For us, at the moment, there was only limitless space, where our boots raised a cloud of multicolored dust that settled on everything that disturbed it. We belonged to the earth far more than it belonged to us. Except for the war, we felt a vast, limitless pleasure in our surroundings, in a kind of plenitude for which, in later years, we would always feel nostalgia.
If only there had been something to eat!
After our eleven-o’clock break, our march began again. We had gulped down like a dose of medicine the cooked sprouts of young wheat which had been prepared two days earlier. As a last resort, we had some millet, cooked in water. The weather was very hot. Fortunately, our exceedingly light meals did not produce after-dinner somnolence.
We drank the warm water from our water bottles with a certain apprehension. Running streams were quite widely spaced, and water from ponds carried the risk of malaria, typhoid, and other diseases, like cholera. To keep up our spirits, we sang as we marched: “Ein Heller and ein Batzen.” The words, like the tune, were carried into the emptiness by the light summer wind, losing all meaning — which no longer seemed strange to ears once accustomed to hearing them echo between the walls of flag-decked towns:
Not that we had any choice-there was no wine and the water had to be drunk sparingly and with caution.
Kompanie, marsch, marsch. We marched, singing for no one but ourselves, and all of us already knew the tune.
Then it grew dark. Darkness fell very late on our bivouac and across the plain, on which it seemed we had hardly moved, on our dust-covered faces and aching muscles. We were already asleep on our feet. The silence seemed to have a special quality, as though it had come from the end of the world.
At daybreak, our march resumed. For hours the long row of hills on the horizon seemed to remain at the same distance from us. We were walking through a rocky plain where the highest rise in the ground was scarcely the height of a man. Small stands of trees, which reminded me of photographs of Africa, were scattered across the landscape. The trees were short and scrubby, curiously like the trees of high altitudes. The wind blew the red dust everywhere, as if we were tramping through a universe of powdered brick. For a long time now, we had given up marching in threes — the regulation order for marching troops — in favor of the system used by partisans. We were broken up into more or less compact groups, in which a man was ahead only until someone else caught up with him. Everyone was tired, and our pace was slackening.
We had given up all unnecessary conversations, keeping all our breath and strength to continue putting one foot in front of the other. How many thousands of steps did we still have to take? Our boots, the color of the dusty universe, kept on across the rocky plain, which seemed to be leading us nowhere. The light wind filled our long, unkempt hair with dust; our position in relation to certain reference points on the horizon seemed unchanging; and the rhythm of our steps, the sounds of our progress, and the wind itself became overwhelmingly monotonous. From time to time we could hear a rumble from the great hollow of emptiness which filled our stomachs.
Just after the eleven-o’clock halt, during which we consumed the last of our millet, an incident disturbed the general monotony. Two twin-engined planes, which we had fortunately been able to see a long way off, appeared in the hot, blue sky. The horizon was so vast that anything which crossed it was visible for at least five minutes before it reached us. We scattered as usual, and assumed a position of anti-aircraft defense. Some of us were going to die…. The planes were either light bombers or reconnaissance planes — but unmistakably Russian.
The two planes flew over us at an altitude of about fifteen hundred feet. The snore of their engines pierced the gentle breeze and seemed to echo in the depths of our tense stomachs.
The two Popovs took our fire without sending down anything in return. They flew in a large circle, which we followed with anguished eyes. The second time around, they would surely let us have it.
However, their second swoop produced nothing but a swarm of white butterflies, flashing and fluttering against the blue of the sky.
As soon as the planes were gone, some of our men went out to pick up the leaflets. A fellow came over to me waving a dozen.
“Ivan doesn’t seem to understand: if we can’t eat, we can’t crap. He’s gone and sent us a lot of paper.”
We read the Communist tracts.
“German soldiers: You have been betrayed…. Surrender to our units, which will rehabilitate you…. You have lost the war.”
Then, to raise our morale, we were shown some bad photographs of anonymous ruins, which, it was claimed, were German cities flattened by bombs. Also, there were photographs of smiling German prisoners. Under each of these photographs was a short caption:
“Comrades: The temporary captivity which we are experiencing in no way resembles the lies we were led to believe. We have been agreeably surprised by the kindness of the camp officers. When we think of you, comrades, wading through the slime of the trenches to preserve the capitalist world, we cannot advise you strongly enough to lay down your arms.”
And so it went on.
One fellow, who had managed to escape from Tomvos, was shouting with rage. “The bastards! For all I know, I’m the only survivor from that damned place.”
In disgust, he tore the leaflet to shreds, and scattered it into the wind.
We resumed our march. The leaflets were still circulating from hand to hand, and their words and phrases “the war is lost,” “treason,” “cities destroyed” echoed in our minds like a gloomy round.
Of course, it was Communist propaganda. All we had to do was talk to the fellow who’d escaped from Tomvos to understand that. But then anyone who’d been home on leave had seen the bombed German cities. And then there was our continuous and painful retreat, and our daily existence, with its total lack of transport, gas, food, mail, everything. Perhaps the war really was lost. But that couldn’t be possible.
Here we were walking across the Russian plain. Was it still ours? Or was it simply witnessing our slow death?
But that, too, was impossible. We had to dismiss these black thoughts. We were simply living through a difficult period which was bound to pass.
Tomorrow, surely, we would get some supplies, and everything would once more make some kind of sense. We had to shake our heads and dispel our dark reveries. Today the sun was shining, and we had to press on.
We began to sing one of our marching songs with deliberate vehemence: