Weary, fearful, and staggering under the burden of lonely despair, Hansmann nonetheless stole out into the sinister night:
I creep forward. Lightly veiled moon…. The others wait in the shadow of the houses. A last cigarette, hasty puffs, we speak to each other softly…. “Nah, it makes no sense, but let’s go…!”
Slowly we slip through the grass fresh with dew…. Singly, we creep past a bare spot, then we reach the clover field…. The heavy silence is suspicious, oppressive. Finally some bursts of fire in the distance…. Dear God, all of this for a dead lieutenant and a shot-up flamethrower. The moon suddenly peeks out of the edge of a cloud. We lie petrified with pounding hearts…. In front of us, perhaps forty meters…, we hear voices. A couple of Russians are conversing,…, then two Russians come hunched out of a trench towards us. They must discover us! In a split second the hopelessness of this undertaking dawns on us: If we actually find the corpse, how are we supposed to bring it back through the enemy lines? Crawling, we could hardly hold onto the dead guy, and finally, he is in fact dead…! Therefore, the only salvation: hand grenades! The first, then others: explosions, crashes, screams….
We quickly throw what we have and take to our heels, simultaneously shooting in short bursts…. We race along, whistling bullet bursts overtake us, behind us their impact. Then finally our bunkers. Everyone unhurt? The last one slides into the trench. Nothing happened. O.K., good night.18
Nothing happened—not physically, at least—but patrols such as these appeared to the Landser a taunt directed at good fortune and his personal well-being, as each feared the vulnerability, isolation, and helplessness of being exposed in no-man’s-land, the psychological torture of being suspended between security and danger, with only the blackness of the night as a comfort.
Leopold von Thadden-Trieglaff illustrated well that sense of having, during combat, an intimate relationship with death. “I am standing before the door of heaven and wait outside to see Ernst-Dietrich [his fallen brother],” he wrote in March 1943. “The most terrible night and the hardest battle of my life lay behind me…. During the night the enemy attacked us in a width of six kilometers with overwhelming strength… [and] broke through on my right flank…. I myself dashed forward in order to direct the firefight…. I knew that must mean death for me, but God stood next to me. They were terrible, indescribable minutes until I was able to gather thirteen men and place them in a hole in the ground that was supposed to be a bunker.” But Thadden-Trieglaff’s personal torture had barely begun. “Deep darkness,” he noted of the sinister night.
The cries of “Hurrah” from almost all sides by the attacking Russians; shouts, screams, …withering fire…. We dished it out to the mass of Russians who had penetrated the position on my right… [and] answered their cries of “Hurrah” with mocking shouts…. We stood like oaks with the consciousness of impending death.
Finally at 2:30 A.M. the enemy broke through on my left…. We knew that… we were now completely destitute, isolated, and deserted….
We held out through the night. I knew that Captain M. would get tanks through to me and haul me out…. In the meantime, I had the first wounded in the small band. The first-aid packets were soon used up. I felt so sorry for the poor fellows…. With morning the situation became even more frightening.19
Frightening indeed, for with the first light the Russian assault would inevitably resume. “As the morning dawned… a hail of fire rained on us, from right, from left,” confirmed Thadden-Trieglaff. “In a few minutes our bunker was full of wounded and I struggled to quiet the poor fellows…. Screams and groans, and singing. I had to strain every nerve in order to remain as calm as before…. In this moment of deepest despair… I discovered that the neighboring company… had withdrawn…. I myself sat about six hundred meters behind the present Russian lines…. Had they given up on us?” In a moment of anguish and despair Thadden-Trieglaff feared that he and his men had been abandoned to a harsh fate. But no: “About 6:00 A.M…. finally German ‘Hurrahs’ were to be heard. German tank motors roared; German machine gun fire and flak guns resounded…. We were rescued…! As I returned to my command post in the village I gaped at the dead comrades. I was so shaken that I almost cried…. When might this hideous defensive struggle come to an end? When will spring finally come? Deep snow, daily radiant sunshine…. At night it is icy cold in this wretched region. We struggle to get into the ground.”20 For the twenty-year-old Thadden-Trieglaff the appalling fighting and his ironic struggle to get into the ground came to an end all too soon. He was killed the next day.
Combat could be an amazingly personal and lonely experience. In the latter stages of the war, German recruits were taught to destroy a Russian tank by letting it roll over their foxholes and attaching a magnetic mine as it passed, or by emerging and firing a shot into the tank’s rear with a Panzerfaust. In theory, most efficient; in practice, potentially agonizing. “The first group of T-34’s crashed through the undergrowth,” recalled one Landser of such an incident:
I heard my officer shout to me to take the right hand machine…. All that I had learned in the training school suddenly came flooding back and gave me confidence…. It had been planned that we should allow the first group of T-34’s to roll over us….The grenade had a safety cap which had to be unscrewed to reach the rip-cord. My fingers were trembling as I unscrewed the cap… [and] climbed out of the trench…. Crouching low I started towards the monster, pulled the detonating cord, and prepared to fix the charge. I had now nine seconds before the grenade exploded and then I noticed, to my horror, that the outside of the tank was covered in concrete…. My bomb could not stick on such a surface…. The tank suddenly spun on its right track, turned so that it pointed straight at me and moved forward as if to run over me.
I flung myself backwards and fell straight into a partly dug slit trench and so shallow that I was only just below the surface of the ground. Luckily I had fallen face upwards and was still holding tight in my hand the sizzling hand grenade. As the tank rolled over me there was a sudden and total blackness…. The shallow earth walls of the trench began to collapse. As the belly of the monster passed over me I reached up instinctively as if to push it away and… stuck the charge on the smooth, unpasted metal…. Barely had the tank passed over me than there was a loud explosion…. I was alive and the Russians were dead. I was trembling in every limb.21
For Guy Sajer, too, the intimate nature of battle resonated vividly, with soldiers shouting personal oaths at each other in the heat of the moment. “The Russians pressed their attack, bringing on their tanks,” he remembered. “Our cries of distress were mingled with the screams of the two machine gunners and then the shouts of revenge from the Russian tank crew as it drove over the hole, grinding the remains of the two gunners into that hateful soil…. The treads worked over the hole for a long time, and… the Russian crew kept shouting, ‘Kaputt, Soldat Germanski! Kaputt!’” Surveying a battlefield, Claus Hansmann noted not only the familiar scenes of carnage, “the horse corpses smothered in a flood of blood, the broken wheels, shattered shafts, …widely strewn mountains of munitions of all calibers, weapons,” but also something more hauntingly personaclass="underline" “the laundry and the pitiful personal effects of the dead thrown into the swamp. Yellowed prints of family photos and the faded ink trails of letters once written with warm hearts, primitive shaving gear and the tragic still-life of mementos become impersonal spill out of the packs and pockets of unknown men. In a muddy tide the water laps over wetly glistening carcasses and washes blood from the corpses.”22