You who perhaps will some day read these lines may also remember that one evening in the autumn of 1943 the bulletins announced that German troops caught in Konotop had managed to break out of a Russian trap. This was true. Of course, the price was never mentioned, because it didn’t matter. For you, the day of deliverance was coming.
9. CROSSING THE DNIEPER
The rain blew in from the horizon in waves.
Occasionally a brief moment of light enabled us to spot the next undulating curtain of water sweeping across the streaming steppe. It had rained steadily for two days, and despite the discomfort and inconvenience we hoped the rain would last for at least that long again. In another two days, if we could maintain our rate of thirty miles a day, and had any luck at all, we should reach the Dnieper.
No planes could fly through such a torrential downpour, so there had been no Yaks — and every day without Yaks was a reprieve from death for hundreds of men. The extraordinary mobility of the Wehrmacht — one of its principal sources of strength up to that moment had entirely disappeared in that part of Russia, and the men from Army Group Center were plodding toward the river in interminable columns at the rate of three miles an hour. Our mobility, which had always given us an advantage over the vast but slow Soviet formations, was now only a memory, and the disproportion of numbers made even flight a doubtful prospect. Moreover, the equipment of the Red Army was constantly improving, and we often found ourselves pitted against extremely mobile motorized regiments of fresh troops. To complete our disarray, the Soviet troops which had been tied up in the attempt to trap us at Konotop were now free to pursue our slow withdrawal.
German aviation, which was entirely occupied south of Cherkassy, had abandoned our part of the sky to the Yaks, which took advantage of this freedom to harass us unmercifully. So, despite our heavy, waterlogged clothes, worn-out boots, fever, and the impossibility of lying down except on the soaking ground, we blessed fortune for sending us gray skies and rain.
During the morning, five Bolshevik planes had appeared despite the weather. Our harassed men reacted with an automatic impulse of self-defense and self-preservation, staring desperately at the flat plain for somewhere to hide. But, like animals caught in a trap, we understood there was no way out. The companies in a direct line of fire dropped to one knee, in the regulation position for anti-aircraft defense. These companies received the Yaks’ fire, and saw several men torn to pieces by Russian bullets, but nevertheless managed to bring down one of the planes. It was our bad luck that the plane went into a spin, and fell directly onto our convoy, crushing a truck full of wounded men, and opening a crater twenty yards wide filled with shattered flesh. No one cried out: in fact, almost no one looked. We simply picked up our burdens and went on.
We were all too exhausted to react, and almost nothing stirred our emotions. We had all seen too much. In my sick and aching brain, life had lost its importance and meaning, and seemed of no more consequence than the power of motion one lends to a marionette, so that it can agitate for a few seconds. Of course, there was friendship — there were Hals and Paula — but immediately behind them was that hole full of guts, red, yellow, and foul smelling; piles of guts, almost as large as the earth itself. Life could be snuffed out like that, in an instant, but the guts remained for a long time, stamped on the memory.
We walked without stopping. The interminable line of men ahead curved in a semicircle which seemed to be standing still. The Dnieper was not yet in sight. We had planned to reach it in five days, but we were now in the sixth, ploughing through the mud at an average speed of two or two and a half miles an hour. I had never seen a countryside so huge and so empty. The trucks and other vehicles which had gas had all passed us long ago. The rest were pulled by the few half-starved nags we had not already killed and eaten. From time to time, someone gave up his place on a crowded steiner, pulled by two horses, to continue on foot. We were under orders not to abandon materiel for any reason whatever. We were supposed to receive more gasoline — God knows how — probably by air — so that we could continue to drive our machines. In fact, one morning we did receive a delivery from aircraft. Two JU-52s threw down eight large packages of rope, which we retrieved with derision. We were supposed to use them for tying our vehicles to the tanks which had been destroyed at Konotop the week before. In default of gas, our gaunt horses stubbornly pulled our vehicles through the gluey muck which had been freshly trampled by thirty retreating regiments. Our steiner, on which I had hung all my gear, was pulled by two Rhenish horses, probably taken from their peacetime labor about a year before. One of them was covered with sores, and his eyes glittered with fever.
Two days later, on the bank of the Dnieper, our brave horse received his reward. A noncom from the cavalry shot him in the head, along with some ten others. Very few horses were allowed onto the pontoons, whose capacity was inadequate even for the men, and nothing could be left behind which might be useful to the Russians. In a way, this was the beginning of our “scorched earth” policy.
The proportion of sick men to healthy rose at an alarming rate. “A healthy mind in a healthy body” was the slogan our leaders had held up to us. Under the conditions of our retreat, it was often hard to tell which was affected first — mind or body. It seemed that well over half our men had nothing healthy about them.
Luckily, the weather remained frightful. This was particularly hard on the sick and feverish — undernourished, dehydrated men with filthy, suppurating wounds and bodies barely covered by torn, ragged uniforms. But anything the weather could produce — wind, rain, heavy clouds trailing down to the ground — was preferable to clear skies, which invariably meant the humming planes, diving down at us like carrion crows attacking a moribund animal. Indifferent to everything, we continued our slow march.
Two or three times a day, covering troops were organized and left behind to slow down the enemy, who were following at a leisurely pace. The men chosen for this task dug shallow holes which protected less than a quarter of their bodies, and waited, resigned, for the juggernaut to crush them.
We knew that we would never see them again. In other districts. entire regiments had been wiped out by Russian armored troops which had caught up with them. The retreat was costly, and reached its climax on the east bank of the river, in an incredible crush of men and materiel, spread out over acres of flat sand, so that each Russian missile was assured a maximum destructive effect. A healthy mind in a healthy body would have done everything possible to escape those circumstances.
Our eyes, which had grown used to accepting everything without surprise, gaped at the most astonishing sights.
Everyone reached the river, the outer boundary of safety, in a state of indescribable panic, only to find it was necessary to trample on the men already there, even drown them, to have any hope of getting onto the wretchedly inadequate vessels, which often foundered before they reached the other side.
On the eighth day, after skirting a broad hill, we reached the bank of the river, or, more precisely, the swarm of landser who covered the bank, hiding it completely. Through the noise and confusion we could hear the sound of engines, which we found curiously reassuring: working engines must mean there was gasoline somewhere. We knew that motorized transport was essential for such a huge country, and that even with motors we could only move very slowly because of the terrible roads. However, if we heard engines, it must at least mean that some reorganization had begun. Among the crowd of men there were many vehicles which had been dragged as far as the river despite almost insuperable obstacles, and were waiting in the long grass, which looked like dune grass. In fact, the engines we heard did not belong to refueled trucks, but to the boats — inadequate in size and number — which the engineers were using to move across as many men and machines as they could. Whenever materiel could be moved, it was given priority. Loading trucks and guns and light tanks onto vessels built to carry hay carts was not easy, but fortunately we had plenty of manpower to replace the cranes and derricks of a port — at least a hundred thousand at our point of arrival alone. I saw men standing up to their necks in water, supporting makeshift landing stages until the water rose over their chins — rickety, hastily improvised piers which collapsed as soon as their human props moved away. Half drowned, these men worked frantically against time, with extraordinary persistence and patience. The urgent task of transporting five divisions was not begun until two days after our arrival, when all materiel that could be moved was across the river. We had ten boats at our disposal, each with a maximum capacity of twenty men, four barges which had run out of gas and were towed in turn by two small boats equipped with B.M.W. portable engines, and four precarious pontoons, each with a capacity of 150 men.