Our hosts always profited when our daily rations reached us, if they reached us. It was all too seldom however. In such weather conditions the supplies always came to a standstill, for various reasons. Columns of lorries could only be pulled behind tracked vehicles over roads that were like ice-rinks. Our warm meals came from the battalion’s field kitchen. Usually a stew, it was carried on the back, in a double-sided canister, or by sledge pulled by Panje ponies to the front-line. In some cases, it was a long way, isolated and dangerous and many a Russian soldier was provided with our meal, the carriers having been shot up on the way. Our daily ration was much better than when we were in training. It consisted of 650 grams of bread, 45 grams butter, or other fat, 120 grams of cheese, 120 grams of fresh meat, 200 grams jam or artificial honey, 10 grams chicory coffee and six Juno cigarettes, which we could so seldom enjoy.
There are three very descriptive words connected to war, which need no supporting vocabulary when being used, such as expulsion, evacuation and refugees. All are connected to the apocalypse of the Twentieth Century, for the poorest of huts is a home. To have that taken away, belongs to the hardest of fates that anyone has to endure. For soldiers like us who had become nomads of the Steppe, separated from the outside world and with seldom a chance to make a telephone call, our quarters had become no less than provisional shelters.
In the next village, but some way off, all the inhabitants had fled. It had become a small garrison for us, as a line of defence, 24 hours a day. In order to reach it, we had an hour-long march, hindered by an icy snowstorm from the north and metre high wind-blown drifts. Underway we rendered first-aid to one another by rubbing the left side of each other’s face with snow. Only so could we avoid the threatening frostbite when yellow patches appeared as the first symptoms on the skin.
We did our best to make our new quarters into a home. In the one allocated to us, an optimist had written, “Humour is when one laughs in the face of all odds”, in the soot on the ceiling. In the warmth of the hut and as I lay on my bed of straw, I used to gaze at it and tried to take heart from this indirect advice, although none of us had forgotten how to laugh. There was always a clown to make a loose joke or two. We had two of those happy souls with us, in the form of two Danish brothers, twins, from Copenhagen, the same age as myself, 18 years old. With their white-blond hair and pink baby cheeks, they represented the typical prototype of the Germanic volunteer. The type appeared as the young and typical, dynamic soldier of the new Europe in the magazine Signal and were good, sporty soldiers, whom we could not understand when speaking at their normal speed. When speaking German, we puzzled at their lisping, swinging, vocabulary mingled with a Danish accent and we nicknamed them sür-su. We only had to open the door of the hut for a second or two and with their aversion to a cold draught they chorused Tür-zu but which rang in the air as sür-su, i.e. ‘shut the door!’
We were therefore concerned and upset, when hearing that their trench at the end of the village was deserted one morning, when the relieving guards approached it, and there was no sign of the blonde brothers. We never saw them again. We had to assume that during their night of guard duty, they had fallen foul of Soviet soldiers using a snow storm to silently approach their trench, overpower them and take them away, which very often happened.
On dark nights the guards of the front-line sent flares over the front terrain, flares on small parachutes. In order to let the Russians know that we were in readiness, we also shot a volley or two from our machine-guns. In doing that we, at the same time, sent away many a hungry wolf as it approached our trenches. Whole packs would come too close for comfort. On nights with a full moon, we were able to see enemy positions. That same moon which shone on friend and foe alike, from Leningrad to the Black Sea, also shone we knew, on our loved ones at home.
On one of those sunny days in December, we were suddenly surprised by a cheeky Russian ‘double-decker’ or biplane aircraft circling above our heads. We ran outside, only half-dressed, to take a look at it. The cheekiness of the pilot flying so low over the roofs meant that he must have known that we did not possess anti-aircraft guns. We shot at him with our pistols and rifles like crazy, which did nothing to scare the pilot, clear to see in his leather cap and goggles. He calmly made a bow over the village before disappearing to the east. It did not end there however, for he returned during the night. That time he stretched his arm overboard and dropped two bombs on us, without doing any harm. But we were to be pestered continually by those Russian ‘double-deckers’, or ‘sewing machines’, as we called them, for the ‘Ivans’ loved to disturb our peace.
The fighting zone of our battalion included several villages. With a strength of 800 men, we should have had a defence-line of around only 1,000 metres, based on the theory that the defence-line of an infantry division of 8,000, was 10,000 metres. We had to guard much more, three or four times as much. Armed patrols kept the communication system open between the units, which was only possible after dark. In that flat no-man’s land, there were only small woods of birches dotted around for cover and the enemy had a good view of the countryside. There was a telephone connection from village to village and the field-lines, open to extreme elements and enemy fire, were very often in need of repair. The men carrying out the work had to be protected. Communications had to be kept open at all times whether dangerous to life and limb or not. It was a very necessary and continual commitment for the men and their protection had to be reliable as well. Recce patrols were always in demand in connection with such work and of all the men to be used, our group was chosen. That after-dark task became routine, a dangerous commodity, for it gave our enemy a weapon to use against us. We used the same well-worn paths through two small woods, in order not to lose one another.
The routine enabled the Russians to lay mines in our path, which became a suicide mission for us, in every sense of the word. Some of the mines were laid with trip-wires and were nearly invisible in the dark. We started to lose men in that way. Two of our comrades were severely wounded. The situation became one that meant those protecting the men doing their work, also had to be protected. Combat engineers were sent ahead of us with mine-detectors. They did not have the expected success however for the mines were not detectable with our type of detectors. Before burying them the Russians encased them in wood. It then became clear to us that with tricks like that, we had to outwit the ‘Ivans’ also with tricks, but ones that were far better. Our regular route had been our undoing and so we had to use another. Or else we let our enemy think that we were using another, and that could only be achieved by using ski-troops. Our ski-comrades helped us pull the wool over their eyes by forming another route for us, but that was not all. The Russians were quick to follow the new route and our ski-comrades were waiting for them. They had used the new route, and at a spot where they could not be seen, had turned round, and using the tracks that they had made, returned to a spot for an ambush, which turned out to be a deadly trap for our cunning friends.