripple. Memel is the tomb of my life, the absolute. The silence which enveloped our groups had a miraculous quality, which allowed each of the living dead we had become to think about what would follow our misery. However foolish it may seem today, the thought that our wretchedness would be recognized later, even posthumously, was a comfort. Today, even this last concern has disappeared. Anything which might be said about our misery depends on a system of interpretation which is believed to be perfect. But the spectacle of Memel will not even be helped by the last judgment.

It is growing dim and vanishing without ever having been seen.

We had left our cellar for a pillbox whose gun had been destroyed. I had stuffed my belongings into the space formerly occupied by the gun. Following my example, Hals, Schlesser, and another fellow had done the same. Wiener, Lindberg, Pferham, and seven or eight others occupied what was left of the turret itself. Our new lodging was less humid than the cellar, but that was not the reason for our transfer. We had shifted because in our new quarters we were closer to the various points we might have to reach at maximum speed. Our defense perimeter had shrunk even further because once again the Russians had become interested in us. The German troops still holding the tiny Memel stronghold had to face the possibility of serious attacks which might prove decisive. As it was, we were often obliged to approach our positions with extreme caution. Our men, driven beyond desperation, sometimes surrendered to the Russians, who would then put on their captives’ rags and wait for the relief.

Our wretched men had fallen into this trap several times. Even more often, in their exhaustion, they had failed to notice Ivan crawling toward them until it was too late. Then Ivan would replace them.

Wiener and two other fellows had almost fallen into one of these traps. The veteran had spotted it in time, and had exploded into the kind of rage we knew so well.

“He saved us,” stammered one of the men who’d been with him. “He let them have all his grenades right in the face.” Both men talked in gasps, in an automatic nervous spasm. In fact, they both knew they were probably done for.

Wiener said nothing. He had recovered his silence, and lay prostrate against the bunker wall, which glittered with frost, while we looked at him. We had grown used to being saved by Wiener.

That evening, one of our men had tried to smoke a cigarette retrieved from a Russian cadaver. He had lit it and gone outside to relieve himself. Ivan had sharp eyes. He had spotted the glowing tip of the cigarette, and a 50-mm. shell had pierced the concrete, and burst in our comrade’s back. He died without a sound.

“Ivan has come even closer,” muttered Pferham.

The next day, in a piercing cold, we went to our outermost position, which should have been in Russian hands for some time past. On our way, we passed the last tank remaining in that sector. It was an old M-2, which had already been on fire, and which bore the impact marks of many shells. Its own guns had been destroyed and replaced by others which weren’t made for it. Each day it moved to a trench cut through the ruins of an alley, and held Ivan back whenever he tried to get through there.

The infantry in its neighborhood had often rescued that old machine from contests that were too unequal, while the soldier gutter — rats infesting the ruins nearby held it in respect for the inestimable services it still performed.

Today, the tank’s engine had broken down, and a team of ragged mechanics were laboring over it. We had huddled nearby to watch for a moment. One of the mechanics broke a tool and threw it on the ground in a rage. We heard the others talking. The machine was beyond repair. The men stood around, considering what to do with it. It had become a familiar part of our daily landscape.

Two planes had just flown over the ruins closest to us. All the tank crew took shelter beside the tank and stared up at the planes with feverish intensity. To our surprise, we found ourselves looking at two German reconnaissance planes. Where had they come from? They banked when they saw the tank, which no longer bore any insignia. For a moment we were all seized with a horrifying doubt: would the planes take us for Russians? We all stepped into the open and waved, with our arms spread wide, and the moment passed. The two planes flew over us very low, to the right. We could see the pilots. One of them even waved.

They must have come from a German base — from Germany, where everything was still possible, perhaps.

Our gray faces followed their flight until they vanished. In imagination we followed them for longer still.

We were still faced with the problem of the tank. The passage of the two planes had given us a fresh stimulus. Everyone was standing around the machine. Someone suggested that we try to push it. Although it was a mad idea, we all took hold of the rough and icy metal. Shouting hoarsely, we tried to establish a rhythm. There were about thirty of us, hoping to synchronize our efforts. Our boots slipped and crunched against the icy ground, but the tank didn’t move. Our emaciated bodies seemed to have lost their strength. The three crewmen swore at our impotence, but still the tank didn’t move. After a hurried discussion, two of our men ran to the rear. We were about to follow them, when we heard the sound of an engine. There was also a truck left in Memel, which I hadn’t known until that moment. However, it arrived, jolting and backfiring. Before it had quite reached the tank the men had pressed pieces of wood against its radiator to protect it from the shock. Then it nudged up to the tank, shoving it from the rear. For a moment we thought it was going to stall too. Then, with a series of shoves, we managed to start the tank rolling, lifting it from behind, and letting it fall several times.

I stared at one of the slowly turning rollers. Its motion struck me as the essence of the miracle of Memel in miniature. The truck’s engine roared, and our boots crunched against the solid ground. The tank rolled forward, and we continued on either side of it without losing our grip. My head was swimming from the effort, but I knew that something was happening in direct response to our will. Perhaps such knowledge is what constitutes joy. The heavy roller, studded with rivets, turned, and my eyes devoured it. It had also rolled across the infinity of the steppe, where part of my life had crumbled away, and it was turning now, just as I was still breathing. Joy is as simple as that. It would die, perhaps, within a short distance, as Hals or I might die, but until death came it would roll noisily down the slope. I felt very much akin to this huge metal object. In Memel, anything that moved was still alive. I was still alive….

We returned twice more to the position. We would go again the next day, if we survived the night. However, that night Ivan was very much awake, raining death onto what was left of the town. The ground trembled continuously, and the sky was starred with flares. The light was as strong as broad daylight, reducing the luminous brilliance of the explosions. Our shelter cracked beneath the Russian blows, and as our lungs emptied of air, we sensed the presence of death. Wollers, our leader, tried to kill himself, but we pursued him outside and grabbed him by the belt. During the course of this rescue operation, one of the rescuers was killed.

Russian tanks had reached the hill to the south of our camp. Our soldiers who had been in the path of their advance had done their duty before they died. Then a heavy bombardment from the sea had struck the tanks as they slid over the dunes. Several tanks to the south of us went up in flames. The Russians were even forced to retreat a little, fighting as they went. The bombardment from the sea continued. Through the darkness and fog we could see the luminous discharges of the guns. With daylight, we were able to see the source of our help through heavy curtains of smoke. Two warships were standing close by the shore. One of them was the Prinz Eugen. The other was a ship of the same size. To the desperate defenders of Memel, they were a source of support we had never hoped for. The tanks respected their large guns, and kept their distance.

In the morning, we were supposed to return to the position described above. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, I had managed to sleep fitfully, like everyone else. Our sleep, under these circumstances, had its own peculiarities. We slept while we were wide awake, with our eyes open, like extinguished lamps. There was scarcely any difference between our faces and the faces of the dead. When. I woke up, I wondered if I would still be able to move. My body felt like dead wood, and I no longer dared look at my arms, which were so emaciated they were like two sticks.

I felt an intense pain in my chest, as if another battle as fierce as the one outside were raging through my interior. Nonetheless, I had to wrench myself from my torpor. Everyone else looked as strange as I did. I stared at them all once again, as I stuffed my crumbling teeth with shreds of cotton torn from the hem of my coat. Their faces were as gray as the faces of the dead. One would have said they were dead or else perhaps that nothing left in Memel was still alive, which seemed a distinct possibility.

We left. The Russians were firing haphazardly now, as if they were just passing the time — a bullet to the left, another to the right; after the night’s bombardment, none of it seemed serious. As we drew closer to the front line, the chaos became indescribable. We had to climb through or over holes and protuberances of more than six yards. My head was spinning. I no longer had the strength of a child.

We could see the smoke hanging over the Russians’ position as well. The Kriegsmarine must have scored several direct hits. On our way, we passed several fellows who were freezing behind their guns. They stared at us as if everything was our fault. We went on without a word. Manners, the weapon of the unmannerly, counted for nothing here. Everything was dead except courage, if that was still of any importance.

We had nearly reached our hole, with another 150 yards to go. I could see the earth heaped around it, and the empty munitions boxes, and the hole, where we would freeze for hours on end, and perhaps even die. What difference did it make where we were? It was just as cold in our bunker…. Anyway, to hell with it; I was still alive….

But what was Wiener doing?

He had stopped. I couldn’t understand it — but it was all the same to me; I was so tired. But why was he firing? Wiener had set up his M.G. right on the ground, without even opening its front legs, and was sweeping the crest of our hole with short bursts of fire. Everyone else had instinctively found a hole. Hals was right beside me, but I couldn’t look at him. He had grown old too quickly. He might have been fifty years old.

