Forgotten Soldier (35 page)

But we continued to run for the trees.

"Halt!" the stabs shouted. "Halt, you cowards!"

We had just caught up with the veteran, who had stopped for a minute behind what was left of a tree. I was right beside him.

"You bastard!" the stabs yelled. "I'll report you for this!"

"I know," the veteran said gasping, almost laughing. "But I'd take one of our firing squads over Ivan's bayonet any day."

We began to run again, climbing a pock-marked hillside stripped of its brush.

"Ai-ee," howled the veteran, as Russian bullets struck the earth bank with hollow thuds.

"Hurry, stabs! Quick!" he shouted to our leader, who was still climbing the bank and would never complete his ascent.

"You'll see. We'll stop them when we get to our lines."

The veteran had barely finished speaking when our noncom suddenly cried out and stood up, flapping his arms in an almost comical way. Then he ran back down the little hill and collapsed, with his face pressed into the ground.

"Damned stabs," said the veteran. "I told him to hurry up." Stripped of a leader for the second time, our 8th group continued its flight through the brush, staggering under our load of weapons. "Let's stop for a second," I said. "I can't breathe."

Hals had dropped to the ground, and was trying to regain control of his breath. Behind us we could hear guns popping, and an occasional German projectile falling toward the east.

"As if that would stop Ivan!" said the veteran. "Hasn't anybody told them, for the love of God? Keep moving boys. This is no time to take it easy."

"Thank God you were there," Hals said to the veteran, "or we'd all be dead by now."

"Damn right. Now beat it."

We began to run again, despite the exhaustion which prevented us from grasping the critical importance of every step.

Three other landser joined us.

"You really scared us," one of them said. "We thought you were Bolsheviks."

We came to a small clearing, which we could see at a glance was not a natural glade but the site of one of our munitions dumps which must have been hit the day before by a Russian shell. We found a few fragments of a Pak, but everything else had been burned. A blackened corpse was still tangled in the branches of a fallen tree, some four yards above the ground. Suddenly we were surrounded by a full company of soldiers, ready to attack. A tall lieutenant ran to meet us.

"Sergeant?" he said, without wasting a moment.

"Killed," answered the veteran, pulling himself approximately to attention.

"Damn!" said the officer. "Where've you come from? What company do you belong to?"

"Eighth Group, 5th Company: interception group of the Gross Deutschland Division, Herr Leutnant."

"Twenty-first Group, 3d Company," added the three fellows who'd just joined us. "We're the only survivors."

The officer looked at us, but said nothing. There was a continuous rumble of guns, and from time to time the shouts of the Siberians. "Where's the enemy?" asked the lieutenant.

"In front of you, Herr Leutnant, everywhere. They just poured onto the plain; there must be several hundred thousand, anyway."

"Keep going back. We're not part of the Gross Deutschland. Reattach when you run into one of your own regiments."

We didn't wait for him to repeat himself, but plunged into the brush once again, while the officer turned back to his troops, shouting his orders. We passed many other groups ready for the slaughter, finally arriving at the hamlet where we had organized the defense post in the cellar a short time before. We stopped because a unit from our division had settled in there, but no one knew anything about the 5th Company. We were bombarded with questions, first by officers and then by anxious soldiers, but we were also allowed a few minutes' rest in the shadow of a ruined house, and were brought something to drink. Everywhere, harassed soldiers were digging in, constructing defensive fortifications, camouflaging, checking over what had already been done. Toward noon, we could hear the battle approaching. A salvo from the Russian artillery made us run for the cellar we already knew, where we saw a fat soldier, a Gross Deutschland veteran, dancing and singing as the earth and air shook with explosions. His companions paid no attention to him.

"He's off his rocker," Hals said.

"He was that way already when we got here," someone else explained.

Pretty soon, we too paid no more attention to the fat lunatic who was trying to execute a French cancan.

"He's too much," Hals muttered.

But the madman went right on waving his arms.

