RETURN TO THE UKRAINE

The Final Spring

The Death of Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau

Exodus

After a rushed, jolting journey, we re-entered the Ukraine, where the ground had not yet entirely absorbed the spring runoff. There were long stretches of gluey mud which we were able to cross only with great difficulty. The weather was beautiful, even hot, and we often stripped to the waist.

On the road we received new orders. We were no longer to proceed to Vinnitsa. Instead, we were to re-establish communications between the rear and the front, which were continually harassed by partisans. We were ordered to annihilate these bands. Their attacks had grown increasingly virulent, and often paralyzed the already uncertain flow of supplies. The Vinnitsa bridgehead had to be maintained as a starting point for new German offensives which would break up the wedge the Russians had driven into Poland before Lvov, and re-establish a connection with the North, which appeared to be holding.

Our detachments, together with other units, had been given the job of engaging the partisans in a contest of ambush, in which the advantage belonged to whichever side surprised the other. Once again, the division was broken up. The largest section was sent to fight north of Lvov and in the northern sector of White Russia. Other units like ours were scattered throughout the rear areas of the south and central sectors before rejoining the division a few weeks later. Our zone of operations extended through Bessarabia as far as the Russian frontier. As before, we were a strong mobile unit designed to move quickly to the support of particular points in imminent danger.

However, our mobility depended on the vehicles I have already described, which we gradually abandoned, continuing on horseback or on bicycles, whose tires were often stuffed with grass. We requisitioned the horses, bicycles, and other vehicles from the thousands of refugees-Ukrainians, gypsies, Polish colonists and others who were fleeing the Red tide in a vast throng. Sometimes partisans infiltrated these crowds, posing as simple peasants who were also fleeing the Bolsheviks. Then, at a given moment, they would shoot some of our men in the back, sowing general confusion. These maneuvers were supposed to crack our self-control, and provoke us to acts of reprisal, which would then turn the refugees against us. From their point of view, any means were justified.

Toward the end of May, we trapped a large band of rebels in a piece of wooded country. There were about four hundred heavily armed men. On our side, we had three companies to draw in the noose around the enemy.

The air was filled with woodland smells, and nothing seemed appropriate to the bloody events about to occur. The morning was splendid. Birds and small animals of every kind were running and fluttering through the branches, to get out of our way.

Wild animals, even ferocious ones, always flee armed men. This time the hunters were tracking far more dangerous game. The birds fearing and fleeing us could never have imagined that the masters of the world, who should have feared nothing, had created enemies of a size and ferocity which equaled their own. Human beings, rulers of the animal world, had created their own destruction. A process of natural selection, often very badly organized, periodically topples our crown.

We all felt extremely nervous. Despite the resignation which had once again taken hold of us, the moment of truth as always revealed who was afraid, who was a coward, and who still hoped to live. The soft leaves brushing against our heads weighted down with steel reminded us that life could be good-especially in such marvelous weather. For us, this was no baptism of fire, but almost a routine-a dangerous routine, in which medals for heroism were generally posthumous. We had already experienced most of its horrors, and had seen the upturned eyes of those who had won the medals. There was no longer much we could learn about that aspect of things. We deliberately maintained an attitude of morbid fatalism, -which we punctuated with bursts of harsh, forced laughter, like machine-gun fire. Some of the very strong had even managed to persuade themselves that since no man is immortal, and everyone dies sooner or later, the hour of death was unimportant. Those men, the strong ones, walked along thinking of other things. Others strong, but not that strong-lived to delay that final moment, watching through pupils as dark as the holes at the ends of their gunbarrels. The rest-which is to say the majority-were pouring with a cold sweat which ran down their bodies beneath their synthetic tunics, into their boots, and into the creases of their damp hands.

Those men were afraid, with an intense fear that reduced every conviction to nothing, and which no routine could soften. They were afraid before every operation, when time seemed to stand almost still. Even those who managed to stop thinking were still assailed by fear, as persistent as the daylight, which illuminates treetops one is still unaware of.

Contact with the enemy puts an end to this sort of fear. The opening shots raise the curtain on a drama which will fully occupy every sense. It is a pity that soldiers can think. When the first men have fallen, the tension slackens, and no one any longer pays attention to anything except the dry twigs crackling underfoot.

Feldwebel Sperlovski, who was leading our group, pointed to the signs of passage of a large number of men. The heavily trampled brush and the numerous empty gun emplacements indicated that we were approaching a large partisan camp. We had to watch carefully for mines-to watch each step, in addition to everything else. Sweat trickled down our temples, attracting clouds of belligerent flies. The brush under the trees and the low branches offered a thousand opportunities for concealed trip wires. Every yard required a desperate concentration. A plane passed over level with the treetops, and the throb of its engines made us all hold our breaths for fear the vibrations might be enough to set off the whole area. At last, there was a short blast on the whistle, and we all fell flat. A small fort of logs driven deep into the ground stood at the end of a vague foot path. At the far end of our group, fighting had already begun.

Sperlovski designated two men--Ballers and Prinz-to throw grenades at the fort. Prinz was one of the men in Lensen's Panzerfaust team. Today, however, the anti-tank group wasn't needed, so Prinz was just another Panzergrenadier, panting as he crawled forward with his lethal burden. Ballers, more dead than alive, was crawling along the other side of the path, identically laden. We all watched, trembling with tension.

Who were Ballers and Prinz?

Two men from anywhere. Were they good men or bad? Were they hateful? Was God with them, or had He condemned them? They were simply two men who had become our comrades in this group of madmen; men whose acquaintance we would probably have avoided in the ordinary circumstances of civilian life. Here, every step they took accelerated the beating of our hearts, and keyed up our pulse rate to equal theirs. Those two anonymous beings, both of them our men, were suddenly more important to every one of us than even our closest relatives-an egotistical transformation in which we all knew that we saw ourselves; had the circumstances fallen slightly differently, they would have been watching us. Motive seemed totally unimportant-if only they lived. They were already quite far from us, and perhaps very close to death, hidden from many of us by leaves. I could still see them. Prinz suddenly stood up and heaved his load toward the log fort. Then he plunged down again.

The entire woods felt the violence of the explosion. Its thunder echoed interminably under the trees. In the patches of sky visible through the branches we could see the birds shooting away from us like arrows. Prinz's bundle had fallen short, and had made a large crater crowned with broken branches some seven or eight meters from the partisan hideout.

"Scheisse," muttered our sergeant.

"There's nobody there," someone else said.

Then I saw Ballers running forward in turn. As he ran, I felt myself dying in his shoes. He too threw his packet of explosives, and then dived down as the trees all around us bent against a flash of light. The forest seemed to groan with the shock. This time there weren't any fleeing birds-only our mimetic uniforms, which confounded us with nature. Ballers had just stood up again. So had Prinz, a short distance ahead of him. Their figures were sharply outlined against the broken earth. Behind them, all that had formerly been visible of the fort had disappeared.

"This way, comrades," shouted Ballers, proud of his exploit. "There's nobody in there."

We all stood up, prepared to join him. He was laughing nervously. A crisp detonation whistled through the leaves, followed by two more. Prinz was running toward us, but Ballers wasn't. He was walking hesitantly, stretching one hand toward us. Then he fell.

A short hour later, four hundred partisans were fighting like devils inside the circle we had drawn around them and were slowly tightening. Three companies almost at full strength-about eight or nine hundred men-were trying to knock out the circle of fire, which was produced by a variety of weapons of every caliber, and amounted to a serious destructive force. The partisan position was so well organized that any approach to it was almost suicidal.

During this hour, two of our men stepped on mines, and their shattered bodies were blown into the budding branches.

