The Stalin Front Read online

  But these were matters that were only loosely bound up with the report on the Lance-Corporal’s going missing in action. More directly concerned with it was the Runner at company command-post. He stuffed the piece of paper in his pocket along with his pipe and the last of some sunflower seeds he had taken off a Russian prisoner. He was never given very long to spend at operational command.

  The road to battalion headquarters was neither a road nor did it offer any sort of security. Several times a day the Runner ran for his life on a sort of cross-country track. This race against death he principally owed to the Sergeant, who kept up a never-ending stream of important communications to the battalion, to justify his continued presence in the company bunker. He needed to make his case several times a day, lest it occur to the Captain to give him the command of a platoon in the front line. That it was only a matter of time till the Runner’s two children became orphans was no concern of the Sergeant’s.

  The Runner was most afraid of the first hundred yards outside the command-post. A Russian mortar had got the range of the company bunker. It regularly scattered its splinters over the little parapet. No one who was hit and lay there for longer than a second ever lived. The Russian marksmen shot at every unmoving target. As the Runner and the Sergeant both knew.

  Each time the Runner went out on one of these pointless missions, he resolved to pay the Sergeant back. He wouldn’t have been capable of killing an enemy in cold blood, but the next time they were under attack he would shoot the Sergeant in the back. He hated him. The heart was half a hand’s breadth beneath the shoulderblade. He had to know some anatomy for his job. He was proud of it. Each time he ran those critical hundred yards, he had murder on his mind. Then came the bushes, and he was over the worst. If he got caught up in some machine-gun fire there, that was just bad luck.

  The road only got truly hopeless when it went across the bluff. Up there, it looked like a lunar landscape. Only you wouldn’t have come across a huge steel pylon on the moon. A few of its props and struts stuck out, warped by direct hits. But the mighty concrete root of it withstood any calibre. Not far from the pylon was a soldier’s tomb. It probably dated from the early days of the advance. A low birch fence surrounded the mound. The cross bearing the name had been smashed by a shell. Within the company, it was referred to as ‘the grave of the unknown soldier’.

  The hill with the pylon on it would have served as an ideal observation point for the whole sector, except that setting up a periscope on the ploughed earth would have been rather like putting a mirror in a cement mixer.

  While the Runner was flitting like a ghost across the heights, he was in another world. Gravity seemed to have been suspended. He flew rather than ran past the sputtering shells. Any thought was a waste of time. A cold wind howled across the bare expanse. The spirit kingdom had taken him in. The horsemen of the Apocalypse were giving chase. Death in the van, on his bony nag. Not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass. Only scuffed, sandy soil. In the craters occasional murky puddles.

  And even so, there were men up here. A Corporal and a couple of Privates. One night, they had dug themselves a hole under the concrete with their bare hands and a short field-shovel. And there they stayed, biding their time till their company down in the trenches was finally wiped out. Then, they had to rush out with their explosive charges to meet the approaching steel monsters, and, with their bodies already shot to pieces, hang the magnetic charges on the tanks as they ground past. That was the moment they were waiting for, hour by hour, day after day. Always in the hope that it might never come. The lump of concrete over their heads creaked and quaked. Sand dribbled down the sides of their dugout. If the tanks didn’t come, the alternative was the moment that the concrete mass settled on top of them. The percussive force of the shells made the dugout ever larger. With every day it became more apparent: the concrete pediment that supported the weight of the pylon would one day squash the little air-pocket beneath it. And in spite of that, they couldn’t leave. What, to go and lie in a shellhole, and die within the hour?

