To that was added the field service cap and, best of all, the white braid, which was the colour of the infantry arm of the service. Apart from its smart and clean appearance, this colour always seemed to me to express the innocence and unpretentiousness for which the infantry was praised. Other colours used were the red of the artillery, the green of the Gebirgsjäger, the black of the pioneers, the blue of the medical units, the bright blue of the Panzer units, the citrus yellow of the signals units, the dark yellow of the cavalry and later reconnaissance troops, and the violet of the military chaplains. But none of them could compare with our pure white.
Outside training mainly took place on the large garrison training ground. However, especially for marching, we switched to the friendly, hilly countryside near to, or further away from, Mörchingen. Once we were resting near a large plum orchard that was far away from any village. It gave the Leutnant the idea that we should ‘take cover’ there and stuff our bellies. Some time later, before the wine harvest, our march took us past a field that was planted with vines. Here, too, the lieutenant let us ‘take cover’ between the furrows. As you see in old pictures of the land of milk and honey, we lay on our backs between two furrows, reaching for the nearly ripe grapes hanging over us, and contentedly ate our fill.
The most pleasant activity, because it was completely different from all the others, we had on Wednesdays. Then, from 2pm to 4pm there was riding, and from 4pm to 6pm driving. In our riding training each one of us had his own horse, mine was the mare ‘Orange’. Everyone had to keep a piece of bread from his rations for the horse, to win its trust and to be able to reward it. We learned not to approach the animal from the rear, and how to bridle and saddle it. We also had to muck-out the stalls and brush the horses.
During the course of that training we learned the paces of the horse, the walk, trot, and gallop, and how to control the horse. Finally, in the riding arena we jumped modest obstacles, and performed exercises on horseback. Riding outside was more satisfying than strenuous, especially when, after our first few hours of riding, our behinds were not burning any more. Once, I must have irritated ‘Orange’ because she bolted with me on the training ground. She slipped into a raging gallop and I could not hold her. After almost a kilometre she had calmed down, but evidently wanted to vex me some more, because she stopped abruptly in her tracks. I had to summon up all my strength not to fly out of the saddle, which is certainly what she intended.
The driving instruction passed off without such difficulties. To drive a horse-drawn vehicle was something we learned in an afternoon, but instruction in driving motor vehicles stretched out over several months. As well as a thorough theoretical and technical training, taken with the aid of an Army service regulation book, a lot of time was spent on the driving itself. We rode motorcycles, motorcycles with sidecars, and drove a medium-weight Kübelwagen. On 18 January 1942, that is, a few days after my eighteenth birthday, we received our Wehrmacht driving licences.
On Wednesday evenings in the officers’ mess there were ‘Gentlemen’s Evenings’. We officer cadets, in our walking-out uniforms of course, had to take part. Before dinner you would stand about aimlessly in the side rooms of the dining hall. Then the commander of the Ersatz Regiment would invite us to take our places. On the first occasion we were, understandably, somewhat awkward and almost stood in ranks. That led a doctor, whom I later got to know as a very clever man, to the sarcastic remark, ‘Ah, the gentlemen have turned up for confirmation’.
We did not always sit together at the end of the table, but were placed individually between officers and thus had to take part in their conversation. If I had not already learned at home how to behave at table, I would have been taught it there. It is true that I had not learned at home that you had, on occasion, to manage with only 40cm space at the table. That had to be done on Christmas Eve, when the wives of the married officers were invited to dine with us and space was tight at the table.
On those occasions, and also on the gentlemen’s evenings, music was supplied by a palm court orchestra composed of members of the regimental music corps. It was frowned upon to speak of service matters. That was strictly avoided. On the gentlemen’s evenings we were allowed out for longer. We were allowed to stay out after the general lights-out, I think until midnight. The food in the officers’ mess was not better than that in the barracks canteen, but was cooked separately. An exception was made at Christmas and New Year, when everyone got a portion of carp or tench. But in addition, there were also Bratwürstchen or Bockwurst that assuaged our hunger and, together with the potato salad, laid down a good basis for the wine. In the Mörchingen officers’ mess you could buy splendid French wine. It was there that I drank my first white and red Bordeaux and Burgundy.
In St Avold there had often been air-raid warnings that mostly lasted from midnight, until the enemy aircraft had left the area of the Reich. For that reason duties were assigned in such a way that, after reveille at 4.30am, they began at 6am. After the meal set for 10.30am, the lunch break lasted until 2pm, so that everyone could catch up the sleep they had lost during the night. There were none of those annoying disturbances in Mörchingen.
Once, in the autumn, we went to Strasbourg and saw the sights of that beautiful city, by then once again in Germany. On the platform of the Minster, from where you got the wide view eastwards into the Black Forest and westwards into the Vosges, Ludwig Popovsky took our photograph. At that time he had attached himself to Helmut Überla from Trautenau. I had become friendly with Hans Alterman from Gottesberg in the Riesengebirge. From Alterman I have a written testimony to our friendship which he wrote for me in the little book Novellen aus Metz, which each of us had received from the regimental commander as a Christmas present. ‘Either we shall meet in victory or never again’, the young man had prophetically written.
A year later, when we passed out of the War College in Dresden, of ‘us eleven’ comrades there only remained Henschel, Popovsky and I. Fiedler wanted to become an officer of engineers. I later chanced to meet him on Liegnitz station as a Panzer Leutnant. I met Bormann at about the same time, in the spring of 1944, in Mährisch-Schönberg. From the summer of 1942 he had had a stiff knee, and without attending War college had, after a long delay, become an officer. Of the others I never heard anything more. As far as my friend Hans Altermann is concerned, I am sure that he was killed in action as early as 1942.
It is time that I described our instructors, who no doubt had been selected for that duty. The Gefreiter and senior soldier in our block, Herbert Kräkler, was a candidate for NCO, a small, blond young man from a Silesian village. His place was shortly afterwards taken by Obergefreiter Wahle. I met Kräkler in the summer of 1942 at Upolosy when we were both already NCOs and could call each other by the familiar Du. A few days later he was killed in action. Wahle was getting on for thirty, and, to judge by his appearance and behaviour, came from a town. The NCO, August Gehle, during the French campaign had suffered a fractured pelvis from a falling tree. Like Wahle, he was a patient, self-controlled instructor who never lost his temper and carried out his duties in an exemplary manner.