“We’ll soon find out,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

The veteran threw a grenade which landed near our former position. What an extraordinary man Wiener was. If our own troops had been in the hole, they would have shouted.

The Popovs were quiet. If they had tried to fool us by shouting, we would have recognized that trick right away. But Wiener had obviously been right. They were firing at us now; that was their answer.

“Schweinhund!” shouted Wiener. “Bastards!”

Wiener should have been a general, or even the Führer. We had more confidence in him than in anyone else. He was firing straight at those damned muzhiks. No one dared move — and to make matters even more disturbing, we could hear the noise of tanks coming toward us from behind the ridge of banked-up earth. We knew that there were one or two Russian tanks back there, which were now going to direct their fire at us.

Wiener had undoubtedly made the same calculations. He was sliding carefully backward, dragging his gun. To my left, one of our men had just been hit.

“Let’s go back!” Hals shouted.

But moving back was just as dangerous as moving forward. Who could I think of to give myself more courage? My mother? Did I even have a mother? Of Paula? But what good was my version of love in my universe? Of my own skin? My skin looked like Hals’s, and I didn’t have the courage to look at that any more. It’s madness to have courage for nothing…. There was Wiener, our leader. He was worth dying for.

We had to abandon our friend Hans. His hip had been shattered, and under Russian fire we could do nothing for him. We said goodbye to him. He would know how to die, since he had known how to live at Memel. We didn’t worry about it.

We reached a shell hole where we set up our two F.M.s ready to fire. As we had expected, the Russians were now plastering the area we had just left with fire from their tanks. The war machine was starting up again both to the north and to the south. The Russians were coming down into our trench. It was terrible to see them, and we felt half dead with fright. Wiener wasn’t firing. He looked at us, and we looked at him, as if praying for advice. Reflected on his face, we could see the immensity of the disaster.

“Get out!” he shouted suddenly, his voice rising above the noise of the guns. “Get out of here as quick as you can!”

We had already grabbed our things and plunged down into the bottom of the hole. We stopped for a moment, and stared at Wiener.

“Come on!” shouted Pferham.

“Shut up, pastor. You get out too.”

But Pferham had his duties, which kept him where he was.

“You go on, for the love of God. Clear out, and don’t worry about me. I’ve had enough of fighting and retreating.”

“Wiener!”

“There’ll be no room for me after the war, remember?”

The veteran had opened fire. He was firing like a madman at the Russians who were coming along the trench. Pferham called again, but the sound of the gun drowned out his voice. We ran back off that ground which was shifting and crumbling under our feet. The position was no longer tenable. Why didn’t Wiener follow us?

Ten minutes later, we plunged down into our mortar and anti-tank positions. Five hundred yards to the east, we could see a thick cloud of smoke rising from the position we had just left. As the deluge of war poured over us, and the parapet of the gunpit trembled like the railings of a ship caught in a storm, we clung to our guns with trembling hands, as to our last salvation.

The fire from the ships made a critical difference to us. Without it we would have been overrun. The danger was so pressing that no one could leave his post. Through the sharp noise of the guns, we could hear the wounded groaning. Such a peak of tragedy was beyond understanding. Each of us felt alone, stripped of all feeling and all judgment. Perhaps there would not even be time for a few hours of rest before our deaths. The men waiting at the piers had gone back to points of defense. This was not altruism, but simple self-interest. They knew that if Memel fell, no one would leave. At a high pitch of fury, they drew on their last reserves of strength to keep watch, and prevent Ivan from destroying their Calvary and their hope.

Memel still held — Memel, a small island of courage drawn from an infinity of anguish. But the boats didn’t come. Had we been abandoned? Had this final reason for fighting vanished too? Was this the end?

However, the following night, a ship drew in to shore like a ghost. A crowd of dying men ran toward her, fighting among each other for places. No order could have held them back. In any case, the officers were in the same state as their men. Here, no one fought because a whistle blew. We fought because there was no other possibility.

It seemed that the ship had not come to pick up men, but food. We had enough food to hold out for another three months, but since we were to be withdrawn “immediately,” these supplies should have been destroyed. However, to the south, there were hundreds of thousands of refugees who were dying of hunger and cold. The crowd which had collected near the shore heard the voice of the naval officer shouting through an amplifier. At first they couldn’t understand these words, which seemed to be coming from another world, from a man whose floating mobility allowed him to see the worst from a distance. They vaguely grasped that from their misery they could still help other people farther to the south. A single word ran through their minds in an endless refrain: immediately… immediately… immediately. The boat loaded up with our supplies and took on a few wounded. Immediately… The crowd stood motionless, wrapped in a silence as large as the night.

Our diminished group had been sent to the northern edge of the stronghold, to a beach beside the sea, overhung by moderately high cliffs. We still held the clifftops, in bunkers which had been built facing the sea. However, the Russians had also reached the clifftops at several points, and even though they were not yet there in strength, they had sent out sharpshooters, who controlled the rocky beach along which we were crawling under their fire.

The German positions on these heights were fortified islands, surrounded by the enemy, and living on God knows what. There was no longer any question of the Gross Deutschland Division, or any other division. Everything which could still move in Memel was alive, and anything alive had to be used.

A ragged officer had brought us to this point, where he feared the Russians might break through our rear lines. Although the position was very dangerous, it was at least somewhat less dangerous than the official front. Tanks couldn’t get through unless they reached the heights, which we still dominated and weakly defended. For shelter, we used the holes dug by civilian refugees who had waited here for deliverance by sea.

We were in almost constant contact with the Russians. Ivan moved along the length of the coast, peppering us from the cliffs. Sometimes he used mortars. The sandy soil was as churned up as if a harrow had been through it, and we were constantly digging out both the living and the dead. However, in this soft soil, the impact of missiles was usually dissipated. The Russians were just playing with us, but they gave us no respite. If our heads hadn’t been empty, they would have burst with exasperation.

Although the cold was cruel, nature had also sent us fog, which was an ally. The Russians had infiltrated our lines, and were sometimes even killed from behind. They were afraid too and were hoping that support from their artillery and tanks would crush once and for all this cemetery where even the dead seemed to defy them. They infiltrated with great caution, and when they thought we could hear them, they shouted insults at us, telling us what they would do to our wives and mothers. They also said they were planning to remove parts of ourselves. Sometimes, too, they sang.

Hals and I listened, with our fingers on our triggers, because they often sang and shouted like that to distract us.

“Ai mayi drougii Germanski, kak sabatchi ch’olet! Ya tibai scajou spaciba ouyoudna mamenchka!”

Then they would count. “Listen, German soldiers. You are going to die. Listen: raz, dva, tri…”

Then they would let off a volley, while we listened in silence, like antennae destined to pick up all the ignominies on earth.

During the night, two more boats came. At the risk of instant death, a crowd of ragged soldiers ran to board them. We were too far from the shore to get there in time. As the nausea rose in our throats, we stood powerless, trying to calculate our isolation. Every time a boatload withdrew, our defense was weakened to that degree. Nothing could stop Ivan now. As soon as the wave broke, we would run like rats. The long nightmare turned heavily in our minds, and we all trembled uncontrollably.

Hals had lifted his gun to his head. I must have stared at him with enough sorrow to stop him. He turned back onto his stomach, and crushed his face into the ground.

The next day, we were still covered with fog. The front was quiet. Were the Russians preparing something?

Hals and Schlesser had crawled toward the water, toward a smashed car which stood in the spray at the edge of the beach. I joined them, taking maximum precautions. Hals spoke in a half whisper.

“You help us, Sajer. We’ll get those inner tubes. Three of them are still good.”

“To make floats?”

“Yes. A raft. But be careful. We don’t have any tools, so we’ll have to use bayonets. Do it like this — but be careful!”

I felt as if a shaft of light had pierced my mind. A raft. We might float for a long time, but this also might be our last chance. We had no tools, and we would have to get the tires off the wheels without lifting them. Trembling with anxiety, we set about this desperate task. The inner tubes had to be full of air, otherwise they’d be no good to us. Pferham came over and joined us.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “Even if you get the tubes out, they’re sure to burst. After all, it’s the tire that holds the pressure in.”

It was true that we’d been half off our heads for quite a while now. We couldn’t give up the idea of escape, and received Pferham’s objectivity with ferocious scowls.

“Then let’s take the whole wheel,” Hals said. “I’m sure they won’t float,” said Pferham.

“Shut up!” roared Hals. “You stick to your God. Myself, I have more confidence in these tires.”

Pferham said nothing more, and like the rest of us tried to free the nuts with the tip of his bayonet.

It took us at least two hours to complete the job. We also had to dig away the sand from under the right front tire, as the wreck was lying on its side.

