The Second Front on the Dnieper
It was now ten days since my return, which we had celebrated according to the circumstances. In the windowless isba we were assigned for rest periods, we had emptied a five-quart container of ersatz-no vodka, no biscuits, but then, that's war.
In any case, we had reserved the ersatz for me and my friends. The rest of the company might as well have been in limbo. Beyond the boundary of our friendship, and indifferent to it, they washed their dirty feet in large dishes of faintly warmed water or attacked their lice or organized lice races to pass the time. For a brief moment, we felt a sense of occasion, but that quickly faded. One can tell the same stories only a certain number of times. We very soon sank back into the torpor characteristic of soldiers at the front. Nothing was new to us; we had been through it all before-and even on days when our morale was relatively high, we felt constrained by the inevitable anxieties of the front.
For ten days we shuttled back and forth between our hole in the ground and the isba where we rested. Every twelve hours, we tramped the half mile which lay between our outpost and the shattered remnants of a village overrun by war. During the day, we stared vacantly at the empty, frozen country beyond our hole. At night, the fog limited our vision to ten or fifteen yards at most. We weren't yet trying to stop the enemy; their front was still extremely fluid.
From time to time, a few attempts at penetration, always motorized, forced us to open fire. And once, since my return, enemy tanks had appeared and fired at our frozen batteries. Otherwise, we had all the time in the world to observe the crystal structure of snowflakes against our infantry half boots, which became as hard as wood during our twelve hours of duty, and softened again in the stable-like warmth of sixty bodies huddled together in the isba during our twelve hours off. Fires, of course, were streng verboten, as smoke would give away our position.
Wesreidau often visited us.
I think he felt especially warm toward our group, and with the veteran, able to speak directly, as man to man. We young ones listened to them talking, the way boys listen to their elders, and what we heard was always alarming. Our exhausted troops had abandoned Kiev, which, in spite of everything, remained a center of combat. We were still trying to hold the Dnieper-but even that famous barrage seemed to be doing us very little good. From Cherkassy to Kremenchug, the Russians were on both banks of the river. They also held both banks of the Desna. At Nedrigailov, victory was no longer a possibility for us, and our men were faced with a choice of captivity or death.
Fortunately, as our front was extremely precarious and shallow, we were only supposed to be covering the southern wing of the fighting. The area we were holding was as flat as a billiard table, and a strong defense would have been difficult even with adequate supplies. On the twelfth day after my return, we were attacked by Russian planes, which cost us many casualties. Later that day, a column of German soldiers straggled over the horizon, partially made up of troops pushed from Cherkassy. Seven or eight ragged, famished regiments, overloaded with wounded, descended on us like a plague of locusts, ravaging and plundering our reserves. The intensity of the battle they had just survived could easily be read on their shaggy, exhausted faces. This fragment of the Wehrmacht, with worn out boots, empty packs, and eyes glittering with fever, preceded by four days the Russian thrust which began at Kherson and pushed through to the west bank of the Dnieper. At precisely this moment, winter also began to attack in earnest. The thermometer suddenly plunged to five degrees below zero.
On an evening of savage cold, the enemy reached our lines. The noise of their arrival preceded them, carried on the wind to the shivering bundles of rugs and blankets waiting behind frozen parapets. We listened, as animals at bay listen to the pack closing in. For at least two hours, we lay with straining ears, our enormous eyes staring fixedly through frozen films of protective tears.
Although we could see nothing, voices kept announcing: "Here they are!"
Our tense imaginations invested the visible edge of our defenses with a thousand imaginary movements, and a thousand thoughts and visions whirled through our heads: our distant homelands, our families and friends, and our desperate, passionate loves. We imagined every possible outcome to the imminent fighting: surrender, captivity, flight . . . flight, or death . . . a quick death, to be done with it all. Some grasped their weapons all the more firmly, dreaming of a heroic defense which would push the Russians back, and hold the line. But most of us were resigned to death-a resignation which often created the most glorious heroes of the war. Simple cowards or pacifists, who had been opposed to Hitler from the start, often saved their lives and the lives of many others in a delirium of terror provoked by the accident of an overwhelming situation.
Faced with the Russian hurricane, we ran whenever we could. But often we had no choice, and became heroes without glory, who were somehow able to conjure up a strength superior to the enemy's. We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich-or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear, which was our motivating power. The idea of death, even when we accepted it, made us howl with powerless rage. We fought for reasons which are perhaps shameful, but are, in the end, stronger than any doctrine. We fought for ourselves, so that we wouldn't die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats, which do not hesitate to spring with all their teeth bared when they are cornered by a man infinitely larger than they are.
Although we were already beaten ten times over, our terror became a fortress of despair, which the Russians found difficult to breach. We lay huddled against the frozen soil, and listened, to the growing tumult of their approach.
We began to hear distinct, separable sounds. The black potato sack which was Hals changed shape and moved toward me.
"Do you hear that?" he whispered. "They've got tanks."
At first I heard nothing but tanks. Then there was the sound of singing too: a Russian victory song. It was their turn now to feel the infectious enthusiasm of advancing troops.
"A year and a half ago, we were marching on Moscow, and I was singing just like that," muttered the veteran.
The night wore on. The noise of the Russian advance changed in quality and intensity, but never stopped. The men who had been resting in the isbas came back to their forward positions. Everyone was now in the line. Even the auxiliary services had been organized to defend the village. The front was long and thin; our division alone held some sixty miles, with the regiments standing elbow to elbow. There were a great many of us, but at least thirty times as many of them.
Our anxiety hovered over us like a pessimistic exhalation trapped by our heavy steel helmets. Our breath condensed on our nostrils and lips, and on the upturned collars of our coats. For a long time now, our hands and feet had been hurting us. For the moment, stiffened by cold, they seemed detached and separate from our general nervous tension. On other evenings, the fellows moved about in their holes to keep from freezing. This evening, however, our cumbersome overshoes had been tossed aside, and everyone was still. The biting cold passed over us like a silent dream, depositing a film of frost on the earth and on us. Periodically, we had to clear our weapons, and every time the touch of the icy metal struck us like an electric shock. To the east, the Russian troops were silent. All we heard from their side was the disquieting roar of their engines.
Occasionally, we heard a horse whinnying: one of our starving beasts protesting the onset of death. The desire for sleep weighed on us as heavily and oppressively as our fear and the cold, and kept over whelming us for five and even ten minutes at a time, despite our wide-open eyes. Then we would jolt back to reality, to wait for the first hours of morning-a time when men and animals often die of cold.
The Russians were taking their time. Since we had caught the first sounds of their new front, a full day had gone by, but nothing more had happened. Had we possessed sufficient strength and equipment, a counter-attack would almost surely have been successful. But our orders were simply to resist and hang on. We were operating on a system of four hours on and four hours off, organized so that a maximum number of men was in the line at any given moment. Many men fell asleep beside their guns, to wake suddenly, badly frozen. We were steadily losing sick and wounded men, who withdrew on foot or on horseback-and no reinforcements were arriving to fill the gaps.
"It's a racket," grumbled the veteran.
At dusk, we found Lindberg naked from the waist down. He had gone off a short distance, supposedly to crap, and had stayed that way for nearly three-quarters of an hour. By the time we found him, he was crying like a baby, and he wouldn't have lasted much longer. Hals blew up at him, and let him have it on the backside and thighs with the strap of his gas mask.
By the next morning, the Russians had still not attacked. We had grown steadily colder and more nervous, and it was difficult to seem calm.
One of our planes flew over, and dropped four sacks of mail. I had four letters: two from my family, and two from Paula. All were very out of date-particularly one of the letters from France, which was more than a month old. I devoured Paula's letters, which seemed filled with sadness. She had been sent to a small factory out in the country some forty miles from Berlin. She said that life in the capital was no longer possible.
What was I supposed to think? What could I imagine?
My parents' letter, with the standard two-line refrain from my father, irritated me by its tone of unjustified complaint. I mentioned this to Wiener, who replied: "That's all the French know how to do-complain."
My mother's last letter astounded me by its lack of realism. The poor woman begged me to take care of myself, to avoid showing off, to do my duty, but nothing more-to protect myself from meaningless risks. This sort of advice seemed so irrelevant that for the moment I was staggered. I looked up from the letter, yellow against the snow, to the whiteness which veiled the appalling danger threatening us from the east. The pathetic futility of my mother's attitude made my eyes fill with tears.
Everyone seemed to be reading a letter whose contents were so unexpected that fellows far older than I were overcome by tears. Others jumped to their feet, screaming like madmen: a close relative or friend had been killed in an air raid.
"This mail is only upsetting everyone," said a tall fellow next to me, as he looked at a friend who was weeping like a child.
