Forgotten Soldier (54 page)

The night wore on. The noise of the Russian advance changed in quality and intensity, but never stopped. The men who had been resting in the isbas came back to their forward positions. Everyone was now in the line. Even the auxiliary services had been organized to defend the village. The front was long and thin; our division alone held some sixty miles, with the regiments standing elbow to elbow. There were a great many of us, but at least thirty times as many of them.

Our anxiety hovered over us like a pessimistic exhalation trapped by our heavy steel helmets. Our breath condensed on our nostrils and lips, and on the upturned collars of our coats. For a long time now, our hands and feet had been hurting us. For the moment, stiffened by cold, they seemed detached and separate from our general nervous tension. On other evenings, the fellows moved about in their holes to keep from freezing. This evening, however, our cumbersome overshoes had been tossed aside, and everyone was still. The biting cold passed over us like a silent dream, depositing a film of frost on the earth and on us. Periodically, we had to clear our weapons, and every time the touch of the icy metal struck us like an electric shock. To the east, the Russian troops were silent. All we heard from their side was the disquieting roar of their engines.

Occasionally, we heard a horse whinnying: one of our starving beasts protesting the onset of death. The desire for sleep weighed on us as heavily and oppressively as our fear and the cold, and kept over whelming us for five and even ten minutes at a time, despite our wide-open eyes. Then we would jolt back to reality, to wait for the first hours of morning-a time when men and animals often die of cold.

The Russians were taking their time. Since we had caught the first sounds of their new front, a full day had gone by, but nothing more had happened. Had we possessed sufficient strength and equipment, a counter-attack would almost surely have been successful. But our orders were simply to resist and hang on. We were operating on a system of four hours on and four hours off, organized so that a maximum number of men was in the line at any given moment. Many men fell asleep beside their guns, to wake suddenly, badly frozen. We were steadily losing sick and wounded men, who withdrew on foot or on horseback-and no reinforcements were arriving to fill the gaps.

"It's a racket," grumbled the veteran.

At dusk, we found Lindberg naked from the waist down. He had gone off a short distance, supposedly to crap, and had stayed that way for nearly three-quarters of an hour. By the time we found him, he was crying like a baby, and he wouldn't have lasted much longer. Hals blew up at him, and let him have it on the backside and thighs with the strap of his gas mask.

By the next morning, the Russians had still not attacked. We had grown steadily colder and more nervous, and it was difficult to seem calm.

One of our planes flew over, and dropped four sacks of mail. I had four letters: two from my family, and two from Paula. All were very out of date-particularly one of the letters from France, which was more than a month old. I devoured Paula's letters, which seemed filled with sadness. She had been sent to a small factory out in the country some forty miles from Berlin. She said that life in the capital was no longer possible.

What was I supposed to think? What could I imagine?

My parents' letter, with the standard two-line refrain from my father, irritated me by its tone of unjustified complaint. I mentioned this to Wiener, who replied: "That's all the French know how to do-complain."

My mother's last letter astounded me by its lack of realism. The poor woman begged me to take care of myself, to avoid showing off, to do my duty, but nothing more-to protect myself from meaningless risks. This sort of advice seemed so irrelevant that for the moment I was staggered. I looked up from the letter, yellow against the snow, to the whiteness which veiled the appalling danger threatening us from the east. The pathetic futility of my mother's attitude made my eyes fill with tears.

Everyone seemed to be reading a letter whose contents were so unexpected that fellows far older than I were overcome by tears. Others jumped to their feet, screaming like madmen: a close relative or friend had been killed in an air raid.

"This mail is only upsetting everyone," said a tall fellow next to me, as he looked at a friend who was weeping like a child.

It seemed we were to be spared nothing.

In the afternoon, some patrols were sent out into the whirling snow. Our command had grown tired of waiting and had decided to test the enemy. We heard a few shots, and then the patrols came back, reporting that they'd seen a heavy concentration of Russian materiel.

I and my comrades were wakened just before nightfall. With pounding hearts, we ran to our forward positions. The Russian tanks were rolling through the storm, and we could feel the vibration of their treads against the frozen ground.

