All language subtitles for [English] I Watched the River Turn to Blood Surviving the Dnieper Autumn 1943 [DownSub.com]

The water never stops moving, and

neither do they. That is the first thing

you learn on this bank, that the river

does not sleep, and the men coming

across it do not sleep either. And so

you do not sleep. You only crouch in the

wet hole you have scraped into the mud

with your hands and your entrenching

tool, and you wait for the next flare to

climb into the black sky and show

[music] you what is coming.

A shell lands close somewhere off to the

left where the second machine gun should

be, and the ground slaps me in the chest

through the earth itself. A flat, hard

punch that comes up through my knees and

my elbows and rattles my teeth together.

Dirt and freezing water rain down on the

back of my neck. I press my face into

the mud and I taste it. [music] the rot

of it, dead leaves and clay and

something underneath that is sweeter and

worse. And I do not lift my head until

the dirt stops falling. Then I lift it

because I have to because [music] the

gun is mine and the gun is the only

thing keeping the bank. And if I [music]

do not look, then the next thing I feel

will be a bayonet or a boot. Out on the

river there is nothing, and then there

is everything. The flare hangs and

swings on its little [music] parachute,

and the light is the color of a corpse,

gray, white, and shaking. And under it,

the Deniper is enormous, wider than any

river has the right to be, a flat black

plane of moving water. And on that

water, [music] there are shapes. There

are always shapes. rafts of green logs

lashed with telephone wire. Doors

[music] torn off houses. Empty fuel

barrels roped together into platforms. A

thing that might once have been a hay

wagon and crouched on all of it. The

men, dozens of them, hundreds of them.

Dark wet lumps that do not look like men

until they move. And then they are all

men. And they are coming straight at me.

I do not think anything. There is no

thinking [music] left in me by this hour

of the night. My hands do the work. The

belt is laid into the feed tray and the

loader, the boy, has his fingers on it

ready to [music] guide it. And I pull

the gun into my shoulder and I find the

nearest raft and I press the trigger and

the machine gun 42 [music] does what it

does, which is not the sound of a gun at

all, but a single tearing roar. A sheet

of canvas ripped from the sky so fast

you cannot hear the rounds apart. And

the muzzle flash blinds me white. And

[music] I keep firing along the line of

the raft until the raft is no longer

carrying men, but carrying meat. And

then I swing to the next one. You learn

not to watch the water after a burst.

The water shows you things you cannot

carry. [music] The men who are hit do

not fall cleanly. They fold and they

slide and the river takes them. And the

ones who are not hit go into the water

on purpose because the water is safer

than the raft. and they sink because of

the packs and the boots and the rifles

slung across their backs. And the river

is cold enough that even a strong man

cannot last long in it. And so the river

kills more of them than I do. I tell

myself the river kills more of them than

I do. I have told myself this many

nights, and I am not sure any longer

that it is true. But I tell myself

anyway, because a man must tell himself

something [music] or his hands stop

working. And if my hands stop working,

we are all dead before the sun comes up.

The barrel is screaming hot. I can feel

it through the mud and the cold air, a

wave of heat off the jacket of the gun.

And the loader knows it, too. And he is

already reaching for the spare in the

case beside [music] him. We change the

barrel every 200 rounds or it warps. And

the gun jams and a jammed gun on [music]

this bank is a death sentence, not only

for me, but for the 40 or 50 men strung

out along this stretch of the cut.

Because [music] the machine gun is the

spine of the defense, and the riflemen

know it. And when my gun goes quiet,

they go quiet, too, [music] and they

look toward me in the dark, and I feel

they're looking.

The loader works the catch and swings

the hot barrel out with [music] the

asbestos cloth and it hisses where it

touches the wet earth. And he slots

[music] the cold one home and locks it

and slaps my shoulder two slaps ready.

And I am firing again before the flare

has finished dying. The smell of the hot

metal and the burnt cordite is the smell

I will die with. I think if I get out of

this war and live to be an old man in

some town that still stands, I will

smell hot gun oil and cordite in my

sleep until I die. They keep coming.

That is the thing no one at home will

ever understand. The thing I could not

understand myself until I stood on this

river. They keep coming. We cut down one

wave and there is another wave behind it

already in the water. And behind that

wave there is another. And we do not

have enough rounds in all the world to

stop them all. [music] And they know we

do not. And so they spend their men the

way a rich man spends small coins by the

handful without counting because on the

far bank there are more men than we have

bullets.

