Nor was this kind of fear an isolated occurrence. “Although our luck had been almost incredible, and had spared us so far,” Sajer reflected on another occasion,
it must almost surely run out…. I suddenly felt terribly afraid…. It would probably be my turn soon. I would be killed, just like that, and no one would even notice…. I would be missed only until the next fellow got it…. As my panic rose, my hands began to tremble. I knew how terrible people looked when they were dead. I’d seen plenty of fellows fall face down in a sea of mud…. The idea made me cold with horror…. I went on crying and muttering incoherently….
“Hals,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here. I’m afraid….” Suddenly it all seemed unbearable. My trembling hands clutched my head… and I sank into total despair.
Although his friend stopped him from running that time, a few days later Sajer again witnessed an elemental scramble to flee the horror: “As we had feared, we heard the roar of war again. The noise… in itself was enough to send a wave of terror through the… men trapped beside the water…. Every man grabbed his things and began to run…. Frantic men were abandoning everything on the bank and plunging into the water to try to swim to the opposite shore…. Madness seemed to be spreading like wildfire… [as] the howling mob… pass[ed] us by.”4
Still, the great majority of Landsers came to realize that courage consisted simply of a dogged determination to resist the human tide fleeing rearward. Even if momentarily panicked, most did not give way to the quivering terror that could make men incapable of action but instead managed to cope with the stress of life at the front. Sometimes the courage to go on could be engendered by the most seemingly mundane means, such as the “good old-fashioned yells” of platoon and section commanders and “the practice of bugle calls.” Human responses to a human crisis of fear thus proved effective, as did the apparent triviality of playing to the vanity of men by offering them medals. Embarrassed, Harry Mielert wrote to his wife, “For us men these [medals] are… very significant. They raise our courage, and we are ready for the craziest things.” Indeed, the simplest conceit could persuade the spirit to endure. “How many times… had I thought myself invulnerable, filled with the pride we all felt,” Sajer mused, “admiring our shoulder straps and helmets and magnificent uniforms, and the sound of our footsteps, which I loved, and love still, despite everything.”5
Painstakingly observing special holidays also served to connect the men to a wider world and sustain their morale. “The most beautiful night of the year, but for soldiers also the most dangerous night is over,” Mielert reflected on Christmas day 1942. “We sang our beautiful Christmas songs in firm spirit, if also with our rifles at hand and our pockets full of hand grenades. In each bunker stood a small green tree with a pair of lights. I [spent time] with each group of my company. They all had photographs with them and hauled them out with pride as well as sheepishly to show me…. The toughest, the ‘old soldiers,’ they are the most affected…. They don’t quite cry openly, but you see it, how they trembled, and it required the total dryness and coarseness of male humor to get over this softness. We drank a bottle of wine, ate some cookies, smoked a cigarette, then it was over.”6
“From the army radio resound the familiar Christmas melodies,” Friedrich Grupe noted in his diary of a Christmas celebration, also in 1942.
The 24th of December 1942 is a wonderful winter day. Snow covers the devastation, transforms this wretched copse that has been shot to pieces into a magical forest. In the evening a magnificent full moon rises over the battlefield.
In the bunker stoves crackles a warming fire. About 4:00 P.M. the sergeant from the 1st squad comes and brings us a glittering, decorated Christmas tree. Now begins a lavish exchange of Christmas presents.
We actually feel now that it is Christmas. We… don’t think about the fact that the Red Army will try to force a breakthrough to the highway…. Mail has also come. We sit quietly at the rough table made from birch and with the reading of the mail all our thoughts are at home, while someone plays on the accordion the Christmas songs that we have sung a thousand times….
The Landsers, stamped by suffering, sit forward in their bunkers with their companies and probably all become soft in this hour.
The battalion leader goes with me through all the positions in the main line. We don’t leave any bunker out…. An urgent closeness reigns…. The hard, stubbled faces of the soldiers are relaxed; they attempt to laugh, shy and embarrassed.
There they are, these men who have just a short time ago repulsed attack after attack in merciless close combat and have looked death in the face a hundred times. They sing “Silent Night, Holy Night,” their white-painted helmets in their hands, and at the same time attempt to sing so softly that Ivan, outside hardly eighty meters away, cannot hear them.7
If only for a moment, the war stopped as the men engaged in the familiar and comforting celebration of Christmas, complete with a decorated tree in each bunker.
To forget the war, the death and destruction all around, the anxiety over his own fate—that remained the goal of every Landser. “At many of the sentry posts I confronted the powerful reek of alcohol,” Grupe confided to his diary. “To be sure the consumption of alcohol while on duty is punishable, but… after weeks of hard, difficult fighting, after all the blood and death, they have earned such pleasure and rest.” Moreover, this urge to blot out the fear could come at any moment, even in battle. “Everything rumbled, blazed, trembled,” Harry Mielert noted during one particularly savage Russian artillery bombardment. “Cattle cried, soldiers searched through all the buildings, barrels of red wine were taken away in small panje wagons (horse carts), here and there men were drinking and singing, in the meantime explosions again and new roaring fires.” During a frightful retreat through dense woods, in which he was under constant fire, Prosper Schücking likewise recorded, with no comment, “In the evening I passed a camp of an infantry battalion in which the men were drunk.” As Grupe commented laconically, “Beer played an essential role.” And vodka, Guy Sajer noted, “is the easiest way to make heroes…. We drank everything we could get hold of, trying to blot out the memory of a hideous day.”8 Little wonder, then, that the Landser referred to alcohol as Wutmilch, the milk of fury, the means to summon courage for yet another game of chance with death.
Humor, as well, served to distract the Landser from daily reality. Grupe recorded that in his sector of the eastern front the nightly appearance of an antiquated Soviet biplane—known to the Landsers alternately as the “sewing machine,” the “coffee mill,” or “iron Gustav”—occasioned many jokes. The wooden plane, would drone overhead and then suddenly turn off its motor, the sign that the pilot was going to toss a bomb overboard. The arrival of this nightly ghost gave rise to “many crazy stories told by the Landser: One night a paymaster was underway with a full keg of good brandy in his panje wagon. Gustav fluttered over. Just as our little paymaster had stooped down over the open spigot of the keg in order to enjoy the aroma, the airplane flew devilishly low over him and to his horror out of it came, while the motor was turned off, a deep, jovial voice: ‘Giddap, giddap, pony!” Another version of the story, according to Grupe, had it that “both occupants of the airplane loudly and clearly scolded the paymaster.”9 Through such a story the Landser not only ridiculed, and thus minimized, the irritating nightly “air raid” but also mocked the “hardships” of those in the rear—and to the Landser the rear was any area behind the front lines—who didn’t live in the land of mice, lice, bugs, and constant danger.