The division had been routed several times, and had sustained serious losses. Units believed to be intact were often borrowed from us, and sent to bolster some faltering position. When they arrived they would be found short by about two-thirds of their strength. There was nothing to be done about it.
Our own group was enjoying a much-needed spell of relative calm. Our existence would have been almost idyllic except for the depressing and infuriating quality of barracks life. The exercises we were given, as if we were green troops in for basic training, brought us close to open revolt.
We had moved 250 miles, to a position in Poland, far from the front. Our camp was on the banks of the Dniester, some fifty miles from Lvov, in the foothills of the Carpathians. The river is quite narrow at this point, and its waters, when we arrived, were swift and tumultuous, running through a network of small islands loaded with snow and ice. On any wide stretch the river was frozen to a considerable depth, and the current ran beneath the ice, giving off a strange, muffled noise.
Our view was magnificent: a pale blue sky and a horizon marked by snow peaks, against which we could watch flights of eagles. For two months we enjoyed the agreeable change from the black and gray of a Ukrainian winter to the sportive landscape of eastern Galicia. Galician snows were also very heavy, and the cold was severe, but we slept in clean, heated barracks. Although an exaggerated sense of economy kept the heat at some fifty degrees or so, this at least enabled us to be fully alert when we were awake. Our camp was huge and organized with all the Prussian rigor of an army on the eve of battle. About 150 wooden buildings without floors had been built in blocks, carrying numbers and letters. Nearby, in the snow-covered woods, we could see a large stone building, which must have been part of the village beside the camp, and which housed our secretariat and principal officers. All our materiel had been repainted and overhauled. In these conditions of order and apparent abundance, none of us dreamed that Germany had reached the limit of its capacities. After the chaos of the front, the atmosphere of efficient organization, with its requirement that every move be registered in writing, made us feel like wild beasts suddenly caged.
The camp was built around a large central square for reviews and drills, in which young recruits were instructed in the art of manipulating arms, so useful in parades and so useless at the front.
The young recruits seemed to enjoy these exercises. Others, like Hals and me, were seeing ourselves as we had been a year and a half ago, back in Poland, where we had handled explosives for the first time. The memory of those days seemed at least ten years old-one ages quickly in wartime. Our world-weary attitude did not escape the attention of the young recruits, who responded by holding themselves even more stiffly, as if to show us that the war was now their affair.
This healthy enthusiasm of schoolboys suddenly transformed into soldiers was destined to weaken somewhat after a few nights in the mud and the shock of seeing a field hospital for the first time. We had been through all that. They would soon learn that war. does not always create the same exaltation as the intoxicating explosion of the plaster grenades in the war games of training camp.
The Fuhrer, who was now scraping the bottom of the barrel, had been forced to send his arrogant Polizei off to war. These elderly new recruits were having a hard time of it. The sight of policemen crawling through the mud on their bellies delighted us enough so that we almost forgot our sufferings. Police officers, whose competence in war was limited, handed over their men to officers of the Wehrmacht, who put them through the works. This spectacle, which gave us so much pleasure, was hard on the eager young recruits, directly exposed to the bad humor of those bastards who did everything they could to keep the younger men in a state of inferiority.
For us, life was also very far from perfect. Before settling into our new quarters, there had been a long and difficult journey. We had begun by tramping more than thirty miles on bad Russian roads, deeply rutted and coated with ice. Then we were loaded onto trucks, and driven as far as Mogilev, an oriental-looking town, where we boarded two trains, both in very bad condition, for the remainder of the journey, along the Bessarabian frontier, to Lvov, in Poland. From Lvov, trucks had brought us to the camp, where we had stumbled out, exhausted and filthy, under the suspicious gaze of polished, healthy officer-instructors.
We were allowed forty-eight hours to rest, before our clothes and equipment had to be in perfect order. At our first inspection, the condition of our uniforms shocked the inspectors, although we had brushed and beaten them as hard as we could. They had completely lost their original color and appearance. Gray-green had become greenish piss yellow, decorated by tears and holes and reddish-brown burns. Our worn and crumpled boots had lost their black finish, and many were without heels or laces. We looked like a bunch of tramps, and the inspectors were ready to jump at the slightest sign of negligence. These evident traces of the battlefield struck them like slaps in the face, to which there was no answer. Those fops should, in fact, have been honoring us.
They knew it too, and the knowledge irritated them. They persisted in picking on details to try to save face. A short way off, sections of police and students in camouflage uniforms were marching to their daily sweat baths, singing gaily in the dry, cold air, which had brought out the color in their cheeks.
