Forgotten Soldier (32 page)

Ahead of us, and far to the right, we were bombarding a town of considerable size. Slow spirals of smoke some fifty yards across rolled along the ground from enormous fires. I was feeding a second magazine into our infernal machine, and the veteran continued to pour his projectiles onto the dead and living who were jammed into the advanced Soviet position.

Then, through all the noise, we heard the unmistakable rumble of tanks.

"Our Panzers!" shouted the Czech with a demoniac laugh.

Hals left his position and rushed toward us with a leap which made us think he'd been hit. He and Lindberg had run just in time. A second later, a huge tank rolled over the ground they had occupied, crushing the barbed wire beneath its treads. The churned-up earth continued to shake with the explosion of mines, which here and there immobilized a heavy armored vehicle, or tossed a landser some fifteen yards. The tank, followed by two others, passed very close to us, thrusting toward the enemy position we had already been peppering for several minutes. In no time, it had crossed the trench, which was overflowing with the bodies of Russian soldiers. Then a second and a third tank plunged through the bloody paste, and rolled on, their treads stuck with horrible human remnants. Our noncom gave an involuntary cry of horror at the sight. Soon the young soldiers fresh from the sportive pleasures of the barracks would arrive at this foul reality. We heard a cry of horror, followed by one of victory, as the first assault wave continued its advance. More tanks were pouring out of the woods behind us, crushing the saplings and brush, and driving, almost rearing up on their treads, toward companies of infantry who had to hurry out of the way. If there were any wounded lying on the ground, that was their bad luck.

The first phase of the attack was supposed to occur like a flash of lightning, with nothing permitted to hinder the progress of the tanks. An infantry group had just joined us, and their leader was talking with ours when a tank bore down exactly on our position. Everyone jumped aside. A young soldier ran toward the tank, trying to wave it off with large gestures. But the monster continued unswervingly, like a blind animal, churning up the ground a bare two yards from our hillock. In my haste, my foot caught on the spandau, and I fell full length down the other side of the rise. The huge machine flattened the edge of our protection, and the steel sections of its treads rolled past, horribly close to my haggard eyes.

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man onto another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor. . . .

And then there are the cries of officers and noncoms, trying to shout across the cataclysm to regroup their sections and companies. That is how we took part in the German advance, being called through the noise and dust, following the clouds churned up by our tanks to the northern outskirts of Belgorod. All resistance was overwhelmed, and once again everything was either German or dead, and a sea of Russian soldiers had drawn back into the limitless confines of their country.

There were thousands of prisoners-including the pro-Germans, who immediately placed in the hands of our indifferent soldiers lists of those we should shoot. There was the park of Russian vehicles hiding two or three thousand enemy soldiers determined to slow our advance, and the spandau, into which the veteran and I continued to feed cartridges, and Hals's spandau, and the one attached to Group 10, decimated and re-formed, firing and laughing as they fired, in vengeance for their fallen comrades. We sent a rain of anti-tank shells onto the park, and listened to the howls of the Russians, who no longer dared to move or surrender or attack, before flames devoured the area, and forced us to retire from their unbearable heat.

Toward noon, the Soviets began to retaliate, and rained a devastating fire on the rising waves of Jungen Lowen. But nothing stopped the young lions, even for a moment, and the burnt-out ruin of Belgorod fell into the hands of their survivors on the second evening.

In a heady state, near delirium, we went on, with almost no rest, to enlarge the wedge our troops had driven into the mass of the Soviet central front: a front of 150,000 men, according to our so-called information services. In fact, closer to 400,000 or 500,000 Russians were jostled back by 6o,ooo Germans.

By the evening of the third day of continuous battle, during which we had only been able to snatch an occasional half hour of sleep, we were seized by the furious strength of madmen. Our group had lost both the Czech and the sergeant, and as they lay either dead or wounded among the ruins, two grenadiers who had lost their units joined us. We were now split into three groups-including the 11th, in which Olensheim was still alive, and the 17th, which had rejoined us-jointly commanded by a lieutenant. We had been ordered to reduce the pockets of resistance in the ashes of a suburb called Deptreoka, if I remember correctly-enclaves which continued to defend themselves, although they had been left behind by the retreating Soviet forces.

Our faces streaked with dust and filth and sweat stared across the ruined, apocalyptic landscape through which we were advancing, more interested in quiet corners for a few moments of sleep than in Russian strays. Explosions from the forefront of our advance were continuously shaking the air around us, and compressing our weakened lungs. No one spoke, except for an occasional "Halt!" or "Achtung!" which threw us down onto the burning ground. We were so exhausted that we stood up only when our fire had subdued the isolated and hopeless resistance from some entrenched hole. Sometimes one or two prisoners might emerge from their hideout with their hands in the air, and each time the same tragedy repeated itself. Kraus killed four of them on the lieutenant's orders; the Sudeten, two; Group 17, nine. Young Lindberg, who had been in a state of panic ever since the beginning of the offensive, and who had been either weeping in terror or laughing in hope, took Kraus's machine gun and shoved two Bolsheviks into a shell hole. The two wretched victims were both a good deal older than the boy, and kept imploring his mercy. We could hear their desperate shouts for a long time. But Lindberg, in a paroxysm of uncontrollable rage, kept firing until they were quiet.

