The rain blew in from the horizon in waves.
Occasionally a brief moment of light enabled us to spot the next undulating curtain of water sweeping across the streaming steppe. It had rained steadily for two days, and despite the discomfort and inconvenience we hoped the rain would last for at least that long again. In another two days, if we could maintain our rate of thirty miles a day, and had any luck at all, we should reach the Dnieper.
No planes could fly through such a torrential downpour, so there had been no Yaks-and every day without Yaks was a reprieve from death for hundreds of men. The extraordinary mobility of the Wehrmacht-one of its principal sources of strength up to that moment had entirely disappeared in that part of Russia, and the men from Army Group Center were plodding toward the river in interminable columns at the rate of three miles an hour. Our mobility, which had always given us an advantage over the vast but slow Soviet formations, was now only a memory, and the disproportion of numbers made even flight a doubtful prospect. Moreover, the equipment of the Red Army was constantly improving, and we often found ourselves pitted against extremely mobile motorized regiments of fresh troops. To complete our disarray, the Soviet troops which had been tied up in the attempt to trap us at Konotop were now free to pursue our slow withdrawal.
German aviation, which was entirely occupied south of Cherkassy, had abandoned our part of the sky to the Yaks, which took advantage of this freedom to harass us unmercifully. So, despite our heavy, waterlogged clothes, worn-out boots, fever, and the impossibility of lying down except on the soaking ground, we blessed fortune for sending us gray skies and rain.
During the morning, five Bolshevik planes had appeared despite the weather. Our harassed men reacted with an automatic impulse of self-defense and self-preservation, staring desperately at the flat plain for somewhere to hide. But, like animals caught in a trap, we understood there was no way out. The companies in a direct line of fire dropped to one knee, in the regulation position for anti-aircraft defense. These companies received the Yaks' fire, and saw several men torn to pieces by Russian bullets, but nevertheless managed to bring down one of the planes. It was our bad luck that the plane went into a spin, and fell directly onto our convoy, crushing a truck full of wounded men, and opening a crater twenty yards wide filled with shattered flesh. No one cried out: in fact, almost no one looked. We simply picked up our burdens and went on.
We were all too exhausted to react, and almost nothing stirred our emotions. We had all seen too much. In my sick and aching brain, life had lost its importance and meaning, and seemed of no more consequence than the power of motion one lends to a marionette, so that it can agitate for a few seconds. Of course, there was friendship-there were Hals and Paula-but immediately behind them was that hole full of guts, red, yellow, and foul smelling; piles of guts, almost as large as the earth itself. Life could be snuffed out like that, in an instant, but the guts remained for a long time, stamped on the memory.
We walked without stopping. The interminable line of men ahead curved in a semicircle which seemed to be standing still. The Dnieper was not yet in sight. We had planned to reach it in five days, but we were now in the sixth, ploughing through the mud at an average speed of two or two and a half miles an hour. I had never seen a countryside so huge and so empty. The trucks and other vehicles which had gas had all passed us long ago. The rest were pulled by the few half-starved nags we had not already killed and eaten. From time to time, someone gave up his place on a crowded steiner, pulled by two horses, to continue on foot. We were under orders not to abandon materiel for any reason whatever. We were supposed to receive more gasoline-God knows how -probably by air-so that we could continue to drive our machines. In fact, one morning we did receive a delivery from aircraft. Two JU-52s threw down eight large packages of rope, which we retrieved with derision. We were supposed to use them for tying our vehicles to the tanks which had been destroyed at Konotop the week before. In default of gas, our gaunt horses stubbornly pulled our vehicles through the gluey muck which had been freshly trampled by thirty retreating regiments. Our steiner, on which I had hung all my gear, was pulled by two Rhenish horses, probably taken from their peacetime labor about a year before. One of them was covered with sores, and his eyes glittered with fever.
Two days later, on the bank of the Dnieper, our brave horse received his reward. A noncom from the cavalry shot him in the head, along with some ten others. Very few horses were allowed onto the pontoons, whose capacity was inadequate even for the men, and nothing could be left behind which might be useful to the Russians. In a way, this was the beginning of our "scorched earth" policy.
The proportion of sick men to healthy rose at an alarming rate. "A healthy mind in a healthy body" was the slogan our leaders had held up to us. Under the conditions of our retreat, it was often hard to tell which was affected first-mind or body. It seemed that well over half our men had nothing healthy about them.