I have heard the officers say it in the

dugouts when they think the soldiers are

asleep. The Russians have decided to

drown us in their own dead. And the

worst of it is that the plan is working.

A new sound now over the river. The one

I hate more than the artillery, more

than the cold, more than anything. It

starts as a strange ripping moan high

up, a tearing in the air, and then it

becomes a shriek of many voices that are

not voices. Dozens of rockets in the air

at once. And the boy beside me presses

himself flat. And I press myself flat.

And we wait the longest two or three

seconds of any night for the Stalin

organ to find us. The salvo comes down

somewhere behind the line in the gully

where the company headquarters is. And

the ground does not shake this time. It

heaves. It lifts and drops like the deck

of a ship. And the air is sucked out of

my hole and then slammed back into it.

And my ears go to a high thin ringing

and stay there. When I lift my head

again, the gully behind us is on fire.

the brush and the dead grass burning low

and orange. And against that fire, I can

see our men silhouetted, running, and I

cannot hear them, but I can see their

mouths open. [music] And I know they are

screaming for stretcherbears who will

not come because the stretcherbears are

dead. I do not know how long the night

has been. Time on this bank is not made

of hours. It is made of flares and

barrels of dead men and changes of the

barrel and the boy's two slaps on my

shoulder. The cold has gone past pain

into something else. A numbness in the

feet and the hands that is worse than

the pain because it means the blood is

leaving them. And I have seen what comes

after the black toes. The men carried

back to the aid station weeping not from

wounds but from feet that have rotted in

their boots.

It is only the end of October, or

perhaps the [music] very first days of

November. I have lost the date. And

already the nights are like this.

Already the puddles skin over with ice

by morning. And every man on this line

knows that the true winter, [music] the

Russian winter, the one that killed an

army before us at the gates of Moscow 2

years ago. That winter is still coming,

is only sharpening itself somewhere out

on the step, waiting. There is a lull.

The flares stop. [music] The artillery

lifts and moves north, walking away from

us toward the next sector. And in the

sudden dark and the sudden near silence,

I can hear the river again. The ordinary

sound of a great river moving. And under

it, I can hear men in the water. The

splashing, the gasping, a voice

somewhere out there calling one word

over and over in Russian, a name maybe,

or a prayer. And then the voice stops.

The boy is shaking.

I can feel him shaking against my side.

[music] He is perhaps 19 years old, this

loader of mine, with a soft round face

that has not learned yet how to be a

[music] face that has seen this. And he

came up to the line 11 days ago in a

draft of replacements who were marched

straight from the train into the

retreat. And of the 30 or so men who

came with him, I think nine are still

alive. He [music] has been with my gun

for six of those 11 days. His name is

Emil. I make myself say his name to him

now. Low in the dark. Emil, reload.

[music] Lay out the belt so they do not

foul. He does it. His hands are shaking,

but he does it. And that is all that can

be asked of any [music] of us. That the

hands keep working while the rest of the

man comes apart. We are dug in along

what the staff officers and the wireless

and the newspapers from home call the

eastern wall. [music]

The great fortified barrier behind which

the Reich will stand and bleed the

Bolevik white. The men back home say the

Panther line as if the whole thing were

one wall. But the Panther runs far to

the north up by the old Russian towns

and the lakes. And the staff maps give

our stretch of the great river its own

name, the Wan position. And it makes no

difference to me which dead god they

have hung upon it because I have walked

this [music] line. I have helped to dig

this line. There is no line. There is a

river which God or the slow work of the

ages made and [music] not us. And there

is mud. And there are holes that we

scraped ourselves in the days before the

Russians came. And there is wire in some

places and no wire in most. And there

are bunkers [music]

drawn on the maps in the rear that exist

on no piece of ground I have ever stood

on. The wall is a lie told to men who

have never been here. We were told to

fall back to prepared positions. And

when we arrived, there was nothing

prepared, only the far slope of the

river and the order to hold. And we have

been holding with our bodies [music]

because there is nothing else to hold

with. I think the men who drew the line

on the map believed in it. I think

Berlin believes in it still. But Berlin

is a long way west and the men who

believe in walls are not standing in

this mud with a machine gun and a boy

named Emile [music] and a river full of

Russians. And so their belief is no use

to me. When the order came to fall back

across the [music] Deniper weeks ago now

in the long retreat out of the bend of

the river, we were told to leave nothing

behind that the enemy could use.

Nothing. I want to be honest about what

that meant because there will be men

after this war who say it did not

happen. And I was there and it happened.

