Forgotten Soldier (59 page)

"It seems we're getting ready for a big show," Pferham observed. "I don't like it."

Obergefreiter Lensen took the opposite view, rejoicing in our increased strength. As he saw it, the Red tide must be stopped here. The idea that Prussia itself would soon fall into enemy hands never even crossed his mind. But then, that was true of all of us.

One night, the Russians sent a human wave of Mongols in a direct assault against our positions. Their function was to knock out the minefield, by crossing it. As the Russians preferred to economize on tanks, and as their human stockpile was enormous, they usually sent out men for jobs of this kind.

The Soviet attack failed, but Stalin hadn't been looking for success. The minefield exploded under the howling mob, and we sent out a curtain of yellow and white fire to obliterate anyone who had survived. The fragmented cadavers froze very quickly, sparing us the stench which would otherwise have polluted the air over a vast area.

The Russians had not even used any of their artillery to help the Mongols, which seemed to confirm our estimate of the situation. We sent out patrols to try to re-mine the field, but the Russians were ready to fire on anything that moved. We were able to put down only a light sprinkling of mines, with regrettably heavy losses. It was clearly no longer possible to rely on mines to protect our front lines.

On another evening, when the cold had attained a dramatic intensity, the Russians attacked again. We were manning our positions in a temperature which had dropped to 45° below zero. Some men fainted as the cold struck them, paralyzed before they even had a chance to scream. Survival seemed almost impossible. Our hands and faces were coated with engine grease, and when our worn gloves were pulled over this gluey mixture, every gesture became extremely difficult. Our tanks, whose engines would no longer start, swept the spaces in front of them with their long tubes, like elephants caught in a trap.

The muzhiks preparing to attack us were suffering in the same way, freezing where they stood before there was time for even one "Ourrah pobieda." The men on both sides, suffering a common martyrdom, were longing to call it quits. Metal broke with astonishing ease. The Soviet tanks were advancing blindly through the pale light of flares, which intensified the bluish glitter of the scene. These tanks were destroyed by the mines which lay parallel to our trenches some thirty yards from our front lines, or by our Tigers, which fired without moving. The Russian troops, with frozen hands and feet, faltered and withdrew in confusion in the face of the fire we kept steady, despite our tortured hands. Their officers, who had hoped to find us paralyzed by cold and incapable of defense, were unconcerned about the condition of their own troops. They were ready to make any sacrifice, so long as our lines were attacked.

I managed to keep my hands from freezing by thrusting them, in their gloves, into two empty ammunition boxes, when the cartridges had run into the spandau. Our gunners, and everyone forced to use his hands, sooner or later turned up at the medical service with severe cases of freezing. There were a great many amputations.

The intense cold lasted for three weeks, during which the Russians restricted themselves to sending over music calculated to make us homesick, and speeches inviting us to surrender.

Toward the end of January, the cold lessened somewhat, and became tolerable. At times during the day the thermometer rose as high as five degrees above zero. The nights were still murderous, but with frequent shifts of duty we managed to get through them. We knew that the Russian offensive would soon resume. One night, or rather one morning, toward four or five o'clock, blasts of the whistle sent us out once again to our interception posts.

A mass of T-34 and Sherman tanks were moving forward in a loud roar. An artillery bombardment had preceded them, inflicting heavy damage on Boporoeivska, and provoking a mass evacuation by the civilian population, which had been waiting for the fighting in terrified apprehension. Our tanks-about fifteen Tigers, ten Panthers, and a dozen Mark-4s and -3s-had managed to start their engines, which had been heated continuously the day before. At the beginning of the offensive, two Mark-4s had been destroyed side by side in the Russian bombardment. The front was once again threatening to give way. We lay in our trenches, our eyes reduced to slits, waiting for the hordes of Red infantry which would surely be coming soon. For the moment our machine guns and Panzerfausts were quiet, leaving the way clear for our heavy artillery and our tanks.

