This hasty scrawl, with dripping letters, gave a tearful impression of Marxist beliefs.
To dispose as quickly as possible of this flimsy, improvised fortress, we loaded the spandau with explosive incendiary bullets. The thatched roof caught on fire almost at once. The enemy, who were defending themselves with automatic weapons, did not spare their fire.
A salvo of mortar shells knocked the roof into the building, and the partisans had to abandon an untenable position. Our two groups ran toward the burning building to harass the Russians as they fled. An old bearded man was leaning against a pile of stones, shouting curses at us. His right hand rested on the head of a dead comrade who lay on the ground beside him. The old man was wounded himself, and his clothes were torn and burned. We walked past him at a distance of no more than three yards. The sight of our guns didn’t silence him. He shook his fist at us, and cursed us. We all saw him through the smoke and sparks of the burning barn, but no one thought of shooting him. He showered maledictions at us until the collapse of the building buried him. A column of sparks rose into the azure sky. The first elements of our group were already in the village streets, firing on anything that moved.
The last of the partisans were running toward the mountains. For a moment, they were directly exposed to our fire, and we shot down twenty of them on the dusty road and among the junipers on the hillside.
The spandau, which had been fitted with a special magazine, took a horrible toll of the fleeing groups of partisans. Then we stopped firing, and the men from the German post came out and joined us. Many of them were wounded, and twelve were dead. We gave the wounded first aid, and drove the local residents from their huts. Fires were spreading everywhere, and had to be put out.
Men, women, and children joined us in fighting the flames. It took almost an hour to put the fires out. Then everyone, ourselves included, dragged the bodies of the dead to a central point. Women screamed and cried as they recognized a husband or son or lover. It looked as if most of the partisans had lived in this place.
Soon, however, the tears and sobs became threats and curses. We collected our own dead and wounded with the usual mute sentiment established by habit. The day was so beautiful it was hard to believe that any of this was really serious. Our eyes, disillusioned by so much accumulated fear and anxiety, no longer distinguished the tragedies of any particular moment.
Hals was staring at the magnificent mountain scenery, as he carried along a comrade whose tunic was blotched with brown stains. The birds had regained their sense of spring joy and were flying once again through the blue sky, which was faintly marked by smoke from the smoldering fires. For us, in the eastern armies, this joyousness of nature almost excused what had just happened. After the mud and the cold, we were like wild animals, overjoyed by the spring sun, and the knowledge that shelter for the night was no longer a serious problem.
We deplored what had just happened as a disturbance of the peace and quiet we so much appreciated.
The villagers were still caught in a crisis of tearful despair, and insults which were comprehensible simply by their tone shook our sense of well-being.
Someone threw a stone, which hit one of our wounded men in the face. Two landser spun around, brandishing their machine guns.
“Break it up, you pigs, or we’ll drill you full of holes.”
But the shouted curses kept right on. We were ringed by faces, especially feminine faces, distorted by rage, spitting and cursing, and by shaking fists. Suddenly, six planes flying wing to wing appeared in that marvelous sky-six Soviet fighters, looking for one of our convoys. This sign heartened the Russians, who shouted, “Ourrah Stalin,” and pointed at the planes, which blindly continued their search.
We could see such hatred on all these faces that we shivered, despite the fine spring day. We were all thinking of our tortured, mutilated comrades, murdered by men who were mixing themselves into a fight that had left them on the sidelines. We remembered once again the tragic deaths at the territorial posts all along our line of retreat during the winter: faces smashed open with axes, so that the gold teeth could be pulled out; the hideous agony of wounded men tied with their heads inside the gaping bellies of dead comrades; amputated genitals; Ellers’ section, whom we had found tied up and naked, on a day when the temperature had dropped to thirty degrees below zero, with their feet thrust into a drinking trough which had frozen solid; and the faces of tortured men under the dark winter sky….
With dry mouths, we listened to the mounting rage of these peasants, who were now paying a price they could have avoided for all time. If anyone had ordered us to fire, we would have obeyed without hesitation. I could see the gun shaking in the filthy, nervous hands of the man nearest me. A little way off, another of our men was no longer able to control the trembling of his face muscles. We had all stopped working, and our anger was rising like a storm.
A tall, slim figure strode between the two groups. We saw that it was Wesreidau, and that he was white with fury. He stopped five yards from the Russians, and threw them a look so terrible that silence fell at once. He had learned Russian during the long course of the campaign. He told the villagers to bury their dead with the same silence and respect he required of his troops. He said that the war would soon be over for them, and that they should wait for the end, keeping to the sidelines. He said that he had never imagined the war would bring him to shoot civilians, who had been misled into arming by false propaganda, and excused himself for what he had been forced to do. Then his voice became as hard as death. He said that he would not tolerate any further hostile manifestations; that he intended to return to camp with all his men still alive, and that the entire village would be held responsible if he did not.
Wesreidau’s words had the effect of a soothing balm. Everything returned to a state of unexpected order. The dead were buried and sobs were stifled.
We found enough gas for our return in the stores of the outpost. The men there entertained us with a few bottles they had put aside several months before. Then we returned to the road, leaving eight wounded men behind at the post, where the medical service would pick them up the next day. Six others failed to answer the roll call, and remained in the Ukrainian soil forever.
“Not so crowded this time,” someone said.
We acquiesced without speaking. Our eyes lingered on the village disappearing behind clouds of dust raised by the trucks. The beautiful spring light glowed all around our blackened, steel-capped faces, which seemed irrevocably cut off from the season. Our awareness of everything was similarly split. Our thoughts, like our eyes, couldn’t settle on anything that seemed definite, or restful, and a sense of well-being had no place in the convoy.
The whirling dust hid the bursting spring. All we could see were the trucks, and the grotesque, dangling cadaver of the pig, covered with blood and flies.