Europe Central (90 page)

Our planes kept rising overhead, screaming and screaming, but there were more Russian planes than I had ever seen, sometimes ramming ours in mid-air. Sergeant Gunther ordered me to contact Europe Central at once.

I unrolled my telephone cable and listened to the skeleton-clicks, but all I could learn was that our FREYA network had gone deaf. No instructions! Then the signal hushed: I received an implication of T-34s ready to burst out of nowhere in vast secret concentrations.

Here came another flock of Shturmoviks!—Take cover! shouted Sergeant Gunther.—I prayed that they weren’t piloted by the “night witches”; those were the most terrifying women on earth! Back in ’41, when Operation Barbarossa began, we could have shot them all down with our magic eighty-eights. The eighty-eight is an antiaircraft gun; it’s a perfect gun, really, but now we needed the eighty-eights to save ourselves from those T-34 tanks! If anyone ever tells you that a seventy-five will do the job, don’t believe him. I’ve seen too many of our Panzer-IVs score direct hits and still lose out. You can shoot a vampire with a machine-gun, but if none of your bullets are silver you might as well use them on yourself.—Remember, Sergeant Gunther used to say, aim for the rear on those T-34s. Send ’em to Commissar Heaven on a pillar of flame!—But I never succeeded in killing one, since I was only a telephonist. It’s a wonder that they didn’t kill
me
a thousand times over.

Dying, we penetrated a few centimeters deeper into their defenses, refusing to acknowledge the stepped silhouettes of more tanks on the horizon. Beware of being too wise, it’s said. I was glad to lose sight of them in the brownish-black smoke which rose diagonally from the engines of our murdered Panzer-IVs.

In Berlin our sleepwalker was surely opening a new case folder, a green one or a grey one, whose operational rescue plans interlaced in pincers as effective as Wagner’s dovetailing leitmotivs: Citadel would achieve the objective! But what if he were actually at lunch? We ducked down; smoke arose from the village across the wheat field. Penetrations made, waves of Russian planes, so sped our lives. Fifteenth Rifles had already been forced back to the western ridgeline; the Reds were shooting at us with their fourteen-point-five-millimeter antitank guns; then our eighty-eights went off and killed them; thank God for eighty-eights!

By 9.7.43 we couldn’t progress any further. We were almost across what was surely the final sunflower field when we encountered a line of Red Army riflemen all firing at us from their trench. Then a Slav ran forward, pulling the pin on a grenade.—In that case, laughed Rüdiger, I wish I’d never tried to reason with you.—His bullet struck home before mine did. But here came twenty more Slavs!

Have you ever through ignorance or stubborn carelessness worn down a drill bit? Perhaps it was meant for wood, and you need to bore a hole through a steel plate. The metal’s not awfully thick; why shouldn’t the drill bit last? But it gets hot, and you lean on your drill, until the bit is ruined and you haven’t punched through. That was why Rüdiger had learned to express a certain knowingness without even moving his eyes. Not only had the friction of enemy counterattacks blunted us, but from the heights ahead, deep within the salient and out of our range, Russian batteries blasted us. Why couldn’t the Luftwaffe take them out? Nor did we have enough flamethrower teams; we’d even run out of jellied petrol. Still we struggled to fulfill this new fairytale held together with anti-magnetic paste and adorned by the red-enameled tin stars which we’d stolen from Soviet graves; it was a fine fairytale about green-and-yellow-camouflaged German tanks; but on 11.7.43, enemy spearheads broke through our Orel salient, and Colonel-General Model, who wasn’t yet Field-Marshal, had to call some of us off the assault to meet that threat. To get right down to it, we were getting smaller while infinity was getting bigger.