  The Corporal and his two men were living as in a prison. They lay side by side. In amongst their stinking bodies were containers full of dynamite. From battered mugs they drank a black liquid that purported to be coffee, dyed water that tasted of metal and chicory. On their tongues they felt the gritty sand that incessantly rained down from the ceiling into their drinking vessels. From time to time they got undressed, and went crawling around their hole like naked hermits, looking for small, greasy-looking vermin in their uniforms. Every day they waited avidly for the bottle of alcohol that they were allotted. They emptied it in next to no time, and every day they felt more astonished by their own unchanged sobriety. When they defecated, they did so either on the field-shovel, or else in empty tin cans. Then they would shovel it outside. That way, they didn’t have to risk their lives. Sometimes the shit would come sliding back in. They were like lemurs. The hair grew down over their collars. They were simultaneously dusty and greasy. But always – whether eating, sleeping, smoking or drinking – they kept their ears pricked for a certain sound, and tried to set aside the howl of shells. They were waiting for the clatter of approaching Russian tanks.

  Several times a day, less often at nighttime, the Runner would visit them in their hole. He was their go-between with the world, which for them had shrunk to a mile or so of Front. Every word of his that bore any relation to ‘relief’ would be repeated and chewed over for hours, even days, to come. And the days went by. In the forgotten army, the anti-tank unit was a zero.

  They would shake hands with every man whom the Runner brought along to reinforce the Front, and secretly pray for his death, because he strengthened the company’s fighting force, and reduced their chances of being relieved.

  They dug around quite unabashed in the Runner’s leather satchel, and in the half-light, spelled out the notifications of deaths with grim satisfaction. They could work out exactly when the company would be reduced to a mere handful of men, and its withdrawal from the Front would have purely symbolic significance. That was all that interested them in the Runner’s satchel. The situation report that he carried from battalion headquarters to the company every day wasn’t worth their attention. The performance report that the Sergeant had composed for divisional staff on the new machine gun drew a pitying smile from them. The Corporal used it to light his pipe with. In this way, he prevented a certain officer at battalion HQ from being reminded of the Sergeant’s existence.

  The Corporal functioned as an unofficial censor of the Sergeant’s communications with the back area. He saw to it that the man didn’t get above himself. A letter from the Sergeant to the Major disappeared without trace in the black hole of the Anti-Tank Unit. The Sergeant’s name was on a list of those eligible for leave. By the time the list reached headquarters, his name was crossed out. ‘Temporarily irreplaceable,’ the Corporal had written next to it. Just as it’s only a short step from the dramatic to the comic, so in that lousy shithole under the hill of death, Prank and Terror were cheek by jowl.

  The Runner left the hole. Before he turned away, he said without emphasis that – if he was still alive – he would look in on them on the way back. His remark was superfluous. His overstrained lungs would have forced him to stop at the hole in any case. He was just talking to keep his courage up. In fact, he might as well have said a prayer.

  Once more, he scuttled across the pockmarked landscape. Armour-piercing shells twittered round him like sparrows. A geyser of earth from a shell impact swallowed him up and spat him out again. In his fingers he clutched his satchel. He dashed over craters and through trenches, and finished up, shaking like a malaria sufferer, behind the rail embankment. Even though he was now back in the front line, the embankment did offer a certain protection. Shells arced across the sky like fireworks. From horizon to horizon. Not one left its trajectory. He could hear rifle fire, but it didn’t scare him. The rails seemed to constitute a border of sorts. Only the splashing mort
ar rounds forced him to continue at his brisk pace. Even here, he wasn’t safe from a chance hit. The only advantage of these five hundred yards along the rails was that they temporarily took away the solitariness that made the fear just a little harder to bear. Every fifty yards, a mud-encrusted figure would be leaning against the embankment. Even though these figures kept their eyes front the whole time, and hardly ever turned to look at him, their mere being there had something soothing about it.

  His mistaken feeling of security lasted till he reached the vicinity of the dressing-station. The sight of the rigid corpses next to the path shattered all his illusions. He started off with those who had been brought there half bled to death, or with severed limbs.

  The bearers were sorry to see that the burden they were transporting on their canvas was already dead. They yanked the birch pole out of the tube that was sewn together from two canvas sheets. They slid the body out, and left it lying by the dressing-station. Continual fire restricted their missions to nighttime, and for them the night ended when day started to grey. They were in a hurry, because they had to lug munitions or soggy bread up to the Front, in the same canvas.