We were under uninterrupted fire from a four-barreled machine gun, and setting up a spandau was very risky. We tried to dig foxholes, but the earth was such a tangle of ineradicable roots that our position of attack was transformed into one of defense, which would be difficult to hold against an enemy breakout.

Only our light mortars, with their almost vertical fire, could touch the enemy position. Unfortunately, the partisans seemed able to absorb our fire without any apparent loss of strength. Two or three heavy howitzers-probably captured German equipment-were shooting at our encircling forces; the impact of the projectiles uprooted trees. The discharge of these guns was invisible, which made their destruction extremely difficult. Ten times we sent assault groups to attack the terrorist position. Each time, they were obliged to make a half turn, leaving some of their men screaming on the ground. Later we learned that Wesreidau had been moving heaven and earth to try to get some armored and motorized support, but none was available in that area and we had to do without it. Everything that remained had been sent to the support of our crumbling front.

After an hour of waiting, and attempted assaults that came to nothing, our commander decided to risk everything once and for all. Leaving only a handful of isolated men in the ring around the fort, he shifted the rest of us, taking every precaution, so that the enemy would believe they were still surrounded by a strong force. In this way, he was able to mass five hundred men and send them all at once against the enemy's weakest point-a V-shaped trench held by forty men armed with rifles and one machine gun. At his order, five hundred men rushed the enemy position, attacking with grenade throwers. The enemy reeled under the force of this blow, and was unable to maintain an accurate fire.

Seven or eight of our men fell during this assault, but the maneuver was so magnificent that for the moment no one paid much attention to them. I was part of the second wave; two others followed us. When we reached the enemy position the job was already done. Some forty partisans had tried to resist, but our rain of grenades annihilated two thirds of them. The remainder had died on the bayonets of the first Germans to reach the fortress. We followed hard on their heels. Another wave was right behind us. The underbrush rang with hideous screams, and smelled of powder and smoke and blood. I saw more partisans pouring from their log fort, and firing point blank at our men, who were exhilarated by the success of our action. In the general confusion, I opened fire along with everyone else. A tall Russian fired at me three times without hitting me, although I made no effort to dodge him. Then he rushed at me, shouting and waving his gun, holding the butt in the air. Two of our men joined me and fired at the Russian. He fell and tried to reload his gun, but we jumped him immediately, battering him with our butts. He died under our blows.

At the foot of the blockhouse, a desperate hand-to-hand struggle was in progress. Something exploded in the midst of the fighting, sending shattered fragments of German and partisan bodies flying through the air. Other men ran up to continue the fighting, surrounded by the dead and dying. Cries and curses mingled with the sharp crack of rifle fire. A moment later, we were in the thick of the fighting. One of the fellows with me had his arm broken by an exploding mine. Pressed against the wooden wall, men were fighting hand to hand with knives, shovels, feet, and stones. An obergefreiter had just hit a Russian in the face with his shovel, opening a hideous gash. The wounded man fell writhing to the ground. Kellerman was firing in short bursts at the partisans hidden behind the two howitzers which had given us so much trouble. Many Russians got away-at least half of them. Those who couldn't added to the numbers of the dead.

We collected all the stray guns and reserves of food, destroyed the howitzers, which we couldn't take with us, and buried seventy of our men. Then we left the place, carrying out the wounded on stretchers made of branches. In the evening we arrived at a kolkhoz, where we drank everything we could get hold of, trying to blot out the memory of a hideous day.

Spring in the Ukraine: endless days of almost unbroken light.

A luminous darkness fell toward eleven at night, to yield to a pink dawn a few hours later. The weather was perfect: a warm, reviving wind, before the crushing heat of summer. Unfortunately, although the season made us dream of peace, the monster of war was finally able to emerge from the paralysis of winter and the thaw. The pale blue sky belonged to the Russians, whose air power had grown enormously. The Luftwaffe, whose numbers had been seriously reduced by the necessity of defending German cities and dealing with the increasing demands of the Western front, flew daily sorties which amounted to suicide flights against overwhelming enemy strength on the ground and in the air. Our few victories were the product of absolute heroism. The sky and the front belonged to the enemy. The rear areas were contested by two nearly equal opponents: the German army and the partisans. We continually sent out patrols. Almost every sortie produced a clash. Every hill and hedge and cottage held a mine, or hid an ambush. We had almost no vehicles of any kind, no gas, and no spare parts. We were also not receiving any fresh supplies. The odd, ill-assorted convoys still pressing through continuous air attacks were not destined for us but for the faltering, collapsing front. When they arrived in the forward zone, they were able to find the correct units only by accident. More often than not, their cargoes were absorbed by the hordes of starving men retreating under a deluge of fire.

We ourselves received at the greatest risk about a tenth of what we needed. We were obliged to live off the local inhabitants, who were very hard-pressed themselves and more than reluctant in their attitude toward us. The problem of food had become extremely serious. As it was spring, there were still very few fruits, and hunting was more dangerous for us than for the game.

A small hamlet sheltered what remained of our three companies. Between operations men slept almost naked on the ground. Those who sleep dine, says the proverb. For us, it was vitally important that this become the reality.

When planes came over, everyone took cover, and when they were gone, we laid our bony bodies out in the sun again. This helped to heal our winter louse bites. Half asleep, with our eyes half closed, we stared into the sky, apparently thinking of nothing. What was the use? We seemed to have broken completely with the past. Memories of peace floated up like fragments of books we might have read. The war had taught us to appreciate every minuscule good. Today, the sun took the place of our goulash and wurst and millet, and the mail which no longer came. We lay stretched on the Ukrainian soil, apparently calm and at peace. Tomorrow, perhaps, some food would arrive-and perhaps some gas, and some spare parts. Perhaps even some mail-a letter from Paula ... But perhaps, too, there would only be ourselves and the earth and the sky and the sun.... What was the use of thinking about it?

One day, our radio crackled out an S.O.S. from a territorial post on the Rumanian frontier. It was surrounded by a band of partisans.

In the eyes of the Wehrmacht, we were still officially considered part of a motorized unit standing by, and therefore available. In consequence, we were always moving, and had to be ready to leave at a moment's notice for points anywhere within a radius of 150 miles. The post calling us was some 100 miles away, and had appealed to us because its officers had been told that in emergencies they could rely on our mobility. In fact, we had four trucks in bad condition, a small civilian van, a sidecar, and the C.O.'s steiner. Wesreidau tore his hair and cursed.

As quickly as possible, a hundred of us left to answer the S.O.S. We took along as many automatic weapons as we could to make up for our small number. Each truck carried two spandaus ready to fire. Above all else, we feared planes. We drove as quickly as we could along the terrible Russian roads, raising a thick cloud of dust. About 30 miles from our starting point, we hurtled through a village which could have be longed to prehistory. The inhabitants ran as fast as they could to get out of our way. We were bristling with weapons and black with dust, and we must have looked far from reassuring. As we left the village, a group of terrified residents scattered ahead of us. The steiner went through, and then the first truck, which crushed a dog. The second truck bumped a black pig, which ran out from nowhere and threw itself under the wheels.

I was in the third truck, and saw the whole sequence: the sudden braking ahead, the shrieking villagers running to the side of the road, the screaming pig, dragging itself through the dust. Five or six landser jumped off the truck to chase the pig, trying to kill it as it squealed in agony. Finally, they stabbed it with their bayonets. It was still kicking, spattering its executioners with blood, as they tied its feet with belts and ropes, and hung its 150 pounds from the tailgate of their truck.

Then we started off again, to catch up with the others, leaving the village in a squeal of gears. The pig too was soon covered with dust, which mingled with its streaming blood. We no longer objected to details like that; for those who survived, there would be fresh meat this evening. Sieg Heil!

We were now driving through a strange landscape of smooth black hills, almost like enormous boulders, scattered with a few stunted trees. Wherever the ground was broken, the soil was black and seemed as hard as stone. I wished that I knew something of geology; our route took us through this curious terrain for about fifteen miles.

We had just left that strange district when a group of planes was reported. One of our spotters confirmed that he had seen them through the treetops, slightly to our left. Our trucks pulled over to the side of the road, where they were screened by leaves. Wesreidau stared at the sky through his field glasses, but couldn't see anything. It seemed wise to wait for a few minutes. The landser in the third truck put the time to good account, slitting open the pig and getting rid of its guts with lightning speed. As the job wasn't quite finished when we started out again, they finished it on the back of the truck.

A few miles farther on, as we bumped through a chaotic landscape, two planes came over very low. We shouted at the drivers, who jammed on the brakes. There were no thick trees anywhere near us. As the planes passed directly overhead, we were all gripped by an insane, hopeless panic. Some men wet their pants. As the planes vanished into the distance, we lifted our heads and saw two ME-109Fs, which must have been the survivors of some squadron. No one thought of cheering the Luftwaffe; we had all been too afraid.

Toward four, we approached the zone of operations. Our trucks were following a winding track through mountainous country, driving very slowly for fear of ambush. Wesreidau's steiner was in the lead. Two observers, hunched on the hood, kept their eyes riveted on the dust along the way, and on the heights surrounding us. Nothing we could see was in any way reassuring. Suddenly, we were looking down into an open valley. We stopped, cutting off our engines, and immediately heard the distant sound of machine guns. Beyond all doubt, we had arrived. In the distance, through the heat haze, we could see what looked like a village. We kept the trucks a hundred yards apart, and maintained a moderate speed, as the men clung onto the outside of the railings. Once again our stomachs clenched at the approach of danger, and we wondered when we would begin to be adult men.

Naturally, the enemy knew we were coming. The first truck suddenly saw the commander's steiner driving backward at breakneck speed from a turn in the road. The vehicle was rolling down a slope when a sharp explosion burst on the track some ten yards ahead of it. Everyone plunged to the ground, and the trucks took whatever shelter they could. A second explosion tore a hole in the road, lifting a large cloud of dust. They were plastering us with shells from a 37-mm. gun. Then a burst of machine-gun fire riddled the first truck. Luckily, everyone was already out. The driver must have watched in a cold sweat.

The enemy was hidden by the undulations of the country, and was very hard to see. Nonetheless, the men in the steiner knew they'd been lucky. It was miraculous that the 37-mm. gun hidden behind the tees to the right of the turning hadn't opened fire the moment the steiner appeared. The partisans had felled a tree across the road, right after the turn.

We set up two light mortars, and shelled the enemy gun, which soon fell silent.

"Probably amateurs," Wesreidau remarked.

We deployed a dozen F.M.s, which made movement very difficult for the partisans firing from the mountainside. Our group slid through the brush and climbed the first rocky outcrops, while our mortars rained a hail of projectiles, more terrifying than destructive, onto any point that seemed to harbor opposition. We had just uncovered an enemy post-real Johnny-come-latelys giving Fritz a hard time in order to reap a reward from their grateful country.

"What bastards," muttered Prinz to Smellens, "coming to shoot at us just for the bell of it. We'll fix them."

Our group attacked the partisans with grenade throwers. In that enclosed bowl of hills, the explosions made an overwhelming noise. Then someone raked the edges of the enemy ambush with a spandau, which we recognized by the sound of its fire. After two more grenades, the apprentice sharpshooters were ready to give up. A figure ran out, attempting a desperate flight. He was quickly cut down by the spandau.

"What a bastard!" Prinz shouted. "It's horrible to shoot down idiots like that. Why can't they stay home and wait until the war ends, for the love of God! If I was in their shoes, no one could twist my arm-and you'd be the same, wouldn't you, Sajer?"

Home! The thought went to my head like a gulp of wine. Home, to wait for the war to end . . .

"Yes," I said finally.

"And now we have to shoot them," he said. "It's disgusting."

We could hear plaintive cries from the enemy entrenchment. To our left, spandaus and grenade throwers were destroying the tranquility of the spring. Suddenly, one of the Russian boys in an excess of zeal stood up, exposing half his body, and raked us with a burst of machinegun fire. His loose, approximate fire wounded one of our men in the right hand, and then another, undoubtedly on the ricochet, in the calf. The Russian was shot down by our spandau, while our wounded man began to groan in a shaded corner.

"God damn it!" someone shouted. "Will you stop this bullshit!" Two figures climbed from the partisan position and, without any apparent hurry, began to run. Our F.M. sent them rolling in the dust too.

"Did you see that?" Smellens said to the gunner. "You just got a girl."

"A girl? Are you sure? If women are getting mixed up in this mess now, that's the last straw."

A few minutes later we counted the bodies of the partisans: six young people about our age. Among them were two pretty girls, bathed in blood and covered with a swarm of blue flies.

We stared down at our victims, sickened by the sight. Why had they thrown themselves across the route of our misery? Their amateur barrier was quickly dismantled. We cleared the road, and marched to the village. The trucks followed slowly behind us.

Had the enemy been misinformed? Had they received exaggerated estimates of our minuscule capacity? Were they afraid? Whatever the reason, they abandoned their grip on the post which was almost theirs, and came out to meet us.

The sun was shining brightly on the narrow, dusty road. At the head of the column, our men were in contact with the enemy, who had taken refuge in the town cemetery. It was a typical Russian cemetery-blue and gold and white, with no suggestion of sadness about it. The day was perfect, the spring of late June turning into summer. We could almost have been fighting for a lark. Each plume of smoke was immediately carried away by a gentle breeze. We would certainly have been satisfied by a light exchange of fire, but our commander saw things differently; we couldn't let the enemy think we were too weak to attack. So our grenade throwers and light mortars destroyed the blue cemetery. Two groups chased the partisans out, and occupied the cemetery gardens. The partisans had taken refuge in a nearby wooden building where the crops were stored. On the door, the enemy had just daubed the Marxist slogan: "Workers of the World, Unite."

This hasty scrawl, with dripping letters, gave a tearful impression of Marxist beliefs.

To dispose as quickly as possible of this flimsy, improvised fortress, we loaded the spandau with explosive incendiary bullets. The thatched roof caught on fire almost at once. The enemy, who were defending themselves with automatic weapons, did not spare their fire.

A salvo of mortar shells knocked the roof into the building, and the partisans had to abandon an untenable position. Our two groups ran toward the burning building to harass the Russians as they fled. An old bearded man was leaning against a pile of stones, shouting curses at us. His right hand rested on the head of a dead comrade who lay on the ground beside him. The old man was wounded himself, and his clothes were torn and burned. We walked past him at a distance of no more than three yards. The sight of our guns didn't silence him. He shook his fist at us, and cursed us. We all saw him through the smoke and sparks of the burning barn, but no one thought of shooting him. He showered maledictions at us until the collapse of the building buried him. A column of sparks rose into the azure sky. The first elements of our group were already in the village streets, firing on anything that moved.

The last of the partisans were running toward the mountains. For a moment, they were directly exposed to our fire, and we shot down twenty of them on the dusty road and among the junipers on the hillside.

The spandau, which had been fitted with a special magazine, took a horrible toll of the fleeing groups of partisans. Then we stopped firing, and the men from the German post came out and joined us. Many of them were wounded, and twelve were dead. We gave the wounded first aid, and drove the local residents from their huts. Fires were spreading everywhere, and had to be put out.

Men, women, and children joined us in fighting the flames. It took almost an hour to put the fires out. Then everyone, ourselves included, dragged the bodies of the dead to a central point. Women screamed and cried as they recognized a husband or son or lover. It looked as if most of the partisans had lived in this place.

Soon, however, the tears and sobs became threats and curses. We collected our own dead and wounded with the usual mute sentiment established by habit. The day was so beautiful it was hard to believe that any of this was really serious. Our eyes, disillusioned by so much accumulated fear and anxiety, no longer distinguished the tragedies of any particular moment.

Hals was staring at the magnificent mountain scenery, as he carried along a comrade whose tunic was blotched with brown stains. The birds had regained their sense of spring joy and were flying once again through the blue sky, which was faintly marked by smoke from the smoldering fires. For us, in the eastern armies, this joyousness of nature almost excused what had just happened. After the mud and the cold, we were like wild animals, overjoyed by the spring sun, and the knowledge that shelter for the night was no longer a serious problem.

We deplored what had just happened as a disturbance of the peace and quiet we so much appreciated.

The villagers were still caught in a crisis of tearful despair, and insults which were comprehensible simply by their tone shook our sense of well-being.

Someone threw a stone, which hit one of our wounded men in the face. Two landser spun around, brandishing their machine guns.

"Break it up, you pigs, or we'll drill you full of holes."

But the shouted curses kept right on. We were ringed by faces, especially feminine faces, distorted by rage, spitting and cursing, and by shaking fists. Suddenly, six planes flying wing to wing appeared in that marvelous sky-six Soviet fighters, looking for one of our convoys. This sign heartened the Russians, who shouted, "Ourrah Stalin," and pointed at the planes, which blindly continued their search.

We could see such hatred on all these faces that we shivered, despite the fine spring day. We were all thinking of our tortured, mutilated comrades, murdered by men who were mixing themselves into a fight that had left them on the sidelines. We remembered once again the tragic deaths at the territorial posts all along our line of retreat during the winter: faces smashed open with axes, so that the gold teeth could be pulled out; the hideous agony of wounded men tied with their heads inside the gaping bellies of dead comrades; amputated genitals; Ellers' section, whom we had found tied up and naked, on a day when the temperature had dropped to thirty degrees below zero, with their feet thrust into a drinking trough which had frozen solid; and the faces of tortured men under the dark winter sky....

With dry mouths, we listened to the mounting rage of these peasants, who were now paying a price they could have avoided for all time. If anyone had ordered us to fire, we would have obeyed without hesitation. I could see the gun shaking in the filthy, nervous hands of the man nearest me. A little way off, another of our men was no longer able to control the trembling of his face muscles. We had all stopped working, and our anger was rising like a storm.

A tall, slim figure strode between the two groups. We saw that it was Wesreidau, and that he was white with fury. He stopped five yards from the Russians, and threw them a look so terrible that silence fell at once. He had learned Russian during the long course of the campaign. He told the villagers to bury their dead with the same silence and respect he required of his troops. He said that the war would soon be over for them, and that they should wait for the end, keeping to the sidelines. He said that he had never imagined the war would bring him to shoot civilians, who had been misled into arming by false propaganda, and excused himself for what he had been forced to do. Then his voice became as hard as death. He said that he would not tolerate any further hostile manifestations; that he intended to return to camp with all his men still alive, and that the entire village would be held responsible if he did not.

Wesreidau's words had the effect of a soothing balm. Everything returned to a state of unexpected order. The dead were buried and sobs were stifled.

We found enough gas for our return in the stores of the outpost. The men there entertained us with a few bottles they had put aside several months before. Then we returned to the road, leaving eight wounded men behind at the post, where the medical service would pick them up the next day. Six others failed to answer the roll call, and remained in the Ukrainian soil forever.

"Not so crowded this time," someone said.

We acquiesced without speaking. Our eyes lingered on the village disappearing behind clouds of dust raised by the trucks. The beautiful spring light glowed all around our blackened, steel-capped faces, which seemed irrevocably cut off from the season. Our awareness of everything was similarly split. Our thoughts, like our eyes, couldn't settle on anything that seemed definite, or restful, and a sense of well-being had no place in the convoy.

The whirling dust hid the bursting spring. All we could see were the trucks, and the grotesque, dangling cadaver of the pig, covered with blood and flies.

The trucks lurched along the narrow mountain road, whose illogical course might have been traced by some wandering goat; obstacles like stone outcrops were included without modification, and natural, shaded ridges were avoided. Sometimes the track plunged into the bed of an unexpected stream, or through a temporary pond. At other times, we crossed deserts of dust, where the dryness seemed eternal. The trucks slowly pursued the twists and turns, carrying us along, penned between the rattling railings.

We seemed to be wandering endlessly toward new horizons on which we never had time to gaze, through an oversized, over-intense spring which would not allow us to forget that we were at war. Our expressionless faces stared at the spring with the unhappiness of paupers staring into a shop window decorated for Christmas.

We too wanted the war to stop and dreamed of peace, like the seriously ill for whom the first sight of spring buds kindles a spark of life.

But the fighting didn't stop; there was never more than a semblance of peace, and always someone to fan the flames of war. These people -on both sides-perhaps had perfectly good reasons for what they did. On that day, one of them crossed the road as we climbed up the long slope. He had seen us coming, and quickly, perhaps inside of ten minutes, laid his trap, hiding it in one of the dozens of potholes that pitted the surface. Then he hid, perhaps waiting to see what happened. Perhaps he too saw the yellow flash that tore apart our lead car. As always, there was a loud noise and a great deal of smoke climbing in black plumes toward the desperately smiling sky. Six bloodstained men were slowly dying in the shadows of those plumes. The front of the steiner was gone. The rest of the machine was knocked over onto its side.

A few men pulled the victims from the flaming wreckage, while the rest assumed a defensive position. We laid Wesreidau and the five other occupants of the car against the bank of red earth. Two of them were already dead. Another had a leg torn open in several places by metal fragments; his thigh looked like a mille-feuille pastry. Wesreidau was covered with wounds, and his body seemed to be broken by multiple fractures. We did everything we could for him. The whole company thought of him as a friend. With everyone helping, we managed to bring him back to consciousness.

Unlike everyone else we had watched, our captain did not have a face twisted by the revulsion or agony of death. His swollen face even managed to smile. We thought we had saved him. In a very weak voice he spoke to us of our collective adventure, stressing our unity, which must hold in the face of everything to come. He pointed to one of his pockets, from which Feldwebel Sperlovski pulled an envelope, undoubtedly addressed to his family. After that, for nearly a minute, we watched our chief die. Our faces, used to such spectacles, remained impassive. But the silence was terrible.

We were able to save two of the men from the car, loading them carefully onto the vehicles which remained. Lieutenant Wollers took command, and organized a decent burial for our venerated leader. We walked past his grave one by one, saluting. We felt that we had just lost the man on whom the well-being of the whole company depended.

We felt abandoned.

That night we returned to the isolated village where our comrades were anxiously waiting for our return. The announcement of our commander's death provoked stupefied consternation. We were all in danger of death, but the annihilation of Wesreidau seemed as impossible to us as life without their parents seems to small children.

We were prepared for every other death, but no one was ready to concede that fate for our leader.

Guard duty that night seemed more uncertain than before; our three companies seemed more vulnerable than ever. We all turned toward a source of strength which remained silent.

Who would our new leader be? On whom would the destiny of our group depend?

At the first light of dawn, after our radio message had reached headquarters, a DO-217 flew over, releasing a smoke signal. This told us that our three motorized companies should proceed quickly to a key position at the front, to the north of us.

We were ordered to destroy our base and most of the village. Nothing should be left which would aid or shelter the enemy. As we had no incendiary material, we limited ourselves to burning the thatched roofs of the cottages.

