by Steven Conte
Von Rauschenberg chuckled. ‘That’s true. We all just want to go home.’
Was he another Dieter, Bauer wondered, a possible friend? Though initially guarded, he now seemed willing to talk. There was more gunfire and a red streak of tracer some way off above the trees.
‘I should get back,’ said von Rauschenberg. ‘If you’d like a tour of our sector sometime, just radio. War and Peace it isn’t, but it’s not without interest.’
‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘That is, once I’ve whipped the dressing station into shape.’
They said farewell and went their separate ways, Bauer retracing his steps to the dressing station in the most literal way, reusing the boot holes he’d punched into the snow ninety minutes earlier. Even so, it was heavy work and soon he was puffing like a locomotive. Then from somewhere in the direction of Malevka he heard the hiss of a flare, then turned and watched it pass its zenith, extinguishing stars, before sizzling earthwards, spilling light between the trees.
FOURTEEN
The next day dawned like the last one: windless and misty, exceptionally cold. Smoke from cooking fires in the bunkers rose vertically through the trees, the ethereality of the mist only partly offset by the sound of artillery fire. The shells were falling far away. Bauer ordered his and Pilcz’s men to unload the lorries, and shortly afterwards Pilcz himself arrived, still looking and sounding jittery about having to face Metz. Bauer offered him more encouragement, then sent him and his men on their way.
For the next few days casualties were light, allowing for the reorganisation of the dressing station along more sensible lines. From Yasnaya Polyana they took delivery of a field operating lamp, to which Winkel added a cone of aluminium foil, substantially increasing its brightness. They gathered timber for building a delousing sauna, only for Metz to order them by radio not to proceed with its construction, as the fall of Tula, he said, was ‘imminent’. Bauer stockpiled the timber. Winkel got wind of a damaged T-34 nearby, went to inspect it and returned saying he believed he could fix it. They could use it as a tractor, he argued, or even as an ambulance in rough terrain, and because things were in hand at the dressing station Bauer agreed to let him try, relieved to see him behaving more like himself.
His own morale was up and down. In effect, Metz had demoted him, and though there was satisfaction to be had in speeding up the transfer of wounded men to Yasnaya Polyana, already he missed the complexity of the surgeries he had done there. His skills were being wasted, and by coincidence or otherwise he began to feel homesick for the first time in the war, not just fed up with being in the Soviet Union but missing Germany: the hilly woodlands of Franconia, his childhood farm, his village, the city of Nuremberg – not the Nuremberg of National Socialist rallies but the city as it had been in the early twenties, his student days, when he had frequented its bars and cafés, not only with fellow students but also with writers and artists, some of them good, as well as would-be or genuine intellectuals, reproducing in a provincial form the ferment going on in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin.
The physical hardships at the dressing station were acute. The barn was perpetually freezing, and they rarely changed clothes. The latrine was in a tent about fifty paces away, its canvas frozen stiff as Bakelite. Reaching it felt like an Arctic expedition, baring his buttocks an ordeal. Even worse, though, were the lice. Within forty-eight hours of arriving he was scratching himself, and had the barn been less cold he might have been tempted to strip down and spend all day picking at his hide.
He noticed compensations. Discomfort had a way of intensifying pleasures that in civilian life he might barely have registered. The taste of hot chicory was bliss, and even a good scratch, properly viewed, felt like ecstasy. Yes, objectively his life might be miserable, but it was his misery, his struggle, and if some genie had wobbled out of his paraffin lamp and granted him three wishes, becoming someone else would not have been one of them. He had invested too much in his own existence, his stubborn fondness for it something akin to what he guessed a soldier might feel for a filthy trench he had occupied and defended for months. It was his trench, his filth, and he’d hold on to it till the last, since the one thing worse than tribulation was meaninglessness.
The same applied to Katerina, he decided. At times knowing her had been painful, like being dunked in icy water, but by God the shock of it had been invigorating. Expecting warmth from her had been ridiculous, he now saw, the fantasy of marrying her exactly that, a fantasy. Katerina wasn’t wifely. Her forte wasn’t tenderness but strength. She was admirable. He missed her, missed her badly, but he wasn’t going to worsen the pain by sentimentalising his memories of her.