Luckily, the weather remained frightful. This was particularly hard on the sick and feverish-undernourished, dehydrated men with filthy, suppurating wounds and bodies barely covered by torn, ragged uniforms. But anything the weather could produce-wind, rain, heavy clouds trailing down to the ground-was preferable to clear skies, which invariably meant the humming planes, diving down at us like carrion crows attacking a moribund animal. Indifferent to everything, we continued our slow march.
Two or three times a day, covering troops were organized and left behind to slow down the enemy, who were following at a leisurely pace. The men chosen for this task dug shallow holes which protected less than a quarter of their bodies, and waited, resigned, for the juggernaut to crush them.
We knew that we would never see them again. In other districts. entire regiments had been wiped out by Russian armored troops which had caught up with them. The retreat was costly, and reached its climax on the east bank of the river, in an incredible crush of men and materiel, spread out over acres of flat sand, so that each Russian missile was assured a maximum destructive effect. A healthy mind in a healthy body would have done everything possible to escape those circumstances.
Our eyes, which had grown used to accepting everything without surprise, gaped at the most astonishing sights.
Everyone reached the river, the outer boundary of safety, in a state of indescribable panic, only to find it was necessary to trample on the men already there, even drown them, to have any hope of getting onto the wretchedly inadequate vessels, which often foundered before they reached the other side.
On the eighth day, after skirting a broad hill, we reached the bank of the river, or, more precisely, the swarm of landser who covered the bank, hiding it completely. Through the noise and confusion we could hear the sound of engines, which we found curiously reassuring: working engines must mean there was gasoline somewhere. We knew that motorized transport was essential for such a huge country, and that even with motors we could only move very slowly because of the terrible roads. However, if we heard engines, it must at least mean that some reorganization had begun. Among the crowd of men there were many vehicles which had been dragged as far as the river despite almost insuperable obstacles, and were waiting in the long grass, which looked like dune grass. In fact, the engines we heard did not belong to refueled trucks, but to the boats-inadequate in size and number-which the engineers were using to move across as many men and machines as they could. Whenever materiel could be moved, it was given priority. Loading trucks and guns and light tanks onto vessels built to carry hay carts was not easy, but fortunately we had plenty of manpower to replace the cranes and derricks of a port-at least a hundred thousand at our point of arrival alone. I saw men standing up to their necks in water, supporting makeshift landing stages until the water rose over their chins-rickety, hastily improvised piers which collapsed as soon as their human props moved away. Half drowned, these men worked frantically against time, with extraordinary persistence and patience. The urgent task of transporting five divisions was not begun until two days after our arrival, when all materiel that could be moved was across the river. We had ten boats at our disposal, each with a maximum capacity of twenty men, four barges which had run out of gas and were towed in turn by two small boats equipped with B.M.W. portable engines, and four precarious pontoons, each with a capacity of 150 men.
At this point, south of Kiev, the Dnieper is about eight hundred yards wide. Had we chosen a section to the north of the city, we would have been in rich, densely populated country, where we would undoubtedly have been able to acquire plenty of boats for crossing, and where, in addition, the river often narrows to less than a hundred yards. There were also bridges in Kiev itself; some had undoubtedly been destroyed, but others must have been standing. . . . By the evening of the third day after our arrival at the river, at least ten thousand men had crossed to the west bank. First of all, the sick and wounded were taken, and I witnessed many instances of lightly wounded or sick men giving up their places to the more seriously injured. Although the rain was remorseless and savage, and we all were sickened by our diet of horse meat-often raw-we nonetheless made use of this forced delay to rest as much as we could.
During the night of our third or fourth day, everything turned hellish again. As we had feared, we heard the roar of war again as soon as the rain stopped-dull and unclear at first, and then unmistakable: the rumble of tanks moving slowly through the mud.
To begin with, there was only the noise, which in itself was enough to send a wave of terror through the eighty-five thousand men trapped beside the water. On the slopes littered with exhausted soldiers, thousands of men lifted their heads to verify the terrifying sound.
We stared through the darkness, trying to see the unseeable, frozen, for a minute, with our heads lifted to listen. Then, everywhere, shadowy figures began to move, with frantic, intensifying speed.
"Tanks!"
Every man grabbed his things and began to run toward what we knew was an insuperable barrier, hoping that the boats were still moving, and that somehow they would be able to take all of us at once.
