He wasn’t the only one scared. The fellow beside Hans stared at him from his blackened face and murmured: “If only those bastards would give up!”
Their feelings, of course, were unimportant.
The trench telephone rang and crackled out an order.
“One-third of the men forward. Count off by threes.”
One, two, three… One, two, three… Hans drew a “one.” Which meant he could stay in that splendid cement hole, but he cut off his smile in case the sergeant should notice and send him right onto the field. Inwardly, Hans thanked whatever spirit he could think of.
The fellow beside Hans had number three, and was looking at Hans with a long, desperate face. Hans kept his eyes turned front, so the fellow wouldn’t notice Hans’ own joy and relief. Then the sergeant made his fatal gesture, and the brave German soldier beside Hans sprang from his shelter with a hundred others.
Immediately, Russian automatic weapons rang out. Before vanishing to the bottom of his hole, Hans saw the impact of the bullets raising little fountains of dust all along the route of his recent companion. The fellow would never again contemplate the implications of number three. The noise of guns and grenades was deafening, and almost drowned out the cries of those who’d been hit.
“Achtung! Nummer zwei, voraus!”
Next, it was going to be Hans. Along with everybody else who’d drawn “one.” Everything outside was flashing and exploding. Usually, people begin counting with “one.” So why had they started with “three” this time?
“Nummer eins, nachgehen, los!”
Hans’ turn had come. After a moment of hesitation, Hans sprang from his shelter and into the madness. Everything looked gray through the thick fog of choking, whirling dust. Except for the glimmering flashes of light. In a few jumps Hans reached the foundation of a shattered hut. Inside, a German soldier was dead and staring at the open breech of his machine gun.
With watering eyes, Hans stared through the smoke, trying to see the enemy. And do his duty. About twenty-five yards ahead some trucks exploded into little fragments, one after the other. Hans couldn’t tell if the four or five running soldiers were German or Russian. Hans was with two companions in an open shelter made of logs packed with dirt; a shelter which the Russians had built to take machine gun fire. The three of them were sitting on the mangled bodies of the four Popovs who’d been killed by grenades.
“I did that bunch in, with one shot,” shouted a strong young soldier from the Grossdeutschland. But a burst of mortar fire forced them all down into the heap of enemy corpses. A shell hit the edge of the bunker, and earth and logs blew apart, falling back onto their heads. The fellow huddled between Hans and a dead Russian was hit. As his body jerked up and down from the impact, Hans tensed himself to run. Then another shell struck the shelter, disintegrating it. Debris poured down onto Hans’ legs and sent him reeling back. He howled for help, sure that his legs were broken. His trousers were ripped down the leg, but the bruised skin underneath was untouched.
Hans plunged back into the heap of Russian corpses and fell onto the fellow who had been hit. He let out a howl as an avalanche of rubble poured down around them.
“I’m wounded,” the fellow next to Hans groaned, “something is burning in my back. Call for a stretcher.”
Hans looked at him in a daze, then shouted, “Saenftentraeger!”
But his ludicrous cries were lost in the whine of yet another shell whistling down onto the now fully-exposed shelter. Instantly Hans buried himself back into the corpses, and then saw nothing but a white light. Then everything went silent.
Cough Cough
……… Screech!
The stillness was broken by the shriek of some bird of prey flying as low as an Ilyushin. He covered his helmet with both hands, forcing himself into the ground, expecting that shell to explode and rip into his spine at any second, but the only thing that hit his back were the rays of a suddenly intense sun. Was he dead? Once the feeling returned, he felt the grit of orange sand against his eyelids and in his mouth.
Hands trembling, he allowed himself to pick his head up a few inches, gradually open his eyes, and lift his head onto the horizon. What his eyes fed back his brain was hardly able to compute; a blue, cloudless vantage with a sea of sand all around him.
His mind must be playing a trick on him. It must have been unable to cope with the overload of trauma, and split off a second personality in response. Any minute now a soldier of the Grossdeutschland, maybe even that damned Prussian whom Hans called his best friend, would pull him out of this dream he was having, and he would be right back outside of the Tractor Works. Maybe the battle would be over, too. The idea of ‘sleeping’ through all of it was not an unattractive one.
The circling bird of prey reminded him of two German sergeants who once examined Hans’ glass-torn body after he flew through the windshield during a truck accident some months ago. Just as the bird was doing now, one officer quipped that Hans must have been dying, and in response Hans violently awoke and shouted, “I’m not!”
Jolting up onto his backside, Hans shouted at that bird that was mocking him.
“I’m not dead!”
For another moment he looked around. The distant smell of water and mud greeted his nostrils and returned his attention to his own choking thirst. Getting back onto his feet, Hans picked up his fallen Mauser, strapped it to his back and followed his nose, the sound of the battle-luggage strapped to his uniform making a strange clanging sound in the desert. It was a sound he’d noticed for the first time.
The desert waterhole was very close; only some three quarters of an hour by foot. Not too far for a specialized infantryman. When he got to the oasis, which looked more like a big water hole, Hans didn’t know whether to be relieved to finally get all the water he needed for once, or to be alarmed that his kamerads had not yet pulled him back into reality. His eyes took in that pool of dark water, lined with date trees, and a single, stone-lain road which looked as if the Romans had laid it themselves. Was he no longer on the steppes of Russia?
Seeing nobody else around, Hans began stripping naked, and as soon as he was done, ran right into the water. It felt like a warm bath. The water soothed his wounds: Deep frostbite from last winter, and especially the dislocated shoulder he suffered from that auto accident. He greedily gulped down the fresh water and rinsed off his filthy, blonde hair. Any minute now he’d be pulled back to Belgorod.
Hans sat in the waterhole for at least half an hour before his temples started to throb. A sharp pain returned to his shoulder from where it was once dislocated, and he felt a bout of nausea coming on. All his illness and injury was coming back to plague him now that his body sensed a shred of normalcy.
Staggering back to the shore, Hans wiped himself dry with his torn trousers and put them back on as quickly as he could before vomiting into the sand. His head was swimming. Deliriously, he picked up his tunic and buttoned it back on, lifted up his Mauser and prepared to keep walking until… Something.
Part of joining the Grosssdeutschland meant going through an unforgiving regimen of endurance training, so Hans was sure that he could walk to some settlement, no matter what his condition. But before he could take another step, Hans’ body rebelled once again and he collapsed back into the silty sand.
“Help.”
Adventurers
Kairah gave a long, dramatic sigh — probably because the lioness knew it would bug her friend, the deercat, who gripped tighter onto the reigns in reaction. The two women had been traveling southward, through the Sea of Sand, for a couple days now. This time they had a horse to save them from an endless walk, like last time they went on an adventure. Kairah was mounted upon the horse as her friend, and servant, Amalija, walked alongside the tall beast.