Forgotten Soldier (67 page)

"Don't worry, Frosch," whispered Hals. "We ate it all."

Lindberg hid his face in his hands and wept. I managed with difficulty to read the message scribbled on the sign tied to Frosch's broken neck.

"I am a thief and a traitor to my country."

A short way off, some ten policemen in regulation uniform were standing beside a sidecar and a Volkswagen. As we walked by them, our eyes met theirs.

Part Five

The End

Autumn 1944 to Spring 1945

FROM POLAND TO EAST PRUSSIA

The Volkssturm

The Invasion

One September morning, we found ourselves in a farmyard somewhere in the south of Poland.

The horror of our previous experiences had left us entirely without reaction, and we stared about us with the stunned eyes of someone who has been heavily drugged. A short way off an officer was shouting something at us-a speech or a report-which fell on deaf ears. We stared at the sky, to avoid thinking about the earth, which supported human life. Only an explosion, or perhaps a feld's whistle, could have dragged us from our lethargy.

However, in this district there was at least a semblance of order, and under cover of this last fragment of organization we were trying, as best we could, to recover our strength and some sense of morale.

The Russian thrust to the south was so strong that we had to consider Rumania enemy territory. We should soon be fighting in Hungary too, before Kekskemet, and then in Budapest.

The officer went on with his speech, to talk of a counter-offensive, of regaining control of events, regrouping our troops-even of victory, a word which no longer had any meaning for us. Although we couldn't conceive of the defeat which lay ahead, we understood that victory was not possible. We knew that we would still be obliged to make intense efforts defending some particular, organized positions, but we had no doubt that we could stop the enemy before the German frontier.

Despite our general unease and near-collapse and all our disillusion, we knew that we couldn't simply give up. The looming disaster was inconceivable to us. Even today, survivors of that experience find it difficult to accept all the facts. But, despite our unshakable faith, we all felt temporarily unable to continue fighting; some time off, some rest, was absolutely essential. We were in a state of exhausted collapse, capable of nothing.

"General Friesener has re-established the Southern Front," the officer was shouting. "Our regiments will be re-formed and reinforced by substantial reserves. The enemy must not go any further. You will stop him."

We were divided into groups, companies, and regiments, and loaded into trucks. It seemed there was still gas hereabouts. The Gross Deutschland units were sent north, which surprised us, as the rest of the division or what was left of it-was fighting with Army Group Center. Some units were already with Army Group North, and the two hard-pressed armies were eventually joined.

The trucks took us to a train which was waiting on a single track, sheltered by a pine forest. There was no station. We left in a long string of miscellaneous cars. My group was loaded onto an open platform like the one which had taken me out of Poland and into Russia so long ago. Today there was no need to fear any future in Russia: the Germans had been chased from that country. Today we were going north, slowly and carefully, as the track might be mined, or the sky full of bombs. The train took us to Lodz, where we saw many astonishing things.

We stayed in Lodz for about thirty hours.

The front was very close, and like all towns near the fighting Lodz was full of troops. As in the south, men were being sorted out and regrouped. Thirty, forty, even fifty percent of the names on the regimental lists had to be scratched off. In some cases, men already scratched off as dead or missing reappeared from the void.

The Gross Deutschland had a rallying point at Lodz-a former candy shop stripped of all its wares, the adjoining room for the concierge, and a long corridor. A large panel correctly painted black on white, and a stylized white helmet, the regimental emblem, hung over the door, which was still intact. Two sentries in correct uniform were stationed on either side of the door.

"Here we are," Lensen said. "Back at the Gross Deutschland." For an hour and a half we had been tramping through the city from which nearly all the civilians had gone-looking for this place. Lieutenant Wollers presented the officer at the center with his list of the men with him, including the numbers of their companies, regiments, and groups. There were about two hundred of us.

"Here is the list of men with me, Herr Hauptmann."

"But you're bringing me a bunch of Russkis, Herr Leutnant," the captain said, looking at our motley collection of clothes. Many of us were wearing padded Russian jackets.

"My apologies, Herr Hauptmann. We began to run short of uniforms."

"Very short," said the officer, smiling. "I'm going to send you to the store, and you'll see if there's anything left. You'll have to be quick, because you won't be here long."

In the next street, we found the divisional store, which was still much better stocked than the supply stores of ordinary divisions. Some of our men could be given quite a few of the things they needed. While we waited, we watched a crowd of men, part of a new Volkssturm battalion, swarm into a factory courtyard. When we looked more closely at these men recently called up by the Fuhrer our eyes opened wide with surprise. They all belonged to the last class of reserves and seemed to be an even more extreme case than the Marie-Louise conscripts at the end of the Napoleonic era.

Some of these troops with Mausers on their shoulders must have been at least sixty or sixty-five, to judge by their curved spines, bowed legs, and abundant wrinkles. But the young boys were even more astonishing. For us, who had saved our eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty year-old lives through a thousand perils, the idea of youth meant childhood and not adolescence, which was still our phase of life, despite our disillusion. But now we were looking literally at children, marching beside these feeble old men. The oldest boys were about sixteen, but there were others who could not have been more than thirteen. They had been hastily dressed in worn uniforms cut for men, and were carrying guns which were often as big as they were. They looked both comic and horrifying, and their eyes were filled with unease, like the eyes of children at the reopening of school. Not one of them could have imagined the impossible ordeal which lay ahead. Some of them were laughing and roughhousing, forgetting the military discipline which was inassimilable at their age, and to which they had been exposed for barely three weeks. We noticed some heart-wringing details about these children, who were beginning the first act of their tragedy. Several of them were carrying school satchels their mothers had packed with extra food and clothes, instead of schoolbooks. A few of the boys were trading the saccharine candies which the ration allotted to children under thirteen. The old men marching beside these young sprouts stared at them with incomprehension.

