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.

When something did arouse a reaction in me, it was even worse. The second night after Körlin, around dawn, we entered a hamlet, a few farms surrounding a manor house. A little to the side stood a brick church, set against a pointed bell tower and topped with a gray slate roof; the door was open, and organ music was coming out; Piontek had already left to search the kitchens; followed by Thomas, I went into the church. An old man, near the altar, was playing Bach’s Art of the Fugue, the third contrapunctus, I think, with that beautiful rolling of the bass that on an organ is played with the pedals. I approached, sat down on a pew, and listened. The old man finished the piece and turned to me: he wore a monocle and a neatly trimmed little white moustache, and an Oberstleutnant’s uniform from the other war, with a cross at his neck. “They can destroy everything,” he said to me calmly, “but not this. It is impossible, this will remain forever: it will go on even when I stop playing.” I didn’t say anything and he attacked the next contrapunctus. Thomas was still standing. I got up too. I listened. The music was magnificent, the organ wasn’t very powerful but it echoed in this little family church, the lines of counterpoint met each other, played, danced with each other. But instead of pacifying me, this music only fueled my anger, I found it unbearable. I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head was empty of everything except this music and the black pressure of my rage. I wanted to shout at him to stop, but I let the end of the piece go by, and the old man immediately started the next one, the fifth. His long aristocratic fingers fluttered over the keys, pulled or pushed the stops. When he slapped them shut at the end of the fugue, I took out my pistol and shot him in the head. He collapsed forward onto the keys, opening half the pipes in a desolate, discordant bleat. I put my pistol away, went over, and pulled him back by the collar; the sound stopped, leaving only the sound of blood dripping from his head onto the flagstones. “You’ve gone completely mad!” Thomas snarled. “What’s the matter with you?!” I looked at him coldly, I was livid but my cracked voice didn’t tremble: “It’s because of these corrupt Junkers that Germany is losing the war. National Socialism is collapsing and they’re playing Bach. It should be forbidden.” Thomas stared at me, he didn’t know what to say. Then he shrugged: “You know, you might be right. But don’t do that again. Let’s go.” Piontek, in the main courtyard, had taken fright at the shot and was brandishing his submachine gun. I suggested we sleep in the manor house, in a real bed, with sheets; but Thomas, I think, was furious at me, he decided we’d sleep in the woods again, to annoy me, probably. But I didn’t want to get angry again, and also, he was my friend; I obeyed, I followed him without protesting.

The weather was fickle, it suddenly got warmer; as soon as the cold disappeared, it got hot, and I sweated copiously in my coat, the slippery earth of the fields stuck to my feet. We remained north of the road to Plathe; imperceptibly, to avoid spaces that were too open, and to stay close to the forests, we were drifting even farther north. Whereas we thought we would cross the Rega around Greifenberg, we reached it near Treptow, less than ten kilometers from the sea. Between Treptow and the river’s mouth, according to Thomas’s map, the entire left bank was swampy; but at the sea’s edge lay a large forest, where we could walk safely to Horst or Rewahl; if these seaside resorts were still in German hands, we could pass through the lines; if not, we would head back inland. That night, we crossed the railroad that links Treptow to Kolberg, then the road to Deep, waiting for an hour for a Soviet column to pass by. After the road, we were almost out in the open, but there were no villages there; we followed little isolated paths in the bend of the Rega, approaching the river. The forest, opposite, was growing visible in the darkness, a large black wall in front of the clear wall of the night. We could already smell the sea. But we couldn’t see any way of crossing the river, which kept getting wider as it neared its mouth. Instead of turning back, we continued on toward Deep. Skirting around the town where the Russians were sleeping, drinking, and singing, we went down to the beach and the bathhouses. A Soviet guard was sleeping on a chaise longue, and Thomas bashed his head in with the metal shaft of a beach umbrella; the noise of the waves drowned out all sounds. Piontek broke the chain fastening the pedal-boats. An icy wind was blowing over the Baltic, from west to east; along the coast, the black water was rough; we dragged the pedal-boat onto the sand to the mouth of the river; there it was calmer, and I launched onto the waves with a swell of joy; as I pedaled, I remembered the summers on the beaches in Antibes or Juan-les-Pins, where my sister and I begged Moreau to rent us a pedal-boat and then set off on our own on the sea, as far as our little legs could push us, before drifting happily in the sun. We crossed quickly, Thomas and I pedaling with all our