In Körlin, battle was raging. Crouching by the edge of the wood, we watched the Russian tanks scattered along a slightly raised road relentlessly shelling the German positions. Infantrymen were running around the tanks, lying in trenches. There were lots of dead bodies, brown spots dotting the snow or the blackish ground. We cautiously retreated into the forest. A little farther back we had spotted a little stone bridge over the Persante, intact; we returned to it and crossed it, then, hiding in a beech grove, we slipped toward the main road to Plathe. In these woods too there were bodies everywhere, Russians and Germans both, they must have fought furiously; most of the German soldiers were wearing the French badge; now, though, everything was quiet. Searching through their pockets we found a few useful things, pocketknives, a compass, some dried fish in a Russian’s haversack. On the road, above us, Soviet tanks were headed at top speed toward Körlin. Thomas had decided that we would wait for night, then try to cross to see farther ahead who held the roadway to Kolberg, the Russians or our own men. I sat down behind a bush, with my back to the road, and ate an onion, which I washed down with some brandy, then I pulled L’Éducation sentimentale out of my pocket, its leather binding swollen and deformed, delicately unstuck a few pages, and began to read. The long, steady flow of the prose soon carried me away, I didn’t hear the rattle of treads or the rumble of engines, the absurd shouts in Russian, “Davaï! Davaï!” or the explosions, a little farther away; only the curling, sticking pages got in the way of my reading. The fading light forced me to close the book and put it away. I slept a little. Piontek was sleeping too; Thomas remained seated, watching the woods. When I woke up, I was covered in a thick, powdery snow; it was falling heavily, in big flakes that whirled between the trees before settling. On the road a tank passed by from time to time, its headlights on, the light piercing whirlwinds of snow; everything else was silent. We went close to the road and waited. Over toward Körlin, they were still shooting. Two tanks came along, followed by a truck, a Studebaker painted with the red star: as soon as they had passed, we crossed the road at a run to bolt into a wood on the other side. A few kilometers farther on, we had to repeat the process to cross the little road leading to Gross-Jestin, a neighboring village; there too tanks and vehicles clogged the road. The thick snow hid us as we crossed the fields, there was no wind and the snow fell vertically, muting sounds, explosions, motors, shouts. From time to time, we heard metallic clicking or bursts of Russian voices; we quickly hid, flat on our stomachs in a ditch or behind a bush; once, a patrol passed right by without noticing us. Again the Persante barred our way. The road to Kolberg was on the other side; we followed the bank northward and Thomas finally unearthed a boat hidden in the reeds. There were no oars, so Piontek cut some long branches to maneuver it, and the crossing was easy enough. On the road there was heavy traffic in both directions: Russian tanks and trucks were driving with all lights on, as if on an autobahn. A long column of tanks flowed toward Kolberg, a fairytale spectacle, each vehicle draped with lace, large white lengths attached to the cannons and to the gun turrets and dancing on the sides, and in the whirlwinds of snow illumined by their headlights, these dark and thundering machines took on a light, almost airy quality; they seemed to float over the road, through the snow that blended with their delicate sails. We slowly retreated to hide in the woods. “We’ll cross the Persante again,” Thomas’s tense voice whispered, disembodied in the dark and the snow. “We can forget about Kolberg. We’ll have to go all the way to the Oder, probably.” But the boat had disappeared, and we had to walk for a while before we could find a fordable stretch, indicated by posts and a kind of footbridge stretched beneath the water, to which the corpse of a French Waffen-SS was caught by the foot, floating on its stomach. The cold water rose up to our thighs, I held my book in my hand to spare it another dip; thick snowflakes were falling onto the water and disappeared instantly. We had taken off our boots but our pants stayed wet and cold all night and into the morning, when we fell asleep, all three of us, without posting a guard, in a little forester’s cabin deep in the woods. We had been walking for almost thirty-six hours, we were worn out; now we had to walk some more.
We advanced at night; during the day, we hid in the woods; then I slept or read Flaubert, I didn’t talk much with my companions. An impotent rage was welling up in me, I didn’t understand why I had left the house near Alt Draheim, I was furious at myself for letting myself be led along to wander like a savage in the woods, instead of staying there quietly alone. Beards covered our faces, dried mud stiffened our uniforms, and under the rough cloth, cramps racked our legs. We ate poorly, there was only what we could find in abandoned farms or the debris of refugees’ convoys; I didn’t complain, but I found the raw bacon vile, the fat stayed stuck inside your mouth for a long time, there was no bread to help it down. We were always cold and couldn’t make a fire. Still, I liked this grave, quiet countryside, the serene, airy quiet of the birch woods or pine groves, the gray sky scarcely agitated by wind, the hushed rustle of the last snowfalls of the year. But it was a dead, deserted countryside: empty fields, empty farms. Everywhere the disasters of war had left their traces. Every sizeable hamlet, which we skirted around from afar, at night, was occupied by Russians; from the outskirts, in the dark, we could hear drunken soldiers singing and firing off volleys in the air. There were still some Germans, though, in these villages, we could make out their frightened but patient voices between the Russian exclamations and curses; screams were common too, especially women’s screams. But that was still better than the burned villages to which hunger drove us: dead livestock made the streets stink; the houses gave off a stench of carrion, mixed with the smell of cold ashes, and since we had to go inside to find food, we couldn’t avoid seeing the twisted corpses of women, often stripped naked, even old women or ten-year-old girls, with blood between their legs. But staying in the woods didn’t mean we could escape the dead: at crossroads, immense, ancient oak branches bore clusters of hanged men, usually Volkssturm, dismal bundles, victims of zealous Feldgendarmen; bodies dotted the clearings, like that of a naked young man, lying in the snow with one leg folded, as serene as the hanged man on the Twelfth Tarot Trump, frightening in his strangeness; and further on, in the forests, cadavers polluted the pale ponds we walked alongside, fighting our thirst. In these woods and forests, we also found living people, terrorized civilians, incapable of giving us the slightest bit of information, isolated soldiers or little groups who were trying like us to thread their way through the Russian lines. Waffen-SS or Wehrmacht, they never wanted to stay with us; they must have been afraid, if we were captured, of being found with high-ranking SS officers. That made Thomas think, and he had me destroy my pay book and my papers and tear off my insignia, as he did, in case we fell into Russian hands; but out of fear of the Feldgendarmen, he decided, somewhat irrationally, that we should keep our handsome black uniforms, a little incongruous for this walk in the countryside. All these decisions were made by him; I agreed without thinking and followed, closed to everything except to what fell under my eyes, in the slow unfurling of the march.