It meant the villages burned. We burned

them. I burned them with my own hands

and a torch of straw because the order

was the order and the field ja arms with

the metal gorge on their chests stood

behind us to see that the order was

carried out and a man who would not burn

a village would himself be stood against

[music] a wall. So the thatch went up

and the barns with the harvest in them

went up and the wells were fouled and

the [music] cattle that could not be

driven west were shot in the fields and

left. and the people, [music] the old

women and the children, because the men

were long gone into the army or the

partisans or the graves. The people

stood at the edge of the road and

watched their houses burn and did not

even cry out, only watched with faces

that had stopped expecting anything from

us or from God, and we marched past them

west toward the river. I do not say this

to be forgiven. There is no one who can

forgive it, [music] and I would not ask.

I say it because it is true, and because

the men who order such things from clean

offices should at least know that the

men who do them carry them, that I carry

that road and those faces, and I will

carry them across whatever is left of my

life, and they are heavier than the gun.

The retreat itself, the long road back

to the river before any of this began,

was its own slow kind of dying, with the

same end in it as the bank only

stretched out over weeks. We are not an

army of machines, whatever the news

reels at home pretend. We are an army of

horses, and the guns and the wagons and

the field kitchens all move behind

horses. And the autumn mud, the mud this

country has its own word for, [music]

took the horses first. I watched the mud

take a whole gun team. The beasts going

down to the knees and then to the belly,

screaming the way only a horse screams.

And the drivers cutting the traces to

save what could be saved and leaving the

gun where it sank. And a battery that

loses its guns in the mud [music] is no

longer a battery. It is only a column of

tired men walking. The wagons we could

not drag free we burned with everything

else and over us the whole way owning

the sky. The Russian aircraft because

the great [music] airfleets that had

darkened the heavens in the first summer

were not there anymore were somewhere

else or were nowhere. And by day the

lowfast fighters came down the roads and

shot the columns to [music] pieces. And

by night came the thing the men call the

sewing machine. The little wooden bay

plane that putters over in the dark with

its engine throttled back to a glide and

lets its small [music] bombs fall on any

light it can find. So that for two years

now no man on this front has dared to

strike a match in the open after dark.

And in the forests to either side of the

road, the partisans who are not soldiers

and do not fight as [music] soldiers do,

who cut the telephone wire and mine the

culverts and take the stragglers and the

wounded who fall behind. And a man

learns very quickly not to fall behind,

learns to keep walking on feet that have

stopped [music] being feet, because the

column is the only safe thing there is.

And the column does not wait. The dawn

does not come the way dawn [music] comes

in stories. There is no rosy light, no

birds. There is only a slow graying of

the merc, the night black turning to ash

gray. And the mist comes up off the

river thick as wool, so that we cannot

see the water at all, only hear it. And

that is the [music] worst time, the gray

hour, because they use the mist the way

they use the dark. We stand to every man

at the parapet gunned toward the river

straining into the white nothing.

Somewhere down the line a nervous

rifleman fires at a shape and the shape

is nothing. And the squad leader curses

him and tells him to hold hold. Do not

waste [music] it. And that word waste is

the word that rules our lives now. We

are short of everything. We have been

short of everything since the bend. The

machine gun belts come up the line at

night on the backs of men who crawl.

[music] And there are never enough. And

I have learned to fire in short bursts,

three rounds, four, where in the early

years I would have held the trigger down

and hosed the whole front. Because in

the early years there was always more,

and now there is never enough. And the

man who empties his belts in the first

hour dies in the second hour with an

empty gun in his hands. Out of the mist

there is a sound of wood on wood. And

then the unmistakable wet rhythm of

paddles, many paddles. And I bring the

gun up and I cannot see anything to fire

at. And the squad leader hisses down the

line. Hold. Hold. Let them come. Let

them come into the bank where we can see

them. And so we wait. And the paddling

comes closer. And now there are voices

low controlled. the voices of men who

have done this before [music]

and expect to die and have decided to do

it anyway. And then the first prow of a

raft slides out of the mist not 40 m

below us and I open fire and the whole

bank [music] opens fire with me. It is

butchery in the gray light. The rafts

are stacked three and four deep coming

into the bank and they cannot turn back

[music] because the rafts behind push

them on. And we fire into the mass of

them. The machine guns and the rifles

and a man with the submachine gun the

squad leader carries and the noise is so

total that it stops being noise and

[music] becomes a pressure on the skull.