strength, Piontek, lying between us with his gun, watching the shore; on the far bank, I abandoned our craft almost with regret. The forest began immediately, stocky low trees of all kinds bent by the wind that swept this long, gloomy coast unceasingly. Walking in these woods is not easy: there are few paths, and young saplings, birch trees especially, invade the ground between the trees, you have to clear a path for yourself among them. The forest came up to the sand on the beach and overlooked the sea, right up against the large dunes that, shifting under the wind, poured their sand between the trees and buried them up to midtrunk. Behind this barrier the backwash of the invisible sea thundered endlessly. We walked until dawn; farther on, it was mostly pine trees; we made better time. When the sky cleared, Thomas climbed a dune to look at the beach. I followed him. An uninterrupted line of debris and corpses cluttered the cold, pale sand, wrecks of vehicles, abandoned artillery guns, overturned, shattered carts. Bodies lay where they had fallen, on the sand or with their heads in the water, half covered by white foam, others floated farther away, tossed by the waves. The seawater looked heavy, almost dirty on this beige, pale beach, the gray-green of lead, hard and sad. Fat seagulls flew level with the sand or soared above the rumbling swell, facing the wind, as if suspended, before heading off away with a precise movement of wing. We ran down the dune to rapidly search some corpses for provisions. There were all kinds of people among the dead, soldiers, women, little children. But we didn’t find much to eat and soon hurried back to the forest. As soon as I moved away from the beach, the calm of the woods enveloped me, letting the roar of the surf and the wind resound in my head. I wanted to sleep on the flank of the dune, the cold, hard sand drew me, but Thomas was afraid of patrols, and led me farther into the forest. I slept a few hours on pine needles and then read my misshapen book until nightfall, forgetting my hunger in the sumptuous descriptions of the banquets of the bourgeois monarchy. Then Thomas gave the signal for departure. After two hours of walking, we reached the end of the forest, a curve overlooking a little lake separated from the Baltic by a dyke of gray sand, surmounted by a line of pretty beach cottages, abandoned, built down to the sea on a long, gentle strand scattered with debris. We threaded our way from house to house, keeping an eye out on the paths and the beach. Horst was a little farther on: a former seaside resort, popular in its day, but for some years past given over to invalids and the convalescent. On the beach, the jumble of wrecks and bodies grew thicker, a big battle had taken place here. Farther on, we could see lights and hear engine noises, it must have been the Russians. We had already passed the little lake; according to the map, we were no more than twenty or twenty-two kilometers from the island of Wollin. In one of the houses we found a wounded man, a German soldier hit in the stomach by a piece of shrapnel. He was crouching under a stairway but called to us when he heard us whispering. Thomas and Piontek carried him onto a gutted sofa, holding his mouth so he wouldn’t cry out; he wanted something to drink, Thomas wet a cloth and wiped his lips with it several times. He had been lying there for days, and his words, between the panting, were scarcely audible. The remains of several divisions, herding tens of thousands of civilians, had formed a pocket in Horst, Rewahl, Hoff; he had arrived there with what was left of his regiment, from Dramburg. Then they had tried to break through to Wollin. The Russians held the cliffs above the beach and fired methodically at the desperate mass that passed beneath them. “It was like a pigeon shoot.” He had been wounded almost immediately, and his comrades had abandoned him. During the day, the beach was swarming with Russians, who came to strip the dead. He knew they had taken Kammin and probably controlled the whole shore of the Haff. “The region must be swarming with patrols,” Thomas commented. “The Reds are going to look for survivors of the breakthrough.” The man kept muttering and moaning, he was sweating; he asked for water, but we didn’t give him any, it would have made him shout; and we didn’t have any cigarettes to offer him, either. Before letting us go, he asked us for a pistol; I gave him mine, with the rest of the bottle of brandy. He promised to wait till we had gotten far away to shoot. Then we started off south again: after Gross Justin and Zitzmar there were woods. On the roads the traffic was incessant, American Jeeps or Studebakers with the red star, motorcycles, more tanks; on the paths there were now foot patrols of five or six men, and it took all our alertness to avoid them. Ten kilometers from the coast, we found snow again in the fields and woods. We headed toward Gülzow, west of Greifenberg; then, Thomas explained, we could continue on and try to cross the Oder near Gollnow. Before dawn we found a forest and a hut, but there were traces of footsteps and we left the path to sleep farther off, in the pine trees near a clearing, rolled up in our coats on the snow.