The Norwegian rolled himself a smoke with old newspaper and coarse Russian makhorka. He offered Sack the tobacco pouch. Sack shook his head. “I never got the habit.”
“Better for you,” the Norwegian answered. He lit his own cigarette—no easy feat in the rain—and took a deep drag. “I like it, though.”
“However you wish.” Reluctantly, Sack started back toward the Trubezh River. Still puffing happily, the Norwegian followed. They hit the dirt whenever an incoming round sounded as if it might be close, but otherwise gave the bombardment only small heed.
Then a shell landed almost right on top of them, so suddenly they had no time to duck. The blast left Sack half deafened, and also with the feeling someone about the size of God had tried to pull his lungs out through his nose. Otherwise, though, he wasn’t hurt. He looked around to make sure his new friend had also come through all right.
His stomach lurched. Only a burial party needed to worry about the Norwegian now, and they’d have to spoon him into a jar if they intended to sent his remains home. It was worse than butchery; it was annihilation. The only good thing about it was that the Norwegian couldn’t have known what hit him.
Dazed and sickened, Sack staggered on. This wasn’t how he’d pictured war when he first donned the German uniform. It wasn’t so much that he hadn’t imagined the death and injury that went with combat. He had, as well as one can without the actual experience. What he hadn’t imagined was the horror and terror and dread they left in their wake, nor the filth and exhaustion of long combat, nor, most of all, that Germany, having pushed her frontier east almost two thousand kilometers, would ever see the line begin to shift west once more.
Trucks rumbled past him, heading away from the Trubezh. One of them stopped. Its driver was one of the Scandinavians with whom Sack had eaten. He poked his head out the window and said in English, “How goes your friend? And where is Olaf?”
“My friend will make it, I think,” Sack answered, also in English. “Olaf—” He grimaced, turned. “Back there, a shell—” Speaking of death in a foreign language helped distance him from it, make it feel unreal, as if it could not possibly touch him.
“Shit,” the driver said, and then, as if English did not satisfy him, he spoke several sharp sentences in Swedish or whatever his native tongue was. After he spat into the mud, he said, “You’d better climb inside. We’re pulling back toward the Dnieper.”
“Already?” Sack said, dismayed.
The driver only answered, “Ja. That is how my orders are.”
The men in the back of the truck helped pull the lance-corporal aboard. He sat on somebody’s lap the whole way. He was not the only one packed in like that, either, and the truck grew more crowded the further west it went. The compartment stank of unwashed men, mud, and damp.
The Scandinavians told different stories. Some thought the Reds had forced the line of the Trubezh in large numbers, while others claimed the enemy was sweeping down from the north and threatening to cut off all the German forces still on this side of the Dnieper. Whichever was true—if either was—it meant another retreat.
“When will it end?” asked the medical officer who had worked on Gustav Pfeil. No one answered him. The silence was in itself an answer of sorts, but not one to ease Sack’s foreboding.
It was indeed another retreat. Over the rear gate of the truck, Sack saw panzers, mechanized infantry fighting vehicles, and self-propelled guns rumbling westward crosscountry, heading no doubt for the still intact bridges (he hoped they were still intact, at any rate) and the ferry links between the eastern bank of the Dnieper and Kiev on the far shore.
He’d passed through Kiev in the summer of ’42, on his way to the front. German arms had still been winning victories then. He remembered the blue-and-gold Ukrainian flags everywhere in the city. He remembered the smiling girls who’d greeted and fed him at the soldiers’ canteen across from the old Intourist Hotel on Vladimirskaya Street, some of them in the elaborately embroidered blouses, skirts, and headdresses of native Ukrainian fashion, others wearing dresses that had been the very latest styles in Berlin in the early thirties.
He wondered how many flags would be flying now, how many girls would want to have anything to do with soldiers who might have to pull out of their city at any minute. Not many, he suspected. Victory had a thousand fathers; defeat was always an orphan.