We could hear the sound of heavy mortars in Memel. The ground shook as far out as we were, and it seemed likely that the Russians had taken a big slice of what was left of the town. We no longer dared to think about what might be happening there, concentrating instead on the ridiculous work we had undertaken. Twice we were forced to give it up, and get back to our holes. The Russians were infiltrating all along our positions, crawling through the fog almost everywhere. Hals and I clung to each other in our refuge. For the seventh or eighth time, we had fired almost point blank on Asiatic-looking men, with Asiatic faces. Each time, our Volkssturm shook in our hands, and we trembled with fright.

By evening, the whole city looked like a volcano. Stalin’s organs were howling without stopping, loosing a storm of random fire. Our shattered nerves no longer reacted. Everything was at once hazy and luminous. By now there were seven or eight of us fastening belts and boards onto the three tires which would probably never float; seven or eight who would probably be killing each other within minutes, for it was clear that the raft would never hold all of us.

It was ready. Schlesser and Pferham pushed it toward the water. We followed, like wolves afraid of missing part of the feast.

“Wait a minute, I’ll give it a try,” said Pferham.

We all took a step forward. Pferham looked at us. He knew that if he went too far we would kill him. Our silhouettes wavered against the lights which were consuming Memel, and our eyes followed the movement of the raft as it pitched, half-submerged on the dark water which melted into the night and fog.

As Pferham tried to maintain a balance which every physical law made impossible, he must have prayed to the sadistic God who watched him sink. He didn’t jump until the water had risen over his belt, as our safety foundered before our eyes.

The night passed slowly, lit by the huge fires. The beach, from which we stared with enormous eyes, shifted from pink to orange. A very young boy from one of the Volkssturm groups had succumbed to despair. His body remained wedged upright in the midst of our group, most of whom didn’t even notice that he had died. Another suddenly stood up and walked off, as if hypnotized by the flames in the south. moving toward Memel in a state which was certainly not conscious. We watched him disappear into the brilliant, unreal half darkness.

The Russians could have taken us by surprise now, without any attempt on our part to intercept them. The horrified faces of the last soldiers in the armies of the East were fixed with fascination on the apocalypse of Memel. At daybreak, the fire over the ruins of the town had turned pale yellow, almost white. We were given no orders or coordinates, and remained where we were, motionless and almost senseless, lost in the hideous solitude.

Toward the middle of the day, Wollers, our leader, said that he was leaving for Memel. He didn’t order us to follow him, but we did. Halfway there, we collapsed on the road. Our strength was gone, and the half mile we had been able to stumble was all we could manage.

Somewhere, a short distance to the east, they were still fighting.

How was it possible that any of our men still survived? A heavy black cloud with a red base lay motionless across the whole horizon, and to the south, at the docks, there were other fires. Could anyone still be alive in that place? We lay where we were, prostrate and silent, with our eyes fixed on the enormity of the catastrophe. Hours passed. Our lives were running out, and our eyes had a strange fixity. No one thought of opening the few cans we had left. We knew that any food would taste too bitter, with the taste of Memel.

Once again, darkness covered us, and our motionless group melted into the fog which lay like a winding sheet over Memel, and stagnated on the sea.

Another group of bent men walked slowly by some ten yards from us. They seemed somehow unreal. Were they German survivors still wandering through this little piece of the void which fate still allowed us? Were they Russians? Or were they, perhaps, a dream?

I don’t know how long we stayed there. Perhaps for another day and night; no one can be exact about a nightmare. Also, it is a question of no great importance. Some things — like Memel — cannot be measured by any ordinary scale. I still need corroboration to believe that Memel really happened and is not the fantasy of a spell of madness. Describing it as I have done still makes me tremble with horror and suffer again, for even the memory is painful. The tomb of Memel, where no one has ever gone to meditate, will receive my recollections as a humble and discreet a offering.

I make no appeals to humanity, and cry for no vengeance. Except for these lines I remain silent, because I have lost my power of discretion. I have also learned, in my solitude, that there is no power more unalterable than the power of forgiveness.

At some point, we became aware of sounds from the sea. Every sound from the sea could still mean life. We stood up and listened: the noise, which was scarcely audible, was muffled and heavy, like an idling engine. And then there was the sound of voices — at first, blurred and incomprehensible. We walked out into the water, scarcely aware of its touch. Through two bursts of thunder, we caught some words.

“Hier Windau! Hier Windau!”

They were asking about Windau, a city farther to the north. A boat with all its lights out was lost in the fog. The voice kept on calling. It was probably coming through a megaphone. We trembled, and shouted as loud as we could, with what was left of our strength: “Windau!”

We had all run into the water, like madmen. The first shock revived us for a moment. We went on shouting, as the water reached our chests. Some men stumbled and fell, and then staggered to their feet again, still shouting. Soon the water was up to our chins. We thought we would pull off our clothes and swim. Then the vague outline of the boat emerged from the fog, and we shouted again. The boat scraped against the sand and stopped.

Half drowned, we went out to meet our salvation. Swimming, floating, sinking, and surfacing again, we reached the sides of the boat. We could just make out the men leaning over the side — sailors, who were throwing us lines and nets. They were asking us questions, but no one answered. We were all hanging on to anything that was thrown out to us, gasping and imploring. I thrust my fingers into a hole whose edge was encrusted with rivets. My fingers, half dead with cold, gripped like claws. Everyone was shoving and pushing for a rope or net.

The icy cold of the water began to break my will. Stiff with suffering, I kept my hold and fought against losing consciousness. An empty cigarette package floated from my pocket and lay on the water some inches from me. I stared at it to fix my wandering attention, and as I stared, my vision grew hazy.

Everything had become painless, and I scarcely felt the arms which were pulling me on board. They put me down on the deck, beside my exhausted companions. We were nothing but a shapeless, soaking mass, like a huge mound of wet sacking. Through my semi-consciousness, I realized they were passing around cups of boiling hot tea, which I swallowed down to the peril of my inner organs. My motionless gaze remained fixed on the flaming Prussian coast.

I no longer have any clear memory of what happened next. I don’t really understand why we didn’t die of exposure on the deck. Perhaps the sailors rubbed us to keep us warm…. I can only remember one thing clearly: the roar of the war coming from the land dominated all the sounds of the boat and of the sea.

Later, the boat arrived at Pillau, where we got off. On trembling legs, surrounded by a flood of refugees, we reached a first-aid station, where our physical condition was checked. A multitude of wounded men were sitting or lying all around us in huge open sheds. The little port seemed filled with a sense of feverish agitation and urgency. If the war had not yet arrived, it was nonetheless very close. We sensed its imminence, and could hear its thunder to the northeast.

18. CALVARY

We stayed at Pillau for about three weeks. We had been declared unfit for service at the front, as we were all more or less wounded, and otherwise in a state which deserved treatment in a sanitarium.

Our liquefied brains were no longer able to grasp what was happening to us, or what was asked of us. However, although we were not in a condition to function under fire, this did not mean that we were exempted from service. The staggering flood of refugees which had poured into Pillau did not allow anyone who still had two arms and two legs to remain idle.

Along with others whose wounds were more serious than ours, we were absorbed by the first-aid organization which was trying to help the civilians waiting to leave, in the face of almost insuperable difficulties. All of these people had lived through a hideous exodus, and the horror of what they had seen was still impressed on their emaciated faces. There was also a swarm of wounded men, soldiers from Königsberg and Cranz, lying about wherever they could. This was often outdoors, in the intense January cold, which sometimes cut short their sufferings. Boats were still putting into Pillau, and leaving filled with people; three-quarters of each load was civilian, the rest, wounded soldiers.

This groaning crowd of men, clinging to a last hope of evacuation, was divided into two categories. The most severely wounded — those whose chances of survival were doubtful, who would at best be hideously mutilated — were not embarked. For them, everything was over. The rest, who might still have some hope of a decent life, were eligible for the boats, which, with any luck, would carry them to the West, to that region we still imagined as a zone of relative quiet.

For every thousand persons embarked, some three thousand more arrived from the East, swelling the ranks of the mob which had turned to us for help.

If the fighting should reach us here, it would be the hell of Memel all over again, only worse. There were many more people here, and the numbers were continuously growing. People were coming in from the south, having crossed the Frisches Haff on anything that would float. They came from Heiligensbeil, Pomehrendorf, Elbing, and even from Preussisch Holland. They had been told that at Pillau they might be able to get on a boat.

We spoke to several of these wretched people. Almost everyone had lost one or two relatives on the way, and described in trembling voices scenes like the ones we had witnessed at Memel. We learned from them that the flight toward Danzig had been cut in two, and that the Russians had reached the Haff at several points. It sounded as if the horror of Memel was duplicated in almost every Prussian coastal town.

