Kaputt (33 page)

This was the most dangerous moment of the great Russian crisis during the autumn of 1941. The army of Marshal Budenny, the Russian Murat, was slowly retiring toward the Don, leaving as a rear guard, units of Cossack cavalry and groups of those small armored cars that the Germans called
Panzerpferde
—armored horses. The
Panzerpferde
were nimble little cars, mostly driven by young Tartar workmen,
stakhanovtzi
and
udarniki
from the Soviet steelworks of the Don and the Volga. They used the tactics of Tartar cavalry; they turned up suddenly to worry the flanks, they disappeared into the bushes and thickets, hid in the folds of the soil and turned up suddenly again in the rear, drawing wide curves across the stubble fields and the meadows. They used light cavalry tactics, of which even Murat would have been proud. They circled the plain like horses in a riding school.

But even the
Panzerpferde
became less frequent. I asked myself where Budenny was, where the whiskered Budenny with his huge army of Cossack and Tartar cavalry was hiding. At Yambol, soon after we had crossed the Dniester, the peasants said, "Eh, Budenny is waiting for you behind the Bug." When we had crossed the Bug, the peasants said, "Eh, he is waiting for you behind the Dnieper." Now with a very knowing air they said, "Eh, Budenny is waiting for you behind the Don." Thus the Germans penetrated ever farther into the Ukrainian plain, like a knife, and the wound was already hurting—it was festering and turning into a sore. During the evenings in the villages where the column halted for the night, I listened to the raucous voices of the gramophones. Invariably, there was always a gramophone and a pile of records in the offices of the Soviet, or of the
kolkhoz,
or in the local
Univermag
shop. They were recordings of the usual factory,
kolkhoz
and
rabochii
club songs, and among them there was always the "Budenny March." I listened to the "Budenny March" and wondered, What the devil is Budenny doing? Where has the whiskered Budenny buried himself?

One day the Germans began to hunt for dogs. I supposed at first that because of numerous cases of rabies, General von Schobert had ordered the extermination of all dogs. Later I realized that there was some other reason behind it. As soon as the Germans entered a village, even before they looked for the Jews, they began a hunt for the dogs. Squads of SS men and of
Panzerjäger
ran through the streets firing their tommy guns and throwing hand grenades at those poor mongrels with yellow hair, red shiny eyes and bandy legs. They were routed out of the orchards and hedges and pursued relentlessly through the fields. The poor brutes fled to the woods, crouched in the ditches, in the hollows, behind orchard fences, or else they sought refuge in the houses, huddling in the corners, in the beds of the peasants, behind the ovens, under the benches. The German soldiers entered the houses, drove the dogs out of their hiding places and slew them with rifle butts.

The armored-car men were most fierce in these hunts,- the
Panzerjäger
seemed to have a personal grudge against the poor brutes. I asked the armored-car men, "Why?" The faces of the
Panzerjäger
darkened. "Ask the dogs," they replied, and turned their backs on me.

The old Cossacks sitting in the doors of their houses laughed in their beards and slapped their knees. "Ah, poor dogs," they said, "Ah,
bednii sobachki!"
and they laughed maliciously, as if they felt sorry not for the poor brutes, but for the poor Germans. Old women peered over the orchard fences, the girls who went down to the river balancing two pails on a yoke over their shoulders, the children who mercifully went to bury the murdered dogs in the fields—they all smiled in a way that was both sad and malicious. At night through the fields and the woods one heard scattered barking, whining howls, the dogs scraping and scratching in the orchards and under the houses in search of food, and German sentries shouting, "Who goes there?" in strange voices. One sensed that they were afraid of something terrifying and mysterious—that they were afraid of the dogs.

One morning I was at an artillery observation post, watching the attack of a Panzer division at close quarters. The detachments of heavy armored cars sheltered in the woods, waited for the order to attack. The morning was cold and clear, and I looked at the fields glistening with frost and at the sunflower forests yellow and black in the rising sun. The sun was like the sun described in the Third Book of Xenophon's
Anabasis
,- it rose from the rosy vapors on the skyline in front of us. It was really like a young god of the ancients, nude and rosy in the vast blue-green ocean of the sky; it rose lighting up the Doric columns of the
Piatiletka,
the columns of glass, concrete and steel, the Parthenon of the U.S.S.R. heavy industry. Suddenly, I saw the column of armored cars stealing out of the forest and spreading fanlike on the plain.

