crowded together like sardines in the cattle car…. There were moans, groans, and whimpers in that car; the smell of pus, urine, stomach and lung wounds, and it was cold. We lay on straw, each of us covered only by a woollen blanket. The train waited for hours on sidings.
After many days a doctor finally came crawling breathlessly into our car. He had long ago given up reacting to the many wishes, pleas, and complaints, indeed listening to them at all, and he concentrated on his task of distinguishing the nearly dead from the still alive, making room for new wounded, and changing dressings only when it was necessary. In my case it was necessary.
“I’m afraid we have no chloroform,” he said. “Grit your teeth.”
Then he tore the whole septic kit and caboodle from my stump in one go…. [I] imagined a leg amputation in the Middle Ages to be something like that.
His left lower leg amputated, Josef Paul endured a variety of modes of torturous transportation in the process of being evacuated back to a hospital in Germany, first being put on an airplane, then loaded onto a medical train that was under constant fighter attack, after which he found himself on a horse-drawn cart, then back on a medical train; all this only to be overtaken, captured by the Russians, and sent to a Soviet prisoner of war camp.68
Perhaps the greatest agony for the wounded was the fear of being left behind during a retreat, of dying unrecognized, unburied, unfound—or, even if found in time, of the rescue operation being overrun. Claus Hansmann has left a poignant and vivid description of the human workings and emotions involved in a frantic effort to evacuate the fallen. “Where was the cheerful train that we had often imagined, where were the laughing comrades at the windows, the last jokes about the lost horrors of Russia, the common delousing at the border?” he puzzled. “Where was all this? Dark cattle cars in whose straw feverish wounded groaned…. Thoughts gnaw into our innermost being.” As the wounded were literally carried out of harm’s way, Hansmann took note of a “murdered wood: stumps and gnarled roots, cold stalks tower bone pale and murky in the dampness…. As far as the eye can see… only this sinister feeling of oppressiveness…. Here the brutal reality of war seized for the first time a young heart.”69
Darkness brought no relief from the torment. “Night… where the battle writhes in our blood. It shrieks like a storm in us…. Sleep, startled awake, someone gives us an injection, bandages, tablets, and something to drink…. Full of despair the feelings vacillate in us…. Where the wounds are can be healed, yet these scars will also still desecrate.” With these wounds to his soul fresh and burning, Hansmann continued his feverish ruminations:
Are you awake? Are you dreaming? On the ground there is an enormous shuddering, and… the pain presses in wild waves…. You want to raise your head…. Your head rolls weakly to the side, and your mouth opens, your tongue seeking cool drops on your bearded lips….
Someone carries you on a stretcher…. Slowly distant impressions sink into your consciousness: the crunching of footsteps, voices, the smell of soldier’s coats, the room, which had seemed infinite, narrows. But what are these men saying? This damned fog! If you could only understand these sounds…. That must be Russian they are speaking above you!… You are so cold and clammy, can just raise your head over the edge of the stretcher, then your whole stomach seems to spring up and you are practically nauseous…. Finally you hear, “Well, are you doing better?” Yet you still can’t answer…. Then you’re already asleep again.
But soon the rumblings of war and the throbbing pain jarred Hansmann awake again:
An “Are you hungry” you can’t understand at all. “Hungry?” Oh no, no, pain. The voice turns away, you are lifted up, get tablets and cool water that you eagerly slurp. Wounded new arrivals come and rest in the straw; they lie silent, as if fallen under a nightmare. Only here and there muffled voices and rustling about…. Unrest all through the night hours, then it is morning. Through the buzzing rumors of many men rings clear: “Comrades! The ambulance column can’t make it through, we have information that they are waiting for us twenty-five kilometers from here. The time is short, we must withdraw….”
Your thoughts become more agitated, red flaming shapes under your eyelids. The cool raindrops appear to turn to steam on your skin, though slowly you become cooler. The wetness and cold on your body drive the fever from your head…. Next to you at the same level you see unkempt faces, filthy bandages, excited unrest. Are the Russians already behind us?… Now comes the moment where old, sometimes derided prayers push in.70
Amid much suffering and groaning the stretcher-bearers, most of them Russian auxiliaries, took up their loads like beasts of burden and set off into the unknown, threatened by enemy forces, with safety almost an impossibly long distance away for wounded men being carried across swampy terrain. Exhaustion mixed with fear and pain characterized the lonely column. “Night at last,” Hansmann recorded:
The same impressions of the smell of straw and damp, sticky uniforms. Again the doctor, also unkempt, becomes steadily more uneasy. Again questions, tablets, something to eat; then sleep, from time to time awakened by groans, screams…. The medics can’t do any more. One sleeps sitting up. He is called, hears nothing, finally someone crawls behind him, then he starts awake with wild eyes and inarticulate cries, and then laughs wearily, hopelessly…. Then quite a few shots reverberate! Is that Ivan already? Anxiety, panic bursts into the open. Everyone’s petrified…. Many look for a knife, a stick; others quickly crawl with tightly clenched teeth into a corner.
But all the excitement proved to be a false alarm, this time. Everyone looked around embarrassed, each ashamed of his weakness and guilty at his open expression of fear. At first light, still no vehicles had appeared, so
tired, worn out, already strung out at the start, the column presses on like a sluggish caterpillar through rain and woods. Even without having to open your eyes you see what they’re suffering. These contorted, pale, blanched faces, these eyes that cling exhausted to the glutinous muddy trail. The complete filth and the old blood encrusted on their uniforms and bandages. Everyone clings to life…. All along the valleys roll threatening reverberations. Our haste grows, overwhelms all our exhaustion. Only the bearers are steady, indifferent…. Where is there a resting place in this world? The unlucky remain behind…. Gone, can’t bear to look.71
Doggedly the column lurched on in a desperate quest for safety, the journey itself proved almost overwhelmingly agonizing. “How long has this odyssey lasted already?” Hansmann speculated at one point. “Is it days, weeks in the monotony of the pain that mistreats your body?… Days in icy, clinging dampness, in the shower of fall storms…. Are you lost in this devil’s forest, are your exertions, this arduous torment, for nothing?” At the moment of ultimate despair, however, salvation appeared like a bolt from the blue: “Something shoots like an electric current through the group! Ahead under a tree a waving form. At closer glance it is a soldier. Already from a distance he shouts: ‘Just five kilometers, Comrades!’ Five kilometers, five thousand meters it sings in us, then ambulances, warmth, care, everything! The steps become more assured, the strange silence lifts, already confident conversations, conjectures flicker.” Almost before they knew it, the five kilometers and the sufferings of the last few days were past and, most improbably, comfort and safety had been reached. “Ambulances under trees, medics, all so fresh and energetic,” Hansmann rejoiced. “Slowly the suffering column leaves the darkness of the forest. All come with the same look of hope, like pilgrims who have seen a Mecca…. Finally after the long march through the night the muffled echo of an entrance door…. Now it’s your turn, again you’re carried, along quiet, long corridors full of hospital air. Through a door a bright room, a voice: it is a woman! Everything is all right.”72 Hansmann’s tale emphasized something every Landser eventually came to understand, that survival on the battlefield often came to depend on the mysteries of chance; all one’s personal precautions, superstitions, and cynicism availed little in the face of “Fate.”