Das schonste auf der Welt
Ist mein Tirolerland.. . .
However, instead of the Alps, the Carpathians witnessed their compulsory gaiety.
The instructors, intent on inspection, were insensible to the poetry of the scene. One of them stopped short in front of a gefreiter whose coat ended in a fringe as full of holes as a piece of Alencon lace. At last the stabsfeldwebel could unload a little rage in front of his sarcastic audience. Our heads turned slightly, scarcely noticeably, to the right, toward the fellow accused of negligence. We rolled our eyes as far as we could, trying to see who was getting it.
"Name and number!" shouted the stabs, stiffening his neck.
Even if we couldn't see anything, we could hear it!
"Frosch, Herr Stabsfeldwebel," the accused shouted, adding the number which each of us was supposed to know by heart.
Frosch ... The name stirred an echo in my memory: Frosch?
And then the barracks the day after we crossed the Dnieper came back to me. Hot water, and a foolish-looking fellow of angelic good will. What was the stabs going to pin on him?
In the third row of men, some ten or twelve yards from me, Frosch was standing at attention, while abuse rained down on him. He was staring straight ahead, as required by convention. His gaunt, hollow face was partly hidden by his heavy steel helmet. Unfortunately his stupidity was obvious enough to give the stabs a sudden sense of confident superiority over this soldier, who had clearly seen a lot. Two large hands, red with chilblains, emerged from his ragged sleeves to press for warmth against the folds of filthy cloth. The coat no longer had any buttons. Frosch had fastened it at each buttonhole with a short piece of wire. With a touching sense of aesthetics, he had bent in the ends of each wire, as if to demonstrate his good intentions. Unfortunately, he had linked a lower buttonhole to a higher one, which produced an improper and all-too-visible crease. This anomaly leaped to the eye of the inspecting noncom, who couldn't let such a golden opportunity slip. However, in complete disregard of normal practice, the company officer intervened, reminding the stabsfeldwebel that our detachment had just survived an extremely difficult experience.
"Your supply report specifically stated that you possessed the necessary materials for keeping your clothes in good repair, Herr Leutnant, and specifically mentioned buttons."
The lieutenant didn't know how to answer.
"In addition, Herr Leutnant, Gefreiter Frosch hasn't even bothered to line up the buttonholes correctly."
There was a moment of charged silence. The lieutenant threw Frosch a look of despairing compassion. Couldn't he have spared himself all this and deprived the instructor of this ludicrous opening? But the facts were as they were, and the lieutenant, despite all his good will, couldn't alter them. He resumed his former position with an impassive air. A wave of irritation seemed to run through the company.
"Stillgestanden!" the feld shouted.
In a flood of gratuitous invective, Frosch was given twenty days' detention and a series of punitive fatigues. Without flinching, Frosch left his position to stand in the ranks of the guilty. He was the only one. The inspection was over. Quarter turn, left, left. Our companies went on to march around the camp. Frosch remained where he was, staring straight ahead. As the only man to be punished, he seemed a symbol of injustice, alone in his punishment as he had always been in life. He had found some comradeship in the Wehrmacht, but the exigencies of military life exacted a high price. Ten days later, when the rest of the unit drew new clothes, Frosch kept his rags. He had in truth become a symbol. He didn't know how to hate, and always wore his expression of touching stupidity and banal good will.
Later the veteran said of him: "He's as humble as Diogenes. If he doesn't deserve victory, at least he deserves Paradise."
Section forward! . . . On the ground! . . . On your feet! . . . Run! . . . Forward! . . . On the ground! . . . On your feet, facing me! . . . The hard, frozen ground scraped our hands and knees, and the sharp twigs of the leafless scrub finished off our threadbare uniforms. They had put us through a series of exercises with concussion bombs. We, who had faced the fire of Russian Katushas, just laughed. Then we had made ourselves as flat as the Ukrainian soil. Now we lay propped on one elbow, half amused, half exasperated. Our attitude provoked torrents of abuse and a collective punishment for the whole company. We had to crawl along the entire perimeter of the camp. The ground, three or four inches beneath our eyes, soaked up the muttered curses of our progress. The instructor-noncoms were working hard, running along the carpet of soldiers.
A short way off, Wesreidau was watching this bad joke and arguing with the officers responsible for the camp. But he might as well have saved his breath. Orders from higher up had put an end to the coddling of troops just back from the front. We had to reinstate the rigidity of '40-'41, and wage war to the death.