It seemed we were to be spared nothing.
In the afternoon, some patrols were sent out into the whirling snow. Our command had grown tired of waiting and had decided to test the enemy. We heard a few shots, and then the patrols came back, reporting that they'd seen a heavy concentration of Russian materiel.
I and my comrades were wakened just before nightfall. With pounding hearts, we ran to our forward positions. The Russian tanks were rolling through the storm, and we could feel the vibration of their treads against the frozen ground.
Our anti-tank gunners and men with Panzerfausts kept their eyes glued to their telescopic sights, which they had to wipe continually. A few anti-tank trenches had been dug, but these were ludicrously inadequate both in number and size. We knew that if our anti-tank defenses gave way, we were lost, and we nervously clenched our fingers around the anti-tank grenades and magnetic mines which had been distributed.
At the Pak we were protecting, Olensheim, Ballers, Freivitch and others were ready to work the gun. Our visibility had been seriously reduced by falling snow. To the north of us, an S.M.G. had just opened fire. The rumbling of tanks was louder than ever, but the tanks themselves were still invisible. To the north, fighting had already begun, and we could see flashes of light despite the thickly whirling snow and the rapidly growing darkness. Short bursts of anti-tank fire lashed the plain, producing a curious muffled echo. As the roar of tanks grew louder, we felt our lungs lift. Long flames ran the length of the horizon, while others rose vertically, illuminating at different levels the whirling masses of falling snow. Then the sound of tank engines in full acceleration, shattered the night and our eardrums. Five vaguely defined monsters loomed out of the darkness, rolling parallel to our line of defense. Our anti-tank crew was already firing. Wiener calmly steadied the butt of his F.M. against his shoulder, and I felt myself stiffen with a thousand indescribable terrors. Flashes of yellow light burst against the lead tank in the group of T-34s, whose turrets were pointed toward our line. Five shells had already left white traces on the huge machine, which otherwise appeared to be unaffected by the efforts of our anti-tank gunners.
A tank was roaring past us, at a distance of about ten yards. We heard a howling sound, and a shell from a Panzerfaust burst against its side. The monster immediately reduced its speed, and thick black smoke began to seep from every joint, to be lashed to the ground by the wind. The hatches opened, clanging back against the heavy metal plates. We could hear shouts and cries, which were quickly drowned by a powerful explosion. The turret disintegrated, leaving fragments of human beings suspended from the shattered metal in colors ranging from purple to gold. But there were no cries of triumph from our position-only the barking voice of our Pak. One of our shells hit a joint on the back of a second tank, and it too began to pour smoke. Then the cartridges were running through my fingers. Everyone who escaped from the immobilized tank was shot down without mercy. For a moment, we breathed more easily. By now, our surroundings were lit by flames and we were able to see the Russian tanks before they got so close. One of them had actually crossed our lines, and as it drew near us, we could feel our hair stiffening with terror. The anti-tank crew were working as fast as they could. Within three seconds, their gun was facing this new threat, and a shell, fired at the earliest possible instant, was bursting against the enemy's front apron. At the moment of impact, the engine stopped, and then began to scream, as if it had been thrown out of gear. Simultaneously, somewhere to our right, we were aware of two brilliant flashes, and heard a long-drawn-out explosion. Another tank began to fire at us, and large pieces of frozen earth hurtled into the air.
I no longer knew what was happening. The tank to our right burst into flames, groaning at all its seams.
"Fur den Panzerfaust: Sieg Heil! Heil!" someone shouted.
Our gunners were now firing at the second tank which had penetrated to our rear, and which seemed to be having mechanical difficulties. Then its left side disintegrated in a prolonged explosion. But our attention was drawn to a hallucinating spectacle farther to the rear. A T-34 had driven over one of our positions, crushing our men under its treads. One of our half-tracks, armed with an anti-tank machine gun was chasing it from behind, firing as rapidly as it could. Our anti-tank crew were in trouble. Freivitch was wounded, perhaps even dead. We fired our machine guns at the Russian monster, which never slackened its speed but continued to make for its lines as fast as possible. Two shells fired by other tanks exploded beside our half-track, and a third disintegrated it right in front of us. But the enemy tank, believing it was still pursued, vanished into the whirling snow.