Our anti-tank gunners and men with Panzerfausts kept their eyes glued to their telescopic sights, which they had to wipe continually. A few anti-tank trenches had been dug, but these were ludicrously inadequate both in number and size. We knew that if our anti-tank defenses gave way, we were lost, and we nervously clenched our fingers around the anti-tank grenades and magnetic mines which had been distributed.

At the Pak we were protecting, Olensheim, Ballers, Freivitch and others were ready to work the gun. Our visibility had been seriously reduced by falling snow. To the north of us, an S.M.G. had just opened fire. The rumbling of tanks was louder than ever, but the tanks themselves were still invisible. To the north, fighting had already begun, and we could see flashes of light despite the thickly whirling snow and the rapidly growing darkness. Short bursts of anti-tank fire lashed the plain, producing a curious muffled echo. As the roar of tanks grew louder, we felt our lungs lift. Long flames ran the length of the horizon, while others rose vertically, illuminating at different levels the whirling masses of falling snow. Then the sound of tank engines in full acceleration, shattered the night and our eardrums. Five vaguely defined monsters loomed out of the darkness, rolling parallel to our line of defense. Our anti-tank crew was already firing. Wiener calmly steadied the butt of his F.M. against his shoulder, and I felt myself stiffen with a thousand indescribable terrors. Flashes of yellow light burst against the lead tank in the group of T-34s, whose turrets were pointed toward our line. Five shells had already left white traces on the huge machine, which otherwise appeared to be unaffected by the efforts of our anti-tank gunners.

A tank was roaring past us, at a distance of about ten yards. We heard a howling sound, and a shell from a Panzerfaust burst against its side. The monster immediately reduced its speed, and thick black smoke began to seep from every joint, to be lashed to the ground by the wind. The hatches opened, clanging back against the heavy metal plates. We could hear shouts and cries, which were quickly drowned by a powerful explosion. The turret disintegrated, leaving fragments of human beings suspended from the shattered metal in colors ranging from purple to gold. But there were no cries of triumph from our position-only the barking voice of our Pak. One of our shells hit a joint on the back of a second tank, and it too began to pour smoke. Then the cartridges were running through my fingers. Everyone who escaped from the immobilized tank was shot down without mercy. For a moment, we breathed more easily. By now, our surroundings were lit by flames and we were able to see the Russian tanks before they got so close. One of them had actually crossed our lines, and as it drew near us, we could feel our hair stiffening with terror. The anti-tank crew were working as fast as they could. Within three seconds, their gun was facing this new threat, and a shell, fired at the earliest possible instant, was bursting against the enemy's front apron. At the moment of impact, the engine stopped, and then began to scream, as if it had been thrown out of gear. Simultaneously, somewhere to our right, we were aware of two brilliant flashes, and heard a long-drawn-out explosion. Another tank began to fire at us, and large pieces of frozen earth hurtled into the air.

I no longer knew what was happening. The tank to our right burst into flames, groaning at all its seams.

"Fur den Panzerfaust: Sieg Heil! Heil!" someone shouted.

Our gunners were now firing at the second tank which had penetrated to our rear, and which seemed to be having mechanical difficulties. Then its left side disintegrated in a prolonged explosion. But our attention was drawn to a hallucinating spectacle farther to the rear. A T-34 had driven over one of our positions, crushing our men under its treads. One of our half-tracks, armed with an anti-tank machine gun was chasing it from behind, firing as rapidly as it could. Our anti-tank crew were in trouble. Freivitch was wounded, perhaps even dead. We fired our machine guns at the Russian monster, which never slackened its speed but continued to make for its lines as fast as possible. Two shells fired by other tanks exploded beside our half-track, and a third disintegrated it right in front of us. But the enemy tank, believing it was still pursued, vanished into the whirling snow.

The Russian armored assault was over. It had lasted for about half an hour, and had clearly been testing our defenses. A certain number of tanks had been disabled or destroyed; their losses were visibly greater than ours. Unfortunately, these losses counted for nothing compared to the vast armada regrouping opposite us. For us, although quantitively our losses were smaller, the destruction of four anti-tank positions in our sector was extremely serious.

