I walked over to the Tatra, trying to brush off the worst of the mud that clung to my uniform. I noticed two holes in the door I had opened to get out which appeared to have swung shut on its own momentum: two round holes, each outlined by a ring of metal from which the paint had been scraped away. Nervously, I pulled open the door. Inside, I saw a man I shall never forget — a man sitting normally on the seat, whose lower face had been reduced to a bloody pulp.
“Ernst?” I asked in a choking voice. “Ernst!” I threw myself at him. “Ernst! What… ? Say something! Ernst!” I looked frantically for some features on that horrible face. “Ernst!” I was nearly crying.
Outside, the column was getting ready to leave. The two trucks behind me were impatiently blowing their horns.
“Hey.” I ran toward the first of the trucks. “Stop. Come with me. I’ve got a wounded man.”
I was frantic. The doors of the truck behind me swung open and two soldiers stuck out their heads.
“Well, young fellow, are you going to move, or aren’t you?”
“Stop!” I shouted louder than ever. “I’ve got a wounded man.”
“We have thirty,” one of the soldiers shouted back. “Get going. The hospital isn’t too far from here.”
Their voices rose over mine, and the noise of their trucks, which had pulled out, and were passing me, drowned my cries of desperation. Now I was alone, with a Russian truck loaded with wounded men, and Ernst Neubach, who was dead, or dying.
“You shits! Wait for me! Don’t go without us!”
I burst into tears, and gave way to a mad impulse. I grabbed my Mauser, which I’d left in the truck. My eyes were swimming, and I could barely see. I felt for the trigger, and pointing the gun at the sky, fired all five cartridges in the magazine, hoping that to someone in the trucks this would sound like a cry for help. But no one stopped. The trucks continued to roll away from me, sending out a spray of mud on each side. In despair, I returned to the cabin, and ripped open my kit to look for a package of dressings.
“Ernst,” I said. “I’m going to bandage you. Don’t cry.”
I was insane. Ernst wasn’t crying: I was. His coat was covered with blood. With the dressings in my hand, I stared at my friend. He must have been hit in the lower jaw. His teeth were mixed with fragments of bone, and through the gore I could see the muscles of his face contracting, moving what was left of his features.
In a state of near shock, I tried to put the dressing somewhere on that cavernous wound. When this proved impossible, I pushed a needle into the tube of morphine, and jabbed ineffectually through the thicknesses of cloth. Crying like a small boy, I pushed my friend to the other end of the seat, holding him in my arms, and soaking in his blood. Two eyes opened, brilliant with anguish, and looked at me from his ruined face.
“Ernst!” I laughed through my tears. “Ernst!”
He slowly lifted his hand and put it on my forearm. Half choked with emotion, I started the truck, and managed to begin moving without too great a jolt.
For a quarter of an hour, I drove through a web of ruts with one eye on my friend. His grip on my arm tightened and eased in proportion to his pain, and his death rattle rose and fell, sometimes louder than the noise of the truck.
Choking back my tears, I prayed, without reason or thought, saying anything that came into my head.
“Save him. Save Ernst, God. He believed in you. Save him. Show yourself.”
But God did not answer my appeals. In the cab of a gray Russian truck, somewhere in the vastness of the Russian hinterland, a man and an adolescent were caught in a desperate struggle. The man struggled with death, and the adolescent struggled with despair, which is close to death. And God, who watches everything, did nothing. The breath of the dying man passed with difficulty through that horrible wound, making huge bubbles of blood and saliva. I considered every possibility. I could turn back and look for help, or force the men I was carrying to tend Ernst, at gunpoint if necessary, or even kill Ernst, to cut short his sufferings. But I knew very well I couldn’t kill him. I had not yet been obliged to fire directly at anyone.
My tears had dried, leaving the trace of their passage on my filthy face, to betray my weakness to the world. I was no longer crying, and my feverish eyes stared at the knob on the radiator two meters in front of me, which cut hypnotically into the interminable horizon. For long moments, Ernst’s hand would tighten on my arm, and each time I was overwhelmed by fresh panic. I couldn’t look at that horrifying face. Several German planes passed overhead, through the cloudy sky, and in a desperate attempt at telepathy every fiber in my body appealed to them for help. But maybe they were Russian planes. It didn’t matter; I had no time to spare. No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.
Ernst’s hand gripped my arm convulsively. The pressure continued for so long that I slid my foot off the accelerator, and stopped, afraid of the worst. I turned and looked at the mutilated face, whose eyes seemed to be fixed on something the living can’t see. Those eyes were veiled by a curious film. My heart was pumping so hard that I felt actual physical pain. I refused to believe what I could guess without difficulty.
“Ernst!” I shouted.
From the back of the truck my shout was answered by several others.
I pushed my companion down on the seat, imploring heaven to let him live. But his body fell heavily against the other side of the cabin. Death! He was dead! Ernst! Mama! Help me!
In a delirium of terror, I leaned against the truck door, and then let myself drop, trembling, onto the running board. I tried to persuade myself that none of this was happening, that it was all a nightmare from which I would wake to see another horizon.
As I sat and thought, I still had no idea of the extent of irremediable evil. I dreamed of what life would be like when I shook off this horrible nightmare in which my friend had just died. But my eyes could see only mud, sucking at my boots.
Two heads looked out from the back of the truck. They were saying something but I didn’t hear them. I stood up, and turning my back on them, walked off a short distance. That small physical effort reawakened some sense of life and hope, and I tried to tell myself that all of this wasn’t really serious, that it was only a bad dream I had to forget. I tried to impose an expression of smiling derision on my features. Two of the wounded men jumped down from the truck to relieve themselves. I stared at them unseeing, while the vitality of being alive beat back the darkness. I began to think with hope that surely all the German soldiers in Russia would be sent to help us, that something must be coming to help us. Suddenly I thought of the French. They were already on their way: all our newspapers said so. The first legionnaires had already set out. I had seen the photographs.
I felt a hot flush run through me. Ernst would be avenged: that poor fool who had never hurt a fly, who had spent his time making life more endurable for wretched soldiers shaking with cold. And his marvelous hot showers! The French would come, and I would run to embrace them. Ernst had loved them like his own compatriots. This surge of hope and joy could not be damped by facts I didn’t know — like the fact that the French had decided on quite another course.
“What’s happened?” asked one of the men, whose gray bandage was falling over his eyes. “Are we out of gas?”
“No. My friend has just been killed.” They looked into the cabin.
“Fuck… that’s not so bad. At least he didn’t have to suffer.” I knew that Ernst’s agony had lasted for nearly half an hour. “We ought to bury him,” one of them said.
The three of us lifted out the body, which was already stiffening. I moved like an automaton, and my face was without expression. I saw a small rise of ground which was less trampled than everywhere else, and we took Ernst there.