What would be done with these troops? Where were they expected to perform? There was no answer to these questions. Were the authorities going to try to stop the Red Army with them? The comparison seemed tragic and ludicrous. Would Total War devour these children? Was Germany heroic, or insane?

Who would ever be able to judge this absolute sacrifice?

We stood in profound silence, watching and listening to the final moments of this first adolescence. There was nothing else we could do.

Some hours later, we were driven to a new assembly area a few miles from the Vistula, in a town called Medau. There we found a large part of our full division, which had left us in the south long ago. Even our regiment was there, and its officers, with their familiar names. The auxiliary services of our autonomous unit had performed enormous feats of imagination to continue functioning. We were extremely surprised to find that the full Gross Deutschland Division was still quite strong-a discovery that raised our morale considerably. We needed to cling to some form of solidity to avoid recognition of the final tragedy which had engulfed us, and of our strictly limited choice between combat in the most desperate circumstances, captivity, or the end, once and for all. Here, on the banks of the Vistula, which could be considered the cradle of hostilities, we found companies restocked with young boys to fill the gaping holes the war had made in our elite division. We also found some familiar faces, including Wiener, the veteran, who seemed quite astonished that we were all still alive.

"We must really be indestructible," he exclaimed. "When I left you on the second Dnieper front, everything looked so black I really thought I'd never see any of you again."

"Quite a few missing," Wollers said.

"And quite a few still here. Mein Gott, Leutnant!"

We told Wiener that Wesreidau was dead, and Frosch.. . . He too had a list of names we could forget. No matter how intense the grief aroused by any particular name, the expressions on our worn faces never changed.

We pressed Wiener for news of Germany, of civilian life there and the situation of ordinary citizens. We all had reasons for concern and followed the movements of his lips, trying to grasp the implications of his inadequate words.

"I was in the Kansea military hospital in Poland," he told us. "I had lost so much blood and seemed so weak that for two horrible days they did almost nothing about me. I would never have guessed that life had so strong a grip on me. It would have been so easy-one last sigh, and then into the hole. But it didn't happen that way. I groaned and howled for ten days or so-especially the first two-and went through infection, transfusion, disinfection, re-infection, and here I am, back with you again, for another autumn of crap. Now I find the damp hard to take, too. I've got rheumatism, and that's fatal."

As before, the veteran relieved his desperation by cracking jokes.

"But you must have had convalescent leave, didn't you?"

"Yes, Hals. I was in Germany. I went to Frankfurt, not am-Main, but am-Oder. I could have gone further if I'd wanted to, but there wasn't any particular reason. They put us up in a girl's high school-sad to say, without the girls. There wasn't enough to eat, but at least they let us alone. Have you noticed, by the way, that I'm missing an ear?" The veteran grinned sardonically.

When we looked, we saw that his right ear was gone, and that his skin where the ear should have been was a pale, shiny pink, which looked as though it might break at any minute. We had all noticed, with out attaching any particular significance to it. So many men were missing one piece or another that we scarcely registered such things any more.

"Yes," Prinz said. "On that side, you look dead."

The veteran grinned again. "That's because you're so used to stiffs you're beginning to see them even where there aren't any."

"Drop all the crap," Solma shouted, "and tell us about Germany."

"Well ... Yes." There was a moment of silence, which seemed to last forever.

"What's it like in Frankfurt?" asked Feldwebel Sperlovski, elbowing the rest of us aside. (He came from Frankfurt, and his family was probably still there.)

The veteran was no longer looking at us. He seemed to be staring into his own interior.

"The high school was on the east banks of the Oder, up on a hill. You could see a big piece of the town from there. It was all gray-the color of dead trees-with walls sticking up here and there, all black from the smoke of fires. People were living down there, like landser in the trenches."

As Sperlovski listened his face began to twitch, and his voice trembled as he spoke. "But our fighters . . . and flak . . . wasn't there any defense?"

"Of course ... but so out of proportion . . ."

"Don't worry too much, Sperlovski," Wollers said. "Your family was certainly evacuated to the country."

"No," Sperlovski shouted in a voice of despair. "My wife wrote me that she had been conscripted and had to stay in town. No one has the right to leave his job."

Wiener knew very well what effect his words must have on an audience starved for good news, but nothing seemed to distress him any more.

"It's total war," he said, like an automaton. "Nothing and no one will be spared, and German soldiers must be able to endure everything." Sperlovski walked away. He looked stunned. His eyes were glazed, and his steps faltered, as if he were drunk.

German soldiers would have to endure everything, in the world we had created. We were fitted only for that world, and were otherwise inadaptable. Lensen was as still as stone, and listened, stony-faced.

"Is it the same for all our towns?" Lindberg asked. He must have been thinking of his town, by Lake Constance.

"I don't know," the veteran said. "It's possible."

"You certainly know how to raise morale," said Hals in irritation.

"Do you want the truth, or a fairy story?"

I felt as though I were wandering through a landscape shrouded with fog and strewn with rubble. I knew that I could never manage to be disappointed again. Before mourning with the suffering world, I would somehow have to regain my balance. Of course I thought of Paula, but it was so long since I had heard anything from her that I wondered if I would even be capable of reading a letter if we should suddenly get mail. I was filling up with bad news like a barrel filling with water from a rainpipe. When the barrel is full to overflowing, all the torrents in the world are incapable of adding to its capacity.

We found ourselves in one of the rare trains still moving through that region, rolling toward East Prussia through the first frosts of our third winter of war-the fifth or sixth for some of the older men. We moved at night, with all our lights out, as Russian planes, which occupied our bases in Poland, were particularly active by day. We were moving toward Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Courland front, to which the remnants of several German divisions were clinging.