Then there was the bread house, so called because after the massacre we found a few wretched biscuits there, which we devoured, hoping to extract some return for the horrors which the war forced upon us. We were mad with harassment and exhaustion, running on our nerves, which were stretched to the utmost, and which alone made it possible to respond to the endless succession of crises and alerts. We were forbidden to take prisoners until our return trip. We knew that the Russians didn't take any, and although we longed for sleep we knew that we had to stay awake as long as there were any Bolsheviks in our sector. It was either them or us-which is why my friend Hals and I threw grenades into the bread house, at some Russians who were trying to wave a white flag.

When we reached the end of our sweep, we collapsed at the bottom of a large crater, and stared at each other for a long time in dazed silence. None of us could speak. Our uniforms were unbuttoned, torn, and so permeated with dust they were the color of the ground. The air still roared and shook and smelled of burning. Four more of our men had been killed, and we were dragging along five or six wounded, one of them Olensheim. There were about twenty of us huddled in that huge hole, trying to put our thoughts into some kind of order. But our stupefied eyes continued to wander vacantly over the burned landscape, and our heads remained empty.

The radio announced that our Belgorod offensive had been crowned with success, and marked the beginning of our further progress eastward.

By the fourth or fifth evening, we had gone through Belgorod without even knowing it. Our assault troops were catching their breath, and numberless ranks of infantry were sleeping on the great battered plain. We were soon loaded onto a truck and driven to a key position. I didn't understand why the ruined hamlet where we were put down was considered strategic, but grasped that this was one of the places from which the next phase of our offensive would be launched. The gently rolling landscape of fat-bellied orchards and willow-bordered streams and irrigation canals reminded me somehow of Normandy; it was occupied either by lines of defense or by rallying points for our assault troops.

We began to organize our position among the poor, half-ruined houses of the hamlet. Our first job was to get rid of some thirty Bolshevik corpses scattered through the rubble. We dumped them into a small garden, which must once have been cultivated. The day was hot and heavy. A greasy sun threw sharp shadows, and made us squint in the harsh light, which emphasized every hollow in our exhausted faces. The same light poured down onto the faces of the dead Russians, whose fixed eyes were opened inordinately wide. Looking at them, and thinking about us all, made my stomach turn over.

"Isn't it funny," the Sudeten remarked calmly, "how quickly a fellow's beard grows when he's dead? Look at this one." He turned over a body with his foot. The man's tunic was torn by seven or eight bloody holes. "He probably shaved yesterday, just before he was killed. And look at him now. He's got a beard on him that would have taken him at least a week otherwise."

"See this one," laughed another fellow, who was clearing out a building which had been hit by a heavy mortar shell. He was dragging a Russian soldier whose head had been blown off.

"You'd do better to go and shave yourself, if you want anyone to recognize you when it's your turn tomorrow. You give me a pain with your idiotic remarks. Anyone would think that's the first stiff you've ever seen."

The veteran sat down on a heap of rubble, and opened his mess tin.

We found a cellar which made a perfect defense point and moved into it with our two machine guns. We dug out the air vent which had been blocked by the collapse of the house, and even enlarged it, stopping work for a moment to watch a flight of Stukas pass overhead. Somewhere,

not too far away, Ivan must have been drenched by a rain of bombs. Hals had made a hole in the masonry walls, and was estimating the firing possibilities. Lindberg was almost jubilant to be setting up this precarious shelter.

Everything which now seemed to be working to our advantage stirred him to a strange excitement, in contrast to the helpless fear in the flaming alleys of Belgorod, which had reduced him to whining and pissing in his pants. Three yards away, the veteran and I were shoving in supports to brace the enlarged air vent, which, at best, seemed a shaky proposition. Whenever we moved, our helmets scraped against the low ceiling. Behind us, Kraus and two other grenadiers were removing the fallen stones and rubble which littered the floor. One of them picked up an empty bottle, and with a civilian reflex, stood it against the wall to wait for the harvest.

As I've said, we had lost our noncom, and the veteran, who was an obergefreiter, was now commanding our group. However, we were still under the orders of a fat stabsfeldwebel, who directed all three groups, and who was killed two days later. The bastard checked our work with all the airs of a superior officer, forcing us to check this detail or that, unaware that he had only forty-eight hours left. We spent the day waiting and watching companies of sweating troops march by, against a continuous background of heavy explosions, and a variety of other noises.

It was in precisely these moments that everything became intensely painful. As we slowly regained our spirits, we began to grasp what had happened to us. It suddenly struck us that our noncom, and Grumpers, and the Czech, and the wounded boy abandoned to his fate were in fact no longer with us. We tried to blot out the memory of the Russian trench we had machine gunned, and the tanks driving heavily over that moving mass of human flesh, and Deptreoka, with its piles of Bolshevik corpses, and the hammering of enemy artillery in the narrow streets crammed with Hitlerjugend-all the appalling, inexplicable details. We suddenly felt gripped by something horrible, which made our skins crawl and our hair stand on end. For me, these memories produced a loss of physical sensation, almost as if my personality had split. I knew that I was actually incapable of such experiences-not because I was superior to other people, but because I knew that such things don't happen to young men who have led normal lives more or less like other people's.

The three grenadiers stood talking beside the staircase. The veteran, alone by the air vent, through which floods of sunlight poured into the room, was going through his pockets, spreading out their wretched con tents on a flat stone. Hals had curled his big body onto a rough bench and was lying silent, while Lindberg and the Sudeten were staring through holes in the wall, with their minds clearly far away. I went over to Hals and lay down beside him. We stared at each other for a moment, unable to speak.