The wait for my marching orders did not, thank God, last much longer. I was glad when it was time and I could set off via Breslau to Minsk. There I had to report to the Führerreserve of Army Section Centre. On that journey to Russia I did not have a ‘goal’ in the same way as I had had the year before. I did not have the prospect of being sent on a course after a few months. My real probation at the front was just beginning, and all the more important since I was then an officer. Strangely, I did not think of the possibility of being wounded. A Heimatschuss, i.e. wound necessitating evacuation home, could bring the coming experience on the front line to a speedy end. In the First World War the Austrians had called it a 1000 Gulden Schuss. It was more as if I felt myself travelling to meet an uncertain future. The recollection of Upolosy joined itself to that feeling. It was a kind of fear of being tested that weighed upon my spirits.
We soon got to Bialystok and Stolpcze, formerly Polish border crossings. With me in the compartment of the leave train returning to the front were sitting a senior MO and two paymasters. The MO was going to a military hospital, the two paymasters were in other lines of communication posts. The gentlemen were carrying much more luggage than I. I only had my miserable Wehrmacht haversack. Dawn broke and the train crawled at about thirty kilometres per hour through a region where there was the threat of partisans.
Suddenly, an explosion shook me out of my doze, and the train lurched to a halt. It threw me off the seat on which I had been stretched out. The senior MO’s case fell out of the luggage rack and hit me on the back of the neck. From outside could be heard the crack of rifles. Bullets crashed through the walls and the windows of the carriage. In the train there was considerable excitement. The people from ‘behind the lines’ reacted with panic. One paymaster fired with his 6.35 pistol through the closed window. I spoke to him and asked him to be sensible.
Then I got out of the carriage and jumped into the ditch beside the tracks. I waited under cover until the rifle fire had ceased. It could have only been a few partisans who had been firing. But the damage was considerable. The empty carriage pushed in front of the locomotive, and the locomotive itself, had been blown off the tracks. The forward half of the first of the long express carriages had been compressed as if it had been made of plywood. There were dead and wounded.
Hours later a fully manned handcar came from the next post up the line. In the morning we were at last able to continue our journey. Meanwhile, the cause of the explosion had been discovered. The Russian improvisers had managed, by means of a much cobbled-together wire, to detonate an obviously home-made mine placed under the track. Then they had made off, not without first having put the fear of God into a couple of travelling paymasters with a bit of rifle fire.
That experience caused me, at least for the next twenty years, not to get in to the first carriage of a passenger train. From Minsk the journey went on to Vyazma. There the line ended. Gschatsk, after the ‘Buffalo’ withdrawal movement in the Spring, was no longer in German hands. I had to continue on towards Spas-Demensk and get off in Jelnja. Many houses had been destroyed. Only a few remained intact and were the distinguishing characteristics of that village in the lines of communication. The Soldatenheim was housed in the one single storey building. The next day a vehicle was to travel to the Division. So I reserved a straw mattress for myself as the last soft bed before I arrived at the front. Then I visited the overcrowded front-line cinema, to see the ‘Judge of Zalamea’.
The film had not finished when suddenly there was the roar of enemy aircraft. While bombs were already falling round about, the cinema was hurriedly evacuated and everyone dived into the cellar. Experience teaches that it is a good sign if you can hear the whistle of the bombs because then they explode further away. But in those moments it was poor consolation. There remained the dreadful feeling of having to crouch in the overcrowded cellar without being able to do anything. Getting on for 150 Landser were together in that one room of about seventy square metres. The ceiling was supported by only one column. More and more bombs whistled and exploded.
I was already considering whether I should get out into the open in one of the pauses between two waves of the bombing. Then a Feldgendarme from the Division spoke to me and suggested that I run across with him to the Felgendarmerie bunker. He had recognised me as being from the ‘Seventh’ by the white tabs on my epaulettes. We ran off straight away and we were both glad to have escaped the cage down there. The air-raid carried on until 1am, but claimed only a few victims. Above all, the direct hit on the cinema that we had feared did not happen.
On 23 May I had set off from Schweidnitz, and after two eventful days and nights had arrived with my company. I had travelled with the Feldpost vehicle from Jelnja to the Divisional command post at Alexandrino. The main dressing station was there and was working at full pressure. A battalion from ‘461’, our sister regiment, had the previous night carried out an assault operation in which half the battalion had been lost. The road forward continued past scented meadows and shining silver birch and over long, carefully laid ‘corduroy’ roads. In the evening I at last arrived at the front line where, compared with the adventures of the journey, peace reigned.
On 25 May I wrote to Father that my welcome to the regiment had been ‘cordial and very nice.’ I had already met many people I knew. The quiet in our positions was ‘doing me good.’ I was quite tense. Only now and then was there individual fire from artillery or mortars. But soon, I said, I would have ‘got used’ to life at the front, and the necessary calm would return. I thanked Father that he and Mother had taught me to make the right, true Christian faith part of my life, because its true value is best learned at the front. I said that I was really helped by the New Testament that Father had given to me. He had written the dedication to me from Psalm 90, verse 10: ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee’. Therefore, I wrote, I was ‘completely confident.’ God would see that all was well.
Our company commander was Oberleutnant ‘Schorsch’ Hentschel, from Upper Silesia. Kompanietruppenführer was Oberfeldwebel Thalige from Troppau. Both were reservists and as early as 1942 had been awarded the German Cross in Gold. My comrades Walter Henschel and Ludwig Popovsky were platoon commanders in the 11th and 7th Companies, and I was platoon commander in the 10th.
The length of the trenches in the company sector was one kilometre. The right-hand edge was formed by the ‘post road’ in the village of Ivanowo. Only charred beams and remnants of walls were left of the few remaining houses. Two platoons of the company were in the trenches in the main line of resistance. The third was in front of them on outpost sentry duty. The distance of the enemy from our sector was 1,800 metres. The outpost sentries were 800 metres in front of our main line of resistance. That was how the notional line between the muzzles of the most forward rifles was defined. The Russians now and again fired a shell from their mortar, or a Ratschbum. Ratschbum was the name we gave to the light Russian infantry gun, an anti-tank gun that fired directly at its target, so that the sound of firing and that of impact followed in quick succession. It was a sound described by the word Ratschbum.
The mood of the men was excellent. Winter was past and they had survived the retreat. The awareness of a solid superiority was beginning to root itself once again. ‘We can hold out in a war like this for years’, they felt. Only the second battalion had participated in the Upolosy adventure, but not the third, in which I then was.