Arno slept and he dreamed. He dreamed that he was sitting on a patio overlooking a valley with dense foliage, almost like a jungle. Next to him sat his soul guide Ringo Badger, clad in his usual garb: pointed cap, green tunic and boots.
“What am I doing?” Arno said.
“You’re fighting in an army,” the Badger said.
“True, I do,” Arno said. “The army that is all armies. A symbolic army.”
Birds flew over the valley. The sky was purple.
“I’m a symbolic warrior in a symbolic army,” Arno said. “A myth, not a man.”
“The Eternal Soldier. An archetype.”
“An archetypal soldier I am.”
“What’s your motto?”
“I Am.”
“Only that?”
“Mm-hm.”
Arno woke up in his quarters and found himself thinking instantly of practical matters. A pistol can load eight shots, a submachine gun 32, an StG 30 and an MG band after band of 50 rounds. For the latter you put together several bands, for example five, resulting in a band of 250 rounds. Once in position you fire ’em, replace the pipe when it is too hot, continue to shoot.
He yawned and lay on his back, looked up at the ceiling and imagined ways to die, like a samurai should do. The best way to start the day: to die!
Start your day with a hit song,
Start your day by dying …
Thus he imagined dying by a sniper’s bullet, a shot out of thin air that hits you when you least expect it. Then he thought of dying by an armour-piercing grenade smashing into the cabin of a Kübelwagen; by an ambush from an unsuspected angle; by an explosive shell when lying at storming distance, not so nice, no, just the opposite in fact: there you lie, ready to storm and then you get perforated by shrapnel, bleed and die.
Other ways of dying were: Being torn apart by a burst from an automatic; being shredded to pieces by 7.62 bullets; by stepping on a mine, getting a leg torn off and dying of blood loss – and so on. By thinking of such things he got used to the idea of death, it got less scary. He had lived in the Valley of Death for a long time and this mental exercise was more or less routine now. Ever since the episode in Kharkov 1943 he had gotten an inkling that he wouldn’t die in this war – but – to keep himself on the edge mentally, he continued with this habit, the habit of thinking of death. It didn’t mean so much to him now, it was mostly a way of going through the motions, it was second nature to him.
Arno was in the strongpoint, in his orderly room in the village. He felt time halting. In this place they seemingly lived timelessly, beyond the regular boundaries of space-time. He had woken; now he rose from the bed, drank water from the water bottle and ate a biscuit he found in his pocket. Then he went out into the overcast daylight, and walked along the slit trench to the Observation Post. Private Venskes was there; he saluted and reported. 3rd Platoon was still holding the fort, still defending this village in the middle of nowhere.
Arno looked out over the plain, saw it flickering in the heat. The sky was whitish blue, the grass was dry, the horizon a misty phantom in the distance.
19
Operation Bagration
On June 9, 1944, the Russians finally attacked the Germans in Belarus. Operation Bagration. The front section that Battalion Wolf held was bypassed. So it had to march off immediately, trying to reconnect their broken line. 3rd Platoon had to make a hasty retreat from Point 31, the village strongpoint. Soon the battalion was sent in to seal a front gap in the Mulkova sector. But to no avail. The front was torn up there as well as in other sectors. So the battalion and the entire Kampfgruppe had to turn back, retreating to western Belarus.
During this retreat a few things happened. It’s useless to tell of this with the usual, “Voice of Clio,” War Academy kind of overview. The four days in which Battalion Wolf retreated from Naksosina to western Belarus were a chaos of combat episodes, going on without respite, day and night. The battalion headed towards the west with its three line companies, its supply company and its HQ Platoon. Everything was vehicle borne, there were no horse carts in this unit. In the lead one or two line Companies travelled with their SPWs, followed by the staff element and the baggage train with their trucks – and finally came the rest of the line Companies, one or two depending on how many were in the lead of the column.
It was a transfer, a regrouping as a mobile position, almost, but not quite, like the Hube’s Pocket operation. Here it was very much the case of floating along to the west in a mass of enemy units, concealing your identity as far as you could, or just living on hope. It was battle during the night and battle during the day. It was clearing of anti-tank positions, it was combat mounted and on foot. Chaos and death, so it seemed to Arno in his role as head of the 3rd Platoon of the 8th Company. Thus, the outline of this chapter is, “Operation Bagration, June 21 through 25, from the viewpoint of a German armoured unit performing a fighting retreat, depicted with fragments.”
First, let’s look at a KV tank that Arno knocked out in a forest battle on June 22, exactly where is unimportant. It was like this: Arno and Karnow were out on an operational mission in a burning forest. In front of them they suddenly saw a silhouette against the smoke; there was no mistaking a Klim Voroshilov. At this very moment the vehicle’s turret turned around to face them. A flame shot out from the turret shield and a long automatic burst rattled off, the heather on the ground ploughed up by 7.62-mm projectiles as the coaxial MG came into action.
Arno and Karnow rushed off and away, rounded the tank’s rear and approached the other side of it, invisible to the crew in the turret who couldn’t keep up with their pace. Arno acted on an impulse: he grabbed the bundle charge from Karnow and jumped on the vehicle’s track. He knew this was dangerous, but the steel monster was motionless so he made it. Once up on the rear armour he fastened the charge between the turret and the chassis, pulled the fuse ignition cord, jumped down and rolled away in the moss, taking cover behind a boulder.
Moments later the detonation rang through the woods; the tank was knocked out. What happened afterwards isn’t important, it’s irrelevant in this chapter of fragments. Next, we can therefore depict dark birch trees in a swamp – a corpse lying among some ferns and blades of blue-green grass – the head with the crown sliced off by a chunk of shrapnel, a bloody eye staring and an anti-tank grenade passing through a sunflower field. Arno thought of living on the edge, of taking control of his mind, forcing himself to endure through strength of willpower. Though I walk in the Valley of the Shadow of Death I sing nonny-nonny.
Arno crossed a brook on a pioneer bridge, fired a signal shot and lived happily ever after in the greenish glow of magnesium. He deployed his men – fewer now – in a skirmish line, saw a group of Focke Wulf 190s flying in for a ground attack. He saw Panther tanks lurching over the steppe, he saw Opel trucks driving in a column, a caravan of cars in silhouette against a yellow sky. A soldier received a fatal lung shot and suffocated, a soldier struck a mine and bled to death, a soldier was hit in the forehead by a rifle shot and died instantly.
We reproduce, as you can see, fragments. We show you scattered impressions from the retreat during Operation Bagration. And there is more from this bloody Belorussian retreat at the end of June 1944:
There was an intense shimmer over a line of trees, blazing sickly green, a bonfire of magnesium flames coming from illumination rounds sent up by mortars. Arno inspected the whole thing where he hung over the visor plate of his SPW. He smoked a cigarette, cupped in his hand against snipers. He noted how a column of Tigers was advancing on the road, the road beside which his Grenadier Platoon had parked, grouped to await their turn, the turn that would soon come. The armor would dash forward and break through and then the Panzer Grenadiers would exploit the break, smacking down remaining resistance, clearing anti-tank positions and infantry, mowing down the enemy and, yet again, holding open the door through which more units would pass. They would go in there, entering in the wake of the tanks, taking care of business. Mounted or on foot, as needed. Just doing their job.