Forgotten Soldier (11 page)

We hardly spoke. I had learned to be as silent as Germans usually are. But, even without words, I knew that Hals was a friend who felt as warmly toward me as I did toward him. We gave each other occasional smiles of encouragement, as if to say: "Hang on! We'll make it!"

We halted at dusk. Feeling that I had been pushed beyond the limits of my strength, I collapsed onto a cart shaft. My legs ached with stiffness, and I could feel exhaustion pulling down my face.

Hals let himself fall onto the snow.

"Aie, my poor feet."

All along the convoy, men were sitting or lying on the snow.

"We're not spending the night here, are we?" asked a young soldier who was sitting next to me.

We looked at each other uneasily.

"I don't give a damn what anyone else does," said Hals, opening his mess tin. "I'm not taking another step."

"You say that because you're still sweating. Wait until you're a little colder. Then you'll have to move if you don't want to freeze." "Shit," said Hals without looking up.

"This food stinks."

I opened my mess tin too. The cooked dinners they had given us early in the afternoon had long since cooled, and then frozen in the metal containers. It looked like tripe.

All around us, other soldiers were making the same discovery.

"God damn it!" said Hals. "But there's no point in just throwing it out."

"What do you think?" someone asked a feld, who was looking at the stuff in his own tin.

"Those bastards must have given us rotten meat."

"Or a week of leftovers. It's unbelievable. There's enough food in that town for a whole division."

"It's not edible.... It stinks!" "We'll have to get out some cans."

"No you won't," the feldwebel flared out at us. "We still have a long way to go, and none too much food as it is. Throw away the meat if you don't like it, and eat the cereal."

Hals, who was never too particular, crunched something vaguely like a lamb cutlet between his teeth. Two seconds later, he spat it out on the snow.

"Pah! It's rotten. The shits must have cooked a Bolshevik."

In spite of our dismal situation, we couldn't help laughing. Faced with the ruins of the meal he had been anticipating with such eagerness, Hals was on the brink of one of his rare fits of rage. Given his giant size, these were always impressive. With a stream of oaths, he gave his mess tin a magisterial kick, which sent it flying across the snow. There was a silence, and then a few laughs.

"You've made things a lot better for yourself," said the young soldier standing beside me.

Hals spun round, but said nothing. Then he slowly went off to pick up his tin. I began to wolf down the mess which had been flavored by the rotten meat. Hals, who looked crushed, collected his battered tin, whose contents had been scattered across the snow. A few minutes later, cursing a cruel fate, we were both digging into my ration.

The noncoms appointed guards, and we were faced with the problem of where to sleep. Already clenched with cold, we wondered where and how to spread out our ground sheets. Some men dug themselves hollows in the snow, others constructed rough huts, using the sacks of dried grass which hung from each side of the horses' collars. Others tried to insure a supply of warmth by making the horses lie down. We had already spent several nights out of doors, but always under more or less sheltered conditions. The fact of sleeping absolutely in the open in such appalling cold terrified us. Here and there, clusters of men discussed what we might do. Some thought we should keep on walking until we came to a village, or at least to some sort of building, on the grounds that it was better to die of exhaustion than of cold. According to this faction, if we stayed where we were, at least half of us would be dead by morning.

"We won't be coming to any village for at least three days," the noncoms told us.

"We'll have to make out the best we can."

"If only we could light a fire!" one man exclaimed. His teeth were chattering, and his voice was almost a whimper. Appalled by the prospect, we prepared ourselves for the night as best we could. Hals and I reorganized the load on a sleigh so that there was a space between the cases of explosives big enough to hold us both. Despite the obvious danger of such a resting place, we preferred disintegration in a hot flash to death by freezing.

Hals had the spirit to crack a few obscene jokes, and they made me laugh in spite of my misery. We managed to doze intermittently, huddled together, haunted by the fear of freezing in our sleep.

