Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Believe it or not, he replied, I can stand my ground as well with one leg as you can with two.

  What could I say to that? The T-34s comprised my own worst fear. They came in daylight or darkness, with their headlights continuously on. And how many Tiger tanks do you think we had in Ninth Panzer? Not one. So how could we hope to stop the Slavs? To get right down to it, my hope was for something both more private and more realistic: a moderate wound. I was moderate in everything. A soldier hunching low and weary in a narrow mud trench, that was me. In those days, when a soldier went on leave from the Ostfront he got a special Führer-parcel of sausage, butter and chocolate. That’s all I was wishing for. But Rüdiger sighed that there might not be any leaves from now on, no more ever.

  The cripple said, and I’d forgotten that he was even here: It’s no use denying it. There was an air raid. That was her end.

  Gernot rolled leaves into a cigarette. Gernot didn’t care. Gernot’s wife had already burned.

  The cripple said: The Amis did it, but I don’t mind revenging myself on Russians. Besides, I’m a former athlete. I like exercise. I believe in physical culture.

  Well, I don’t know why I troubled myself, but I led him to Sergeant Gunther, who said: We need every man we can get. He can draw Schnelling’s rations; the dead list hasn’t gone through. If he’s thickskulled enough to volunteer, maybe the Russian shells will bounce off his head . . .

  2

  Operation Citadel commenced at 0430 hours on 5.7.43. It concluded on 19.7.43, after seventy thousand of us were dead. Well, from the very beginning we’d known that it was no use; as I’ve just told you, it was up to us as frontline soldiers simply to obey orders and bear the responsibility. Nobody was singing “Erika, We Love You” anymore. And all that time the air burned with the sound of metal screaming; and after we’d failed on the Ol’khovatka axis, the sky grew light grey, like the service colors of an-general; and after Ninth Army lost two-thirds of its tanks on the Ponyri axis the sky became as brown as the service colors of anconcentration camp guard; and finally, after we’d lost on the Oboian’ and Korcha axes it was as black as an army engineer’s armband. The Prokhorovka axis was where we were truly beaten. Stalingrad had been the end, but Kursk was really the end; two years after Operation Citadel I saw a Russian with his German girl in Berlin; they were playing with his pistol, shooting it at the sun, and he was kissing her and she was kissing him and she wore a blood-red rose in her hair.

  3

  As for us, no Russians had tasted our girls yet; we still bore arms, and on command we disguised the X of our divisional emblem with a V overhung by a horizontal bar. We didn’t want to make it easy for those Slavs to know who we were, see.

  It’s said that Freissner’s Twenty-third Corps struck first, but I’ll never believe that we didn’t earn the prize! At 0500 hours we came forth from the Butovo-Gerzovka Line, with the long guns of our Tiger tanks pointing the way far above our heads; I won’t forget how those great steel nursemaids rolled calmly at our side, comforting us in our triple line of march. So far, our formation was still as perfectly spaced as the eyelashes of Lisca Malbran. I didn’t feel unsteady. You see, I hadn’t spied any T-34s yet. When the Tigers began to pull away (they all belonged to the bastards in Twenty-first Panzer), it was as if someone were holding my head underwater and I had to accept my first breath of fatality; but although I choked, it didn’t kill me; death was in my lungs now and soon would be in my blood, but I just went on choking; thus my German fortitude. Once upon a time, a woman loved me and I loved her and everything was perfect; then she stopped wanting to sleep with me quite so much and I panicked, which drove her farther away; eventually I learned to hide my anguish from her, to delay the final disengagement; in short, I believed in magic; if I only concealed my need for the Tigers to stay, they’d keep me company for a half hour longer! But there they went now; the shadows of their eighty-eight guns passed over me and cooled me; a grenadier, standing in his open hatch, waved at me, and his tank groaned and clattered onward; then they were all roaring ahead out of sight, and we remained alone.

  Rüdiger shook his head. I liked him because he always expected the worst.

  We had six command tanks, thirty-eight Panzer-IVs, thirty-eight Panzer-IIIs, which at this stage of the war were scarcely better than bicycles, and one repainted Panzer-II, whose crew regarded themselves as already buried. There you have the tale of us in Ninth Panzer. We were skinny soldiers marching out of order, with cigarettes drooping in our mouths as we stared anxiously ahead. Twenty-first held only half as many tanks, so they had the cheek to envy us; we would have been happy to trade them two for one, as long as we got Tigers! That woman I mentioned (Lina was her name), when she wasn’t there I missed her so much I thought I’d die; when I was with her the knowledge that I’d soon lose her poisoned everything; that was how I felt now, seeing the Tiger tanks go away. There went another of our mortar platoons with their eighty-ones; my God, were we really going to be left without help on our assault front? Those seventy-fives that our Panzer-IVs were saddled with, well, I’ll complain about them later. At least Army Groups Center and South were both engaged today, and that was comfort of a sort: strength in numbers, as they say. Unfortunately, the salient was so vast that Army Group South remained an infinite distance away! On the bright side, South faced ten thousand Russian tanks, while we in Center faced only three thousand—excellent news for me. No doubt our dedication would produce decisive results. At least that was what the cripple said, and so did our commander, Lieutenant-General Scheller.