Adroitly camouflaged, the Tigers lay waiting, with their engines idling. Almost every time a Russian tank came into range, a sharp, strident burst set it on fire. The Russians were moving toward us slowly, sure of themselves, firing at random. Their tactic of demoralization would have worked if there had not been so many plumes of black smoke rising against the pale February sky. Our 37s and Panzerfausts, designed to be used at almost point-blank range, were scarcely called on. The first wave of Soviet armor was consumed five hundred yards from our first positions, nailed down by the concentrated fire of our Tigers and Panthers and heavy anti-tank guns.

The Tiger was an astonishing fortress. Enemy fire seemed to have almost no effect on its shell, which, at the front was five and a half inches thick. Its only weakness was its relative immobility.

A second Russian wave followed closely after the first, more dense than the first, and accompanied by a swarm of infantry which posed a serious threat.

We waited, dry-mouthed, our guns jammed against our shoulders and our grenades in easy reach. Our hearts were pounding.

Suddenly, like a miracle, thirty of our planes flew over. As promised, the squadron from Vinnitsa was attacking. This particular job was easy for them, and every bomb hit home.

A cry of "Sieg Heil, der Luftwaffe," rang so loudly from our trenches that the pilots might almost have heard it. We opened fire with everything we had, but the Russian offensive kept coming, despite over whelming losses. Our tanks drove at the stricken enemy with an ardor worthy of 1941.

The noise became unbearable. The air was thick with bitter fumes and smoke, and the smells of gunpowder and burned gasoline. Our shouts mingled with the shouts of the Russians, who were reeling under the unexpected resistance.

We were able to watch the magnificent progress of our Tigers, pulverizing the enemy tanks before they were able to complete a half turn. The Luftwaffe attacked again with rockets and 20-mm. cannons. The Russian rout was hidden by a thick curtain of luminous smoke.

The Russian artillery kept on firing at our lines, causing several deaths which we scarcely noticed. However, their guns were soon overrun by their own retreating troops, and fell silent.

A second wave of German planes, an undreamed-of extra luxury, completed the Russian debacle. We hugged each other in excitement, bursting with joy. For a year now, we had been retreating before an enemy whose numerical superiority was constantly increasing. Lensen was shouting like a man possessed by demons: "I told you we'd do it! I told you we'd do it!"

Our achievement was mentioned in special bulletins. The front on the Rumanian border had held. After months of sustained attack and terrible cold German and Rumanian troops had once again pushed back the Russian offensive and destroyed quantities of enemy materiel.

The mass of broken, twisted metal strewn with corpses which lay in front of us was visible proof of what we'd done. Along a front of two hundred miles, the Red Army had launched sixteen attacks inside of a month. Taking into account the three weeks of inactivity during which all operations were impossible, these sixteen attacks had all occurred inside the space of one week. Five points had borne the brunt of the Russian effort, and at only one had the Russians come close to success.

The front was broken to the south, but this thrust was cut off, and the Russian troops were either annihilated or taken prisoner.

In our sector all the lines had held, and we felt very proud. We had proved once again that with adequate materiel and a certain minimum preparation we could hold off an enemy of greatly superior size, whose frenzied efforts were never intelligently employed. .

The veteran, Wiener, had often remarked on this Russian failing at difficult moments. At the sight of an enemy tank in flames, he would bare his teeth in a wide, wolfish grin.

"What a damned fool," he would say, "to let himself get caught like that. It's only their numbers that will get us someday."

There were thirty Iron Crosses for the Gross Deutschland, and as many for the small tank regiment, which also earned the honor.

RETURN TO POLAND

The division had been routed several times, and had sustained serious losses. Units believed to be intact were often borrowed from us, and sent to bolster some faltering position. When they arrived they would be found short by about two-thirds of their strength. There was nothing to be done about it.

Our own group was enjoying a much-needed spell of relative calm. Our existence would have been almost idyllic except for the depressing and infuriating quality of barracks life. The exercises we were given, as if we were green troops in for basic training, brought us close to open revolt.