For the moment, the tension dropped somewhat. Trench telephones rang, asking for reports, and voices shouted for the stretcher-bearers who were running and sliding across the icy ground. The veteran slid to the bottom of our hole and lit a cigarette, despite the ban. Hals jumped down and joined us.

"I just heard that Wesreidau's bunker was crushed by a T-34," he said, gasping.

We gaped at him, waiting for more information.

"Stay here," the veteran said finally. "I'll go and see."

"Achtung! Zigaretten!" warned Hals.

"Danke."

The veteran extinguished his butt, and tucked it into the cuff of his sleeve. He reappeared half an hour later.

"We had to dig for ten minutes before we could get Wesreidau out," he told us. "He's all right, and so are the two other officers-just a few scratches. But the fellow from liaison outside was killed. He must have panicked and tried to get inside. We found his body in the rubble."

We quickly suppressed that mangled vision to rejoice that our hauptmann was safe. We all felt very attached to him, and dependent on his survival.

By next morning, the snow had stopped. The plain was strewn with the carcasses of wrecked tanks, which the storm had not entirely covered

-at least twenty in the immediate vicinity of our position. Parts of these huge black cadavers, still warm from the fires which had burned over and through them, had turned red in the intensity of the flames. It seemed that the Russians had attacked our line at four points, separated by intervals of fifteen miles. One of those had been centered directly on our position, which was held by six companies. The other three were farther to the north.

We went back into the line at eight o'clock. Everything was motionless and muffled, under a low, dark sky, as opaque and heavy as a lead roof. Nowhere else have I seen skies quite like the skies of Russian winter. We used to stare up, amazed by the oppressive solidity. The diffused light seeping slowly downward made everything look unreal. Our reversible winter overalls stood out against the immaculate new snow a dingy piss yellow. A great many men were already wearing all the winter clothes we'd been issued: coat, vest, sheepskin, etc., which made their movements slow and clumsy. As the overalls had not been cut to cover so much bulk, they often tore. We looked like a collection of filthy, tattered pillows.

Despite our sense of inferiority, we all felt much less tense. The carcasses of the Russian tanks looked to our otherwise pessimistic eyes like the slaughtered beasts of a triumphant hunting scene. We all knew that it had not been a serious attack; nonetheless, we had managed to hold off the enemy's most dangerous machines. The possibility that the Russian tanks had been ordered not to advance any further occurred only to the veterans among us. All the younger men preferred to believe that we had stopped them. A few bottles of alcohol theoretically reserved for wounded men were opened by the captain himself, and that evening we celebrated in the isbas. In our hut we particularly honored our Panzerfaust team.

In the dim, wavering light of seven or eight candles, we drank to the healths of Obergefreiters Lensen, Kellermann, and Dunde. Grenadiers Smellens and Prinz touched glasses with Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau, who wore a large dressing on his left hand, and two others on his face. There were also two wounded men lying on stretchers, to whom we gave as many cigarettes as they wished.

Hals, exuberant as always, was describing the battle, miming certain scenes with sweeping gestures of his left arm and hand, which held his glass, while with his right he vigorously scratched his arm pits, which swarmed with lice. Lindberg, as always when things were going well for us, was in a state of high excitement. Cowardice had affected him more than anybody else, and his face, although it looked as young as ever, bore the traces.

Several men had fallen asleep, despite the noise. Everyone who stayed awake was soon quite drunk. As always at a German celebration, several fellows began to sing-marching songs, because we knew hardly any others. In the shadowy light of the isba, the scene looked fantastic and unreal.

The veteran began a Russian song. None of the rest of us understood him. We didn't know whether we were listening to a Revolutionary song or a song from the friendly Ukraine-although the distinction no longer mattered, as our Ukrainian days were over.

Everyone was singing whatever he liked, as part of a continuously increasing uproar. Hals had been twisting my arm to sing something in French, and I obliged, despite a growing desire to vomit, adding the "Sambre et Meuse" and a series of more or less obscene songs to the general discord.