For some Landsers, then, combat ultimately produced tragic human moments of frightening clarity when the fog of battle cleared and they became horribly aware of what was happening around them, not merely of the death and destruction but of the deeply personal essence of war. “Daily I engage in hour-long discussions with my comrades and preach humility,” warned Siegbert Stehmann in the heady days of victory in June 1940, then added insightfully: “There are people who are inwardly destroyed by victory!” This was a revelation to which Guy Sajer added, in blunter terms, “Even a victorious army suffers dead and wounded.” Indeed, Sajer insisted,
the front line troops… had already made up their minds about the future…. Much of the time we felt desperate. Can anyone blame us? We knew that we would almost certainly be killed…. If our courage incited us to hours of resignation, the hours and days which followed would find us… filled with an immense sadness. Then we would fire in a lunatic frenzy, without mercy. We didn’t wish to die, and would kill and massacre as if to avenge ourselves in advance…. When we died, it was with fury, because we hadn’t been able to exact enough retribution. And, if we survived, it was as madmen, never able to readapt to the peacetime world. Sometimes we tried to run away; but orders, adroitly worded and spaced, soothed us like shots of morphine.73
Still, as Sajer knew, this calm soon wore off, to be replaced by “the fear of ultimate success as a dead hero,” a death that offered slim solace to those so honored. “It is small comfort to have shared your own destruction with others,” lamented an anonymous soldier at Stalingrad, to which another added, “Now it’s either die like a dog or off to Siberia.” From Stalingrad, indeed, most would have agreed that “there are only two ways left: to heaven or to Siberia.” But this forlorn choice revealed the ultimate impotence of men confronting the war machine. “At home… in many newspapers you will find beautiful, high-sounding words in big black borders,” concluded the same Landser, writing from Stalingrad. “They will always pay us due honor. Don’t be taken in by this idiotic to-do. I am so furious that I could smash everything in sight, but never in my life have I felt so helpless.”74 Combat, as most discovered, was not a romantic adventure but a continual series of shattering incidents, until many Landsers decided that only an ambulance or a grave-digger offered a way out.
4. WITHSTANDING THE STRAIN
A mid the savage fighting and appalling misery of the German retreat from Russia in the autumn of 1943, Harry Mielert was struck by the personal anger he felt, a rage based on fear, the pervasive death and destruction, and a sense of anomie. “All connections are broken,” he despaired. “Where is man? Anger roars through all the cracks in the world.” Mielert’s fury expressed well the complex emotions produced by combat and life at the front. An army’s first and most important function is, of course, to fight; but it is individual human beings, not some impersonal machine, who do the actual fighting, suffering, and dying. Every Landser thus lived with the likelihood that he would be killed or wounded, and the longer he was at the front, the greater the possibility. Combat therefore produced a study in extremes of behavior with enormous mood shifts: one was alternately frightened or resigned, laughing or crying, screaming or cheering. After a battle a Landser’s nerves would take over, but although his knees might shake and his hands tremble, he was happy to be alive. At the moment of killing or being killed, each man discovered a powerful consciousness of self and realized acutely the menace all around him. Each one came to know only too well the thin line between life and death. “I had learned,” noted Guy Sajer, “that life and death can be so close that one can pass from one to the other without attracting any attention.” “The bullet that you hear,” observed Helmut Pabst drily, “is already past.”1 He left unspoken the tormenting knowledge that the bullet that struck home remained unheard.
Every man had a breaking point, a fact the Landser understood and, if only grudgingly, accepted. The constant strain and tension of life on the edge of death would eventually snap the resolution of even the toughest soldier. Given such continual terror, a fear to which one could never become accustomed, how did the average Landser find the strength to endure? Not surprisingly, the first instinct of many men under fire was to flee, to cope with stress simply by escaping it. Cowardice, after all, may be just a kind of honesty about fear. “Something hung in the air,” noted Claus Hansmann of an episode that was certainly repeated hundreds of times during the war:
We marched hurriedly rearward…. As we go along we hear in the ranks that Russians are supposed to have broken through…. Staff members roar to the rear, horses and wagons travel past in a gallop, truck drivers: all in a hurry, already it smells almost like a rout. And suddenly a shout from behind: “Go to the right, our tanks are coming!…” Everyone breathes a sigh: well, finally, tanks! And then come horrible seconds: [enemy] tanks duck out of the yellow-brown cloud of dust and open fire on vehicles and the column. Then there is no more stopping us. Munitions boxes fly into the ditches, rifles are thrown away, gas masks, gun belts, machine guns…. Everyone flees from them, and the men run, becoming a poor, spineless herd of animals…. Autos drive into the swamp, wagons overturn, horses run on through, and the men likewise have thrown off all reins and fled…. The reason? Yeah, the reason… well, is just immaterial.2
Hansmann, like virtually all Landsers, understood that everyone panicked from time to time; in reaction to a mortal threat a group of men in a very real sense could lose their human qualities and become a herd of animals.
As the Landser well knew, there was no such thing as being too seasoned to panic; even seemingly immunized combat veterans occasionally succumbed to the desire to escape danger by running. Overwhelmed by a Russian assault, Guy Sajer and his comrades—hardened veterans all—gave way to this primal terror and the urge to flee. “The human tide continued to roll toward us, making our scalps crawl,” he recalled. “It’s useless!’ shouted the veteran…. ‘We haven’t got enough ammunition. We can’t stop them….’ Our frantic eyes moved from the lips of one man to the other.” Their sergeant refused to order a retreat, but orders were no longer needed, for the men were acting out of animal terror, instinctively: “The veteran had just jumped from the trench and was galloping toward the woods…. We grabbed our guns in frantic haste… [and] followed him. For a moment we were almost mad with terror…. ‘You bastard!’ the [sergeant] yelled. ‘I’ll report you for this!’ ‘I know,’ the veteran said…. ‘But I’d take one of our firing squads over Ivan’s bayonet any day.’”3