We were packed in a dense crowd onto a narrow strip of ground beside the river, and the sound of our shouting voices rose above the heavy rumble of tanks which now filled the night. Frantic men were abandoning everything on the bank and plunging into the water to try to swim to the opposite shore; thousands of voices were shouting toward the gray water and the opposite bank, where they hoped they would at last be able to rest. Men waded out into the icy water until they lost their footing, and the sound of voices pleading and calling for help rose to such a pitch that the boats still operating hesitated to draw into shore for fear of being swamped. Madness seemed to be spreading like wildfire. Almost unconscious with exhaustion, I sat through about twenty minutes of panic with five or six other soldiers, collapsed onto a heap of packs which had been abandoned on the wet grass, letting the howling mob and the rush of events pass us by. Here and there, we could see other small groups like ours, moving only when the frantic stampede swept them along.
The officers, who had managed to keep some self-control, organized a few more or less conscious men, and ran to meet the mob, trying to stop them, like shepherds trying to control a herd of crazed sheep. They were able to reorganize a few groups, which they posted on the slopes of the hills to attempt interception of the Soviet tanks, if they should come that way. Our dense crowd of men stretched down the river bank as thinly as possible, to offer fewer opportunities for mass destruction by the T-34s which appeared about an hour and a half later. Fortunately, there were not many tanks, and they didn't linger, as their real objective was Kiev, where heavy fighting was in progress.
I stayed where I was, sitting on the heap of packs with a few strays, when we heard that a raft made of tires taken from the trucks parked nearby would be able to carry a certain number of landser across to the west bank. We ran several hundred yards upstream, and saw a tight .cluster of men beside the dark water. We quickly went over to them. There must have been about a hundred men wading in the mud. In the center of the group, about a dozen fellows were busily taking out the inner tubes of a heap of tires, and tying them together to make a raft -which would clearly never be large enough to hold everyone. We were greeted with unwelcoming stares, and given no encouragement to stay. Finally, a big fellow who was standing watching the work spoke to us: "You can see that this thing won't even take half the men here. Go on a little further-you'll be sure to find something."
He must have said more or less the same thing several times over to the fellows who'd arrived ahead of us, but most of them had stayed, hoping to get onto the raft somehow-even to fight their way on, if necessary. I had neither the build nor the strength to force my way onto a contraption that would probably sink anyway. So, despite the distant rumble which came to us in spurts on the wind, I went on up the river, accompanied by two stray artillerymen.
We walked through a damp, heavy fog, between clumps of dripping furze, past groups of frantic, terrified men pacing up and down that interminable bank. The fog grew steadily thicker, until at last it blotted out the countryside completely, and turned us into Chinese shadow puppets. We could no longer tell which way we were going, and were gripped by continual anxiety that we were walking in the wrong direction. Luckily, from time to time someone would check on the position of the river, and shout out into the darkness: "Ach gut! das Wasser ist da."
We went on without thinking, unaware that if we followed the river long enough we would arrive at Kiev, which was the heart of the fighting. No one seemed capable of any logical, connected thought, but the constant fear, exhaustion, and threat of tanks kept us moving, trying to get away. It didn't really matter where we might get to, or how -just away.
The darkness of the night was continually broken by flares, and by the noise of guns. A group of men passed by, invisible, but quite close to judge by the sound of their voices.
"Achtung! Ivans! Achtung!"
I looked imploringly at the man from the artillery who had been stumbling along beside me for more than half an hour, but received nothing except the fixed stare of a hunted animal. We no longer understood anything. We had thought the Russians were on our right, behind the hills-but the firing was coming from the river bank, which was on our left.
Expecting the Russians to begin shooting at us at any minute, we began to run, to look for some hole or hollow where we could hide. Once we had flattened ourselves down into what seemed to be a shallow frog pond, we tried to grasp the facts of our situation.
A noncom in our group thought the Popovs must be patrolling in boats, knocking off Germans whenever they could. To judge by the lights of the explosions, which were sometimes hundreds of yards apart, there must have been several Russian boats. The darkness which hid our trapped men rang with the sounds of our frantic disorder.
Shells were coming in from the west, and landing somewhere to the east of us, beyond the hills. This comforted us somewhat; since the shells were falling beyond the hills, they must be landing on the Russians, and our men must be firing them. The artilleryman remarked in a pleased and knowing voice: "Those are ours all right. I'd know that yap anywhere."
"I never thought we'd get any help," said a soldier who had just joined us.