We had moved 250 miles, to a position in Poland, far from the front. Our camp was on the banks of the Dniester, some fifty miles from Lvov, in the foothills of the Carpathians. The river is quite narrow at this point, and its waters, when we arrived, were swift and tumultuous, running through a network of small islands loaded with snow and ice. On any wide stretch the river was frozen to a considerable depth, and the current ran beneath the ice, giving off a strange, muffled noise.

Our view was magnificent: a pale blue sky and a horizon marked by snow peaks, against which we could watch flights of eagles. For two months we enjoyed the agreeable change from the black and gray of a Ukrainian winter to the sportive landscape of eastern Galicia. Galician snows were also very heavy, and the cold was severe, but we slept in clean, heated barracks. Although an exaggerated sense of economy kept the heat at some fifty degrees or so, this at least enabled us to be fully alert when we were awake. Our camp was huge and organized with all the Prussian rigor of an army on the eve of battle. About 150 wooden buildings without floors had been built in blocks, carrying numbers and letters. Nearby, in the snow-covered woods, we could see a large stone building, which must have been part of the village beside the camp, and which housed our secretariat and principal officers. All our materiel had been repainted and overhauled. In these conditions of order and apparent abundance, none of us dreamed that Germany had reached the limit of its capacities. After the chaos of the front, the atmosphere of efficient organization, with its requirement that every move be registered in writing, made us feel like wild beasts suddenly caged.

The camp was built around a large central square for reviews and drills, in which young recruits were instructed in the art of manipulating arms, so useful in parades and so useless at the front.

The young recruits seemed to enjoy these exercises. Others, like Hals and me, were seeing ourselves as we had been a year and a half ago, back in Poland, where we had handled explosives for the first time. The memory of those days seemed at least ten years old-one ages quickly in wartime. Our world-weary attitude did not escape the attention of the young recruits, who responded by holding themselves even more stiffly, as if to show us that the war was now their affair.

This healthy enthusiasm of schoolboys suddenly transformed into soldiers was destined to weaken somewhat after a few nights in the mud and the shock of seeing a field hospital for the first time. We had been through all that. They would soon learn that war. does not always create the same exaltation as the intoxicating explosion of the plaster grenades in the war games of training camp.

The Fuhrer, who was now scraping the bottom of the barrel, had been forced to send his arrogant Polizei off to war. These elderly new recruits were having a hard time of it. The sight of policemen crawling through the mud on their bellies delighted us enough so that we almost forgot our sufferings. Police officers, whose competence in war was limited, handed over their men to officers of the Wehrmacht, who put them through the works. This spectacle, which gave us so much pleasure, was hard on the eager young recruits, directly exposed to the bad humor of those bastards who did everything they could to keep the younger men in a state of inferiority.

For us, life was also very far from perfect. Before settling into our new quarters, there had been a long and difficult journey. We had begun by tramping more than thirty miles on bad Russian roads, deeply rutted and coated with ice. Then we were loaded onto trucks, and driven as far as Mogilev, an oriental-looking town, where we boarded two trains, both in very bad condition, for the remainder of the journey, along the Bessarabian frontier, to Lvov, in Poland. From Lvov, trucks had brought us to the camp, where we had stumbled out, exhausted and filthy, under the suspicious gaze of polished, healthy officer-instructors.

We were allowed forty-eight hours to rest, before our clothes and equipment had to be in perfect order. At our first inspection, the condition of our uniforms shocked the inspectors, although we had brushed and beaten them as hard as we could. They had completely lost their original color and appearance. Gray-green had become greenish piss yellow, decorated by tears and holes and reddish-brown burns. Our worn and crumpled boots had lost their black finish, and many were without heels or laces. We looked like a bunch of tramps, and the inspectors were ready to jump at the slightest sign of negligence. These evident traces of the battlefield struck them like slaps in the face, to which there was no answer. Those fops should, in fact, have been honoring us.

They knew it too, and the knowledge irritated them. They persisted in picking on details to try to save face. A short way off, sections of police and students in camouflage uniforms were marching to their daily sweat baths, singing gaily in the dry, cold air, which had brought out the color in their cheeks.