In the afternoon, five or six tanks went to meet the Russians, with several groups of grenadiers right behind them. In the distance we could hear fighting, which seemed to go on for about an hour. Then we saw the grenadiers coming back, surrounded by a thick swarm of fleeing soldiers. The woods beyond the orchards were red with fire. Scattered shots were falling all around the gasping soldiers, who were dragging their wounded comrades with them.

We realized that in a short time we would again be on the front line. The battle was drawing continuously closer, with its rumbling explosions and loud bursts of sound, and we felt ourselves gripped once again by the essential, inescapable anguish of the front. The counterattacks of the regiments whose positions we had crossed had been swamped, like our tanks, by the irresistible Soviet flood, for whom the most enormous losses seemed immaterial.

The hamlet had become an important strategic point, jammed with machine guns, mortars, and even an anti-tank gun-which no doubt was the reason for the hell we suffered during the next thirty-six hours. Some sixty yards ahead of us, two holes had been fitted out to hide two spandaus, just in front of the ones manned by the veteran and Hals, which we had re-installed in our position of the day before. To our right, protected by the ruins, a big geschnauz had been set up and was ready to fire, surrounded by some fifty other infantry weapons, rifles, machine guns, and grenade throwers-hidden in the ruins of four or five wooden sheds, or behind piles of wood, or half-collapsed garden fences. A little further along, behind a low wall, some of the soldiers who had fled were being regrouped and set to digging new trenches. To our left, in a trench beside the only structure left more or less intact, a mortar section had set up its position, swelled by numbers of retreating infantry troops, who were reattaching themselves wherever they could. Further to the left and somewhat behind us, above the road which cut through the hamlet, a 50-mm. anti-tank gun protected by earth built up into something like a bunker was aimed toward the orchards, and behind it, somewhat lower down, a radio truck had parked beside the tractor for the gun. We had watched the truck arrive while we were resting.

An endless stream of orders was pouring from our basement shelter.

Officers were regrouping all the fugitives, forming emergency units, and lengthening the line of defense above the hamlet, where there must have been a command post under the authority of a superior officer. From time to time, a bullet fired at random obliged one or another of our groups to dive for the ground. But, compared to what we'd been through the day before, nothing seemed particularly alarming. Only in the distance, about a mile away, violent contact persisted between the last of our retreating troops and advance Russian forces.

The veteran nodded as he listened to the rush above and beyond us.

"Well," he kept saying, "they're trying to make another Siegfried line up there. Do they really think that's how they'll stop the Russkis? You, preacher," he turned to a chaplain, "ask your kind God to send us some lightning to help us out. We could use it, since there doesn't seem to be any artillery."

Everyone laughed, including the chaplain, who was less sure of his arguments now that he'd seen God's creatures tearing each other to pieces without the slightest trace of remorse.

A feld looked into the shelter.

"What the hell's a crowd like this doing in here?"

"Interception Group 8, 5th Company, feldwebel," shouted the veteran, gesturing at the six of us. "The rest invited themselves in a little while ago."

"O.K.," said the sergeant. "Your group stay put, but everybody else out. There are still plenty of holes outside that need to be filled." The other men groaned and got up.

"Feldwebel," said the veteran. "Leave us a couple of extra men to help out, in case some of us are killed. We've got to be able to hold this place."

"O.K." But, before he was able to point to anyone, the fat lunatic who'd been dancing when we arrived proposed himself.

"I was a machine gunner outside Moscow, Herr Feldwebel, and nobody criticized my performance."

"You stay then, and that fellow over there. The rest come with me." So our group was enlarged by the fat man, whom we'd nicknamed "French Cancan," and a thin, gloomy-looking character.

"I beg your pardon," French Cancan said to us. "I hope you'll forgive me for encumbering you with my voluminous presence. You must see that digging a foxhole big enough to take me would be an awful lot of work."

He began to talk, enlarging on anything that came into his head. From time to time, an explosion made him fall silent, blinking his little pig eyes, but as soon as the danger was past he would start talking again, more voluble than ever.

"You can set your mind at ease about the hole we'll dig for you," said the veteran without a smile. "A few stones on your beer sack, and that'll be it."

