Next, Arno saw Kadax standing in front of the unit. He was addressing the soldiers, who wore field uniform with webbing and carried slung weapons, M/45 submachine guns and M/96 rifles. Kadax in turn saw Arno, called the men to attention, saluted and said:
“Sergeant Major! 1st Platoon under orders. I’m about to tell them about the importance of disguising the tent.”
“Fine, Sergeant,” Arno said. “Carry on!”
Kadax, a 20-year conscript Officer Cadet, continued to lecture the unit on something he had read in a book. Meanwhile Arno went into the tent where he found Cadet Forslid lying down asleep.
“Rise and shine!” Arno said. “This is a good day to die.”
Forslid awoke with a start, said, “Yes, Sergeant!” took his cap and belt and went to leave the tent. Before he went out Arno added:
“If you have time to rest, rest, but more than that, as an officer you have responsibility. You must look like a Leader, giving the impression of activity and preparedness.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” said the Cadet and went out. Once outside he stood some distance behind Kadax and tried to look responsible. And that was exactly what Arno wanted: if you’re in command, look the part. In the meantime, Arno inspected the inside of the tent. There were spruce branches on the floor, equipment stowed away along the walls and a bucket of water with a fir branch in it, ready for extinguishing any small fire inside the tent. The unit slept in it lying like the spokes of a wheel, with their feet towards the heating stove at the centre. They did not have sleeping bags. You slept with boots and tunic taken off and with tunic and overcoat as covers.
Arno went out again and took over once Kadax finished his training lecture. Arno praised the neat set up inside the tent. Then he took them through all the forms of military accommodation, from tents like these and proper quarters indoors, everything from barns to apartment houses and villas. Living in some sort of purpose-made building, he said, was the standard for the German Army during the war. He usually didn’t advertise his war background but he divulged it now and then to those having ears to listen with. It was well known that he had been a platoon commander on the Eastern Front.
But he barely spoke about it. For one thing, he wasn’t really a talkative type. And it wasn’t quite the done thing to talk about the Eastern Front to grunts of Sweden’s Democratic People’s Army. By comparison, to speak of Finland’s war against the Bolsheviks in 1939-40 and 1941-44 was more acceptable. This was because Finland and Sweden had a long common history, up until 1809 – and even after that, both under Russian rule and afterwards, there was a large ethnic Swedish population in Finland. Finland and Sweden were Nordic brother countries, so service in Finland’s wartime Army was less controversial than having served in the German Army.
Arno then declared the exercise over. The two tents were to be dismantled and loaded on to the truck they had available. Once back at base, the tents must be pitched again, because sailcloth gets damp during a night in the open. This was done; led by the Cadets the youngsters broke camp, loaded all the equipment onto the truck and finally clambered up onto the platform behind all the kit.
They went back to base. Once at the Platoon Storage Area, two rows of garage-like facilities, Arno oversaw the unloading and then went off to the end of the row, standing with arms akimbo and looking out into the distance, over the hills and far away.
After a while a soldier of the platoon approached him, Private Tallberg. He was a peculiar fellow, a naive questioner who reminded him of Kellner who had been his orderly during Operation Spring Awakening in 1945. The man who died of a lung shot.
Tallberg saluted and spoke. “Sergeant Major, I wonder about one thing.”
“Go ahead and ask.”
“In the war, I mean, World War II, did you live in houses? At the front?”
“Indeed we did, as soldiers in the German Army.”
“Did you sleep in beds?”
“Sometimes, you could get a bed. If you were lucky you might even get a mattress: a sack filled with hay.”
“Who owned the houses, then?”
“The civilian population.”
“Did you pay for it?”
“Not for the accommodation per se. It was a coercive measure. If you were in an occupied country, the Company Quartermaster would just saunter into the latest village, go into a house, see if there were rooms available, book ’em for the Army, scrawl ‘Room for 3’ in chalk on the wall, then go on to the next house. Then soldiers were allotted this room and they would stay there, sleeping on the floor, on straw or whatever.”
“Did you ever live in a tent?”
“Almost never. The German Army didn’t have a lot of tents. But there were plenty of villages where you were operating. Everywhere in Russia there are villages and that’s where we stayed. Military Police and such made sure the locals behaved themselves. If civilians harassed or killed housed men, it led to reprisals. At the same time, of course the soldiers weren’t allowed to harass the people they lived by. Army discipline saw to that.”
After checking the packing of the equipment in the storage room, Arno dismissed the troops. He himself stayed and talked with Kadax and Forslid. He praised them for the good order in the tent and the overall fine execution of the drill. Then he again chided Forslid for lying down and relaxing while Kadax had been left alone to train the men. Finally, he thanked them for the successful exercise and let the two return to their barracks on the crest to the east of the parade ground, on this side of the Officer’s Mess. Then Arno went down to his barracks for the School Platoon’s evening lineup at five PM. After this his service was over for today, but Arno suddenly had an urge to stay on at the base until after dinner.
35
Germany Calling
He had no desire to go home. Partly because Solbritt wasn’t home, she would have dinner down town and then go to a gathering with her sewing pals. Partly because the reading of the Gösta Borg book had given him the desire to check out the NCO mess library for more of the same, more books about the Eastern Front. So he stayed and had dinner in the main canteen. Tonight they served salmon from the river. Then he went off to the NCOs’ mess, the yellow two-storey house surrounded by birch trees. The leaves were already yellow.
Arno went inside, got a glass of beer at the bar and then went to the library. There were chairs and sofas and a rather large shelf of books, stretching along an entire wall. On the shelf he found one new book. It was a history of the fighting on the Eastern Front, written by Lothar von Coburg. The book was in German and fairly unread, pristine condition: Ostfront im zweiten Weltkrieg was the title, published in 1952. Since Arno knew German he grabbed it eagerly. Standing by the shelf he read on the back cover that Coburg had been a Divisional Commander and Army Corps Chief of Staff in the wartime German army. At times he had even fought on the same battlefield as Arno – for example, in Ukraine 1943-44.
Arno walked over to a chair and opened the book at a random page. It was about the fighting around Rostov. Coburg used Rostov as the example of how fluid the fighting on the Eastern Front had been.
Rostov was situated in southern Russia, in the part of the Russian Soviet Republic reaching down to the Black Sea. Rostov lay at the mouth of the River Don on the Azov Sea, which in turn connects to the Black Sea. At the same river, Don, 500 km upstream, lies the Ukrainian city of Kharkov where Arno fought in the spring of 1943. Rostov was an example of mobile combat. Arno was quickly wrapped up in Koburg’s account, appreciating the narrative of how the city had changed hands several times:
“The fighting on the eastern front was mobile, the frontline pattern being fluid, not static. The operations around the city of Rostov can illustrate this. (…) On November 20, 1941 Rostov was conquered for the first time by German units but they retreated as fast as they had come. The city was retaken by the Russian 37th Army, supported by 2nd Army. In the summer of 1942 the Germans were back in the vicinities of Rostov. On July 23 German units were in the outskirts of the city, and the following day they occupied it. After the Germans during the capture of the Caucasus (to which the retaking of Rostov’s was a first step) had been drained of their strength in Stalingrad, and finally surrendered there with the 6th Army in February 1943, it wasn’t long before the Russians recaptured Rostov. This took place on February 14, 1943. Then the Russians kept the city for the rest of the war.”