We spent a fortnight in these bitter conditions, and it proved fatal for many of our group. On the third day we had two cases of pneumonia. On subsequent days we had frozen limbs and Hergezogener Brand, a kind of gangrene from cold, which first attacks the exposed portion of the face, and then other parts of the body, even if they are covered. Those affected by this condition had to apply a thick yellow pomade, which made them look both comic and pitiable. Two soldiers, driven mad by despair, left the convoy one night, and lost themselves in the featureless immensity of snow. Another very young soldier called for his mother, and cried for hours. We tried alternately comforting and cursing him for disturbing our rest. Toward morning, after he had been quiet for a while, a shot jolted us all awake. We found him a short way off, where he had tried to put an end to his nightmare. But he had bungled his effort and didn't die until the afternoon.

My feet, tortured by so much walking and by the cold, caused me agonizing pain at first, but soon became so numb that I felt almost nothing. Later, when a doctor checked us, I saw that three of my toes had turned an ashen gray. Their nails remained stuck to the double pair of pestilential socks which I took off for the examination. A painful injection saved by toes from amputation. It still seems astonishing to me that any of us should have survived such an ordeal; especially I, who have never been particularly strong.

Now, "at last," I was going to experience war at the front-and ordeals far worse than anything I had yet known.

We used the huts and bunkers of a temporary Luftwaffe airfield for a rest that was indispensable. Most of the field had been abandoned by the Luftwaffe, which had been forced to withdraw farther to the west. Some fighter planes were still there, in various states of disrepair and covered with ice, but a rump ground staff had moved out most of the equipment on big sleighs pulled by tractors.

We were allowed several days to restore ourselves in these more or less comfortable circumstances. However, the moment we began to look better, the authorities plunged us back into the thick of things. For the fighting troops of that sector, our company represented a considerable and unexpected supply of manpower. We were divided into fatigue parties and assigned various jobs. Three-quarters of our men were put to work preparing positions for 77s and even for light machine guns. This meant shoveling masses of snow, and then attacking the earth, which was as hard as rock, with picks and explosives.

Hals, Lensen, and I had managed to stay together. We were in a group that was ordered to supply an infantry section about ten miles away with food and ammunition. We were given two sleighs, each with a troika of shaggy steppe ponies. The distance was not great, our equipment was better than we'd had on our last tragic expedition, and thinking that we could easily manage the round trip in a day, we accepted the job as an easy one.

There were eight of us altogether, counting the sergeant. I was on the second sleigh, which was carrying grenades and magazines for spandaus. *  (* Machine gun from the Spandau works).

Sitting on the back of the sleigh, I had plenty of time to observe the dreary, empty landscape. At rare intervals, small stands of spindly trees thrust up from the immaculate white ground. They seemed to be engaged in an unequal struggle with the overpowering whiteness; it seemed to be gaining on them, slowly but surely. There was nothing else to be seen in this countryside, which must surely be inhabited by wolves-nothing except for the opaque, grayish-yellow sky. We seemed to have reached the far end of the world.

After a short time, we were following a depression in the snow which we took as an indication of a path. As we came to the edge of a thick forest, a soldier jumped up from behind a pile of wood, and stood in front of our first sleigh, which came to a dead stop. After a few words with our sergeant, he stepped aside, and we entered the forest, where we saw a spandau in action, manned by two soldiers, and further on an antlike swarm of soldiers and innumerable gray tents. There were a great many big guns, light tanks of the Alpenberg type, Paks,*( Anti-tank guns) and mortars set up on sleighs. A slaughtered horse had been pulled up into a tree, and was gradually being transformed into steaks by soldiers whose coats were spattered with blood. We were besieged by soldiers who asked us for mail, and cursed us when we said we didn't have any.

An officer checked our orders. The company we were to resupply was farther to the east. He sent an orderly to guide us. We continued through the woods, which concealed some three or four thousand men, and then crossed a series of small, partly cleared hills; I can still see them with absolute clarity. The white snow was crossed by three telephone lines which had been more or less covered over.

"Here we are," said the orderly, who was on horseback. "Beyond this crest you will be under enemy fire, so go as quickly as you can. Follow the telephone line. The company you're looking for is about a mile and a quarter from here."

