If Sajer and Hansmann depicted the personal horror of combat, Wilhelm Prüller recorded an episode that conveyed the presense of the absurd in battle. “The C.O.’s jeep… got stuck again,” he noted. “As the driver was trying to decide how to get the jeep going, he saw that the car was sitting over a hole out of which the barrel of an enemy trench mortar was protruding. He had to leave the jeep and saved himself only by galloping like a wild boar over the numerous Russian holes, each one full of Russians and well camouflaged. It is,” Prüller concluded with some understatement, “a nice story.” Fighting his way into Kursk in November 1941, Prüller found a more personal danger, now far from funny: “Every second a bullet wings past us. You never know where it comes from. Pressed flat against the house walls, bent down, your gun ready to shoot, your grenade in the other hand, you creep along.” But a month later Prüller chronicled an incident in which a Russian tank “play[ed] hide and seek around the house corners with our men.”23
Bernhard Beckering too noted the often ludicrous nature of personal experiences of combat. “The villages in which we were located were attacked. During the rescue of the American wounded we were attacked in an open field from the air by four [American] machines. This opaque muddle is almost comical.” Absurd, yet for others, like Prüller, there were also daily reminders of the very dangerous small war within the larger struggle. “Once we took fire from all sides,” recalled Werner Paulsen of an intensely personal moment. “In front of us. Behind us. It rang out everywhere…. We absolutely didn’t know where the firing came from…. Where was it best to run…? I ran into a cornfield and there I remained lying…. I heard only Russian [voices]…. When it was dark I… crawled back…. toward the road I was totally alone there. The next day Germans came. Tanks came driving down the road. And then I hopped aboard these tanks.” It was an intimate and ominous brush with death: from Paulsen’s platoon of fifty men, only four returned.24
Hans Werner Woltersdorf had a similar experience of being the prey in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Cut off with five other men by a Russian attack near Zhitomir on the day before Christmas 1943, Woltersdorf’s squad groped its way through dense woods searching desperately for a way back to German lines. Emerging from the woods, Woltersdorf noticed “open terrain, farmland, and after that, a good kilometer away, a village…. Who occupied it? Our troops, surely…. We had no choice but to go over the open terrain…. After fifty meters the first shot was fired. We darted from side to side, and they shot at us as if it were a rabbit hunt…. Fifty meters ahead of us… was a ditch, a life-saving ditch!” Although his men reached the ditch one had been hit in the ankle by Russian fire. Dragging the wounded man along, Woltersdorf struggled through the thick muck. “Was this to be my end?” he wondered. “I imprinted the date of my death in my mind…. I aimed a couple of shots at the group [of Russians]… and drove them under cover…. Only fifty meters up ahead our ditch led into a cross-ditch, which was wider, deeper, and filled with brown water.”
They reached the deeper ditch, but the Russians kept advancing. At the point of giving up, Woltersdorf glimpsed a speck in the distance. “It was neither a tank nor a lorry, it was much too fast. It was a private car, a German one…. A hundred meters more. We got ready to jump. Forty meters more. Now we jumped on to the road, holding our submachine guns in front of us. The driver stopped…. ‘For God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid,’ he cried, ‘jump in; they’re coming.’” Shaken but alive, Woltersdorf reflected on his luck with the god of war: “In the following days, more than sixty men returned in similarly bizarre fashions; the rest…, those who had sat and sung and laughed, sitting on the wall of the Tude bridge—.”25 Left unspoken, Woltersdorf knew what the fate of the remainder had been. The real war was deeply personal, as each Landser fighting his own lonely battle understood.
On yet another occasion, Woltersdorf experienced again that sense of battlefield intimacy, of war reduced to isolated combat between individuals. “We had grown used to destroying tanks in close combat,” he noted, but on this occasion the destruction proved intensely personaclass="underline"
We sneaked up to it through the wood from behind…. My heart was pounding…. I climbed carefully onto the tank from behind and approached the hatch cover…. Damn! How did one get the cover open? I braced myself against the turret with my thighs and tore at the cover until I realized that a bolt was fastened with a padlock.
So the crew was locked in…. They were riding in a sealed coffin…. I quickly withdrew my thigh from the close-combat opening and held firmly to the disc that closed it. Now what…? My hand grenade was too thick to fit through the hole.
Then I thought of my flare pistol…. Carefully I inserted the muzzle of the flare pistol into the hole…. Very quickly: muzzle in. They fired immediately, but I had the pistol out again already…. They were shouting, loud commands and shrill cries of fear…. Then there was a fearful thunderclap…. The turret rose a few centimeters, tilted to one side, and came crashing down…. I couldn’t get the men from the Moscow tank brigade out of my head. What a drama must have been played out in their coffin!26
That same sense of a private struggle pervaded the thoughts of a German lieutenant fighting in Stalingrad:
We have fought during fifteen days for a single house, with mortars, grenades, machine-guns and bayonets. Already by the third day fifty-four German corpses are strewn in the cellars, on the landings, and the staircases. The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling between two floors…. There is a ceaseless struggle from noon to night. From story to story, faces black with sweat, we bombard each other with grenades in the middle of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke…, floods of blood, fragments of… human beings. Ask any soldier what half an hour of hand-to-hand struggle means in such a fight…. The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses….
Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell, …only men endure.27
Only men persisted; the savagery of combat led twenty-year-old Hans-Heinrich Ludwig to a similar judgment: “Man is so tough,” he concluded a letter simply; no elaboration was necessary.28
In these accounts one gets a sense of combat as a deeply private experience, as an individual encounter with life, fate, and suffering in the spaces that the larger war failed to fill. Battle could make a Landser feel forlorn and abandoned, with little but his weapon and his few comrades to comfort him. Many fought, indeed, with a quiet expectation of death. As Friedrich Leonhard Martius wrote despairingly from the eastern front, “We are still in our wolf’s den and some of us go out daily: weapons and iron for a mighty struggle against flesh and hearts.” Mused Max Aretin-Eggert, “The individual will always be consumed more and more by the war and the organizational machine. But even in this process of consumption there lies an unimaginable performance by our troops.”29 In a struggle that was personal to the end, some soldiers saw themselves as men with a trade, and in a strange way they were proud of it.