We learned that the main line of resistance had held in an outstanding manner. In the 10th Company, Schorsch Hentschel, only just promoted to Hauptmann, had thrown back the Russians in a counter-attack. Only on the post road had they penetrated into the remnants of the village of Ivanowo. There, the badly wounded Oberleutnant Mallwitz was encircled with only parts of the 6th Company. Behind the battalion command post of 2nd Battalion, the enemy had been brought to a halt. A counter-attack by 1st Battalion had a certain amount of success. From our Reserve bunker I had seen parts of the battalion that had been in reserve moving forwards. Oberleutnant Klaus Nikolai, commander of the 3rd, and Fahnenjunker-Unteroffizier Eberhard Kern were with them. Kern limped because his right big toe was missing since the winter of 1941. But he preferred to be there at the front rather than at home. Towards midday, after sending back many wounded, Leutnant Ast came back, shot through the shoulder. ‘The damned sods’, he swore. He said that, to be sure, the Russians had broken into his trench as they had the day before, but had been thrown out again by him and his men.
It was said that, during the two and a half hours’ heavy barrage of 6 August, the Russians fired 50,000 shells on the Division’s sector. They then attacked with nine infantry divisions and two armoured brigades. In front of the regiment’s main line of resistance, and in the places where they had broken through, 3,000 dead Russians were said to have been counted. Oberst von Eisenhart was proud of his regiment’s achievements. He drove to the front every day, standing in his Kübelwagen. My request, that he should take me with him one time, he declined. He said that I would get there ‘soon enough’.
In the meantime, Leutnant Franke had left, and I was the last of the Führer-Reserve to be with the regiment. Again I had a disappointment. I received an order to ride to a village ten kilometres behind the regimental command post. My task was to guide baggage-trains through a busy junction. They were to be moved further to the rear. It was the village in which, before the attack, the Division’s pioneer battalion and Panzejägerabteilung had been located. So, in a peevish mood, I rode overnight to the rear, accompanied only by a chap from the regimental riding platoon. When we reached the highway, a Soviet aircraft was already clattering over us. Expecting to be bombed, I was holding the horse on a very short rein, and managed to control it. But then a bomb fell very close by and the nag, terrified by the crash and the lightning flash of the impact, bolted with me so that I had great trouble bringing it under control again.
After I had guided the baggage-trains through the junction, as ordered, and before riding back, I looked for the commander of the self-propelled gun company. He was proud of his men’s successes. Of the almost one hundred tanks destroyed in front of the Division’s sector, a large number was down to them. However, the fact that the baggage was being moved to the rear was a sure sign that the front was soon to be pulled back. The surest sign was my new mission, to go as adjutant to the trench construction staff of the Division who had been hastily formed.
I learned from the Divisional history that, under the code name ‘Panther’, it was intended to withdraw, within two weeks and in two stages, from the Büffel position, to the Panther position. The new line ran approximately along the line Jelnja-Dorobusch-Spasdemensk. The final position ran approximately along the line Gomel and the course of the Pronja-Lenino east of Vitebsk. The Division’s Stellungsbaustab, i.e. trench construction staff, was under the command of Hauptmann Müller. Until then he had been commander of our 2nd Company.
Müller was a tall, good-looking man, with dark brown eyes and hair, and heavy eyebrows. Oberst von Eisenhart called him ‘glowing eyes’ or ‘Greyhound Müller’, and in actual fact his appearance could remind you of a noble greyhound. As a student at the Tharant Forestry College near Dresden he had got the daughter of a professor pregnant, and married her forthwith. At the time, that went without saying. You could well imagine that he was inclined to be extravagant, even though he had his batman write his letters to his wife. The batman was Obergefreiter Petzold. He had been brought along and used as the clerk.
The staff also included an officer from, respectively, the artillery, the Panzerjäger and the pioneers. The officer of artillery was the congenial Oberleutnant Rauprich whom I had got to know before the attack. Müller and I determined the course of the trenches in accordance with the infantry point of view that regarded the representatives of the other service arms as providing the supporting weapons, so to speak. In that scheme, Rauprich’s task was to fix the points for the ‘B’, i.e. the observation positions for the forward artillery observers. We had at our disposal an Adler-Trumpf Kübelwagen in which we drove around the terrain. The driver was Obergefreiter Moravietz, who had been detached from our 14th Company together with his vehicle. The actual work on constructing the trenches was carried out by the Division’s so-called Baubataillon, of which I will speak later. That battalion also included two horse-drawn mobile columns. One was commanded by the dark-skinned elderly Hauptmann Focke, a Sudeten German and an hotelier by profession. In the evening, when I was issuing orders on behalf of my Hauptmann, I felt like the proprietor of a small construction business, planning from day to day how best to use his foremen, his workers, and his materials.
My displeasure over the lost opportunity to prove myself in a large-scale action had vanished, and I was even then able to see good points in the ‘business’ of trench construction. It was not to be sneezed at that here, at the rear, you could sleep at night, take off your tunic and even your trousers. That was all the more the case since calm had returned to the front line. I had not had it so good for a long time. Our base was in the little village of Lyadi and we lived in a clean, two-roomed farm cottage. The man of the family had been with the Red Army since the beginning of the war. Since then his wife had heard nothing from him. She did not know whether he was still alive, but bore it with resignation and equanimity. In a corner of the room stood the icon. It had always been there, even under the Bolsheviks. The village commissar had made fun of it, but otherwise found no fault in it. But the villagers had not taken him seriously, said the woman.
In a frame without glass were stuck some photographs, including a picture of a dead person of a kind known in Russia. The relatives were crowded round the dead man, in an open coffin. The women were wearing headscarves and the men long, white wide smocks.
The woman lived alone with her child on the small estate. The girl, perhaps eleven years old, was called Schenia. Mother and child had brown eyes and brown hair. The child had an innocent angel’s face. We were touched to see how her face lit up when we gave her some of our scanty confectionery. She was amazed, as was her mother, at the pictures we showed her from home. The woman gave us a lot of the bread that she regularly baked. It was coarse, moist, heavy and full of spelt. We knew that in doing this she was treating us as her guests, and we gave the two of them what we could spare.