The attractions of our construction sector were the Vyazma-Jelnja railway line and a collective farm that lay in front of the future frontline. The extensive State property was administered by an agricultural Sonderführer. He had a couple of Landesschützen to provide military cover. For the rest he had obviously lived up till then ‘like a king’. The yield was poor, he said. There was a shortage of workforce and machines to work the land more intensively. In front of the farmhouse was a ravaged German military cemetery from 1941, which partisans had destroyed. I wondered why the Sonderführer had not had it restored.
On 22 August, Rudi’s eighteenth birthday, I got a concerned letter from Mother. She wrote that for about a week mention had been made every day in the Army news reports of ‘west and south-west of Vyazma’, and she suspected that they were talking about the district where I was. On top of this, she said, mention was made once of a ‘Silesian infantry division’: was this mine, she asked? She was obviously worrying about me more then she needed to, but how could I have said to her that her worries, at least for the moment, were unfounded?
A few days later there was great consternation among the inhabitants of the village. The starets, the village elder, had got news that the 18-year-olds, born in 1925, were to be rounded up and sent to forced labour in the Reich. Since all the young men were with the Red Army, only three girls were affected. No-one could respond to the village elder’s plea for help. It could not even be ascertained from which authority he had received the order.
The countryside around Lyadi could, in different circumstances, have been described as lovely. Woodland, bushes, marsh, meadow, and a small river in a deep gully offered a constantly changing picture. Seen with a soldier’s eye, the ‘terrain’ had disadvantages, and in places was even ‘shitty’. Several hundred square metres of undergrowth had to be rooted out to provide a field of fire. In another place the unavoidable change from the position on the upward slope to that on the downward slope presented a puzzle. The problem would only be able to be solved by the relevant sector commander deploying outpost sentries. He would not be envied. The comrades would not be edified over some irreparable corners that would involve close quarters combat.
In our walks over the terrain, stepping through some tall bulrushes, we came across parts of a human skeleton. The gnawed bones, shining and bleached by the sun, had evidently been scattered over a wide area by birds. The skeleton had to be that of a soldier killed in action in 1941 in the fighting in the Jelnja arc. But it was not a German but a Russian. A little further on we found the hollow skull, still covered with a Russian helmet and with the chinstrap under the chin. However, we had no time to reflect on the mythical image of a soldier’s death. In looking around for more bones, I noticed two half-overgrown, square plywood boxes in the form of oversized cigar boxes. They were more or less covered with moss and overgrown. They were Russian anti-tank mines. We had stumbled into an old minefield! Virtually on tiptoe we felt our way out of the field, using the open areas as if on a chessboard to get out of danger.
Those mines would make the trench construction work considerably more difficult. At any time, members of the work units could stumble across mines, and vehicles drive over them. Casualties were to be expected. In the absence of a precise map, danger loomed practically everywhere. In addition, we would not even be able to give a guarantee to the unit that would next move into the position that the area to their rear was free of mines. If it were only a matter of anti-tank mines requiring the imposition of a certain minimum weight before they exploded, the danger would have been less. But there was no reason to assume that that was the case.
As if to confirm our worry that there were also anti-personnel mines in the area, one day after the minefield was discovered a vehicle from the light column drove over a mine on a road and was blown to pieces. In another place a Russian civilian stepped on an anti-personnel mine. Afterwards the poor devil must have lain the whole night, far away from anyone, with his foot blown off, and so met his death. Inspection of the place where the horse-drawn vehicle had driven over the mine revealed that the tyre tracks of my Kübelwagen were only 10cm away from them. A special angel must surely have been holding his hand over Moravietz. I ordered him from then on only to use well-worn tracks.
Some days later, I was a guest of Hauptmann Kriegl, the ‘commander’ of the famous Baubataillon. He lived alone in a little house. He did not have a batman, but instead was served by a local woman. Vera was a nice and intelligent technical draughtswoman from Bialystok. She made no secret of her Bolshevik convictions and her belief that the Soviet Union would win the war. But this did not prevent her from living with Kriegl, who was in his mid-forties, in a relationship similar to marriage. Vera was chubby-faced, red-cheeked, had an ample bosom, and was always in a good mood. Even if those characteristics were not in her nature, she would have had every cause to be cheerful because the only work she was required to do was to look after Hauptmann Kriegl.
Not only I, but also the local commander was struck by the shameless outspokenness with which Kriegl defied our notions of clean living and marital fidelity. Moreover, it was the same with the men under his command. The civilians were all women and young people who were not particularly kept under watch, but merely supervised by members of the regimental band. I heard then that every one of these Feldwebeln and Unteroffiziere, active military musicians, was said to have had a ‘wife’ among the women workers. The sobering realisation for me was that even among us there was luxuriousness in the lines of communication, and that these Etappenschweine, who had left their mark so deeply in the literature about the First World War, had evidently still not been eliminated by the spirit of the new Germany.
Still, I also participated in the amenities of the lines of communication when Kriegl had cow’s liver prepared, and had roast goose served to the members of the trench construction staff. During the meal, Kriegl told of a man from the company whom he had had under his command at the beginning of the Russian campaign. That man, shot through his skull through both temples, had not only lived to tell the tale, but had been returned to the active list!
Around 10 September the trench system of the Hubertus position was practically completed, and there came the order to move the staff to the rear. Hauptmann Müller had to go up the line to take over command of a battalion of Regiment 461. With him went his batman, Obergefreiter Petzold, who looked like a middle-aged official, i.e. about 35. Petzold even wrote his boss’s letters to his Ehemädchen, as Müller called his young wife. While Müller and I were out in the field fixing positions, Petzold would write precise descriptions in clear script, like the company secretary of a building concern. In doing so, he always spoke of ‘us’ and wrote in the name of ‘we’ and Müller signed the letters after adding a short personal note. The young wife soon had to mourn for her husband, because Müller was killed in action the following November at Nevel. He was said to have been shot through the neck and thus to have bled to death.