Sometime later, we were all helped down. Every movement hurt my shoulder, and the pain, intensified by fatigue, made me feel sick at my stomach. I began to retch and vomit violently. Two soldiers helped me to a building where the wounded were stretched out on the floor. Hals joined me with his bloody neck, and our driver, who was hopping on one leg.
“You in a bad way?” Hals asked. “You’re not dying, are you, Sajer?”
His words reached me through a loud buzzing noise, across an immense distance.
“I want to go home,” I said, between two spasms of retching.
“So do I,” Hals said. He stretched out on his back and fell asleep. Sometime later, we were wakened by men from the sanitary service, who had come to sort out the dead and wounded. I felt a set of cold fingers lifting my eyelids, as someone peered into my eyes.
“It’s all right, boy,” he said. “Where are you hurt?”
“My shoulder. I can’t move it.”
The orderly unbuckled my straps, which made me howl with pain.
“No visible wounds, Herr Major,” he said to a tall man wearing a cap.
“What about his head?”
“Nothing there,” the other said. “His face is bloody, that’s all. And there’s something wrong with his shoulder.”
The orderly moved my left arm back and forth, and I screamed. The major nodded, and the orderly pinned a white slip of paper to my tunic. He did the same to Hals and to the driver, and then helped the driver into an ambulance which was already nearly full. Hals and I remained on the ground. Toward noon, two more orderlies came back to deal with the men like us, who’d been left to wait. They tried to help me to my feet.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I can walk. It’s my shoulder that hurts.” The orderlies lined up everybody who could walk, and sent us to the canteen.
“Everyone strip!” shouted a feld.
The pain of undressing nearly made me faint. Two fellows helped me, and my swollen, battered shoulder was bared. We were each given an injection in the thigh. Then the orderlies washed our wounds with ether, and stuck plaster on anyone who needed it. Beside the door they were sewing up a fellow who had a huge rip down his back, and who screamed as the instruments bit into his flesh. Two of them came over and grabbed hold of my shoulder. I howled and cursed, but they paid no attention. With a cracking sound which sent spasms of pain right down to my toes, they pulled my dislocated arm back into place, and moved on to the next case.
I found Hals outside. They had just stuck a gauze bandage onto his neck with a long strip of tape. My friend had been wounded by a metal fragment three inches below the first wound he had received at Kharkov.
“Next time, they’ll get me in the head,” he said.
A short distance along, we found the veteran, the Sudeten, Lindberg, and the grenadier asleep and snoring on the grass. We lay down beside them, and were very quickly asleep too.
And that was the end of the battle for Belgorod. The German offensive had lost all the ground it had taken at such cost during those ten days, and even more. A third of the forces engaged in the fighting had been killed, including many of the Hitlerjugend.
What happened to the beautiful young man with the Madonna face and his friend with clear, loyal eyes, and the student who spoke so well?
Probably they were left lying on the mutilated soil of Russia, like the melancholy harmonica player who sang of his desire to return to his peaceful, green valley, if only to die there.
There is no sepulcher for the Germans killed in Russia. One day some muzhik will turn over their remains and plough them under with his fertilizer, and sow his furrow with sunflower seeds.
PART THREE
THE RETREAT
Autumn, 1943
7. THE NEW FRONT
In September, Kharkov was retaken by the Soviets.
The entire south and central front was seriously shaken, with several major breakthroughs which the enemy poured their tanks, jeopardizing our whole system of defense. A general withdrawal began, during which the Russians often managed to surround entire divisions. Our unit had been re-equipped with new weapons and rapid motor vehicles, and was used to check enemy penetration behind our lines, often achieving prodigies which were cited in the orders of the day. Wherever the Gross Deutschland appeared, our troops took heart and routed the enemy — or so it seemed. Of course, the general difficulties of our situation — our encirclement, and the despair of troops forced to abandon their weapons in a sea of mud — were never mentioned. Nor were such things as the adjutant and his section taken prisoner, and liberated too late, or the profound sense of hopelessness and misery which settled over the adult children we were, facing another winter of war — more human bridges across icy rivers, like the one over the Dnieper; more frozen, abandoned regiments and scorched earth and weeks of terror, like our week at Chernigov; more hands cracked open by chilblains; and more fatal acceptance of the idea of death. Generals have since written accounts of these events, locating particular catastrophes, and summarizing in a sentence, or a few lines, the losses from sickness or freezing. But they never, to my knowledge, give sufficient expression to the wretchedness of soldiers abandoned to a fate one would wish to spare even the most miserable cur. They never evoke the hours upon hours of agony, or the obvious resentment of individuals swamped by the herd, in which each man is lost in his own misery, and oblivious of the sufferings of others. They never mention the common soldier, sometimes covered with glory, sometimes beaten and defeated, burdened by the angry remonstrances of the noncoms and by the hatred of another herd of human beings whom it is officially permissible to hate, confounded by murder and degradation, and later by disillusion, when he realizes that victory will not return him his liberty. In the end, there was only the physical crime of war, and the hypocritical and intellectual crime of peace.
“That’s why you’re fighting,” Hauptmann Wesreidau, our captain, said to us one day.
“You’re nothing more than animals on the defensive, even when you’re obligated to take the offensive. So be brave: life is war, and war is life. Liberty doesn’t exist.”
Captain Wesreidau often helped us to endure the worst. He was always on good terms with his men, and was never one of those officers who are so impressed by their own rank that they treat ordinary soldiers like valueless pawns to be used without scruple. He stood beside us during countless gray watches, and came into our bunkers to talk with us, and make us forget the howling storm outside. I can still see his thin face, faintly lit by a wavering lamp, leaning over, beside one of ours.
“Germany is a great country,” he used to tell us. “Today, our difficulties are immense. The system in which we more or less believe is every bit as good as the slogans on the other side. Even if we don’t always approve of what we have to do, we must carry out orders for the sake of our country, our comrades, and our families, against whom the other half of the world is fighting in the name of truth and justice. All of you are old enough to understand that. I have done a good deal of traveling — to South America, and even to New Zealand. Since Spain, I have fought in Poland and France, and now Russia — and I can tell you that everywhere there are the same dominating hypocrisies. Life, my father, the example of former times — all of these taught me to sustain my existence with rectitude and loyalty. And I have clung to these principles in spite of all the hardships and follies which have been my lot. Many times, when I could have responded with a thrust of the sword, I only smiled, and blamed myself, assuming that I myself was the cause of all my troubles.