  The Runner saw the dead lying there. Those who were shot in the belly writhed in agony till the moment of death. If he couldn’t pick them out by their curled-up bodies, then by their bared bellies. They could be classed as hopeless. Their removal was nothing but a courtesy they couldn’t be refused as long as their brains were still functioning. Or again their screaming made it imperative. It all depended on circumstances. And circumstances varied.

  For example, the railway line was back in use a couple of miles away. The front line – or what was marked as the front line on the general staff maps – wasn’t always identical with the railway. The rails headed off in an easterly direction. At the point where it was out of range of the medium German batteries, the Russians used it in their logistical system. One platoon had been assigned the task of disrupting this system by blowing up the tracks, before the company took up position in advance of the height. The platoon was led by a Lieutenant (this was just eight weeks ago). He and his men were of the view that this was more properly a job for the airforce. The Sergeant, on the other hand, maintained that such decisions could only be taken higher up; he had complete confidence in the planning of this strategically important undertaking. He would always talk like that when putting together units, and usually he would end up by saying he regretted his commitments didn’t permit him to take part in whatever undertaking it was. Only Engineer Meller dared look the Sergeant sardonically in the eye as he said it. Regularly he would ask him with an expressionless face to come along anyway, and these invitations were a reason why Engineer Meller had been repeatedly passed over for promotion. It wasn’t until Meller was no longer among the living that the Sergeant could find it in himself to say a gracious word about him. After the dynamiting of the railway tracks had been successfully carried out eight miles behind the Russian lines, Engineer Meller got a shot in the belly. The bullet caught him from behind, just left of the spine, and an inch below the belt. It passed through his body, and exited just left of his navel. No one in the platoon had time even to look at the wound. It was just that Engineer Meller had a scorched hole at the front and back of his tunic, which meant he was unable to carry on as a stretcher-bearer for the dead Lieutenant. The NCO had to make a split-second decision whether to abandon the Lieutenant’s body or take it. He didn’t need a further second in which to decide whether to dump the superfluous munitions boxes to get another man to carry the Engineer. The Engineer said he could still walk. A couple of hundred yards further on, the munitions boxes and their carrier fell by the wayside anyway: the man had got himself blown up by an anti-personnel mine. Two more men were wounded in the same incident, and the situation became critical. The Corporal fired off his remaining bullets, then he dumped his gun and accessories in a puddle. Meller was starting to lag, and the NCO was compelled to stay behind with him. Turning round, he loosed off a few clips from his submachine gun into the line of brown snipers behind him. Only the beginning of the marshes saved the group from further losses. They disappeared into the underbrush. Now they had to find the path that had slipped them right through the Russian advance guard. Within half an hour, the Corporal had found it. All this time, Engineer Meller kept insisting he could walk unaided. They had made another half a mile or so through the swamp when the Corporal saw an enemy machine gun up ahead on the path. So the unit was surrounded. With a pained half-smile on his face, Meller volunteered to take care of it. A nod from the NCO gave him permission to run at the surprised machine-gun crew with a couple of live hand-grenades. When the remaining six men of the detachment leapt up from their cover after the explosion, they ran straight past the dying Engineer. He was lying on his back, cut off at the thigh by a machine-gun burst. It was possible he was still alive at the point that a Russian, furious at the shredding of his comrades, had rammed a bayonet into his chest. Only the Runner saw the NCO level his pistol at the Engineer’s head. The sight of the NCO, unconcerned with his own safety, calmly saluting the dead man, was something the Runner would never forget, and nor did he ever speak about what he had seen. He didn’t have the words for it. But he was the only one to understand why the NCO was unable to write the letter to Frau Meller (the one with the standard references in it to ‘shot in the chest’ and ‘painless death’). The Sergeant had to take care of that for him.

