Len Gilbert
THE FURRED REICH
Belgorod, 1943
Hans coughed out loud. Dust penetrated everything, especially his parched throat. He was exhausted, but as usual, his feelings were irrelevant in the vast emptiness and heavy gray horizon of the Russian steppes. The mass of vehicles ahead of him churned up clouds of soil that covered both man and machine in gray dust. Even still, the growl of Panzers ahead reassured him.
The first light of dawn fell over them, and through a veil of fog Hans saw a town whose name he did not notice. Numerous vehicles moved slowly forward, with motorized troops of the Division Grossdeutschland walking on either side, ready for anything.
They reached the edge of town. Hovels on fire illuminated their exhausted faces. Like innumerable Russian towns, this one looked like an over-sized barnyard, with no sidewalk and no alignment of buildings. Some of the men ran up to a rusted trough filled with water and drenched themselves despite the cool autumn weather, beating their clothes against trees or the sides of buildings.
Guns blasted off somewhere northwest. It was time to go again. Hans’ company loaded themselves back into the truck as it sped toward the sound of the guns. They climbed off the truck when the officer’s whistle blew. Ahead was a village built around a tall, steely factory looming in the distance.
Guns slung, the company made its way toward the village, and immediately the Russian trenches showered them with a rain of shells. The two companies broke for cover in an orderly outburst. Without a word they spread out and surrounded the point.
“Reach those points ahead!” Lieutenant Lensen shouted as he came running back. “Surround the brickworks!”
Hans and company scanned for every nook and cranny which might offer some shelter. Bent double, they proceeded toward the village. Occasionally he heard someone laughing, and he wondered if it was innocence or bravado.
Still the Russians were invisible. Hans watched as some thirty of the men leaped silently through the ruins. Five or six Panzer grenadiers ran along beside a building. One threw a grenade through a busted window, and the air shook from the explosion. A blood curdling scream followed in its wake, but it was unlike what they had often heard before. A human figure dressed in white fell from the window and rolled down to the feet of one of the men. It was a Russian civilian. She ran towards the soldiers, screaming. The men stood silent, aghast, as she ran through the ranks of petrified German soldiers. Three others came out: Two men and a child. Lensen, who just realized that the civilians hadn’t been evacuated, stuck a loud speaker to a half track and fastened the speaker a on a pole with a white rag.
The loudspeaker crackled out some nasally Russian words and the four men on the half track looked desperately at their comrades still in the shelter. The half-track had gone less than a hundred yards when the irreparable occurred. The whole vehicle seemed to fly upward as a series of deafening explosions rang out. Five or six huts disintegrated on the spot. The truck had driven over a land mine.
Hans saw two black silhouettes gesticulating in the flaming half-track. He heard them screaming, too.
“Look out for mines!” someone shouted.
But his voice was drowned out by the German response of mortars and anti-tank shells. The ground in front of Hans burst into geysers of flame and earth. More thatched roofs flew off now-exposed houses, like bald men who’d lost their wigs.
The Russians replied with much heavier howitzer guns. And every shell landing within sight of Hans and his comrades made the ground shake under their feet and sucked the air from their lungs. Still the assault whistles blew. Everyone left the shelter and ran for the nearest embankment. German mortars pounded the ground some thirty yards ahead to disrupt the arrangement of mines. The Russians, with multi-barreled machine guns mounted upon trucks, poured a devastating fire onto everything they could see.
Suddenly, no one felt confident. Hiding in the brickworks building, Hans and four others pressed their faces into the ground. His face knocked against the dirt with every explosion. Behind another heap of shattered bricks, a noncom was shouting at the top of his lungs to fire at will. One at a time, the five of them risked looking out from behind the pile. But the whine of shells made even the boldest duck right back down.
German mortars and rocket launchers kept on firing at an enemy who seemed to have the upper hand. The metallic factory tower of the tractor works just bounced off all those shells. They had to get closer.
Hans heard some men shouting to give themselves courage. As for himself, he grit his teeth and clenched his sweaty hands onto his Mauser, not from emotion but rather from a reflex akin to a drowning man hanging onto a rope.
Earth flew up all around them, sometimes coming down on human figures dressed as soldiers. Shrill and deep sounds were everywhere, as was brilliant and fading light. Suddenly, to Hans’ left, a raging fire broke out in a cluster of sheds. Smoke and heat climbed into the sky and a huge sheet of flames quivered and roared to life. Even where he was the intense heat invaded the air.
Their men surged back rapidly, as if the whole thing were some kind of ballet. The metal roofs buckled in the heat. A horde of Russians, some with uniforms and some without, came running from the burning buildings. The Germans shot them all down like rabbits.
An explosive blast erupted in the air. One of the shells must have hit a gasoline dump. In confusion the Russians scrambled around with their hands in the air, occasionally remembering the way to other Russian entrenchments.
The artillerymen now concentrated anti-tank fire on the area just around the factory. The job of ‘cleaning up’ the Russians, who were scurrying around desperately, was left to Hans and the infantry. A light pressure on the trigger, a puff of smoke, and Hans’ Mauser went looking for another victim. Was this a crime? A young, bewildered Popov, already wounded several times, stayed in Hans’ sights a moment too long. And then turned ashen and clutched his breast with both hands. He did a little half turn and fell face-first into the ground. Would Hans ever deserve a pardon for that?
For Hans and company, as it had been for Ivan just a moment before, everything that moved through the smoke became hateful. Nothing could stop their desire for destruction, not even the rending cries of Obergefreiter Woortenbeck, who clenched his trembling hands on an iron grille and stiffened up for death. Death that flooded from the bloody pulp which once held his entrails.
Hans’ group joined the rest of the men, who were snatching a few moments of rest in a cement settling tank. Everyone was gray with dust. A telephone operator settled down beside them and spoke with Captain Wollers. The fighting had died down some, and the Germans were regrouping for the final assault. One section had a mortar and two anti-tank guns. Hans’ section had grenadiers with machine guns and rifles.
The sergeant specified the points Hans’ company must reach. And the men agreed to do so before the uncontrollable terror set in. A group of Russians suddenly appeared through some dismantled scaffolding, waving a white cloth. There were well over fifty of them and none of them had uniforms or even weapons.
One of the Landsers, who was fluent in Russian, talked to them. Protected by the white cloth, four of the men took the prisoners to the rear. A few friendly words between the adversaries would probably produce a settlement which would have allowed all of them to just sit down and have a drink. An exception to all the insensibility.
But it wasn’t enough to peel the young men’s eyes away from the metallic wreckage of the factory, which Hans and his Kamerads would soon be obliged to attack and enter. Fear knotted his throat, and he once again felt like a sheep moving to the slaughter.