The Russian armored assault was over. It had lasted for about half an hour, and had clearly been testing our defenses. A certain number of tanks had been disabled or destroyed; their losses were visibly greater than ours. Unfortunately, these losses counted for nothing compared to the vast armada regrouping opposite us. For us, although quantitively our losses were smaller, the destruction of four anti-tank positions in our sector was extremely serious.
For the moment, the tension dropped somewhat. Trench telephones rang, asking for reports, and voices shouted for the stretcher-bearers who were running and sliding across the icy ground. The veteran slid to the bottom of our hole and lit a cigarette, despite the ban. Hals jumped down and joined us.
"I just heard that Wesreidau's bunker was crushed by a T-34," he said, gasping.
We gaped at him, waiting for more information.
"Stay here," the veteran said finally. "I'll go and see."
"Achtung! Zigaretten!" warned Hals.
"Danke."
The veteran extinguished his butt, and tucked it into the cuff of his sleeve. He reappeared half an hour later.
"We had to dig for ten minutes before we could get Wesreidau out," he told us. "He's all right, and so are the two other officers-just a few scratches. But the fellow from liaison outside was killed. He must have panicked and tried to get inside. We found his body in the rubble."
We quickly suppressed that mangled vision to rejoice that our hauptmann was safe. We all felt very attached to him, and dependent on his survival.
By next morning, the snow had stopped. The plain was strewn with the carcasses of wrecked tanks, which the storm had not entirely covered
-at least twenty in the immediate vicinity of our position. Parts of these huge black cadavers, still warm from the fires which had burned over and through them, had turned red in the intensity of the flames. It seemed that the Russians had attacked our line at four points, separated by intervals of fifteen miles. One of those had been centered directly on our position, which was held by six companies. The other three were farther to the north.
We went back into the line at eight o'clock. Everything was motionless and muffled, under a low, dark sky, as opaque and heavy as a lead roof. Nowhere else have I seen skies quite like the skies of Russian winter. We used to stare up, amazed by the oppressive solidity. The diffused light seeping slowly downward made everything look unreal. Our reversible winter overalls stood out against the immaculate new snow a dingy piss yellow. A great many men were already wearing all the winter clothes we'd been issued: coat, vest, sheepskin, etc., which made their movements slow and clumsy. As the overalls had not been cut to cover so much bulk, they often tore. We looked like a collection of filthy, tattered pillows.
Despite our sense of inferiority, we all felt much less tense. The carcasses of the Russian tanks looked to our otherwise pessimistic eyes like the slaughtered beasts of a triumphant hunting scene. We all knew that it had not been a serious attack; nonetheless, we had managed to hold off the enemy's most dangerous machines. The possibility that the Russian tanks had been ordered not to advance any further occurred only to the veterans among us. All the younger men preferred to believe that we had stopped them. A few bottles of alcohol theoretically reserved for wounded men were opened by the captain himself, and that evening we celebrated in the isbas. In our hut we particularly honored our Panzerfaust team.
In the dim, wavering light of seven or eight candles, we drank to the healths of Obergefreiters Lensen, Kellermann, and Dunde. Grenadiers Smellens and Prinz touched glasses with Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau, who wore a large dressing on his left hand, and two others on his face. There were also two wounded men lying on stretchers, to whom we gave as many cigarettes as they wished.
Hals, exuberant as always, was describing the battle, miming certain scenes with sweeping gestures of his left arm and hand, which held his glass, while with his right he vigorously scratched his arm pits, which swarmed with lice. Lindberg, as always when things were going well for us, was in a state of high excitement. Cowardice had affected him more than anybody else, and his face, although it looked as young as ever, bore the traces.
Several men had fallen asleep, despite the noise. Everyone who stayed awake was soon quite drunk. As always at a German celebration, several fellows began to sing-marching songs, because we knew hardly any others. In the shadowy light of the isba, the scene looked fantastic and unreal.
The veteran began a Russian song. None of the rest of us understood him. We didn't know whether we were listening to a Revolutionary song or a song from the friendly Ukraine-although the distinction no longer mattered, as our Ukrainian days were over.
Everyone was singing whatever he liked, as part of a continuously increasing uproar. Hals had been twisting my arm to sing something in French, and I obliged, despite a growing desire to vomit, adding the "Sambre et Meuse" and a series of more or less obscene songs to the general discord.
Hals, who was as tight as a drum, burst out laughing and shouted: "Here come the Franzosen to the rescue: Ourrah pobieda!"
