Chapter Text
I. The Way to Dusty Death
7. November
Second Battle of El Alamein
West of Mersa Matruh
1:30 p.m.
The 21st Panzer Division had narrowly escaped being encircled by the British 7th Armoured and were now in full retreat, trying to reach the Halfaya Pass. No one was saying the actual word “flee”, but that is in fact what they were doing, with the British and New Zealanders under Montgomery in hot pursuit.
Corporal Friedrich Arnheiter, of the 3rd Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, was among the DAK troops racing for the pass that day. He had gotten separated from the rest of his company, but had managed to climb aboard a communications truck belonging to another company of 3rd Recon. Clinging to the inside of the swaying vehicle, he kept peering out of the back, searching for any of his own comrades in Kompanie 4, but especially the company commander, Hauptmann Dietrich, whom he had not seen at all since some time the day before when their whole company had gotten scattered by a sudden attack. Finding the captain—or anyone else—was probably impossible, yet he still had hope. The approach to Halfaya Pass was a bottleneck which would funnel together all of the various German and Italian units trying to reach it. He was exhausted, but he couldn’t bring himself to rest as long as he might by some miracle be able to spot their own unit markings on any of the disordered mass of armored vehicles limping away from the chaos at El Alamein.
2:40 p.m.
By the middle of the afternoon, the company clerk’s hope was nearly dashed. In a few more hours it would be sunset, and with the fading light, he would have no way to see if any of the other vehicles were of his own company. His eyes were stinging from the dust and exhaustion, so he almost missed seeing a broken-down vehicle off to his right as the radio truck passed it. The unit marks were not familiar, but… then his heart leaped as he saw the tall officer limping wearily away from the vehicle. That man—his own captain—he would recognize anywhere on earth. He tried to shout, but he could have shouted until the Day of Judgment and no one inside, much less outside, the radio truck would hear him over the sounds of the engine, nearby gunfire, exploding shells, and flapping canvas overhead. Scrambling to his feet, Arnheiter drew his sidearm and fired into the air, and the officer looked up. It was too late; the truck was leaving Hans Dietrich in its wake, alone and on foot.
“Halt!” the fair-haired corporal shouted as he charged forward to where the driver sat. “Stop the truck! That’s my captain out there!”
The driver shook his head. “Can’t! They’ll catch us! He can’t make it anyway!”
Arnheiter, normally an unassuming young man, had read about berserkers before, in old stories about the days of the bearded Northmen in their dragon-prowed longships, but he had never known how it felt to be one—until now. Before he even knew what he was doing, pulse roaring in his ears, he was holding the pistol to the driver’s head. “You miserable coward! Stop the truck! We don’t abandon our own officers—what do you think we are?! You have three seconds: one, two…”
The truck stopped, as the driver realized that the young maniac holding the pistol meant exactly what he said. “He can’t make it, he can’t… you’re giving us up to the Engländer…bis’ du verrückt?”he shouted in a Rhineland accent, bordering on panic.
Unmoved, Arnheiter’s hold on the pistol didn’t waver. “My captain holds his school’s record for the hundred meters… he’ll make it. And so will we.”
A sound from the rear of the truck several seconds later caused Arnheiter to glance long enough to see that Hauptmann Dietrich was scrambling up into the rear opening. He holstered the pistol, and ran back to give the tall officer a hand. The truck lurched into motion so abruptly that he nearly fell over from the inertia, and Dietrich would have fallen to the ground outside if he had not seized Arnheiter’s outstretched hand and forearm. “Sehr vielen Dank,” Dietrich said finally, breathing hard, as he hauled himself inside and his clerk handed over his canteen of water without a word. “What made them stop the truck?”
Arnheiter coughed, suddenly realizing to his dismay that just minutes earlier, he had actually been holding a sergeant at gunpoint. “Don’t ask, mein Herr, bitte…you don’t want to know.” I will be in so much trouble—that is, if I’m still alive to be court-martialed sometime next week when we stop running.
Dietrich gave the younger man an odd look, but decided not to pursue that. There would be time later; he had other concerns now. “Where are the others? Kunzler, Bergmann…?”
The clerk shook his head, at a loss. “Keine Idee, Herr Hauptmann. I have spent the entire day with these men from Kompanie 1. I have been looking for our men, but the only one I have found is yourself, sir.”
