We tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. About half an hour later we heard a muted noise of bustle and commotion just beyond the walls of the covered shelter. In the darkness, we guessed that we were listening to some fellows collecting their gear. We all turned toward the sound, trying to grasp what was happening, when a feld appeared, wearing camouflage.
“Groups 8 and 9?” he asked in a low voice. “Present!” answered the two group leaders.
“You’ll be leaving in five minutes, by way of access C, and will proceed to your respective positions. Good luck!”
He pointed to a small sign, scarcely visible in the darkness, marked with the letter C. All our reflections came to a dead stop, and our brains emptied, as if we had been anesthetized. Everyone grabbed his gun, and checked the critical points of his harness and straps, as Hauptmann Fink had taught us — especially the chin straps of our helmets. Hals lifted the big F.M. onto his shoulders, and Lindberg, who was his number-two man, slipped his slender silhouette in beside the man he was supposed to serve. Only the veteran — our second machine gunner — behaved as if he’d forgotten the object of all these preparations. His movements were not marked by the febrile haste which characterized the actions of all the rest of us. He knew all this from before. He propped the heavy F.M. against his leg, and waited for the order to move out.
“I hope you’re in good shape,” he said to the gun, grinning sardonically.
“Group 8!” called the sergeant, sounding as if he’d been struck by a sudden electric shock.
“After me, and silence!”
We took exit C and, sticking close together, followed the trench to the forward positions. Our noncom was at the head of the column. Behind him came Grumpers, the grenadier, who was about twenty-two years old; then Hals, just past eighteen, and Lindberg, not quite seventeen; then our three gunners: a Czech of indefinable age with an unpronounceable name, a Sudeten of nineteen, whose name ended with an “a,” and me. Right behind me was the veteran with his number-two man, another terrified boy, and finally Grenadier Kraus, who must have been well into his twenties. We moved out in good order, exactly as we’d been taught at Camp F, where we’d sweated so hard.
Indefinable noises reached us, coming from either the Russian or the German lines. We crossed several trenches jammed with troops who were still half asleep in the warm summer air, before climbing out of our own trench in the middle of the woods. Young Lindberg, who was loaded down like a donkey, slipped on the earth embankment, and the magazines of the spandau he was carrying clashed together. The noncom grabbed him by his straps and helped him climb up. Then he glared at him furiously, and kicked him in the shin. We walked to the edge of the wood in single file. The noncom stopped short very suddenly, and we all more or less piled into each other.
“It’s darker than Hades here,” the veteran muttered in my ear.
It seemed to me that our guide, having signed us to stop, was now going on ahead. We stayed where we were, bent double, waiting for an order to proceed. Despite our best efforts to keep quiet, we couldn’t avoid a certain amount of metallic clatter from all the weapons we were carrying.
The noncom came back, and we set out again, walking forward another short distance to the foxholes at the edge of the wood, where our scouts were waiting, as quiet as snakes. We threw ourselves down into their short trench.
“As flat as you can,” whispered the Sudeten, who in principle walked just ahead of me. “Pass it on.”
One by one, we left the last German positions, and crawled out onto the warm earth of no man’s land. I kept my eyes glued to the hobnailed soles of the Sudeten’s boots, trying nervously to keep in sight all that could be seen of my closest companion. From time to time the air ahead of me would darken with the looming shape of a comrade who had to climb over some obstacle. At other moments, the soles of the boots ahead of me would suddenly stop inches from the end of my nose. Then I would be gripped by a horrible anxiety: maybe the Sudeten had lost sight of the fellow in front of him. A moment later he would begin to move again, and the instinctive confidence I felt as part of the group would unknot my throat.
During such moments, even naturally reflective characters suddenly feel their heads emptying, and nothing seems to matter except the dry, cracking stick pressing into one’s stomach, which one must somehow crush and pass over without making any noise. A new, hitherto unsuspected acuteness sharpens every sense, and the tension seems pressing enough to subdue one’s wildly racing heart.
We inched slowly forward across that damnable Russian soil, which all of us had already trampled more than enough.
We had to crawl around a short stretch of light sand against which we would show up too easily, crushing under our bodies a mat of thorny creepers which we took at first for Russian barbed wire. Then we came to a mossy hollow where we stopped for a moment. Our sergeant, who had a very good sense of direction, was going over our route in his head, trying to fix our position. The hollow reeked with a pestilential smell. When we began to move again, I was startled to see two motionless figures lying on the sand some two yards to our right. I pointed at them, nudging the veteran, who looked and grabbed his nose. With a shock of horror, I understood that we had just passed two corpses, which were quietly rotting as they waited for burial in a common grave.
We seemed to have crawled as far as China. About half an hour after we had started, we came to the first Russian wire. We waited with beating hearts while our first men opened a precarious passage. Every time we heard the cutters snap we expected to see a spray of dirt shooting up from an exploding mine. Our faces, blackened with soot from the canteen kettles, were pouring with sweat, and the tension was so great we certainly must have aged several years during the few minutes we needed to crawl under the Soviet wire, at a speed of about fifteen yards an hour.
When we had all made it through, we stopped for several moments and huddled together. Every one of us was trembling. We could hear faint sounds from the Russian forward positions. We rolled our eyes at each other and understood without words that we all felt the same way. We crept forward another twenty yards to a stand of low scrub or tall grass. We could hear the sound of voices and knew beyond any doubt that we had reached the first Russian line.
Suddenly, we were staring incredulously at an almost invisible figure — a Soviet reconnaissance man, who was bending over a hole which undoubtedly contained some of his comrades. We almost stopped breathing, and slowly lifted our guns, looking at our leader, who seemed to have frozen, and then at each other, with a look beyond expression, as the Russian walked slowly toward us. Then he turned back. Our sergeant pulled a knife from his belt. Its blade flashed white for a moment, before he thrust it slowly into the ground in front of Grumpers, pointing to the Russian with one finger.
The grenadier opened his eyes enormously wide, and looked with horror from the Russian to the knife to the sergeant. The latter gestured him on, as Grumpers’ quivering hand clenched round the knife handle. With a final mute look of supplication, the grenadier began to creep forward. We followed the progress of his dark shape with an anxiety which made us clench our teeth to keep from crying out. Then he was lost in the darkness.
The Russian was still talking to his friends, as if the war were thousands of miles away. He took a few more steps. We could hear more voices a little farther off. For a few long moments, each of us forgot his own existence. The Russian walked toward the spot where Grumpers must have hidden, and turned back. As he turned, a second silhouette rose up behind him. Grumpers covered the four or five yards that separated him from his quarry in one jump. The Russian whirled around. We heard a rough cry and the sound of a struggle. From a hole a short way off, we heard Russian voices. Then we were able to distinguish the silhouette of our grenadier rolling on the ground, and hear the sound of his voice.