Then something disagreeable happened. Lensen stood up, stiff with drunkenness.
"Who the hell is talking about the Franzosen? What can anyone expect from a bunch of lousy milquetoasts like that?"
He was shouting at Hals, who was dancing heavily, like a bear. Hals grabbed him by the arm, and tried to pull him into a waltz.
"Shut up, you idiot!" Lensen yelled. "Go stick your head in the snow instead of belching out such crap."
Hals, who was almost a head taller, went right on dancing. Then Lensen let him have it with his fists, shouting at him louder than his minuscule superiority of rank gave him any right to do.
"Stillgestanden, gefreiter!" he yelled.
"Who the hell do you think you are? Are you telling me to shut up?" Hals was trying to stare at Lensen through eyes clouded by drink. "Stillgestanden!" Lensen repeated. "Or I'll give you something you won't like."
"But you're forgetting Sajer!" Hals shouted, waving at me. By now he was purple-faced too.
"He's half French, and he's lived in France all his life. And anyway the French are with us now."
He'd obviously been reading the same stories I had.
"You damned fool. Where the hell did you get that?"
"But it's true!" someone else shouted.
"I read it in Ost Front."
I no longer knew which way to look.
"Wake up, you dummkopf. So what if a handful of those milksops have come over to us? It doesn't mean a damn thing. And anyone who thinks anything different is no better than they are-goddamned black-haired guitarists whining over their goddamned love gongs."
I knew that Lensen was talking about the fundamental discord which has always existed between South Germany and Prussia.
"You're forgetting, Lensen, that my mother grew up just outside Berlin," I said.
"Well, then, you've got to choose. Either you're German like us, or you're one of those worthless, feckless Frogs."
I was on the point of saying that after all I didn't really have much choice.
"And you were asked to make just that choice in Poland, even at Chemnitz. I remember. I was there."
"But he did choose!" Hals shouted. "And here he is, in the same boat as you and me and all the rest of us."
"So-he doesn't have any more goddamn connection with the French."
Lensen, who was unquestionably brave, had been awarded the Iron Cross after destroying his seventh tank.
I suddenly felt overwhelmingly depressed and vulnerable, and incapable of ever attaining anything like Lensen's record. As always, I found the war almost totally paralyzing-probably because of my soft French blood, which Lensen despised so much. I was really almost as bad as Lindberg. He wasn't a true German either, but came from somewhere near Lake Constance-one of Lensen's typical "black-hairs."
A joyous group had begun to sing "Marienka," and general drunken revelry took over again. This time, though, I stayed on the sidelines, sunk in thought. All the pride I had felt when I had sworn my oath at Camp F, all my joy in feeling that at last I was the equal of my companions, for whom I felt an unquestioning respect, all the struggles and miseries undertaken and endured with the burning faith of a true believer-all of these had been once again cast into doubt by Lensen's drunken outburst. I had always sensed a certain scorn on his part. However, once in Poland he had come to my defense, and I had jumped to the conclusion that he held nothing against me on account of my origins. Now I knew the truth. Despite all my efforts, and all the suffering we bad been through together, my comrades rejected me. Would they ever think me worthy of bearing German arms? Inwardly, I cursed my parents for having brought me into the world at their particular crossroads.
I felt angry and sad and incredibly alone. I knew that I could count on Hals and Wiener and maybe a few others; but even they had started drinking and singing again, beside their blood brothers.
I would never again be able to sing with a light, casual spirit those German songs I enjoyed so much. And someday, maybe very soon, I might die, in a position not much better than that of an adoring black slave at his master's side. This vision of things was unbearable, and increased the nausea brought on by alcohol. I went outside to vomit and take a few breaths of icy air. My drunkenness prevented any further thought, and when I returned to the hut, I collapsed onto a heap of packs, to scratch at the lice biting me under my belt.
The next morning, the Russian front began to move again. First they sent over a few rounds of artillery. They had been keeping us in a state of expectation for several days now, undoubtedly preparing a definitive offensive with the slowness characteristic of their organization. During the day, we were reinforced by an artillery column which meant digging new trenches, and blistered hands for all of us. All along the front, our troops were ordered to break up the Russian positions.
That afternoon, we pounded the enemy with our big guns. They remained obstinately quiet. As soon as it was dark, certain sections loaded with ammunition left our trenches and advanced across the snowy ground. We had resumed our push to the east.
