He looked so furious that I kept myself from laughing. His inadequate vigilance had given us both a good night’s sleep. Suddenly he pointed his gun at the open door. Before I could turn around, I heard a foreign voice, and one of the Russians who had received us the day before came and stood in the doorway.
“Kamerad,” he repeated in German. “This morning no good. Boom boom pretty close.”
We went out of the shed. On the roof of the little building in front of us, some Russians from the kolkhoz were inspecting the horizon. We heard some more long-drawn-out explosions.
“Bolsheviks very close,” said one of the Ukrainians, turning to us. “We’ll leave with kamerad soldat German.”
“Where are the wounded?” my companion asked, irritated at having been caught off balance.
“Where you put yesterday,” answered the Popov. “Two kamerad German dead.”
We looked at him in confusion.
“Come and help us,” my companion said.
Two of the more seriously wounded men had died. There were now four, all in poor condition. One of them was groaning and holding his right arm, whose hand was missing. His purulent dressing glistened with the gangrene which was already devouring him.
“Dig two graves over there,” ordered the tall soldier. “We must bury these men.”
“We not soldiers,” answered the Popov, still smiling.
“You… dig grave… two graves,” insisted the. German, aiming his gun at the Russians. “Two graves, and quick!”
The Russian’s eye gleamed wildly as he stared at the black hollow of the gun barrel. He said a few words in Russian, and the others busied themselves with the job.
We had begun to change the dressings of the wounded when we heard the sound of a motor in the courtyard. Without thinking, we ran out. Several armored vehicles had just driven in, and a gang of German soldiers were running toward the big drinking trough. They were followed by four or five Mark-4s. An officer climbed from a steiner, and we ran to meet him, telling him who we were.
“Alles gut,” said the officer. “Help us load up, and leave with us.” We tried to get the amphibious V.W. to start, but that proved impossible. We dragged it from the hut, and one of the landser threw a grenade into the engine. A moment later, it blew to pieces. More vehicles arrived. Others left in the direction from which we’d come. We couldn’t understand what was happening. The sound of explosions from the southeast was continuous. The road that ran through the kolkhoz was a stream of traffic of every description. Whenever anyone stopped I asked for news of my unit, but no one knew anything. It seemed likely that my companions of the 19th Rollbahn were far to the west by now — far from the front, to which it seemed I was being sent. A little while later, I turned west again, in a company of soldiers drawn from many infantry units. The fact that I was involved with this group caused me considerable difficulty a few days later. We appeared to be taking a line parallel to the front, at right angles to the Russian thrust. Far to the north, the Russians were pushing toward the south, hoping to surround the German forces still in the Voronezh — Kursk — Kharkov triangle. For a day and a half, we followed a muddy rut, on which our only troubles were mechanical. The machines we were using had been in Russia since the German advance of 1941, and had been pushed hard. Our forces were obliged to abandon large numbers of trucks and tractors and tanks.
The tanks in particular had taken a beating, often having been used for work their designers had never imagined. They were almost the only vehicles able to move normally during the winter months, and a tank pulling five trucks along a snowy mule track was not an unusual sight. When they had to face the Russian counter-offensive, this rough usage, coupled with their lightness, which had served us so well until then, made them no match for the famous T-34s, incontestably superior to the Mark-2s and -3s. Later, our Tigers and Panthers stood up to Soviet armor, and played with their T-34s and KW-85s.
Unfortunately, as in the air, our inadequate numbers had to yield to an enemy multitude fighting on two fronts. We were obliged, in effect, to defend a fortress with a circumference of two thousand miles.
To cite a single example: the fighting on the Vistula, north of Krakow, pitted twenty-eight thousand Germans supported by thirty-six Tiger tanks and twenty Panthers against two strong Soviet armies of six hundred thousand men and seven armored regiments disposing of eleven hundred tanks of various kinds.
Toward noon the next day, we arrived at a small village about fifteen miles northeast of Kharkov, with a name like Outcheni. I can no longer remember precisely. The place was filled with smoke, and to judge by the noise fighting was still going on quite nearby.
The steiner of the officer who bad picked us up at the kolkhoz drew ahead, while the rest of us jumped down from our machines. Flickering light a mile or so to the south marked the line of fire. The soldiers who had come with me peed into a hedge or chewed some food, with blank faces. I myself have never been able to achieve a resigned, indifferent attitude in the face of pressing danger; nevertheless, I tried to hide my desperate anxiety. Perhaps the others were doing the same thing. The steiner came back, and two noncoms wrote down our names. Then we were organized into groups of fifteen, led either by a sergeant or an obergefreiter.[9]
The officer climbed onto the seat of the steiner and spoke to us briefly, mincing no words.
“The enemy has cut us off from our line of retreat. To get around them, we would have to turn north, onto the plain, where there are no roads. This could be fatal. Therefore, we will have to break through their barrage to reach our new positions, which are quite close.
“As further elements of the Don army arrive, they will be used to maintain the passage already opened, which will allow all our soldiers to escape the Bolshevik noose. Thereafter, you will proceed to positions which will be announced, and which you will maintain until further orders. Good luck! Heil Hitler!”
I was about to say that I belonged to the transport service, when I suddenly felt ashamed. Munitions boxes were opened, and their contents distributed. My pockets and cartridge pouches were full, and I was given two defensive grenades, which I didn’t know how to operate. We moved single file to the edge of the village past houses burning from enemy incendiaries. Groups of men were walking about in the debris; others were tending to the wounded. Some burnt-out German vehicles were still smoking. We were taken over by a lieutenant, who asked five or six of us to follow him down a long street which was still more or less intact. A salvo whistled past us, and we threw ourselves to the ground. It fell somewhere in the center of the village, about seven or eight hundred yards behind us. Enemy shells had dug several holes in the packed earth which lay between two rows of buildings, and occasional mutilated bodies lay sprawled on the street.
We walked for about fifteen minutes, sticking close to the buildings, until we heard the sound of automatic weapons. About a hundred yards ahead of us, the street was swept by mortar fire. We hesitated for a moment. Then we saw some running figures emerging from the wall of dust stirred up by the enemy salvo.
“Achtung!” shouted the lieutenant.
Instantly, we dropped to our knees, or even onto our stomachs, ready to open fire, but stood up again when we saw German uniforms. The other soldiers ran over to us, and threw themselves down by our sides. We could see that still more were coming through the flying dust. Several of them were howling at the tops of their lungs, a sound which combined fear, anger, and pain.