Then our motorized company left on foot, with our materiel loaded into the four ancient trucks we had left. The radio truck and sidecar preceded them. Every ten or fifteen miles, the trucks and sidecar stopped and waited for us. We would arrive at the front together or not at all.

Our orders made no sense. The officers issuing them seemed to be completely unaware of the actual condition of mobile units allegedly standing by. We were limited to doing the best we could.

Food was our most difficult problem. For a long time now, we had received no supplies, and our meals were produced by some kind of magic. We became hunters and trappers and nest robbers, and experimented with wild plants whose leaves looked like salad greens. After a long chase, we were sometimes able to catch an abandoned horse. But eight hundred men require substantial quantities of food, and every day we were faced with the same difficulties. Every day we called for help on the radio, and every day received the same reply: "Supplies en route. Should have reached you." The Army Postal Service seemed to have vanished too: no letters or packages-no news of any kind.

Despite the warm summer sun, which was now, in fact, somewhat too warm, the situation had become desperate.

Yesterday's pig had been grilled and boiled and devoured the night before, along with a hundred and fifty quarts of hot water which we elevated to the status of "pork bouillon."

Today we were leaving for the front. Our eyes gleamed, like the eyes of famished wolves. Our stomachs were empty, our mess tins were empty, and the horizon was devoid of any hope. Murderous sentiments lurked behind our eyes, which glittered with hunger. Hunger produces a curious frame of mind. It is impossible to imagine dying of hunger. For a long time now, we had been used to living on very little. Our stomachs digested substances which would kill a comfortable bourgeois citizen in a few weeks. No one had any spare fat left-no bellies or double chins, and our long muscles stood out in relief, as though we'd been flayed. As our fast continued, our senses grew more acute. We looked like the bony animals with blazing eyes one might encounter in the desert. It would take days of marching and dust to extinguish that blaze. For the moment, despite the hollows in our bellies, everything still seemed possible. We would simply march until we found food. After all, Russia was not an empty desert. The immense prairie around us looked fertile, and we would surely come across a village we could ransack.

Sperlovski and Lensen checked the map. There were a great many villages in our sector; therefore, the situation wasn't too serious. The trouble was that our rectangle of paper represented an area as large as all of France. Between any two villages, there might be hundreds of absolutely empty miles. The smallest digression to reach one of the names on the map could mean several more days of marching.

"There's nothing really to worry about," said Lensen, who didn't like to concede defeat. "There are plenty of villages lost in the steppe which aren't marked on the map. And then there are the kolkhozes, too."

We had been ordered to march north. There could be no more delay. In any case, there was nothing left to eat where we were. Our long file set out: "Kompanie, marsch! marsch!"

Hour after hour, at two or three miles an hour, we tramped in growing desperation through the uncultivated prairie.

"Somebody could make money farming here," remarked a Hannover country boy.

There were large fields of wheat near each village. Beyond these, over spaces as broad as a French department, there was nothing but wild grass and gray or red dust and thick forest, much of which was probably virgin. We had grown used to great distances. Above all, we thought of them as possible battlefields. Other reactions still lay in the future for those who returned to their native countries, with their suffocating densities and horizons which seemed close enough to touch, always marked by commonplace structures of public utility, stones arranged in some dubious style. These men, who had grown used to stretches of ground as vast as the sky, no longer knew how to sit on grass which always belonged to someone.

For us, at the moment, there was only limitless space, where our boots raised a cloud of multicolored dust that settled on everything that disturbed it. We belonged to the earth far more than it belonged to us. Except for the war, we felt a vast, limitless pleasure in our surroundings, in a kind of plenitude for which, in later years, we would always feel nostalgia.

If only there had been something to eat!

After our eleven-o'clock break, our march began again. We had gulped down like a dose of medicine the cooked sprouts of young wheat which had been prepared two days earlier. As a last resort, we had some millet, cooked in water. The weather was very hot. Fortunately, our exceedingly light meals did not produce after-dinner somnolence.

We drank the warm water from our water bottles with a certain apprehension. Running streams were quite widely spaced, and water from ponds carried the risk of malaria, typhoid, and other diseases, like cholera. To keep up our spirits, we sang as we marched: "Ein Heller and ein Batzen." The words, like the tune, were carried into the emptiness by the light summer wind, losing all meaning-which no longer seemed strange to ears once accustomed to hearing them echo between the walls of flag-decked towns:

Der Heller ward zu Wasser

Der Batzen ward zu Wein ...

Not that we had any choice-there was no wine and the water had to be drunk sparingly and with caution.

Heidi, Heido, Heida! Heidi, Heido, Heida! Heidi-Heido-Heida! Ah, ah, ah, ah!

Kompanie, marsch, marsch. We marched, singing for no one but ourselves, and all of us already knew the tune.

Then it grew dark. Darkness fell very late on our bivouac and across the plain, on which it seemed we had hardly moved, on our dust-covered faces and aching muscles. We were already asleep on our feet. The silence seemed to have a special quality, as though it had come from the end of the world.

At daybreak, our march resumed. For hours the long row of hills on the horizon seemed to remain at the same distance from us. We were walking through a rocky plain where the highest rise in the ground was scarcely the height of a man. Small stands of trees, which reminded me of photographs of Africa, were scattered across the landscape. The trees were short and scrubby, curiously like the trees of high altitudes. The wind blew the red dust everywhere, as if we were tramping through a universe of powdered brick. For a long time now, we had given up marching in threes-the regulation order for marching troops-in favor of the system used by partisans. We were broken up into more or less compact groups, in which a man was ahead only until someone else caught up with him. Everyone was tired, and our pace was slackening.

We had given up all unnecessary conversations, keeping all our breath and strength to continue putting one foot in front of the other. How many thousands of steps did we still have to take? Our boots, the color of the dusty universe, kept on across the rocky plain, which seemed to be leading us nowhere. The light wind filled our long, unkempt hair with dust; our position in relation to certain reference points on the horizon seemed unchanging; and the rhythm of our steps, the sounds of our progress, and the wind itself became overwhelmingly monotonous. From time to time we could hear a rumble from the great hollow of emptiness which filled our stomachs.

Just after the eleven-o'clock halt, during which we consumed the last of our millet, an incident disturbed the general monotony. Two twin-engined planes, which we had fortunately been able to see a long way off, appeared in the hot, blue sky. The horizon was so vast that anything which crossed it was visible for at least five minutes before it reached us. We scattered as usual, and assumed a position of anti-aircraft defense. Some of us were going to die.... The planes were either light bombers or reconnaissance planes-but unmistakably Russian.

The two planes flew over us at an altitude of about fifteen hundred feet. The snore of their engines pierced the gentle breeze and seemed to echo in the depths of our tense stomachs.

The two Popovs took our fire without sending down anything in return. They flew in a large circle, which we followed with anguished eyes. The second time around, they would surely let us have it.

However, their second swoop produced nothing but a swarm of white butterflies, flashing and fluttering against the blue of the sky.

As soon as the planes were gone, some of our men went out to pick up the leaflets. A fellow came over to me waving a dozen.

"Ivan doesn't seem to understand: if we can't eat, we can't crap. He's gone and sent us a lot of paper."

We read the Communist tracts.

"German soldiers: You have been betrayed. . . . Surrender to our units, which will rehabilitate you. . . . You have lost the war."

Then, to raise our morale, we were shown some bad photographs of anonymous ruins, which, it was claimed, were German cities flattened by bombs. Also, there were photographs of smiling German prisoners. Under each of these photographs was a short caption: "Comrades: The temporary captivity which we are experiencing in no way resembles the lies we were led to believe. We have been agreeably surprised by the kindness of the camp officers. When we think of you, comrades, wading through the slime of the trenches to preserve the capitalist world, we cannot advise you strongly enough to lay down your arms."