Scheisse! In a state of considerable apprehension, these groups fell on a motorized Soviet regiment, whose mass of vehicles seemed immobilized for all eternity. The night stillness was broken by the sound of our F.M.s and grenades, the cries of the Russians, surprised by this sudden and unexpected display of aggressiveness, and the roar of incendiary bombs, which must have consumed a costly quantity of materiel.
Then our men made a half turn, before the Russians were able to muster an organized reaction, and ran back to our trenches, bathed in transitory glory.
We had, in fact, aroused the anger of the Russians, who decided to retaliate as soon as it was light.
As at Belgorod, the whole horizon burst into flame, with the sudden, total involvement of the opening bars of a Wagner opera. Our frantic dash to our positions assumed a tragic quality, as the rain of fire was so dense that a quarter of our men fell before they'd reached the line. Then, we relived scenes and experiences very like what we'd known before. The sight of comrades screaming and writhing through final moments of agony had become no more bearable with familiarity, and I, despite my longing to live or die a worthy hero of the Wehrmacht, was no less of an animal stiff with uncontrollable terror.
Fortunately for us, the Luftwaffe, on which we could no longer rely, made an unexpected appearance, and somewhat reduced the force of the Russian blow. But the next day this intervention was answered in kind, and Russian planes did what they could to knock out our artillery. As a result, our artillery was withdrawn during the night, leaving us to do the honors unsupported.
We held our positions for four more terrible days, in spite of continuous infantry attacks supported by armor. Whenever possible, we buried our dead in the holes where they fell. Eighty-three names were scratched off the company list-among these, Olensheim, who had re covered from a serious wound at Belgorod, to receive his coup-de grace here, on the west bank of the Dnieper, where tranquility was to have been assured.
The Russians had finally regrouped for their supreme effort, and were delaying only to complete last-minute preparations. Their artillery, which seemed to be growing stronger by the hour, pounded our positions and the countryside for a long way back. The veteran had just been wounded, and was waiting, along with some hundred other men, for evacuation to a hospital, or at least to a quieter zone in the rear. A brusque sergeant had taken Wiener's place, and I continued to feed ammunition into the spandau, operated by someone considerably less expert than my friend.
The night which followed was so horrible that I retain only a confused and fragmented memory of it. Fresh supplies of ammunition were often slung into a length of canvas and carried across the trenches by two or four fellows.
The "night" of which I speak was, of course, total by five in the evening. Time in Russia is like that: in the summer there is almost no night, and in the winter, no day.
We had just withstood two or three major assaults. From the screams of anguish to our left, we concluded that a great many of our men had been killed. We had emptied five magazines, and were warming our fingers on the hot metal of the machine gun. Our sixth and last magazine had been attached, and we were anxiously waiting for fresh supplies. The night was continuously lit by the explosions of thousands of Russian shells, which made movement extremely difficult. Our trenches, which in any case were not deep enough, extended only to certain positions. The others had to be reached by leaps and bounds, alternating with plunges to the ground, and writhing on our stomachs across dozens of yards of snow mixed with chunks of frozen earth.
From time to time, we could see four figures moving toward us, jumping from crater to crater, carrying shells for our 50-mm. mortar, and magazines for the spandau. They were still about forty yards away, when their shadowy mass was surrounded by a flash of white light. We never heard any cries. A few minutes later, I was sent out to crawl to the point of impact. The sergeant ordered me to bring back at least two magazines. I had just arrived at my destination when I heard the Russian assault cry, followed by a shower of grenades and mortar shells. The ground shook beneath me in a manner which defied all prediction. I felt like a pea inside a ferociously beaten drum. I was lying flat on the ground among the bodies of comrades killed only a few minutes before, unable to see any of the supplies I'd been sent to fetch. Then I heard the sound of a tank. The darkness all around me was broken by streaks of light and large pink and yellow explosions. In a momentary beam from some headlight, I could see a small sign marked S. 157. I opened my mouth wide, as prescribed, because I could hardly breathe, and lay where I was, frantically groping for something to hang on to in that diabolical setting, where horizontal and vertical alternated to the rhythm of the lights which slashed the darkness. I thought that I could recognize through the uproar the crackle of the weapon I had operated with Wiener and had left only a moment before, and felt that my sanity might be close to collapse. I could see no escape from my situation, and lay glued to the ground with my head down, like a trussed animal, waiting for the butcher's axe.