Just getting to Kiev looked like more of an adventure than he’d ever wanted. A shell hit the truck right behind his in the convoy, turned it into a fireball in an instant. He looked down at the tattered knees of his trousers, not wanting to watch his comrades burn. It could have been he as easily as they, and he knew it. Had the trucks not kept the ordained fifty meters’ separation even in adversity and retreat, it could easily have been he and they.
One of the Scandinavians, a big burly Dane, pulled out a mouth organ and started playing American country songs. Sack was not the only one to smile when he heard them. Their incongruity here on a plain vaster than any in the United States somehow brought home the absurdity of war.
After jounces and jolts and halts where everyone scrambled out to put a shoulder to a wheel to get the truck out of the mud, it pulled to a stop not far from the Dnieper. “All out,” the driver called over the intercom. “I’m going back for another load.”
“Good luck to you,” Sack called as the driver put the truck back into gear. The Scandinavian waved to him and drove off. He never saw the fellow again.
If the bank of the Trubezh had been crowded, that of the Dnieper fairly swarmed with men. Panzers and other fighting vehicles still crossed over into Kiev by way of the motor bridges still standing, but that way was closed to mere infantry, who might clog traffic and impede the flow of the precious armor. Military police directed footsoldiers toward the boats boarding by the river.
The two biggest, the Yevgeny Vuchetich and the Sovietskaya Rossiya, were four-deck Dnieper excursion boats, seized when the Germans first took Kiev more than two years before. Along with a host of smaller craft, now they ferried German soldiers back to guard the city against recapture by the Reds.
The big boats each took aboard hundreds, maybe a thousand or more at a time. The smaller vessels added dozens, more likely hundreds, to that total. But the riverbank remained packed as men from the crumbling German positions east of the Dnieper streamed back to try to hold the line west of the river.
Such a concentration of men, unfortunately, also offered a delicious target for planes painted with the red star. Antiaircraft batteries fired furiously at the raiders, but bold pilots bored through to strike even so. The casualties were horrendous, but Germans still kept pressing down toward the bank. As at the Trubezh, the only alternative was to stand and fight, and that seemed a worse bet than trying to escape.
A ground-attack plane roared low overhead, firing cannon and rockets into the crowd of men. Just above Sack, it also let go with its chaff cartridges. But instead of strips of aluminized foil to baffle radar, the cartridges were filled with leaflets. They fluttered down on the Germans like warnings of doom from the heavens themselves.
Sack snatched one out of the air almost in front of his own nose. He read it quickly, before the cheap paper it was printed on turned soggy in the rain. THERE’S MONEY IN WAR … FOR SOME, the headline read. Sack snorted. “Not for me,” he said aloud. He collected 108 Deutschemarks a month, including his combat pay bonus.
He read on: For others, this war can only mean death and mutilation. Maybe you think Berlin is fighting for the European values your propaganda so loudly proclaims. The hard fact is that you are carrying out Berlin’s vicious orders, and those of Mercedes, Siemens, I.G. Farben, and other capitalists who drink your blood to fatten their dividend checks. Where will that get you? Your armies are marked down for defeat; all your sufferings are futile. Your blood is worth marks on the stock exchange—but what cost to your folks at home?
&nbs
p; Sack’s folks had been bombed out of their homes a few weeks before. With rising anger, he finished the leaflet: We have common enemies. Every member of the People’s Liberation Army hereby guarantees: if you lay down your arms, you will not be harmed or humiliated. Your personal belongings will not be touched. You will receive any medical treatment you need. You will surely get home. Come on over, soldier. Just put down your weapon and say—
Growling, Sack crumpled the paper and stuffed it into his pocket. He didn’t care how the Reds said “surrender.” But one of the other panzergrenadiers gave him a half-curious, half-suspicious look. “Why are you keeping that Scheisse?” the fellow asked.
“Scheisse is right,” Sack answered. “How many better arsewipes have you seen lately?”
“None around here,” the other fellow admitted. “Last time I dumped, I scraped my backside raw with dry grass.”
The attack run of another Red fighter-bomber ended abruptly when a Gepard self-propelled antiaircraft cannon shot off its left wing. The plane slammed into the Dnieper with a tremendous splash. The Germans on the bank and on the boats cheered like wild men.