And the river below the bank turns first

churned white with the splashing and

then a color I will not describe because

I told [music] myself at the beginning

of this I would not reach for the colors

of it. Some of them get ashore. They

always [music] get some ashore. That is

the arithmetic of it. That if you put a

thousand men on the water [music] and we

kill 900, there are a hundred on your

bank with submachine guns. And a hundred

men who have just crossed that water and

watch their friends drown and burn are

not [music] men you can reason with.

They are past fear. They come up the

mudbank screaming the one long word they

scream. A great rolling roar of voices

that I have heard in my sleep every

night for 2 years and they come into the

trench. This is the part the gun cannot

win. When they are in among us, the gun

is too slow and too long, and I drop it

and pull the pistol and the entrenching

tool, and it becomes the oldest kind of

fighting, the kind from before there

were guns. Men killing men with their

hands and with sharpened spades in a

muddy ditch in the half light. And I

will not describe that either except to

say that I am alive and writing this in

my head and the men who came up the bank

at me this morning are not and there is

no glory in it. None. There is only that

I was a little faster and a little more

frightened and the ground was on my

side. And Demile stood at my back with

the squad leader's submachine gun that

he had snatched up off the body of the

squad leader, who is now also a body.

And the boy with the soft round face

emptied the magazine into the men coming

over the parapet and saved my life and

then turned aside and was sick into the

mud. And I did not say anything to him

because there is nothing to say. That

was this morning. The squad leader,

Unafitzia Lindner, a Saxon, a decent man

who had a wife and two daughters, whose

photograph he kept in his paybook and

showed to no one but me, is dead in the

bottom of the trench with us. And there

is no one to carry him back and nowhere

to carry him to. And so he lies there

through the day, and we step over him,

and by the afternoon we have stopped

seeing him as Lindner, and started

seeing him as part of the trench. And

that is the crulest thing the war does.

Faster than the cold, faster than the

hunger, it makes the dead into

furniture, and a man is ashamed of how

fast it happens, [music] and then he is

too tired even for the shame. It is in

the long gray afternoon when the mist

has burned off, and a thin cold sun

stands over the river, and the Russians

have pulled back to the far bank to

gather themselves for the night. that I

have time to think and thinking [music]

is dangerous and I do it anyway because

I cannot stop it. I am called [music]

Brandt Oberg writer Kurt Brandt. I am 31

years old which on this river makes me

an old man, one of the oldest in the

company and the new boys look at me the

way you look at a man who has cheated

something he should not have been able

to cheat. I was a printer before the war

in a town in the Rhineland, in a [music]

shop that smelled of ink and hot lead.

And I set type for wedding invitations

and funeral cards and the small

newspaper of the district. And I had a

girl I was going to marry. And I have

not had a letter from her since [music]

the spring. And I have stopped writing

to her because I do not know what is

left of me to put in a letter that she

should want to read. I came east in the

summer of 1941 with the great advance

when we believed it would be over by the

autumn. When we drove east through the

dust and the burning Russian towns and

took prisoners in numbers no one could

count, hundreds of thousands of them,

columns of them stretching to the

horizon. And we thought, we truly

thought that a country that lost so many

men could not go on. We were fools. We

did not understand the country. There is

always another river. There are always

more men. We took prisoners by the

hundred thousand. And behind them there

were millions. And now those millions

are on the far bank of the Neper with

the rafts and the barrels. [music] And

we are 30 men in a ditch where a company

used to be. The company had a captain

once and then a left tenant and then a

sergeant major holding it together with

his fists and his voice. And now it has

whoever is standing when [music] the

counting is done. And that is the shape

of the whole war in the east told small.

When I first came to this company, there

were 150 men and more in it. A full

company, three [music] rifle platoon and

the heavy weapons, and the men knew one

another, had trained together, came from

the same towns, and drank in the same

beer sellers on leave. And that company

is as dead now as the Romans, every man

of it. And the company I'm in tonight

wears the same name and is made of

strangers fed into it in drafts the way

you feed coal into [music] a stove and

the strangers do not last long enough to

stop being strangers. I have stopped

learning the new one's names at first.