We went on long marches, carrying all our gear. We tramped through villages in step, singing. These demonstrations were intended to impress the local population, who, in fact, greeted us as we went by-the boys waving and the girls smiling. The routine never let up. We even had to practice retreating in a series of backward leaps-a skill which might always come in handy.
Every fourth day, we were free from 5 to 10 P.M. We flooded into Nevotoretchy and Sueka, two villages near the camp, where the peasants often invited us into their houses and gave us something to drink, and sometimes even to eat. Our soldiers quickly amused themselves with the girls, who were not shy. These few hours of liberty, used to the utmost, made us forget the rest.
The following day we would return to the training routine. Despite the boredom, we cooperated, thinking that perhaps these were necessary measures. We were still inclined to believe in the validity of orders. Perhaps these exercises would help us bring the war to a quicker end. At last we were issued new clothes. Some of the uniforms were quite different from the ones we'd always known, with blouses like those worn in the French army today, and trousers tucked into short, thick spats, looking like a grotesque parody of a golfing costume. This new design was for the most part distributed to new troops. The Gross Deutschland, as an elite division, kept the old design. We were even given new boots-a further sign of privilege.
However, the cloth of the uniforms was of very inferior quality, much more brittle than formerly. It reminded us of specially treated cardboard. The new boots were also markedly inferior, of rough, stiff, fourth-quality leather, which cracked at the ankle instead of forming the usual creases. The underclothes were the worst of all; they were made of a cloth which seemed to have substance only where it was doubled-at the hem and the seams. The new socks, which we appreciated immensely, also seemed curiously synthetic.
"If this is what we're getting," Hals said, "I'll keep my Russian socks."
In fact, the new socks wore a great deal longer than the old ones. However, they were less warm. They were among the first to be made with nylon, which was still largely unknown.
We slapped a great deal of black polish from the store onto the boots, to make them lose their look of cardboard paste. We all felt better to be out of our stinking, tattered rags, and in new clothes, despite the synthetic fabrics. Our brightened appearance also had its effect on the local inhabitants, who decided that all must be well with the Wehrmacht.
Hals, in his fresh and dashing uniform, had fallen in love once more-this time with a pretty young Polish girl. With him, falling in love was compulsive. He really couldn't help himself, and lost a piece of his heart every time we stopped in a rest zone. This time, as always, he was ardently wooing a girl during our short periods of free time, and we all had to hear about it constantly.
"You're driving us all up the wall with your tart," Lensen complained.
"Why can't you just kiss and run like everybody else?" Lindberg grinned. He was remembering his last outing with Lensen, Pferham, and Solma. The four of them had trapped a Polish woman of about forty in a barn. She had yielded to their ardor, which had lasted the four hours remaining.
"Her husband came home while we were at it," Solma remembered joyfully. "He laughed with us, and said, `Mama too old for me now-for you!' " Later they'd all had a drink with the husband, who seemed perfectly content that they'd done him that service.
"She's nothing but a sow, your Polska," Hals said. "And you're just a bunch of pigs. No poetry at all . . ."
The barracks shook with our laughter. Pastor Pferham laughed too, because he couldn't do anything else, but all the same he was somewhat troubled. Our company's love life was doing far too well.
I myself didn't have any particular adventures. I had pawed one or two girls, but matters had never progressed any further than that. Of course, I was in love with Paula and wrote to her often. Above all, I longed for a leave, and lived on that hope. For the rest, strange bodies made me uneasy, almost sick. As soon as I saw naked flesh, I braced myself for a torrent of entrails, remembering countless wartime scenes, with smoking, stinking corpses pouring out their vitals. All things considered, I preferred platonic love by mail. To me, Paula was in an entirely separate category from all these other women-something delicate and marvelous, which could not be eviscerated-or so I tried to think.
Then I was involved in an episode which gave everyone else a laugh at my expense.
We were on leave at Sueka. It was a beautiful day, with only a light trace of frost. We all felt like a spree, but were also extremely interested in food. Our rations were now so small that we were always hungry when we left the mess halls. The peasants would usually sell us something to eat in exchange for the paper currency which looked as though the Rentenbank was printing notes in excess of its reserves. We had, in fact, been given these notes as supplementary pay, in addition to the special tickets issued to occupation troops. Eggs were the easiest form of food to come by. At Sueka we divided the job. There were three of us: Hoth, Schlesser, and me. We had left Hals with his Polska at Nevotoretchy. Nevotoretchy was right beside the camp, and the soldiers had already stripped it of all extra food. We decided to go three miles farther, to Sueka, which was also on the Dniester, taking separate routes through the countryside to try our luck at the farmhouses whose location every man in the company had by heart.
