“Where is the front?” our noncom asked.
“More or less everywhere,” the other said. “And mostly mobile units. In the evenings, convoys come through on the track. They never have their lights on, and every time it scares us to death. A plane knocked our radio out, so we’re completely cut off. It’s enough to drive a fellow mad.”
“We’re supposed to be rejoining our units,” the noncom explained. “Do you think we’ve still got far to go?”
“Well, the front is certainly five or ten miles east of here. But it’s very fluid. It’s impossible to be exact.”
We all felt extremely perplexed.
“Let’s go along that way,” our guide said finally. “We’re bound to find something.”
The tank crew watched us go with regret. With darkness, which fell earlier than we had expected, accompanied by a heavy fog, we arrived at the precarious approximation of a front which existed in that sector. A few arbitrarily disposed Paks emerged from the darkness, and a sentry, green with terror, shouted, “Wer da?” in a trembling voice. The same terror made our noncom squeak an incomprehensible reply. Our preservation from the guns of our own men could only be laid to a simple collapse of vigilance. A frozen, ill-tempered soldier led us to the company commander.
“The Russians come through this way from any direction,” he said as we walked along.
“It’s pretty demoralizing, and unless the front is stabilized again, it’ll go on this way, as far as I can see. Anyway, the regiment you’re looking for isn’t around here.”
We ran into the company commander, a captain, coming up from a candle-lit hole. He looked old and ill. His long overcoat was thrown carelessly over his shoulders, and his chest was covered by a thick, pale scarf which stood out against the gray green of his uniform. He wore a forage cap instead of a helmet. We snapped to attention out of habit. The officer studied our map, trying to find some helpful directions he might give us. He seemed bewildered. The map included very few details, which made it almost as easy to get lost on paper as it was on the ground. He made some deductions in the light of a pocket flashlight, and decided to send us to the northeast. As the regiments were disposed, ours must be in that direction. This seemed a long way from the orderly procedures of the Gross Deutschland office in Vinnitsa.
Despite the exhaustion of the long, painful march on which we had been engaged since dawn, we set off again, into the icy, foggy darkness. Three-quarters of an hour later, some fellows in a company buried in that white desert huddled a little closer in their shelter to make room for us. We had to stop, or we might have been lost for good. The acid, almost palpable fog burned our throats and made every effort excessively painful. We managed to fall asleep despite the cold, which, as always, was much harder to bear at the beginning of the season, before our bodies were used to it. Outside, in the trenches, the sentries were stamping up and down to keep from freezing on their feet. The veil of fog wrapped them round completely, cutting them off from everything that lay beyond their parapets.
We spent a harassed night of half sleep. Despite the lamp-heaters and the canvas stretched across the mouth of our shelter, the cold, still only relative at the beginning of the season, was severe enough to make us feel half frozen. The thermometer must have fallen to as low as fifteen degrees, and the fog poured in, almost as thick as outdoors. The troops passed the time as best they could, either sunk in sleep despite the discomfort, or playing Skat, or writing home with a pen precariously balanced between numbed fingers. The candles, on which they had been ordered to economize as much as possible, were stuck into empty tins which caught the melting wax, prolonging their lives by as much as four or five times. The memory of those bunkers buried in the wildness of the steppe still haunts my memory, like a legendary tale heard in childhood.
The demoralizing dawn cold greeted us as we left the hole. Silently, we resumed our march and our search. Everything was quiet, as if paralyzed by the cold, as dangerous an enemy as the Red Army. For a long time, we walked parallel to a frieze of barbed wire, coated with frost. The fog, which had not yet lifted, clung to the wire in minute drops which froze instantly.
Toward the end of the morning, two-thirds of our group at last found their regiment, whose officers were able to tell us the approximate positions of the other two regiments we still had to find. More precisely, for the sixteen of us still at loose ends, we were looking for two regiments and three companies — the young recruit and I, for example, belonged to separate companies — and the weather was no help. The inescapable necessity of trial and error added a considerable number of miles to our progress. We grew increasingly angry. How could our instructions have been so vague? Organizational failure of this kind were particularly hard on German troops, who were accustomed to the utmost efficiency. In fact, the centers of responsibility had practically ceased to exist. The extraordinarily tight army organization, which had functioned so superbly in Poland and France and all the smaller countries invaded by the Wehrmacht, was lost in the immensity of Russia, where the front was nearly fifteen hundred miles long. Our rapidly dwindling transport capability further complicated the situation during the terrible winter, which was to be followed by only one more.
Our group of sixteen men was made up of fourteen fellows belonging to one unit; myself, attached to another; and the tall young recruit, who was looking for still a third. To be exact, he and I belonged to two separate companies in the same regiment.
Just before dark, the main group of fourteen ran into their unit unexpectedly, as had the others. The young fellow and I were left to fend for ourselves on the icy track already packed hard by endless comings and goings. Feverish with anxiety, we pursued our tentative route, passing through a half-deserted hamlet. The few soldiers occupying it, dressed as they pleased, or as they could, stared at us in silence. We felt embarrassed and frightened.
According to our instructions, we were to keep on to the northeast. As long as there was any light, we tried to fix reference points on the slightest hollow or hump in the ground, on features more imaginary than real, which we projected onto the infinite monotony. We kept the earthworks and trenches of the front on our right. However, the fog soon reduced the possibilities of navigation to nil.
Despite my youth, it seemed that circumstances required me to assert myself. The other fellow was looking at me with wild, questioning eyes. I suggested digging a hole deep enough to cover with our two canvases to make a shelter for the night. This idea terrified my companion, who wanted to keep going.
“Our regiment must be quite close now,” he said.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “We can’t keep on like this. We’ll only get completely lost, and then the wolves will eat us.”