The Kindly Ones

We advanced at night; during the day, we hid in the woods; then I slept or read Flaubert, I didn’t talk much with my companions. An impotent rage was welling up in me, I didn’t understand why I had left the house near Alt Draheim, I was furious at myself for letting myself be led along to wander like a savage in the woods, instead of staying there quietly alone. Beards covered our faces, dried mud stiffened our uniforms, and under the rough cloth, cramps racked our legs. We ate poorly, there was only what we could find in abandoned farms or the debris of refugees’ convoys; I didn’t complain, but I found the raw bacon vile, the fat stayed stuck inside your mouth for a long time, there was no bread to help it down. We were always cold and couldn’t make a fire. Still, I liked this grave, quiet countryside, the serene, airy quiet of the birch woods or pine groves, the gray sky scarcely agitated by wind, the hushed rustle of the last snowfalls of the year. But it was a dead, deserted countryside: empty fields, empty farms. Everywhere the disasters of war had left their traces. Every sizeable hamlet, which we skirted around from afar, at night, was occupied by Russians; from the outskirts, in the dark, we could hear drunken soldiers singing and firing off volleys in the air. There were still some Germans, though, in these villages, we could make out their frightened but patient voices between the Russian exclamations and curses; screams were common too, especially women’s screams. But that was still better than the burned villages to which hunger drove us: dead livestock made the streets stink; the houses gave off a stench of carrion, mixed with the smell of cold ashes, and since we had to go inside to find food, we couldn’t avoid seeing the twisted corpses of women, often stripped naked, even old women or ten-year-old girls, with blood between their legs. But staying in the woods didn’t mean we could escape the dead: at crossroads, immense, ancient oak branches bore clusters of hanged men, usually Volkssturm, dismal bundles, victims of zealous Feldgendarmen; bodies dotted the clearings, like that of a naked young man, lying in the snow with one leg folded, as serene as the hanged man on the Twelfth Tarot Trump, frightening in his strangeness; and further on, in the forests, cadavers polluted the pale ponds we walked alongside, fighting our thirst. In these woods and forests, we also found living people, terrorized civilians, incapable of giving us the slightest bit of information, isolated soldiers or little groups who were trying like us to thread their way through the Russian lines. Waffen-SS or Wehrmacht, they never wanted to stay with us; they must have been afraid, if we were captured, of being found with high-ranking SS officers. That made Thomas think, and he had me destroy my pay book and my papers and tear off my insignia, as he did, in case we fell into Russian hands; but out of fear of the Feldgendarmen, he decided, somewhat irrationally, that we should keep our handsome black uniforms, a little incongruous for this walk in the countryside. All these decisions were made by him; I agreed without thinking and followed, closed to everything except to what fell under my eyes, in the slow unfurling of the march.