In the end, the shelling lasted only ten minutes, and probably had very little effect, as there was no effort to aim it with any precision. The fog had grown so thick that the glow of the discharges of the 77s was almost invisible, emerging from the darkness and vanishing again, as if we were watching through a thin, semi-transparent cloth. But, although the fog was thicker, the air had also grown astonishingly cold, stabbing our lungs every time we took a breath.
"My God, it's cold," someone said.
The temperature of the water, which came to the middle of our boots, must have been close to freezing. Despite their remarkable resistance to water, our boots had at last become waterlogged, and our feet felt frozen.
"We can't keep on like this," said the artilleryman, almost laughing. "We've got to get out of here, or we'll catch our deaths. Anyway, why should we be afraid of our own guns?"
My boots each seemed to weigh a ton: a ton of dense, solid matter which was, in fact something like 95 percent water.
The exhaustion we had been dragging about with us for days increased the fear we could no longer control. Fear intensified our exhaustion, as it required constant vigilance. We had learned to see in the dark, like cats, but on that particular night no look, however penetrating, could pierce the fog, which was as thick as a London pea souper. I could no longer breathe through my clogged nose, and only drew in through my pursed lips the bare minimum necessary to sustain life. We seemed to be moving through a mixture of water and sulphur, and each icy breath stabbed me with hundreds of sharp points, all the way down to my empty stomach.
I remembered the veteran's advice, but couldn't think of anything convincingly warm or dry, so I began deliberately to recollect pleasant things that had happened to me, that I might have experienced a long time ago. But this proved almost impossibly difficult; my mind filled only with unpleasant memories. The hunched back of the soldier in front of me could not be transformed into the back of my mother busy with some household task on a long winter evening, or my brother's back, or the back of anyone I had ever known in peacetime. All I saw was a silhouette of the history of the war, and Russia, which memories of youth could not blot out. It seemed as if the war would mark men for life. They might forget women, or money, or how to be happy, but they would never forget the war, which spoiled everything-even the joy which was bound to come, like the victory ahead. The laughter of men who lived through the war has something forced and desperate about it. It does them no good to say that they must now make use of the experience; their mechanisms have been run too hard, and something has gone out of balance. Laughter no longer has any more value for them than tears.
The back of the soldier in front of me filled me with pity and respect and even exasperation. I felt like hitting him until he fell, so that he would be on a level with the war. But, if that man fell, there would be another right after him, and then thousands more after that thousands of hunched backs swollen by acid fog. Russia is still full of backs like that, the hunched backs of men who have forgotten how to dream, and it will take more toil and war, too, before they all have been toppled.
The roar of the guns was growing louder, like the noise of an oncoming train, and there was the sound of machine guns too, although we still couldn't see anything. We could also hear a vast din of human voices which rose above the thunder of guns and machinery. We stopped where we were, a light trace of breath escaping from each half-open mouth. I looked for some explanation on the filthy faces of my companions, but their expressions were as bewildered as my own, which had probably not changed much since I had begun to try to lose myself in memories. Since surprises in wartime can only be dangerous, we immediately looked for a hole. All I could find was the river bank. I slid over the edge until I was up to my thighs in the invisible water, which seemed almost warm after the icy air.
I immediately lost hold of my attempted daydream, and stared feverishly through the black and impenetrable wall which hid the action from us, like a curtain in the theatre. The roar of the tanks grew louder, and made the surface of the water tremble, with a motion I was just able to perceive.
When danger finally comes, after hours of harassing fear, it is almost like a liberation. At least one knows what the confrontation will be, and if the danger is terrible, one knows that at least it will soon be over. But, when danger continues indefinitely, it becomes unbearable. Then even an outburst of tears is no release. After hours and then days of danger, as at Belgorod, one collapses into unbearable madness, and a crisis of nerves and tears is only the beginning. Finally, one vomits and collapses, entirely brutalized and inert, as if death had already won.
For the moment, I remained calm. The river blocked our escape but, at the same time, offered a prospect of safety. I was already over my knees in water. The fog hid the terrifying breadth of the river from me, and I thought that, if the worst came to the worst, I could always try that way out, skimming over the surface like a will-o'-the-wisp. I felt almost convinced that I could do it. Then we saw lights, and heard explosions like grenades, and crackling sounds accompanied by little points of light. Five or six gasping soldiers splashed into the water beside me.
"It's those dumb bastards in the artillery who brought Ivan here."
Terrifying screams drowned the sound of engines, screams so prolonged and horrible that my blood froze, and the water around my legs seemed even colder than before.
"Mein Gott!" someone murmured in the darkness beside me.