Little by little, Sack drew nearer the concrete stairway that led down to the embarkation point. As he filed down to the river, he fearfully watched the heavens—hemmed in as he was, he couldn’t hope even to duck if shells or rockets started coming in or if another plane strafed the landing. He saw other faces also turned up to the rain. Knowing comrades shared his fright made it easier to bear.
Down by the river, military police with submachine guns kept the troopers boarding the boats in order. When a man in camouflage gear tried to shove his way onto an already crowded boat, they did not argue with him. One of them fired a short burst from point-blank range, then rolled the corpse into the Dnieper with the toe of his boot. After that, the line stayed orderly.
“This way! This way! This way!” a big fellow with a metal gorget shouted. Sack was among those whom he directed “this way”: aboard the Yevgeny Vuchetich. The men packed the boat’s four decks so tight no one had room to sit down. Combat engineers had mounted a 20-millimeter antiaircraft gun at the bow and another on the third deck at the stern, but the lance-corporal doubted their crews had room to serve them.
The old boat’s overloaded diesel roared flatulently to life. Slowly, so slowly, it pulled away from the riverbank. The Sovietskaya Rossiya was a couple of hundred meters ahead. It had drawn close to the colonnaded mass of the river station when a bomb or a big rocket struck it amidships.
The excursion vessel seemed to bulge outward, then broke apart and sank like a stone. Hundreds of soldiers must have gone down with it. More hundreds thrashed in the chilly water. Many of them quickly sank, weighted down by their gear.
The Yevgeny Vuchetich slowed to throw lines to survivors and pull aboard those they could. Sack stared in horror as men drowned within easy reach of a line because they were too stunned to reach out and grab it. The boat did not save as many as it might have under other, more peaceful, circumstances, both because it was already overloaded itself and because stopping would have left it even more vulnerable to an attack like the one that had sunk its sister.
At the Pochtovaya Ploshchad river station, more military police lined the docks. Like their fellows on the east bank, they screamed, “This way! This way! This way!” As he followed their pointing arms into the station, Sack wondered if they knew how to say anything else.
Milling men in grimy uniforms filled the main hall. Still more men in dog collars profanely urged them on their way. One of the herd, Sack shambled sheeplike past wall panels depicting big blond men in chain mail (Varangians, he supposed), men with guns under red and gold hammer-and-sickle banners entering Kiev in triumph, and factories pouring smoke into the sky under the same Soviet emblem. The lance-corporal deliberately looked away from those. He had seen all the red flags he ever cared to look at.
The German military police did know how to say more than “This way!”—the ones at the rear of the station were shouting, “To the subway station! To the subway station!” That was an order Sack obeyed gladly; the farther underground he went, the safer he felt from Red air attacks.
More crowds of wet, stinking, dazed soldiers jammed the platform. When he’d been here last, the station had been immaculate. It was a long way from immaculate now. The trains did not run on time, either. Advancing as much from the pressure of the men behind him as by his own will, Sack moved toward the track.
After a longish while, he boarded a train. It rumbled through the darkness of the tunnel, then came to a jerky stop at Kreshchatik Station, only two stops south of Pochtovaya Ploshchad. The few Ukrainian flags that draped the inside of the station were faded and stained; he’d have guessed they were the identical banners he’d seen when he came through Kiev heading east to the front. Now he was back, and the front with him.
When he walked outside into the rain, he met only silence. He looked around in confusion, then turned to the soldier nearest him and said, “Where the devil are the boys in the dog-collars? I figured they’d be screaming at us here, same as everywhere else.”
“Do you miss them so badly, then?” the other fellow asked, tugging at the straps of his pack. He and Sack laughed. They both knew the answer to that.
The lance-corporal started to say something more, but a public address system beat him to the punch and outshouted him to boot: “German soldiers detraining at Kreshchatik Station, report to Dynamo Stadium in Central Recreation Park. The stadium is north of the station. Signboards will direct you. German soldiers detraining at Kreshchatik Station—”
The recorded announcement ran through again, then shut off. Sack turned to the other soldier. “There, you see what they’ve done? They’ve gone and automated the bastards.”
