[烛光生存狂]-被遗忘的士兵

Early December 1943. The following from a soldier in the Gross Deutschland Division describing a few days in life at the front battling the elements.

The Wehrmacht bent before the power of an incomparably greater enemy. The unbearable harassment by partisans was added to the overwhelming and heroic rigors of the front, while our territories in the rear no longer guaranteed any repose to our exhausted troops. The Ukraine, which had shown some sympathy for us, was itself pillaged by partisan bands - on orders from Moscow. The Ukrainian population had to choose, and be actively for one side or another. The partisans either killed or enlisted the young Ukrainians who had until then been so respectful to us. The invisible war triumphed: war which no longer offered any retreat, or calm, or pity. Wars of subversion have no face, and unlike revolutions create their own martyrs, innocent victims, and hostages, and provoke confused judgments of ill-considered actions. Men kill for revenge, in reprisal for what has happened or might happen. The partisan was pouring oil into a huge conflagration.

In the name of Marxist liberty, the Ukraine was forced to alter their attitude. German and Ukrainian alike grew bitter and full of hate. The war became a total war, a war of scorched earth, offering the towns and villages in its path no more relief than we would eventually receive when we became the vanquished. In this period, as the war attained the most violent paroxysms of an already unbearable conflict, our unit set out it’s sentence of round-the-clock guard duty in the murderous cold.

Over the snow covered ground silence hung, unbroken except for the occasional howl of a gray tiaga wolf deep in the forest, which were still largely unexplored. A quarter of our men were always on guard, watching from the shelter of ludicrously inadequate fortifications, or frost covered tank turrets, or mounting hurried patrols at the edge of the forest. The rest waited in abandoned isbas.

The stoves in these huts had been systematically destroyed before we arrived - no doubt by partisans, who hoped that without shelter we would die of cold. Some of the isbas were open to the sky, with their roofs burned or pulled off. Probably the partisans had not had time to destroy the village completely before we arrived. Their were for too many of us for the number of buildings still standing, and hundreds of men were reduced to finding what shelter they could, huddled behind gutted walls whose only roof was the heavy, opaque, fog. Inside these walls these men burned everything they could find. In the better isbas the intense flames threatened to set fire at any moment to the structures themselves. Our exhausted troops no longer bothered to collect deadwood from the forest, and burned every combustible fitting left in the huts. Cursing at the smoke which blinded them, and which in the roofed isbas escaped only through the open doors, our soldiers packed closely together for warmth, tried to sleep on their feet, despite the coughs that shook their bodies. In the isbas without roofs smoke was never a difficulty, but the men were never warm. Those closest to the fires rapidly grew so hot they had to move, while others, only four or five yards away, felt only the faintest warming of the air, whose temperature rose to 15 to 16 degrees above zero(all temperatures in Fahrenheit).

Every two hours another quarter of the men went back to the dugouts to make room in our precarious sleeping quarters for those who would return white with cold. The winter was now serious: 15 degrees below zero, according to the thermometer of our radio group. As before, our general state of filth aggravated the situation. Any desire to piss was announce to all present, so that hands swollen by chilblains could be held out under the warm urine, which often infected our cracked fingers.

I was taking my first tour of the early-mourning hours of polar darkness, and my second began at one o’clock, in the diffused light of midday, which was veiled by the sky as dark as the sky over Tempelhof the day it was destroyed. Toward the end of my patrol, the day would turn an unusual pink. By three o’clock, when I returned to the smokehouse, there was nothing further to report.

My eyes hurt me, and my nose was inflamed by frostbite. I could no longer bear to leave it uncovered. We hid our faces like Chicago gangsters, with our collars raised and tied around our faces with scarves and strings. An hour later the pink light turned violet, and then fray. The snow turned gray too, and then it was dark, from mid-afternoon untill 9 the next mourning. With darkness, the temperature always plunged sharply, often to 35 to 40 degrees below Zero. Our material was paralyzed; gasoline froze, and oil became first a paste then a glue, which entirely blocked the mechanisms. The forest rang with strange sounds; the bark of the trees bursting under the pressure of the freezing. Stones cracked only when the temperatures fell to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. For us, the horror we had been dreading for so long had arrived.

Winter at war; a reality we had almost forgotten, fell on us like the die of a gigantic press ready to crush us. Everything combustible was burned. A lieutenant defended two of our sleighs, with a gun, against some forty of our landser, whose breath rattled through their congested lungs. The nose of every face cover developed a block of ice which grew larger as each fresh breath condensed and froze.

“We want the sleighs wood!” the men shouted.

“Get back!” the lieutenant screamed in reply. “The forest is full of wood”

The landser stared at him, wondering what good the sleighs would do to them if they all froze.

A party sent out to fetch wood from the forest ran to the shelter of the trees. Faceless specters returned with bundles which they threw down into the dying fires. The fires had to be kept alive, which made rest impossible. We prayed the that the Russians wouldn’t attack, as all attempts or defense had been abandoned.

Guard duty was the hardest of all. To stand still one seriously risked being frozen alive. At nine o’clock it was my turn again. Fifteen of us were standing watch at the ruins of a building crusted with hard snow which cracked like glass. We got through the first half hour beating each other to keep our blood moving. The second half hour was torture. Two men fainted. We thrust our stiffened hands from our sleeves and clumsily tried to help them. Our gloves, part wool and part leather, were already full of holes and good for nothing. The pain in our hands and feet seemed to travel through our bodies and clutch at our hearts. Four men carried the unconscious soldiers to the fires which gleamed in the darkness. If the Russians had come, they could easily have wiped us out. One man was running around in small circles, crying like a baby. The pain in my feet made me scream aloud. Despite orders, I abandoned by post and ran to the nearest isba. Shoving my way through a compact mass of soldiers, I thrust my boots right into the coals. They immediately began to crackle and hiss, and at the pain of contact between not and cold I burst into loud sobs. I was not the only one to cry, and there were others whose screams and moans were far louder than mine.

The hour of release finally came, and we prepared to leave. The Russians had not swarmed down on us, and the steel of our frozen weapons, which had not been heated by firing, glimmered bluer than ever in the horrible cold, and looked like as brittle as glass. Our men assembled listlessly, torn by the conflict of disloyalties which brought them close to madness. Although no one had covered himself with glory fighting against the Russians, another fight, which was equally formidable, had been fought against the cold, our exhaustion, filth, and

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