Honestly, I don’t know how that far-faring cripple got through without movement orders. But, come to think of it, we weren’t even calling up fifty-year-olds yet, because Operation Citadel would set everything right. He was an old, old man, maybe seventy or more, blind in one eye, but he traveled fast on his crutch. When I think back on it now, it’s like a dream. And why did he choose us in particular? I was in Ninth Army, Forty-seventh Panzer Corps, Ninth Panzer Division, which by then was hardly winning any prizes. We were all of us as gaunt as antitank rounds in our field-grey cloaks and hats, our striped belts pulled tight, our grey helmets transforming our heads into bullets. We were hungry and sullen, doing little without direct orders, knowing that we would leave another forest of neat crosses here, with helmets hanging on some of them, and triangular roofs over a very few, all destined to be wrenched out of the mud once the Slavs took over. Even Private Volker, who’d sedulously tried to improve his mind by sightseeing in the various uncanny places we went, cranked up no enthusiasm for Kursk, which is noted primarily for its State Bank and the palaces of the Romodanov boyars. I remember how at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa he used to peer into every cottage before we torched it, hopeful to see evidence of anything beyond what we politely referred to as a certain form of existence. Rüdiger used to tell him: There’s no point. What could a Red possibly have that one of us would want? Even their Natashas are hideous! Do you want to see German beauty? Here’s my daughter’s photograph…—But Rüdiger didn’t understand. Volker wasn’t a souvenir hunter; he shared few qualities with Corporal Dancwart, who once crammed an entire tank full of embroidered peasant blouses. Volker—why am I talking about Volker? He’s dead. The last time I saw him get excited was months before Operation Citadel, when a direct hit from a Katyusha sent up our ammunition dump in beautiful fireworks. The boy often entertained me. His guidebook devoted two chapters to Moscow. The second chapter was all churches, so given what I know about Reds I can promise you that it was out of date; a couple of lines would have exhausted that topic after Stalin took over! Well, what’s the difference? Going to church won’t save you. Volker wanted to set foot in Saint Basil’s Cathedral not to be saved, but because its dome reminded him of a painted wooden top which he and his brother used to play with. That brother caught a bullet in the throat at Sebastapol. He died for our Reich. Did Volker want to pay back any Slavs for that? In my opinion, that wouldn’t have accorded with his nature; he was more interested in music. Once he remarked that he would have liked to be at the siege of Leningrad, just to hear Shostakovich’s new symphony! Such idealists aren’t long for this world. By the way, he was a very brave man, and in hand-to-hand combat the Reds avoided him; they feared his face. It’s a pity he never visited Moscow, which enjoys many amenities, so I’ve heard; Rüdiger spoke incorrectly; their Natashas aren’t trollish at all. And the Kremlin is adorned with red glass stars; I’d take one home if I could find the right sort for my Christmas tree. So why not Moscow? As soon as we’d tied off the salient and clanked into Kursk, no doubt we’d get there, because with the destruction of the Central Front and the Voronezh Front, only the Steppe Front and an infinite number of other Fronts would stand in our way.
Now I wonder if Dancwart wasn’t correct. At least he got something; those embroidered blouses transformed themselves into schnapps, cigarettes and new Natashas (P-girls and U-maidens, I should say). But he bored me. His favorite proverb was: Keep riding until daybreak. And now Volker bored me, too. All he longed for was to get wounded again, as who didn’t?
Not this cripple! He wanted to be a hero. Can you imagine? In our national poem, when second-sighted Hagen warns Gunther not to ride to the country of the Huns, they name him a coward, so he angrily insists on sharing their doom. My psychoanalyst would call that compensation. The sleepwalker would call it a noble sacrifice. It might have been either or both, because the cripple was now informing us: You might not know it to look at me, but I was accepted into Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland!
Rüdiger shook his head, Gernot was as silent as a Russian civilian, while Dancwart, who’d once had a Slavic wife but did the right thing, looked up from the raw potato he was cutting rotten spots out of, and with genuine amazement inquired: Why in the world should we care?
Anyhow, chuckled the cripple, here I am. I’ve been fighting for Germany ever since we Aryanized the Hermann Tietz department store. Here we go again!
I remembered him then.—How’s your wife? I said.
He started wiping his eye then, and we got disgusted.
I was a telephonist; I sat there cranking my grey box. Operation Citadel was Operation Suicide, and I sincerely tried to warn him of that fact. Consider the enemy salient—half the size of England! They should have taken my discouragements into account when I came before the Denazification Court, but there’s another tale. Yes, I tried to weaken Hitler’s army—I was practically a member of the Resistance!—for I told the old man: Watch out for those T-34 wolfpacks!
Believe it or not, he replied, I can stand my ground as well with one leg as you can with two.
What could I say to that? The T-34s comprised my own worst fear. They came in daylight or darkness, with their headlights continuously on. And how many Tiger tanks do you think we had in Ninth Panzer? Not one. So how could we hope to stop the Slavs? To get right down to it, my hope was for something both more private and more realistic: a moderate wound. I was moderate in everything. A soldier hunching low and weary in a narrow mud trench, that was me. In those days, when a soldier went on leave from the Ostfront he got a special Führer-parcel of sausage, butter and chocolate. That’s all I was wishing for. But Rüdiger sighed that there might not be any leaves from now on, no more ever.
The cripple said, and I’d forgotten that he was even here: It’s no use denying it. There was an air raid. That was her end.
Gernot rolled leaves into a cigarette. Gernot didn’t care. Gernot’s wife had already burned.
The cripple said: The Amis did it, but I don’t mind revenging myself on Russians. Besides, I’m a former athlete. I like exercise. I believe in physical culture.
Well, I don’t know why I troubled myself, but I led him to Sergeant Gunther, who said: We need every man we can get. He can draw Schnelling’s rations; the dead list hasn’t gone through. If he’s thickskulled enough to volunteer, maybe the Russian shells will bounce off his head…
Operation Citadel commenced at 0430 hours on 5.7.43. It concluded on 19.7.43, after seventy thousand of us were dead. Well, from the very beginning we’d known that it was no use; as I’ve just told you, it was up to us as frontline soldiers simply to obey orders and bear the responsibility. Nobody was singing “Erika, We Love You” anymore. And all that time the air burned with the sound of metal screaming; and after we’d failed on the Ol’khovatka axis, the sky grew light grey, like the service colors of an
-general; and after Ninth Army lost two-thirds of its tanks on the Ponyri axis the sky became as brown as the service colors of anconcentration camp guard; and finally, after we’d lost on the Oboian’ and Korcha axes it was as black as an army engineer’s armband. The Prokhorovka axis was where we were truly beaten. Stalingrad had been the end, but Kursk was really the end; two years after Operation Citadel I saw a Russian with his German girl in Berlin; they were playing with his pistol, shooting it at the sun, and he was kissing her and she was kissing him and she wore a blood-red rose in her hair.