It sounds a cruel thing and it is a

cruel thing but a name is a weight and I

am carrying as many as I can carry. And

so I wait now to see whether a new man

lives a week before I will let his name

into me. And most of them do not live a

week. And Emile lived 11 days, and I

learned his name on the sixth against my

own rule. And look what [music] it has

cost me. Look what the river took when

it took him. So perhaps the rule was

right after all, and I'm only a man who

could not keep it. I have served [music]

in this regiment for 2 years, and I will

not write its number. Not out of

secrecy. The war will decide what is

secret, but because the regiment I

joined does not exist anymore. It has

been destroyed and rebuilt and [music]

destroyed again so many times that the

number on the paper means nothing. The

men are all gone. The regiment is only a

number now. [music] And a few survivors

like me who carry the dead regiment

inside us. We belong [music] on the maps

in the rear to the eighth army. In the

sector south of the great city on the

river and above the eighth army stands

the whole southern army group. And above

that somewhere far behind us the field

marshall himself von Mstein [music]

whom I have never seen and never will.

And who I am told is a clever man, the

cleverest we [music] have. And perhaps

he is. Perhaps somewhere behind us he is

moving his counters on a great table and

finding a way to save [music] what can

be saved. But down here the cleverness

does not reach us. Down here there is

only the river and the mud and the count

of the belts. In the worst lulls when

the wind comes off the river toward us,

we can hear the loudspeakers.

They have set them up on the far bank,

great horns of them. And a voice comes

across the water in German, in good

German, sometimes a tired, flat German

that any of us might speak, telling us

that the war is lost, that we have been

thrown away by the men in Berlin, the

way the Sixth Army was thrown away at

the city on the Vular last winter.

300,000 men and more swallowed hole in

the snow and the [music] rubble while

the radio at home played solemn music

and called it a hero's death. The voice

tells us there is bread on the far bank

and warm dugouts and that an honest

German need not die for a cause already

lost. That there is even a committee now

made of our own generals who were taken

at the vulgar who say the very same. And

the voice gives out the password and the

safe ways to come across with the hands

showing. And men do go. I will not

pretend they do not. In the gray hour, a

man here and a man there slips out of

the line toward the water with his hands

already half raised. And sometimes the

voice has told the truth and they live.

And sometimes our own machine guns take

them in the back before they reach the

bank. And sometimes the field jean dams

find the ones who only talked of going.

And that is the end of those men too.

And so the loudspeaker kills us in its

own slow way. By putting into our heads

the one thing a soldier on this bank

cannot afford to hold, the thought that

there might be a way out other than the

gun and the river and the grave. The

leaflets do the same work. the little

paper squares the aircraft scatter with

the safe conduct printed on them in two

languages and we are forbidden to read

them or to keep them. And so of course

[music] every man has read them and

burned them or not quite burned them and

kept one folded small and deep in a

pocket against the night when the cold

thought finally winds. The rations come

up at dusk. what there is of them. Cold,

a heel [music] of black bread gone hard,

a smear of fat, and for the whole gun

crew, one tin of meat to share, the meat

that the men call by a crude name I will

not set down, and a mouthful of schnaps,

each from a bottle the supply runner

carries, and the schnaps is the most

important thing he carries, more than

the bread, because the schnaps is the

only thing that lets a man go back to

the parapit when the dark comes. There

is no fire. A fire on this bank draws

the artillery. [music] So we eat the

cold food in the cold dark and we drink

the schnaps and the warmth of it spreads

through the chest for a few minutes and

then it [music] is gone. And the cold

comes back and the cold has a sound

[music] now. A small high singing in the

ears. And I know that sound. It is the

sound the body makes when it is starting

to lose. I take off my boots, which the

old soldiers taught me to do whenever

there is a moment, and I rub my feet

with my hands in the dark, until I can

feel them again. And I make Emil do the

same. And I tell him that more men on

this front are killed by their own boots

than by the Russians. And it is not

quite true, but it is true enough, and

he does it. Between the Russians, there

is the other war, the small one that

never lifts. And it is almost worse for

having no flares and no end. The lice.

Every man on this bank is alive with

them in the seams of the tunic, in the

waistband, in the hair of the chest and

the groin. [music]

And on the rare day when the sun has any

warmth in it at all, you see men sitting

on the back of the parapit with their

shirts off, running a thumbnail down the

seams and cracking them one by one. And

it does no good. There are always

[music] more by nightfall. And we have

all heard what the lice carry. The fever

that emptied whole companies last winter

without a shot being fired. And so a man

scratches [music] and waits to learn

whether the fever will come for him

next. Then there are the rats grown fat

on the river and on the dead who do not

fear us in the least anymore. [music]