One distraction was reading, and in spare moments and at night he took to lying in his bedroll and blankets, engrossing himself in War and Peace. As usual he found it consoling. Whatever the fate of individuals might be, Tolstoy seemed to say, the rhythms of life would remain the same. The young would be foolish, hopeful and wild, would fall in love and out of it, become sadder, maybe wise. Some would meet their deaths sooner than others, yet there would come a day when everyone engaged in the struggles of their age would without exception die, bequeathing the world they had made to those strangers, their children, who would struggle to change it again.
* * *
With its turret reversed and swastika flags on its hull, the T-34 grumbled up to the dressing station, squealed through a ninety-degree turn and braked. Its engine fell quiet and seconds later Winkel wriggled out onto the turret. He looked pleased with himself. Bauer led Demchak and Pflieger in a round of applause and Winkel grinned and took a bow.
‘Well done, Sepp,’ Bauer said.
‘Why, thanks, sir,’ Winkel said. He hopped onto the hull, and from there into the snow. ‘All we need now is fuel.’
From overhead there came the sound of an aircraft and they all looked up.
‘Reconnaissance,’ Demchak said. ‘One of theirs.’
They stepped away from the barn to get a clearer view. The aircraft was small and heading against the wind, its engine straining. Its course was westerly, tracking the front lines, though high enough to stay clear of ground fire.
‘Where’s the Luftwaffe?’ Winkel asked, voicing the question that Bauer had just put to himself. In France they had operated with air superiority, especially in the second half of the campaign.
‘Buzzing Moscow,’ Pflieger said. ‘Giving Stalin hell.’
‘How would you know?’ Winkel said.
‘They’re not here so they must be elsewhere, right? I bet it’s Moscow. Concentrate your forces where they’re needed the most.’
‘They’re needed here,’ Winkel said.
‘The main prize is Moscow. Tula is a sideshow.’
‘Some sideshow.’
‘It’s all a matter of perspective, Sepp. In war not everyone gets to fight the big battles. Some of us have to play supporting roles.’
‘Oh, good grief,’ Winkel said. ‘Leave the thinking to the horses.’
‘Very funny.’
‘They have bigger heads.’
‘Oh, you got me one there, Sepp. Got me good, you did.’
Where the front lines turned northwards at Malevka the plane did the same, and a short time later it disappeared behind the trees, its engine noise trailing like a glider under tow.
‘That’s it, gentlemen,’ Bauer said. ‘Show’s over.’
‘Not much of a show, sir,’ Pflieger said.
‘Let’s just hope we don’t get a better one.’
* * *
Six days passed before he could take up von Rauschenberg’s offer of a tour of his sector of the front. Bauer radioed, they made the necessary arrangements and met early that afternoon in front of von Rauschenberg’s company headquarters, a log bunker in the forest near Malevka. There had been a snowstorm overnight but the wind had since dropped. The sky was dark and overcast. Somewhere to the west a howitzer battery was in action, though without much intensity.
‘Softening the
m up?’ Bauer asked.
‘Hardly,’ said von Rauschenberg. ‘There’s a shortage of shells. Disturbing their afternoon nap, that’s all.’
Machine-gun fire sounded in the distance, its timbre unfamiliar, unfriendly, and Bauer felt his heart begin to thump.
‘I’ll get you one of our helmets,’ von Rauschenberg said. ‘We’ve painted them white.’
‘Sounds sensible.’
From the bunker von Rauschenberg returned carrying a machine pistol and a pair of white helmets. He put on one of the helmets and handed over the other. ‘Ready?’
Bauer buckled his chinstrap. ‘Ready. How far?’
‘Six hundred metres, give or take. But first a social call.’
They set out on a well-trodden track through the snow, not towards the front, Bauer calculated, but in parallel. Von Rauschenberg pointed at another bunker about a hundred metres away among the trees. ‘Our casualty collection point. It doubles as a barracks.’
