by Jana Petken
At first, he experienced almost complete silence as he walked towards the lines of able-bodied men waiting for instructions. But as his auditory shock from the most recent blast dissipated, the stillness gave way to countless sounds, distinct and infinitely gentler than the rocket fire that had continued for what had seemed like hours. His breath was loud and rasping. Under his feet, snow crunched and squeaked. To his left, multiple fires crackled, and in the distance rifle bullets snapped and pinged in the air.
Dead Germans littered the pastel-pink, snowy ground like broken dolls with contorted limbs and wide staring eyes. The hut where the officers had held their meeting earlier that day had been destroyed, and the area in which it had stood was covered in flaming red timber, giving the frigid air a welcome warmth. And when he joined a platoon of infantrymen, he saw his own horror reflected in their eyes.
“Gather around!” the Unteroffizier shouted.
Wilmot counted forty-five men in his platoon. Most of them he knew, but some were missing, Geert and Claus included. Some distance away, other platoons were also assembling. He couldn’t imagine how many men had been killed in the attack, but he saw hundreds of survivors preparing for what he guessed would be a quick and decisive counteroffensive. Minutes later, the Unteroffizier confirmed Wilmot’s thoughts.
“There’s a village about eight hundred metres from here. It’s about three hundred metres behind the Leningrad Line.”
“We broke though that last week,” one of the men said.
“And we’ll break through it again,” said the Unteroffizier, without confirming that the Russians had probably retaken that section of the line and had been able to launch their Katyusha rockets from there. “Our job is to clear the houses.”
A whistle blew, moving the men forwards en masse; the blind leading the blind into another fog of battle. Wilmot glanced over his shoulder and saw a few men in his platoon lagging behind with reluctant or painful steps. His injured head was pounding and bleeding anew. Beneath his helmet, he felt the metallic wetness of his blood dribbling down his face, but regardless of his pain, he surged to the front, unafraid and relieved that they were rushing to battle instead of cowering behind their lines waiting for the Russkies to attack again with their rockets … or as the Wehrmacht called them, Stalin’s organs. Enraged, he was glad of the chance to kill as many Russians as he could as pay-back for his friends. He knew of no greater motivation than revenge.
In an exposed formation, the platoon reached the dreaded Leningrad Line and were met with rifle and machine gun fire. Wilmot’s relief morphed into terror as one by one the infantrymen fell to the unseen enemy. He glanced to his left. Hundreds of men were still running forward across uneven ground pitted with burnt out craters. He couldn’t stop, couldn’t go back, so blindly followed the Unteroffizier until the latter suddenly slumped to the ground screaming, his thigh laid open to the bone.
Unaccustomed to taking charge but fuelled by his hatred of the enemy, Wilmot took a unilateral decision and headed to the treeline on his right. Others followed, desperate to get out of the line of Russian fire that was knocking them off one by one like tin soldiers at a fairground.
Twenty men in Wilmot’s platoon made it as far as the trees, but more than double that number lay dead or wounded in the open field. The Germans had taken the line only one week earlier, but when Wilmot was running towards the trenches he saw Russian soldiers, not Germans.
“We took it last week … we took it. What happened … and where’s the Unteroffizier?” a soldier gasped.
“I saw him drop. I don’t know if he’s dead. I was too busy running.” Wilmot grabbed his water flask.
The noise of guns blazing in the clearing was intense, but the men didn’t feel safe in their concealed position because of notorious Russian snipers that stalked the woods. Wilmot again took the initiative by leopard-crawling on his belly and aiming his rifle outwards towards the open field. “Keep your eyes peeled on the perimeter,” he yelled to no one in particular. The others followed his example, spreading out, and lying on the ground in a circle with weapons trained in every direction.
