Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

But soon the rumblings of war and the throbbing pain jarred Hansmann awake again:

An “Are you hungry” you can’t understand at all. “Hungry?” Oh no, no, pain. The voice turns away, you are lifted up, get tablets and cool water that you eagerly slurp. Wounded new arrivals come and rest in the straw; they lie silent, as if fallen under a nightmare. Only here and there muffled voices and rustling about…. Unrest all through the night hours, then it is morning. Through the buzzing rumors of many men rings clear: “Comrades! The ambulance column can’t make it through, we have information that they are waiting for us twenty-five kilometers from here. The time is short, we must withdraw….”

Your thoughts become more agitated, red flaming shapes under your eyelids. The cool raindrops appear to turn to steam on your skin, though slowly you become cooler. The wetness and cold on your body drive the fever from your head…. Next to you at the same level you see unkempt faces, filthy bandages, excited unrest. Are the Russians already behind us?… Now comes the moment where old, sometimes derided prayers push in. 70

Amid much suffering and groaning the stretcher-bearers, most of them Russian auxiliaries, took up their loads like beasts of burden and set off into the unknown, threatened by enemy forces, with safety almost an impossibly long distance away for wounded men being carried across swampy terrain. Exhaustion mixed with fear and pain characterized the lonely column. “Night at last,” Hansmann recorded:

The same impressions of the smell of straw and damp, sticky uniforms. Again the doctor, also unkempt, becomes steadily more uneasy. Again questions, tablets, something to eat; then sleep, from time to time awakened by groans, screams…. The medics can’t do any more. One sleeps sitting up. He is called, hears nothing, finally someone crawls behind him, then he starts awake with wild eyes and inarticulate cries, and then laughs wearily, hopelessly…. Then quite a few shots reverberate! Is that Ivan already? Anxiety, panic bursts into the open. Everyone’s petrified…. Many look for a knife, a stick; others quickly crawl with tightly clenched teeth into a corner.

But all the excitement proved to be a false alarm, this time. Everyone looked around embarrassed, each ashamed of his weakness and guilty at his open expression of fear. At first light, still no vehicles had appeared, so

tired, worn out, already strung out at the start, the column presses on like a sluggish caterpillar through rain and woods. Even without having to open your eyes you see what they’re suffering. These contorted, pale, blanched faces, these eyes that cling exhausted to the glutinous muddy trail. The complete filth and the old blood encrusted on their uniforms and bandages. Everyone clings to life…. All along the valleys roll threatening reverberations. Our haste grows, overwhelms all our exhaustion. Only the bearers are steady, indifferent…. Where is there a resting place in this world? The unlucky remain behind…. Gone, can’t bear to look. 71

Doggedly the column lurched on in a desperate quest for safety, the journey itself proved almost overwhelmingly agonizing. “How long has this odyssey lasted already?” Hansmann speculated at one point. “Is it days, weeks in the monotony of the pain that mistreats your body?… Days in icy, clinging dampness, in the shower of fall storms…. Are you lost in this devil’s forest, are your exertions, this arduous torment, for nothing?” At the moment of ultimate despair, however, salvation appeared like a bolt from the blue: “Something shoots like an electric current through the group! Ahead under a tree a waving form. At closer glance it is a soldier. Already from a distance he shouts: ‘Just five kilometers, Comrades!’ Five kilometers, five thousand meters it sings in us, then ambulances, warmth, care, everything! The steps become more assured, the strange silence lifts, already confident conversations, conjectures flicker.” Almost before they knew it, the five kilometers and the sufferings of the last few days were past and, most improbably, comfort and safety had been reached. “Ambulances under trees, medics, all so fresh and energetic,” Hansmann rejoiced. “Slowly the suffering column leaves the darkness of the forest. All come with the same look of hope, like pilgrims who have seen a Mecca…. Finally after the long march through the night the muffled echo of an entrance door…. Now it’s your turn, again you’re carried, along quiet, long corridors full of hospital air. Through a door a bright room, a voice: it is a woman! Everything is all right.” 72Hansmann’s tale emphasized something every Landser eventually came to understand, that survival on the battlefield often came to depend on the mysteries of chance; all one’s personal precautions, superstitions, and cynicism availed little in the face of “Fate.”

For some Landsers , then, combat ultimately produced tragic human moments of frightening clarity when the fog of battle cleared and they became horribly aware of what was happening around them, not merely of the death and destruction but of the deeply personal essence of war. “Daily I engage in hour-long discussions with my comrades and preach humility,” warned Siegbert Stehmann in the heady days of victory in June 1940, then added insightfully: “There are people who are inwardly destroyed by victory!” This was a revelation to which Guy Sajer added, in blunter terms, “Even a victorious army suffers dead and wounded.” Indeed, Sajer insisted,

the front line troops… had already made up their minds about the future…. Much of the time we felt desperate. Can anyone blame us? We knew that we would almost certainly be killed…. If our courage incited us to hours of resignation, the hours and days which followed would find us… filled with an immense sadness. Then we would fire in a lunatic frenzy, without mercy. We didn’t wish to die, and would kill and massacre as if to avenge ourselves in advance…. When we died, it was with fury, because we hadn’t been able to exact enough retribution. And, if we survived, it was as madmen, never able to readapt to the peacetime world. Sometimes we tried to run away; but orders, adroitly worded and spaced, soothed us like shots of morphine. 73

Still, as Sajer knew, this calm soon wore off, to be replaced by “the fear of ultimate success as a dead hero,” a death that offered slim solace to those so honored. “It is small comfort to have shared your own destruction with others,” lamented an anonymous soldier at Stalingrad, to which another added, “Now it’s either die like a dog or off to Siberia.” From Stalingrad, indeed, most would have agreed that “there are only two ways left: to heaven or to Siberia.” But this forlorn choice revealed the ultimate impotence of men confronting the war machine. “At home… in many newspapers you will find beautiful, high-sounding words in big black borders,” concluded the same Landser , writing from Stalingrad. “They will always pay us due honor. Don’t be taken in by this idiotic to-do. I am so furious that I could smash everything in sight, but never in my life have I felt so helpless.” 74Combat, as most discovered, was not a romantic adventure but a continual series of shattering incidents, until many Landsers decided that only an ambulance or a grave-digger offered a way out.

Amid the savage fighting and appalling misery of the German retreat from Russia in the autumn of 1943, Harry Mielert was struck by the personal anger he felt, a rage based on fear, the pervasive death and destruction, and a sense of anomie. “All connections are broken,” he despaired. “Where is man? Anger roars through all the cracks in the world.” Mielert’s fury expressed well the complex emotions produced by combat and life at the front. An army’s first and most important function is, of course, to fight; but it is individual human beings, not some impersonal machine, who do the actual fighting, suffering, and dying. Every Landser thus lived with the likelihood that he would be killed or wounded, and the longer he was at the front, the greater the possibility. Combat therefore produced a study in extremes of behavior with enormous mood shifts: one was alternately frightened or resigned, laughing or crying, screaming or cheering. After a battle a Landser ’s nerves would take over, but although his knees might shake and his hands tremble, he was happy to be alive. At the moment of killing or being killed, each man discovered a powerful consciousness of self and realized acutely the menace all around him. Each one came to know only too well the thin line between life and death. “I had learned,” noted Guy Sajer, “that life and death can be so close that one can pass from one to the other without attracting any attention.” “The bullet that you hear,” observed Helmut Pabst drily, “is already past.” 1He left unspoken the tormenting knowledge that the bullet that struck home remained unheard.