By the evening of the third day of continuous battle, during which we had only been able to snatch an occasional half hour of sleep, we were seized by the furious strength of madmen. Our group had lost both the Czech and the sergeant, and as they lay either dead or wounded among the ruins, two grenadiers who had lost their units joined us. We were now split into three groups — including the 11th, in which Olensheim was still alive, and the 17th, which had rejoined us — jointly commanded by a lieutenant. We had been ordered to reduce the pockets of resistance in the ashes of a suburb called Deptreoka, if I remember correctly — enclaves which continued to defend themselves, although they had been left behind by the retreating Soviet forces.
Our faces streaked with dust and filth and sweat stared across the ruined, apocalyptic landscape through which we were advancing, more interested in quiet corners for a few moments of sleep than in Russian strays. Explosions from the forefront of our advance were continuously shaking the air around us, and compressing our weakened lungs. No one spoke, except for an occasional “Halt!” or “Achtung!” which threw us down onto the burning ground. We were so exhausted that we stood up only when our fire had subdued the isolated and hopeless resistance from some entrenched hole. Sometimes one or two prisoners might emerge from their hideout with their hands in the air, and each time the same tragedy repeated itself. Kraus killed four of them on the lieutenant’s orders; the Sudeten, two; Group 17, nine. Young Lindberg, who had been in a state of panic ever since the beginning of the offensive, and who had been either weeping in terror or laughing in hope, took Kraus’s machine gun and shoved two Bolsheviks into a shell hole. The two wretched victims were both a good deal older than the boy, and kept imploring his mercy. We could hear their desperate shouts for a long time. But Lindberg, in a paroxysm of uncontrollable rage, kept firing until they were quiet.
Then there was the bread house, so called because after the massacre we found a few wretched biscuits there, which we devoured, hoping to extract some return for the horrors which the war forced upon us. We were mad with harassment and exhaustion, running on our nerves, which were stretched to the utmost, and which alone made it possible to respond to the endless succession of crises and alerts. We were forbidden to take prisoners until our return trip. We knew that the Russians didn’t take any, and although we longed for sleep we knew that we had to stay awake as long as there were any Bolsheviks in our sector. It was either them or us — which is why my friend Hals and I threw grenades into the bread house, at some Russians who were trying to wave a white flag.
When we reached the end of our sweep, we collapsed at the bottom of a large crater, and stared at each other for a long time in dazed silence. None of us could speak. Our uniforms were unbuttoned, torn, and so permeated with dust they were the color of the ground. The air still roared and shook and smelled of burning. Four more of our men had been killed, and we were dragging along five or six wounded, one of them Olensheim. There were about twenty of us huddled in that huge hole, trying to put our thoughts into some kind of order. But our stupefied eyes continued to wander vacantly over the burned landscape, and our heads remained empty.
The radio announced that our Belgorod offensive had been crowned with success, and marked the beginning of our further progress eastward.
By the fourth or fifth evening, we had gone through Belgorod without even knowing it. Our assault troops were catching their breath, and numberless ranks of infantry were sleeping on the great battered plain. We were soon loaded onto a truck and driven to a key position. I didn’t understand why the ruined hamlet where we were put down was considered strategic, but grasped that this was one of the places from which the next phase of our offensive would be launched. The gently rolling landscape of fat-bellied orchards and willow-bordered streams and irrigation canals reminded me somehow of Normandy; it was occupied either by lines of defense or by rallying points for our assault troops.
We began to organize our position among the poor, half-ruined houses of the hamlet. Our first job was to get rid of some thirty Bolshevik corpses scattered through the rubble. We dumped them into a small garden, which must once have been cultivated. The day was hot and heavy. A greasy sun threw sharp shadows, and made us squint in the harsh light, which emphasized every hollow in our exhausted faces. The same light poured down onto the faces of the dead Russians, whose fixed eyes were opened inordinately wide. Looking at them, and thinking about us all, made my stomach turn over.
“Isn’t it funny,” the Sudeten remarked calmly, “how quickly a fellow’s beard grows when he’s dead? Look at this one.” He turned over a body with his foot. The man’s tunic was torn by seven or eight bloody holes. “He probably shaved yesterday, just before he was killed. And look at him now. He’s got a beard on him that would have taken him at least a week otherwise.”
“See this one,” laughed another fellow, who was clearing out a building which had been hit by a heavy mortar shell. He was dragging a Russian soldier whose head had been blown off.
“You’d do better to go and shave yourself, if you want anyone to recognize you when it’s your turn tomorrow. You give me a pain with your idiotic remarks. Anyone would think that’s the first stiff you’ve ever seen.”
The veteran sat down on a heap of rubble, and opened his mess tin.
We found a cellar which made a perfect defense point and moved into it with our two machine guns. We dug out the air vent which had been blocked by the collapse of the house, and even enlarged it, stopping work for a moment to watch a flight of Stukas pass overhead. Somewhere, not too far away, Ivan must have been drenched by a rain of bombs. Hals had made a hole in the masonry walls, and was estimating the firing possibilities. Lindberg was almost jubilant to be setting up this precarious shelter.
Everything which now seemed to be working to our advantage stirred him to a strange excitement, in contrast to the helpless fear in the flaming alleys of Belgorod, which had reduced him to whining and pissing in his pants. Three yards away, the veteran and I were shoving in supports to brace the enlarged air vent, which, at best, seemed a shaky proposition. Whenever we moved, our helmets scraped against the low ceiling. Behind us, Kraus and two other grenadiers were removing the fallen stones and rubble which littered the floor. One of them picked up an empty bottle, and with a civilian reflex, stood it against the wall to wait for the harvest.
As I’ve said, we had lost our noncom, and the veteran, who was an obergefreiter, was now commanding our group. However, we were still under the orders of a fat stabsfeldwebel, who directed all three groups, and who was killed two days later. The bastard checked our work with all the airs of a superior officer, forcing us to check this detail or that, unaware that he had only forty-eight hours left. We spent the day waiting and watching companies of sweating troops march by, against a continuous background of heavy explosions, and a variety of other noises.
It was in precisely these moments that everything became intensely painful. As we slowly regained our spirits, we began to grasp what had happened to us. It suddenly struck us that our noncom, and Grumpers, and the Czech, and the wounded boy abandoned to his fate were in fact no longer with us. We tried to blot out the memory of the Russian trench we had machine gunned, and the tanks driving heavily over that moving mass of human flesh, and Deptreoka, with its piles of Bolshevik corpses, and the hammering of enemy artillery in the narrow streets crammed with Hitlerjugend — all the appalling, inexplicable details. We suddenly felt gripped by something horrible, which made our skins crawl and our hair stand on end. For me, these memories produced a loss of physical sensation, almost as if my personality had split. I knew that I was actually incapable of such experiences — not because I was superior to other people, but because I knew that such things don’t happen to young men who have led normal lives more or less like other people’s.