“What do we do now? We’re cut off. Snipers might be surrounding us. How are we going to get out of here?” The soldier closest to Wilmot panicked. “Jesus Christ, we’re going to die in here! We’re all going to be cut down. I don’t want to die like this…”
“Shut up, Martin. I’ll kill you myself if you don’t stop wailing like a baby.” Blood dripped into Wilmot’s eye and he swiped it away with his sleeve before glancing around him. The remains of his platoon were looking outwards towards the line of trees. At least the branches were bare, making it easier to spot snipers had they been sitting on a bough waiting to pick off Germans.
“…we have to go back,” one of the men suggested in a ferocious whisper.
Wilmot thought about that idea as a few men began to argue among themselves. They’d lost their sergeant and very soon someone would have to decide about what to do next.
“We can’t go back to our lines. We haven’t been given the order to retreat,” Wilmot reminded him.
“Well, we can’t bloody go forward, can we, Willie?” Martin retorted.
“We’ll have to join the other platoons. If we retreat, we’ll be shot for running away.”
“Willie’s right,” another man said. “We wouldn’t be the first to get executed for cowardice. We’ve all seen what happens to men trying to get away from this … Mother of God, I’m freezing. We need to move, or we’ll ice up. Think … think, one of you. There must be a way out of here.”
A fierce fight was still going on in the open field. German shells were exploding, which meant that the Russian resistance had been much heavier than expected, and no unit or platoon had broken through.
“We’ll stay here – unless any of you want to get blown up out there – well, do you?” Willie asked, butting into the ongoing debate about how it had been possible for the Russians to retake that section of the line from the Germans who had been manning it for the last six days.
The Leningrad Line was a formidable series of prepared Russian defences. Areas of importance were surrounded by heavy fortifications and German units had encountered some up to six miles in length.
Wilmot’s platoon had been involved in the previous week’s attack, which had put this section of the line squarely in German hands. Another platoon had been told to man it after the Russians retreated. The platoon commander had set the place up nicely as a forward outpost, making themselves at home, as though they’d thought it would be an utterly impossible feat for the Russians to take it off them again.
“I agree with Willie,” said Martin, having calmed down. “But if we get caught in here, we’ll need to be ready.”
The men tightened their circle. Two soldiers volunteered to scout deeper into the woods to see if there was a safe exit. Rifles were still trained in every direction. It was evident that the Russians’ tenacity to come back time and again to retake what they’d once lost was galling to the Germans who’d thought they were far superior in every way – at least, on paper.
Wilmot listened to one of the men say he was ashamed not to be out there kicking the Russkies’ backsides and thought back to the times he’d remarked to Geert and Claus that the German army had always underestimated the Soviet troops.
He disagreed with the arrogant fools who thought that the Soviets were badly equipped, and second-rate soldiers. If he were to be asked by a general what he admired about this enemy, he’d have a long list at hand. The Russians were hard to kill, like cockroaches when one stamped on them. Their white-clad ski troops appeared to be defeated one day only to resurge the next with greater numbers. They used cows, and sometimes their own men to clear mine fields and their strategy was successful. They had an unnatural ability to hide under the snowy ground and suddenly appear only metres from German troops, anytime, anywhere. They could walk ten times further on ice-encrusted ground than any German, and still be energised t
o fight at the end of it. And they scared the living daylights out of him.
An hour later, Wilmot’s platoon came out of hiding and joined a new surge led by Stormtroopers charging towards the Russian line. Wilmot glimpsed his dead comrades as he ran, and it struck him just how lucky he’d been earlier on. An inch to the left or right, a second later or earlier, a wrong zig-zag pattern, a trip, a fall, and he’d be dead too; his fighting days over and the long, never-ending sleep beginning.
A sharp pain and violent shaking in Wilmot’s hand made him drop his rifle. He plastered his bloodied hand to his chest but kept on running until he skidded to a halt when a Russian’s head and shoulders popped out of a manhole like a jack-in-the-box. Both men stared at each other, instincts and common sense replaced by the shock of their proximity.