And so it went on.

One fellow, who had managed to escape from Tomvos, was shouting with rage. "The bastards! For all I know, I'm the only survivor from that damned place."

In disgust, he tore the leaflet to shreds, and scattered it into the wind.

We resumed our march. The leaflets were still circulating from hand to hand, and their words and phrases "the war is lost," "treason," "cities destroyed" echoed in our minds like a gloomy round.

Of course, it was Communist propaganda. All we had to do was talk to the fellow who'd escaped from Tomvos to understand that. But then anyone who'd been home on leave had seen the bombed German cities. And then there was our continuous and painful retreat, and our daily existence, with its total lack of transport, gas, food, mail, everything. Perhaps the war really was lost. But that couldn't be possible.

Here we were walking across the Russian plain. Was it still ours? Or was it simply witnessing our slow death?

But that, too, was impossible. We had to dismiss these black thoughts. We were simply living through a difficult period which was bound to pass.

Tomorrow, surely, we would get some supplies, and everything would once more make some kind of sense. We had to shake our heads and dispel our dark reveries. Today the sun was shining, and we had to press on.

We began to sing one of our marching songs with deliberate vehemence:

Auf der Heide bluht ein kleines Blumelein

Und das heisst Erika

Heiss von hunderttausend kleisen Bienlein

Wird umschwdrmt Erika.

This was the second time Hals had shaken me awake.

Despite the exhaustion which rapidly returned us to unconsciousness, it was annoying to be torn from such deep sleep.

"I'm telling you, I can hear guns," he said.

I listened, but was aware of nothing except the pale, glittering night.

"Leave me alone, Hals, for the love of God. Don't wake me for anything. We'll be marching again tomorrow, and I'm so tired I could die."

"I'm telling you that off and on we can hear guns. If you'll look around, you'll see that other fellows are standing up and listening too." I listened again, but still heard nothing except the gently blowing wind.

"Well, it's possible. But so what? This isn't the first time. Go back to sleep. You'll be better off."

"I can't sleep on an empty stomach. I'm sick of this. I've got to find something to eat."

"So that's why you wake me up?"

Someone walked over to us. It was Schlesser, who was on guard duty.

"Did you hear that, fellows? Guns."

"That's what I was trying to tell this blockhead," said Hals, nudging me.

Despite the sleep stagnating in me so that I was only half conscious, I felt obliged to listen to what my companion was saying.

"All we need here is a Soviet breakthrough," Schlesser said.

"That would be the end of us," said Hals, his voice suddenly hoarse.

"We can still fight, though," said someone else who'd just come up.

"Fight!" said Hals, hideously objective. "With what? Seven or eight hundred anemic, half-starved men armed with light infantry weapons. You must be joking. It would be the end of us, I tell you. We haven't even got the strength to run."

But the newcomer wasn't joking. His name was Kellerman. Although he was exactly twenty years old, he already had the lucidity of a much older man and an instant grasp of reality. This reality lifted the veil of fear, and exposed the anguish deeply inscribed on his face, whose hardened features seemed incompatible with his youth.

Then we all heard a distant rumble, carried to us on the wind. . . . We stared at each other. The noise stopped, began again, stopped again.

"Artillery," said Schlesser. The rest of us were silent.

I had heard the noise, like everyone else, but my exhaustion had produced the sensation of two simultaneous lives. Sleep and reality had become confused. I felt as though I were deeply asleep, dreaming of artillery fire, lost somewhere in time. My comrades went right on talking. I listened to them without really hearing what they were saying. Sergeant Sperlovski had joined us, and seemed to be making some deductions.

"It's still far off," he said, "but it's the front. We'll be arriving in a day, or a day and a half."

"That would be an hour or two in a car," Hals remarked.

Sperlovski looked at him. "In a hurry? So sorry we're not motorized any more."

"That's not what I meant," Hals growled. "I was thinking of Ivan, who must have gas and tanks. If he breaks through, he could be on top of us just like that."

Sperlovski stalked off without another word. What business had he to be discouraged-a noncom in the Gross Deutschland?

"Let's go to sleep," Kellerman said. "There's nothing better to do."

"It's a nice lookout," I couldn't help saying. "Here we are, like animals in a slaughterhouse, waiting for dawn, when the butchers will come."

"Are we going to be killed with empty stomachs?" Hals roared. Despite our hunger and fear, we managed to fall asleep again, and stayed asleep until daybreak-which arrived at what would be considered the middle of the night in any organized civilian life.

Here we had no bells or bugles, or even a whistle. The gentle commotion made by our group leaders was enough to drag us from the heavy sleep which, paradoxically, was very easily penetrated by sound and movement. According to the custom of troops approaching a combat zone, movement at night, or before full daylight, was preferred. The docile Wehrmacht, even in its death agony, clung to its professionalism and woke its soldiers at the customary hour, leading them in disciplined order to the field of glory.

The rules did not envisage that soldiers without food could avoid this or that trial, but stated that in all cases everything still possible should be accomplished with maximum efficiency. Time is measured out in equal quantities for the poor and the old and the underfed alike.

Our faded uniforms looked gray in the first faintly white light of day. Familiar silhouettes which had walked beside me for nearly two years now were advancing on either side of me in a rhythm that was also mine, and that has remained indelibly stamped on my memory. Whenever I think of those days, I can see again with absolute clarity details which are pointless in themselves: familiar profiles in a diffused light, the loose cloth of trousers improperly tucked into boots, belts loosened by their dangling load of heavy objects, and helmets hanging from one of our straps, always knocking against some other metallic object, with a dull sound I can still hear, without resonance, like a padded bell. And the smells, and the backs, hunched over in a thousand different ways, each one with its own expression, and its own arrangement of creases. The very anonymity of our uniforms created its own kind of individuality. No one uniform was precisely like any other, although no other uniform is so deliberately designed as the German to turn a man into a soldier, absolute and united with his fellows, and not just a civilian in special clothes. For the rest of the world, there are German soldiers with no distinction between them, but for us, the word "Kamerad," meaning one soldier just like any other, was exaggerated. Beyond the uniform and the formula, we were individuals.

That back over there, the same color as thousands of others, is not just any back. It belongs to Schlesser, and over there, on the right, is Solma. Somewhat closer, that's Lensen, and his helmet. It's his helmet, unlike any other among the hundreds of thousands issued in the same series. Then there are Prinz and Hals and Lindberg and Kellerman and Frosch ... Frosch, whom I'd recognize in any crowd. Through our sameness, our individualism emerged, as it must have from all men stripped to essentials, since the beginning of time.

All our helmets were the same gray-green, covered with dust. But none stayed for long at a regulation angle, or moved in the same way, and all were distinctive and distinguishable. One thing above all remains more or less indescribable: the contagious anguish of soldiers stripped of everything, whom each step is carrying closer to an incomprehensible danger. There were also our resignation and our equally profound and violent desire to live.

Apart from these three sentiments in common, everything else was personal. But this was apparent only to us. To anyone else, all Huns were alike.

We saw them when we were still five hundred yards away.

They were swarming around the three or four vehicles which had stopped to wait for us. There must have been at least ten thousand of them. Ten thousand men seems like nothing on the Ukrainian plain, but it is still a considerable number. Ten or twelve thousand soldiers in a pitiful state, storming our wretched trucks, rummaging through them again and again in search of some food or medicine. They had thrown themselves onto our battered machines as if they were revenging themselves for their abandonment. Then, as we arrived and they became aware of our miserable state, they collapsed into a torpor which was close to suicide.

Those wretched men, collected from several infantry regiments, were retreating after several days of fighting an implacable enemy who had toyed with them, decimating them as and when he chose. They were on foot, in rags, their faces livid after so much suffering, dragging along with them nauseatingly wounded men on litters made of branches, like the litters of the Sioux.

These men, numbed by too much disaster, were no longer fighting for any spiritual motive, but were more like wolves, terrified of starvation.

To oppose their sole and legitimate reason for living was to risk one's own life. These men, who no longer distinguished between enemies and friends, were ready to commit murder for less than a quarter of a meal. They were to demonstrate this a few days later, in a horrible phase of the confused flux of the war. These martyrs to hunger massacred two villages to carry off their supplies of food, but thirty of their men died of starvation anyway, near the Rumanian frontier.

Our shock at meeting combat troops in such a state was equal to theirs at finding us as we were.

"Where do you think you're going?" sneered a tall, emaciated lieutenant, swimming in a curious conglomerate uniform which was far too big for him.

He was talking to our lieutenant, who had led us since the death of Wesreidau. Our lieutenant pointed on the map to the position we were supposed to reach. He cited names, numbers, latitudes. The other listened, swaying stiffly, like a dead tree in the wind.

"What are you talking about? What sector? What hill? Are you dreaming? There's nothing left, nothing-do you hear me-but mass graves, which are blowing apart in the wind."

The man talking like this still wore the 1935 commemorative National Socialist decoration pinned to his scorched tunic, which was marked by a thousand stains. He was tall and dark, and a heavy bundle of grenades hung from his belt.

"You can't be serious," our lieutenant answered in a pleading tone. "You've had a hard time, you're a little light in the head, and you're hungry. We too have been keeping ourselves alive by miracles."

The other drew closer. His eyes were filled with such a hateful, disquieting light that we would gladly have killed him, as if he were a sick animal.

"Yes, I'm hungry," he roared. "Hungry in a way the saints could never have imagined. I'm hungry, and I'm sick, and I'm afraid, to such a point that I want to live to revenge myself for all mankind. I feel like devouring you, Leutnant. There were cases of cannibalism at Stalingrad, and soon there will be here, too."

"You're crazy! If worse comes to worst, we can eat the grass, and there's all of occupied Russia, with plenty of reserves for the troops. For God's sake, pull yourself together. You keep going, and we'll cover your retreat."

The other made a noise more like a hiccup than a laugh.

"You'll cover us, and we can take ourselves quietly away! Tell that to the men you see there. They've been fighting for five months, and have lost four-fifths of their comrades. They've been waiting for reinforcements, ammunition, vitamins, food, medicine, God knows what! They've hoped a thousand times, and survived a thousand times. You won't be able to tell them anything, Leutnant, but you can try......

We tried to shift some of the materiel from our decrepit vehicles the last vestige of our motorization-onto our backs, to make room for some of the seriously wounded men among the retreating troops. They left first, driving past the rest of us, who were left to that extent less mobile than before on the great Ukrainian plain. We watched the trucks disappearing into the distance, envying the fate of the wounded, who might be going to escape the oppression of that immensity.

Then our motley collection of troops continued their retreat-a vain and empty march. We seemed to be tramping along a huge carpet on rollers, which unwound beneath our feet, leaving us always in the same place. How many hours, and days, and nights went by? I can no longer remember. Our groups spread out, and separated. Some stayed where they were, and slept. No order or threat was strong enough to move them. Others-small groups of men who were particularly strong, or who still had enough food to keep going-went on ahead. There were also many suicides. I remember two villages stripped of every scrap of food, and more than one massacre. Men were ready to commit murder for a quart of goat's milk, a few potatoes, a pound of millet. Starving wolves on the run don't have time to stop and talk.

There were still a few human beings left in the wolf pack: soldiers who died to save a can of sour milk-the last reserve of a pair of infants. Others died at the hands of their fellows for protesting against the savagery produced by famine, or were beaten to death because they were suspected of hiding food. Usually, these men were found to have nothing. There were a few exceptions: an Austrian had his head kicked in, and a few handfuls of crumbled vitamin biscuit were found at the bottom of his sack. He had probably collected them by shaking out the provision sacks of some commissariat which had ceased to exist several weeks before. Men died for very little-for the possibility of a day's food. When everything had been eaten, down to the last sprout in the meager gardens, twelve thousand soldiers stared at the village, which had been abandoned by its terrified inhabitants.

Living corpses wandered here and there, staring at the tragic shreds of existence which remained to them. They stared at the scene of pillage, looking for some understanding of the past which might shed some light on the future. They stayed where they were until dusk. Then three or four armored cars from the advancing Russian troops arrived, peppered with machine-gun fire the crowd of men, who didn't even try to escape, made a half-turn, and left. The desperate, ravening men scattered across the steppe.

Everyone fled, running for the west because the west drew them irresistibly, as the north attracts the needle of a compass. The steppe absorbed and obliterated them, leaving only small, scattered groups tramping toward the Rumanian frontier, which was very close, but still out of sight. I belonged to one such group. There were nine of us: Hals and me-inseparable as always-Sperlovski, Frosch, Prinz, an older fellow called Siemenleis, who must have been an incorruptible civil servant before the war, and three Hungarians, with whom all conversation was impossible. Were they volunteers, or had they been enrolled in circumstances similar to mine? No one knew. They looked at us with eyes full of hate, as if we were responsible for the misadventure of the Third Reich in which they had been involved. Yet they clung to us as if we were their last hope of ever returning to their distant firesides.

One day there was a line of trees, or a hedge of saplings, which I can still see, as in a drunken dream, and beyond it, the wide, very wide field which we planned to cross. We could see some buildings on the crest of a small hill, and had decided to search them for food.

Halfway across the field the sound of planes made us look up. Two Yabos were seeking some prey.

Seven of us melted into that enormous stretch of ground, and two ran-Frosch and myself.

Like hunted animals intent on self-preservation, each man thought only of himself, and no one shouted to us. The two Russian aviators spotted our wild gallop, and dived down at us. Although we had nothing left but our skins, we still represented the enemy to them, and had to be wiped out.

When the noise reached a certain pitch, we instinctively threw ourselves down on the thick grass. The bullets passed over our heads and landed far beyond us. When we lifted our heads, we could see the planes completing a graceful arabesque against the stormy blue and black summer sky. Gasping for breath, we ran desperately until the two vultures once again filled the air with overwhelming noise. The planes made two more passes after that, peppering the ground with bullets, each time twenty or thirty yards wide of the mark. Like a terrible joke, the planes roared gown a fourth time at the trembling, sweating grasshoppers which were ourselves. Suddenly, as if by a miracle, we came to a ditch, and fell into it.

Without seeing them, we distinctly heard the roar of the Russian rockets, which turned both banks of our ditch into ridges of broken earth. Our friends were sure we were dead. The planes made one more pass, and flew off, undoubtedly convinced that they had brought our wanderings to an end. When we walked out through the whirling dust, our companions greeted us with shouts of incredulous delight.

At the farm, which the inhabitants had abandoned some fifteen minutes before our arrival, we found a kettle full of steaming Jerusalem artichokes, which had undoubtedly been left to distract us. We went on our way, gorging on this unexpected windfall. Two days later, during which we twice collected potatoes from Russians at gun point, we ran into an interminable convoy retreating into Rumania, and were inescapably absorbed into it.

Then we experienced Rumania and its population, which seemed stunned by the sequence of events, by the route of their army, and by the painful disintegration of the Wehrmacht.

Civilian life was in a state of panic, with Rumanian and foreign partisans, daily over-flights of foreign planes, raids for food and supplies, and Rumanian prostitutes who flocked around the troops in such numbers that it seemed as if most of the women in Rumania must be prostitutes.

