The three grenadiers stood talking beside the staircase. The veteran, alone by the air vent, through which floods of sunlight poured into the room, was going through his pockets, spreading out their wretched con tents on a flat stone. Hals had curled his big body onto a rough bench and was lying silent, while Lindberg and the Sudeten were staring through holes in the wall, with their minds clearly far away. I went over to Hals and lay down beside him. We stared at each other for a moment, unable to speak.
“What the hell are we doing here?” Hals said finally. His face had grown noticeably harder since Bialystok.
I limited myself to a gesture of ignorance.
“I’d like to sleep, but I can’t,” he said. “Yes. It’s just as hot in here as outside.”
“Let’s go out anyway.”
We went out and took a few steps. The light was blinding.
“Maybe there’s some cold water over there,” I said, pointing to an orchard divided by a thin stream.
“I’m not thirsty — not hungry either,” Hals answered to my great surprise. I was used to his enormous appetite.
“Are you sick?”
“No. I just feel like vomiting. I’m so tired — and those fellows over there don’t help either.” He nodded at the thirty putrefying corpses in the little garden.
“That’s always how it is, with fellows who won’t make any more trouble,” I answered, in a tone which still surprises me.
“Ours were picked up before we got here,” Hals continued.
“There’s some freshly turned ground just inside the village. I don’t know how many they were able to stuff in there. Do you know how many we’ve had killed already?”
We were silent for a moment.
“We’ll probably be relieved soon, Hals.”
“Yes,” he said. “I hope so. We really were shits to kill those Popovs at the bread house.”
He was clearly desperately troubled by the same things that troubled me.
“The bread house is how it is, and all there is,” I answered.
I could still feel the cartridges running through my hands, see them entering the spandau, and see the bluish smoking metal of the barrel and the sparks that flew out each time the gun fired, painfully striking my hands and face, and hear the shrieks penetrating the infernal din, and the cries for help: “Pomoshch! Pomoshch!” Something hideous had entered our spirits, to remain and haunt us forever.
It was broad daylight, but we had no idea what time it was. Was it still morning? Was it afternoon? It didn’t matter: everyone ate and drank when he could, slept when he could, and tried to think whenever he could take off his helmet. It’s strange how much a helmet interferes with thought….
It was still daylight when an enemy barrage ripped into the orchards and the advancing troops, who had stopped only a short distance from us. We dived into our cellar shelter, and stared anxiously at the ceiling, which rained down plaster with each explosion.
“We’ll have to shore it up too,” said the veteran. “If anything lands too close, the whole thing will come down on our heads.”
The bombardment lasted for at least two hours. A few Soviet shells fell right beside us, but they were clearly intended for the assault troops. Our big guns answered theirs, and all other sounds were drowned in the noise of artillery. Shells from our howitzer were shooting right over our ruin, contributing as much to the collapse of our ceiling as the Russian shells which sometimes burst less than thirty yards away.
During the bombardment, we were all gripped by an extreme and exhausting tension. Some of us attempted predictions, only to be contradicted by events a few moments later. The veteran smoked nervously, continuously begging us to shut up. Kraus had drawn apart and sat muttering in a corner. Perhaps he was praying.
In the evening, one of the counter-attack units visited us, and installed an anti-tank gun nearby. A colonel came by a little later and tested the new supports we had put in to prevent any further collapse of the roof.
“Well done,” he said. He made the rounds of our little group, offering each man a cigarette. Then he rejoined his unit, which was part of the Gross Deutschland, a little closer to the front.
It grew dark. Through the tattered silhouettes of the remaining orchard trees, the horizon glowed red with fire. The battle was not yet over, and the extreme tension it generated was almost unbearable. We had to take turns standing guard outside, and no one had a good night’s sleep. We were rounded up well before dawn and forced to abandon our well-organized hole and proceed further into Soviet territory. The German advance had not been stopped.
During our advance, we crossed a frightful slaughtering ground of Hitlerjugend, mixed into the dirt by the bombardment of the day before. Each step made us realize with fresh horror what could become of our miserable flesh.
“Somebody should have buried all this mincemeat so we wouldn’t have to look at it,” Hals grumbled.
Everyone laughed, as if he’d just said something funny.
We crossed a piece of ground so heavily pitted with shell holes it was hard to imagine that anyone who’d been on it could have survived, and an open-air hospital behind an embankment from which the shrieks and groans came so thick and fast it sounded like a scalding room for pigs. We were staggered by what we saw. I thought I would faint. Lindberg was crying with terror. We crossed the enclosure with our eyes fixed on the sky, seeing as if in a dream young men howling with pain, with crushed forearms or gaping abdominal wounds, staring with incomprehension at their own guts puffing out the piece of cloth which had been hastily flung over them.
Immediately beyond the hospital, we had to wade across a canal. The cool water which rose over our waists made us feel much better. On the far bank, the springing turf was strewn with Russian bodies. A Soviet tank, twisted and blackened by fire, stood beside a big gun and the shattered bodies of its operators. To our left, in the northeast, the battle continued more fiercely than ever. We thought we heard a groan from one of the Russian gunners, and went over to a man smeared with blood, who was leaning, gasping, against one of the wheels of the gun carriage. One of our men uncorked his drinking bottle, and lifted the head of the dying man. The Russian stared at us through enormous eyes, widened by terror or shock. He cried out, and then his head fell back, thudding against the metal of the wheel. He was dead.
We continued across a series of rolling wooded hills, where our front-line troops were regrouping and catching a moment’s rest in the shade of the trees. Many men wore bandages, whose whiteness stood out sharply against their gray, dusty faces. We were rapidly regrouped, called out, and sent to precise locations.
The two grenadiers who had joined us were sent somewhere else, while our 8th group was completed by a new pair of strays. Unfortunately, the stabsfeldwebel whom I’ve mentioned before, and who had only one more day of life, was made the leader of our group. We were swiftly attached to an armored section which transported us on the backs of their machines to the edge of an enormous plateau, which seemed to stretch into infinity….
We jumped off the backs of the moving Panzers to join a group of soldiers lying flat at the bottom of a shallow trench. Already, several 50-mm. rounds fired directly at us by enemy artillery had brought it home to us that we were in the front line. The tanks turned back, and vanished under the trees some fifty yards behind us.