Swaying on our unsteady legs, we stared at the vast flood of human misery slowly washing toward the safety which had been promised. In spite of the most prodigious efforts it was clear that these people could not receive even a tenth of what they were expecting. If their prayers had been heard, heaven would have opened to succor their misery. But nothing happened, and misery subsided only for moments at a time, as on the tear-streaked face of a child who has collapsed into a passing sleep.

As winter closed in, the thermometer sank toward five degrees below zero, only aggravating the plight of the refugees and accelerating the death rate.

A crowd stretched as far as the eye could see, in front of a large building crammed with people. From the building a faint smell of the gruel cooking in large caldrons washed over the tightly compressed mass of people, who stood stamping their feet to keep from freezing. The thudding of their feet against the pavement sounded like a dull roll of muffled drums. The children were the most heart-wringing. Many were lost. When they tired of calling for their mothers, they collapsed into floods of tears which nothing and no one could console. These were the smallest ones, too young to grasp any explanations. Their faces, dabbed with tears which instantly froze, remain one of the most pathetic images of that time. We tried to gather them inside, near the caldrons, where they might feel some of the heat. We questioned them, hoping for some identifying information we could broadcast over loudspeakers, but they could only reply with tears and sobs.

Further on, a large metal cross, which stood on a slight elevation, glittered with frost. It looked like a huge sword, thrust into the breast of catastrophe. Another part of the crowd had collected here to listen to the prayers and encouragement of a priest.

The cold grew so intense that the Frisches Haff froze, creating new difficulties for the boats still coming into Pillau. The Frisches Haff froze, and despite the desperate consequences of such cold the fact was put to use. Hundreds of thousands, on forced marches across the ice, were able to reach the narrow strip of land at Nehrung, and Kahlberg, and finally, Danzig. People also left from the pocket at Heiligenbeil. They experienced every sort of hardship, including attacks from Soviet fighter-bombers, which tried to break the ice with strings of bombs, and often succeeded. Private cars and other vehicles of every kind frequently disappeared into crevasses covered over by thin films of ice.

However, nothing could hold back the flood of refugees, who were prepared to endure the most severe hardships. As the Russians grew increasingly active throughout the sector, large numbers of people left Pillau by this providential route. Russian planes were flying over Pillau every day, and it appeared that the defense of Königsberg had given way.

As the work at Pillau had become less intense, we planned to evacuate everyone who wasn’t strictly essential. It was barely twelve miles from Königsberg to Pillau. The front at Cranz had also been shortened, and before long we too would probably be directly involved in the fighting. We were part of an inadequate reserve composed principally of fragments of broken or annihilated units, from which a certain standard of performance was still expected. No one knew any longer where the rest of the Gross Deutschland might be, but we still wore our divisional flashes on our worn and discolored tunics, and there were still a few familiar names near me — principally, Lieutenant Wollers, with a dirty dressing on his right hand, which had lost two fingers; Pferham, our disillusioned pastor; Schlesser; Lindberg, who had survived his fear; and our cook, Grandsk, who had long ago exchanged his caldrons for an F.M.

There were also my friend Hals, whom I will never be able to forget, and I, who have consecrated the rest of my life to bearing witness. Then there were seven or eight others, whose names I never knew, who, with us, made up what was left of the Gross Deutschland Division in that area. Had our division been scratched off the list? Not yet, it seemed. An officer hailed us and ordered us to attention. Our eyes, which had already seen so much, studied this gray-faced hauptmann, who still clung to his sense of disciplinary strength.

This discipline, which had so often annoyed us in the past, touched us now like a soothing balm. Its demands were those made of living beings, of creatures still worthy of life. We analyzed no further than that; for us, accustomed as we were to thinking only of the moment, this realization was a kind of dividend. The captain spoke to us, and through his firm, official voice we caught the intense emotion of the crushing load which weighed on all of us: officers and troops, men, women, and children. The time of boasting and gratuitous bullying was so far behind us that no attitude incompatible with the gravity of the circumstances was possible. A man was speaking to us as men; no one could evade the situation.

However, this man still wore the vestiges of a military uniform, and was still trying to impose some semblance of order in a situation of cataclysm which had swept an entire nation into a devastating retreat. This man, who knew that everything was lost, was still trying to save the moment. He told us that we would have to withdraw; that we too would have to cross the ice of the Frisches Haff, and get to Danzig, where several sizable fragments of our division still remained. He tried to tell us, in a tone which was not peremptory, that there was still work for us to do as part of a particular organization which could be found where he had indicated. He was not trying to spare us a worse disaster when he gave us those orders; the worst was everywhere, and there was no escape. The hauptmann was already walking toward another group of men, saluting as he withdrew.

So we started to walk. A violent wind swept the snow from the mirror like expanse of ice. In the distance we could hear the gentle purr of the sea, behind us, the steady roar of war.

In the evening, we reached the Frische Nehrung, and the first anti-aircraft bunkers, which barely rose above the long grasses, bent over beneath their burden of snow. To crown my personal difficulties, I fell and injured my foot. It was forty miles across the Nehrung. I would have to make it anyway. For a long time now, I had known that fate was against me.

I found a broken broomstick to use as a crutch. So many people had suffered and died in this place that my minor discomfort seemed almost indecently trivial. We progressed very slowly. The hollow of a battered, overturned boat sheltered us for a few hours. We were not the only ones to use it; a group of shivering civilians were already inside, groaning as they tried to sleep. I buried my head against Hals’s shoulder, hoping to pass out, despite our wretchedness.

We reached Kahlberg toward the middle of the next day. The small town was overflowing with starving refugees. People with the faces of madmen were wolfing down the flour which was the only food distributed to them. Cans of condensed milk were reserved for the children. Soldiers also had to stand in interminable lines, to receive, finally, two handfuls of flour apiece, and a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea.

Our exhausting march resumed amid the pitiable swarms of faltering refugees. Twice we were attacked by Soviet planes, swooping low and scattering missiles which had been designed to destroy tanks. Each impact tore long, bloody furrows in the dense mass, and for a moment the wind was tinged with the warm smell of disemboweled bodies. Above all, I feared for the children, who could no longer understand anything about their situation. They didn’t know that the planes were enemy aircraft, or how urgently they were faced with cold and hunger. Everything was a misery for them, and each step a trap. The sky could make them suffer, and the earth hurt them. Their hands and feet made them bite their lips with pain. They were lost in a state of constant fear, which was justified by a world of horror which never let them forget their pitiable weakness. They stared about them with unseeing eyes at their swollen hands, which they wished were no longer attached to their bodies; at the people around them, who should no longer exist; and at the frozen grasses trembling in the wind, which they would never again enjoy as part of an innocent game.

I feared for these children, who were being punished before they had committed any crime, for whom the idea of existence would become synonymous with vengeance. I could do nothing but watch this tragic procession; even my life would be no help to them. I was not a redeeming Christ, and in any case I had discovered very good reasons for dying.

We reached Danzig three days after crossing the ice of the Frisches Haff. Everything was calm in the city, despite the tragic spectacle of hundreds of thousands of refugees. The war was to the south of us, so that we even escaped its noise, although frequent air raids struck at the heart of the crowded city. Danzig had become the terminal point of the Prussian exodus, and, although huge crowds were living day and night without shelter, there was nonetheless a substantial and organized effort to help them. It was still possible to leave for the West by rail, and the port was still open to maritime traffic. We waited down by the docks, in a dense mass of vagabonds.

Wollers went to a center which should have been able to give us some information about reintegrating with our group. He waited for several hours under its flattened glass roof. I myself was in no hurry to move on, as the stiff folds of my boot pressed painfully against my swollen ankle.

A large ship had come into Neufahrwasser, and the crowd had flowed toward the pier. The ship had not yet cast off its mooring lines, and everyone would have to wait for several hours before they were loosed again, but in Danzig then time counted for nothing. Each aim was stubbornly pursued, even at the cost of maximum patience, endurance, and suffering.

As always, there were children, with their small faces twisted by emotion, staring and hating without comprehension, and without looking for any explanations. When sleep overwhelmed them, they slept where they were, without any release from trouble. I, immobilized by exhaustion and by my sense of solitude, tried to see no more than the seagulls did, as they flew overhead, seemingly part of another world.

For two days now, we had been waiting for some information, or some instructions, under the shattered glass structure of the station. A wind which made the inside as cold as the outdoors shook the metal frame, loosening and scattering the remaining glass fragments. We had to keep walking and waving our arms to avoid freezing on the spot. As it was very hard for me to walk, my comrades gave me a permanent place inside, while they took turns walking through the rubble of the port. Finally a piece of negative information reached us: there were no Gross Deutschland units in Danzig; perhaps they had moved on to Gotenhafen. Gotenhafen was several miles to the north, on the bay only a short walk, if my foot would support me.