We heard the sounds of gunfire and explosions coming closer, punctuated by bloodcurdling screams. Men suddenly plunged out of the pale, enveloping cotton, and disappeared like ghosts into the black water. From the sounds of splashing, we guessed they were trying to swim. We felt petrified by fear, and stayed where we were. A terrible, growling mass of machines passed by close to us, shaking the earth and water, and a penetrating headlight pierced the fog. We couldn't see where it was going, only that it was moving. During those moments of terror, we clung to each other like children. A piece of the bank broke away under our weight, and our heap of belongings slid into the mud. My head went under for a few seconds, and when I surfaced the river bank and the long grasses hid what was happening. We could hear the sound of machine guns ripping into the air very close to us, over the grinding roar of tank treads. And always, terrifying screams, as the tanks drove a bloody furrow through the tightly packed crowd paralyzed by terror and darkness. A little higher up, two other lights, barely visible in the gloom, were seeking out other victims.
With daylight, we saw that there must have been about ten tanks, passing through without stopping, on their way to Kiev.
However, our tension was so great that we stayed in the water for a long time, without moving, in spite of the stinking mud which had seeped into our helmets, and through our hair, which was standing on end with terror.
With absolute accuracy, the German guns, firing from the other side of the river, had drawn the Bolshevik tanks onto us, and contributed to the horrible deaths of many of our men.
Cries for help drew us from our slimy refuge, and we ran to do what we could to help the dying-which was very little. We saw sights so horrible they were beyond any imagining. We shot a great many men to put them out of their misery, although mercy killings were strictly forbidden. At dawn the fog lifted, and an almost spring like sun ushered in a new day of difficulties and disappointments.
Burial squads were forcibly organized and began their grisly work, grimacing with horror. Everyone who managed to escape this duty went off as far as he could, to try to sleep or warm up. My partly dried clothes had gone stiff, and I felt uncomfortable and ill. But my exhaustion, which weighed on my eyes and made the sunlight unbearable, prevented me from grasping that I should have stripped and washed in the river, allowing the sun to nourish my exhausted body. I stayed as I was, immobilized by my need for sleep, staring through half-closed eyes at the damp gray-green of my uniform, turning slowly yellow as it dried. When I finally did sleep, I was awakened almost immediately by shouts of terror.
I opened my eyes, and stared up into an infinite, pale blue sky, in which there was a familiar noise: planes. My bones creaked as I propped myself up on one elbow. I couldn't see anything unusual only the piles of sleeping bodies among the gorse. Everywhere, faces drowning in sleep were turning to the sky. A fellow in a fatigue cap ran by, shouting like a deaf man.
A heavy machine gun behind me opened fire. It took us a while to shake off our torpor. Four Russian planes were circling like hornets about three thousand feet above us. Everyone was shouting-both men and officers.
"Do you all want to be killed?" a ragged lieutenant was yelling at us. "You should at least try to defend yourselves."
We feverishly grabbed our guns, and waited with one knee on the ground for the enemy, who was about to drop from the clouds. However, the Yaks went away. It was inconceivable that they should have been afraid of us, so we concluded they were running out of gas. We rubbed our eyes and sighed with relief, as our partially revived sense of vigilance died down. Everyone was thinking of stretching out again and catching up with his lost sleep. Then the heavy machine gun pivoted rapidly on its mount and began to fire toward the north. Everyone turned that way too, before throwing himself flat. The four planes roared over us almost at ground level, firing rapidly with all their guns. We could just hear the lieutenant, who was very near us, shouting as loud as he could to make himself heard above the noise of the planes: "Fire, you bastards!"
The planes passed overhead. I saw the lieutenant roll onto the ground, stand up again, and with one hand clutching his stomach fire his revolver at the roaring planes. Then he grimaced, fell to his knees, and rolled over onto himself. Of all the men around us, he was the only one who had been hit. The planes had reserved most of their fire for the overloaded, almost motionless rafts, which made perfect targets.
"Give us some help!" shouted a fellow with a long thin face, who'd gone with a companion to see what he could do for the lieutenant.
"Why in God's name did he stand up?"
"He was acting like a hero," answered one of the felds, "and he was the only one. We should all be ashamed."
The thin-faced fellow was helping to carry the dying man down to the river's edge. I was behind him with some of the lieutenant's things.
"Shame has nothing to do with it," he said, sighing heavily.