The second bunker contained ten or so men who stood to attention as Bauer followed von Rauschenberg inside. The place stank, of course, but when the men learned he was a surgeon they offered him hot chicory, chocolate and schnapps, which Bauer regretfully refused. Instead he asked to see the company’s medical supplies, found them in good order and said so. A sergeant explained that during a battle the room’s main table was pushed aside to make way for the wounded, who were then evacuated in groups to the dressing station.
The next stop was well forward, though still inside the forest: a machine-gun nest protected by a berm and a roof made of slim, bark-covered logs. ‘This isn’t like the last war,’ von Rauschenberg explained as they approached. ‘There are no trenches as such. We’re deployed in depth, and most of our strength is to the rear.’
The machine-gun nest contained three men, two of whom were trying to warm their hands over a paraffin stove. All three men looked perished with cold, but when they saw Bauer’s medical patch they welcomed him with the same warmth he had met with in the bunker. Von Rauschenberg chatted with them a little, addressing all three by name. When they moved on he said, ‘You know, to these fellows a surgeon is as good as divine. The medics they regard as angels, you surgeons as gods.’
‘You make it sound like we’re despatching them to the afterlife.’
‘It’s the before-life they’re longing for, that place of splendour, home. Never mind that home was a hovel or an overcrowded tenement, to some of my men your operating table is beginning to seem like a flying carpet that will take them where they want to go.’
‘You’re exaggerating, surely.’
‘Only a little. They’ve seen too many frostbitten wounds to truly welcome being wounded, but I can imagine some of them half-consciously putting themselves in harm’s way.’
‘It’s going badly here, then?’ Bauer asked in a neutral tone, not wanting to sound like an Ehrlich sniffing out sedition.
‘That last attack knocked the stuffing out of us,’ von Rauschenberg replied. ‘And we’d already lost plenty before it began.’
‘So we’re not about to capture Tula?’
‘Still wondering whether or not to build your delousing station?’
‘Well, yes. Among other things.’
The path they were on began to slope subtly downwards, and up ahead an opening in the forest appeared, a V-shaped clearing littered with tree stumps, beyond it snowy fields.
Von Rauschenberg gestured at the clearing. ‘I’d take you over to meet your divisional comrades but Ivan’s snipers might take a potshot at you.’
Bauer peered again in the direction of the clearing and saw, less than fifty metres away, a panzer dug in at the crook of the V, its hull draped with sheets and further camouflaged by the background brightness of the fields. Of the things he’d witnessed in the last six days the sight of a tank behind earthworks was the most ominous, since if he had learned one thing about armoured tactics since joining the 3rd Panzer it was that mobility was all. Digging in was an admission of defeat.
‘This way,’ von Rauschenberg said, taking a path to the left.
Bauer started to follow him then paused. ‘Wait,’ he said and pointed at the tank. ‘Are they hit?’ From the undercarriage, black threads of smoke.
Von Rauschenberg looked over his shoulder. ‘Burning diesel,’ he said. ‘A pan underneath. Apparently it stops the engine freezing.’
‘You’re telling me they have to burn diesel to stand still?’
‘Not ideal, is it.’
They were walking uphill now, staying within the forest but in sight of its edge. Von Rauschenberg pointed towards a hollow between the trees. ‘Nest for the wounded,’ he said. Bauer pictured wounded men, including some he had no doubt treated, being brought to this and scores of similar spots, a network of extraction, the capillaries and veins of a system pumping casualties all the way back to Germany.
‘In answer to your earlier question,’ von Rauschenberg said, ‘no, I don’t expect us to take Tula soon. We’re short of fuel, short of ammunition, short of warm clothes – the other night one of my sentries froze to death. We’re short of paper. Short of boot grease. Tools. Nails. We are not short of food, thank Christ, at least not yet, and as you saw we still have some medical supplies. And we don’t lack heart. I honestly believe that were we properly supplied we could take Tula tomorrow, in spite of everything.’
They reached a dugout with a shelter sheet drawn across its entrance, beside it a sentry pacing to and fro. Bauer returned his salute and von Rauschenberg engaged with him in the same easy manner he had displayed with the others under his command. The soldier was wearing a quilted Soviet jacket and, for added warmth and proof of nationality, a field-grey Wehrmacht blanket.