With the aid of Hals and my broomstick crutch, I managed to cross part of the town. On the way, Providence intervened to help us. Some civilians who had been watching us from their house came out to meet us, and took us back indoors. The house was warm, and it seemed as if the gates of Paradise had opened to receive us. There was already a crowd of people in the house — refugees from the East, including large numbers of silent children, who seemed to relish the wall bench on which they were sitting as if it were a marvelous toy.

There was water in the house, and our hosts offered us the opportunity to wash. Wollers knew that soldiers had no right to the privileges reserved for fleeing civilians. But his dressing was a mass of putrefaction, and his body was so exhausted he didn’t know how to refuse. Even I was able to soak my swollen ankle in a basin of hot water. The owners of the house insisted that we rest there overnight and, in the evening, produced something for us to eat.

We spent the night in the warmth of the cellar. Unfortunately, we were so unused to being warm that we couldn’t appreciate it as much as we should have. We shook uncontrollably for seconds at a time, as if some form of warning system were on continuous alert inside our heads. Our exhaustion, which we had been keeping more or less suppressed, broke out during this period of unaccustomed rest. Lindberg trembled for minutes at a time. Hals felt so lost if he fell asleep lying down that he spent the night propped against the wall, whimpering. As for me, I was racked down the length of my body with pains which seemed to rise and fall as I breathed.

Were we no longer able to function like normal human beings? This was certainly possible. However, one development struck me as extremely favorable. The three hot soakings I was able to give my foot put an end to the trouble in record time. Perhaps, when our bodies have been deprived of practically everything, they react favorably to the most elementary care. Then, the most desperately wounded clung to life after a glass of schnapps and a promise; today, a simple cold can flatten a healthy man for several days. Then, we were certainly not supermen, but men, in the most real and complete sense in the world.

In the morning, we took leave of our benefactors, who told us that their last reserves had been exhausted, and that they were planning to leave Danzig and flee to the West while there was still time.

With daybreak, which came late, the first fighter-bombers appeared and attacked the port, and we said goodbye against the roar of explosions and the barking of flak. We resumed our march toward Gotenhafen, sharing the road with an unbroken column of civilians, who were all moving west, as Danzig could no longer be considered safe. Others were moving north, following the coast to Hela, a port opposite Gotenhafen, which was used almost as heavily as Danzig.

Gotenhafen, about a month before its destruction, was a collection point for wounded men, who were then sent on to villages and hamlets inland. Others passed through it, to continue on the next lap of their miserable route, as always or foot. Hela was the next stop, some thirty miles beyond Gotenhafen.

We questioned the groups of soldiers we met along the way. No one knew anything or had seen any trace of our unit. Someone suggested the assembly center, but when we got there we hesitated to ask any questions of the harried officials, who had been overtaken by the course of events. A rumor was circulating through the throng of refugees: a large ship had been sunk a few days earlier, almost certainly after a torpedo attack. It had been crammed with refugees, relieved to be escaping to a region of greater security. It was easy to imagine the horror of the scene, in the black and icy night.

The news of this disaster had been officially withheld, but had nonetheless penetrated to the anxious mob, for whom the sea route was the last hope of escape. The ship in question was thought to be the Wilhelm-Gustlojff.

We had still been unable to obtain any information about our unit. Finally, we were reincorporated in a defense battalion which, with civilian aid, was constructing a line of defense to the west of Zoppot.

We dug in, some twenty miles inland. I had no idea where the enemy was, but it seemed to me that the positions we were organizing faced the wrong way. The anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns pointed west and southwest — the only directions in which retreat was possible. I couldn’t understand it — but that made no difference! It wasn’t the first time, and others were undoubtedly thinking for us.

Aside from the problem of civilian refugees, overflowing from every farmhouse and outbuilding, life was much easier here. The Prussian farmers continued to function with order and discipline, despite the anxiety which visibly marked their faces. The future looked dark, and the miracle which yesterday might have saved them now seemed much less possible. Despite orders to avoid despair and panic, and despite an effort to continue life as usual in the rush of the exodus, these people were quietly and surreptitiously beginning to liquidate their stocks, rather than lose them to the enemy. Many cattle were slaughtered for food, which later proved to have been wisely done. A short time after that, cattle were collapsing and dying by the hundreds on the frozen soil.

Despite the hard work, and the endless watches and patrols, we regained some of our strength on a diet which was no longer tightly rationed. Meat had the greatest effect on our physical wretchedness, and we absorbed it, as the war absorbed everything, with maximum determination.

Grandsk had returned to his old job. With the help of civilian volunteers, he set up a huge kitchen in an open shed. Two trucks shuttled between Zoppot, Gotenhafen, and Danzig. Ammunition for the front was organized here, and transported in small loads. With the exception of a few air raids, life went on in a state of striking calm, which seemed incompatible with the gravity of the hour, toward the end of the war, in the beginning of 1945. Even the cold had lessened, and we no longer dared look at the sky, which brought us such indecent clemency. We spent long hours engaged in activities created by the necessities of the times, but which nonetheless seemed to us like a diversion.

Then one day toward the end of February an organization which we thought no longer existed invited us back to Gotenhafen. Our Gross Deutschland group had collected a few fragments which were to be embarked for the West. Everything seemed to be improving. We separated ourselves from the battalion which had utilized our service, and said goodbye to the comrades we had made. Grandsk left the kitchen he had organized so efficiently, with regret. This break, however, saved us from the horrible ordeal in which that battalion was practically destroyed. Heaven, which had so often overwhelmed us, spared us this time.

Russian tanks moved in from the west, and a storm of fire of unequaled violence broke over the positions we had so judiciously arranged. Our men took the first blow, but were soon swept aside. The Russians suffered frightful losses, but as we had learned, this made little difference to them.

From Gotenhafen, where we were waiting for orders, the roar of the war rang louder than ever. Russian infiltration had penetrated to within six miles of the city, and our retreating troops were engaged in fierce fighting. Through the rain of shells which cut them down, the fleeing civilians entrenched in the countryside moved back toward town. Large German battleships were firing from the sea at advanced Soviet positions. The ground trembled and shook, and any window panes still in place fell out.

We were trying to impose some sort of order on the swarm of terrified civilians who wished to embark for Hela. Retreating troops were also arriving in the city, which indicated that we could no longer count on our barrage. The town was gripped once again by frantic panic, and the civilians making their way to the port completed the paralysis of the order which had been maintained until then only with the greatest of difficulty. Although we all had evacuation papers, we were rounded up once again and sent to Zoppot to fill a gap in the line.

We left Gotenhafen, where despair had assumed a pitch of delirious intensity. With dry mouths and rage in our hearts, we climbed into the civilian cars which were to take us to our new Golgotha. Through the windows, which we kept shut against the cold, we watched the sky, where flights of fighter-bombers buzzed like enraged wasps.

At Brössel, we left our cars to plunge directly into the rubble. The town rang to the sounds of an exploding universe. The Russians were attacking everything that moved with rockets and bombs, and their planes came over so low we could almost see the grins on the pilots’ faces. When they had gone, we moved back to our rickety cars, and started off again, through the flying dust. The road was strewn with rubble, and several times we had to dig our way through. We also had to skirt the enormous shell holes into which we otherwise would have disappeared entirely. Our journey ended when we were dumped, with our Panzerfaust, at the edge of a small village. We could hear the big guns some ten minutes to the south.

We ran toward a leafless hedge with a sidecar pulled up beside it.

We thought we might receive some instructions, but we arrived too late: both occupants of the sidecar had been shot. The driver had collapsed over the handlebars, with his back reduced to a bloody pulp. The other man appeared to be asleep, but he too was dead. The bursts sounded closer each time. We had never imagined that the Russians were so close. Where were the rest of our men?

Then we caught sight of them. We climbed over a garden hedge, and came out onto a smooth piece of ground which sloped up to the horizon, some two hundred yards beyond and above us. Continuous trails of smoke marked the discharge of big guns and the impacts of their shells, and the gray sky was lit by flashes of white light.

We had to reach that high ground whatever the cost, and we all had our passports for the West in our pockets. I knew very well what kind of curse lay behind the closed faces of each of my companions.

As if the malevolence of the situation were drawing us on, we completed our progress with a series of carplike leaps which were unknown to any system of physical training.

Three German half-tracks, which had been resuscitated from some unit, were pointing their D.C.A.s at some twenty motionless Soviet tanks, waiting on the brown-and-white ground. Soldiers crusted with mud crouched in shallow, hastily dug holes, pointing various antitank weapons at the monsters, which kept their distance. We had barely taken our places when a new salvo came over — first the bursts, and then a thick fog of smoke, rolling toward us, level with the ground. We could hear cries and moans from our positions. The half-tracks, which were more sheltered, were also firing, and all further speech was blotted out.