Who run across your legs in the dugout

in the dark and who reach the bodies out

in the open ground before the bodies are

even cold. And a new man cannot sleep

for the thought of them. And an old man

has stopped caring, has decided that a

rat on the chest in the night is a small

thing set beside the rest of it. The

dugout itself is only a hole roofed with

logs and a hands depth of earth. Low

enough that you go in on your knees and

it leaks. Everything here leaks. The

water comes down through the logs and

stands in the bottom and there is

nowhere dry to lie. And the smell of it

is wet wool and unwashed men and old

smoke and the latrine that is nothing

but a hole a few steps off. And we crawl

in two and three at a time to steal an

hour out of the line and lie pressed

against one another for the warmth of

each other's bodies. The only warmth

there is, and the few old men left do

not talk in there. We have nothing to

say that any of us would want to hear

and the new boys talk [music] too much

of home and food and girls until the

cold and the work take the talk out of

them as well. The night comes and with

it the river wakes [music] again. It is

always the same and always different.

The flares, the artillery walking up and

down [music] the bank, the rockets, the

rafts, the long roaring word coming out

of the dark. But tonight there is a new

sound. A sound that makes every man in

the trench go still. A deep grinding

mechanical sound from the far bank and

then from the water. Engines. Heavy

engines. And I know before the flare

goes up what I will see. And the flare

goes up. And I see it. They have got

tanks across. Not here, not on my

stretch, but down river to the [music]

right. Where the bank is lower. They

have built a ferry of heavy pontoons

strong [music] enough to bear the

weight. And the first of the tanks is

coming across in the dark. The long low

shape of it, the gun, the broad tracks

that can go where ours cannot. The T34,

the tank that has been the terror of

this whole war for us. And when those

tanks are across in numbers, there will

be no holding any line, wall, or river,

or ditch because we have nothing to stop

them with. The anti-tank guns went in

the retreat. abandoned in the mud when

the horses died and there was no fuel

for the prime movers. There is one gun

in the sector that can kill a T-34

cleanly at range. The 88, the great

anti-aircraft gun that they turn level

and [music] use against tanks. And there

is one of it, one gun for a stretch of

river a man could not walk in a day. And

one gun cannot be everywhere. And the

Russians know exactly where it is and

will go around it. I think kneeling

there in the cold with the flare light

on the far tanks [music]

that this is the night it ends, not the

war. The war will grind on for years. I

have stopped believing it will end soon.

But this position, this bank, the 30 of

us in this ditch. I think tonight is the

night the river finally pours over us

and we are gone. And I find that I'm not

afraid in the way I was afraid at the

beginning 2 years ago when I would shake

and pray. I am too tired to be afraid

like that. I am afraid in a flat cold

way, like a man watching weather come in

that he cannot get out of. And I check

the gun and I lay out the last of the

belts and I count them. And there are

four belts of 50 rounds, 200 rounds for

the whole night. And on a busy night, I

can fire 200 rounds in 10 minutes. And

so I will have to make every round a

round that hits. And I tell Emil this,

200 rounds. Make me wait for the shot.

Do not let me fire at shadows. And he

nods in the dark. The order comes down

the line, passed mouth to mouth, from

man to man, because the field telephone

wire was cut by the rockets, and there

is no runner to spare. The order is to

hold the bank through the night, and at

first light [music] to fall back to a

second position on the rise behind us. a

reverse slope position and to do it in

good order by sections covering one

another and not as a route. I have heard

such orders before. They are good

orders, sensible orders, the kind of

order a clever staff officer writes, who

has never tried to move 30 exhausted men

under fire across open ground at dawn

while T34s come up the bank. We will try

to obey it. Some of us will live to

reach the rise. I do the arithmetic in

my head the way I have learned to do it

coldly, the printer's arithmetic,

counting the men and [music] the ground

and the light. And I think that if we

are clever and lucky, perhaps half of us

reach the second position. And I look at

Emil's round face in the flare light,

and I decide without [music] saying it

that he will be one of the half, that I

will spend whatever I have left [music]

to make him one of the half. And I do

not let myself ask why, because the why

is dangerous, too. The why is the boy I

might have had if there had been time.

The brother, the self I was at 19 before

the dust in the burning towns, and a man

cannot afford the Y on this bank.

[music] The Y will get you killed. So I

put it away, and I lay my hand on the

gun. They come before midnight, and they

come the way they have never come

before. [music] All at once. The whole

river at once. The artillery does not

walk this [music] time. It stands on us,

a barrage that does not lift, the ground

in a continuous earthquake, and through

it and under it the rafts come more than

I have ever seen. The whole black

surface of the river crawling with them,

and down river the tanks are firing as

they come. The muzzle flashes huge and

orange, and the rockets come down, and

there is no longer any sound at all

because the sound has become everything.

