Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

At that moment, I suddenly understood the meaning of all the cries and shrieks I had heard on every battlefield. And I also understood the marching songs, which so often begin with a ringing description of a soldier dying in glory and then suddenly turn somber:

Once again I learned how hard it is to watch a comrade die: almost as hard as dying oneself. 40

Learning that lesson could involve more than a moment of agony especially when death did not come quickly. In an intense and emotional passage in The Forgotten Soldier , Sajer allows a glimpse of the almost frightening power of comradeship:

“Anybody hit?” one of the noncoms called out. “Let’s get going then….” Nervously, I pulled open the door [of the truck]. Inside, I saw a man I shall never forget, a man sitting normally on the seat, whose lower face had been reduced to a bloody pulp.

“Ernst?” I asked in a choking voice. “Ernst!” I threw myself at him…. I looked frantically for some features on that horrible face….

His coat was covered with blood…. His teeth were mixed with fragments of bone, and through the gore I could see the muscles of his face contracting….

In a state of near shock, I tried to put the dressing somewhere on that cavernous wound…. Crying like a small boy, I pushed my friend to the other end of the seat, holding him in my arms…. Two eyes opened, brilliant with anguish, and looked at me from his ruined face….

In the cab of a gray Russian truck, somewhere in the vastness of the Russian hinterland, a man and an adolescent were caught in a desperate struggle. The man struggled with death, and the adolescent struggled with despair…. I felt that something had hardened in my spirit forever. 41

The death of one’s comrades could sometimes seem too hard to bear. “Tonight we again had some heavy losses,” admitted Harry Mielert in October 1943, “among them a really old veteran, a sergeant who was the pillar of his men. He died before our eyes. Our staff doctor, who… is usually without exception drunk, was sober on this night, and he revealed himself as a man… lacking the strength to hold on in this war. He cannot bear the strife and deadens himself with nicotine and alcohol…. He longs for reality and yet must always shut his eyes when it becomes very real, as this evening with the poor comrades.” Returning from an action against Russian partisans, Sajer witnessed the lead car in their column go up in flames. Among the victims was their beloved Captain Wesreidau, who “was covered with wounds, and his body seemed broken…. We did everything we could for him. The whole company thought of him as a friend…. In a very weak voice he spoke to us of our collective adventure, stressing our unity, which must hold in the face of everything to come…. The silence was terrible…. We felt that we had just lost the man on whom the well-being of the whole company depended. We felt abandoned.” 42

Yet to a comrade the dead never left the battlefield; their spirit always remained. Given the bonds of comradeship, it is hardly surprising that Hans Martin Stählin, reflecting on the nature of death, noted, “In death the realms of God and man border one another and the issue of death is a questioning after God, just as one would inquire at a door if one wanted to know something of the expanse behind it. Soldiers know that. Can you understand it if I say that it is not immaterial how we think on our dead…. It is not empty talk when one says, the dead are always with us.” The air might well be heavy with death, with the impermanence of life, but Mielert asserted in July 1943, fallen comrades “live immortally in that spirit which shapes a common spirit of the nation.” 43

The impulse to grieve for the fallen proved so powerful that even in the aftermath of a winter battle, with the ground frozen solid, one’s comrades still saw to a funeral service. “The grave had to be hacked out of the frozen earth like out of rock,” Ernst Friedrich Schauer wrote in February 1942:

It was a brilliant, bright winter day. The birds twittered, as if spring wanted to begin…. The bodies of both fallen [comrades] lay there, rigid and lifeless, wrapped in a brown tent. The bloody emergency bandage still clung above Hans-Jürgen’s right eye. His expression was indifferent…, as if he wanted to say: “What’s going on with me?”

We laid the bodies side by side in the grave. Then I said a few words…. “They cared for us as comrades and brothers and friends in past times. They fought with us, starved and froze with us, shared the concerns and distress of the Landser experience with us…. They marched next to us and now they’ve fallen next to us…. Not only your spirit and your memory lives on, no, you yourself, you live in another, better world….” We took the shovel and threw dirt over the bodies, I first, then Ewalt, then Kurt Link, then the others. Then we went back to the front. 44

“All over the burning steppe, in the blank, unending expanse of Russia they lie,” an anonymous soldier reflected in June 1943, “our comrades, who caroused with us, sang, marched and fought, starved and fled with us. In the woods, in villages, on the roads, their graves are everywhere, a mound, a white birch cross, the steel helmet on top, silent reminders for us who still remain to fight on further for those who have fallen.” 45In burial ceremonies such as these, repeated a thousandfold throughout Russia and elsewhere, the Landsers not only honored and thereby reaffirmed the fragile ties of comradeship, which could be exploded with the next shell, but also exorcised their own collective grief, fear, and vulnerability, if only for a brief instant.

This almost mystical, spiritual closeness, so like love, perhaps also explained why so many Landsers , when away from the line, felt an irresistible tug from their buddies at the front. “I [voluntarily] reported to the front,” wrote Private K.B., “because it is better for me. It is a funny feeling to sit around in the rear while others must lie out there in that crap.” An odd feeling indeed, mingling guilt at living in relative comfort and safety with the acute sense that a vital spirit, one that you loved and in which you wanted to immerse yourself, was missing. The bonds of comradeship defined the Landser ’s world. Within this circle, he knew intense loyalty and emotion; outside the union, he felt isolated and rejected. While recovering from his second wound, Helmut von Harnack speculated about this mysterious attraction: “Why do I feel so pressed to go back there so soon, back to the troops at the front? For a long time it’s had nothing to do with ambition and personal impatience; it’s a feeling of duty, that you cannot leave your comrades stuck in that crap but must help, that you simply belong up there, that you cannot get over it because you almost feel at home there.” After being rotated away from the front, Bernhard Buhl complained that in the rear areas all sense of comradeship disappeared, that there the war seemed only “a battle against dirt, vermin and illness, chaos…. I want out of here… to go forward, back to the front.” 46

Harry Mielert vented similar frustrations with the revolting nature of life in the rear, writing of a period of training behind the front, “Tomorrow is the last day of this repugnant instruction. I am already downright glad to be going back to the front…. At the front, where I do really necessary work, I feel myself in the right place.” “Don’t worry about me,” one eighteen-year-old soldier reassured his parents, “I’ve never been so carefree in my life,” because, he explained, with one’s comrades at the front one is “really free.” 47As Buhl, Mielert, and many other Landsers discovered, without the rewards of camaraderie the war appeared merely a sordid and meaningless affair.