If some men functioned to the rhythm of the deadly machine, remote from anything but the need to feed it, they could not outlast it. For many Landsers, therefore, the defining characteristic of combat was its elemental destructiveness. “At 4.00 alarm is sounded,” recounted Wilhelm Prüller of one of the many Russian assaults in December 1941:
Supported by artillery, the Russians attack to the north of the railway…. I place [my] Platoon between the houses and spread out the carbines…. One MG (machine gun) is to shoot continually at the Russians lying in front of us… to keep them from advancing. The other MG’s and all those with carbines are to go into position. I shall have a white Verey light shot up, and in that moment we shall aim and shoot with all our various weapons…. For 9 seconds it’s like broad daylight, you can see the whole ground in front of us…. My boys are already shooting like mad….
Slowly it gets light and now the enemy is lying in front of us on a silver plate…. I yell at the top of my lungs to the Russians: …“Hands up! Surrender!” One by one the hands go up….
The prisoners are herded together into a house, but there aren’t as many as we’d expected. When we return, we discover the reason: the many enemy dead still there. All shot through the head….Some of the dead are still burning, set on fire by our Verey lights. Then we start counting: …150 dead.30
Ferocious slaughter defined combat for a terrified Guy Sajer as well. “We were going to be part of a full-scale attack,” he remembered of the German assault at Belgorad in the spring of 1943. “A heavy sense of foreboding settled over us, and the knowledge that soon some of us would be dead was stamped on every face…. All of us were haunted by so many thoughts that conversation was impossible…. Sleep was [also] impossible… because of our anxiety about what lay ahead.” Apprehension and uncertainty preceded the battle, yet this was not the first experience of combat for these men. But as Sajer well knew, no one got used to traversing that thin line between life and death. Indeed, when cold steel could crack skulls like eggshells, the consuming passion was to dig deep into the ground—yet out they went into the night. “Our brains emptied, as if we had been anesthetized,” he noted. “Everyone grabbed his gun and, …sticking close together, followed the trench to the forward positions…. We moved out in good order, exactly as we’d been taught…. One by one, we left the last German positions, and crawled out onto the warm earth of no man’s land…. During such moments, even naturally reflective characters suddenly feel their heads emptying, and nothing seems to matter.”31
Training, the comfort of a learned routine, enabled Sajer and his buddies to stifle their fear and negotiate their way into no-man’s-land. Still, no amount of training could adequately prepare a young man for the elemental terror of combat, the awful loneliness of confronting the hidden gun that lay ahead. “Our immediate surroundings… were shaken by a series of thunderous explosions,” Sajer recalled. “For a minute we thought that the whole mass of creeping soldiers we had seen just the minute before had been blown to pieces. Everywhere…. young men were jumping up and trying to rush through the tangles of barbed wire…. I could see what was happening only with the greatest difficulty…. Through the… smoke, we were able to observe the horrible impact of our projectiles on the lost mass of Red soldiers in the trench in front of us.”32
Despite the chaos and confusion, Sajer had a vivid impression of how delicate even the bodies of tough men were, how they could be torn to raw chunks in a flash:
A huge tank rolled over the ground… which was overflowing with the bodies of Russian soldiers. Then a second and a third tank plunged through the bloody paste, and rolled on, their treads stuck with horrible human remnants. Our noncom gave an involuntary cry of horror at the sight [of]… this foul reality….
It is difficult even to try to remember moments… when there is nothing under a steel helmet but… a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions… and the cries of madmen…. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp…. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions…: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man onto another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments…. And then there are the cries of officers and noncoms, trying to shout across the cataclysm to regroup their sections and companies.
The battle was not yet over, and the extreme tension it generated was almost unbearable…. During our advance, we crossed a frightful slaughtering ground…. Each step made us realize with fresh horror what could become of our miserable flesh…. We [encountered] an open-air hospital… from which the shrieks and groans came so thick and fast it sounded like a scalding room for pigs. We were staggered by what we saw. I thought I would faint…. We crossed the enclosure with our eyes fixed on the sky, seeing as if in a dream young men howling with pain, with crushed forearms or gaping abdominal wounds, staring with incomprehension at their own guts.33
As with many other soldiers (Heinz Küchler claimed, “The pictures that you see border on delusions and nightmares”), the horrible scenes produced in Sajer a sense of unreality, but it was a nightmare that refused to end:
The Russians began a bombardment of unprecedented ferocity. Everything became opaque, and the sun vanished from our eyes…. Screams of fear froze in our constricted throats….
Suddenly a human figure crashed into our hole… [and] shouted to us…: “My whole company was wiped out….!” He carefully lifted his head just over the edge of the embankment as a series of explosions began to rip through the air beside us. His helmet and a piece of his head were sent flying, and he fell backward, with a horrifying cry. His shattered skull crashed into Hals’s hands, and we were splattered with blood and fragments of flesh. Hals threw the revolting cadaver as far as he could, and buried his face in the dirt. Nothing remains for those who have survived such an experience but a sense of uncontrollable imbalance, and a sharp, sordid anguish…. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else.34
Sajer and his comrades had been into the realm of death, had smelled death, had witnessed firsthand the promiscuous, wholesale, anonymous death that accompanied combat, and it was an experience forever stamped into their being. Others, too, attested to the extravagant horrors, to what Wilhelm Prüller termed the “revoltingly wonderful” nature of warfare. Following a pitched battle with Russian tanks, Hans Woltersdorf noted, “Now we finally had the opportunity to take a look at the tank that only a shot in the track had stopped. Had the first grenades not pierced it? Indeed, they had. The men looked into the tank, and they were near vomiting, so they didn’t look further but instead went away, embarrassed. A headless torso, bloody flesh, and intestines were sticking to the walls…. It wasn’t good to look into the tank…. One always sees oneself sticking to the walls in a thousand pieces like that, without a head.”35 It was not good to look at, or to think too much about such sights, yet the distressing reality of combat intruded constantly. “Next to us barked the shots of another anti-tank gun,” Friedrich Grupe recorded in his diary of the abhorrent events all around. “The column divided, Russian soldiers sprang out of the trucks, were caught by the bursts of the machine guns, often remained hanging between the running board and the ground, burning bodies fell out of the vehicles.” And after a second skirmish: “In the roadside graves lie mountains of dead…. We discover completely charred corpses.” Another encounter left Grupe virtually numb as he viewed the tormented postures of the dead, left as a thousand bloody rags. “The remaining [Russians] we saw lying there when it became light,” he wrote with an uncomfortable sense of foreboding, “mowed down by our machine guns in long rows on a sled path, a whole company…. Man after man they lie mute and rigid. We swallow silently at this picture of horror.” Spring was blooming, Grupe concluded, “but death triumphed here.”36