How many more thousands did we have to kill? Wheat rose up to the shoulders of our steel horses, then drowned us. Our assault guns were running out of fuel, and I still couldn’t achieve contact with FREYA. So I dialed the emergency frequency, and guess what signal I received? Europe Central commanded that we tighten up our assault front! Maybe they expected me to scratch runes on the back of my hand. Why even expend saliva on a curse?
Rüdiger shook his head once more; in the next instant, all that remained of him was a white face torn open, its red insides already black. He used to share his parcels with me; once he gave Gernot a very pretty dagger that he’d picked up somewhere. Decisive results, why not, so we struggled forward until an enemy tank brigade drove us back; we dug in and waited for our self-propelled guns to clear the way; then by your order we went forward again until we met something almost as terrible as the T-34s: a bank of Katyushas, aimed not at our tanks but straight at us, screaming over the earth as they sped from open sights! Even if I’d had a whole 
-division to protect me, even if the sleepwalker himself had pulled me under his magic blanket, I wouldn’t have survived that, and yet somehow I did continue to exist; I was almost the only one; the other one was that old cripple.
The worst thing I have ever seen was not the annihilation of men I lived and fought with; after all, they comprised an insignificant part of Ninth Panzer Division, which was but one of many units of Ninth German Army, which continued to advance upon Olkovatka after Rüdiger and the rest of us disappeared, and, moreover, could in turn have been extinguished, just as Sixth Army had been at Stalingrad, without negating the existence of its Army Group. For that matter, had Army Group Center vanished, the military forces of our Reich would have continued to function to the end! Rüdiger, to be sure; I missed Rüdiger; but precisely because I identified with him so perfectly, his death was no more tragic than mine would have been. What actually crushed me was when a fifty-seven-millimeter Russian gun opened up on one of our Tigers and punched right through it. That time I did hear the crew screaming. And it burned, calmly and spectacularly, from the inside out. Until then I had truly believed that Tigers were safe.
The cripple croaked in my ear: Tungsten-cored ammunition. That’s their secret. Don’t worry. We’ll take vengeance on those Slavs.
Have you ever seen an injured bird at the seashore? Here come crabs from nowhere—they wait under the sand—and ring it round, cautiously at first; before you know it, the first crab has leapt onto the broken wing and pinched off a morsel. The bird struggles, but here come other crabs in a rush. That’s how it is when T-34s surround a Tiger or a Ferdinand, probing with their seventy-sixes until a close-range shot gets through; if that doesn’t work, the Russian infantrymen, who ride on the backs of those tanks like eggs glued down to a mother beetle’s shell, board us and shoot into every ventilation slit, or pour in gasoline and light it—oh, there’s nothing those Slavs won’t do! Then what? From a hole in a Panzer a hand dangles, half connected to a black puzzle of bones.38
My existence had become as heavy as a Stalinets S-60 tractor. What could I do but drag it forward? A line of Russians stretched behind me now; I didn’t dare raise my head to look at them, but they were laughing. Forward toward the final victory; that remained my direction and theirs.
The sun winked at me from the moles on an SU-152’s face. I ducked down, crawled through the sunflower stems beneath the great proboscis, avoided the blind square face of that evil thing which killed our Tigers. It didn’t see me.
The old man was right behind, dragging his crutch. Then he was beside me. Then he was ahead of me. We crawled and crawled. He never got tired.
At 2200 hours, with the night sky spider-legged by artillery fire, we stopped. Where we were remains disputable—between the second and third of the enemy’s defensive lines would be my guess. I longed to telephone Headquarters and give them our position report; they might even have had some use for that information. Whenever I got isolated on the Ostfront, which happened more often than you might imagine, I used to calm myself by visualizing myself amidst the switchboard operators all in a row; they sat facing the wall so that all any third party could have seen of them was their uniformed backs and cropped heads, a black phone dug in against each left ear, a bank of narrow metal shelves sprouting cables and wires like ivy; to me they represented consciousness itself; each one of them was a thought wired into other thoughts; together they comprised a brain, safely hidden under the earth, blind to the enemy outside: nothing could frighten them. Like any child, I used to will away monsters under the bed by shutting my eyes. This might not have been rational, but it was better than smoking cigarettes with Rüdiger, sitting in the dirt.
The old man said in my ear: Do you want me to show you how you can live?
I didn’t like him anymore. I would have preferred Volker, who was always loyal and volunteered for the night watch. He’d passed his life sitting on the grassy lip of a trench-womb, writing letters home which would never get there. That species of futility I respected.
Disdaining to answer, I started to crawl again, gripping my helmet-strap in my teeth, and I kept on until I found shelter behind the hulk of a burned Tiger tank, whose gun-turret went twice as high as I could stand. Now they were shooting at us with their antitank rifles, but blindly. If Dancwart were here, he would have opened up with his eighty-eight! The old man stayed right behind me. We hid there together, observing the hopeless seeking of our long white rays of antiaircraft light in the enemy darkness. When they stopped shooting, we kept hiding, because as Sergeant Gunther used to brilliantly remark, you never know.
Dawn came at 0300 hours. The old man repeated: Shall I show you how you can live?
I wouldn’t answer. Off to the north, I could see half a dozen Tigers locked in position against a pack of T-34s. All at once the sun glinted on their gunbarrels, and our Tigers began to fire. They killed every T-34, whose shots in turn bounced off the Tigers. I wanted to cheer, but didn’t dare. What if the Russians heard?
I’ll have to hang you for awhile, the cripple said.
Now I know who you are, I told him. You’re Wotan. Well, I don’t want your knowledge. Don’t you remember how Siegfried shoves Wotan out of the way? I’m Siegfried.
That’s only in Wagner, he said wearily. That’s incorrect.
We started to crawl eastward. I couldn’t shake him, which was in character for me; never would I have any chance of being Siegfried! “Between Two Fires,” that was I. What a perfect E-film! Lisca Malbran would have had more hope of representing German manhood than Siegfried the telephonist—how Rüdiger would have shaken his head at me!
After half an hour we rested in a Russian spider-hole, the dead Russian still in it below the waist, the rest of him sprawled out on the trampled wheat; he hardly stank yet, and his forage cap was pulled down over his eyes, so we didn’t need to enter into any relationship with him.
Doom never dies, said the old man.
I wouldn’t answer. We sucked in our cheeks beneath our helmets and off we went.
In the next trench lay one of our own dead, and beside him, a communications outfit! Longing to escape my hopelessness, I found myself trying to speak to FREYA on the muddy telephone; needless to say, the enemy had snipped the wire.
I understood all too well what the cripple expected of me. He wanted to place me in anguish, suspended between the zones until I could grow. But I was determined not to change in any way; that would have been disloyal to my own sufferings.
38
Why couldn’t the human factor have been eliminated entirely? World War III, which I expect Germany to win, will be fought with robots. Then we can all hide in deep bunkers; we’ll be invulnerable. On the first afternoon of Operation Citadel, our Goliath radio-controlled explosion machines broke through at Maloarkhangelsk, but One Hundred-and-Twenty-ninth Soviet Armored Brigade defeated further penetrations. Does that fact invalidate our Goliaths? Not at all. It’s merely that we didn’t have enough of them.