  The enemy had beset our way with many tank traps, especially in the Gerzovka lowlands, but we broke through the outer Russian line. That wasn’t pleasant. We waited a moment, to let them finish shooting their own wounded before we moved in. Nobody can say we’re not humane.

  By 0900 hours we had reached our first objective, Point 237.8, which lay westward of Cherkasskoye. You can take it from me that it wasn’t in Private Volker’s guidebook. And beside me, excellent Rüdiger, still young but powder-burned, his blond hair cropped, watched ahead, his neck pulsing, his right hand ready on the trigger; he searched for death with his bitter, wary eyes. Oh, that was Rüdiger for you! And Rüdiger shook his head. Action! We now faced a heavy aircraft assault, and by 0915 hours our regimental bomb station had received a direct hit. Among those killed were my friend Regimental Adjutant Hauptmann Hildebrand. (He was the one who always used to say: It could have been worse! We could have been at Stalingrad!) His pale head met the dirt; dark blood crept from his mouth. Well, so what? It could have been me. Somebody I didn’t know was already blubbering about the betrayed offensive, and the officers were all shouting, far too late: Set up defensive positions! after which the roaring of our eighty-eights silenced everything human.—At 1000 hours we achieved our second objective, Point 210.7, where First and Second Battalions joined us. Here we were delayed by more tank traps.

  Rüdiger, soulful Rüdiger was now in the truck ahead of me and Volker was behind. According to his guidebook, the Tverskaia quarter of Moscow is supposed to be very nice; Stalin widened the streets just for us! As for the old cripple, I initially supposed that he was with Sergeant Gunther, which couldn’t have been the case; to tell you the truth, I couldn’t have cared less about him right then. We could almost hear the breathing of the Slavs all around us in the wheat fields. That made me sick with fear. And here I want to state that the sleepwalker made sure that the best new assault guns went to his pets in the Waffen-; we were under strength and certainly didn’t get to ride in armored half-tracks, I can assure you! As I’ve already inserted into the record, I was only a telephonist; I had to ride in an open truck. I kept saying to myself: If there’s only something I can do; if I can only reason it out! I’m not a good person but I’m not such a monster, either. I’ve never shot a civilian except when under orders. I deserve to live. What measures can I take? Hermit crabs become all helmet whenever they want to; smugglers invent a hiding place that no one has ev
er thought of before; tank crews get themselves transferred into Tigers. And tanks protect themselves with anti-magnetic paste, so that Russian mines can’t—

  Then suddenly from somewhere within a dense tall forest of sunflower-stalks rose a metal thing which resembled a cup on a stick; this innocuous object whirled through the air, landed on the engine cover of the Panzer-III on our left flank, which was Dancwart’s, and blew it up, just as I’d expected; that was the end of Dancwart. To the sleepwalker, all this was merely reconnaissance in force.

  At 1100 hours our engineers had completed their bridge over the Gerzovka lowlands, and even I, who knew better, almost convinced myself that we would actually break through and shatter these supernatural enemy concentrations, because an illusion was better than the nastiness of Sergeant Gunther, who’d said: Whoever doesn’t get killed is going to be called a traitor for losing, so you might as well give it your all! And don’t think about getting captured, either. Slavs drink from the skulls of their enemies.—At 1300 hours a Russian tank attack toward Korovino was halted by us, we destroying all seven tanks. But then came more tanks in squares of a hundred and two hundred.

  Well, we kept doing what we could. Our wills were armored, like our Führer’s heart, train and automobile. Volker said: There’s nothing we can do, so we may as well roll on and find out what’s going to happen to us . . .

  By the end of the second day we’d achieved a breakthrough to the depth of fifteen kilometers. After that, everything got impossible. By the fifth day we’d penetrated deeper, to be sure, half a dozen more kilometers; our wills might have been armored, but the enemy’s armor was thicker. We tried to be cautious; we raised our binoculars and peered through holes in every wall; but dead men, black with flies, lay in the killing zones between barbed wire. Even if only one in four was German, we’d still lost, because there are so many Russians, you see!

  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 wholedivision 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.