4

In the old legend, when Kriemhild sets the palace on fire, Hagen advises his companions to cool themselves by drinking the blood of the slain. But when their artillery opened up at our marsh-trapped and mine-maimed tanks, how were we supposed to cool ourselves then? I remember that four-day battle along the ridgetops, when Russians kept popping out of the straw-packed earth like cardboard cutouts, all of them wearing berets and aiming long or short guns at us, while FREYA never answered me. As soon as we called our tanks back to help us, the Reds hid again. Oh, we were fine fellows. Send us Teutonic Knights off to storm another castle! Our
Nebelwerfers
against their Katyushas, what an unresolved problem! I wore a white bandage around my forehead by then; a mortar shell had exploded in the sunflowers to my left. Sergeant Gunther was already dead. Within five minutes his corpse had turned as yellow as Ribbentrop’s fancy office on the Wilhelmstrasse. Now the old cripple could draw
his
rations, too.

That was when a T-34 reared upward at me at full speed, its proboscis stabbing the air; it overhung us for an instant, then tilted horrifyingly down, grinding us under its treads.

I know I must have screamed; I wish I knew why that thing has always terrified me so much; it’s as if its designers knew exactly what I most dreaded and hated; they’d created exactly what I didn’t want them to. (Meanwhile, everything that I
didn’t
fear was embodied in the shape of the Tiger, at which I swear I’d smile even if I knew it were coming to crush me.) This T-34 roared so loudly that I couldn’t hear my comrades’ shrieks. It left crimson ruts in the grass. Then it charged on toward our rear and was soon out of sight; I don’t know how it finally met its end, because just then another Katyusha killed six of us.

That was when we got ordered forward to exploit the capture of Soborovka Village, which also wasn’t in Volker’s guidebook. By your order, sir! Forward it was; we ran ahead as if we hoped to overtake the speeding shells fired by our own eighty-eights. Gernot clapped his hand to his face in screaming desolation when death took him by the testicles. Then he fell. Oh, I forgot; he was already dead. Somewhere a telephone rang.

5

Before the war I suffered from nightmares, so I went to a psychoanalyst who explained to me: Wherever the unconscious gets rejected, it forms battalions to counterattack somewhere else. You can reject
them
as much as you please; if you’re strong enough, you can even wipe them out, but it will be self-defeating. The unconscious will mobilize more battalions. And they’ll attack the conscious until they break through. In my opinion, this is what’s happening to you.

Well, he was correct. The machine-guns had begun picking us off, and if we tried to duck down into any gullies for cover, it was a sure bet that those places had been booby trapped with Russian mines. That was what befell Private Volker. He flew straight to Moscow—in a thousand pieces. Don’t say we don’t get what we wish for. The rest of us advanced toward the final victory, which we might even have achieved with the help of a few more
Nebelwerfer
brigades. If we could only establish a bridgehead; if only we could dig ourselves in within a circle of dug-in Tigers! There unfortunately weren’t enough Tigers to be everywhere; years later I learned that Ninth Army in its entirety had only thirty-one of them; when I’d seen Twenty-first Panzer grinding optimistically off toward their assault front on that first day I certainly didn’t suspect that there went every single Tiger we possesssed on our side of the salient; Army Group South had all the rest! Can you believe it? Their task was to be the point of the wedge, and the wedge was wearing down; the enemy kept shooting at our tanks with their Zis-3s.

How many more thousands did we have to kill? Wheat rose up to the shoulders of our steel horses, then drowned us. Our assault guns were running out of fuel, and I still couldn’t achieve contact with FREYA. So I dialed the emergency frequency, and guess what signal I received? Europe Central commanded that we tighten up our assault front! Maybe they expected me to scratch runes on the back of my hand. Why even expend saliva on a curse?

Rüdiger shook his head once more; in the next instant, all that remained of him was a white face torn open, its red insides already black. He used to share his parcels with me; once he gave Gernot a very pretty dagger that he’d picked up somewhere. Decisive results, why not, so we struggled forward until an enemy tank brigade drove us back; we dug in and waited for our self-propelled guns to clear the way; then by your order we went forward again until we met something almost as terrible as the T-34s: a bank of Katyushas, aimed not at our tanks but straight at
us,
screaming over the earth as they sped from open sights! Even if I’d had a whole
division to protect me, even if the sleepwalker himself had pulled me under his magic blanket, I wouldn’t have survived that, and yet somehow I did continue to exist; I was almost the only one; the other one was that old cripple.

