Arno said:
“Seems to be a long day this one. The operations are continuing. There’s still another line to storm. Located seven kilometres or so ahead. I’m pretty sure we’ll be part of it. Questions…?”
“Well,” Deschner, the man with the moustache, wondered “where’s the rest of the Company?”
Arno too wondered this. But he was lucky – because at that very moment an engine was heard and a handful of SPWs and a Kübelwagen appeared on the road behind them. He pointed at the vehicles:
“There they are. They will pause here too. I just spoke with the Captain over the radio. He said we must wait. Trouble ahead in the lead. The roads are congested. But in time we’ll roll on behind the Kampfgruppe’s Tank Battalion.”
The Company column rolled up into the crossroads and parked untidily. The Captain stepped out of his Kübelwagen and went up to Arno. Arno told the Squad Leaders to join their vehicles. Pause and break until further notice.
Captain Wistinghausen was wearing his usual uniform cap and white windcheater. His face was haggard. He greeted Arno.
“Quiet so far. Here, have a cigarette.”
They both lit up. Then the Captain said:
“Everything has gone well. Thank you, Sergeant. Everything so far, from the storming of the outposts and on. You’ve done well.”
“Thank you,” Arno said. He meant it; he didn’t show his pleasure but it was good to be accepted by his Chief in this offhand way.
The sky was grey. The temperature was only a few degrees below zero but it was a damp, chilly, windy climate, quite uninviting. The whole time you heard gunfire, occasional explosions, various battle sounds. In addition there was the engine noise, the sounds of strained motors running. The Kampfgruppe, Division and Corps, indeed the entire 1st Panzer Armee was on the move. Overall Zhukov had been misled about the general direction of the breakout and some part of the Armee had almost reached safety. But still the bastards were around, attacking and harassing them.
8th Company, grouping in the crossroads, found itself in the second echelon of the breakout force. All they had to do was to wait. Such was the order. The roads were congested.
Second Lieutenants Dion and Shasta arrived. The former was head of 2nd Platoon, the latter head of 1st Platoon. Shasta was of medium height and had a slightly asymmetrical face. He wore a field cap and snow smock and a belt with a holster, containing a 9 mm Walther HP. He clutched a submachine gun. Dion, for his part, was short and compact. He wore his helmet with the chin strap hanging. He wore a Sturmgepäck of brown leather with magazine pouches for his submachine gun, which was slung over his shoulder..
The Captain told them what he had said to Arno. All these officers were part of the Army Reserve. In pre-war times none of them had planned to be an officer. But now they were, they had undergone more than one year of schooling for this. Arno for his part had no leadership training at all. He had learned on the job, from Stalingrad 1942 onward. It was a hard school, but instructive for a man having eyes with which to see with and a head to think.
Arno stubbed out his cigarette and looked around. Deserted moorland, forests and meadows. Distant cannon thunder was heard. Pitch black TNT clouds scudded across the grey sky. The place they stood at was a kind of plateau, with a good view of the surroundings. Here and there you could see a distant stretch of road, along which fighting vehicles were crawling.
The Captain killed his butt, glanced at the clock and said:
“All right, gentlemen. Get loading. Stay in radio contact.”
The platoon leaders returned to their vehicles and made sure that the men, who while they had talked had rested beside the cars, packed themselves back in them.
Arno stepped down into the passenger seat of his vehicle. He checked the radio handset in its cradle on the dashboard. Then it crackled in the earphone. Arno grabbed it.
“All of Spades,” the voice in it said, the voice of the Captain. “From King of Spades. We’re moving out. Order of march: 1st, 2nd, 3rd Platoon. I will advance behind 1st Platoon. Forward. Over.”
Arno confirmed and ordered the driver to start. When the 1st and 2nd Platoon vehicles had passed they too rolled away. Towards freedom. And the Russians blocking their way.
The Company’s ten SPWs plus the Chief’s Kübelwagen were back on the road, heading due north. The engines were strained, the armor bore traces of rust, the gasoline splashed in the tanks. It was orders and counter-orders on the radio, bullshit jargon with the driver in order to lighten the mood and map reading in the fading light of a late winter day. Fighter-bombers circled over the march grouping, AA went into action and explosions were heard.
The AA fire was suddenly drowned by thunder gathering in the distance. It grew to an immense whistling sound that passed over the travelling vehicles. The salvo ended with a series of violent blasts somewhere ahead.
It was prep fire from their own artillery, the Kampfgruppe Artillery Section peppering the line that they would break through, a Russian deployment with anti-tank guns and no doubt other weaponry dug in, blocking their road. What they had just heard was only the first salvo. The rumblings, whizzing and the thunder continued.
Arno picked up his assault gun from the floor and checked that it was fully loaded. It was, of course. Ho-hum, he thought, on through the night…
The column of armoured vehicles rolled on, over the battlefield, under the descending trajectories of the shells. Attack, always attack; such was Arno’s motto even though the war was going backwards for the Germans in general. He had attacked at Stalingrad, attacked to get out of the Kharkov trap, attacked at Kursk and now they attacked themselves out of the Kamenets-Podolsky Pocket. It seemed to be Arno’s way of being, his essence which he projected onto the environment: always attack. Fire and movement as a state.
13
The Height
Some hours later Arno led his platoon through a twilight wood. 8th Company was preparing to storm the Russian position on the ridge. The men advanced on both sides of the road, Arno’s detachment on the right wing, Dion and Shasta on the left. The sound of idling Panzers and SPWs filled the evening air; the road was jammed with armoured vehicles waiting for the block to be removed.
The immediate goal of Arno’s unit was to deploy to a forest edge some 200 metres on this side of the target, the Russian positions on the hill. The enemy had destroyed a number of advancing Panzers. The anti-tank emplacements had to be cleared out by infantry moving ahead on foot. Arno’s men were to await covering mortar prep fire and then, halfway through it, storm the target.
They reached the edge of the forest. Some 10 metres inside the forest proper Arno deployed them line abreast, with the MG squad behind the left wing. Arno placed himself midway between the squads and looked ahead.
First, there was flat ground, overgrown with small trees and bushes. Beyond this, 200 metres away, rose a hillside, the ridge virtually straddling the road. The road itself ran over the field and up the slope, then into a cutting at the top of the crest. The hill, Arno guessed, was about 70–80 metres in height. It was overgrown with pine and birch and had a series of ledges or shelves in the side. It was rocky, difficult terrain. On the top he could make out field-of-fire clearings and the contours of concrete emplacements. So there was the anti-tank position they had to assault and annihilate, clearing the path out of the death trap.
Two broken Panzer IVs and two SPW 251s still smouldered partway across the field. Nearby lay corpses in black uniforms: armoured soldiers. They had tried to save themselves from the wrecks but had been mown down by the Russians grouped on the ridge. In the thicket in front Arno a half-platoon of Panzer Grenadiers lay where they had fallen. Some were still alive, you could hear them moaning. They were Panzer Followers who had made it out of their knocked out 251s, in the process trying to storm this side of the position, but they too had been mown down and stopped in their tracks.