And a thing that is everything cannot be

heard. It is just the medium you are in

like water to a fish. I fire. I fire at

the rafts in the flare light. Short

bursts. Three rounds four. Make them

count. And a meal feeds the belt and

changes the barrel. [music] And we work

the gun like one animal with four hands.

And the rafts break apart under the

fire. And the men go into the water and

more rafts come over the wreckage of

[music] the first. and I am down to my

last belt before the moon is anywhere

near the middle of the sky. A T34 comes

up onto the bank to our right and its

machine gun ra the trench and two men I

have known for a year are simply gone,

swept away, [music] and the tank's main

gun fires once into the bank below us,

and the blast throws Emil and me apart

and fills my mouth with earth. And when

I claw back to the gun, the belt is

fouled with mud. And I clear it with

hands I cannot feel, and Emil is not

beside me. And I look, and he is a few

meters away on his back in the bottom of

the trench, with both hands pressed to

his stomach. And even in the dark, I

know that grip. Every soldier knows that

grip, the grip of a man holding himself

together. And I crawl to him and I pull

his hands away to see and I should not

have because there is no helping it. The

wound is the kind there is no helping.

And he looks up at me with the round

face that never learned how to be the

right kind of face. And he says [music]

my name. He says, "Hair ober, which

after everything is still what he calls

me." And then he says, "Am I going home

now?" And I am ashamed to write that I

lied to him. I said, "Yes, Emil, you are

going home now." And I held his hand

while the river roared and the tanks

came. And it did not take long. The cold

was already in him, and the cold is

merciful that way, at least. It makes it

quick. And then he was furniture, too.

And I went back to the gun because there

was nothing else in the world I knew how

to do. and I fired the last of the last

belt into the dark. 50 rounds and then

the gun was empty and the river was

still full. I will not pretend that what

happened after was a fighting retreat in

good order. When the gun [music] was

empty and the tanks were on the bank,

what was left of us ran. We ran in the

dark across the open ground toward the

rise and the flares caught us and the

machine guns of the tanks caught [music]

us and men ran and fell and did not get

up. And I ran with the empty gun on my

shoulder because a machine gunner does

not leave the gun that is drilled into

you below the level of thought. You do

not leave the gun. And twice I fell in

the mud and twice I got up. And a man

running beside me, a Bavarian whose name

I never knew, was hit and grabbed my arm

as he went down and nearly took [music]

me with him. And I tore free of him and

kept running and left him in the mud.

And that is one more thing I carry, the

feel of his hand tearing free of my

sleeve. and I reached the reverse slope

of the rise and threw myself over it

into a shell hole and lay in the bottom

of it with my heart trying to break out

of [music] my chest and listened to the

men who had not reached it dying in the

open behind [music] me.

In the gray of the next dawn there were

11 of us on the rise of the 30 who had

held the bank. 11. And we were the

second position now. We were the line,

11 men and three machine guns, and one

of the guns had no ammunition at all,

and [music] was kept only so the enemy

would not have it. And a feld Weeble I

did not know, came along the slope,

counting us. An older man with a gray

stubble and eyes that had gone somewhere

far away, and he counted us the way a

man counts coins he already knows are

not enough. And he did not say anything

encouraging. There was nothing to say.

He only told us that the 88 had been

knocked out in the night, the one gun,

and that the order was to hold the rise.

And then he went on to count the next

hole, and that was the whole of the

speech. And it was the truest speech I

heard in the whole war. Hold the rise,

there is no gun. And he went on down the

line. Of the wounded, there is little to

say that is not worse than what there is

to say of the dead. There is no aid

station on the rise. There is a hollow

behind it where the badly hitter laid on

the bare ground out of the worst of the

wind. And there is one medical orderly

for all of us. A quiet man who has run

out of nearly everything. Out of the

morphine first of all, and a wound that

the morphine cannot reach is a wound. A

man must simply lie inside of until

[music] it kills him or until it stops.

And so the hollow is never quiet. There

is always the low steady sound coming

out of it that you teach yourself not to

hear. The way you teach yourself not to

hear the river. The orderly does what

can still be done which by now is

bandages boiled and used again and a

word and a cigarette if there is a

cigarette. And the lightly hit he sends

walking to the rear if there is still a

rear to send them to. [music] And the

rest he leaves where they lie and goes

on to the next. And no one blames him.