He saluted in the prescribed fashion and went off at a trot. We looked at each other.

"Well, here I go again," said our sergeant, who undoubtedly was a long-time Rollbahn veteran.

He waved us forward, then stopped us.

"We're going to try and get there really fast. Don't be afraid to beat the horses. If the Russians see us, they'll open fire, but it usually takes them a while. If things get too hot we'll leave the sleigh with ammunition, because if that goes anyone closer than thirty yards will never see his mother again."

I thought of the attack on the convoy near Kharkov. "Let's go," someone shouted, to prove he wasn't afraid.

The sergeant jumped onto the first sleigh and waved us forward. We soon reached the top of the hill. The horses, panting from the climb, stopped for a moment before dashing down the other side.

"Get going!" shouted the sergeant. "We can't stay here!" "Use the whip!" Hals shouted to the fellow who was driving. Our sleigh was the first to start down. I can still see our three plucky ponies jumping through the snow like rabbits, from one depression to the next, churning up a white cloud which undoubtedly was visible a long way off. The three of us huddled behind the driver, in the center of the sleigh, perched on dark green boxes which carried a disquieting inscription in white stenciled letters. We were all feeling nervous, and had forgotten the cold.

I tried to watch the horizon through veils of white dust, despite our jolting progress. I thought that I could dimly see a group of isbas in front of us. All around us, shell holes of a remarkable symmetry mutilated the immaculate whiteness of the slope. Despite our precipitate speed, I noticed the curious borders of these excavations, which the earth thrown up by the explosions had tinged a light yellow. They looked like enormous, stylized flowers, with dark brown centers and yellow petals which turned very pale, almost white, at their outer edges. The holes which had already been there for long enough to be partly filled by new snow made a subtle variation in this curiously decorative pattern.

We reached the bottom of the slope without incident. There were a few heavily damaged isbas, and several large guns almost buried in the snow.

We stopped beside an isba whose roof sloped right down to the ground. The wall nearest us was of open lattice, and we could see some engineers working inside. They seemed to be taking the building apart. A few men came out carrying pieces of wood. Then a plump sergeant with a white garment pulled over his coat came up to us.

"Unload right here," he said. "The engineers are preparing a shelter. It'll be finished in an hour."

A loud explosion made us jump. To our right, we saw a yellow flash, and then a geyser of stones and dirt, which spouted almost thirty feet into the air.

The sergeant turned calmly toward the noise. "Goddamned dirt," he said. "Harder than a rock."

We concluded that these fellows were engineers playing with dynamite. The corpulent noncom looked at our orders.

"Ah," he said, tapping a box of cans with a gloved finger. "These aren't for us. But our supplies are already three days late, and we're living on our reserves which we're not supposed to touch. If this goes on . . . You truck drivers certainly take your own sweet time! That's why fellows up front die of the cold. When you haven't got anything inside, you know, you can't keep going." He slapped his belly.

Judging by his waistline, it was hard to imagine that he'd fasted for long. He must have had a private store of food hidden away somewhere, because it was clear that, despite our best efforts, the front lines were extremely short of supplies.

"You'll have to get over that way," he pointed down the track. "That section is holding a piece of the Don bank . . . and you'll go there on your hands and knees, if you know what's good for you."

We set off across the snow-covered chaos, following a trail marked by trucks half buried in snow. Beyond an embankment, some big guns and heavy howitzers were hidden by a heap of piled-up snow. Once we had passed them, they simply vanished from sight: their camouflage was perfect.

We came to a big trench in which a group of thin, shivering horses were pawing the hard ground. Some sacks of hay-so dry it was practically dust had been ripped open and put down for them. The poor animals were sniffing at the hay with their rimy nostrils, but didn't seem too tempted. A few frozen horse cadavers lay on the ground among the animals that were still standing. A handful of soldiers in long coats were watching the horses. We passed through a string of rough dugouts, and heard machine-gun fire coming from quite nearby.