A sudden fusillade of gunfire put an end to their conversation. Verdammt nochmal! thought Arnheiter with a sudden fury. You’re not even going to give me three minutes to make a report, are you? he swore silently at the pursuing British unit which was rapidly gaining on them, their Browning machine gun roaring. Perhaps that coward of a sergeant was right…they may catch us after all. He struggled to his feet and grabbed the machine gun that Dietrich passed to him, and fired back at the armed British Land Rover, attempting to hit the driver or at least blow out one of the forward tires. Behind him and to his left, Dietrich had braced himself against the side of the swaying truck and was starting to fire as well.
Arnheiter moved forward a step or two to get a better shot, and was just squeezing the trigger when bursts of white-hot pain exploded across his legs, he felt himself falling, and he knew nothing more.
Smoke pouring from under the hood, the British Land Rover ceased fire and veered off, but in the back of Kompanie 1’s comm truck, Dietrich had no attention to spare for them. Sick at heart, he saw only the body of his loyal clerk, his intrepid driver, lying motionless in the sand behind them as the truck rumbled away. There was nothing to be done for poor Arnheiter now; even if he ordered the driver to stop, even if they were not being pursued by the enemy, they were already more than a mile away. It was too late. Too little, too late, he said quietly, realizing only then that his breeches were splashed with blood not his own.
<<<<<>>>>>
4:45 p.m.
The sun was low in the afternoon sky when corpsman Bill Jones started to walk back to the ambulance after surveying the now-silent battleground. They were headed westward, following in the wake of the 7th Armoured Division, searching for the wounded. He paused and turned back, frowning. Had he heard something, or was it just the wind? He looked again—there. A lone man in a German uniform was lying face down in the sand, nearly in the path where dozens of vehicles had passed by. Jones had almost not seen him at all. Loping over to the man, he saw that both of the young German’s trouser legs were soaked with blood, but he knelt on the ground to check for a pulse anyway. To his surprise, the soldier’s heart was beating, and he stirred a little when the corpsman turned him face up. “Blimey!” exclaimed Jones. “’E ain’t gone after all… Alfie! Over ‘ere!” he shouted. “Bring a stretcher and tourniquets.”
<<<<<>>>>>
As twilight faded into night, the stars came out; the winter night sky was as glorious as ever, but Dietrich saw none of its beauty. He stared out into the darkness as they rolled across the desert, his vision blurred by unshed tears.
8:40 p.m.
At the other side of Halfaya Pass, the scattered sections of 21st Panzer Division were attempting to collect themselves in some kind of order and regroup to withstand the 8th Army’s next attack. Little by little, companies and battalions were slowly assembling together as the stragglers who had escaped from Montgomery’s devastating onslaughts arrived at the rendezvous point.
“Fifty-two men killed or missing,” said Lieutenant Bergmann, shaking his head gloomily. “In the last three weeks. That’s forty percent of the company, mein Herr…”
“Fifty-three,” Dietrich replied quietly. He and his three lieutenants—no, only two now—were seated on the ground around a small fire, along with Kompanie Dietrich’s first sergeant Georg Kunzler, sharing among them the meager provisions that could be scraped together. It was typical of Dietrich’s company that he had ordered that any food be given to the men first, so the officers were making do as best they could.
Kunzler took in the commanding officer’s grim tone and demeanor, and suddenly became aware there was one man whom he had not seen since the day before— Arnheiter, their indefatigable company clerk. Normally, he would be moving briskly about just as he had done following the battles at Alam el Halfa, taking an on-the-spot roll call and making note of all those who needed medical attention and what supplies were needed. Then, as Kunzler looked again, in the firelight he could see that his captain’s breeches were heavily spattered with blood although he was himself unwounded. That’s how he knows… the boy must have been killed right in front of him. “Arnheiter,” he said with a heavy sigh. It wasn’t a question.
Dietrich’s dark eyes held an unreadable expression. “Ja. Genau das.” He looked as though he didn’t want to say anything more, but a moment later he added, “He was rescuing me.” As he looked down at his own forearm where Arnheiter had seized hold of him to help him into the comm truck, he noticed in a strangely detached way that one of his sleeve buttons had come off at some point.
Emil Bergmann nodded. “Natürlich.” With pride in their men, he gestured around them at the surviving members of their company, gathered in small groups around fires here and there, attempting to eat and rest as best they could. Their medic, Paul Schäfer, was tending one man after another as he moved around the field. “All of them would do the same, mein Herr, every one—but he more than most…”
“He loved you, you know.” Kunzler spoke up, his throat tight. He remembered well the anxious, shy youth who had arrived in their company thirteen months earlier. “He loved you as the apostles loved our Lord. Nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for you, mein Herr.” And I know that boy—he would not have regretted it for an instant even if he had known it was his last act on earth.
None of the four around that fire spoke.