A few minutes after the beginning of the attack, General von Schobert arrived at the observation post. He searched the battlefield through his field glasses and smiled. The armored cars and the attacking parties marching in the furrows of the caterpillars seemed to be cut with a burin on the huge copper plate of the plain stretching to the southeast of Kiev; there was something of Dürer in that vast scene drawn with harsh precision, in those soldiers monstrously wrapped in camouflage nets, resembling ancient gladiators and ranged like allegorical figures along the margins of the print, in that open and vague perspective of trees, cars, guns, motors, men and horses variously placed and poised in the foreground along the slope descending from the observation post toward the Dnieper, farther away, and deepening and opening as the view became more distant; it also was in the men squatting behind the armored cars with their tommy guns cradled in their arms and in the Panzers scattered here and there among the high grass and the clusters of sunflowers. There was something of Dürer in the purely Gothic care for detail that at once caught the eye, as if the artist's burin had lingered for a moment and the hand had cut a deeper groove in the copper plate on the gaping jaws of a dead horse, on a wounded man crawling through the undergrowth, or over there, on a soldier leaning against a tree trunk, his hand held open above his forehead to shade his eyes against the glare of the sun. The raucous voices, the neighing, the occasional, sharp rifle shots, the harsh creaking of caterpillars seemed also to have been engraved by Dürer on the clear cold air of that autumn morning.

General von Schobert was smiling. The shadow of death was already hovering over him—an extremely light shadow like a spider-web; and no doubt he felt that shadow weighing on his brow. No doubt he knew that a few days later he would fall in the Kiev suburbs, that his death would have something of the whimsical Viennese grace that appeared in the rather frivolous elegance of his manner. No doubt he knew that he would die a few days later landing in his small plane, a "Stork" on the airport of newly occupied Kiev; that the wheels of his "Stork" gliding over the grass of the landing field would touch off a mine, and he would disappear among a cluster of red flowers in a sudden explosion, and only his blue linen handkerchief with his white embroidered initials would drop intact on the grass of the airport. General von Schobert was one of those old Bavarian noblemen to whom Vienna is but a loving nickname for Munich. There was something ancient and youthful, something old-fashioned in his sharp profile, in his ironical and sad smile, a kind of strange fanciful melancholy in his voice, when at Baltsiu in Bessarabia he said to me, "Alas, we are waging war against the white race," or in his voice when in Soroca, on the Dniester he said to me, "
Wir siegen unsere Toten
—We conquer our own dead." He meant that the last, the final laurels of the German victories would spell the death of the German people, that the German nation and all its victories, will win death as the only reward. That morning he watched the column of armored cars spreading out fanlike on the Kiev plain; on the margin of that Dürer engraving—
Wir siegen unsere Toten
was written in black letters.

The armored cars, supported by the attacking units, had already penetrated deeply into the deserted plain. After the first rifle shots a heavy silence had fallen on the rolling ground covered with stubble and grass withered by the first autumn frost; the Russians apparently had abandoned the battlefield, fleeing beyond the river; several flights of large birds took wing from the acacia groves, clouds of little gray birds that resembled sparrows rose and twittered over the meadows, their wings throwing off dull flashes in the flame of the rising sun; from a far-off pool two wild ducks took to the air, paddling with their slow wings. Suddenly a few black dots darted out of a forest in the distance, then more and still more; they moved quickly, disappeared in the bushes, turned up nearer and rushed rapidly toward the German Panzers. "
Die Hunde! Die Hunde!
—The dogs! The dogs!" cried the soldiers around us in terrified voices. A gay and ferocious barking came to us on the wind, the baying of hounds on the track of a fox.

Under the sudden onslaught of the dogs the Panzers began to rush about zigzagging and firing wildly. The attacking units back of the armored cars stopped, hesitated and scattered; they fled here and there across the plain as if in the throes of panic. The rattle of the machine guns was clear and light, like the tinkling of glass. The baying of the pack bit into the roar of the motors. Now and again came a faint voice smothered by the wind and in the widespread rustle of grass. "
Die Hunde! Die Hunde!"
Suddenly we heard the dull thud of an explosion,- then another, and another. We saw two, three, five Panzers blow up, the steel plates flashing within a tall fountain of earth.

