Hals had dropped to the ground, and was trying to regain control of his breath. Behind us we could hear guns popping, and an occasional German projectile falling toward the east.
“As if that would stop Ivan!” said the veteran. “Hasn’t anybody told them, for the love of God? Keep moving boys. This is no time to take it easy.”
“Thank God you were there,” Hals said to the veteran, “or we’d all be dead by now.”
“Damn right. Now beat it.”
We began to run again, despite the exhaustion which prevented us from grasping the critical importance of every step.
Three other landser joined us.
“You really scared us,” one of them said. “We thought you were Bolsheviks.”
We came to a small clearing, which we could see at a glance was not a natural glade but the site of one of our munitions dumps which must have been hit the day before by a Russian shell. We found a few fragments of a Pak, but everything else had been burned. A blackened corpse was still tangled in the branches of a fallen tree, some four yards above the ground. Suddenly we were surrounded by a full company of soldiers, ready to attack. A tall lieutenant ran to meet us.
“Sergeant?” he said, without wasting a moment.
“Killed,” answered the veteran, pulling himself approximately to attention.
“Damn!” said the officer. “Where’ve you come from? What company do you belong to?”
“Eighth Group, 5th Company: interception group of the Gross Deutschland Division, Herr Leutnant.”
“Twenty-first Group, 3d Company,” added the three fellows who’d just joined us. “We’re the only survivors.”
The officer looked at us, but said nothing. There was a continuous rumble of guns, and from time to time the shouts of the Siberians. “Where’s the enemy?” asked the lieutenant.
“In front of you, Herr Leutnant, everywhere. They just poured onto the plain; there must be several hundred thousand, anyway.”
“Keep going back. We’re not part of the Gross Deutschland. Reattach when you run into one of your own regiments.”
We didn’t wait for him to repeat himself, but plunged into the brush once again, while the officer turned back to his troops, shouting his orders. We passed many other groups ready for the slaughter, finally arriving at the hamlet where we had organized the defense post in the cellar a short time before. We stopped because a unit from our division had settled in there, but no one knew anything about the 5th Company. We were bombarded with questions, first by officers and then by anxious soldiers, but we were also allowed a few minutes’ rest in the shadow of a ruined house, and were brought something to drink. Everywhere, harassed soldiers were digging in, constructing defensive fortifications, camouflaging, checking over what had already been done. Toward noon, we could hear the battle approaching. A salvo from the Russian artillery made us run for the cellar we already knew, where we saw a fat soldier, a Gross Deutschland veteran, dancing and singing as the earth and air shook with explosions. His companions paid no attention to him.
“He’s off his rocker,” Hals said.
“He was that way already when we got here,” someone else explained.
Pretty soon, we too paid no more attention to the fat lunatic who was trying to execute a French cancan.
“He’s too much,” Hals muttered.
But the madman went right on waving his arms.
In the afternoon, five or six tanks went to meet the Russians, with several groups of grenadiers right behind them. In the distance we could hear fighting, which seemed to go on for about an hour. Then we saw the grenadiers coming back, surrounded by a thick swarm of fleeing soldiers. The woods beyond the orchards were red with fire. Scattered shots were falling all around the gasping soldiers, who were dragging their wounded comrades with them.
We realized that in a short time we would again be on the front line. The battle was drawing continuously closer, with its rumbling explosions and loud bursts of sound, and we felt ourselves gripped once again by the essential, inescapable anguish of the front. The counterattacks of the regiments whose positions we had crossed had been swamped, like our tanks, by the irresistible Soviet flood, for whom the most enormous losses seemed immaterial.
The hamlet had become an important strategic point, jammed with machine guns, mortars, and even an anti-tank gun — which no doubt was the reason for the hell we suffered during the next thirty-six hours. Some sixty yards ahead of us, two holes had been fitted out to hide two spandaus, just in front of the ones manned by the veteran and Hals, which we had re-installed in our position of the day before. To our right, protected by the ruins, a big geschnauz had been set up and was ready to fire, surrounded by some fifty other infantry weapons, rifles, machine guns, and grenade throwers — hidden in the ruins of four or five wooden sheds, or behind piles of wood, or half-collapsed garden fences. A little further along, behind a low wall, some of the soldiers who had fled were being regrouped and set to digging new trenches. To our left, in a trench beside the only structure left more or less intact, a mortar section had set up its position, swelled by numbers of retreating infantry troops, who were reattaching themselves wherever they could. Further to the left and somewhat behind us, above the road which cut through the hamlet, a 50-mm. anti-tank gun protected by earth built up into something like a bunker was aimed toward the orchards, and behind it, somewhat lower down, a radio truck had parked beside the tractor for the gun. We had watched the truck arrive while we were resting.
An endless stream of orders was pouring from our basement shelter.
Officers were regrouping all the fugitives, forming emergency units, and lengthening the line of defense above the hamlet, where there must have been a command post under the authority of a superior officer. From time to time, a bullet fired at random obliged one or another of our groups to dive for the ground. But, compared to what we’d been through the day before, nothing seemed particularly alarming. Only in the distance, about a mile away, violent contact persisted between the last of our retreating troops and advance Russian forces.
The veteran nodded as he listened to the rush above and beyond us.
“Well,” he kept saying, “they’re trying to make another Siegfried line up there. Do they really think that’s how they’ll stop the Russkis? You, preacher,” he turned to a chaplain, “ask your kind God to send us some lightning to help us out. We could use it, since there doesn’t seem to be any artillery.”
Everyone laughed, including the chaplain, who was less sure of his arguments now that he’d seen God’s creatures tearing each other to pieces without the slightest trace of remorse.
A feld looked into the shelter.
“What the hell’s a crowd like this doing in here?”
“Interception Group 8, 5th Company, feldwebel,” shouted the veteran, gesturing at the six of us. “The rest invited themselves in a little while ago.”
“O.K.,” said the sergeant. “Your group stay put, but everybody else out. There are still plenty of holes outside that need to be filled.” The other men groaned and got up.
“Feldwebel,” said the veteran. “Leave us a couple of extra men to help out, in case some of us are killed. We’ve got to be able to hold this place.”
“O.K.” But, before he was able to point to anyone, the fat lunatic who’d been dancing when we arrived proposed himself.
“I was a machine gunner outside Moscow, Herr Feldwebel, and nobody criticized my performance.”
“You stay then, and that fellow over there. The rest come with me.” So our group was enlarged by the fat man, whom we’d nicknamed “French Cancan,” and a thin, gloomy-looking character.