  So even with belly shots, it depended on circumstances. The bulk of the corpses were recruited from those who had died of various wounds. One stretched his arms and legs up into the air. Another lay naked on the grass, his skin chargrilled by a flame-thrower. The Runner could have spent an hour just looking at them all.

  But already he was approaching the dressing-station. This was where the dead and the living parted company. It was more than he could do to look at this inferno of a charnelhouse. He passed it with eyes tight shut. But in his ears he heard the groans and cries, and the whimpering for water. After that, he turned off left into the wood. The trees – or what was left of them – seemed to swallow him up. They offered protection against mortars, sniper fire and shrapnels. The whistling in the air overhead only began to matter again once he reached the artillery positions.

  As soon as he entered the wood, he felt alone. The brush, the birch trunks – everything was silent. The log-road, built by Russian soldiers who had long since died of starvation or been shot, swayed silently underfoot. A swarm of mosquitoes danced over a dead body in the murky puddle in the clearing. A beetle in shining armour dragged a blade of grass across the path. A ring of scorched grass, an uprooted tree and a pile of broken boughs indicated that death had been at work, days previously, just yesterday, or even a matter of hours ago. A few sunbeams managed to break through the leaves and reach the ground. The air shook. A white scrap of wool dangling from a twig warned those in the know of the presence of a minefield. Behind the Runner, there was a rumble like a parting thunderstorm. He was all alone. Loneliness constricted his heart. He sensed an ambush. There were two possibilities. One was as silent as the wood itself. It gave no notice. It lay hidden behind a tree or in the tall grass. It would come out of the bushes like a sudden whiplash. The blow was always fatal, but at least it was quick. This possibility was equipped with a pistol and a bundle of rags. Half-starved, ground down by the same fear as he was himself, it lurked behind a tree. A lightning flash and a whiplash. Maybe a little puff of smoke as well. Then a silent brown shape would leap out from its covert. Bend over the dead body. Prise the weapon out of its hands. Burrow frantically through its pockets. Valuables and junk disappeared among the rags. And it was all over in a trice. All that was left was a dead man that the mosquitoes danced over, till someone one day found him. If it was marshy, then he wouldn’t be found.

  The other possibility had a similar outcome. Only you were given warning. You heard animal roaring in the distance. A dull groan, a sound like nothing else. It was like a shout
that could be heard over miles. Two or three times you heard it. Then the wailing of an out-of-tune organpipe. An entire sector of the Front suffered paralysis. The ticking of machine guns broke off. The snipers pulled in their rifles. The mortar crews moved closer together. The order to fire died on the lips of the artillerymen. Even the Runner cut his stride. And then it came. Innumerable lightnings ripped into the forest. Almost half a hundred shells exploded against trees or on the ground. A deafening uproar. Fire, dynamite fumes, lumps of brass as big as your fist, earth, dust. An entire artillery unit, with four guns, stacks of ammunition crates, cartridges, equipment and horses, wallowed on the ground. An hour later, the field-kitchen copped it. Driver, co-driver, cook, cold rations for sixty men and a hundred litres of watery soup were vaporized. A few minutes after that, it visited a company that was marching towards the Front on relief: eighty men, with difficulty pepped up behind the lines for a week, polished boots, oiled weapons. The forty who made it to the trenches were filthy, bloodied, demoralized. In the space of two hours, two days, two weeks. Somewhere a tank brigade was advancing into position. In the security of a hollow the commander assembled his tank crews for a final discussion. A noise on the horizon. Five or six seconds of oppressive silence. Shells burst out of nowhere. Screams. Rubble raining down on empty tanks. The youngest officer had trouble getting together enough drivers to move the dozen tanks and their dead crews back. And all who felt the shaking of the earth and saw the smoke of the explosions going up into the sky thanked (depending on their belief) fate or God that someone else had been hit, and they had got lucky this time. The Runner, too, who had gone down on his knees and covered his face with his hands thanked his destiny. And that was the second possibility.