"Ah, the dogs!" said General von Schobert passing a hand over his face. They were "anti-armored-car dogs" that had been trained by the Russians to look for food under the armored cars. Kept without food for a day or two, they were brought to the front line whenever an attack was impending. As soon as the German Panzers appeared out of the woods and spread out fanlike on the plain, the Russian soldiers shouted "
Pashol! Pashol!
—Off! Off!" and unleashed the famished pack. The dogs carrying cradles on their backs loaded with high explosives and with steel contact rods like the aerials of a radar set-up, ran quickly and hungrily to meet the armored cars, in search of food under the German Panzers.
"Die Hunde! Die Hunde!"
shouted the soldiers around us. General von Schobert, deathly pale, a sad smile on his bloodless lips, passed a hand over his face, then looked at me and said in a voice that was already dead, "Why? Why? Even the dogs!"

The German soldiers became daily more ferocious. The hunt for the dogs continued with a merciless rage, while the old Cossacks laughed and slapped their knees.
"Ah, bednii sobachki!—
Ah, poor dogs!" they said.

One night barking was heard over the black plain, and the anxious scratching around the fences of the orchards. "Who goes there?" shouted the German sentries in strange voices. The boys awakened, jumped out of their beds, opened the doors with extreme caution and called softly into the dark:
"Idi syuda! Idi syuda!
—Come here! Come here!"

One morning I said to the Sonderführer of Melitopol: "When you have killed them all, when there are no more dogs in Russia, Russian boys will squeeze themselves under your armored cars."

"Ach,
they are all of a breed," he replied. "All sons of dogs!" and he walked away spitting on the ground with great contempt.

"I like Russian dogs," said Westmann. "They should be fathers of brave Russian boys."

X. Summer Night

A
FTER
the endless winter night, after the cold clear spring, summer had come at last. The cool, frail, rainy Finnish summer had the smell and taste of green apples. The season for
krapu
was approaching and the first sweet crayfish of the Finnish rivers, the summer delicacy of the North, were already reddening the dishes. And the sun never set.

"Alas, that a Spaniard like myself should be doomed to travel as far as Finland to find the sun of Charles V!" said Count de Foxá gazing at the night sun blossoming on the windowsill of the horizon like a pot of geraniums. In the transparent night the girls of Helsinki strolled about in their green, red and yellow dresses, their faces white with powder, their hair molded by curling tongs and scented with Teo's Eau de Cologne, their foreheads shaded by paper hats bedecked with paper flowers bought at Stockmann's. They walked along the Esplanade in creaking paper shoes.

A thin smell of the sea came up from the end of the Esplanade. The faint shadows of the trees rested lightly on the smooth pale fronts of the buildings; they were extremely pale green shadows, as if the trees were made of glass; young, convalescent soldiers with bandaged heads, with arms in slings, with feet swollen by dressings, sat on the benches listening to the music played by the small orchestra of the Café Royal and watched the blue-paper sky being crumpled by the sea breeze along the edges of the roofs. The shop windows reflected the cold, metallic, ghostly light of the "white night" of the North on which the twittering of the birds seemed to cast a warm shadow. Winter was far away now; it was no more than a memory,- but something of the winter seemed still to be floating in the air, perhaps it was the white light resembling the reflection of snow, perhaps a recollection of dead snow that lingered in the tepid summer sky.

Country parties at Krankulla had begun in the villa of the Italian Minister, Vincenzo Cicconardi who was seated before the fire with his old dog, Rex, curled up at his feet and his mad valet standing stiffly, with wide-open eyes behind his chair. Cicconardi spoke Neapolitan with a strong Berlin accent—it was his idea of speaking German—to the German Minister von Blücher. He twisted his mouth overshadowed by a huge Bourbon nose, and joined his hands as if he were praying. I liked Cicconardi because of the clash between his Neapolitan indifference and irony, and the aspiration for power and glory that the odd shape and the exaggerated size of his skull, his forehead, his jaws and his nose seemed to express. Facing him, von Blücher, long, thin, stoop shouldered, his gray hair cropped very closely, his pale bluish face creased by thin wrinkles, listened, and monotonously repeated,
"Ja, ja, ja!"
From time to time Cicconardi glanced through the window at his guests who were walking through the wood in the rain and at the violet hat of Madame Blücher that clashed with the green of the foliage as a Renoir purple might clash with one of Manet's green landscapes.