I set off along a road which ran downhill between two walls of snow. I can see it still. At the bottom of the hill there was a frozen pond which pink-and-yellow ducks were tapping with their bills, apparently mystified by its solidity. I turned to the right. Ahead of me were two low columns twined round with what looked like lifeless Virginia creeper, and beyond them, an enormous pile of wood which almost hid the low, thatched house. To the left, with their backs to the river, was a group of squat, irregular buildings, made of rough wooden planks. The whole scene was inescapably rustic, but there was also a rudimentary sense of style, which was noticeable here even in the poorest, roughest setting.
I was walking toward the cottage when I saw a woman coming from one of the outbuildings. Her clothes might have belonged to a medieval peasant. We both smiled. She said something unintelligible.
"Guten Tag, Frau. Ei, bitte." (I was sure she wouldn't understand French, but she might very well know the German for "egg".)
"Ei ... ei, bitte."
She came closer, still smiling and pleasant, speaking and making gestures I couldn't understand. I contented myself with returning her smile. She signaled that I should follow her, which I did. We walked over to a ladder, and she began to climb, signing me to hold it steady.
As she went up, laughing and talking, my eyes naturally followed her ascent toward a loft bulging with hay. My astonished gaze struck her rump, which was of very dubious charm, and a pair of enormous, meaty thighs. Her buttocks seemed to fill the view with a curious obstinacy. Her drawers had the texture of a loosely knit sweater. I stared at them as I might have stared at some medieval monument of the twelfth century. The Polska, who saw that I was watching, finally stopped by the false window of the loft, and waved at me to follow her. I felt awkward and uneasy. I had often watched a tank trying to outmaneuver a machine gun, but this type of maneuver was beyond me. I was used to going straight ahead, and climbed the ladder as if it were an assault wall which I had to scale under the eye of an officer. Then I was bent double in the piled-up hay, beside the Polska, whose thighs must have been a half yard round. She was laughing and clucking as if she herself were about to lay an egg. My gun caught on everything, and I felt once again as if I were crawling down a trench. The hay was full of chickens. The Polska chased them off and collected a few eggs. She turned back to me, still laughing. Her teeth were somewhat too widely spaced, but were dazzlingly white. She came toward me, holding out the warm eggs, which, in a manner of speaking, she had collected for me.
I felt her breath and the warmth of her body. As she thrust the eggs and her hands deep into the pockets of my tunic, her fingers pressed against my hips. My startled eyes rolled in my head, as I waited for the order to disengage. But the order didn't come, and the bold fingers of the enemy kneaded my flesh through the double folds of my pockets.
"For the love of God! Danke schon . . . Danke schon!"
I wanted to make the quickest possible departure no matter what she thought of me.
She was now so close an embrace seemed inescapable. Her smile was one of certain anticipation, and her eyes were rolling feverishly.
Mein Gott!
I braced myself for her cry of "Ourrah pobieda." There were two possible courses of action, as I saw it. I could withdraw in a hurry and risk cracking my skull at the bottom of the ladder, or counterattack, rolling my adversary into the hay.
However, these calculations came too late. The woman, who must have weighed at least twenty pounds more than I did, suddenly enlaced me, adroitly pushing me to the left, so that I lost my balance. I found myself gesticulating in vain desperation beneath a massive enemy. One of her hands was already busy with the fly of my new synthetic trousers. The eggs in both pockets were broken, and my gun, which was slung behind my back, was no use to me.
If the Fuhrer ever saw me like that, I'd be thrown out of the Gross Deutschland for good, shipped off to one of the Brandenburg disciplinary battalions. To complete my downfall, my ravisher, who was clearly more accustomed to manipulating an axe handle than the personal appendage in question, had grabbed me, and was making me jerk and shudder like an invalid with a severe case of hiccoughs. I might perhaps have been able to oblige her, if the Polska, in the height of her frenzy, hadn't suddenly flung up her petticoats over the obese folds of her stomach and thighs. This spectacle destroyed the minimal desire my predicament might have aroused in me, and the delicious memory of Paula offered a contrast which was too absurd. With a brusque twist of my body, I freed myself from this female in rut, who was exciting herself without any cooperation from me. Her somewhat porcine face, in which, a few moments before, I might have found a certain charm, now wore an expression of bovine ecstasy. I stood up and turned out my pockets, which were filled with liquid egg and broken shell. My companion regained some measure of self-control and tried to laugh, suddenly afraid that her audacity might provoke severe consequences. In a flash, I was at the bottom of the ladder, gesturing to the women to bring me something to clean off my jacket. I myself was worried about the consequences the stains on my uniform might bring down on me. I tried to look furious, but an overpowering sense of inadequacy made me flush hotly instead.
