Matthew Funk
Soldatenkino Excerpt
Ashumanity he thinks can sink no further. He is wrong.
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8. GAPS –
LATER
Along the march my ankles began complaining
noisily, scraping against the insides of my boots. By about halfway to our destination the
murmur of abrasion that had begun as had turned into a wild hissy fit of pain. As it began
to really bother me, I ran through the possible culprits, thinking about whether it was
grounds to halt myself for inspection and medication or whether it was just a blister
coming to a head and being ground down. I hoped for the latter – after some time I
was praying for the latter – and yanked along the whining foot like a protesting
mongrel on a taut leash. I reassured myself of the latter, but all the while visualized
some of the East Prussian mud, possessed of a malicious sentience, stealing inside the
wall of my shoe and systematically grinding away at my skin. Against the seamless canvas
of the earth and sky I painted Goya-like visions of my skin, a fungal gray after weeks of
being in the wet sheath of the boot, coming off in curds as this gritty patina of dirt
gnawed at it. I nauseated myself by flipping through my mental portfolio of case histories
in gas gangrene on the foot, of suppurating abrasions, of how Big Dieter begged
shamelessly, offering everything he had if we would just not take his foot after that
Russian wood splinter had gone infected and made it too fat to stand on. I reflected on
how the eyes of his friends looked as they calmly forced him, coaxed him, to the aid
station. I thought about how my own eyes must have looked. I thought about every manner of
disease of the foot, deformity of the foot, injury to the foot, creating an action agenda
out of the wordless frustration of my skin’s pain.
We stopped on a number of occasions along the
way, but on none of these occasions did my condition improve in the slightest. In the
first occasion, it was a case of Rodt getting the runs. We all of us have one stomach
disorder or another. The Swiss cheese that remains of his bowels launched such an
prolonged and brutal offensive against his body that we eventually could wait no longer
– our position of point had become that of rear guard and he still could not get out
of a squat – and had to carry him, depositing him periodically in a trench. This,
given that Rodt easily weighs as much as Big Dieter (I’ve always found humor in the
size of the soldiers in my aptly named Heavy Infantry squad), which feels like as much as
your average tank engine, was no good my foot.
Next was the disassembly of a minefield (how
this became the officially recognized specialty of I and Von Wittke, I will never know)
about halfway along the route was also hardly the kind of therapy my raw and rash-ridden
flesh cried out for. A few hundred meters later we had to move a herd of cows out of the
way – their insides having been practically turned to leaking red gelatin by
artillery concussion damage, it was a revolting, odious mess – and this too required
my athletic skill. I hopped about, swatted the lumbering beasts with a switch, and again
lamented my agrarian upbringing. I dodged the occasional excitement-inspired gout of goo
from the alarmed, punch-drunk animals and urged them on with all of my favorite swear
words. I did this, along with five others, for ten nostalgic minutes. Sometimes I wonder
whether the urbanites in the 505th really think me better qualified for this
duty or whether my only qualification is that it’s hard for me to say no. Whatever
the case, my foot didn’t care one way or the other and insisted on continuing to
scream throughout. Then came the Soviet planes. The planes and the convoy.
9. CRASH – CONTINUOUS
When the planes passed over, the body knew
what was to come and began to shake. This is an instinct fashioned by experience and mined
from desperation; one that is now an indelible dimension of who we are, not only as men,
but as animals. We will never again be able to look at the sky and think only of safety.
The experience I’m referring to is that
of being bombarded – incessantly and without recourse – by enemy aircraft. It is
a long regimen of watching your faith in the heavens corrode; of watching friendly planes
vanish like extinct birds killed off by the pollution of an unsalvageable war; of the
sickening, sinking feeling that comes from the realization that the roaring metal overhead
can only mean murder for you. At the outset of the War in the East we had air supremacy to
such an extent that we never doubted our ability to project aerial force and to contest
anything the enemy sent against us. Then our purportedly bottomless coffers of supply
began to run low and the hazardous conditions in this foreign land wore at the power of
our Air Force. So vaunted that it had been assigned its own entirely separate branch of
the Armed Forces, that Air Force soon found itself at the mercy of our failing economy
just as much as the common foot soldier. Undersupplied and overwhelmed by the determined
aggression of Russian climate and Russian machines, our planes could not endure. The
expert pilots in their unmatched craft died slowly, but they did die. It was only a dozen
here and a score there at first, and only in major engagements, but this would change. As
things fell apart, the upkeep of the craft and the efficacy of the formations
disintegrated along with them. Everything starves in
I heard all this from a reliable source of
course. Most of the men now filling out the ranks of our supply column and our radio
section used to be Air Force pilots. I hear it every time I want to barter for dry socks.
Now that they’ve no longer got adequate
supply to support their inadequate numbers of machines, the Air Force is on the ground
with the rest of us. As I mention, there continue to be suicidal forays against the
Russian and, not surprisingly considering the pinnacle of supremacy we began this conflict
at, we still enjoy marginal success. Our pilots are expended in horrifying numbers but
they still manage to exact a terrific toll on the Soviet.
This is largely due – again, so
former-flight-officer-now-mess-officer Kramer tells me – to the fact that the Russian
has yet to produce a sufficient Fighter craft to match ours. The pilots, apparently, lack
nothing in their valor; incidents of Russians ramming their planes into ours are as
commonplace as they are hideous. There are even formations that are as excellent in their
technique as nearly any that
The Ground Attack craft employed by the
Soviets is a real piece of work. From what I’ve seen from crash sites – my
observations confirmed by discussions with our former Air Force personnel – the
Soviets use a Fighter-Bomber with a plate of solid steel in the bottom of the fuselage. In
short, they’re tough – damn tough – hard as anything that was built to get
off the ground on the Eastern Front. Back in the early years, it used to be that a
well-aimed barrage of rifle fire could make a Fighter-Bomber think twice. Now even our
anti-aircraft machineguns seem inadequate. We send up flurry after blazing flurry of
bullets and the Soviet machines, which I believe are called, “IL”s, shrug them
off, dump their payload and fly off before the smoke clears. Thunderous bastards; we would
be as helpless as we feel if they couldn’t be heard from miles off.
With their unopposed domination of the skies,
the Soviet has “harassed” the German Army severely. By “harassed”, I
of course mean slaughtered thousands, blasted whole convoys into burnt matches and turned
civilian centers into mass graves. As they have yet to truly annihilate any unit of
formidable size – and thereby seriously peeve a staff officer who was counting on the
respective flag pinned into his map to mean something more than a mile-long carpet of slag
– they only “harass”. This is certainly an apt term for the affect on that
staff officer but for us, it means that we’ve been destroyed as fully functional
human beings. I look forward to many splendid years shitting myself with terror every time
a neighbor starts up their lawnmower.
Yes, it has become that bad. It is such that
when we hear the air began to shake and moan, nervous with the approach of a flight of
planes, we are reduced to infants. We can hardly run far enough, we cannot dig deep enough
and there is no adverse action we can take that will do anything other than make us a more
likely target. So whether you begin running or just freeze immediately, it isn’t soon
before the helplessness of the situation pushes you down and you fall wherever you are.
The noise gets louder – you can hear the engine firing and falling – and soon
you can feel it in your teeth. It’s in your chest, in your legs and arms; most of all
in your groin and head, where it’s so loud in your blood that you lose all control to
it. Your hands clench, trying to hold the world together while the sound tries to rip it
apart. The waiting is interminable but no matter how long you wait, the tension only gets
worse. The tension works at you like the plane engine was a winch, distending your muscles
as they work to make you into an even smaller ball; you’ve wadded up, trying to crush
yourself back into the womb. You try not to think of anything but now all your head is, is
that roar and the fear and your thoughts flood through just like your bladder empties
itself. Everything is the noise and the piss stink and your open, hapless hole of a mouth
screaming so loud you’d think your mother can hear, but nothing can be heard over the
plane. Everything is agony, still but for the plane, frantic but for the plane. Then
everything explodes.
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