A hundred yards to my left, the Pak, with its barrel marked for eleven kills, was fleeing into the striped darkness with its ammunition and gun crew. I heard the terrifying roar of a tank rising above the general tumult, and a headlight wavered and leaped through the undulating darkness. It had obviously driven through our defenses and was now passing within twenty yards of where I lay. I saw it suddenly burst into flame, and despite the intense cold a wave of hot air almost asphyxiated me. Half unconscious, I could hear the trample of running feet all around me, and, despite the noise of guns and explosions, cries which sounded more like curses than anything else, and were certainly neither French nor German.
I thought I could distinguish three or four pairs of boots thumping past me. Everything happened so quickly at that moment that I am no longer sure of what in fact I did see. I could still hear the sound of a machine gun, and then there were hundreds of shouting voices. The tank exploded a second time, showering steel fragments all around me. Some of our soldiers must still have been firing.
Then there was a period of relative calm, which lasted for about three-quarters of an hour. Exhausted by nervous tension, I managed to pull myself out of my torpor enough to take a few steps toward the position I had left twenty minutes earlier. But nothing remained of it except smoke and motionless bodies. Furthermore, the entire sector, as far as I could see, was veiled in smoke. I turned back again, heading for our rear lines, and, too late to stop myself, tripped over a corpse. I realized that I had no weapon, and grabbed the dead man's gun, which was lying beside him. Then I began to run.
I heard four or five shots. The whistling flight of the balls made me think of hell. I knew that I might faint at any moment, and between two spasms of nausea fell into a hole where three fellows in roughly the same state as myself were staring fixedly at the dark, somber east. Literally crumpled into the bottom of the hole, I attempted to order my thoughts. My retina still bore the imprint of a thousand darting, luminous points, which prolonged my sense of vertigo.
For a long moment, I stayed where I was, wondering where to head for next. Then I heard the other fellows in the hole exclaiming with astonishment. Far to the south, the earth seemed to have caught on fire, and the sky rang with the sound of thunder.
Twenty miles to the south, the second Dnieper front had given way in the face of irresistible Russian pressure, and thousands of German and Rumanian soldiers met an apocalyptic end. Some twenty regiments had been unable to disengage in time, and had laid down their arms, to be rewarded for their bravery by captivity and degradation. For the rest of us, the war continued. In a rush, I decided to leave the hole which had received me a few moments before. Doubled over, I ran like a madman to another defensive position, where a group of soldiers were clustered around a motionless figure who was being bandaged. A fellow I didn't recognize hailed me by name: "Where've you come from, Sajer?"
My head was still pounding to the rhythm of the bombardment. I stared at him.
"I don't know. . . . I don't know any more. . . . Everyone back there is dead.... I ran away, through all the Russians."
Behind us, we could hear the roar of an engine. A tractor was pulling a heavy anti-tank gun into position. Then we heard the burst of the exhaust a moment before each shell exploded. Our overwhelming weariness was now affecting us like a drug. Russian shells were coming over in profusion. For a moment, we watched the storm closing in. Then, with a cry of despair and a prayer for mercy, we dived to the bottom of our hole, trembling as the earth shook and the intensity of our fear grew. The shocks, whose center seemed closer each time, were of an extraordinary violence. Torrents of snow and frozen earth poured down on us. A white flash, accompanied by an extraordinary displacement of air, and an intensity of noise which deafened us, lifted the edge of the trench. None of us immediately grasped what had happened. We were thrown in a heap against the far wall of the hole, wounded and intact together. Then, with a roar, the earth poured in and covered us.
In that moment, so close to death, I was seized by a rush of terror so powerful that I felt my mind was cracking. Trapped by the weight of earth, I began to howl like a madman. The memory of that moment terrifies me still. The sense that one has been buried alive is horrible beyond the powers of ordinary language. Dirt had run down my neck and into my mouth and eyes, and my whole body was gripped by a heavy and astonishingly inert substance which only held me more tightly the harder I struggled. Under my thigh I felt a leg kicking with the desperation of a horse between the shafts of a heavy cart. Something else was rubbing against my shoulder. With a sudden jerk, I pulled my head free of the dirt and of my helmet, whose strap was cutting into my windpipe, nearly strangling me. Some two feet from my face a horrible mask pouring blood was howling like a demon. My body was still entirely trapped. I knew that I was either going to die or lose my reason.