The Russian tanks, which still did not move, began to fire too. Some of them seemed to be paralyzed, and the smoke leaking from their entrails mixed with smoke produced by our side, which a generous wind was blowing toward the enemy.

Then an inhuman order sent us forward: as the tanks were not rolling toward our Panzerfausts, we had to go out to meet them.

In a series of miraculous leaps we moved forward for several yards, through bursts of machine-gun fire which felled several of my companions.

Our fear reached grandiose proportions, and urine poured down our legs. Our fear was so great that we lost all thought of controlling ourselves. We drew still closer, tearing convulsively at our faces after each leap. The tanks were unaccompanied, and their myopia made their aim uncertain. One of them was burning, some sixty yards from a hole into which six of us had crowded. Then some of my comrades moved out. I stared after them with enormous eyes as they mocked their imminent deaths. Three tanks were moving toward us. If they rolled over the mound which protected us, the war would end for us in less than a minute.

I can still see those tanks, blotting out everything else. I can also see the metal plaque, and the nose of my first Panzerfaust, and my hand, stiff with fear, on the firing button. As they rolled toward us, the earth against which my body was pressed transmitted their vibrations, while my nerves, tightened to the breaking point, seemed to shrill with an ear-splitting whistle. Once again I understood that one could wear out one’s life in a few seconds. I could see the reflected yellow lights on the front of the tank, and then everything disappeared in the flash of light which I had released, and which burned my face.

My brain seemed paralyzed, and made of the same substance as my helmet. To the side, other flashes of light battered at my eyes, which jerked open convulsively wide, although there was nothing to see. Every thing was simultaneously luminous and blurred. Then a second tank in the middle distance was outlined by a glow of flame. It had not been able to take the three projectiles we had lobbed toward it with a considerable degree of precision. Our fingers clutched feverishly at the launching tube, which jutted against the sky somewhat to the left of the burning tank. We could hear the noise of a third tank crossing a hillock just beyond our position. It had accelerated, and was no more than thirty yards from us, when I grabbed my last Panzerfaust. One of my comrades had already fired, and I was temporarily blinded. I stiffened my powers of vision and regained my sight to see a multitude of rollers caked with mud churning past in a dull roar of sound some five or six yards from us. An inhuman cry of terror rose from our helpless throats.

The tank withdrew into the noise of battle, and finally disappeared in a volcanic eruption which lifted it from the ground in a thick cloud of smoke. Our wildly staring eyes tried to fix on something solid, but could find nothing except smoke and flame. As there were no more tanks, our madness thrust us from our refuge, toward the fire whose brilliance tortured our eyes. The noise of the tanks was growing fainter. The Russians were backing away from the stubbornness which the devil seemed to have instilled in us. We collapsed onto the icy ground, whose touch seemed gentle to our exhausted bodies.

The first three attacking tanks had been destroyed. The others, from each of which we pulled a wounded man, had been stopped. The rest had no longer wished to expose themselves to our desperate resistance. They would undoubtedly reappear in greater numbers, with the support of planes or artillery, and our despairing frenzy would count for nothing.

We were still fighting, and, although the disproportion of our strength relative to the enemy’s left us with no hope, our struggle was not in vain, because it allowed a host of civilians to escape.

During a sleepless night, other German troops joined us. We reestablished our positions, and laid down a minefield, which a fresh delivery of supplies from Danzig made possible. The mines were a powerful support for our defense, but unfortunately they were effective only once, and the Russians would certainly give the ground a preliminary going-over with a heavy bombardment.

For three days, the Russians had been launching intensive attacks toward the bay, attempting to cut off Danzig from Gotenhafen. Pferham had been seriously wounded, and once again we had been forced to give up some ground. This time, we had the invaluable support of naval artillery. If the Russians had not been there with such vast quantities of men and materiel, they would probably have been obliged to withdraw.

The remainder of our forces was concentrated on a small piece of territory. The Russians were using planes against us, and it was above all their air power which overwhelmed us in the end. As we stared toward the horizon, we could see that the slightest projection had been eliminated. The territory, in which, even six months ago, life must have had a certain regularity and sweetness, was now experiencing an apocalypse. It was no longer possible to move during the day. The sky was constantly filled with Russian planes, which, despite the heavy opposition of our anti-aircraft defenses, always returned in constantly increasing numbers. Our defenses, moreover, were continuously weakening, as the evacuation of troops began.

We were among the first to return to Gotenhafen, where certain sections of the city were already the scene of fierce combat. Within a few days, the appearance of the town had entirely changed. There were ruins everywhere, and a strong smell of gas and burning filled the air. The wide street which led down to the docks no longer had any definition. The wreckage of the buildings which had once lined it was crumbled right across the roadbed, obstructing all passage.

Along with thousands of others, we were put to work clearing away the rubble, so that trucks filled with civilians could get down to the harbor. Every five or ten minutes, planes came over, and we had to freeze where we were. The street was strafed and burned twenty or thirty times a day. Only our memories of Belgorod and Memel kept us from killing ourselves. We were no longer counting our dead and wounded: almost no one was entirely unhurt.

Heavily laden horses, which must have been spared by Supply, pulled a continuous train of sledges loaded with bodies wrapped in sacking or even paper. They had to be collected and buried with a speed which rivaled that of the Ilyushins’ machine guns.

Exhausted people stood stunned and motionless on heaps of ruins, creating magnificent targets for Russian planes. As a finishing touch, the horizon to the west and southwest was reddish-black. House — to house fighting had already begun in the outlying sections of the town, while thousands of civilians still waited down by the docks. From time to time, Russian shells reached as far as the embarkation area, and exploded there.

We were trying to snatch a short rest in a cellar, where a doctor was delivering a child. The cellar was vaulted and lit by a few hastily rigged lanterns. If the birth of a child is usually a joyful event, this particular birth only seemed to add to the general tragedy. The mother’s screams no longer had any meaning in a world made of screams, and the wailing child seemed to regret the beginning of its life. Once again, there was streaming blood, like the blood in the streets, and on the earth, where we had known so much suffering, and where my appreciation of existence was continually spiraling down toward the abyss whose depths I occasionally glimpsed, defining life as a mixture of blood and suffering and groans of pain.

A short while later, after a last look at the newborn child, whose tiny cries sounded like a tinkle of delicate glass through the roar of war, we returned to the flaming street. For the child’s sake, we hoped he would die before he turned twenty. Twenty is the age of ingratitude. It is too hard to be leaving life at the moment when one so much longs for it to flower.

We helped some old people, whom younger ones had left to the mercy of the Soviets. In the darkness lit up by flames, we once again performed our duty. We supported and carried the old people down to the port, where a boat was waiting for them. Planes passed over, and in spite of the blazing fires which lined the street, they once again scattered their load of death.

They killed some fifteen of our number. We had tried to pull the victims down with us on our several rapid plunges to the ground, but the old people were unable to follow us. It didn’t matter though we saved a good many of them anyhow, finally hoisting them onto a trawler, after getting them through the thickly packed crowd. The boat had to slip its lines while loading, to escape an aerial attack.

As we moved away from the shore, Wollers ran back to the stern to see if the gangplank had really been drawn in. Then he came back to us, tramping through the refugees who crowded the deck. He looked at us as if he were about to speak. Then we all turned to stare at the flames.

“Do you still have your embarkation cards?” he asked suddenly.

We all pulled out our tattered, filthy cards.

“I would have lost my head first,” muttered Grandsk.

The water slid quietly by, less than a yard below us. The boat would probably sink if the weight of its human cargo shifted. No one moved so much as a finger. Once again, we had escaped from the Russians and their fury.

19. THE WEST

Before daybreak, we arrived at Hela, without incident. We had passed several ghostly ships, navigating without lights, going back to Hela, or to Gotenhafen, and Danzig, where large numbers of civilians were still waiting for deliverance. Hela, which I had thought of as a large town, proved to be only a village, with a harbor of very secondary importance. Many ships were anchored off shore, and small boats were delivering a steady stream of passengers fleeing to the West.

We had scarcely set foot to the ground when the police, who were still functioning, made us step to one side. We stared at them with desperate unease. Was our good luck, which had brought us this far, going to melt like summer snow and send us back to Danzig, or Gotenhafen? The police turned their backs on us to direct the white-faced civilians. In any event, all of our papers were in order. But wasn’t that the ship which was to take us further? And mightn’t a counter-order arrive any moment? The minutes went slowly by, without giving us any glimpses into our future.

As it grew light, the cumulative exhaustion of many months seemed to crush our shoulders. We were now able to see the numerous gray outlines of ships, including many warships, riding at anchor on both sides of the peninsula. As we looked, the air-raid alarm sounded. Our eyes turned to the sky, as rumors began to circulate through the crowd.

