Carrying our arms and baggage, covered with slimy mire, we set off down the road despite the mud which threatened to engulf us.
With heroic patience and discipline, each man waited his turn, enduring the torrential rain without complaint. With our feet in the muddy water our boots could no longer resist, we kept our assigned places. The last men to embark had to wait for several hours.
Vague, momentary smiles lit our almost unrecognizable faces. At last we were going to cross, and all of this would be over. We would be able to dry ourselves, and sleep, perhaps even in comfort, and stop feeling afraid. We clung to our more hopeful thoughts, although we were haunted by one last fear: what would happen on the trip across? Would the overused, overloaded boats make it? Or would they sink, carrying a hundred desperate souls to the bottom? And then there were the Yabos… If any Russian planes appeared… We could all remember in clear detail the horrible massacre of the day before.
Then it grew dark. Russian planes rarely flew at night, so perhaps we were at least safe from them.
When it was my turn, I climbed with a hundred other men onto a raft whose planks had been splintered by the passage of thousands of hobnailed boots. I watched anxiously as the water rose to within a foot of swamping us.
“That’s enough, cap’n,” shouted a noncom who looked about forty years old. “Do you want us to sink?”
“As many as possible, Herr Spiess,” an engineer said, laughing. “That’s orders, and we’re used to it. Come on — let’s have another ten.” When we were on the point of foundering, the boatmen let go of the ropes and, with the agility of young goats, jumped onto the few inches they had reserved for themselves.
So slowly we were almost unaware of it, the raft began to move out onto the water, which was barely creased by our momentum. Our balance seemed so precarious that no one dared move. The cursed bank, veiled in fog, disappeared from sight. I was huddled in the center of the raft between two fellows I didn’t know: a young lieutenant from an infantry regiment which had come to help us at Konotop, and a fellow from my own company, who seemed to be asleep on his feet. He was the only one who seemed so indifferent. Everyone else was listening and looking intently, especially toward the rainy sky, which we mistrusted absolutely. A boat half the size of ours, but with the same engine, slowly pulled level with us. Its deck was as jammed as ours.
How long was the crossing? Perhaps a quarter of an hour. It seemed interminable. The water slid past us with an easy, regular motion, whose slowness made us frantic. Some of the fellows were counting aloud, marking off the seconds perhaps, or using them as one uses imaginary sheep, to force sleep.
Then voices announced the approach of the west bank and safety and release from our torments. The men at the front of the raft could see it, enveloped in fog. Our blood ran faster in our veins, as we tried, by will power, to increase the speed of the engine. We were about to land, to be safe — quick, while the sky was still quiet.
An empty raft crossed our path, heading back for the east bank. We looked at it coldly. Any movement toward the east made us shiver. Then the west bank was only twenty yards away. We no longer dared to move for fear of foundering, despite an intense joy which we would have expressed in other circumstances by jumping and shouting. After so many days and hours of waiting and despair, we had been saved.
Then there were only ten yards… then five. The engines went into reverse, to slow us down. We drew up beside a pier made of tied branches, and we heard voices telling us to move slowly and care fully. With a sense of enormous privilege, we stepped, one after the other, onto the solid earth — which is to say, onto a quagmire exactly like the east bank. But the mud no longer mattered; we had crossed to the other side. The west bank meant security and safety, a barrier between us and the Russians. We had dreamed of this safety for so long, and so intensely, that we almost felt as if there were a barrier between us and the war itself. The bulletins had been officiaclass="underline" we would hold on to the Dnieper. The enemy would not pass beyond that line, and in the spring we would push them back beyond the Volga. During our long and painful retreat to the river and our endless wait, our thoughts had crystallized around this idea, and actually stepping onto the west bank seemed like the end of our misfortune: reorganization, clean clothes, leave, and the assurance that we had not been beaten. Of course, the west bank was still Russia, but it was the part of Russia which had welcomed us a few years earlier, the part of Russia which really favored us. Our exhausted brains clung to this fantasy: the west bank was almost the motherland.
PART FOUR
TO THE WEST
Winter 1943 to Summer 1944
10. “GOTT MIT UNS”
The officers and soldiers waiting to direct us were not particularly agreeable, and the military police, with their badges glistening damply in the fog, were downright unpleasant.
All organizations have police, and some of them must be fine fellows. However, we wanted to forget the police at Romny, and on the retreat from the Don, to preserve some of the joy we felt at being back in the West.
We tramped along, herded by a couple of fellows in a sidecar covered with mud. They didn’t bother to line us up in threes, but let us walk any way we liked, almost as if we were out for a stroll — which was a pleasant variation of usual practice. Maybe they knew what a hard time we’d had, and had decided to give us a break. Now that we were out of it, maybe everything was going to be all right. The sidecar forced us to increase our pace. We went on for about a mile and a half, stumbling through the mud and splattering our companions, to arrive finally at a big camp, where the men who’d crossed ahead of us were already waiting. It was dark and a fine rain was falling. We could see the barbed wire gleaming with wetness. Two soldiers with machine guns under their arms waved us through a makeshift entrance. Then we stopped, and the sidecar drove rapidly away. We stood where we’d been left, surrounded by barbed wire, not knowing what to think.
We tried to tell ourselves that this was just how things happened in the army, and that this welcome seemed excessively cold because we were fresh from the hell of Konotop. They were probably making us wait so that they could take us straight to clean, comfortable barracks, where we would sleep and regain our strength. Or perhaps they were getting our passes ready. This last idea filled us with joy, and annihilated the liquid mud, and the rain, and the barbed wire, which in reality held us prisoner.
We waited for about two hours. A second group of new arrivals joined us. The rain had become heavier, and we were all streaming with water. Quite nearby, we could see a row of huts with firm roofs and weather-tight windows, to which men were being sent in groups of twenty. We waited expectantly, certain that we were living through the last of our miseries. The fellows who went into the huts weren’t coming out again. They must already be sleeping on soft beds, the lucky bastards.
An hour later, it was my turn, along with nineteen others. There were two noncoms and a lieutenant in our group. We went into the building, which had its own generator and was brightly lit. Our state of extreme filth suddenly made us feel awkward. Military men of all ranks and military police were sitting facing us behind a row of long tables. An obergefreiter came up to us, yelling as in the old days at training camp. He told us to get over to the tables to be screened. We should be ready to produce on demand the papers and equipment entrusted to us by the army. This reception only increased our sense of astonished unease.