Sure enough, signs with arrows pointed the way up Zankovetskaya Street. Sack and his new companion, whose name, he learned, was Bruno Scheurl, ambled toward the park with other weary men coming up out of the subway.
He glanced over at the Moskva Hotel, which had taken shell damage when the Germans forced their way into Kiev. It looked as good as new now, all the rubble cleared away, all the glass in place. He wondered how long that would last. If Germany held the line of the Dnieper, it might survive intact a while longer. If not—if not, the hotel would be the least of his worries.
The Palace of Culture was similarly pristine; the Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts on Kirov Street had not been damaged when Kiev fell. Across Kirov Street from the museum lay Central Recreation Park. The trees, green and leafy when Sack last saw them, now were skeletons reaching bony branches up to the dripping sky. The grass in the park lay in dead, yellowish-white clumps.
“Ugly place,” Scheurl remarked.
“It’s nice in summer,” Sack said. “But I’m damned if I know how even Russians—excuse me, Ukrainians—live through winter hereabouts, especially when winter seems to run about eight months out of the year.”
Near the entrance to Dynamo Stadium stood a granite monument more than twice the height of a man. In low relief, it showed four stalwart-looking men in the short pants and knee socks of footballers. A nearby plaque told who they were, but its Cyrillic letters meant nothing to Sack. He jerked a thumb at it, asked, “Can you read what it says?”
“Maybe. I did some Russian in school.” Scheurl studied the plaque, then complained, “Ukrainians spell funny. I think it says these fellows were part of a team of Russian prisoners who beat a crack Luftwaffe team in an exhibition match during the last war—and got executed for it. The death match, they call it.”
“Ha!” Sack said. “I wonder what really happened.”
Shrugging, Scheurl headed into the stadium. Sack followed. Signs of all sorts in the stands and on the football field directed soldiers to their units. The rows of colorful seats were rapidly filling with field-gray. Military policemen served as ushers and guides. “What unit?” one of
them asked Sack.
“Forty-First Panzergrenadiers, second regiment,” the lance-corporal answered.
The fellow with the gorget glanced down at a hastily printed chart. “Section 29, about halfway up. Haven’t seen many from your division yet.”
Sack believed him. Too many comrades hadn’t made it back over the Trubezh, let alone the Dnieper. He and Scheurl parted company, one of a thousand partings with brief-met friends he’d made since he came east.
The people who made the signs hadn’t left a division’s worth of room for the Forty-First Panzergrenadiers. Maybe they knew what they were doing; only a company’s worth of men rattled around in the area, so many dirty peas in a pod too big for them. Sack found a couple of real friends here, though, men he’d fought beside for more than a year. They all looked as worn and battered as he felt. He asked after others he did not see. Most of the time, only shrugs answered him; once or twice, he got a grim look and a thumb’s-down.
Somebody asked him in turn about Gustav Pfeil. “He took a leg wound, not too bad,” he said. “I got him to a doctor. He should be all right, unless”—he found himself echoing the Danish medical officer—“the field hospital gets overrun.”
“He may be luckier than all of us,” somebody else said. “If he does make it, they’ll fly him all the way back to Germany.” Everyone in earshot sighed. Germany seemed more a beautiful memory than a real place that still existed. Reality—mud and blood and rain and fear—left scant room for beautiful memories.
Sack nervously looked around at the ever-growing crowd. “If they land a salvo of rockets in this place, they’ll kill thousands,” he said.
“We’ve got our own rocket batteries in the trees east of here, on the far side of the square,” one of the other panzergrenadiers assured him. “They’ve knocked down everything the Reds have thrown so far.”
Sack nodded and tried not to think about the potentially ominous ring of those last two words. “I notice there aren’t a whole lot of vehicle crews here,” he said. “Did the damned Asiatics take out that many panzers and combat vehicles?”
We Install Page 5