My throat burst with screams of rage and despair. No nightmare could possibly reach such a pitch of horror. At that moment, I suddenly understood the meaning of all the cries and shrieks I had heard on every battlefield. And I also understood the marching songs, which so often begin with a ringing description of a soldier dying in glory and then suddenly turn somber:
We marched together like brothers, And now he lies in the dust.
My heart is torn with despair, My heart is torn with despair....
Once again I learned how hard it is to watch a comrade die: almost as hard as dying oneself.
During the night, the Russians made nine attempts to break through our lines, and failed. If they had persevered once, or maybe twice more, they would surely have been successful. I watched, three quarters buried, for about twenty minutes, while a hurricane of fire broke over our rear, destroying what was left of the village, and killing something like 700 men in our regiment alone, which, at the beginning of the offensive had numbered about 2,800 men. I scratched at the ground with my hands, and somehow managed to free myself. Two men were lying beside me in pools of blood. The dying man had been buried under more than a yard of earth, and could no longer hope for anything but the mercy of heaven. A fellow beside me, who had been wounded, was groaning with pain. He was buried almost as deeply as I had been. I dug him out as fast as I could, and helped him to crawl through the explosions toward the rear. On the way, I saw a gun lying on the ground and picked it up.
The rest of the night was consumed by a series of almost insuperably difficult problems, as if we were caught in a terrible game with all the odds against us and our lives at stake.
At dawn, in the first faint light of a dark winter day, the front grew quiet.
The scattered remnants of our regiments collected as they met among the craters and shell holes. A cloud of stale smoke hung over the snowy ground, which was littered with Russian and German dead. The wounded who had not yet succumbed to the bitter cold were still groaning, filling the air with a chorus of misery which our exhausted ears heard as they might have heard a winter wind howling over the roof of an isba in an isolated hamlet on the steppe. Sections were organized to help the stretcher-bearers with a job of impossible magnitude.
As always, the Russians left all rescue efforts to us. Their wounded were left lying where they fell, with a possibility of either dying on the spot or of being picked up by one of our first-aid teams. Their supplies of materiel seemed to be increasing daily in quantity and quality, but their medical services barely functioned. As our army grew more and more disorganized by retreat, we became increasingly unable to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers, whose number was continuously growing. The Russian wounded could hope for very little from us.
While the medical service tried to deal with the wounded, some twelve of us settled into a half-covered bunker back of our former sleeping quarters, which had been entirely destroyed. Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau, who had just arrived, was one of the group. Despite a general sense of foreboding in the face of disaster, we all felt a surge of joy whenever a particular friend appeared. Hals, Lensen, and Lindberg were all there. I was helping a wounded corporal bandage his severely burned right hand when the captain announced that we would retreat. He sent us out to help the noncoms count off and regroup our decimated company before moving camp at dawn. I went with Lensen, to help him find what was left of his section. The Russians, who had also taken a beating, were catching a moment's rest before demolishing what remained of our front. For the moment, everything was quiet in the eerie half light of December.
Lensen couldn't quite grasp what had happened to me.
For him, the simple fact that I had survived the Soviet thrust was extraordinary. My explanations that at the time I had understood nothing made no difference to him; he simply supplied his own scenario.
My winter overalls had entirely disappeared, leaving me with nothing but my singed overcoat. During my flight, I had picked up a gun which proved to be Russian. For Lensen, it was all clear. The Russians had overrun my position, and had either failed to notice me or had taken me for dead. In a desperate man-to-man struggle, I had managed to wrest a weapon from one of them and, with his gun, had fought my way to our lines.
"You're still stunned," he insisted. "But I'm sure you'll remember later. I don't see any other explanation."
Lensen's version certainly had its advantages.
I myself retained nothing but a chaotic impression of flashing lights and thunderous noises over a sense of such total disorientation that I had no longer been capable of distinguishing east from west or up from down. Perhaps Lensen was only trying to compensate for his attitude during our evening of celebration.
At dusk, which fell in the middle of the afternoon, the German Army abandoned the second Dnieper front. While the immense Russian thrust whose fringe had swept over us was pressing with its principal strength against German and Rumanian units further to the south, our depleted columns withdrew from their positions, abandoning all materiel which was no longer usable or transportable. Our Gross Deutschland regiments, half of us on foot, left in relative silence, our backs bent by the weight of our burdens, hoping that the gray skies would hold back for a while longer the rain of metal and fire which the pursuing enemy was bound to send after us.