We had not been abandoned. From the west bank, our antiaircraft guns were firing on the Russian vultures overhead, and the two ramshackle rafts on the river were continuing their dangerous journey. There must have been many dead and wounded men on board, to judge by the agitation we could all see.
The planes dived down toward the swarming strip of ground which rang with screams of pain and cries for help, and toward the rafts, and achieved a hideous massacre. Every time the danger withdrew for a moment, so that we could lift our heads and look out over the reeds, we saw scenes of tragedy. Almost everyone on the rafts who hadn't been killed or immobilized by wounds had jumped into the water and was trying to swim. The planes made a fourth pass, and were met this time by all our guns and spandaus, which finally drove them away. We heard a loud sound of shooting. One of the Russian planes had been hit, and was spiraling upward, trying to gain height, leaving a thick plume of black smoke behind it. Suddenly it lurched into an irrevocable dive toward the water. We saw a smaller shape detach from the mass of the plane-probably the pilot, trying to jump to safety. But his parachute, if he had one, failed to open. Man and machine hit the water at the same speed, and disintegrated. For a moment, our cheers drowned the groans of the wounded on the rafts. However, toward noon the Russian planes were back again-about a dozen fighter-bombers this time.
In the interval, we had deepened our holes so that we were better protected; but we couldn't reach the planes with our fire. The Russians, as before, attacked the heavily loaded rafts on the river, which had almost reached the west bank. Our flak tried unsuccessfully to keep the planes away, and we watched, pale with helpless rage, as the bombs fell toward the water. A raft and all its human cargo were blown to pieces. Our fleet was being liquidated, and the attacks were just beginning. The Ilyushins were gaining height, to dive down again. A soldier beside me was weeping and shouting over and over: "The bastards, the bastards." Our damp hands scraped nervously against the ground as we maneuvered our guns.
"We'll never get out of this," shouted my companion. "They'll wipe us out, the shits."
Then a miracle occurred, which completely changed the tone of our cries.
"Sieg! Sieg! Der Luftwaffe!"
Nine Messerschmitt 109-Fs had appeared and were diving down onto the Russian planes, which had just completed an attack formation. The Russian pilots, aware of the technical inferiority of their planes, were trying to get away as fast as they could. We could hear bursts of fire, and felt a surge of intense, savage, and vengeful joy when we saw two of the Ilyushins spinning through the air like partridges hit by hunters' bullets. Then our cries grew even louder. Five Russian planes passed right overhead before we realized they meant danger. We shook our fists at them.
The fellow beside me, who'd been trembling with fury a moment before, was now trembling with joy, as uncontrolled as a madman. Our fighters were chasing the Ilyushins, which fled, skimming low over the ground. Then the pack disappeared behind the hills, which blocked our view. We heard guns, and a loud explosion. After that we had nothing to do but tend the wounded.
The next day we felt almost happy to wake in the rain. Traffic across the river had continued all night, carrying over as many men as possible; nevertheless, a vast number were still waiting on the east bank. We no longer knew how many days we'd been there, but, despite all our difficulties, we'd been able to reorganize somewhat. Men belonging to the same units had sorted each other out, and waited in distinct groups. Our officers had posted armed men on the hills to warn against a sudden attack. We knew that the Russians were very close, and felt rather surprised that they hadn't attacked already. Probably the battle for Kiev had absorbed almost all of them.
I had joined a large group of men made up for the most part of members of the Gross Deutschland, and men who had escaped from the infantry regiment which had come to our aid when we broke through at Konotop. The officers present-among whom I was delighted to see Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau-told us that as members of an elite division, and as specialized offensive troops, we should have been among the first to embark for the west. They also said that we would be the next to go. Naturally, we were glad to hear it, as everyone wished to reach the west bank as quickly as possible. Some fellows suggested a technique that had occurred to many of us as soon as we arrived at the river. This was to tie together bunches of reeds with our belts, and use them as floats. This had been proved successful many times, but it was not possible for moving the equipment indispensable to any soldier who did not wish to be considered a deserter.
The reception of these unequipped men on the other bank must have been sufficiently poor for our officers to forbid escape by reed float. But it was difficult for them to impose discipline on men simultaneously paralyzed by fear and prepared to affront the devil. Many men, in fact, drowned, or died of pneumonia, and many, after risking everything, were court-martialed.
I no longer had any clear idea of our situation, and set about trying to discover from the soldiers in my unit what had happened to my friends. Perhaps someone among these three thousand men waiting in the mud had run into Hals or Lensen or the veteran, stretched out on an armful of long, soaking stalks, dreaming of a distant utopia, indifferent to the rain running down his resigned features.
