The platoon was advancing with Arno in the lead. Going by the book, a unit commander was supposed to have a private in front of him on point, but he preferred it this way. He was their leader, and he wasn’t going to die in this war.
Shasta’s platoon trudged along on the right. And Dion brought up the rear with a rifle squad made up of unoccupied mortar crewmen. They were advancing through the gloom, chasing the enemy, giving him no time to regroup. Suddenly, Deschner thought that he saw something move in front of him in the murky wood. With gestures and hasty, whispered orders, he brought his support weapons into position. The two MG 34s opened fire, muzzle flashes lighting up the tree trunks and the snow-covered ground. With rapid bursts of three or four round and alternate firing between the two weapons, a storm of lead tore through the wood to cover their advance.
Thus it continued for a while: forward and cover, fire and movement. Bauer’s and Karnow’s squads followed in their wake. They seemed to have something in front of them, the sound of scattered hostile fire reaching them from time to time, the rapid sound of Pepesjas accompanied by the echo of single rifle shots that rang out from time to time.
Soon they reached a large pit some 200 metres across, a natural feature created at the end of the last Ice Age. The thought came to him from nowhere, from something he’d read in his old life, back in the dream days. Arno pushed the thought away. Concentrate! These men depend on my wits to stay alive!
They stayed at the top and fired between the trees, down into the pit. During a pause in the firing they heard the sharp rattle of an MG ahead.
”It’s the rest of the battalion!” Arno said. “That’s the barrier. Ivan’s trapped.”
Arno took Deschner’s squad and positioned it 100 metres away on the left wing. Arno thought the enemy would try to escape in this direction. And indeed. After a few minutes movement was spotted down in the pit, men rushing towards the south. Arno commanded fire. The “electric rifles,” the MG 34s, fired belt after belt of 7.92 into the cornered Russians. The steel scythes reaped another harvest.
Arno drew his flare pistol and fired a shot. A white ball exploded in the sky; shadows moving slowly as the illumination shell drifted to the ground. The MG fire was joined by the rest of the platoon opening up with their StGs. The last fleeing Russians were cut to pieces in the crossfire. As Arno had planned.
Finally, the soldiers went down in the pit and gave the coup de grace to the wounded. Unusually, a few Russians, having surrendered their weapons, were spared and sent back. But back to what? 1st Army was a movable entity in a hostile land, a panzer amoeba, a hedgehog defensive position heading west; there were no rear lines here. This made “taking care of surrendering enemies” difficult, even if you wanted to obey the ‘rules’. If the three frightened teenagers had any sense, they’d try to hide until the fight had rolled on.
Wistinghausen on the radio. He ordered the Company to regroup on the road. Once there, reunited with their vehicles, the weary men were driven for an hour until they reached a village. Some slept. Some smoked and stared at nothing in the dark.
In the village, accommodation had been commandeered and allocated by the Battalion Supply Company. As usual, they requisitioned accommodation in the civilian houses that had survived. Civilians still lived in them, Ukrainian peasants. Now they had to provide shelter for the battalion as best as they could. Arno’s platoon got quarters in an earth-floored barn. Not what you could call warm, but dry, and much better than the forest floor or a hole scooped in a snow drift.
The billeting was a forced process but this night it went without frictions. Apart from anything else, the Ukrainians had got used to this two and a half years ago, and – whatever they now thought of the Germans – they still hated the Bolsheviks for the artificial famine with which they had killed millions just ten years earlier.
Sleeping on straw in the Ukrainian barn, Arno dreamed. He was in a vault, looking in coffins and funeral urns, searching for a scroll he knew he must find. And finally he unearthed it, a rather large, ancient object, papyrus rolled up on two coils.
In his dream Arno, sitting in a stone chamber high in a tower, studied the scroll. As he pored through its apocryphal characters, he suddenly had the insight for which he was searching; he understood everything. Everything. And then, when he awoke in the pre-dawn cold, he had forgotten everything. But the feeling that life could be understood remained with him. The philosopher in him had taken another step towards clarity.
Three days later, on April 5, the battalion found itself in the middle of nowhere, at the ruins of a place called Rissnovsk. They had continued the march northwest and now paused at a crossroads, bordered by burned down houses. There, at two o’clock, Arno sat on an ammunition box. Made of wood and it was 30 cm long, 17 cm wide, 12 cm high and had carrying handles made of rope. It was grey-green. Packets of 9 mm ammo had been stored in it. German ammunition. It was empty.
Arno had taken off his M/35 helmet; it lay on the ground in front of him, in itself a meaningful hieroglyph with its white fabric cover now being quite dirty. Arno found himself with the rest of the company at a Ukrainian crossroads. Another Nowhere Place in Nowhere Land.
Arno meditated. He forced himself to breathe calmly. It was a demonstration of willpower. You never begin to meditate by chance; you decide to meditate. It’s a case of mind over matter. And it starts with taking control of your breathing. This was Arno’s train of thought as he sat on the ammo box.
After a night by the ruined village, each man got a meagre breakfast ration slopped into his mess tin. Then the Battalion continued its advance towards Tarnopol. There followed a few uneventful days, in which they just rolled on through the mud. Over forest-lined fields, over hills and across raging rivers.
Slowly but surely they were heading for their main lines. They seemed to be practically out of the pocket now, hostile encounters were much less frequent. But they weren’t in Tarnopol yet, the city was still some way off. They had passed other ruined villages, burned down by the Reds to deny them shelter and supplies on their way. It was only a transit region, of no tactical value to anyone.
This latest crossroads was lined with ruins, a few rough brick chimneys standing lonely amid ashes and the charred remains of roof timbers. Ash stirred in the breeze. 100 metres off in the background was a forest edge of spruce and birch. Smoke drifted over the deserted plain. Out in a field stood one single, majestic, leafless oak. In the sky, grey clouds gathered. The Company rank and file were sitting listlessly around the haphazardly parked SPWs. It was like a real-life, open-air scene from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
They were waiting for the SPWs to be refueled, dependent on the arrival of a truck laden with jerry cans that was supposed to arrive several hours earlier. Kampfgruppe G had a Supply Battalion that worked in curious ways and travelled on mysterious roads.
They sat and waited. Arno fell to thinking of his land of birth, his Nordic homeland. Sweden. Strange thoughts, quite out of context. An advertising jingle: “Sandvikens bågfilsblad, går lätt, skär lätt”… (“Sandviken hacksaw blade – runs easily – cuts easily”). He felt close to tears. It was the memory of a language, his own language, his language of birth, mother tongue. He rarely thought of his parents. Rarely thought of the unreal days before the reality of The War.