“No panic!” shouted the police. “Our anti-aircraft defenses will hold them off!”

By now, we knew what that meant. All the shelters were filled with wounded, and each of us had to find what protection he could. If the bombs fell near the harbor, there would be an impressive carnage.

We moved toward an old hulk pulled up on the shore, whose tarred timbers might be able to ward off a few blows. We hadn’t quite reached it when the massive crackle of an anti-aircraft barrage burst all around us, fired by our coastal defenses or by one of the warships we had glimpsed earlier. This was my first experience of such a barrage. The falling fragments alone were capable of no small damage.

To the east, the sky was spattered with numberless black spots. The noise of firing was so loud that we couldn’t hear the planes approaching. Finally we saw three of them, flying quite low, parallel to the shore, pursued by the black granules of exploding flak. We heard an explosion to the south, over the water; one of the planes must have been hit. The police had not been exaggerating — not one plane flew over Hela. We felt a wave of confidence and security; finally, the Russians had been stopped.

The police came and checked our cards.

“Be back here for embarkation on the 31 of March,” a noncom told us.

“While you’re waiting, you can make yourselves useful north of town.”

We took ourselves off without any questions.

“What is the date today?” Hals asked.

“Wait a minute,” Wollers said. “There’s a calendar in my diary.” He looked through his pocket, but couldn’t find it.

“In any case, we’re not ahead of ourselves.”

“But we ought to know, all the same,” Hals persisted. “I would like to know exactly how much longer we have to wait.”

We finally learned that it was Sunday, the 28th or 29th of March, and that we would have to wait for two days, as I remember: the last two days of the Ost Front, which had consumed so much of our lives.

We spent those two days in the throng of anxious refugees camping out on the narrow Hela peninsula.

There were two more attempted Russian air raids. The last victim I was to see was a dirty white horse.

A Russian plane had been hit, and was disintegrating above us. We all watched as the forward part of the plane, whose racing engine gave off a long howl, plunged toward the ground. The noise terrified the animal, which slipped its collar and galloped, whinnying, toward the spot where the roaring mass of metal would land. It must have taken about three steps before it was hit. Its flesh was scattered for over fifteen yards in all directions.

On the evening of April 1, during a spell of terrible weather, we boarded a large white ship, which must, at one time, have taken rich people on cruises. Despite the anxiety we all felt, despite the crowd, and the stretchers, and the wounded, with their rattling breath, my eyes gaped at all the magnificent and barely-faded details inside that elegant ship. I was reminded of the shop windows my father had always taken me to admire at Christmastime. But I didn’t have the courage to rejoice; I knew that such feelings always end badly.

In the darkness, our boat pressed forward through the large hollow waves. A short while before, the sound and light which had filled the sky over the other shore of the Bay of Danzig had still reached us. Our comrades were still fighting and dying there. We scarcely dared think of the good fortune that had saved us — and that troubled us. For two days, our boat slid across the sea, toward the unbelievable West, which we had dreamed of for so long, where we could not imagine the war. We learned that our ship was the Pretoria, and although we were allowed only a small space on the bridge, lashed by wind and rain, the sweetness of the moment made us forget food and drink.

Of course, a torpedo could send us to the bottom at any minute, but we didn’t think of that. We also had a battleship escort; everything was going very well.

We arrived in Denmark, where we saw things we had almost forgotten, like pastry shops, which we devoured with enormous eyes, forgetting our filthy faces ravaged by misery. We scarcely noticed the looks of mistrust fixed on us by the shopkeepers, who couldn’t understand us. We had no money, and the wares on display were not free. For a moment, we even thought of our machine guns.

Hals could not resist temptation. He held out his big hands, which looked like dead wood, and begged for charity. The shopkeeper tried to pretend that he hadn’t noticed, but Hals persisted. Finally, the baker put a stale cake into those filthy hands. Hals divided it into four pieces and we tasted a substance which had become unknown to us. We thanked the man, and tried to smile, but the rotting teeth in our gray faces must have produced an effect of grotesque grimace, and made the baker think we were mocking him. He turned on his heel, and disappeared into the back of his shop. He couldn’t know bow long it had been since we’d had the chance to laugh, and that we would need a little while to learn how again.

A less sumptuous boat took us on to Kiel, where we found a more familiar atmosphere, with no more bakeries and no more occasion to smile. In a setting of ruins, we were reincorporated, with alarmingly precipitate haste, into a scratch battalion. Hals asked if he might be given a leave to visit his home in Dortmund. An enlisted man of about fifty put a hand on his shoulder and told him that with a little courage and a little luck, if he managed to infiltrate the American and British lines, he might perhaps get there.

My friend’s face reflected astonishment, stupefaction, and sadness.

“The American and British lines!”

In the West, which we had dreamed of and longed for so often, which we had finally reached, we were assaulted by the most overwhelming and terrible news. We were astounded. The West, the paradise we had been counting on in our icy holes at Memel, on the Dnieper, and on the Don; that chimerical paradise which should have taken us in and soothed our sufferings, the West, which had been our sole reason for surviving, was only a small country more or less thickly covered with buildings; a country where the silence was broken by the roar of planes, where terrified people crawled and ran. The West was also three dirty gray trucks carrying at high speed a reduced battalion of soldiers in gray toward another encounter with death; it was the place where my last illusions would crumble in conditions of inhuman grief.

The West was the other half of the vise tightening on our misery. Several armies were challenging our exhausted arms — several, among them the French Army. I cannot describe the emotions which this news produced in me. France, which in my thoughts had never abandoned me, “la douce France,” had abused my naïveté. In the trenches of the steppe, I had loved France as much as any young man does as he talks revolution in the back room of a Paris café.

Most of my efforts had been for France, which I had made my comrades-in-arms appreciate and love. What could have happened, which had not been explained to us?

France had turned against me, when I was expecting her help. Perhaps I would have to fire at my French brothers — which I could no more do than I could fire at Hals or Lindberg.

What had happened? What had they kept from us? I no longer knew, or understood. My brain refused to take in any more, and the hope which the West had revived in all of us died in me.

We would have to fight again. Against whom and what? We knew that we no longer had any courage, and that nothing could lead us to hope any more. Despite Anglo-American cries of victory, there was no longer any opposition to the imposing materiel they had fabricated for nothing. No victory is possible over men who have died toward everything.

We had reached the banks of the Elbe, and were lying stretched out on the grass beside a small road which led to Lauenburg. British troops were in the sector, and we were supposed to try to react.

An older man was devouring the substance which fate still saw fit to deposit in our mess tins. Hals was a short way off, his eyes vacant, as he pondered imponderables. The older fellow did not seem too depressed. He muttered some barely audible words to me: “With a little luck, the war should be over for us in a few days.”

What did he mean? I knew that when a war ended for soldiers on the side that lost it usually meant a small brownish hole in the head or the chest.

“I don’t mean that,” the other said. “We’ll be prisoners — you’ll see. That’s not so grand either, but it’s better than bombing and starvation. You’ll see. These fellows aren’t muzhiks. They’re really not so bad.”

The night passed. It was mild, almost warm. We sat on the damp grass of the bank beside the road. Massive flights of planes growled invisibly through the starry sky. But nothing could interfere with our habit of half sleep, which we had perfected during three years of enforced watchfulness.

Toward three o’clock in the morning, we heard the roar of artillery somewhere to the north, and the sky was lit by flashes of light. The whole episode lasted for about forty-five minutes, during which our half sleep continued without interruption.

Daybreak came early, and a light spring sun rose over the horizon. A small battered car appeared on the road, bumping over the broken surface. The car was brown, and was occupied by three fellows whose uniforms were quite different from ours.

We watched as three brick-red faces beneath unusually large helmets drew closer to us. The owners of the faces appeared to be enjoying their morning outing.

It was my first encounter with Englishmen — the first three. To have fired at these cheerful individuals would have been a criminal act; however, some bastard in our group did fire — twice — at their heads. The car — a jeep — skidded into a panicky half turn which was slow enough to give us ample time to wipe them out.

The old man beside me roared with anger at the young fellow who had just done his duty, explaining that this ill-considered gesture risked bringing in motorized troops to attack us, against which we would have no defense. A startled hauptmann almost intervened, but saw that there was no point, and went back to stand beside his gunner.

An hour later, we heard the sound of several motors to the north of us: the old man’s prediction was coming true. A reconnaissance plane flew over, directing the fire with considerable precision to the road beneath our bank. Clinging to the ground like treads, we crawled up the hollow of a small valley, thus escaping some fifty mortar shells, which would have inflicted heavy losses.

