With my watering eyes, I stared through the smoke, trying to see the enemy and do my duty.
About twenty-five yards away some trucks exploded into little fragments, one after the other, engulfing four or five running soldiers. Were the men German or Russian? I couldn’t tell.
I was with two companions in an open shelter made of logs packed with dirt, which the Russians had built to take a machine gun. We were more or less sitting on the mangled bodies of the four Popovs who’d been killed by grenades.
“I did that bunch in, with one shot,” shouted a strong young soldier from the Gross Deutschland.
A burst of mortar fire forced us down into the heap of enemy corpses. A shell hit the edge of the bunker, and the earth and logs blew apart, falling back onto our heads. The fellow huddled between me and a dead Russian was hit. As his body jerked up from the impact, I tensed myself to run. Another shell struck the shelter, disintegrating it. The debris poured down onto my legs and sent me reeling back against the opposite wall. I howled for help, sure that my legs were broken, and afraid to move. My trousers were ripped down the leg, but the bruised skin underneath was unbroken, although I could trace the red-violet passage of the blow I’d taken.
I plunged back into the heap of Russian corpses, falling onto the fellow who’d been hit a moment before. He let out a howl. We lay side by side, with our heads touching, as an avalanche of rubble poured down all around us.
“I’m wounded,” he groaned.
“Something is burning in my back. Call for a stretcher.”
I looked at him, and dazedly shouted: “Sänftentrager!”
But my ludicrous cries were lost in the deafening uproar of two spandaus firing quite near us. The big fellow from the Gross Deutschland was shouting at us to advance, as loud as he could: “Come on, fellows! Some of our boys are already at the water tank.”
I looked at the wounded man, who was staring at me with desperate, imploring eyes and clutching my sleeve. I didn’t know how to tell him that there was nothing I could do for him just then. The big soldier had jumped out of the shelter. I pulled myself brutally away, and turned my head. The wounded man called again, but I had already jumped from the shelter and was running like a madman after the other fellow, who was nearly fifteen yards ahead of me.
I joined another group who were hurriedly setting up two trench mortars, and helped them maneuver the tubes into position. Instantly our mortar bombs were shooting almost straight up. A landser, whose face was pouring blood, shouted that the Russians had withdrawn to the central tower.
The veteran, whom I hadn’t noticed before, let out a savage howclass="underline" “Got ’em!”
As he shouted, a white flash lit his face, which was covered with an incredible layer of dust, and a geyser of flame enveloped the tower. The Russian defense crumbled and fell under the impact of our concentrated fire. Our assault groups moved in and cleaned up the last resistance. Another German soldier fell, clutching his face, and then it was all over, except for a few widely scattered shots.
I and my companions ran into the ruins of what had once been a factory but was now reduced to rubble beyond classification. Once again, we were victorious; but the victory gave us no joy. Stupefied by the noise and the nervous tension, we wandered among the twisted, collapsed metal roofs. A landser with a face drawn by exhaustion mechanically picked up an enameled plaque which had something written on it in Cyrillic characters, perhaps a direction, or the word for “toilet.”
The town had fallen to us. There were about three hundred prisoners, in addition to two hundred enemy dead or wounded. The noncoms regrouped us, and led us back through the smoking devastation of the village. Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau reviewed his two companies, and called roll. About sixty men were missing. We collected the wounded, and regrouped them to wait for our three orderlies to give them first aid. There were about fifteen wounded men, including Holen Grauer, whose right eye was gone.
Finding water was difficult. The preikas had been smashed, and we finally had to lower soup kettles down a well in the ashes of one of the isbas. The water was black with soot. The wounded were screaming with pain; most of them were delirious.
There were also about seventy-five Russian wounded, who presented a dilemma to our Kommandant. In principle, we should have helped them too, as best we could. But we were under orders to rejoin our division as soon as the operation was completed. So we abandoned the Russian wounded, and piled ours into and onto the vehicles we had, which bore no resemblance to ambulances, or even to ordinary trucks — a few gun carriages and a couple of light artillery tractors. We felt exhausted, disgusted, and numb.
There was also the question of how to move the prisoners. There was no room in our collection of already overloaded vehicles. Finally, a sidecar fitted with an F.M. slowly drove some fifty of the prisoners along ahead of it. We turned them loose two days later, for lack of anything better to do with them.
As an autonomous group, we were faced with extremely difficult problems of supply. In theory, the vehicles carrying munitions and gasoline picked up the flotsam of war as their loads grew lighter. But the division already had some eleven hundred prisoners, and we didn’t know what to do with them. We set off with clusters of men — German and Russian — hanging on to everything that could roll.
We all looked back at the town, from which a thick cloud of smoke was climbing, and spreading out to the horizon. The dark gray sky was threatening rain, which would soon fall on the graves of forty German soldiers sacrificed to neutralize a single point of enemy resistance, which we weren’t even interested in holding. We moved on to another operation, not as part of any design to conquer, but simply as part of an attempt to protect our vast withdrawal of troops to the west bank of the Dnieper.
No one smiled. We knew that our victory couldn’t make any difference to the outcome of the war, and only hoped that it might have some strategic interest. The experience of the battle itself had been as always — more fear and, for some, like my friend Grauer, irreparable mutilation.
A young blond soldier, huddled beside the driver of the machine which was carrying about thirty of us, began to play on his harmonica. The melody rang softly in our nearly insensible ears: “…mit dir, Lilli Marlene, mit dir, Lilli Marlene…”
The music was slow and filled with a nostalgia which weighed heavily on our exhaustion. Hals was listening, his mouth hanging half open, making no sound, and staring at nothing.
8. THE BREAKTHROUGH AT KONOTOP
We drove for an hour — which meant about thirty miles — before it grew dark.
We were all anxious to stop so that we could get rid of the thick, choking dust which coated us from head to foot. We were also exhausted and longing for sleep. Although a good bed in a warm barracks would have been paradise, any place where we could have stretched out and lost consciousness would have done, and we knew that when we did stop we would collapse onto the ground, and sink immediately into blackness.
The dark sky was filled with heavy black clouds lit up on their outer fringes. Large drops of rain began to fall as the storm broke. The rain — so often a curse — seemed like a blessing this time, washing off the filthy faces we turned up to meet it. It soon became a downpour, running down our collars and over our bodies, like a gift from Providence to friend and foe alike, making us all smile with a sense, however partial, of returning well-being. The soaking cloth of the uniforms on our tightly packed bodies clung to all of us — gray-green for the Germans, violet-brown for the Russians. We all grinned at each other without distinction, like players from two teams in the showers after a match. There was no longer any feeling of hatred or vengeance, only a sense of life preserved and overwhelming exhaustion. The rain became so heavy that we had to improvise shelter, and covered our heads and shoulders with our ground sheets. Although hardly anyone understood more than a few words of the other language, we were all laughing and trading cigarettes — Hannover cigarettes for machorka tobacco from the Tartar plain. We smoked and joked over nothing — a “nothing” which in fact represented the most absolute human joy I had ever known. The exchange of tobacco, the smoke under the ground sheets, which made us choke and cough, and the simple fact of laughter without reserve — all of this made a small island of joy in a sea of tragedy, which affected us like a shot of morphine. We were able to forget the hate which divided us, as our stupefied senses reawakened to an awareness of life. Understanding nothing, I laughed uncontrollably, as a curious sensation took hold of me and filled my veins. Suddenly I was covered with gooseflesh, as one is during a particularly moving piece of music. The rain was beating on the metal hood. Would we have to shoot our Russian fellow passengers tomorrow? That seemed impossible; it was impossible that such things could continue.