Von Rauschenberg slapped the sentry on the shoulder and came away. ‘Excuse me while I stop to piss,’ he said, and went over to a nearby tree. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Better do the same if you need to – further forward there’s nowhere to stand.’
Though his need wasn’t pressing Bauer went to the closest tree, turned his back to the breeze and urinated, wondering if agreeing to this excursion had been wise. It was one thing to be killed or wounded in the line of duty, quite another as a result of curiosity. He pictured himself as a casualty making a return journey through the forest, leaving his blood at each evacuation point, looking like a fool to the men he had met on the way in. Next would come the dressing station, and then – Christ almighty – Yasnaya Polyana. Was that his motive here? Was he one of those von Rauschenberg suspected of wanting to go home via the operating table? Surely not, since nothing short of dying would be worse than having Metz or, God forbid, Erich Pilcz rummaging about in his entrails. Along with the pain and humiliation involved, Metz would regard his getting wounded as a dereliction of duty, even a personal affront. Still, backing out now was not an option, and surely the danger was minimal, especially compared to what the men of the Grossdeutschland division were exposed to every day.
At the extreme edge of the forest von Rauschenberg stopped and pointed to their destination: an observation post on a rise another fifty metres further forward. ‘We’ll run hunched over till we reach that wooden marker,’ he said. ‘From that point onwards you have to crawl. Do as I do and you won’t come to any harm.’
Bauer crouched a little, a sprinter taking his mark. His heart was hammering and it occurred to him that this was a good thing, this was normal – that between arriving at Yasnaya Polyana and now he had relearned a fear of death. Then von Rauschenberg set off running, bent over, holding his machine pistol low to the ground. Bauer scuttled after him in the same ungainly style, listening for gunshots but hearing only his breathing, shallow and fast, the flapping of his greatcoat, his boots squeaking on the snow. At the wooden marker von Rauschenberg dropped into a crawl, Bauer did the same, and in this way they covered the last ten metres, pushed aside a hessian curtain at the rear of the observation post and bellied inside. At first Bauer saw nothing of the interior, only a bar of daylight in
the opposite wall, but as his snow-blindness lessened he made out a log-lined space a little larger than the interior of a tank, too low to stand in and too cramped for the five men it now contained. The others, three Landsers seated on ammunition cases, greeted von Rauschenberg and shuffled up against the walls to make more room. A medium machine gun stood on a mound of soil, its muzzle thrusting into the light. A two-way radio, a pair of binoculars, open ration packs, discarded cans, three rifles propped in a corner. One of the Landsers was wearing a pair of fleece-lined leather gloves, while the knuckles of another were showing through a pair of worn-out socks. Under their helmets all three men had wrapped their heads in rags secured with knots beneath their chins.
Von Rauschenberg invited him forward to the viewing slit and he peered outside. It was a lower vantage point than he’d expected, not much higher than the fields it overlooked, but what seized his attention first was a row of stakes not ten metres away, all sharpened to a point and angling forward. It was an obstacle straight from the Middle Ages, or even earlier – from prehistoric times – and several seconds passed before Bauer could raise his eyes and look across the fields to a low confusion of buildings in the distance: the outskirts of Tula. In front of it were the obstacles he’d heard about: metal burrs and concrete prongs. The latter were uniform and orderly, a cemetery of stone. Columns of smoke were rising over the town, blackening the already dark clouds overhead. Rifle and machine-gun fire sounded sporadically, louder here than it had been inside the forest, though he couldn’t tell where it was coming from or where it was directed, or make out any enemy positions. Von Rauschenberg handed him a pair of binoculars, and in their cross hairs he made out the Soviet lines, a suture seam of trenches and barbed wire, stone and concrete buildings. It looked formidable and he almost said so, then remembered that sooner or later the men of the Grossdeutschland would be expected to attack it again. Instead he lowered the binoculars and gestured at the row of tilted stakes. ‘Are those really necessary? I thought it was us attacking Ivan, not the reverse.’