We plunged down beside the fellows who were already there, who seemed none too cheerful. The Russian fire followed the tanks, and was lost in the brush. Our idiot stabsfeldwebel was already feeling uneasy about the distractions of the neighborhood, and was discussing them with a very young lieutenant. Then the young officer waved to his men, who followed him toward the woods, running, and bent nearly double. The Popovs, who must have been watching, sent over five or six rounds aimed directly at them. Some of their bullets landed very close to us.
Once again we were alone — nine of us in a hole, facing the Soviet lines. The sun was directly above us.
“Get cracking on that hole, now,” shouted the stabs in a perfect parade-ground voice.
We began to turn over the dusty Ukrainian soil with our short pick-spades. We barely had time to speak. The heat of the sun was crushing, and increased our lassitude.
“We’ll probably die of exhaustion before anything else has a chance to get us,” Hals said. “I give up.”
“My head is killing me,” I answered with a sigh.
But our bastard stabs kept after us, staring anxiously out over the grassless plain, which stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see.
We had just finished setting up our two spandaus when the noise of tanks rolling over the brush behind us made us shudder.
On that magnificent summer afternoon, German tanks were once again leaving the shade and driving toward the east. From behind them, entire regiments, bent double, passed us and vanished into a wall of dust, which hid them from view. About five minutes later, the Russians began a bombardment of unprecedented ferocity. Everything became opaque, and the sun vanished from our eyes, which had become enormous with fright. The storm cloud of dust was relieved only by continuous red flashes shooting up against the darker masses of trees eighty or a hundred yards away. The earth shook harder than I’d yet felt it do, and the brush behind us burst into flame. Screams of fear froze in our constricted throats. Everything seemed displaced. The air all around us was filled with flying clods, mixed with fragments of metal and fire. Kraus and one of the newcomers were buried in a landslide before they even knew what had happened to them. I threw myself into the deepest corner of our hole, and stared uncomprehendingly at the stream of earth flooding towards our shelter. I began to howl like a madman. Hals pressed his filthy head against mine, and our helmets clattered together like two mess tins. Hals’s face was transfigured by terror.
“It’s… the… end,” he gasped, his words broken up by the explosions, which took away our breath.
Overwhelmed by horror, I could only agree.
Suddenly, a human figure crashed into our hole. We both trembled with desperation and fright. Then a second human shape joined the first, in a great leap. This time our huge eyes took in that these were two of our own men. One of the newcomers shouted to us through his frantic gasps for breath: “My whole company was wiped out! It’s terrible!”
He carefully lifted his head just over the edge of the embankment as a series of explosions began to rip through the air beside us. His helmet and a piece of his head were sent flying, and he fell backward, with a horrifying cry. His shattered skull crashed into Hals’s hands, and we were splattered with blood and fragments of flesh. Hals threw the revolting cadaver as far as he could, and buried his face in the dirt.
The explosions had become so violent that we felt the ground all around us must be shifting. Outside our hole, on the torn and ravaged plain, we could hear an engine roaring out of control. Then there was another explosion, more violent than all the others, and an enormous flash of light swept the edge of our trench. Our two spandaus fell back on top of us in a wave of loose earth. Those who weren’t struck dumb with fright howled like madmen:
“We’re finished!”
“Mama! It’s me!”
“No, no!”
“We’ll be buried alive!”
“Help!”
But nothing we said could put an end to this hell, which seemed to go on forever….
About thirty soldiers on the run plunged in with us. We were kicked and shoved without mercy, as everyone tried to burrow down as deeply as possible. Whoever was left on top was finished. The earth all around us was pocked with thousands of shell holes, and from each of these we could hear the sounds of fleeing soldiers looking for refuge. But the cruel Russian soil was torn by fresh salvoes, and those who thought they’d been saved continued to die.
We heard the roar of airplane engines, and cheers for the Luftwaffe rose from thousands of desperate men. The bombardment continued for a few more seconds, and then decreased dramatically.
The officers who were still alive blew their whistles for retreat, and the men packed into our hole poured out like rabbits chased by a ferret. We were about to follow when our stabsfeldwebel, who hadn’t yet been killed, shouted loudly after us: “Not you! We’re here to stop a Russian counteroffensive. Get your guns ready to fire.”
Six Hitlerjugend cadavers were lying on the bottom of the trench, which had completely changed shape. To the left, one end was caved in, and Kraus’s boots were sticking out of two cubic yards of gray dirt. The other grenadier had been completely buried.
With the help of the veteran, whose face was streaming with blood, we were able to get the F.M. back into place. The plain, which had been altered beyond recognition, was scarred with holes and lumps, as if giant moles had been at work. Wherever one looked, there were smoke and flame and a scattering of motionless bodies. In the distance, through spirals of dust and smoke, we could see geysers of fire from the bombs which our ME-110’s were dropping on the Russian artillery. It looked as though we’d hit a couple of their ammunition dumps. The shock waves from those explosions engulfed the earth and sky in an extraordinary intensity of light and displacement of air.
“Those bastards!” shouted the ober. “Now they’re getting what they deserve.”
Our ME-110’s turned back to the west, and the Russian artillery opened up again. They were concentrating particularly on the Panzers, which were retreating in disorder, with at least half their number destroyed.
Although my left arm had almost been broken when the gang of panic-stricken soldiers jumped into the trench on top of us, I had felt nothing at the time. Now, it was beginning to cause me violent pain, which hovered beside me like a supplementary presence; but I was too busy to pay much attention to it. The bombardment was continuing to the north and to the south, and then passed over us once again, intensifying and spreading its complement of pain and terror. Our group of stupefied men could breathe only with difficulty, like an invalid who gets up after a long illness to find he has lost both strength and wind. We were all unable to speak: there was nothing to say then about the hours we had just lived through, and there is no way of describing them now with the vehemence and force they require. Nothing remains for those who have survived such an experience but a sense of uncontrollable imbalance, and a sharp, sordid anguish which reaches across the years un-blunted and undiminished, even for someone like me, who is attempting to translate it into words, although a precise and appropriate vocabulary remains elusive.
Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb.
From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead.