Three enormous Zundapp-Russland sidecars skated through the powdery snow, which often plugged the space between the front mudguard and tire, preventing that wheel from turning. Their engines were powerful enough to free the back wheel and the wheel of the sidecar, which was also motorized, and send the whole machine zigzagging forward, roaring from its twin exhausts, while the blocked driving wheel skated over the surface like the runner of a sleigh. Three Paks completed our defense. With these weapons, which were suitable for chasing partisans, and the classic infantry weapons — P.M.s, mortars, F.M.s and grenades — we had been ordered to stop three Russian divisions, including several armored regiments, for at least twenty-four hours. Lastly, our orders were to withdraw, even if our efforts should be triumphantly successful.
Throughout our sector, whose front was roughly sixty miles long, groups analogous to ours were left behind, while the main body of troops withdrew to the west in a series of forced marches.
The Russians, who had broken through further south, neglected our sector. There was no need for them to take any more losses pursuing an enemy who was withdrawing anyway. The Red Army left our harassment to the partisans, whose numbers were continuously increasing, and which soon reached proportions astonishing in a country nominally under our control. On Stalin’s orders, they intensified the desperation of our retreat with sudden ambushes; shells with delayed action fuses; booby-trapped and mutilated bodies of men from interior positions; attacks on supply trains, isolated groups, and rallying points; hideous mutilation of prisoners; and a constant refusal of contact with units capable of fighting.
The partisans — or terrorists, a name they richly deserved — always took on easy victims, and greatly intensified the usual cruelties of wartime. By these means, they achieved an effect which the regular army was never able to equal.
The Wehrmacht bent before the power of an incomparably greater enemy. The unbearable harassment by partisans was added to the overwhelming and heroic rigors of the front, while our territories in the rear no longer guaranteed any repose to our exhausted troops. The Ukraine, which had shown some sympathy for us, was itself pillaged by partisan bands — on orders from Moscow. The Ukrainian population had to choose, and be actively for one side or another. The partisans either killed or enlisted the young Ukrainians who had until then been so respectful to us. The invisible war triumphed: war which no longer offered any retreat, or calm, or pity. Wars of subversion have no face, and like revolutions create their own martyrs, innocent victims, and hostages, and provoke confused judgments of ill-considered actions. Men kill for revenge, in reprisal for what has happened or might happen.
The partisans were pouring oil onto a huge conflagration.
In the name of Marxist liberty, the Ukraine was forced to alter its attitude. German and Ukrainian alike grew bitter and full of hate. The war became a total war, a war of scorched earth, offering the towns and villages in its path no more relief than we would eventually receive when we became the vanquished. In this period, as the war attained the most violent paroxysms of an already unbearable conflict, our unit sat out its sentence of round-the-clock guard duty in the murderous cold.
Over the snow-covered ground silence hung, unbroken except for the occasional howl of a gray taiga wolf deep in the forests, which were still largely unexplored. A quarter of our men were always on guard, watching from the shelter of ludicrously inadequate fortifications or frost-covered tank turrets, or mounting hurried patrols at the edge of the forest. The rest waited in the abandoned isbas.
The stoves in these huts had been systematically destroyed before we arrived — no doubt by partisans, who hoped that without shelter we would die of cold. Some of the isbas were open to the sky, with their roofs burned or pulled off. Probably the partisans had not had time to destroy the village completely before we arrived. There were far too many of us for the number of buildings still standing, and hundreds of men were reduced to finding what shelter they could, huddled behind gutted walls whose only roof was the heavy, opaque fog. Inside the walls, these men burned everything they could find. In the better isbas, the intense flames threatened to set fire at any moment to the structures themselves. Our exhausted troops no longer bothered to collect deadwood from the forest, and burned every combustible fitting left in the huts. Cursing at the smoke which blinded them, and which in the roofed isbas escaped only through the open doors, our soldiers packed closely together for warmth, tried to sleep on their feet, despite the coughs which shook their bodies. In the isbas without roofs smoke was never a difficulty, but the men were never warm. Those closest to the fires rapidly grew so hot they had to move, while others, only four or five yards away, felt only the faintest warming of the air, whose temperature rose to fifteen or sixteen degrees above zero.
Every two hours another quarter of the men went back to the dugouts to make room in our precarious sleeping quarters for those who would return white with cold. The winter was now serious: fifteen degrees below zero, according to the thermometer of our radio group. As before, our general state of filth aggravated the situation. Any desire to piss was announced to all present, so that hands swollen by chilblains could be held out under the warm urine, which often infected our cracked fingers.
I was taking my first tour of guard duty in the early-morning hours of polar darkness, and my second began at one o’clock, in the diffused light of midday, which was veiled by a sky as dark as the sky over Tempelhof the day it was destroyed. Toward the end of my patrol, the day would turn an unusual pink. By three o’clock, when I returned to the smokehouse, there was nothing further to report.
My eyes hurt me, and my nose was so enflamed by frostbite I could no longer bear to leave it uncovered. We hid our faces like Chicago gangsters, with our collars raised and tied around our faces with scarves or strings. An hour later, the pink light turned violet, and then gray. The snow turned gray too, and then it was dark — from mid-afternoon until nine the next morning. With darkness, the temperature always plunged sharply — often to thirty-five or forty degrees below zero. Our materiel was paralyzed: gasoline froze, and oil became first a paste and then a glue, which entirely blocked the mechanism. The forest rang with strange sounds: the bark of trees bursting under the pressure of the freezing. Stones cracked only when the temperature fell to sixty degrees below zero. For us, the horror we had been dreading for so long had arrived.
Winter at war — a reality we had almost forgotten — fell on us like the die of a gigantic press ready to crush us.
Everything combustible was burned. A lieutenant defended two of our sleighs with a gun against some forty landser, whose breath rattled through their congested lungs. The nose of every face cover developed a block of ice which grew larger as each fresh breath condensed and froze.
“We want the sleighs for wood!” the men shouted.
“Get back!” the lieutenant screamed in reply. “The forest is full of wood.”
The landser stared at him, wondering what good the sleighs would do them if they all froze.
A party sent out to fetch wood from the forest ran to the shelter of the trees. Faceless specters returned with bundles which they threw down onto the dying fires. The fires had to be kept alive, which made rest impossible. We prayed that the Russians wouldn’t attack: all attempts at defense had been abandoned.