There is nothing in it to blame. There

is only too little of everything and too

much of the war. We have each of us made

the same bargain with ourselves about it

in the dark. A clean death, a fast one,

is the thing every man on the rise prays

for now. Not victory, not even home.

Only that when it comes for him, it

should come all at once. And not into

the belly, not the long way, not the

hollow behind the rise. And we held the

rise that day. [music] The 11 of us and

the men on either side of us whom we

never saw because the Russians on our

stretch did not press in daylight. They

had got their bridge head [music] across

the river in the night. And now they

were widening it elsewhere, pouring men

and tanks across the great water at the

points where there was no 88 and no

machine gun 42 and no Oberrighter brand.

And the truth that every man on the rise

understood without saying it was that

the river was lost. The wall was [music]

lost. The whole eastern wall that the

newspapers had promised would save the

Reich was a thing the Russians had

stepped over in a single night of rafts

and barrels and drowned men. And that

there would be another line behind this

one and another behind that. And that we

would be told each time that this was

the line that would hold. and that each

time it would be a lie, [music] and that

the war would go on rolling back west

across the burning land toward the

country I came from, and that the only

question left, the only one, was whether

a printer from the Rhineland named Curt

Brandt [music] would still be alive and

on his feet when it finally reached a

place with a name he knew. I did not

sleep that day on the rise, though I had

not slept in, [music] I no longer knew

how many nights. I sat in the bottom of

the hole with the empty gun across my

knees [music] and I cleaned it because a

machine gunner cleans his gun and the

cleaning of it was the only thing in the

world that still made sense. the brush

and the oil and the rod, the small exact

motions. And while my hands cleaned the

gun, my mind went to Emil and to Lindner

with the photograph of his daughters,

and to the Bavarian whose hand tore free

of my sleeve, and to the road of burning

villages, and the old women who had

stopped expecting [music]

anything. And I understood sitting in

that hole that I had stopped [music]

expecting anything too. That I had

become one of them. One of the people at

the edge of the road watching the world

burn down with a face that wanted

[music] nothing. And that this was what

the river had done to me. not the wound

it had not given me, but the thing it

had taken out [music] of me without my

noticing, somewhere between the first

raft and the last belt, and that I would

have to go on living with the hole where

that thing had been, if I went on living

at all. The cold came down harder that

night, harder than it had yet come. the

kind of cold that has iron at the back

of it, and the puddles in the bottom of

the holes skinned over and then froze

hard, and the breath [music] froze gray

in our scarves. And a man two holes down

from me, who had not been wounded, who

had come through the river and the

retreat without a mark on him, simply

lay down in [music] the bottom of his

wet hole in the night, soaked to the

bone, and starved and finished, and did

not get up in the morning. the wet and

the cold and the long bottomless

exhaustion taking him all together while

he slept. The way they take a man even

[music] before the true winter freeze

has come. And we found him gray and

stiffening at the standto. And there was

no surprise in any of us. Only the dull

recognition, the river or the cold or

the tanks or the rockets. It did not

matter in the end which one. The country

was killing us by every means it had and

would go on until there were none of us

left on its soil. And the men around me,

[music] what was left of the company,

the 11 becoming nine, becoming whatever

number the next night left, stood at the

frozen parapet, and looked out across

the lost river toward [music] the gray

east where the millions were, and we did

not speak, because there was nothing

left to say that the river had not

already said. over and over every night

in the only language it knew, which was

the language of men in the cold [music]

black water, paddling toward our guns,

refusing to stop, and stopping at last,

only when they reached the bank or the

bottom, and either way, not stopping us.

never stopping us. Never for one single

night letting us believe that the wall

would hold or the winter would spare us

or the war would do anything but go on

and on and on west toward home. That is

the river. That is the autumn of 1943 on

the Deniper in the place they told us

was a wall and that was only a river. On

the stretch the staff maps called the

Wotan position and the men at home

called the panther line as though a name

could stop water. And I have set it down

as it was with no glory in it because

there was none and with no excuse in it

because there is none. And I have set

down my own name, G. Brandt, and the

name of the boy Emile, who asked me if

he was going home, and to whom I lied,

because if I do not set the names down,

then the river takes them too, the way

it took everything else. And I have

decided in the bottom of this frozen

hole with the empty gun across my knees,

that the one thing the river will not

have from me is the names. The rest of

it the river can keep.