The English must have decided that further resistance would be limited to a few isolated shots, and sent four half-tracks after us. We watched with a certain anguish as they climbed over the bank. Two of our men stood up, with their hands raised. The Eastern Front had never seen anything like that. We wondered what would happen next. Would English machine guns cut them down? Would our leader shoot them himself, for giving up like that? But nothing happened. The old man, who was still beside me, took me by the arm, and whispered: “Come on. Let’s go.”

We stood up together. Others quickly followed us. Hals came over and stood by me without even thinking of raising his hands. We walked towards the victors with pounding hearts and dry mouths. This was the only time I was ever afraid of the Western Allies, and I had provoked the fear myself.

We were roughly jostled together, and shoved into place by English soldiers with vindictive faces. However, we had seen worse in our own army, particularly in training under Captain Fink. The roughness with which the English handled us seemed comparatively insignificant, and even marked by a certain kindness.

In this way, I laid down the arms and insignia of my second country, and the war ended for me and for my comrades.

To humiliate us, they made us stand in the sturdy trucks which brought the relief of their victory to our faltering ranks. The closed, flushed faces of the English continued to reflect their non-comprehension of the smiling remarks which emerged from our famished faces. Hals even received a slap in the face from an English noncom, without much of an idea of what had happened to him. He had simply been comparing our easy ride as prisoners to our forced marches in the East.

Then we met the other allies, tall men with plump, rosy cheeks, who behaved like hooligans, but hooligans who had been nicely brought up. Their bearing was casual, and seemed to be designed to give them the opportunity to roll their hips and shoulders. Their uniforms were made of soft cloth, like golfing clothes, and they moved their jaws continuously, like ruminating animals. They seemed neither happy nor unhappy, but indifferent to their victory, like men who are performing their duties in a state of partial consent, without any real enthusiasm for them.

From our filthy, mangy ranks, we watched them with curiosity. It seemed that we, in the ranks of the defeated, were happier than these children, for whom Paradise itself had no value. They seemed rich in everything but joy — a reassuring spectacle which reconciled us with humanity.

The Americans also humiliated us as much as they could — which seemed perfectly normal. They put us in a camp with only a few large tents, which could shelter barely a tenth of us. Even in prison, the Wehrmacht continued to organize itself. As at Kharkov, or on the Dnieper, at Memel, or at Pillau, or in the black depths of winter on the steppe, space in the tents was reserved for the sick and feeble.

In the center of the camp, the Americans ripped open several large cases filled with canned food. They spread the cans onto the ground with a few kicks, and walked away, leaving the division and distribution up to us. Everyone received a share. The food was so delicious that we forgot about the driving rain, which had turned the ground into a sponge. The packets of powdered orangeade and lemonade seemed the height of luxury, and collecting rainwater in the folds of our jackets to mix with them a gay, even joyous distraction. From their shelters, the Americans watched us and talked about us. They probably despised us for flinging ourselves so readily into such elementary concerns, and thought us cowards for accepting the circumstances of captivity — the distribution of food in the rain, for instance. Wasn’t our condition as prisoners enough in itself to make us walk in silence, with that unbearable air which men have when their pride has been damaged? We were not in the least like the German troops in the documentaries our charming captors had probably been shown before leaving their homeland. We provided them with no reasons for anger; we were not the arrogant, irascible Boches, but simply underfed men standing in the rain, ready to eat unseasoned canned food; living dead, with anxiety stamped on our faces, leaning against any support, half asleep on our feet; sick and wounded, who didn’t ask for treatment, but seemed content simply to sleep for long hours, undisturbed. It was clearly depressing for these crusading missionaries to find so much humility among the vanquished.

In due course, we were sent on to Mannheim, where we passed through a large processing center.

Hals, Grandsk, Lindberg, and I had remained inseparable through all this, as in our worst moments. We understood only that the war had really ended for us, and had given no thought to the consequences of that fact. Everything was still too new, too much in the present. We knew that the worst was over, and that German ex-soldiers were organizing themselves to facilitate the task of the Allies, who had to count their prisoners and assign them to various jobs. Our men helping with this organization, often in rags, moved through the elegant ranks of the victors, attacking with them the same pressing necessities. Cigarettes were given to the prisoners, who had nothing to offer in return. Some even received chewing gum, which they chewed, laughing, and then swallowed by mistake. Orders were shouted in German, and ranks of men formed and broke up. Were they going to send us back to the line? That wouldn’t be possible. A bastard noncom, carried away by the spirit of things, absent-mindedly shouted at a group of prisoners: “Grab your weapons!”

He was answered by a howl of laughter.

This made the Americans angry, and they came outside to shout at us. This struck us as even funnier, but it was clear that we had to correct our attitude. The erring noncom, who suddenly realized his mistake, snapped to attention, expecting a reprimand. Three American officers protested in their language, hounding the delinquent, who was himself overcome with embarrassment.

A short while later, the prisoners were moving in long lines past a health inspection. Some were sent to a hospital, others to — an endless series of offices from which a recruiting service would send them out to take part in the first efforts at cleaning up a country in ruins. Control and verification commissions then studied each case. These commissions often included representatives of several Allied armies: Canadians, English, French, and Belgian. My scraps of paper fell to a French officer, who looked up at me twice. Then he looked up again, and spoke, at first, in German.

“Is this the date and place of your birth?”

“Ja.”

“Well?”

“Yes,” I answered, in French this time.

“My father is French.” My French was now almost as bad as my German had been at Chemnitz. The other looked at me with mistrust. After a moment he spoke again in French.

“Are you French, then?”

I didn’t know what to say. For three years the Germans had persuaded me that I was German.

“I think so, Herr Major.”

“What do you mean — you think so?”

I felt embarrassed, and made no reply.

“What the hell are you doing with this bunch?”

I still didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t know, Herr Major.”

“Don’t call me ‘Herr Major.’ I’m not ‘Herr Major.’ Call me ‘Mon Capitaine,’ and come with me.”

He stood up, and I had to follow him. From the ranks of dirty gray-green, I sensed Hals’s eyes fixed on me. I waved to him, and called softly. “Bleib hier, Hals. Ich komme wieder.”

“Who’s that you’re talking to?” the captain asked me, irritated.

“Das ist mein kamerad, Herr Kapitän.”

“Stop talking German, since you remember French. Come along this way.”

I followed him through a series of corridors, suddenly afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find Hals again. Finally, we arrived at an office where four French soldiers were talking and laughing with a young woman, who spoke to them in English, I think.

The captain said he had brought along a doubtful case. They put me through an extended interrogation, to which my answers must have sounded far from convincing. My head was spinning, and everything I said seemed to ring false.

One of them — also an officer — called me a bastard and a traitor. As I remained apathetic and absent, they gave up on me, sending me off to a small room on the floor below. For a day and a night they left me there, thinking of my companions in wretchedness, and especially of Hals, who must have been wondering about me. I felt a sinister premonition that I wouldn’t see him again, and a feverish restlessness kept me from sleeping.

The next morning, a lieutenant, who seemed in a very friendly mood, came to release me. I was taken back to the office of the day before and asked to sit down. This invitation was so unexpected that the words fell on my ears as if for the first time in my life.

Then the young lieutenant looked through my papers and spoke to me.

“Your story took us somewhat by surprise yesterday. Now we know that the Germans often forced young men with German fathers into their army. If that had been your case, we would have been obliged to keep you a prisoner for a while. However, with you it was the mother, and we cannot detain you. For your sake, I am glad,” he added gently.

“We have now liberated you, and this has been recorded on the papers I am handing back to you. You may return to your home, and resume your old life.”

“To my home!” He might just as well have been talking about the planet Mars.

“Yes, home.”

He paused for a moment, giving me an opportunity to speak, which I didn’t take. I couldn’t quite grasp what had happened, or find the proper words.

“Nevertheless, I would advise you to clear yourself by signing up for a term with the French Army, and in that way return to normal life in good order.”

My expression remained impenetrable. My thoughts above all were with Hals, and I only took in about half of what the amiable officer was saying. “Do you agree?”

“Oui, Mon Lieutenant,” I said, only partly aware of my own words.

“I congratulate you on your decision. Sign here.”

I signed my name, more interested by the French words than by their significance.

“You will be called up,” he said, closing my folder.

“Go home quickly and try to forget this adventure.”

I still didn’t know what to say. Even the lieutenant seemed to be losing his patience. He stood up anyway, and walked me to the door.

“Do your parents know where you are?”

“I don’t think so, Mon Lieutenant.”

“Didn’t you write to them?”

“I did, Mon Lieutenant.”

“Well, then — you must have had answers from them, too. Don’t the Boches have a post office?”

“Yes, Mon Lieutenant. They wrote to me too, but we haven’t had any mail for almost a year now.”

He looked at me in surprise.

“The bastards,” he said. “They wouldn’t even send you your mail. Go along now. Get yourself home, and try to forget all this as fast as you can.”