Inferno - Max Hastings [387]
On the central front, the Russians temporarily halted. It is plausible that Zhukov could have continued his advance, exploiting momentum to seize Berlin, but the logistics problems were formidable. Stalin’s armies had no need to take risks. Farther north, Rokossovsky pushed on through the snows of Prussia. Russian soldiers derived deep satisfaction from witnessing the destruction they had seen wreaked upon their own homeland now overtaking German territory. One man wrote from East Prussia on 28 January 1945: “Estates, villages and towns were burning. Columns of carts, with dazed German men and women who had failed to flee, crawled across the landscape. Shapeless fragments of tanks and self-propelled guns lay everywhere, as well as hundreds of corpses. I recalled such sights from the first days of the war …” His memories were, of course, of the struggle in Mother Russia. Landowners in East Prussia and Pomerania rash enough to remain in their homes, sometimes because of age or infirmity, suffered terrible fates: to be identified by the invaders not merely as Germans, but also as aristocrats, invited torture before death.
Millions of refugees fled westwards before the Soviets. The strong survived their journeys, but many children and old people perished. “At least we were young,” said Elfride Kowitz, a twenty-year-old East Prussian. “We could cope with it better than the old.” The snowclad landscape of eastern Europe was disfigured by tens of thousands of corpses. Fugitives shared dramas of fantastic intensity which made them briefly companions in adversity, who ate or starved, lived or died, trekked and slept with one another until some new shift of circumstances separated them. “In these situations,” said the schoolteacher Henner Pflug, “people were thrown together in great intimacy for hours, days, weeks, then sundered again.”
One among the great host of dispossessed German women wrote, “The world is a very lonely place without family, friends, or even the familiarity of a home.” She learned the meaning of desperation when she saw other housewives, frantic for warm clothing in the icy weather, dash past soldiers engaging the Russians with rifles and mortars to reach a Schloss where they had heard there was a garment store, to seize whatever they could lay their hands on. Fleeing with two small children, she herself plumbed a depth of exhaustion wherein she could no longer push uphill the cart carrying their pathetic baggage: “I leaned on all our worldly goods and wept bitterly.” Two passing French POWs took pity, and helped them over the crest. A few days later, a farmer in whose house she briefly sought refuge urged her to leave her son behind for adoption by himself. “He promised me the earth if I would leave him. What future had the child? There, he might have a good and safe home.” But this mother clung to a reserve of stubborn courage which enabled her to refuse. “I had set myself a task—to take the children to safety and see them grow up. How? I did not know. I just tackled each day as it came.” This little family at last reached the sanctuary of the American lines, but many other such stories lacked happy endings.
The advancing Soviet legions resembled no other army the world had ever seen: a mingling of old and new, Europe and Asia, high intelligence and brutish ignorance, ideology and patriotism, technological sophistication and the most primitive transport and equipment. T-34s, artillery and katyusha rocket launchers were followed by jeeps and Studebaker and Dodge trucks supplied under Lend-Lease, then by shaggy ponies and columns of horsemen, farm carts and trudging peasants from the remote republics of Central Asia, clad in foot cloths and rags of uniform. Drunkenness