We marched twenty, twenty-five, even thirty miles a day, pouring with sweat and stunned by disillusion. Our tortured feet were alternately bare in the dust of narrow, twisting roads, then back in our boots, and then naked and bleeding once more. Our hollow stomachs rumbled with hunger. There were raiding parties, re-formation of units, and a lunatic rabble, whose fringes and surface were skimmed by military police intent on discipline, and as always alert for the possibility of exemplary executions.

The landscape was profoundly romantic, but we had been transformed into ravening wolves, and thought of nothing but food.

A particular episode emerges from my memories of disorder-a tragic paroxysm which still seems to me a symbol of humanity gone mad. We were in the mountains and had just been through a town called Reghin, which at that time was known as Arlau, or Erlau. We were tramping along, gray with dust and pouring with sweat. We had miraculously escaped incorporation into several scratch formations, and our interminable, wretched column was twisting through what seemed like an infinite chain of mountains. The column was broken up into groups of varying size, in which unkempt soldiers pushed along every kind of transport to move our basic necessities.

We requisitioned the most extraordinary vehicles. Anyone who found a bicycle grabbed it, even if it had no tires, and went on ahead of the rest to skim off anything even remotely digestible. In this district of jagged peaks and crags, we were free of enemy aircraft, but the terrain was ideal for partisans, and there were many battles to the death between them and our men, who were now fighting simply to save their skins.

In this district, one group among many others of men in a motley conglomeration of clothes was struggling to reach the mother country. Behind our glittering eyes, deeply sunk into shadowy sockets, one belief sustained us. This was that, if we managed to survive, the mother country would receive us with tenderness, and try to help us forget the unimaginable trial which was nearly over. We thought that, once we reached home, the war would be over, and that in the worst imaginable case the army would be reorganized, so that no enemy would enter Germany itself. We held to this as the one final idea which would justify our sufferings and banish the solution of suicide which others had already accepted.

Yesterday's landser, members of elite units, Panzergrenadiers who had confronted a thousand deaths to live for a chimera, clung to the idea that we had to live to be able to hope, and we had to hope passionately to be able to live as we were. We had to fight against daily ambush, and keep going no matter what, to get away from the Russians, who were hard on our heels. And we had to eat a certain minimum, which wasn't easy to do.

There were twelve in our group-many of them familiar companions: Schlesser, Frosch, Lieutenant Wollers, Lensen, Kellerman, and then Hals and me, kept together by a miracle of silent fraternity. Hals, who had grown startlingly thin, was forcing his large bony body along the narrow mountain road some four or five yards ahead of me. He often walked ahead of me, which gave me a certain sense of security, although his large body was seriously reduced. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a leather belt and a band of cartridges for the spandau across his chest. A Russian blouse, in anticipation of the cool evenings at this altitude, floated from the leather pouch that held his few possessions along with four or five grenades. His heavy steel helmet seemed to be riveted to his head, and the lice in his filthy hair must have died for lack of light.

Many men had thrown away their heavy helmets, but Hals felt his was a last link with the German Army, and that during this terrible trial we should try to remain soldiers, rather than degenerate into tramps. I kept mine too, as a sign of solidarity, dangling from my belt.

Someone up ahead shouted for us to come and see. We looked down into a leafy ravine. A camouflaged truck bearing the inscription "WH" had crashed to the bottom. Lensen was already running down to have a closer look.

"Watch out!" someone shouted. "It might be a trap!"

Lieutenant Wollers had joined Lensen. We drew back, certain that the partisans had arranged a booby trap, and that we would see our two companions blown to pieces any minute. However, a reassuring shout floated up from the gulf.

"A windfall! Mein Gott, it's like a whole commissary!"

Within seconds we were all running toward the miracle.

"Look at that! Chocolate, cigarettes, wurst . . ."

"Good God! And here are three bottles, too!"

"Shut up," shouted Schlesser, "or you'll have the whole army down here! It's a miracle no one found this before."

"So many delicious things," said Frosch in an almost tender voice. "Let's all grab everything we can. We can share it out later, on the road." Frosch and another fellow loaded themselves heavily, and climbed back to the road to keep watch. Thousands of men were wandering very close to us; we would try to take everything. We had almost completed the job when our two lookouts shouted: "Achtung!"

We ran into the brush and heard the distant roar of a motorcycle. The engine slowed down and seemed to stop. We ran off through the thorny growth, clutching our precious cargoes. We were used to getting out of the way in a hurry and melting into the ground when an unfriendly eye might become too interested in our existence. We could hear some noncoms shouting, and supposed that our two companions had been caught by a military patrol, perhaps even by the military police.

"Those two sods were caught with bottles under their arms," muttered Wollers.

"Let's get out of here as fast as we can," said Lindberg, who had just run up.

"Someone's coming down," whispered Lensen. "An M.P.-I saw his badge."

"Hell, let's get out of here."

Everybody ran, scattering into the bushes as if Ivan himself were at his heels. We regrouped after five or six hundred yards, hiding behind a rocky outcrop.

"I've lost enough breath because of those bastards," said Hals. "If they want to chase us this far, I'll take care of them."

"You're crazy," said Lindberg. "Don't talk like that. What are you trying to do to us?"

"Shut up!" Hals said. "You'll never make it home anyway. Ivan's going to get you for sure. Why don't you think for a minute of Frosch and the other fellow who've been caught?"

"We might as well eat," said Wollers. "I've had enough of giving orders, and sweating, and shitting in my pants like a baby when I'm scared. So let's get started. If we're going to die for it, all the more reason to fill our bellies while we can."

Like hungry beasts, we wolfed down the contents of the tins and the other provisions, masticating loudly.

"We'd better eat it all," Lensen said. "If we're caught with anything in our sacks that wasn't handed out, we'll be in trouble."

"You're right. Let's eat it all. They won't slit us open to see what's inside, although it would be just like those bastards to check our shit." For an hour we gorged ourselves until we were almost sick. When it grew dark, we returned to the road by a devious route. Lensen stepped out of the brush first.

"Come on, the coast is clear."

We went on for three or four hundred yards, passing once again the hole with its unexpected windfall which had allowed us to fill our famished stomachs for a moment. There was no one in sight. We went on for another two or three miles, and collapsed at the side of the road.

"I can't go any further," said Schlesser. "We're not used to eating any more, and this is what happens."

"Why don't we go to sleep right here?" someone said. "That will help our digestions."

Toward two o'clock in the morning, a large group of German soldiers came by and woke us up.

"On your feet," shouted an old feldwebel. "Get going, or Ivan will be in Berlin before you."

We resumed our trek. This bunch had collected several horse-drawn wagons, and for a while, we were able to ride. At daybreak, we arrived at a town built on the mountainside. Some men were splashing in an icy bathing place. Others were sleeping on the ground or on terrace walls. Farther on, still others had begun their march again, toward safety, the west, the mother country, waiting to receive them, whose true condition they couldn't begin to guess.

And then there was a tree, a majestic tree, whose branches seemed to be supporting the sky.

Two sacks were dangling from those branches, two empty scarecrows swinging in the wind, suspended by two short lengths of rope. We walked under them, and saw the gray, bloodless faces of hanged men, and recognized our wretched friend Frosch and his companion.

"Don't worry, Frosch," whispered Hals. "We ate it all."

Lindberg hid his face in his hands and wept. I managed with difficulty to read the message scribbled on the sign tied to Frosch's broken neck.

"I am a thief and a traitor to my country."

A short way off, some ten policemen in regulation uniform were standing beside a sidecar and a Volkswagen. As we walked by them, our eyes met theirs.