“Partisans up ahead,” a feldwebel shouted. “Scatter for defense.” He pointed to our left.
Without understanding very much, I followed the sergeant who was at the head of our group of fifteen soldiers and plunged into the snowy slope. As I pulled myself up on the white barrier, I could see very clearly a swarming mass of black figures emerging from a stunted woods and proceeding at right angles to our line of march. The Russians seemed to be moving as slowly as we were. The cold and the weight of our clothes combined to deprive this spectacle of the animation of Westerns, or of American so-called “war” films. The cold made everything sluggish: both gaiety and sadness, courage and fear.
Ducking my head like everyone else, I moved forward, paying more attention to the position of my boots than to the movements of the enemy. The partisans were still too far away for me to see them in any detail. I imagined that, like us, they must be making huge strides to avoid disappearing in a hole in the snow.
“Dig your foxholes,” the feldwebel ordered, lowering his voice as if the other side could hear us.
I didn’t have a shovel, but scraped away some snow with the butt of my rifle. Once I was crouched in this relative shelter, I was able to observe the scene at leisure. I was astounded by the number of men coming out of the woods opposite; there were so many of them! And I could see still others in the forest itself, through the branches of the leafless trees. They looked like ants swarming through tall grass. They were obviously moving from north to south. As we were moving east to west, I couldn’t grasp their intention. Perhaps they were going to try to encircle us.
Our troops had just set up a heavy machine-gun battery on the slope nearest us, about twenty yards away. I didn’t understand why there had not yet been any exchange of fire. The enemy had begun to cross the road, about two hundred yards from us. The sound of big guns from the north was louder than ever, and there seemed to be some answering fire directly opposite us. My hands and feet were beginning to feel the cold. I didn’t understand our situation, and felt entirely calm.
The band of Russians crossed the road without bothering us. They appeared to outnumber us by three or four to one. Our convoy consisted of a hundred trucks with a hundred armed drivers, and sixty accompanying troops whose sole function was defense. In addition, there were ten officers and noncoms, a doctor, and two medical orderlies.
Each explosion created clouds of powdered snow. From the wooded hill in the near distance, plumes of smoke synchronized with the increasingly frequent sounds of explosion rose into the air. The heavy machine gun to my right burst into sound for a moment, and then fell silent.
Stupidly, instead of crouching down in my hole, I lifted my head. I could see little white clouds puffing out among the numerous silhouettes of the partisans. There was a sound of dry detonation, with an answer in kind from the Russians.
My eardrums had begun to feel as though they would burst from the noise of the machine gun, which was joined by another on the slope opposite. Everywhere, soldiers were firing their Mausers. Over in the Russian sector, the black silhouettes were running in all directions, faster and faster, through the puffs of white smoke. Some of them fell and lay motionless. The sun went on shining. None of it seemed really serious. Here and there, Russian bullets whistled through the air. The noise was deafening. With my slow reflexes, I hadn’t yet fired.
To my right, someone cried out. The sound of firing was almost continuous. The Bolsheviks were running as fast as they could toward the shelter of the snowy thickets. Our tanks were rolling toward them with sharp bursts of gunfire.
Three or four Russian bullets landed in the snow in front of me, and I began to fire blindly, like everyone else. Seven or eight other tanks had arrived and were harassing the partisans. The whole episode lasted about twenty minutes, and when it was over, I had fired about a dozen cartridges.
A short time later, our tanks and armored cars returned. Three of them were driving prisoners ahead of them, in groups of about fifteen men, who all looked deeply humiliated. Three German soldiers supported by their comrades climbed down from one of the cars. One of them seemed almost unconscious, and the other two were grimacing with pain. Three wounded Russians and two Germans were lying inert on the back of one of the tanks, one of them moaning. A short distance off a German soldier, leaning against a snowbank, was gesturing to us and holding his head, which was red with blood.
“The road is clear,” announced the commanding officer of the Mark 4 nearest us. “You can go ahead.”
We helped carry the wounded to the hospital truck. I went back to my Renault. Lensen passed by close to me, and shook his head in perplexity.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“Yes. Do you know if anyone was killed?”
“Of course.”
The convoy started off again. The idea of death troubled me, and suddenly I felt afraid. The sunshine of a moment ago had been pale, and the cold had become more intense. Bodies in long brown coats were lying along the sides of the road. One of them gestured as we passed.
“Hey,” I nudged my driver. “There’s a wounded man waving at us.”
“Poor fellow. Let’s hope his side takes care of him. War is hard that way. Tomorrow it may be our turn.”
“Yes, but we’ve got a doctor. He could do something for him.”
“You can talk. We’ve got two truckloads of wounded already, and the doctor has more than enough to keep him busy. You mustn’t be upset by all this, you know. You’ll see plenty more of it.”
“I already have.”
“I have too,” he said, without believing me.
“Especially, I’ve seen my own knee. The whole kneecap was taken out by a shell in Poland. I thought they were going to send me home again. But they stuck me into the drivers’ corps instead, along with the old men, the boys, and the infirm. It’s no joke you know; a wound like that really hurts, especially if you have to wait for hours before they give you any morphine.”
He launched into the history of the Polish campaign as he had experienced it. At that time, he had belonged to the Sixth Army, which now was fighting in Stalingrad.
It was growing dark. Our long convoy stopped in a small hamlet. The armored column was there too. The captain had ordered this halt so that the wounded could be cared for. The crust of snow and the roughness of the road made the hospital truck rock and jolt. The surgeon couldn’t operate under such conditions. Two Russians had already died of hemorrhage, and the rest of the men had already been waiting for several hours.
Our truck had just stopped beside a large building where the peasants stored the harvest. I was about to open the door and run to the kitchen truck when my driver held me back:
“Don’t be in such a hurry, unless you want to be on guard duty tonight. The sergeant doesn’t keep records here, you know, the way he does at the barracks. He just grabs the first people he sees, assigns them, and then takes it easy.”
It was true. A short time later I was listening to the complaints of the eternally hungry Hals: “Scheisse! They’ve stuck me for guard duty again. God knows what’ll happen to us all. It’s getting colder and colder. We won’t be able to stand it.”
It was another clear night, and the thermometer fell to twenty-two degrees below freezing.
I thanked my driver for saving me from another night in the open air. However, the fate that befell me instead almost made me regret my luck. We were walking toward the kitchen truck feeling somewhat anxious about dinner, wondering if there would be enough left to fill our mess tins. When the cook saw us coming, he couldn’t resist a little sarcasm: “So, you’re not feeling hungry tonight?”