This healthy enthusiasm of schoolboys suddenly transformed into soldiers was destined to weaken somewhat after a few nights in the mud and the shock of seeing a field hospital for the first time. We had been through all that. They would soon learn that war. does not always create the same exaltation as the intoxicating explosion of the plaster grenades in the war games of training camp.
The Fuhrer, who was now scraping the bottom of the barrel, had been forced to send his arrogant Polizei off to war. These elderly new recruits were having a hard time of it. The sight of policemen crawling through the mud on their bellies delighted us enough so that we almost forgot our sufferings. Police officers, whose competence in war was limited, handed over their men to officers of the Wehrmacht, who put them through the works. This spectacle, which gave us so much pleasure, was hard on the eager young recruits, directly exposed to the bad humor of those bastards who did everything they could to keep the younger men in a state of inferiority.
For us, life was also very far from perfect. Before settling into our new quarters, there had been a long and difficult journey. We had begun by tramping more than thirty miles on bad Russian roads, deeply rutted and coated with ice. Then we were loaded onto trucks, and driven as far as Mogilev, an oriental-looking town, where we boarded two trains, both in very bad condition, for the remainder of the journey, along the Bessarabian frontier, to Lvov, in Poland. From Lvov, trucks had brought us to the camp, where we had stumbled out, exhausted and filthy, under the suspicious gaze of polished, healthy officer-instructors.
We were allowed forty-eight hours to rest, before our clothes and equipment had to be in perfect order. At our first inspection, the condition of our uniforms shocked the inspectors, although we had brushed and beaten them as hard as we could. They had completely lost their original color and appearance. Gray-green had become greenish piss yellow, decorated by tears and holes and reddish-brown burns. Our worn and crumpled boots had lost their black finish, and many were without heels or laces. We looked like a bunch of tramps, and the inspectors were ready to jump at the slightest sign of negligence. These evident traces of the battlefield struck them like slaps in the face, to which there was no answer. Those fops should, in fact, have been honoring us.
They knew it too, and the knowledge irritated them. They persisted in picking on details to try to save face. A short way off, sections of police and students in camouflage uniforms were marching to their daily sweat baths, singing gaily in the dry, cold air, which had brought out the color in their cheeks.
However, instead of the Alps, the Carpathians witnessed their compulsory gaiety.
The instructors, intent on inspection, were insensible to the poetry of the scene. One of them stopped short in front of a gefreiter whose coat ended in a fringe as full of holes as a piece of Alencon lace. At last the stabsfeldwebel could unload a little rage in front of his sarcastic audience. Our heads turned slightly, scarcely noticeably, to the right, toward the fellow accused of negligence. We rolled our eyes as far as we could, trying to see who was getting it.
“Name and number!” shouted the stabs, stiffening his neck.
Even if we couldn’t see anything, we could hear it!
“Frösch, Herr Stabsfeldwebel,” the accused shouted, adding the number which each of us was supposed to know by heart.
Frösch… The name stirred an echo in my memory: Frösch?
And then the barracks the day after we crossed the Dnieper came back to me. Hot water, and a foolish-looking fellow of angelic good will. What was the stabs going to pin on him?
In the third row of men, some ten or twelve yards from me, Frösch was standing at attention, while abuse rained down on him. He was staring straight ahead, as required by convention. His gaunt, hollow face was partly hidden by his heavy steel helmet. Unfortunately his stupidity was obvious enough to give the stabs a sudden sense of confident superiority over this soldier, who had clearly seen a lot. Two large hands, red with chilblains, emerged from his ragged sleeves to press for warmth against the folds of filthy cloth. The coat no longer had any buttons. Frösch had fastened it at each buttonhole with a short piece of wire. With a touching sense of aesthetics, he had bent in the ends of each wire, as if to demonstrate his good intentions. Unfortunately, he had linked a lower buttonhole to a higher one, which produced an improper and all-too-visible crease. This anomaly leaped to the eye of the inspecting noncom, who couldn’t let such a golden opportunity slip. However, in complete disregard of normal practice, the company officer intervened, reminding the stabsfeldwebel that our detachment had just survived an extremely difficult experience.
“Your supply report specifically stated that you possessed the necessary materials for keeping your clothes in good repair, Herr Leutnant, and specifically mentioned buttons.”
The lieutenant didn’t know how to answer.
“In addition, Herr Leutnant, Gefreiter Frösch hasn’t even bothered to line up the buttonholes correctly.”
There was a moment of charged silence. The lieutenant threw Frösch a look of despairing compassion. Couldn’t he have spared himself all this and deprived the instructor of this ludicrous opening? But the facts were as they were, and the lieutenant, despite all his good will, couldn’t alter them. He resumed his former position with an impassive air. A wave of irritation seemed to run through the company.
“Stillgestanden!” the feld shouted.
In a flood of gratuitous invective, Frösch was given twenty days’ detention and a series of punitive fatigues. Without flinching, Frösch left his position to stand in the ranks of the guilty. He was the only one. The inspection was over. Quarter turn, left, left. Our companies went on to march around the camp. Frösch remained where he was, staring straight ahead. As the only man to be punished, he seemed a symbol of injustice, alone in his punishment as he had always been in life. He had found some comradeship in the Wehrmacht, but the exigencies of military life exacted a high price. Ten days later, when the rest of the unit drew new clothes, Frösch kept his rags. He had in truth become a symbol. He didn’t know how to hate, and always wore his expression of touching stupidity and banal good will.
Later the veteran said of him: “He’s as humble as Diogenes. If he doesn’t deserve victory, at least he deserves Paradise.”
Section forward!… On the ground!… On your feet!… Run!… Forward!… On the ground!… On your feet, facing me!… The hard, frozen ground scraped our hands and knees, and the sharp twigs of the leafless scrub finished off our threadbare uniforms. They had put us through a series of exercises with concussion bombs. We, who had faced the fire of Russian Katushas, just laughed. Then we had made ourselves as flat as the Ukrainian soil. Now we lay propped on one elbow, half amused, half exasperated. Our attitude provoked torrents of abuse and a collective punishment for the whole company. We had to crawl along the entire perimeter of the camp. The ground, three or four inches beneath our eyes, soaked up the muttered curses of our progress. The instructor-noncoms were working hard, running along the carpet of soldiers.
A short way off, Wesreidau was watching this bad joke and arguing with the officers responsible for the camp. But he might as well have saved his breath. Orders from higher up had put an end to the coddling of troops just back from the front. We had to reinstate the rigidity of ’40–’41, and wage war to the death.