6

The worst thing I have ever seen was not the annihilation of men I lived and fought with; after all, they comprised an insignificant part of Ninth Panzer Division, which was but one of many units of Ninth German Army, which continued to advance upon Olkovatka after Rüdiger and the rest of us disappeared, and, moreover, could in turn have been extinguished, just as Sixth Army had been at Stalingrad, without negating the existence of its Army Group. For that matter, had Army Group Center vanished, the military forces of our Reich would have continued to function to the end! Rüdiger, to be sure; I missed Rüdiger; but precisely because I identified with him so perfectly, his death was no more tragic than mine would have been. What actually crushed me was when a fifty-seven-millimeter Russian gun opened up on one of our Tigers and punched right through it. That time I did hear the crew screaming. And it burned, calmly and spectacularly, from the inside out. Until then I had truly believed that Tigers were safe.

The cripple croaked in my ear: Tungsten-cored ammunition. That’s their secret. Don’t worry. We’ll take vengeance on those Slavs.

Have you ever seen an injured bird at the seashore? Here come crabs from nowhere—they wait under the sand—and ring it round, cautiously at first; before you know it, the first crab has leapt onto the broken wing and pinched off a morsel. The bird struggles, but here come other crabs in a rush. That’s how it is when T-34s surround a Tiger or a Ferdinand, probing with their seventy-sixes until a close-range shot gets through; if that doesn’t work, the Russian infantrymen, who ride on the backs of those tanks like eggs glued down to a mother beetle’s shell, board us and shoot into every ventilation slit, or pour in gasoline and light it—oh, there’s nothing those Slavs won’t do! Then what? From a hole in a Panzer a hand dangles, half connected to a black puzzle of bones.
³⁸

7

My existence had become as heavy as a Stalinets S-60 tractor. What could I do but drag it forward? A line of Russians stretched behind me now; I didn’t dare raise my head to look at them, but they were laughing. Forward toward the final victory; that remained my direction and theirs.

The sun winked at me from the moles on an SU-152’s face. I ducked down, crawled through the sunflower stems beneath the great proboscis, avoided the blind square face of that evil thing which killed our Tigers. It didn’t see me.

The old man was right behind, dragging his crutch. Then he was beside me. Then he was ahead of me. We crawled and crawled. He never got tired.

At 2200 hours, with the night sky spider-legged by artillery fire, we stopped. Where we were remains disputable—between the second and third of the enemy’s defensive lines would be my guess. I longed to telephone Headquarters and give them our position report; they might even have had some use for that information. Whenever I got isolated on the Ostfront, which happened more often than you might imagine, I used to calm myself by visualizing myself amidst the switchboard operators all in a row; they sat facing the wall so that all any third party could have seen of them was their uniformed backs and cropped heads, a black phone dug in against each left ear, a bank of narrow metal shelves sprouting cables and wires like ivy; to me they represented consciousness itself; each one of them was a thought wired into other thoughts; together they comprised a brain, safely hidden under the earth, blind to the enemy outside: nothing could frighten them. Like any child, I used to will away monsters under the bed by shutting my eyes. This might not have been rational, but it was better than smoking cigarettes with Rüdiger, sitting in the dirt.

The old man said in my ear: Do you want me to show you how you can live?

I didn’t like him anymore. I would have preferred Volker, who was always loyal and volunteered for the night watch. He’d passed his life sitting on the grassy lip of a trench-womb, writing letters home which would never get there. That species of futility I respected.

Disdaining to answer, I started to crawl again, gripping my helmet-strap in my teeth, and I kept on until I found shelter behind the hulk of a burned Tiger tank, whose gun-turret went twice as high as I could stand. Now they were shooting at us with their antitank rifles, but blindly. If Dancwart were here, he would have opened up with his eighty-eight! The old man stayed right behind me. We hid there together, observing the hopeless seeking of our long white rays of antiaircraft light in the enemy darkness. When they stopped shooting, we kept hiding, because as Sergeant Gunther used to brilliantly remark, you never know.