But my researches were in vain, and my questions remained unanswered. Once I thought I recognized a couple of faces from our disbanded company. I talked to the fellows, who answered evasively that they no longer remembered anything that had happened. They were absolutely exhausted, and my questions only seemed to annoy them. Their stunned minds seemed capable of only one idea: they had to cross the river.
There was only one person who might know a little more than the others-Herr Kapitan Wesreidau. But the respect and fear which officers required of us made it almost impossible to speak to them. A few of the older soldiers were bold enough to approach them, but for a boy like myself it was entirely different. However, I was so consumed by desire to speak to the captain that it must have showed on my face. Also, I was always lingering somewhere near him or his group. I was sitting on my bundle a short distance away from Wesreidau and two or three other officers, including a major, when Wesreidau began to walk toward me. I stared in confusion at the tall figure in the long leather coat shining with rain, ready to leap to my feet and snap to attention. But the captain gestured to me to stay as I was, so I remained on the ground, with my eyes glued to his face. He seemed even taller than usual, because I was so low down.
"What regiment do you belong to, young fellow?" he asked.
I stammered out my regimental number, as well as the number of the scratch company I was taken into for the retreat from Konotop. He took me for a Czech, so I explained my origins to him.
"Hm," was all he said about that.
"Those scratch companies were the last ones out. I led several of them myself."
"I know, Herr Hauptmann," I said, blushing. "I saw you."
I couldn't get used to the idea that the captain really was talking to me.
"Ah," said Wesreidau. "Then we have memories in common, of a difficult time."
"Ja, Herr Hauptmann."
He reached for a cigarette, but the packet was empty. Had he perhaps been going to offer me one?
"We'll be crossing tomorrow, young fellow, and I expect you'll be getting a long leave."
The word "leave" was like a sudden sip of champagne. "Leave!"
"I think so. We won't have stolen it from you.,,
Sensations which I had thought I would never feel again immediately revived-all the emotions I had buried with so much difficulty. Could it be possible . . . ? But it had always been possible; how could
I doubt it? I suddenly realized the full weight of my despair, how absolutely I had given up hope. Now I began to think again, timidly and gently, of Paula. Since we had been organized into the special assault group, there had been no mail. Although we had been moving continuously, this lack of news had weighed on me terribly. And then, in the face of such intense misery and disgust, words describing love and tenderness lost their meaning. Everything I had felt seemed to have been swept away in the dust and noise of crumbling houses, and in misery far more intense than the miseries of love. I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was constantly in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance
of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything-fortune, love, even a limb-if I could simply survive.
I sensed that Captain Wesreidau was about to leave, so I asked him if he knew anything of my usual companions. He was only able to remember the veteran, calling him by his proper name.
"August Wiener's company was supporting a howitzer battery at the beginning of the offensive. The first troops had a hard time. It was very difficult. In any case, the men who got through were probably sent to Kiev. That's where we would have regrouped if we'd had the trucks."
I listened to him in silence. He nodded, and walked away.
"We'll be crossing tomorrow."
My head was spinning with the thought of a leave, and with the anguish of the possible loss of my special comrades. Perhaps I had already walked past their burnt bodies on the shattered pavement of the Konotop-Kiev road. Would I also have to renounce the friendships which had seen me through so much? I knew that they also were so close to being stripped of everything that the sentiment I had for them seemed permissible, it was so gratuitous and disinterested. Must I also obliterate, without remorse-for remorse is a dangerous luxury in battle-the memories of Hals, and Lensen, and even that bastard Lindberg?
However, if my friends had disappeared, the veteran had left me an inheritance, a special faculty. I would relive all my good memories, even in the worst moments, and lie on the ground, inert and almost insensible, oblivious of the rain which my saturated cap was no longer able to soak up, and which ran over my face and collar and down my neck. The rain streaming across my cheeks would take the place of the tears I should have shed.
The rain continued for a long time, through the night and the next day, until the end of the afternoon. The soil on which we waited had become a giant sponge. Each fresh bundle of rushes soaked up as much water from the ground as it received from the sky. We were so thoroughly soaked through that some of us stripped altogether, to wait naked. Most of the time, we stayed on our feet, with tent cloths over our shoulders, watching the endless back-and-forth of the rafts.
