In the next street, we found the divisional store, which was still much better stocked than the supply stores of ordinary divisions. Some of our men could be given quite a few of the things they needed. While we waited, we watched a crowd of men, part of a new Volkssturm battalion, swarm into a factory courtyard. When we looked more closely at these men recently called up by the Fuhrer our eyes opened wide with surprise. They all belonged to the last class of reserves and seemed to be an even more extreme case than the Marie-Louise conscripts at the end of the Napoleonic era.
Some of these troops with Mausers on their shoulders must have been at least sixty or sixty-five, to judge by their curved spines, bowed legs, and abundant wrinkles. But the young boys were even more astonishing. For us, who had saved our eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty year-old lives through a thousand perils, the idea of youth meant childhood and not adolescence, which was still our phase of life, despite our disillusion. But now we were looking literally at children, marching beside these feeble old men. The oldest boys were about sixteen, but there were others who could not have been more than thirteen. They had been hastily dressed in worn uniforms cut for men, and were carrying guns which were often as big as they were. They looked both comic and horrifying, and their eyes were filled with unease, like the eyes of children at the reopening of school. Not one of them could have imagined the impossible ordeal which lay ahead. Some of them were laughing and roughhousing, forgetting the military discipline which was inassimilable at their age, and to which they had been exposed for barely three weeks. We noticed some heart-wringing details about these children, who were beginning the first act of their tragedy. Several of them were carrying school satchels their mothers had packed with extra food and clothes, instead of schoolbooks. A few of the boys were trading the saccharine candies which the ration allotted to children under thirteen. The old men marching beside these young sprouts stared at them with incomprehension.
What would be done with these troops? Where were they expected to perform? There was no answer to these questions. Were the authorities going to try to stop the Red Army with them? The comparison seemed tragic and ludicrous. Would Total War devour these children? Was Germany heroic, or insane?
Who would ever be able to judge this absolute sacrifice?
We stood in profound silence, watching and listening to the final moments of this first adolescence. There was nothing else we could do.
Some hours later, we were driven to a new assembly area a few miles from the Vistula, in a town called Medau. There we found a large part of our full division, which had left us in the south long ago. Even our regiment was there, and its officers, with their familiar names. The auxiliary services of our autonomous unit had performed enormous feats of imagination to continue functioning. We were extremely surprised to find that the full Gross Deutschland Division was still quite strong — a discovery that raised our morale considerably. We needed to cling to some form of solidity to avoid recognition of the final tragedy which had engulfed us, and of our strictly limited choice between combat in the most desperate circumstances, captivity, or the end, once and for all. Here, on the banks of the Vistula, which could be considered the cradle of hostilities, we found companies restocked with young boys to fill the gaping holes the war had made in our elite division. We also found some familiar faces, including Wiener, the veteran, who seemed quite astonished that we were all still alive.
“We must really be indestructible,” he exclaimed. “When I left you on the second Dnieper front, everything looked so black I really thought I’d never see any of you again.”
“Quite a few missing,” Wollers said.
“And quite a few still here. Mein Gott, Leutnant!”
We told Wiener that Wesreidau was dead, and Frösch…. He too had a list of names we could forget. No matter how intense the grief aroused by any particular name, the expressions on our worn faces never changed.
We pressed Wiener for news of Germany, of civilian life there and the situation of ordinary citizens. We all had reasons for concern and followed the movements of his lips, trying to grasp the implications of his inadequate words.
“I was in the Kansea military hospital in Poland,” he told us. “I had lost so much blood and seemed so weak that for two horrible days they did almost nothing about me. I would never have guessed that life had so strong a grip on me. It would have been so easy — one last sigh, and then into the hole. But it didn’t happen that way. I groaned and howled for ten days or so-especially the first two — and went through infection, transfusion, disinfection, re-infection, and here I am, back with you again, for another autumn of crap. Now I find the damp hard to take, too. I’ve got rheumatism, and that’s fatal.”
As before, the veteran relieved his desperation by cracking jokes.
“But you must have had convalescent leave, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Hals. I was in Germany. I went to Frankfurt, not am-Main, but am-Oder. I could have gone further if I’d wanted to, but there wasn’t any particular reason. They put us up in a girl’s high school — sad to say, without the girls. There wasn’t enough to eat, but at least they let us alone. Have you noticed, by the way, that I’m missing an ear?” The veteran grinned sardonically.
When we looked, we saw that his right ear was gone, and that his skin where the ear should have been was a pale, shiny pink, which looked as though it might break at any minute. We had all noticed, with out attaching any particular significance to it. So many men were missing one piece or another that we scarcely registered such things any more.
“Yes,” Prinz said. “On that side, you look dead.”
The veteran grinned again. “That’s because you’re so used to stiffs you’re beginning to see them even where there aren’t any.”
“Drop all the crap,” Solma shouted, “and tell us about Germany.”
“Well… Yes.” There was a moment of silence, which seemed to last forever.
“What’s it like in Frankfurt?” asked Feldwebel Sperlovski, elbowing the rest of us aside. (He came from Frankfurt, and his family was probably still there.)
The veteran was no longer looking at us. He seemed to be staring into his own interior.
“The high school was on the east banks of the Oder, up on a hill. You could see a big piece of the town from there. It was all gray — the color of dead trees — with walls sticking up here and there, all black from the smoke of fires. People were living down there, like landser in the trenches.”
As Sperlovski listened his face began to twitch, and his voice trembled as he spoke. “But our fighters… and flak… wasn’t there any defense?”
“Of course… but so out of proportion…”
“Don’t worry too much, Sperlovski,” Wollers said. “Your family was certainly evacuated to the country.”
“No,” Sperlovski shouted in a voice of despair. “My wife wrote me that she had been conscripted and had to stay in town. No one has the right to leave his job.”
Wiener knew very well what effect his words must have on an audience starved for good news, but nothing seemed to distress him any more.
“It’s total war,” he said, like an automaton. “Nothing and no one will be spared, and German soldiers must be able to endure everything.” Sperlovski walked away. He looked stunned. His eyes were glazed, and his steps faltered, as if he were drunk.
German soldiers would have to endure everything, in the world we had created. We were fitted only for that world, and were otherwise inadaptable. Lensen was as still as stone, and listened, stony-faced.
“Is it the same for all our towns?” Lindberg asked. He must have been thinking of his town, by Lake Constance.