The Polska, half smiling, half uneasy, led me over to the house. We went through a door which opened outward, down a few steps, and then through a second door which opened inward.
The house was built into the ground to a depth of about two and a half feet. We came into a dark, low-ceilinged room with a single tiny window, whose yellowish panes admitted very little light. The building was divided by a heavy wooden grate-one side was for people, the other for animals. This explained the fetid smell which I noticed as soon as the door was open. A couple of pigs were being fattened just beyond the grate. The wide benches built against the grate and covered with straw ticks were obviously the beds. An old woman turned toward us as we came in. She smiled with the indifference of a sphinx, I doubt if the idea of "a German" even existed for her. Two children were playing on a woodpile which stood in the middle of the room. The Polska brought me some water in a wooden dipper, like the ones used in Russia for measuring millet. I had to take off my tunic, and reveal the extent of my deprivation. The pullover my mother had sent me over a year and a half before no longer had any sleeves below the elbow, and the waistband had become a scant, lacelike fringe.
I was preparing to wash my tunic when the Polska took it from me. She rubbed the stains between a round stone and a stiff straw implement shaped like a large cork. With a graciousness which almost excused her excesses of a few minutes earlier, she returned my tunic, which was clean once more. I didn't dare smile lest I rekindle her amorous fury. However, all of that seemed to have been forgotten. These Polish peasants seemed curiously primitive, living wholly in the present, unburdened by any thoughts of the past or the future. I said goodbye, thrusting out my stiffened arm in a regulation salute.
While the old woman on the bench smiled-a smile which seemed to cross a gulf of several millennia-the younger one rummaged through a heap of cooking pots which stood on the table. She found an egg and held it out to me.
I accepted it, not knowing what expression to put on to disguise my embarrassment. The egg recalled the loft of recent history. I could feel myself blushing as I went through my pockets for the correct change. However, the woman gestured to me that I need not pay. Still embarrassed, I withdrew in a flurry of "danke schons."
I had already taken a few strides away from the house when the door behind me opened again. The woman stood there calling me, holding out the gun which I had left propped against the table.
How humiliating!
I recovered myself with another sequence of voluminous thanks, and feeling ridiculous, straightened my back and tried to look stern, to make up for what had happened. I knew that this episode was destined to lighten the evening hours of these people, and found it hard to forgive myself. What an idiot-to survive the battle of Belgorod, only to get my pants torn off by a fat Polish mama! I might be a proud member of a proud regiment, but all I had to show for it was a single egg, and an experience I wasn't going to disclose in a hurry for fear my friends would rip off my pants again, to make sure she hadn't stolen anything.
"Why didn't you tell us right away?" they asked me later.
"We would all have gone there, and all insisted on it. Reprisals, you know!" Spring burst out with sudden brutality. On the Eastern Front, things were going from bad to worse, but our training continued in the spirit of an athletic team preparing for a competition. Even more extraordinary, our schedule of exercises was markedly reduced, and we were often given free half days. These were in fact necessary, to give us time to forage and keep adequately fed. Our official rations had been cut back again, and now amounted to a starvation diet. The two villages closest to the camp had almost nothing left to give us, and we had to go farther afield in search of the calories which were largely consumed by our comings and goings. We took up fishing in the Dniester. Unfortunately, we had neither the proper equipment nor any local knowledge. Three times, Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau went with us. As an officer, he had appropriated a certain number of explosive devices, which made the operation profitable. Some pools produced giant fish.
There was also an accident. Two fellows who went out to look for food disappeared. Their friends said they'd gone toward the mountains. Two days went by without any news of them. No one knew anything about them in the villages where we asked. It sounded like partisans. We sent out two search parties, which did, in fact, run into partisans, and suffered five stupid deaths without finding a trace of the missing men.
While the Red Army pushed into Poland toward our camp, which would soon be in the battle zone, we lay in the sun as much as we could, and waited for orders. Hals was daily more deeply in love, and spent as much time as he could with the girl he considered his fiancée. I often went with him, but never found a girl for myself. We had many pleasant times together, and Hals repeatedly told me that I must be due for a leave soon, and would surely see Paula. Sometimes, the two of them plainly wished to be alone, and I would take myself off.
