At the unit dressing station I found half of my company. Only 15 men out of 70 had remained unwounded. 20 must have been killed. I myself had been incredibly lucky. The first shot had clipped the surface of my stomach in two places. The second had neatly gone between two ribs over the spleen. I just about managed to walk unaided, with my upper-body bent forward. The wounded were driven back on the assault guns. I was lifted on, with Feldwebel Geissler, whose forearm had been lacerated by an explosive shell. At the regiment we were unloaded into Sankas, the medical motor vehicles that took us to the railway at Gorky. There a hospital train was standing ready. I had found time to report to the commander over the failed operation. I learned that the 1st and 2nd companies had not reached the trenches of the main line of resistance. Oberstleutnant Dorn shook his head sadly over the badly prepared and precipitate adventure. It had been taken out of his hands as a commander. The battalion had been put under the command of the second unit.
I can still remember the feeling of indescribable relief as I lay in the moving hospital train. The train’s destination was Vilna, and was reached via Minsk. During the journey I looked out through the porthole of the wagon, a converted cattle truck. I saw an unforgettable picture. From the West shone the setting sun. In its reddish light lay a broad land, with no houses, no trees, no bushes. On the northern horizon there was the wall of a thunderstorm, blackish violet. In front of it, lonely and distant, there rested a whitewashed stone church.
I wrote home about my two shots in the stomach and that I did not expect a lengthy stay in hospital. But after 10 days, the wound made by the shot in my stomach had become inflamed and had to be operated on. The surgeon was a staff medical officer of about middle age, red-haired, small and compact. He made fun of my officer’s ‘snappishness’, as I woke from the effects of the ether. Still under its influence, I rambled on about how nice it had been to pass, fully conscious, into unconsciousness. All responsibility was taken from me, and all thoughts of duty and compulsion fell away. The sceptical expression on the surgeon’s face told me that he did not know what I was talking about. He probably had no idea of the burden of responsibility placed on the shoulders of a 19 years old company commander. After leaving the operating table, I said ‘thank you, sir’, as was appropriate. But he was none the wiser. ‘Don’t mention it, my boy’, was his answer in reply to the thanks which I had meant so seriously.
The military hospital was in a convent hospital, an old building with thick walls. I have a fleeting recollection of Halina, a Polish medical student, who was on duty during the day. On the other hand I can still clearly picture the night sister with whom I had conversations every evening. She was a 70 years old nun, who ‘belonged to the House’. She was a cultured lady from the Polish nobility, and a widow of 44 years. In fluent German she told me, her interested listener, of her short youth, long ago. She had lived in Warsaw and had stayed in Paris and London. For years she had done only night duty. Perhaps, in that way, she felt closer to the ‘eternal night’. Every day an eleven years old girl came into the hospital selling newspapers. The child was obviously undernourished. Somehow she affected all the comrades in the room. We joined ourselves together into a ‘benevolent society’ for her family by always paying ten or twenty times too much for her 10-pfennig newspapers. Her eyes shone with thanks. On 3 November when we were loaded up into Sankas and driven to the station, ‘our’ little girl waved after us for a long time.
To my delight, the hospital train travelled to Wernigerode in the Harz, a lovely spa town. In its situation, and because of the Harz landscape, it reminded me of Sonneberg and the Thuringian Forrest. On the way, some of the wounded were unloaded in Halberstadt. I have no recollection of the town, but I certainly do recollect that a Gigant flew over it. That was the Wehrmacht’s new large transport aircraft. A tank or a whole company of soldiers could be transported in it. The gigantic plane with its six engines, three on each wing, made a lasting impression on us wounded men, particularly because of the noise it made. It seemed to us to be a sign that the power of the Reich was anything but broken.
Wernigerode was the earlier residence of Prinz Stolberg-Wernigerode. His great castle was situated above the town and towered over it. Noble hotels and old half-timbered houses were characteristic of the town. It was a home to a series of sanatoria, into one of which I was sent. It was the house called ‘Dr Kaienburg’. Evidently it was named after a doctor, but was run by his widow. In it 20 officers were accommodated whose wounds were not particularly serious and who were all capable of walking. The doctor came every day on his rounds from a military hospital. A full sanatorium regime prevailed. To me it was an unaccustomed ‘feudal’ environment. There was a radio in the room, a balcony with a view on to the Brocken, and billiards in the billiard hall. The food was good, but there were ‘only a few cigarettes’, I complained in a letter to Father.
Of my officer comrades, of all ages, I still remember three. My room-mate was an Augsburg clergyman’s son Leutnant Uttmann. After me he was the youngest. A cavalry Oberleutnant of the Bamberg cavalry was Herr Langen from Munich. He was from the publishing family ‘Langen and Müller’, and very cultivated. A friendly man was the reserve Oberleutnant Dr Wutzl. He was a German scholar and an art historian. He was from the 45th Infantry Division, the Linz Division. He later received the Knight’s Cross and after the war was a Hofrat in the office of the Austrian provincial government.
To get from the sanatorium into the town, we travelled one stop on the Brocken railway, a narrow-gauge railway. It travelled from the Wernigerode main station to the Brocken, the highest mountain in the Harz. We often went to the café in the afternoon or evening. Once we even went up the Brocken thinking, as we did so, of Goethe’s Faust and the witches on the Blocksberg. In a letter of 5 December, from Wernigerode to Father, I note that I had been at home in Stockerau on a short special leave. I told him of a fine performance of La Traviata in the State Opera. However, I added that the only problem was that the tenor had been rotten, ‘as is almost always the case in Vienna’.
But I did not like at all what was going on around my family at home. I liked it so little that I often said ‘you would really like to punch them’. It was the moaners on the home front that I cursed in a Christmas letter to Rudi. ‘Their ‘lordships’ do not deserve the sacrifices made at the front’, I wrote. ‘It has the effect of throwing me into a screaming rage! Then I begin to mock them. So I get dreadfully on the nerves of many people, especially girls!’
I told Rudi that I had been together a lot with two of his classmates, Egon Papritz, nicknamed Kitty, but who was later killed. The other was Ernst Vogl, nicknamed Avis. After the war he became a factory owner and a well-known contemporary composer. With those two friends I joined in one evening in a poker game. But I was a beginner! In fact I gambled so badly that at the end of the evening I had lost an entire month’s salary. The main complaint of my letter was about the fact that my girl was ‘not there for me’. I closed the letter asking when we would see each other again, ‘because I had the feeling that the war would only last another year at most – God willing’.