In that moment, so close to death, I was seized by a rush of terror so powerful that I felt my mind was cracking. Trapped by the weight of earth, I began to howl like a madman. The memory of that moment terrifies me still. The sense that one has been buried alive is horrible beyond the powers of ordinary language. Dirt had run down my neck and into my mouth and eyes, and my whole body was gripped by a heavy and astonishingly inert substance which only held me more tightly the harder I struggled. Under my thigh I felt a leg kicking with the desperation of a horse between the shafts of a heavy cart. Something else was rubbing against my shoulder. With a sudden jerk, I pulled my head free of the dirt and of my helmet, whose strap was cutting into my windpipe, nearly strangling me. Some two feet from my face a horrible mask pouring blood was howling like a demon. My body was still entirely trapped. I knew that I was either going to die or lose my reason.
My throat burst with screams of rage and despair. No nightmare could possibly reach such a pitch of horror. At that moment, I suddenly understood the meaning of all the cries and shrieks I had heard on every battlefield. And I also understood the marching songs, which so often begin with a ringing description of a soldier dying in glory and then suddenly turn somber:
Once again I learned how hard it is to watch a comrade die: almost as hard as dying oneself.
During the night, the Russians made nine attempts to break through our lines, and failed. If they had persevered once, or maybe twice more, they would surely have been successful. I watched, three quarters buried, for about twenty minutes, while a hurricane of fire broke over our rear, destroying what was left of the village, and killing something like 700 men in our regiment alone, which, at the beginning of the offensive had numbered about 2,800 men. I scratched at the ground with my hands, and somehow managed to free myself. Two men were lying beside me in pools of blood. The dying man had been buried under more than a yard of earth, and could no longer hope for anything but the mercy of heaven. A fellow beside me, who had been wounded, was groaning with pain. He was buried almost as deeply as I had been. I dug him out as fast as I could, and helped him to crawl through the explosions toward the rear. On the way, I saw a gun lying on the ground and picked it up.
The rest of the night was consumed by a series of almost insuperably difficult problems, as if we were caught in a terrible game with all the odds against us and our lives at stake.
At dawn, in the first faint light of a dark winter day, the front grew quiet.
The scattered remnants of our regiments collected as they met among the craters and shell holes. A cloud of stale smoke hung over the snowy ground, which was littered with Russian and German dead. The wounded who had not yet succumbed to the bitter cold were still groaning, filling the air with a chorus of misery which our exhausted ears heard as they might have heard a winter wind howling over the roof of an isba in an isolated hamlet on the steppe. Sections were organized to help the stretcher-bearers with a job of impossible magnitude.
As always, the Russians left all rescue efforts to us. Their wounded were left lying where they fell, with a possibility of either dying on the spot or of being picked up by one of our first-aid teams. Their supplies of materiel seemed to be increasing daily in quantity and quality, but their medical services barely functioned. As our army grew more and more disorganized by retreat, we became increasingly unable to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers, whose number was continuously growing. The Russian wounded could hope for very little from us.
While the medical service tried to deal with the wounded, some twelve of us settled into a half-covered bunker back of our former sleeping quarters, which had been entirely destroyed. Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau, who had just arrived, was one of the group. Despite a general sense of foreboding in the face of disaster, we all felt a surge of joy whenever a particular friend appeared. Hals, Lensen, and Lindberg were all there. I was helping a wounded corporal bandage his severely burned right hand when the captain announced that we would retreat. He sent us out to help the noncoms count off and regroup our decimated company before moving camp at dawn. I went with Lensen, to help him find what was left of his section. The Russians, who had also taken a beating, were catching a moment’s rest before demolishing what remained of our front. For the moment, everything was quiet in the eerie half light of December.
Lensen couldn’t quite grasp what had happened to me.
For him, the simple fact that I had survived the Soviet thrust was extraordinary. My explanations that at the time I had understood nothing made no difference to him; he simply supplied his own scenario.
My winter overalls had entirely disappeared, leaving me with nothing but my singed overcoat. During my flight, I had picked up a gun which proved to be Russian. For Lensen, it was all clear. The Russians had overrun my position, and had either failed to notice me or had taken me for dead. In a desperate man-to-man struggle, I had managed to wrest a weapon from one of them and, with his gun, had fought my way to our lines.
“You’re still stunned,” he insisted. “But I’m sure you’ll remember later. I don’t see any other explanation.”
Lensen’s version certainly had its advantages.
I myself retained nothing but a chaotic impression of flashing lights and thunderous noises over a sense of such total disorientation that I had no longer been capable of distinguishing east from west or up from down. Perhaps Lensen was only trying to compensate for his attitude during our evening of celebration.
At dusk, which fell in the middle of the afternoon, the German Army abandoned the second Dnieper front. While the immense Russian thrust whose fringe had swept over us was pressing with its principal strength against German and Rumanian units further to the south, our depleted columns withdrew from their positions, abandoning all materiel which was no longer usable or transportable. Our Gross Deutschland regiments, half of us on foot, left in relative silence, our backs bent by the weight of our burdens, hoping that the gray skies would hold back for a while longer the rain of metal and fire which the pursuing enemy was bound to send after us.
13. THE THIRD RETREAT
Our prayers were granted and we were able to march for thirty miles undisturbed.
We were unpleasantly surprised to find no reserve positions in that distance. Except for a few surveillance posts, where the fellows to their astonishment were told to pack up and leave with us, we encountered no serious defensive efforts. The Russians could easily have continued their advance without firing a shot.
On the second day of this third retreat, the most mobile portion of our battalion stopped and settled in to act as a covering force while the rest continued westward. Some two thousand men, among them myself, were stationed near a village which was not marked on any of the staff maps. As we arrived, the inhabitants fled into the thick forest. We established ourselves with light but motorized weapons. We had four minuscule tanks, which had been effective in Poland but were like toys compared to the T-34s. Their armament consisted of a double-barreled machine gun and a grenade thrower, and we used them principally as tractors, to pull the twelve sleighs which made up our train. Four half-tracks doubled as anti-tank machine-gun posts, and as a source of emergency power for our six trucks when they stuck in the deep snowdrifts.