Wilmot was frozen with fear, but fortunately the Russian also seemed incapable of making a move. With an overwhelming desire to live, Wilmot went for his gun holster with his injured hand. The excruciating pain when he tried to grip his pistol then forced him to go for his spade handle instead. The Russian, having his own troubles, was fumbling in the hole’s confined space to hike his rifle to his shoulder. He’d either dropped it in fright when he’d seen Wilmot less than a metre from his position, or it had got wedged in the hole.
Wilmot wrenched the spade free and, swinging it with both hands, sliced into the Russian’s neck, nearly taking his head off.
He stared at the grotesque, almost-decapitated man for only a second or two before looking down at his own wound. He gasped. His hand had a hole in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. A bullet had gone right through it, but he could still move all his digits; thus, it hadn’t hit any bones. The pain was making him feel sick. Would an injury like this get him sent back to Berlin?
Russian guns had grown silent, and German soldiers were crossing the line, shooting the enemy who were already lying on the ground beside the German soldiers who’d lost the outpost earlier. Wilmot wrapped a bandage around his hand, then trotted towards a squad of men. Although it had seemed like hours, the whole incident with the Russian in the manhole had taken no more than a minute. That tiny spec of time would live in his memory until the day he died. It had been his greatest victory in the war, thus far.
After a German reconnaissance unit confirmed that the Russian rocket launchers were disabled, the infantry moved forward towards a row of houses. The Russians had managed to hold on to the enclave during the previous German offensive one week earlier. The structures had been built as defence and observation posts with heavy guns and other weapons hidden inside them, and, being designed to repel German mobile units, they’d been extremely difficult to take. The task, like many other recent missions, had been compounded further by General von Leeb’s gripe that he didn’t have enough resources to capture the hundreds of fortified bunkers across the Stalingrad Line; a sentiment echoed by many of the officers in the Northern Army. We are the poor relation, the last of the three Russian campaigns to get anything, the furthest away from supply lines, the forgotten, the abandoned, they constantly whined.
Wilmot and the men with him reported to an Unteroffizier who ordered them to check the houses for booby-traps and Russians who might still be hiding there. They found the first one empty, but they also came across fresh bread, cheese, and drinking water in canisters.
Wilmot shovelled the bread into his mouth, his cheeks bulging like a squirrel’s as he chewed. Then he yawned, relaxed by the heat coming from an iron stove with a flue that went through a hole in the roof. The Russians must have been confident that they’d hold on to this house, he thought. They’d brought a picnic that hadn’t been eaten and had built a fire. Blankets were on the floor along with straw-filled pillows and a couple of torn mattresses. It was a home from home.
The construction had camouflaged gun ports almost flush with the floor. Its interior was reinforced with sandbags and earth. Observation slots were cut into the roof, and they’d uncovered bunkers built into the floor connected to adjacent houses. What must it be like to sleep in a place like this? Wilmot pondered. There was a raging fire and shutters on the windows to keep out the worst of the wind and freezing cold and a gas stove to boil water for tea or coffee, if one were lucky enough to get one’s hands on a bag; what he wouldn’t do to spend a single night there.
“The officers will probably barrack here,” said Martin, reading Wilmot’s mind.
“Lucky gits. Ach, never mind, Martin,” Wilmot said, smiling for the first time that day, “at least we’re a bit closer to the city than we were this morning. We’ll drag the Russians out of their beds when we march into Leningrad.”
Chapter Six
Wilmot had been given the unenviable job of burying the German dead in a mass grave; no easy task because of the icy ground. Minutes earlier, he’d been throwing dead Russians onto the backs of the trucks that were being used to transport the corpses to the nearby river, where they’d be tossed in and forgotten.
The bulk of the German army was moving forward to Wilmot’s location later that day, and two platoons, a total of sixty-one men, had been ordered to mop up the blood and debris in the area surrounding the village. Within hours, the officers were going to barrack in the houses the Germans had just taken, and thus claim they’d moved even closer to Leningrad.
