I can remember very distinctly the first deaths I encountered in the war. The thousands upon thousands which followed are blurred and faceless: a vast, cumulative nightmare which still haunts me, in which atrocious mutilations appear side by side with figures who seem to be peacefully sleeping, or with others whose eyes are opened astonishingly wide, stamped by death with an uncommunicable terror. I thought I had already experienced the limits of horror and of endurance, that I was a tough fighting man who would return home in due course to recount my heroic exploits. I have used the words and expressions which my experiences from Minsk to Kharkov to the Don suggested to me. But I should have reserved those words and expressions for what came later, even though they are not strong enough.
It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later. It’s a mistake, for instance, to use the word “frightful” to describe a few broken-up companions mixed into the ground: but it’s a mistake which might be forgiven.
I should perhaps end my account here, because my powers are inadequate for what I have to tell. Those who haven’t lived through the experience may sympathize as they read, the way one sympathizes with the hero of a novel or a play, but they certainly will never understand, as one cannot understand the unexplainable. This stammering outpouring may be without interest to the sector of the world to which I now belong. However, I shall try to let my memory speak as clearly as possible. I dedicate the remainder of this account to my friends Marius and Jean-Marie Kaiser, who are in a position to understand me, as they lived through the same general events in the same part of the world. I shall try to reach and translate the deepest level of human aberration, which I never could have imagined, which I never would have thought possible, if I hadn’t known it firsthand.
We reached the communications trench, which had seemed like safety to our sergeant, and literally dived into it as a brutal burst of fire scattered the soil beyond the parapet. The two men in white overalls who were already there jumped up in astonishment.
One of them had been standing beside the gun surveying the scene through field glasses. The other, hunched down at the bottom of the hole, had been fiddling with the knobs of a radio apparatus.
“The 2nd… section?” asked our sergeant, puffing for breath. “We’ve got some supplies for them.”
“It’s not very far,” said the soldier with the field glasses, “but you won’t be able to get there right now; you’d only be blown up. Put your explosives down — but not right here — and use the bunker.” He smiled.
Without waiting for him to repeat the invitation, we slid down into a tomblike structure of boards and hard earth, which was almost without light. Inside, there were four soldiers dressed in white. One of them had somehow managed to go to sleep. The others were writing beside a flickering candle.
The bunker wasn’t high enough for us to stand, and everyone had to move over so we could get in, but we were, at any rate, something new.
“Is it solid?” Hals asked, pointing his tattered finger at the roof of the rathole.
“Well… if something lands a little closer, it might collapse,” one of the soldiers answered mockingly.
“And if something lands square on us, our pals won’t have to bury us,” added another.
How could they joke? Habit, probably. The fellow who had been asleep woke up and yawned.
“I thought they’d sent us some women.”
“No… just a bunch of kids. Where did you find this brood, sergeant?”
We all laughed.
As if to rub our noses in our situation, the ground shook again. From here the noise was less violent.
“These boys are new recruits, part of the supply train, and they’ve crossed the whole of Russia so you can fill your stomachs.”
“That’s nothing,” said the fellow who’d just waked up.
“We’ve been sweating it out here for three months already, while you were taking your own sweet time. I know they’ve got pretty girls in the Ukraine, but you shouldn’t have stayed there so long. We’ve been dying of hunger.”
I ventured a few words in my atrocious German:
“Girls! We didn’t see any girls! All we saw was snow.”
“Alsatian?” somebody asked.
“No, he’s French,” Hals answered, joking.
Everyone burst out laughing. Hals was taken aback, and didn’t know what to say.
“Merci,” the questioner added with a good accent, holding out his hand to me.
“Ma mere est allemande,” I replied.
“Ach, gut. Votre mutter ist Deutsche? Sehr gut.”
The ground shook again. Some pieces from the ceiling rattled down onto our helmets.
“Things don’t seem to be going very well here,” said our sergeant, whose mind was absorbed by his terror, and who plainly didn’t give a damn whether my mother was German or Chinese.
“Oh, they’re just having fun,” the other one said. “The beating they took three days ago really calmed them down.”
“Ah?”
“Yes. Those bastards made us re-cross the Don about a month ago. We had to give up at least forty miles. Now our front is on the west bank. They’ve tried to cross on the ice at least four times already. The last time was five days ago. Then you would really have seen something. They attacked for two days, especially at night. It was really pretty rough. You see how I am today: I’m trying to catch up on my sleep. We haven’t had much lately. We’re supposed to counterattack too, but nothing’s happened yet. Take a look through the glasses. The ice is still covered with Russians. The pigs don’t even pick up their wounded. I’ll bet some of them down there are still groaning.”
“We’re supposed to resupply the 2nd section,” our wretched sergeant explained anxiously.
“You’ll find them a little further on — right down on the river bank — real daredevils. I think they’ve got the little island too. They lost it one night when they had to fight hand to hand, but in the morning they took it back. It’s a pretty tight spot down there, I can tell you. I’d rather be where I am.”
Our battery had been silent for a few minutes, but the Russian shells were still coming over at a slow but regular pace. The soldier with the field glasses came in, hunched up and blowing on his fingers.
“Your turn,” he said to one of the soldiers. “I’m shaking so hard I’m afraid my teeth will fall out.”
The man he called got up with a groan, and pushed his way through to the exit.
“Our guns aren’t firing any more. Have they been destroyed?” our sergeant asked the newcomer.
“You’ve got some funny ideas,” the soldier replied, still rubbing his fingers.
“We’d be in a fine fix without them. A few days ago, we’d have just been overrun without those guns. I sincerely hope that all our comrades of the 107th are still among the living.”
“I do too,” our sergeant agreed emphatically, realizing that he’d said the wrong thing. “But why have they stopped firing?”
“You should know how tight supplies are. We have to fire drop by drop, so to speak, or when we know we can’t miss. The infantry and the artillery both have to economize on munitions to the maximum. But we can’t let the Soviets know that, so from time to time we give them a heavy dose… you see?”