"I don't drink much beer," said French Cancan. But Hals interrupted him.

"Things must be pretty rough outside," he said. "Look-there are two of our tanks coming back."

"The hell they're ours," said the veteran. "Those are T-34s, and our anti-tank boys had better notice them."

We stared at the two monsters roaring toward us.

"God help us," said Hals. "We'll never be able to reach them with these pop guns." He began to fire the heavy machine gun, and a moment later, the tanks were surrounded by flying clods. We also saw luminous impacts on their turrets, which otherwise seemed to be undamaged. Their long tubes, waving and balancing like elephants' trunks, kept moving forward. An explosion sent us down to the floor, and a Russian shell screamed over us, before exploding somewhere beyond the hamlet. The tanks had just slowed down, and the second one was already shifting into reverse. Our geschnauz was still firing at the two monsters, which were now lurching slowly backward. A second Russian shell hit the left-hand wall of our building, and made the whole cellar shake.

There were several other explosions, but we no longer dared look out. Then an exultant shout from outside gave us a moment of courage, and we saw that the first tank, which had been knocked askew by one of our anti-tank guns, was drawing back, zigzagging on a single tread. It bumped the other tank, which wobbled from the impact, and turned, offering its flank to our geschnauz. A few minutes later, enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke, it joined the other tank, which had completed a half turn, and withdrew. One of them was spouting a thick stream of black smoke, and would certainly not get very far. We could hear all our men cheering.

"You see that, boys!" exclaimed the veteran. "That's how to make Ivan run!"

We all laughed nervously, except the thin, dark boy. "Why are you looking so grim?" Hals asked him. "I'm sick," the other replied.

"You mean scared," the Sudeten said. "But that's something we've all got."

"Sure I'm scared. But I'm sick too. Every time I have to crap, blood pours out of my ass."

"You ought to go to the hospital," said the veteran.

"I've tried, but the major doesn't believe me. What I've got he can't see."

"Yes. I guess a fellow's better off without an arm, or with a big hole somewhere. That's more spectacular."

"Try and sleep," the veteran said. "For the moment, we can do without you."

A mess truck had arrived at the hamlet, and anyone who had the nerve to go out could get his mess tin filled. The simple fact that we were being supplied restored some of our confidence. We felt that we hadn't lost all contact with the outside world. However, our panic returned at nightfall.

The fighting flared up again with renewed violence, and in short order the rest of the German troops were retreating from the Russians, who arrived before the last of the landser were able to get through. We could see the oncoming muzhiks everywhere, outlined against the shattered orchards. They were running toward us shouting, but the noise of our guns covered their voices. A horrible massacre had begun.

In the cellar, filled with smoke from our two spandaus, the air was almost un-breathable. The noise of the anti-tank gun, which must have been red-hot, had enlarged and multiplied the cracks in the ceiling, whose plaster fell onto our helmets like rain.

"Let's take turns firing," the veteran shouted to Hals. "Otherwise, the guns will melt."

Lindberg, whose face had turned the color of his tunic, stuffed some dirt into his ears so that he wouldn't hear any more. A fifth belt of cartridges was running through my torn hands into the red-hot machine, which the veteran kept on firing.

One of the two machine guns in front of us had been knocked out by a grenade. The other was still firing, sweeping across the ranks of Soviet troops, who were piling up in a horrible bottleneck. In spite of their desperate efforts to break through, waves of howling men were dying under our mortar and machine-gun fire. We had no idea what was happening beyond our range of vision. Directly in front of us, however, the enemy was taking a terrible beating.

Two or three fragments of shrapnel had come through the holes in the wall, but miraculously no one had been hit.

Then we heard a heavy rumbling sound, and two or three thousand soldiers ducked their heads a little lower. In front of us, among the living and the dead, hundreds of flares lit the darkness. For a moment, we were terrified. Then someone shouted: "It's our artillery!"

"Thank God," said the veteran. "I'd given up on them. O.K., boys, we'll be able to stick it out-this means the Popovs can't get through."