Toward noon, despite the terrible weather, a squadron of Ilyushins appeared. Once again, we cursed those birds of ill-omen, which forced us to lie with our noses in the gluey Dnieper mud. The planes made three passes, scattering bombs and bullets wherever they could see anything. Once again, we were filled with a panic which ended only when the list of killed and wounded had grown a little longer.
Finally, toward six in the evening, as the light was fading, our group was taken in charge by the transit services.
We were ordered to collect our things and proceed in good order to the three embarkation points which the incessant trampling had transformed into an astonishing quagmire.
Carrying our arms and baggage, covered with slimy mire, we set off down the road despite the mud which threatened to engulf us.
With heroic patience and discipline, each man waited his turn, enduring the torrential rain without complaint. With our feet in the muddy water our boots could no longer resist, we kept our assigned places. The last men to embark had to wait for several hours.
Vague, momentary smiles lit our almost unrecognizable faces. At last we were going to cross, and all of this would be over. We would be able to dry ourselves, and sleep, perhaps even in comfort, and stop feeling afraid. We clung to our more hopeful thoughts, although we were haunted by one last fear: what would happen on the trip across? Would the overused, overloaded boats make it? Or would they sink, carrying a hundred desperate souls to the bottom? And then there were the Yabos ... If any Russian planes appeared ... We could all remember in clear detail the horrible massacre of the day before.
Then it grew dark. Russian planes rarely flew at night, so perhaps we were at least safe from them.
When it was my turn, I climbed with a hundred other men onto a raft whose planks had been splintered by the passage of thousands of hobnailed boots. I watched anxiously as the water rose to within a foot of swamping us.
"That's enough, cap'n," shouted a noncom who looked about forty years old. "Do you want us to sink?"
"As many as possible, Herr Spiess," an engineer said, laughing. "That's orders, and we're used to it. Come on-let's have another ten." When we were on the point of foundering, the boatmen let go of the ropes and, with the agility of young goats, jumped onto the few inches they had reserved for themselves.
So slowly we were almost unaware of it, the raft began to move out onto the water, which was barely creased by our momentum. Our balance seemed so precarious that no one dared move. The cursed bank, veiled in fog, disappeared from sight. I was huddled in the center of the raft between two fellows I didn't know: a young lieutenant from an infantry regiment which had come to help us at Konotop, and a fellow from my own company, who seemed to be asleep on his feet. He was the only one who seemed so indifferent. Everyone else was listening and looking intently, especially toward the rainy sky, which we mistrusted absolutely. A boat half the size of ours, but with the same engine, slowly pulled level with us. Its deck was as jammed as ours.
How long was the crossing? Perhaps a quarter of an hour. It seemed interminable. The water slid past us with an easy, regular motion, whose slowness made us frantic. Some of the fellows were counting aloud, marking off the seconds perhaps, or using them as one uses imaginary sheep, to force sleep.
Then voices announced the approach of the west bank and safety and release from our torments. The men at the front of the raft could see it, enveloped in fog. Our blood ran faster in our veins, as we tried, by will power, to increase the speed of the engine. We were about to land, to be safe-quick, while the sky was still quiet.
An empty raft crossed our path, heading back for the east bank. We looked at it coldly. Any movement toward the east made us shiver. Then the west bank was only twenty yards away. We no longer dared to move for fear of foundering, despite an intense joy which we would have expressed in other circumstances by jumping and shouting. After so many days and hours of waiting and despair, we had been saved.
Then there were only ten yards . . . then five. The engines went into reverse, to slow us down. We drew up beside a pier made of tied branches, and we heard voices telling us to move slowly and care fully. With a sense of enormous privilege, we stepped, one after the other, onto the solid earth-which is to say, onto a quagmire exactly like the east bank. But the mud no longer mattered; we had crossed to the other side. The west bank meant security and safety, a barrier between us and the Russians. We had dreamed of this safety for so long, and so intensely, that we almost felt as if there were a barrier between us and the war itself. The bulletins had been official: we would hold on to the Dnieper. The enemy would not pass beyond that line, and in the spring we would push them back beyond the Volga. During our long and painful retreat to the river and our endless wait, our thoughts had crystallized around this idea, and actually stepping onto the west bank seemed like the end of our misfortune: reorganization, clean clothes, leave, and the assurance that we had not been beaten. Of course, the west bank was still Russia, but it was the part of Russia which had welcomed us a few years earlier, the part of Russia which really favored us. Our exhausted brains clung to this fantasy: the west bank was almost the motherland.