Although we could see nothing, voices kept announcing: “Here they are!”
Our tense imaginations invested the visible edge of our defenses with a thousand imaginary movements, and a thousand thoughts and visions whirled through our heads: our distant homelands, our families and friends, and our desperate, passionate loves. We imagined every possible outcome to the imminent fighting: surrender, captivity, flight… flight, or death… a quick death, to be done with it all. Some grasped their weapons all the more firmly, dreaming of a heroic defense which would push the Russians back, and hold the line. But most of us were resigned to death — a resignation which often created the most glorious heroes of the war. Simple cowards or pacifists, who had been opposed to Hitler from the start, often saved their lives and the lives of many others in a delirium of terror provoked by the accident of an overwhelming situation.
Faced with the Russian hurricane, we ran whenever we could. But often we had no choice, and became heroes without glory, who were somehow able to conjure up a strength superior to the enemy’s. We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich — or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear, which was our motivating power. The idea of death, even when we accepted it, made us howl with powerless rage. We fought for reasons which are perhaps shameful, but are, in the end, stronger than any doctrine. We fought for ourselves, so that we wouldn’t die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats, which do not hesitate to spring with all their teeth bared when they are cornered by a man infinitely larger than they are.
Although we were already beaten ten times over, our terror became a fortress of despair, which the Russians found difficult to breach. We lay huddled against the frozen soil, and listened, to the growing tumult of their approach.
We began to hear distinct, separable sounds. The black potato sack which was Hals changed shape and moved toward me.
“Do you hear that?” he whispered. “They’ve got tanks.”
At first I heard nothing but tanks. Then there was the sound of singing too: a Russian victory song. It was their turn now to feel the infectious enthusiasm of advancing troops.
“A year and a half ago, we were marching on Moscow, and I was singing just like that,” muttered the veteran.
The night wore on. The noise of the Russian advance changed in quality and intensity, but never stopped. The men who had been resting in the isbas came back to their forward positions. Everyone was now in the line. Even the auxiliary services had been organized to defend the village. The front was long and thin; our division alone held some sixty miles, with the regiments standing elbow to elbow. There were a great many of us, but at least thirty times as many of them.
Our anxiety hovered over us like a pessimistic exhalation trapped by our heavy steel helmets. Our breath condensed on our nostrils and lips, and on the upturned collars of our coats. For a long time now, our hands and feet had been hurting us. For the moment, stiffened by cold, they seemed detached and separate from our general nervous tension. On other evenings, the fellows moved about in their holes to keep from freezing. This evening, however, our cumbersome overshoes had been tossed aside, and everyone was still. The biting cold passed over us like a silent dream, depositing a film of frost on the earth and on us. Periodically, we had to clear our weapons, and every time the touch of the icy metal struck us like an electric shock. To the east, the Russian troops were silent. All we heard from their side was the disquieting roar of their engines.
Occasionally, we heard a horse whinnying: one of our starving beasts protesting the onset of death. The desire for sleep weighed on us as heavily and oppressively as our fear and the cold, and kept over whelming us for five and even ten minutes at a time, despite our wide-open eyes. Then we would jolt back to reality, to wait for the first hours of morning — a time when men and animals often die of cold.
The Russians were taking their time. Since we had caught the first sounds of their new front, a full day had gone by, but nothing more had happened. Had we possessed sufficient strength and equipment, a counter-attack would almost surely have been successful. But our orders were simply to resist and hang on. We were operating on a system of four hours on and four hours off, organized so that a maximum number of men was in the line at any given moment. Many men fell asleep beside their guns, to wake suddenly, badly frozen. We were steadily losing sick and wounded men, who withdrew on foot or on horseback — and no reinforcements were arriving to fill the gaps.
“It’s a racket,” grumbled the veteran.
At dusk, we found Lindberg naked from the waist down. He had gone off a short distance, supposedly to crap, and had stayed that way for nearly three-quarters of an hour. By the time we found him, he was crying like a baby, and he wouldn’t have lasted much longer. Hals blew up at him, and let him have it on the backside and thighs with the strap of his gas mask.
By the next morning, the Russians had still not attacked. We had grown steadily colder and more nervous, and it was difficult to seem calm.
One of our planes flew over, and dropped four sacks of mail. I had four letters: two from my family, and two from Paula. All were very out of date — particularly one of the letters from France, which was more than a month old. I devoured Paula’s letters, which seemed filled with sadness. She had been sent to a small factory out in the country some forty miles from Berlin. She said that life in the capital was no longer possible.
What was I supposed to think? What could I imagine?
My parents’ letter, with the standard two-line refrain from my father, irritated me by its tone of unjustified complaint. I mentioned this to Wiener, who replied: “That’s all the French know how to do — complain.”
My mother’s last letter astounded me by its lack of realism. The poor woman begged me to take care of myself, to avoid showing off, to do my duty, but nothing more — to protect myself from meaningless risks. This sort of advice seemed so irrelevant that for the moment I was staggered. I looked up from the letter, yellow against the snow, to the whiteness which veiled the appalling danger threatening us from the east. The pathetic futility of my mother’s attitude made my eyes fill with tears.
Everyone seemed to be reading a letter whose contents were so unexpected that fellows far older than I were overcome by tears. Others jumped to their feet, screaming like madmen: a close relative or friend had been killed in an air raid.
“This mail is only upsetting everyone,” said a tall fellow next to me, as he looked at a friend who was weeping like a child.
It seemed we were to be spared nothing.
In the afternoon, some patrols were sent out into the whirling snow. Our command had grown tired of waiting and had decided to test the enemy. We heard a few shots, and then the patrols came back, reporting that they’d seen a heavy concentration of Russian materiel.
I and my comrades were wakened just before nightfall. With pounding hearts, we ran to our forward positions. The Russian tanks were rolling through the storm, and we could feel the vibration of their treads against the frozen ground.
Our anti-tank gunners and men with Panzerfausts kept their eyes glued to their telescopic sights, which they had to wipe continually. A few anti-tank trenches had been dug, but these were ludicrously inadequate both in number and size. We knew that if our anti-tank defenses gave way, we were lost, and we nervously clenched our fingers around the anti-tank grenades and magnetic mines which had been distributed.