With the last of the German bodies interred, Wilmot sat on a patch of burnt grass and lit a cigarette. “It’s at times like this I wish I’d gone to officers’ academy,” he remarked to a Schütze lying beside him. “I’m sick and tired of getting these dirty jobs. If I’d wanted to be a bloody gravedigger, I’d have stayed in Berlin. And look at the state of my hand – bloody disgusting, shovelling earth and getting it into an open wound like that. I’ve got a fucking hole the size of a grape next to my thumb – look at the filth on the bandage. You know, they never even gave me something for the pain…”
“Sod your hand, Willie. I’m freezing my balls off here…”
The private’s voice died under the deafening noise of a shell hitting one of the houses a few metres from their position. Wilmot dropped his cigarette – the last one he had – leapt to his feet and sprinted away, but in blind panic got caught by another blast behind him. He fell. The world disintegrated and went black.
When he came to, he was lying on his stomach, peering through blurry eyes. The area was crawling with Russian soldiers; many hundreds of them – could be thousands – or was he seeing double? With ringing ears, he struggled to make sense of what had happened to him and what was going on now. He recalled the strange sensation of flying through the air in slow motion, loud bangs in his ears, feeling drunk and floating like a feather. He’d felt no pain or fear, couldn’t remember landing, and didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious.
As his vision cleared, he peered around his immediate area. He thought about sitting up to check if he’d been hurt. His body felt heavy and a bit numb. Jesus, had he lost a leg? He might be paralysed; he couldn’t see or feel a thing below the waist.
His ears tuned in to the sound of gunfire, not from rifles but pistols. He squinted around again, lifting his head an inch off the ground and turning it from side to side. The Russians were shooting Germans who were moaning and groaning. His line of sight was limited, but the shouting, talking, laughing enemy voices were sharp enough.
He still had his 08-pistol with a couple of bullets left in the breech. A full magazine was also in his belt pouch. If he moved to get the gun or ammo, they’d shoot him. If he didn’t move, they’d bury him alive or put a bullet in his head just for the hell of it. He’d seen plenty of Germans do that to Russians. Why had the German army not advanced again? They knew they’d left sixty-one men at this location, as they had done a week earlier. They must have heard the shells destroying the houses. Was the Wehrmacht bloody stupid? They were so very close yet seemed a hundred miles away. He felt as though he’d been ripped from his mother’s womb and abandoned.
An anxiety attack took his breath
away, leaving him gulping for air. Terrified, he feigned death. The soldier he’d been talking to earlier lay close by, flat on his back, his eyes wide open. “Are you alive, Jürgen?” Wilmot whispered, turning his head slightly.
Jürgen moaned, “Hard to believe, but yes, I think I am.” He struggled to sit up and appeared to be in the same dazed state Wilmot had experienced minutes earlier.
Wilmot also sat up and expanded his lungs. “Thank God … thank you, thank you … am I wounded?” he mumbled. Then, he saw the Russians and froze.
“Put your hands behind your head, Jürgen,” Wilmot said, seeing other Germans trying to surrender. “And don’t talk.”
Jürgen gasped when he finally looked around him. “How did the Russians get this back? What’s going on, Willie?”
“Shut up, Jürgen – shut up.”
Both men raised their arms and clasped their hands at the back of their heads. The small of Wilmot’s back was struck by a rifle butt, and he groaned, more with fright than pain. The Russian soldiers who had surrounded them were shouting angrily, but since the two did not understand a word they were saying, they elected to remain on their knees.
“Nazi pigs. Get on your feet and keep your hands in the air,” a Russian ordered in German.
Wilmot, with slow, cautious movements, leant forward whilst raising his eyes to the Russian who’d just given the order. He kept his gaze on the man, but when he raised his right knee to stand, someone kicked him in the back, laughing uproariously when Wilmot fell forward.
Winded, Wilmot gasped for breath, fighting the pain to his kidneys.
“I said, get up!” the German speaker ordered again.
This time, Wilmot moved quickly, getting to his feet as two of the Russians searched him for weapons or anything else he might have hidden. He couldn’t blame them; he’d done the same and worse to plenty of Russian prisoners.