Some minutes later, Feldwebel Georg Kunzler rose to his feet and stepped up onto a nearby rock where he could be seen and heard by the assembled men around them. He pulled a folded paper from his pocket. “These are the men who are fallen in battle today, or captured, or missing.” By announcing their names in the company, it allowed the men to honor their dead as well as be aware of whose duties needed to be picked up by others. As usual, he read off their names in alphabetical order. “Obersoldat Ernst Altenbach, Obergefreiter Friedrich Arnheiter, Soldat Peter Braun, Gefreiter Helmut Engelmann, Obergefreiter Konrad Genscher…”
“Genscher and Braun weren’t killed,” a voice called out from somewhere in the dark. “I saw them and a few others being taken away by die Engländer.”
“Danke.” There’s precious little good news this night, thought Kunzler, but we’ll take what good news we can get… He went on. “Gefreiter August Krähenbuhl, Obersoldat Walter Reinke, Feldwebel Richard Teichmann…”
When he reached the end of the list of the eleven men who were new casualties, Kunzler stepped down from the rock he was standing on. A tall lanky man with dark hair and a neatly trimmed moustache—the first sergeant recognized him as Rudolf Hartmann the tanker, and a good friend of both Genscher and Arnheiter—rose to his feet and began to sing in a baritone voice. His lone voice was joined by seventy others as he began the second half of the old German colonial song “Heia Safari.”
…Und saßen wir am Feuer
Des Nachts wohl vor dem Zelt,
Lag wie in stiller Feier,
Um uns die nächt'ge Welt.
Und über dunkle Hänge,
Tönt es wie ferne Klänge
Von Trägern und Askari:
Heia, heia Safari!
Tret' ich die letzte Reise,
Die große Fahrt einst an,
Auf, singt mir diese Weise
Statt Trauerlieder dann,
Daß meinem Jägerohre
Dort vor dem Himmelstore
Es klingt wie ein Halali:
Heia, heia Safari![1]
Hartmann’s voice failed him at the last, but by then the assembled voices of the whole company supported him and carried the song to its end.
Dietrich rose from the stone he was sitting on and made his way through the company as they prepared to secure the makeshift camp and attempt to rest for the night. He knew that the sight of him moving among them would encourage the men and give them solace even in this time of defeat. Although his outward bearing was calm and poised, inwardly he was in turmoil.
That day it had struck him, as clearly and sharply as a bolt of lightning, that in fact there was no hope of victory for them anymore or even survival, neither for their division nor the entire Afrika Korps. The only possible outcome for the campaign in Africa, now that the Americans had landed in force in Tunisia a couple of days earlier, was a long and fruitless retreat. Word had arrived from Rome that no further help would come from Italy—neither supplies nor ammunition, nor the fuel needed to drive the once-mighty Panzers across the desert sands. He could no longer do anything to protect his men, or to save them from being destroyed one by one, abandoned to their fate. There is nothing to be done. In the end it is the same; no matter how brave or resourceful my men are, they will be sacrificed to no purpose, feeding the cruel Minotaur that awaits us all.
9:25 p.m.
Konrad Genscher lay in one of the post-operative beds, conscious now, and with the pain of his wounded shoulder dulled by morphine. It was not the first time he’d been in a field hospital—but certainly the first time he’d been in a British one. For me, it seems, the war is over. He did not relish the idea of being a prisoner of war, but from what he’d heard about how the French in North Africa treated their prisoners, he counted himself fortunate to have fallen into the hands of the English instead. He had taken a bullet in the front of his left shoulder, which had penetrated far enough to fracture the shoulder blade. It felt as though the surgeons had used a steam shovel to remove the bullet. He’d gotten an injection of penicillin and the wound was packed in gauze. All things considered, his case could have been far worse.
As Genscher lay there half-awake, trying to think of what he would write to his parents in Marienstadt, among all the other voices around him groaning or swearing as they came out of the anesthesia, he heard one familiar voice. It was the same voice he’d heard in the other half of his tent every morning and every night for over a year. “Papa, help me… Papa, I can’t get up…” said his roommate Friedrich Arnheiter’s tenor voice, clearly audible over the general noise of the post-op tent. At least that’s who it sounded like.
The fuzziness of the morphine started to fade as Konrad struggled to sit up in spite of the nausea he felt from the anesthetic wearing off. “Fritz, is that you? It’s me, Konrad, I’m over here…” Papa? he wondered, bewildered at what his roommate was saying. His father died years ago… what’s he thinking of?
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said the British corpsman, who materialized out of nowhere and seized Genscher’s sound arm as he tried to get out of the bed. “You’re not getting up, lad, you’ll fall flat on your face.” A nearby nurse came over to translate.
Genscher turned to him, suddenly angry. “My best friend is over there, and he’s terrified. He doesn’t know where he is. You can help me, or I will crawl over there on my knees and one hand.” He shook his arm free, determined, and slid his legs off the bed as the nurse repeated his words in English.
“Stone the crows!” exclaimed the corpsman, shaking his head. “Half a tick, then…” He left the ward and came back with a wheelchair. “You fall and muck up that shoulder, the surgeons’ll have my guts for garters.” The English nurse declined to even try translating that into her rusty college German.
“Papa,” Arnheiter groaned again, shifting position to try to ease the intense pain in his legs. “Papa, I need you… help me.”
“I’m sorry, my boy,” said the other corpsman approaching the bed, a young man about their own age with short dark hair and glasses who looked like a teacher. His voice was calm and soothing, with an unusual accent—sounding as fluent in the language as if he’d spoken it all his life, but with an accent Genscher couldn’t recognize. He must have grown up outside of Germany somewhere. “Your papa isn’t here. We’ll help you if we can.”
The young blond soldier finally looked up, “But…he was right there with me, hunting—we were both shooting…” Then his blue eyes grew wide with alarm, as he recognized the last voice he’d heard—the last thing he remembered. “No… it wasn’t Papa… it was Hauptmann Dietrich!” he exclaimed, seeing Konrad Genscher being wheeled toward him. “Konrad, I found Herr Hauptmann… ach Gott, it hurts…”
“I’m right here,” said Konrad, resolving not to let his expression react to what he saw as he came next to Arnheiter’s bed. Oh Fritz, I thank God you’re alive, but… how do I tell you this? Aloud he said, “What hurts? The nurse is over there, she can help maybe.”
“Das Knie,” his roommate groaned, “das Knie…”
Konrad Genscher was now at a complete loss, as he saw his friend’s bandaged left thigh, where blood had seeped slowly through the dressing. How can that be? His left knee isn’t wounded, and his right knee isn’t there. He reached to grip his friend’s hand firmly with his own right hand, as his left arm was immobilized in plaster. “Your knee?” he repeated, not knowing what else to say and exchanging worried glances with the corpsman.
“Ja, das rechte Knie…” said Arnheiter, pushing himself up with his left arm as if he meant to show them where it hurt. He began to reach for the site of the pain and then stopped, staring at his own legs in complete shock. As Genscher had already seen, the clerk’s right leg was amputated several inches above his knee. His moving about had disarranged the sheets; what was left of his right thigh, also firmly bandaged, was exposed to view. He said nothing more; shocked beyond words, he slowly sank back into the pillow with the help of the corpsman.
<<<<<>>>>>
It was not unlike being frozen, or perhaps electrocuted—no words would come to his mind, or even coherent thoughts. The last thing Arnheiter could clearly remember was that their reconnaissance company had gotten scattered as vehicles failed, were destroyed, or ran out of fuel, and his sole concern for the last hours had been trying to find the rest of their men. What had happened to him? Utterly bewildered, he had not the slightest idea how he had come here, or even where ‘here’ was. The only thing he could remember, and that dimly, was that he had found Hauptmann Dietrich after hours of anxious searching.
After some time, he heard a low murmuring sound, or rather a voice—familiar and comforting although he didn’t know what the words meant. He looked for the familiar voice, and then realized that Konrad—dear, good old Konrad—was still sitting by his side, gripping his hand with his one uninjured hand, and his well-worn black rosary beads in the fingers of his other hand. He was murmuring the Latin prayers he had said every night and morning for the year and more they had known one another. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen… Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, …” said his Bavarian friend and roommate, eyes closed, and with tears on his dark lashes.
“Forgive me, Konrad,” Arnheiter finally said, sounding even to himself as if he were speaking from a great distance or the bottom of a deep well. At that moment, it seemed as if his voice, his mind, and his body—or what was left of it—weren’t quite connected to each other. “I didn’t even notice that you’re wounded, too…”
“Gott sei Dank’ im Himmel,” breathed Konrad in gratitude. “Talk to me, Fritz, don’t just stare like that…” For a terrifying fifteen minutes, his friend had said absolutely nothing, lying there unmoving as if he had been turned to stone by some evil sorcerer’s spell.
“Your arm…”
“Not as bad as it looks. I was shot, here…” he indicated his left shoulder where the bullet wound was. “But it broke the shoulder bone, too.” His upper arm and upper torso was encased in plaster, with an opening over the front of his shoulder for cleaning the wound. “They say it will be all right in time.”
