“They’re ours!” said the veteran, and a faint smile crossed his face.
“Get ready to fire, if anyone moves in Ivan’s hole,” our leader added.
Suddenly, I began to shake uncontrollably — not precisely because of fear, but because at that moment, when our mission was about to be accomplished, all the nervousness and anxiety which I had been able to master until then burst out in violent spasms. I tried shifting my weight, but nothing did any good. I managed to open the magazine and nervously slip the first belt into the breech of the gun, which the veteran held open for me, and left partly open, to prevent the sound of its clicking shut.
Far to our left, the dance had already begun: a dance which would surely have inspired Saint-Saens, and which lasted for days. A moment later, among the German troops we were watching, someone must have pulled a wire attached to a string of mines. Our immediate surroundings — the Russian position, the bodies of Grumpers and his adversary, our little hill, and all our hearts — were shaken by a series of thunderous explosions. For a moment we thought that the whole mass of creeping soldiers we had seen just the minute before had been blown to pieces. Everywhere among the Hitlerjugend — for it was they who had been crawling toward us — young men were jumping up and trying to rush through the tangles of barbed wire. Hals had just opened fire. The veteran slammed our gun shut and fitted it into the hollow of his shoulder.
“Fire!” shouted the noncom. “Wipe them out!”
The Russians ran to take their places. The string of 7.7 cartridges slid through my hands with brutal rapidity, while the noise of the gun burst against my eardrums.
I could see what was happening only with the greatest difficulty. The spandau was shuddering and jumping on its legs, and shaking the veteran, who kept trying to steady himself. Its percussive bark put a final touch on the vast din which had broken out. Through the vibrations and smoke, we were able to observe the horrible impact of our projectiles on the lost mass of Red soldiers in the trench in front of us. Day broke over the frenzied scene, and the sky slowly lightened. From far behind us, German artillery was roaring through every tube, pounding the enemy’s secondary positions. The Russians, taken by surprise, were attempting a desperate defense, but from every side the Junge Löwen were surging out of the darkness, breaking like waves over their entrenchments and pulverizing both men and materiel. An overwhelming din engulfed the plain, which rang with the sound of thousands of explosions.
Ahead of us, and far to the right, we were bombarding a town of considerable size. Slow spirals of smoke some fifty yards across rolled along the ground from enormous fires. I was feeding a second magazine into our infernal machine, and the veteran continued to pour his projectiles onto the dead and living who were jammed into the advanced Soviet position.
Then, through all the noise, we heard the unmistakable rumble of tanks.
“Our Panzers!” shouted the Czech with a demoniac laugh.
Hals left his position and rushed toward us with a leap which made us think he’d been hit. He and Lindberg had run just in time. A second later, a huge tank rolled over the ground they had occupied, crushing the barbed wire beneath its treads. The churned-up earth continued to shake with the explosion of mines, which here and there immobilized a heavy armored vehicle, or tossed a landser some fifteen yards. The tank, followed by two others, passed very close to us, thrusting toward the enemy position we had already been peppering for several minutes. In no time, it had crossed the trench, which was overflowing with the bodies of Russian soldiers. Then a second and a third tank plunged through the bloody paste, and rolled on, their treads stuck with horrible human remnants. Our noncom gave an involuntary cry of horror at the sight. Soon the young soldiers fresh from the sportive pleasures of the barracks would arrive at this foul reality. We heard a cry of horror, followed by one of victory, as the first assault wave continued its advance. More tanks were pouring out of the woods behind us, crushing the saplings and brush, and driving, almost rearing up on their treads, toward companies of infantry who had to hurry out of the way. If there were any wounded lying on the ground, that was their bad luck.
The first phase of the attack was supposed to occur like a flash of lightning, with nothing permitted to hinder the progress of the tanks. An infantry group had just joined us, and their leader was talking with ours when a tank bore down exactly on our position. Everyone jumped aside. A young soldier ran toward the tank, trying to wave it off with large gestures. But the monster continued unswervingly, like a blind animal, churning up the ground a bare two yards from our hillock. In my haste, my foot caught on the spandau, and I fell full length down the other side of the rise. The huge machine flattened the edge of our protection, and the steel sections of its treads rolled past, horribly close to my haggard eyes.
What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man onto another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor….
And then there are the cries of officers and noncoms, trying to shout across the cataclysm to regroup their sections and companies. That is how we took part in the German advance, being called through the noise and dust, following the clouds churned up by our tanks to the northern outskirts of Belgorod. All resistance was overwhelmed, and once again everything was either German or dead, and a sea of Russian soldiers had drawn back into the limitless confines of their country.
There were thousands of prisoners — including the pro-Germans, who immediately placed in the hands of our indifferent soldiers lists of those we should shoot. There was the park of Russian vehicles hiding two or three thousand enemy soldiers determined to slow our advance, and the spandau, into which the veteran and I continued to feed cartridges, and Hals’s spandau, and the one attached to Group 10, decimated and re-formed, firing and laughing as they fired, in vengeance for their fallen comrades. We sent a rain of anti-tank shells onto the park, and listened to the howls of the Russians, who no longer dared to move or surrender or attack, before flames devoured the area, and forced us to retire from their unbearable heat.
Toward noon, the Soviets began to retaliate, and rained a devastating fire on the rising waves of Jungen Löwen. But nothing stopped the young lions, even for a moment, and the burnt-out ruin of Belgorod fell into the hands of their survivors on the second evening.
In a heady state, near delirium, we went on, with almost no rest, to enlarge the wedge our troops had driven into the mass of the Soviet central front: a front of 150,000 men, according to our so-called information services. In fact, closer to 400,000 or 500,000 Russians were jostled back by 60,000 Germans.