The war seemed to have forgotten us in this enchanted place. But one morning our tranquillity and dreams of love came to an end. The camp hummed with activity, as companies packed up and prepared for action before our incredulous eyes. As motors hummed, the barracks were destroyed. Our amazement was complete.
"What's going on?"
"Los! Los! Schnell! We're clearing out!"
Before we had quite realized it, we were loaded onto dull gray blue trucks, which bumped off to the north. In the beautiful fullness of germinating spring, the settled, organized camp went up in flames behind us. The convolutions of smoke rising into the pure, still air seemed like a sinister presage of things to come.
In the trucks, everyone was talking. What was happening? Why were they destroying the camp? Where was the front now anyway?
Toward ten o'clock the Gross Deutschland column suddenly stopped, on a road dappled by the knobby shadows of branches loaded with thousands of buds bursting from the irresistible pressure of thousands of plump leaves still barely touched with green.
The birds, as unprepared as we for what was coming, were singing, and swooping down low over the trucks. A sidecar from liaison delivered orders to the officers' Volkswagen. Then the noncoms told us to make a half turn.
Through the bursts of backfiring, we could hear the hum of a flight of planes. Then the whistles blew.
"Achtung! Enemy planes coming for us! Achtung!"
In a general rush, we jumped from the slowly moving trucks.
In fact, the Ilyushin fighter-bombers which had spotted us took their time. About fifteen of them were turning in the sky some four or five hundred yards above us. Some trucks had been precipitately abandoned, and were lying across the road. Our officers ran shouting at the drivers, who, caught between two fires, didn't know what to do. Finally, they jumped back into their machines, started them up again and crashed them into the bank at the last possible moment, as the flight of vultures swooped down on us.
First, there were bombs, which we watched fall until the first explosions. They looked like fat darts, with their long shafts, which allowed them to explode just above the ground. The planes had divided into two groups; the second unloaded at about the same spot as the first.
The shock was extraordinarily violent. Everything flew into the air and fell onto our heads. An overturned truck flew toward us, stopping some ten yards short of where we lay. The flames spread quickly in our direction, forcing us to move farther back. We no longer had any doubts about what was happening, and ran as far as we could from the road, which was attacked again with rockets and machine guns.
The running men, intent on getting away, hadn't noticed the second wave of planes and were cut down by the machine-gun fire, which passed over them like a pitiless reaper. Men were jolted off the ground as they ran, to fall back again in pieces, like puppets whose strings are broken.
When the enemy withdrew, eighteen of our machines were sending plumes of black smoke up into the sky. The attack had been so sudden and overwhelming that none of us quite grasped what had happened. We returned to the scene of the disaster with one eye on the sky; the enemy might only have pretended to leave, and might still be waiting to attack us again.
The road, still gluey from the recent thaw and the spring rains, was strewn with debris and shattered bodies. The violence of the impact had smashed some of the victims wide open, scattering their entrails over distances of seven or eight yards. The peaceful roadway, which had been filled with the sounds of twittering birds only fifteen minutes before, looked defiled.
Within fifteen minutes our column, made up of thirty trucks transporting three companies, had lost twenty men and eighteen trucks. There were also three wounded men in critical condition.
We collected the remains of our dead, and dug graves. Among the victims were Hoth and Dunde, who had both received Iron Crosses for their bravery on the second Dnieper front. They were both friends with whom we had been laughing and joking barely twenty-four hours before. After the event, the tragic impact of what had happened crushed and overwhelmed us.
We piled onto the remaining trucks, which seemed to buckle under the extra weight. There were men on the running boards, fenders, hoods, and bumpers. Budding twigs clung to these human swarms bumping forward at twenty-five miles per hour. Two of the trucks quickly died under the extra load, and the men they carried had to continue on foot. They joined us six hours later, on the Rumanian frontier, as we were getting ready to join the carnage at Vinnitsa, between the central front, which had been broken, and the southern front, which still seemed to be holding. On the way, these men had been attacked by Russo-Polish partisans; however, they were fortunately able to turn the encounter to their own advantage. They had taken the partisans' horses, and a few more still left on neighboring farms, and had joined us looking like an apparition of chivalric fantasy. The weather was warm and sunny we were returning to Russia just after the period of melting ice. We requisitioned a few Rumanian trucks which had been left for civilian use, to replace the ones destroyed in the attack. These were old machines, bearing the names of private firms, which we didn't have time to paint out. Our section drove off in an English moving van which must have left the factory sometime around 1930.