“Where were you?” Arnheiter was still trying to put the pieces together. “Did you see…? I don’t know what happened … I can’t remember…ich weiß nicht wie…”
The nurse came back to the two men from Kompanie 4, and spoke to Arnheiter directly. “This is a British field hospital. One of our medical units brought you in a few hours ago. What they told us was that they found you, badly wounded but still alive. From the location of the wounds in your legs, they guessed that you were standing in an open truck when you were shot,” she explained quietly, reaching to count the fair-haired corporal’s pulse in his wrist. “We did all that we could. The wound in your left leg should heal well enough, but the right one…I’m sorry. The knee joint was shattered. There was nothing else to be done.”
“So ist das Leben,” Arnheiter said, dazed from the shock of finding himself not only a cripple, but in the enemy’s hands as well. If we are all prisoners, then… All at once, he was seized with an awful thought, realizing that his first duty as company clerk, as far as he was concerned, still remained undone. “Ach, Gott… Where is Herr Hauptmann?” A wave of panic washed over him, as he realized that Hauptmann Dietrich could be out there anywhere, in any kind of trouble one could imagine, and he himself was utterly helpless either to search for the captain, or to help him even if he could find him. He couldn’t even get up from the bed he was confined to.
“Ich habe keine Idee,” said Genscher gravely. “No idea. When they brought me in, while I was waiting my turn with the surgeon, I asked everyone here, and described Hauptmann Dietrich to all the doctors and nurses, and told them his name. No one has seen any officer of his description. Do you know his service number? I don’t.”
“Of course I do. And yours, and Bergmann’s, and everyone else’s. It’s my job to know…” Suddenly, to his horror, he realized that those numbers, which he had known by heart for months, had completely vanished from his recollection. He wasn’t sure if he even remembered his own.
Then the nurse shook her head, and moved to wheel Konrad’s chair away. “You’re becoming too agitated. Both of you need to rest. You’re going to be moved into the ward, to make room for men who are coming out of surgery next.”
Genscher looked up at her, and at the doctor who was just entering the post-surgical area. “Please place us together, Herr Doktor…” He was not too proud to beg for that.
The doctor nodded. “I think that can be arranged.”
Completely unaware that he was being mourned among the many dead, Friedrich Arnheiter lay quietly in his cot in the field hospital. One thing at least was familiar; a few feet away in the next bed, he could hear Konrad Genscher snoring softly.
The most recent dose of morphine dulled both the pain of his wounds and his fears about what sort of future might await him, if in fact there were any future for him at all.
The nightly sign-off of Soldatensender Belgrade with the customary playing of “Lili Marleen” was a comfort to the wounded young soldier.
At the same time, it consoled his grieving comrades miles away in their makeshift bivouac, where someone had tuned in one of the vehicle radios, a minute or so late:
... Unsere beide Schatten
Sah'n wie einer aus,
Daß wir so lieb uns hatten
Das sah man gleich daraus,
Und alle Leute soll'n es seh'n
Wenn wir bei der Laterne steh'n
Wie einst, Lili Marleen.
Schon rief der Posten,
Sie blasen Zapfenstreich,
Das kann drei Tage kosten—
Kam'rad, ich komm’ ja gleich!
Da sagten wir auf Wiederseh’n
Wie gerne wollt ich mit dir geh'n;
Mit dir, Lili Marleen…[2]
Before the song had concluded, Arnheiter had drifted into an uneasy sleep.
[1] This game-hunting and soldiering song dates from 1916 in German colonial East Africa, and was “immensely popular” both during WWI and after. It’s quite long, so I have quoted here only the last two verses.The best translation I have found is this one, though I have amended it slightly. It and the history of the song can be found at https://almostchosenpeople.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/heia-safari/.
We sat around the fire
At night before the tent
At peace in silent ritual
The world at night around us.
Across the darkened mountains
Echoes are still resounding
Of bearers and Askari
Hurray! Hurray! Safari!
When I go on my last trek
And begin the great Journey
Come and sing to me in this way
Instead of with mournful hymns,
So that to my hunter’s ear
Before the gates of Heaven
It sounds like the Halali (Horn call announcing the end of the hunt)
Hurray! Hurray! Safari!
[2] The complete lyrics of “Lied Eines Jungen Wachtpostens” (the actual title of the song we know as "Lili Marleen"), along with a very close English translation (not the well-known recorded English “version” with completely different and unrelated words) can be found here: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/lili-marleen-lili-marlene.html.